Revolving Doors

Revolving Doors

by Anne McGrath

Urban Isolation by Lawrence Bridges

It is with one eye on the everyday and the other one on the eternal that I’m awaiting my turn to enter a revolving door at the entrance of the New York City Post Office.

        A heavily perfumed woman saddled with bags and a mother with her young son have entered the revolving door partitions ahead of me at the Post Office. The door has four wings that rotate around a central shaft within a cylinder large enough for several people with bags or even strollers to fit into each section. As I enter, I have vague concerns about getting locked in a compartment with a stranger, no way to bypass the awkward intimacy, or worse, stranded in one by myself, or getting a limb stuck between partitions. The air feels un-fresh, like airplane-cabin air. I am glad no one ever got around to designing curtains—light and eyeball blocking contraptions I’ve never understood—for revolving doors.

        A man enters the wing behind mine somewhat aggressively and gives it a shove. My body is thrust into the metal bar and I have no choice but to quickly advance forward. Other people join our revolving carousel and I feel their impact propelling us onwards. While we turn, the world turns around us, concentric circles take us from the daily minutiae of our little cabin to the street outside, to the city we live in, to the planet we are destroying. Across the street people bustle around Penn Station, overhead, airplanes take people across the globe, across the country, and politicians do or don’t discuss the opioid epidemic, global warming, ways to mitigate risk during a pandemic.

        In the brief time it takes for my partition to rotate around the center cylinder, things have changed. I’ve envied a well-dressed woman who exited with several packages. A baby has begun to cry. Even I am not the same as I was at the start of the revolution—I have another round of breath under my belt, the seed of an idea about rotational forces in my head, the sudden desire for warm socks and a cup of Earl Grey tea. All in a matter of seconds.

*

In the absence of visual cues, people tend to walk in circles. It is also a fact that dead hikers are usually found within a mile from where they got lost.

        Studies conducted by psychologists and scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany show that left in a dark desert or blindfolded, walkers wearing GPS devices end up walking in small circles with a diameter of less than sixty-six feet, all the while thinking they are headed straight. Given light or a landmark, people are better able to stay on a straight course.
For years I missed the warning signs. He played soccer, did well in school, and was a gifted musician. Or maybe I was too preoccupied with my daily life and lulled into taking the short view of our existence—brushing teeth, making beds, clapping for him at his shows—to think about the future. I should have known something was wrong.

        The longer children delay drug use the less chance they have of becoming addicts. My child started smoking and snorting god-knows-what at age twelve. He’s been at it for fifteen years.

        Drunk people are often confident that they are walking straight when they are pulled over for driving erratically. Everyone can see the drunk staggering in loopy zigzags, but the drunk thinks he’s walking straight. Being intoxicated can make us feel like we are escaping something en route to something better, but when the lens is pulled back, we’re just circling the same problems, even if we’ve blurred them.

        I can see the curve of his neck as he bends to reach for some powder that will make his basic discomfort with being alive go away. But what he reaches for brings new pain. Then he does more drugs to make that pain go away. He’s been spinning through this cycle, punctuated with bursts of sobriety, since middle school. In the shadows that his addiction casts on the walls of my life I’ve balled up into a fetal position. I don’t even know how to give up.

*

I’m making a day of it, going through as many revolving doors as I can in an effort to notice things in the city that I usually ignore, like the curve of each door’s imprint mimicking the orbit of the earth around the sun. Interestingly, small bodies do not generally circle around large ones. Instead, large and small bodies orbit their combined center of mass. Whether we carry shopping bags, Xanax bars, weapons, grief, joy, fear, or longing, the central shaft around which we rotate links us in our separate glass boxes. I take this as another one of those winks from the universe pointing toward our connectivity.

        It’s a beautiful fall afternoon, and next I walk to the New York Public Library which has folded back their stately revolving door wings against themselves to widen the entry and exit ways.

        Macy’s doors are smudged and scratched, with grimy weather stripping hanging off in shreds. I would imagine even after being wiped down, there is only so much that can be done to such well-worn doors. They sound like they are dragging the weight of the city as they rotate. Red flashing ambulance lights reflect off the glass I share with the shopper ahead of me, as we round the circle to the entrance.

*

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines sonder, a noun made up by John Koenig as: The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. In ways large and small we impact the trajectories of people within our range, those we know, those we meet in passing, and those whose paths never cross our own.

        Ram Dass said we’re really just walking each other home.

*

Since I was young I’ve been fascinated with the idea of liquid to solid transformations. Not so long ago I started freezing my son’s old action figures—Pokemon, Power Rangers, Mr. Freeze—into blocks of ice, to see what they would look like floating in crystal rectangles, squares, and circles.

        I filled Tupperware containers with distilled water (fewer bubbles) and eventually moved from toys to small plastic religious statues—Jesus, Mary, and St. Francis. The ice doesn’t freeze evenly; there are cloudy places and areas of layered cracks. Signs of time raging all around each figure. One morning I watched a frozen Mary peer out at me from a globe of ice. As the ball of ice slowly melted it left a silvery track like snail slime on my kitchen table. A kaleidoscope of small fractures in the ice created a perfect halo around Mary’s head. I spun the sphere around and marveled at the rays of sunlight that sparked off its curved edges. When it stopped, Mary was facing me, looking sad and trapped.

        I suddenly felt cruel, ashamed. The freezing seemed an act of violence. I ran to the basement for a hammer and took Mary-in-her-globe out to the driveway, where I cracked her open in a dramatic rescue and recovery operation. Some of the paint around her face chipped off with the ice and she looked battle worn.

