Heart in the Mouth

The doorbell rings in the small hours. You wake up frightened out of your wits. Insistent rings. Your heart goes up to your mouth. It doesn't make any sense. You live on the ninth floor of a building with just one neighbour per story and the doorman, at such a time, would never let anybody in without calling you on the intercom first. You open the door and who stands right in front of you? Yes, the very concierge! But how the heck?! He then, briefly explains what, otherwise, would look very unlikely: he suffers from panic disorder and, after various months of calm, had just started having an attack. Simply couldn't he stay in his booth! He sustains his going to your apartment on the grounds of your being one of the less arrogant and most accessible people in the building. He makes a request: "Sir, could you stay in the booth for a few minutes till my attack goes away? You know, someone may arrive or leave and then I'm in trouble!" You, then, in order to knock yourself off your pedestal of supreme humbleness and also to prevent the building from complete chaos, sit the anguished doorman in a chair in the kitchen and take the elevator down towards the building's entrance, not without first equipping the ill man with a copious glass of water and sugar. When you get at the entrance, you find yourself faced with a wild multitude of buttons, devices and cameras whose form of operation you have not the slightest clue! You decide to deal with the situation in an empirical way, that is, you'll learn from experience, what is actually very coherent with the approach you have adopted for the whole event up to now: impulse. Anxiously you start waiting for the typical events of a building's entrance. Several minutes go by but nothing really happens. Each span of time that slips away strengthens your belief that, at such an early hour, nothing will happen anyway. Now, stopped in the booth, your rational mind has finally a chance of working accordingly. The first question that arises is: "Why didn't he call the building's manager?" You, on the other hand, think that maybe the manager was habitually too severe with him. Another supposition that you make is that, probably, amidst the attack's desparation, he might have rushed himself out of the booth in search of help while his survival instincts might have guided him directly to the door of the, in his own "flattering" words, less arrogant person in the building. After a period whose length you didn't know, since you hadn't even taken notice of the exact time of each fact, the doorman hadn't still come back to his booth. You consider for a moment doing what he might have strongly avoided, which means calling the manager but, conveniently in the middle of your reasoning, you remember that you could just call your apartment and check on the recovery of the one who was, in a certain sense, your employee as well. You grab the handset and dial your apartment's number. Nobody answers it. You don't wait for too long since you don't want to wake any of your relatives up. At that moment you realise that you had left your family at the mercy of a complete unknown. An unknown with disturbances. What if he were more than a panic sufferer? What if he had no panic at all?! Without further thinking you abandon the entrance completely and goes running towards the elevator. You press the up and down buttons simultaneously.  "What a stupidity to attend to the doorman's request so readily!". Regret eats you alive! It seems to take ages but the elevator never gets to the ninth floor. You are now in complete despair! You just want to get off the elevator, hurl the door open and achieve the certainty that nothing bad happened. Yet, unfortunately, as you open the kitchen's door all you encounter is dimness. Through it you can see the fallen glass vessel and the doorman still sitted but with chest lying over the table. You intend to check on his state and you call him, at the same time that, subconsciously, you close the door, bringing the kitchen to a complete darkness, a situation that was opposite to the one in which you had left it. Therefore you rapidly press the light switch. You can notice that, besides being laid over the table, the doorman's chest was also leaning to the right, supported only by the side of a cupboard adjacent and perpendicular to the table. You touch the body. No answer. You lift it trying to put it in an upright position over the chair but gravity forces it to lie back against the same furniture.Your heart starts pounding again. You find out that the body's temperature is abnormally low. Your heart suffers another blow when you detect an unusual paleness in the doorman’s skin. That would be the beginning of pallor mortis. You then rush to the bedrooms to check on everybody’s safety. Two months had passed since the morbid event and now you breathe in relief for the fact that your family, directly, had gone through no ordeal. You make that reflection while, late at night, you wrap up the narration of the event to your wife and a friend couple that was paying a visit to your home when, out of the blue, a snapping sound is heard and the living room’s light goes off. You, in an ultrasonic reflex, slides your hand over the switch that is at your side and, when the light goes back on, everyone looks to the opposite corner of the room to catch your three-year-old son red-handed standing right below the switch plate. At that moment, in unison chorus, the adults in the room say: "Shoot, Jimmy!"