Tuesday, 28 February 2006 | Elevator

There's a woman, F., who works in my office, who was the inspiration for the character Ripley in the movie Alien. I've watched the washed out 1980s talk show footage in which Sigourney Weaver was asked about what it was like to play such a tough female character. In response, Sigourney calls F. out by name, saying that, as Ripley, she would ask herself, "How would F. handle this situation?"

I've seen the footage a few times now (my office is kind of proud to have Ripley's inspiration in our midst, so the tape gets shown whenever sort-of appropriate), and every time it never fails to give me totally uncynical chills.

Naturally, although F. is incredibly nice and polite, I find her enormously intimidating. The other day it was just the two of us in the elevator, and F. was being particularly chatty. Even though most of what she said was weather-related, I couldn't stop thinking about how many aliens this woman was capable of killing.

Later that same day, I found myself riding the elevator with another unsettling fellow -- a man who (I swear) looks just like Peter Braunstein, the "fireman rapist" who permanently graced the covers of all New York tabloids during the last half of autumn. In fact, the man looks so much like him (although he's too short, I admit), that in a very uncharacteristic paranoid moment, I once called 911 to report a Peter Braunstein sighting upon walking past this man. (In my defense, he was walking in Chelsea, which is where the majority of real PB sightings happened. He should've known to avoid Chelsea, looking like that.)

Of course, it was well after Mr. Braunstein was apprehended and sent to jail that I discovered my Peter Braunstein worked in my building. I wanted to apologize to the man, in case he actually got pestered by the police that day, but of course there's no way I'm going to admit to such a thing.

Incidentally, the man in my building always seems kind of angry and dark; I'm not sure, though, whether that's reallly the case, whether it's just me transferring the real Braunstein's crimes onto the man, or whether it's simply the guilt I feel whenever I'm in close proximity. In any case, I don't love riding the elevator with him, because whenever I do I become irrationally convinced that He Knows.