It happened shortly after 5 p.m. on a Friday. Camille and I had just finished up with work and were leaving the office.

We were in a bit of a rush to leave, really, and the two minutes we spent in front of the Gradia Building’s single elevator took excruciating patience to pass. Camille was fixated on her real-time transit app, furiously pounding the refresh button every five seconds; she had a date to get to. I hadn’t much to do this evening, but her nervous foot-tapping had given way into a fidgety dance by the time the ding of the elevator chimed, and I was silently seething from secondhand impatience.

Then the stainless steel double doors parted to reveal the people within.

So many people. Stuffed to the rafters with people. Packed like sardines with people. Enough people to make a fire marshal weep. Dozens of miserable, sweaty, uncomfortable women and men, young and old, black and white and Hispanic and Asian, all in their ill-fitting suits and dresses and ties. A sea of arms and legs, wriggling helplessly in their tight columns. Heads buried in the spaces between others’ necks. Breasts pushed up against others’ shoulders. In the back rows a small child was hoisted high above the madding fray by an anonymous set of arms, a desperate bid for breathing space.

The one man in the front and centre who was facing our direction stared piteously at us and wheezed out one word.

“No.”

The two of us glanced at one another. Then Camille began to move toward the wall of people.

“No,” the man repeated, soon to be echoed by the chorus of people behind him. Somewhere beyond what I could see, my ears picked up the frantic woodpecker clicking of elevator buttons.

“Camille,” I said, holding her arm, “don’t do it.”

“The train comes in four minutes,” she said. “At a dead run I can just make it to the station by the time it gets here. Next one’s in half an hour.”

“Then take the next one! It’s not worth it.”

“You don’t have a date to get to.”

She wrenched herself away from my grip and stepped resolutely into the elevator, wedging herself in the impossibly small space between the man and the woman on his left, much to the consternation of everybody else in the elevator, who barely found the inches to step backwards to accommodate her. Then the double doors shunted themselves in front of the human mass, closed with a sickening pop, and I was alone on the seventh floor.

Ten seconds later, well, that’s when I heard the clunk.