“I don’t understand,” the man said, obviously confused and his forehead bunched over his eyebrows in confusion, his dark brown eyes narrowed with skepticism, “where does it lead to?”
“To your fulfillment, your bliss.”
The man stared at the wide, metallic staircase that was in the middle of the vast field and narrowed as it ascended. There were horizontal plates of moving stairs at the center of the staircase and on either side, were stairs of metal that filled in the space to the fancy guardrail that looked to be carved of white stone. It was resplendent in the light and the man was more than intrigued by the sight; it was as if God himself had constructed the stairs so that they could descend to the earthly realm, but the movement of the stairs at the center belied that notion.
“How high up is it?” he asked as he craned his neck back, eyes up at the seemingly infiniye staircase that disappeared into clouds that drifted by. “Do planes ever fly into it?”
“No,” the woman chuckled, and her robbed body glitched and flickered out of existence in what seemed like a wave, starting from her center and cascading up and down to her head and feet. She reconstituted with no effort and almost as soon as she blinked out, and her light brown face smiled dutifully at the man. “There has never been a threat of plane impact to the Escalator. The height of the Escalator has not been officially recorded because it’s upper reaches have never been confirmed. It extends into bliss, which is not a physical destination.”
“To bliss,” the man said spitefully. It had to be a joke, a trap, a prank of some kind. He had heard about the Escalator to Nowhere when he was in a bar late one night into early morning, trying to forget that he’d been laid off from his job and chasing shots with shots until he wasn’t sure that he could make the distance to his house that wasn’t a long walk from the bar.
He sat alone at a table, concentrating on keeping him head aloft and waiting for the bar tender to tell him that they were closed. But minutes rolled into an hour and he sobered up enough to check the time. It was well after the bars posted closing hours. He looked over at the bar and saw a woman still sitting there, smoking a cigarette.
“I swear, you ain’t ever gone see me here again. I’m going to my bliss!” The woman spoke enthusiastically.
“So you know where it is?” the bartender asked. “I done heard about it before, people told me they know people that found it but I ain’t talked to nobody that saw it in person.”
“That’s ’cause if you find it, you take it where it take you and you don’t wanna come back.”
“Where is it?” the bartender asked and leaned close to the woman. She looked around herself like she was worried about discretion, but she didn’t see the man sitting alone at the table.
“It’s in a field at the dead center of North Carolina…” the woman started but the bartender interrupted.
“In a field? If that was true, everybody would’ve found it by now.”
“You can’t just walk up to it. First you gotta find the center and that ain’t as easy as you think. Once you find it, you gotta convince the woman that you ain’t wasting her time.”
“Sound like a fairy tale to me,” the bartender said. “But people been disappearing, my sister in law didn’t come home one day and her oldest son said she went looking for it. Everybody assumed she found it.”
“And this is the last you’ll see of me,” the woman said and stood. “Oooh, boy, what time is it? I done kept you all past your close time,” she said and then apologized as she turned to leave the bar. She had a look of happiness on her face like she was seeing the whole world as her own vision and she passed the man at the table like he wasn’t even there.
He knew that they had been talking about the Escalator to Nowhere and he followed her out of the bar.
“I wanna go too,” the man called after the woman on the sidewalk.
She turned and the two talked at a distance. When they were done, she wrote numbers on a piece of paper, coordinates, gave it to the man, and then she practically disappeared. The man never saw her again.
The man eyed the Escalator and then looked at the woman who stared at him with unblinking eyes and a persistent smile that could have been painted on her face.
“You found it,” she said, “and your reward is the ride.”
“But where it lead to?” the man asked. “What that ‘to your bliss’ mean?”
“Look inside yourself,” the woman said calmly, evenly, like she was lulling the man into sleep. “The destination of the Escalator is the improbable happiness that you don’t think you deserve. It is the source of your happiness, the root of your smile.”
The man closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that was. When he opened them again, the woman faced the Escalator with one of her robbed arms extended toward the glorious staircase.
“Your faith will tell the Escalator its destination,” she said.
“My faith in what?” the man asked.
“Your faith in yourself, in your belief that you can be happy, that you deserve to be.”
The man approached the Escalator and put a tentative foot on the moving staircase, and then let himself be drawn up.
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