        Perhaps my son is able to see only the burst of fissures in front of his face as the wider world grows blurry and distant. I’ve read the Nar-Anon brochures. I know he must come to sobriety on his own. But I can’t help thinking too that someone on the outside might warm the ice, dissolve the walls that keep him separate, stop him from spinning in circles, give him visual cues to remind him that he isn’t alone, that he can make a change, that there are still hills to skateboard, puppies to hug, and music to transport in this world.

        Stress can cause us to fight, fly away, or freeze. The latter happens when we think about doing something difficult and, instead of pushing ahead, stop in our tracks; we can’t start moving until we know where we’re going. It takes strength and courage to develop new perspectives, to break away from familiar frameworks—upbringing, habits, political leanings—and see the world with fresh eyes. There’s less struggle involved with looking the other way.

*

In 1942, a fire broke out in a Boston post-Prohibition nightclub. When a stampede of panicked people tried to exit the same way they had entered, through the main entrance’s single revolving door, bodies piled up and jammed the door until it broke. Almost five-hundred lives were lost in the Cocoanut Grove fire, the deadliest revolving door tragedy.

        Following the disaster, it became illegal to have only one revolving door as a main entrance without being flanked by outward opening hinged doors. Firefighters said that if such doors had been available during the Coconut Grove fire, at least three hundred lives could have been saved.

        I imagine the people in the nightclub stampede. Their brains, like ours, were wired to organize conflicting images and dangerous signals into something that made sense, something orderly and familiar—if they could reach the door, they would exit, as they had always done before. To ask people to slow down, take turns, delay the reality they wanted to see, is not how we humans make sense of the world.

        It is the same with addiction. I received so many conflicted messages from my brain when I was trying to help my son—protect him yet let him fail, trust him but do not be manipulated by him, nurture him or give him tough love. The way I perceived him, the problem, and my responses changed from day-to-day, hour-to-hour.

*

The glass of a revolving door doesn’t frame outside scenes the way you’d think it might. My view from within a revolving door usually narrows to include only the glass partition itself, like a statue frozen in ice. The glass in revolving doors is often smudged by handprints and heavily scratched, making it less transparent. The big picture outside blurs and fades until it is time to exit. Maybe it is natural for us to focus on what’s right in front of us. The small picture. It’s also surprising to realize how little I look at the person in the partition ahead of mine. If not for the glass between us, a reminder of the many invisible walls we build to protect ourselves from others, we’d be invading each other’s space in a manner that would be intolerable for many of us. I’m surprised elevators lack partitions.

        When I do look out, I feel like reaching out, connecting with what is separate—the people walking by, the clothes displayed in shop windows, the adorable puppies smiling at me. With distance comes desire.

        In right-hand traffic countries’ revolving doors move counter-clockwise (as viewed from above), while in left-hand traffic countries the doors revolve clockwise. Door rotations go both ways in Britain. Undoubtedly this is also true for how our views of the world are formed—who and what we deem worthy of our attention and resources. We take our cues from those around us, but our perceptions are not always reliable.

        My dermatologist shuddered when I told her that I was writing about revolving doors. “I have a phobia about them,” she said. “I was stuck in one with my mother while I was in a stroller when I was two. We were in Manhattan, trying to get into the Waldorf Astoria. We were trapped for five and a half excruciating hours. Authorities had to come and fix the hydraulics. Given a choice, and there’s almost always a choice, I never enter a rotating door. Never.” She said it was indicative of her mother’s personality that she would try to cram a stroller into a questionable space.

*

My son always looks healthier to me from a distance. Like when I see him with a group of friends or his girlfriend, joking, playing guitar, looking normal. It is when I get closer that I take stock of the sallow skin, glazed eyes, and inaudible speech. It is no wonder many Americans choose to ignore the opioid epidemic. What we don’t see, we don’t think about. Perhaps I would be more judgmental of substance abusers if I didn’t love people who struggled with addiction, if I hadn’t spent years waiting for the light to return to their eyes.

        We have the option to change our focus at any time—from close-up to long distance and back again. The most interesting observations often come from the space in between those two. For the bulk of my life I spent my time spinning from one project to the next, checking off my to-do list, focusing on movement that kept anxiety at bay until it became a sort of Groundhog Day of sameness. It is only in recent years, in part because of the pandemic, that I’ve gained a reverence for quietude, a slower pace, the circuitous route. I’ve started to wonder, because it isn’t all that hard to imagine, what if there is no tomorrow? I revisit moments from my past to gain insight into where I stand now. I imagine the lineage that came before me and the one that will come after I’m gone. I stare out of the window like a cat.

*

Children overdosed in the small town where I raised my family; some died, and dozens will spend their lives in and out of rehab facilities. For these kids, for my kid, the cycle went something like—depression/anxiety, dependence on drugs, denial— in a continuous loop with no exit ramp. Parents and school administrators buried the inconvenient truth of the problem that threatened to destroy our community, leaving addicts to fester in the dark.

*

My eldest son is now twenty-seven and lives too far away for me to look into his eyes each day or check his drawers for contraband. By necessity, and because I’ve consciously aimed to step back, I now see him from a distance. The specifics surrounding his drug use are outside of my orbit. It’s that lack of seeing that at equal turns allows me to move forward and wakes me at night.

*

In a moment of sonder I recall that when my children were young and we were in a crowded place, I advised them to circle back to where we started if they got lost. I hope they remember that and that I remain, in some way, part of their center.