The Tin Box at the Bottom of the Elevator Shaft

Lao Zhou had been repairing elevators for twenty years. He had seen all kinds of things fall down the shaft: phones, keys, wallets. Once he even fished out a live cat — it had been sitting at the bottom for three days, hungry but otherwise unharmed. People in this line of work had a saying: an elevator shaft is a place things go and never come back. Most of what fell in never got retrieved.

In mid-October, the company sent him to an old residential building in the south part of town for an annual inspection. Built in the early nineties, nine floors, two apartments per floor, the exterior still clad in that outdated pale green mosaic tile. The elevator was the original unit, so old that finding replacement parts had become a challenge. Lao Zhou actually had a soft spot for these old machines. The new ones were all variable-frequency, whisper-quiet, a pain to repair — like servicing precision instruments. The old ones were different. Where they rattled, where they vibrated, you could feel the problem just by laying a hand on them.

He was working through lunch, having parked the car on the eighth floor and climbed down to the bottom of the shaft. The beam of his headlamp sliced through the darkness, illuminating the buffer springs and guide rails. The pit was coated in years of dust, mixed with the smell of oil and rust. He crouched to inspect the buffer, and when his headlamp swept across the corner, something glinted in the beam.

At first he thought it was a shard of glass. But the color was off — not the cold white of glass, but a warm golden metallic sheen. He moved closer and dug a metal box out of the dust.

A tin candy box. One of those White Rabbit creamy candy gift boxes popular in the eighties: rectangular, the pattern on the lid worn almost beyond recognition, just a few smudges of red left. The box was rusted but still largely intact. It had weight in his hand. Not empty.

Lao Zhou crouched at the bottom of the shaft, rested the box on his knees, and pried the rusted lid open.

Inside were letters.

The envelopes were sealed inside a plastic bag, wrapped in a layer of oiled paper. Whoever had put this box together had been meticulous. The seal was tight. Lao Zhou peeled back the oiled paper and pulled out the first letter. The paper had yellowed, the edges gone fragile, but the handwriting was still clear — blue-black ink, fountain pen, not pretty but each stroke pressed hard into the page.

"Xiulan, I have arrived in Guangzhou.

I found a place to stay, a guesthouse near the train station. Eight yuan a night, four to a room. Conditions are not great, but the owner says there is a building materials market nearby. I will go tomorrow and see if there is work.

Is the baby still coughing? Keep giving him the loquat syrup, three times a day, do not stop just because he seems better. And you — do not skip meals just to save money. Eat some meat once in a while.

I will be fine here. Do not worry. Once I have saved enough, I will buy you and the boy an apartment in the county town. No more living in this old building.

— Guohua, March 7, 1992"

Lao Zhou set the letter down and pulled out the second. Dated March 15 of the same year, also from Guangzhou. He had found work installing aluminum windows, meals and lodging provided, saving two hundred yuan a month. The third was from April — changed jobsites, phone was inconvenient, told Xiulan not to write to the old address anymore. The fourth from May.

Six letters in total. The last one was dated June 2, 1992.

"Xiulan, the work here is almost finished. I told the boss I would settle up next month and come home.

I miss you both. I want to hear the baby call me Dad. When I left he could not talk yet. He must be able to by now.

Wait for me at home.

— Guohua"

Lao Zhou arranged the six letters by date, folded them back into the plastic bag. He sat at the bottom of the elevator shaft, the dark channel rising nine floors above him, the beam of his headlamp swallowed by blackness somewhere overhead. The damp from the ground was seeping up through his trousers.

Twenty years on this job, he had fished out phones, wallets, cats. But he had never fished out half a lifetime of waiting.

Thirty-six apartments in the building. Lao Zhou spent the afternoon knocking on every door.

The third floor, the fourth, the fifth — no one knew a "Guohua" or "Xiulan." Most of the residents were renters now. The old-timers were few. A woman on the sixth floor told him that the west apartment on the second floor might still have an original resident — she did not know the name, only that it was an elderly woman living alone, been there for many years.

Lao Zhou went down to the second floor and knocked on the west apartment door.

It opened slowly. First a crack, then the rattle of the security chain, then fully open.

The woman who answered was in her seventies, hair fully white but neatly combed, wearing a faded floral blouse. She steadied herself against the doorframe and regarded Lao Zhou calmly, like she was looking at someone she had been waiting for a long time.

"Who are you looking for?"

Lao Zhou pulled the tin box out of his tool bag.

The old woman's eyes fell on it and stopped.

She reached out and took the box. Her hands were steady. She looked at the pattern on the lid, wiped some of the dust away with her thumb, then opened the box and pulled out one of the letters. She did not read it. She just looked at the handwriting on the envelope.

The living room was very quiet. Sunlight slanted in through the window and fell across her floral blouse. The old pendulum clock in the corner ticked, second by second.

Lao Zhou thought she would cry.

She did not.

She put the letter back, closed the lid, and looked up.

"When he left, he hid the box in the elevator shaft. He told me when he came back we would open it together, that he had a surprise for me. I thought he was joking."

Her voice was very soft, like she was talking about someone else's life.

"I waited for him for three years. Every afternoon I went to the train station. Then I stopped going, but I never moved out. I kept thinking, what if he comes back and cannot find home." She paused. "Later, someone went to Guangzhou to look for him. They said the contractor on their jobsite ran off, there was a fight among the workers, two dead, five injured. No one knew the names of the two who died."

She placed the box on the coffee table, then picked it up again and held it against her chest.

"Twenty-eight years," she said. "All this time I thought he did not want to come back."

The sky outside was darkening. Lao Zhou gathered his tools and went downstairs. As he stepped out of the building entrance, he looked back at the second-floor window. The light was on. Behind the curtain, a silhouette sat motionless.

He got on his electric scooter and headed to the next inspection site. The wind found its way into his collar, a little cold.

He thought: an elevator shaft really is a place things go and never come back. Most of what falls in never gets retrieved. But this tin box, after waiting nearly thirty years in the dark and dust, had finally come up.