The frame was worn smooth at the top-right corner, pale pine stripped down to gray pulp by forty-two years of finger-oil and high-velocity anxiety.
Eli stood on the threshold of the lobby, his right index finger hovering two inches from the wood. His posture was that of a man about to disarm a naval mine with a salad fork.
To properly appreciate Eli’s hesitation, one must understand that human mortality in this particular corner of the universe did not operate on the customary schedule of long illnesses, quiet hospital bed declensions, or dramatic last words delivered to weeping grandchildren. The human body, when its allotted clock ran out, whether due to advanced age, untreatable organ failure, disease, or malady did not flatline. It popped.
Specifically, the brain stem issued a brief, definitive, firework-level detonation, leaving behind a slightly singed collar, a remarkably clean pair of shoulders, and an otherwise intact, motionless body that would instantly collapse onto the floor like a sack of damp laundry. The global life expectancy remained entirely normal, but the cause of death was, with very few exceptions, uniform, loud, and bad for wallpaper.
Naturally, because human beings despise the concept of helpless, random inevitability, they invented rules.
Eli’s family belonged to the Order of the Third Threshold, a respected group that knew for a scientific fact that one could prevent an early pop by tapping the top-right corner of any outbound doorframe exactly four times with a double-jointed knuckle. Other, less enlightened people chewed dried clove, carried polished walnuts in their left pockets, or refused to walk under telephone wires on a Tuesday.
A man in a wrinkled rain-slicker barged past Eli from behind, carrying a greasy paper bag of bagels. He did not tap the pine. He did not even lift his heels, dragging his boots across the threshold with a wet, heavy scrape.
Eli winced, instinctively pulling his chin down into his collarbone to protect his throat from the imminent shower of gore and toasted sesame. He waited for the loud, metallic POP!
It did not come.
The man in the slicker simply strolled out onto the avenue, humming an upbeat toothpaste commercial, his head resting squarely on his neck in blatant defiance of the second chapter of the Bylaws of the Sealed Vessel.
Eli’s finger remained suspended in the humid air of the apartment lobby, feeling rather foolish.
Behind the counter, Mrs. Gable, a woman whose skin possessed the exact color and texture of an old grocery sack, did not look up from her crossword puzzle.
"He didn't touch the corner," Eli said, his voice taking on the thin squeak of an instrument badly in need of tuning.
"He's a North-Sider," Mrs. Gable grunted. "They chew clove."
"Clove has no structural grounding," Eli insisted, quoting his father’s favorite evening lecture. "He's playing with fire."
"Lane seven at the bowling alley," Mrs. Gable muttered, turning a page. "His brother went off back in October mid-frame. Ruined League Night."
"Because he forgot his clove," Eli offered.
"Because he had stage-four kidney trouble," she snapped. "Now either tap the jamb or stand out of the breeze; you're letting the humidity in."
Eli reached up. His knuckle met the pale pine.
Thock. Thock. Thock. Thock.
Feeling significantly safer, Eli stepped out onto the avenue, walked two blocks to the transit stop, and boarded the 8:15 cross-town bus.
The bus was a moving catalog of blasphemy. To Eli’s left, a woman in a canary-yellow coat was aggressively stepping on every floor-seam in clear violation of basic pressure dynamics. Behind him on the right, a man reading a folded newspaper was wearing a green hat on a Thursday, an invitation to disaster so obvious it was practically suicidal.
Eli sat near the front, rigidly keeping his knees pressed together, his fingers performing the Liturgy of the Seated Passenger against the vinyl cushion.
The bus driver was an imposing man named Hector, whose neck was the width of an oak stump and whose dashboard was littered with little plastic charms from three distinct, mutually exclusive sects. Hector was currently ignoring a red light, breaking three traffic laws, and completely omitting the customary two-finger tap on the steering wheel before crossing an intersection.
Eli braced his feet against the floorboards. The yellow-coat woman hadn't popped. The green-hat man hadn't popped. And now Hector was barreling through a busy six-way junction at forty miles an hour, his head firmly attached, his hands casually resting on the wheel.
Eli looked at Hector’s thick, unbothered neck. He looked out the window at the city rushing past. A city of millions of people breaking every sacred rule Eli had ever been taught, walking under ladders, stepping on cracks, forgetting their walnuts, and inexplicably continuing to breathe.
Mrs. Gable’s dry voice echoed in his memory: Stage-four kidney trouble.
A strange, cold sensation blossomed in Eli’s chest. It was the sudden, dizzying realization that the four taps on the pine had done nothing. The clove had done nothing. The world was not held together by double-jointed knuckles or dried spices. There was no shield. There were no safety measures. There was only a universe full of invisible clocks, ticking down in absolute, indifferent silence, completely unbothered by whether one tapped a doorframe or...
POP!
It was a sharp, festive sort of noise, not unlike a party popper going off inside a metal trash can, though markedly more inconvenient for everyone currently on or in front of the 8:15 cross-town.
Hector’s dark-blue driver’s cap bounced merrily off the windshield, performed a neat little pirouette, and landed upside down in Eli’s lap like an inverted souvenir. Hector’s heavy, headless torso slumped forward onto the steering wheel with a dull, wet thud, his right arm flopping uselessly over the turn signal, which began to click cheerfully for a right-hand lane change that no one in authority was actively planning.
Regrettably, Hector’s heavy leather boot had chosen that exact moment to settle permanently onto the accelerator pedal.
The bus, liberated from human ambition and guided only by momentum, gave a jaunty little lurch to the left. It hopped the curb with the enthusiastic bounce of a puppy chasing a tennis ball, aiming itself directly at the display window of Goldberg’s Fine Pastries.
In the back, the woman in the canary-yellow coat dropped her tote bag, while the gentleman in the green hat finally paused his reading to consider whether a front-row seat to a bakery invasion constituted a cancellation of his morning commute.
Eli sat suspended in the front row, holding the driver's cap in his left hand like a potted plant and the knuckles on his right turning white against the metal handrail. The scent of freshly baked rye bread expanded rapidly through the cabin and he found himself experiencing a profound, almost peaceful clarity. The good news, Eli realized as twenty tons of municipal transit roared through the croissants, was that he no longer had to worry about popping at all.