Rent Due in Two Days

Six months since Dev moved out, and I've gotten so used to the quiet that I sort of treat it like a roommate now. I say goodnight to it. I make it coffee, which is insane, because silence doesn't drink coffee, but there you go.

The apartment is a sublet, cut rate, which in this city means the radiator sounds as if it is a dying animal and the walls are basically decorative. Johan found it for me. She's my best friend, twenty-seven, blunt the way a hammer is blunt, and she looked around the place on move-in day and said, "Congratulations, you now live inside a guitar."

"Acoustics build character," I said.

"Acoustics build nothing. You're gonna hear your neighbor's whole life."

She was right, obviously. I heard the guy across the hall before I ever saw him. Alarm at five forty-five, every weekday, like a hammer drill set to snooze. Boots on hardwood. Coffee maker. Door. Then nothing until eight or nine at night, when the boots came back and the TV murmured something with a lot of sirens in it. I built a whole personality out of listening to that schedule. His day was my clock.

His name, I learned from the mailboxes, was Avi. That was it. One name, four letters, and a slot that was always stuffed with invoices.

That was the extent of my neighbor life for months. It was fine. It was quiet. Quiet was, as established, my roommate and possibly my only one.

Then October happened, and the heat wave that would not quit happened, and everything went sideways in one morning.

I was up late finishing pages for the commission, the mural job that pays my rent and my self-respect in roughly equal insufficient amounts, so I was still in bed at nine, which is nothing, don't judge me, freelancers keep farmer's hours, just on the wrong end. I heard the big front door of the building grind open, which it only does for someone with a key or a grudge.

Then footsteps. Then a knock, three doors down. Then two doors down.

Then directly across the hall from me, which I had not known was empty, because I never look at that door, it's just a door, it's part of the wall, walls are my whole theme apparently.

Voices. A woman's voice, doing that realtor cadence, and a second voice, lower, male, giving one-word answers like he was being charged per syllable.

Now, I will be honest about my next move, because it's not my finest one. I got out of bed, crossed the apartment, and looked through the peephole. Fully. On purpose. In my underwear, holding a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST ARTIST on it. Johan would've charged me admission.

The door across the hall was propped open with a stack of flattened boxes, and there was a truck outside, double parked, hazards going, and a man. Not moving boxes yet. Just standing in the hallway, looking up at the ceiling light like it owed him money.

He was, and I say this with all the objectivity of a man in his underwear at nine in the morning, built. Not gym-built. Work-built. Forearms with actual stories on them, sawdust in the creases of his shirt, fortyish, no, wait, he's thirty, I found that out later, but he looked like thirty was a thing that had happened to him on purpose. Dark hair going gray at the temples in a way that felt less like aging and more like a design choice.

The realtor was saying something about "great light," and he said, "It's a hallway, Linda. There's no light. There's a bulb."

"It's an open concept."

"It's a corridor."

Okay. So. My type, apparently, is a man who argues with realtors. Good to know. Six months of therapy avoidance finally paying off.

He turned his head, slightly, toward my door. Toward the peephole. And I will state that peepholes work both ways, optically, I didn't know that, I do now, and there is no feeling on this earth like making eye contact through a fisheye lens while wearing underwear with cartoon pickles on them.

I fell back from the door. I knocked over the mug. Coffee went everywhere, obviously, because that's the universe we live in. I stood in my kitchen with my heart doing percussion and listened to him, across the hall, laugh. Not mean. Just a short huff, like he'd seen a raccoon do something dumb.

Then his voice, muffled through a door that was decorative: "You good over there?"

I said nothing. Silent roommate, remember. Great at silence.

"Okay," he said, to himself or to me, hard to say. "Moving day."

And that was it, he went back to the truck, and I cleaned up coffee and told myself, out loud, in my empty apartment, "He saw nothing. Fisheye. Distortion. Legally he saw nothing."

The next two hours I spent in the worst possible position, which was pretending to work while listening to him move. And this man moved like a professional, which, fine, but he moved loudly in a way that told you things. Box down the hall, thud. Something heavy set on the floor with care, then something else set down without any care at all, then a low "come on" like the furniture had personally failed him. At one point there was a long silence and then a single word, "No," very flat, and I have thought about that "No" more than I've thought about most conversations I've actually been in.

By noon the hallway had gone quiet. I needed to check my mail, because I'd been avoiding the mail, because the mail contains the electric bill, and I'm a coward. This meant the hallway. This meant possibly him.

I put on actual pants for this, which tells you everything. Opened my door, and there he was, leaning against his doorframe, drinking from a water bottle, looking at me.

"Hey," he said. "Pickle guy."

"They're not pickles. They're cartoon pickles. There's a difference and it matters."

"Uh huh." He looked me over once, not gross about it, more like measuring, the way a guy who builds things for a living measures things. "You're the one who watches doors."

"I don't watch doors."

"Everybody watches doors. It's fine. I'd have watched too, if the roles were flipped." He said it completely level, no smirk, which somehow made it worse. Or better. Unclear. "Avi."

"Sal."

"You live in the guitar?"

"The... oh. Yeah. Thin walls. Acoustics build character."

"That's the second time I've heard that line in this building."

"Realtors travel in packs."

Almost a smile. Not quite. He tipped the water bottle at me. "Fair warning, I work a lot. You'll hear my alarm at five forty-five."

"I know."

Beat. His eyebrows went up a little. "You know."

"The walls, man. I know your whole schedule. You come home around nine and watch something with a lot of sirens in it."

He glanced at me for a moment, no, shorter than that, but it did something anyway, and then he said, "That's the news."

"It's all sirens."

"That's the world." He straightened up off the doorframe. "Nice to meet you, Sal. Sorry about the truck, I'll move it in a sec."

And he went back inside and shut his door, and I stood in the hallway holding my electric bill, feeling like I'd just gotten out of a meeting where I'd done better than expected and couldn't figure out why that bothered me.

The truck was still double parked. Hazards ticking. It sat there another full hour while I pretended to work, and every time I glanced at the window I could see the top of it, and I thought, this is fine, he's just a neighbor, neighbor is a category of person that does not do anything to you.

Which is exactly the kind of sentence you say right before everything.

The mailroom is a closet at the end of the hall with a bank of dented boxes and a smell like old tape. I went down there on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays are when Johan sends me things she thinks are funny, which is most days. And he was in there. Of course he was in there. He had his head inside his own mailbox, which was physically impossible, his whole mailbox was the size of a toaster.

"Are you in the mailbox?" I asked.

His head came out and he turned around and there it was again, that flat look he does, like I'm a form he has to fill out. "It's stuck. Package won't fit, they wedged it in anyway."

"That's not how mailboxes work."

"That's how this mailbox works." He pulled at something and a padded envelope came out at an angle, torn at one corner, and a little glass bottle slid free and rolled to my feet. He bent and picked it up and held it under the light. "That's mine."

"Is it broken?"

He shook it near his ear. "Seems okay." Then he looked at my hands. "You've got ink on your fingers. Like, permanently. It's in the skin."

"That's the job. I'm a muralist."

"There's a word for that?"

"There's several words for that, and one of them is broke."

He laughed. It was a real one this time, short but real, and I felt it somewhere I don't want to itemize. "What are you painting?"

"A comic shop on Delancey. Eleven stories of some fantasy knight thing. The owner's very excited and very cheap."

"Eleven stories. You do that by hand?"

"Hanging off a scaffold, yes!"

"Huh." He turned the little bottle over in his fingers. It was dark green, heavy, like something you'd keep on a shelf for years. "Huh," he said again, and put it in his jacket pocket very carefully, and that was the first thing I noticed, how careful he was with it.

Then I checked my box and my box was empty and my package, the one with the big reference book I'd ordered for the knight commission, was not in it. I checked again like the book would change its mind.

"Everything okay?" he said.

"I had a package. The tracking said delivered."

"Check the floor."

We both looked down. Nothing. We looked at each other. "Okay," he said, "so this is a building mystery," and I want you to understand that I have never in my life heard those words said in a tone that made me want to solve the mystery with a person, and I wanted to solve this one with him. That was the second thing I noticed.

Johan, when I reported all this by phone that night, was merciless. "Sal. He said building mystery. To your face. That's flirting for men who own a level."

"It's not flirting. He's just methodical."

"You called me to tell me about a man for forty minutes."

"Mail crime is interesting."

"Goodnight, Sal."

The wine happened on a Friday. There was a knock at my door at nine at night, which is already suspicious, and I opened it and there he was, holding a bottle of red by the neck and wearing the expression of a man who had rehearsed this in the truck on the way home.

"I need your Wi-Fi," he said. "Mine died during the move. The router guy comes Tuesday. Until then I've got nothing and I'm going out of my mind."

"You want my password."

"I brought a bribe." He held the bottle up. "It's decent. I checked."

"It's nine at night."

"I know when it is. I've been standing in my apartment listening to the pipes groan for an hour." He paused. "You can say no. I'll go back to my sirens."

"Come in," I said, faster than I meant to.

He came in and looked around the way he looks at everything, measuring. The sublet is a mess of drafting tables and taped-up reference sheets and the radiator doing its thing in the corner. He looked at the pickles-print page proofs pinned over my desk, because of course those were up, and said nothing, which was its own kind of mercy.

He poured the wine into my two mismatched mugs, because I own no wine glasses, and we sat on the floor, because my chairs are mostly drawing stools. He told me the router died in a surge the day of the heat wave and that Linda, the realtor, had said the wiring was "charming," and I said charming was a realtor word for "fire hazard" and he said he'd had the same thought.

"Tell me the password," he said, and I told him, and he typed it into his phone with two thumbs, fast, and then just sat there a minute with the wine like the whole problem had been solved and there was nothing else to do, and I realized he didn't want to leave. He wanted to sit on a floor. I know that feeling. That's my whole religion.