The Noise in the Wall

Mackenzie was fifty-three years old and she had lived in a lot of bad apartments, but this one had walls made out of paper and spite, and she knew that before the first week was out. You could hear the guy downstairs arguing with his mother about mayonnaise. You could hear the saxophone kid two doors down, who was actually a grown man of about twenty-eight with a kid of his own, running the same eight bars until midnight like the building owed him money. You could hear, on the good side of it, the old lady in 4C flush her toilet at 6 a.m. sharp, every day, like a train schedule.

And you could hear Mackenzie and Cody, which was the problem.

They had found each other again last spring, twenty-two years after trade school, after her marriage wound down and his just stopped, and it had been easy in a way that scared her a little. He was fifty-five now, gray coming in at the temples, still built like someone who carried steel all day. She was heavier than she'd been at thirty-one and cared about it less, and he had looked at her across the bar at the union Christmas party and said, well, hell, Kenzie, there you are, and that had been that, or close enough to it.

They'd been careful at first. Condoms, a conversation about testing at a diner over eggs, the whole grown-up routine, which she'd appreciated because it meant he'd been thinking about her health and not just his own convenience. By August they'd talked their way past that, and now here they were in October, sharing a fourth-floor walk-up that smelled like radiator dust and somebody else's cooking, and here was the problem: the walls.

The first time in the new place, she'd kept her mouth shut out of pure habit, biting it down on his shoulder, and even then the headboard had knocked twice against the plaster and the lady in 4C had cleared her throat in the morning at the mailboxes, a pointed little ahem that said everything. Cody had laughed about it. Mackenzie had not laughed about it, because Mackenzie had spent thirty years in shops and break rooms where everybody knew everybody's business, and she had wanted one thing in this life to be hers.

So they got quiet. They got slow. They learned to move like they were sneaking past a sleeping dog, and the strange thing, the thing she thought about while welding seams at the plant with her hood down, was that quiet made it better. Slow made it better. Cody's hands going patient and deliberate, her breath coming out through her nose in a long controlled stream like she was laying a bead, both of them listening to each other's bodies instead of the noise they made. It turned sex into something with a shape to it. Something you could almost craft.

She just wished she knew why it felt, lately, like somebody was listening closer than 4C ever could.

The complaint came on a Monday, taped to their door, written on the back of a takeout menu in block letters. KEEP IT DOWN AT NIGHT. SOME OF US WORK. Cody read it twice and grinned.

"That's for the saxophone guy," he said. "Has to be. That man butchered 'Careless Whisper' at eleven forty last night, I almost went over there myself."

"It's taped to our door, Cod."

"Yeah, well, whoever taped it was probably too mad to count doors." He stuck it to the fridge with a pizza magnet, which was his whole management style in one gesture. "We're practically monks anyway. You're quieter than a library, babe."

She let it go, because he was mostly right. But that night she was making the bed and she saw it, low on the bedroom wall behind the headboard, a scratch in the plaster. Fresh, pale, longer than her hand, like something with nails had dragged down from the baseboard and then just stopped. She ran her thumb over it. The plaster around it was cool and slightly soft, damp almost, which made no sense, because the radiator was on the other wall and the roof didn't leak, she'd checked.

"Cody," she called. "Come look at this."

He came in wiping his hands on a rag out of pure habit, even though his hands were clean, forty years in a shop'll do that to you. He looked at the scratch, then at the wall, then knocked on the plaster with two knuckles. It sounded hollow. Deeper than a wall should sound.

"Mice," he said.

"Mice don't leave a groove in plaster."

"Big mice." He knocked again, put his ear near it, and shrugged. "Old building. Something got in the void between the studs. I'll put a trap back there tomorrow. We'll deal with it."

She believed him about sixty percent, which was about what she believed anybody, and she dropped it. She had a double shift Wednesday and a weld inspection Thursday and no energy for a mystery. The scratch stayed. It didn't grow, exactly. It just sat there, pale against the gray plaster, like a mark on a ruler.

The first time the scratching happened was that Friday, though they had been quiet for weeks before.

They'd had a decent week, both of them, good checks, no overtime, and Cody had brought home a bottle of the red wine she liked that cost four dollars more than the wine she didn't like, and they'd eaten on the couch watching the news and heckling it. By ten the building had settled into its usual racket, the sax man running his scales, a truck downshifting on the avenue, the pipes ticking. And Cody looked at her across the couch, that look he got, patient and a little crooked, and said, "You want to? We can keep it quiet."

"I know we can," she said. "We're good at it now!"

They were good at it. That was the funny part. Twenty-two years ago they'd been all elbows and hurry, and now, both of them past fifty, they'd gotten good at each other the way you get good at a trade, slow and on purpose and with practice. He kissed her at the doorway of the bedroom, a long one, his hand flat on her lower back, and she said yes against his mouth, and that was how it always started now, a yes first, spoken, because they'd agreed on that early and neither of them ever got tired of it.

He undressed her like he had all night, which he did, and she got his shirt off over his head, and the lamp was off but the streetlight came through the blinds in stripes, and the building breathed around them. His mouth went down her neck, over her collarbone, and she felt it all the way to her heels. Her nipples got tight in the cool air and his palms were hot on them, and she heard herself let a slow breath out through her nose, controlled, laying the bead.

"Get on your back," he said, low, and she did, and he worked his way down her body with a patience that used to drive her crazy when they were young and now just undid her, his mouth on her stomach, her hip, her inner thigh. When he put his mouth on her pussy she had to turn her face into the pillow, because his tongue was slow on her clit, flat and lazy, circling, and quiet sex meant she couldn't make the noise she wanted, so it all just piled up inside her instead, pressure with nowhere to go.

"Cody," she whispered, and it came out like a warning and a request at once.

"Yeah," he said against her, and didn't stop.

She came with her hand over her own mouth, shuddering, her heels digging into the mattress, and he held her through it with both arms wrapped around her thighs, and when she was done he crawled up her body and she reached for the nightstand where they kept the condoms, out of rhythm now, out of old habit, and he shook his head with a small smile.

"We talked about it. Tested, both of us. It's just us."

"Just us," she agreed, and it was.

He pushed into her slow, inch by inch, her legs open around him, the streetlight striping his back, and she wrapped around him and they moved together the way they'd learned, unhurried, deep, rolling instead of slamming, the bed making almost no sound at all. His cock filled her up on every stroke and her clit dragged against him just enough, and she kept her breathing long and even and her eyes on his face, which was better than anything loud ever was.

And that was when she heard it.

A scraping, soft and dry, behind the headboard. Inside the wall. Not mice, not pipes, nothing mechanical, a slow drag like fingers, like something long dragging itself along the inside of the plaster, right behind her head.

She froze. Cody felt it and stopped too, propped on his elbows, and they lay there breathing while the sound went on, patient, unhurried, scratching down the wall and then back up, like it was settling in to wait.

"It's the building," he whispered. "Settling."

"Cody, it started when we did."

He didn't have an answer for that. And here was the part she never told anybody later, the part she turned over at 3 a.m. with the trucks rattling past: she wasn't scared. Not really. Something was in the wall, listening to them, and her body's answer to that was to pull him back down to her.

"Keep going," she whispered. "Slow. Just like before."

He moved again, slow and deep, and the scratching kept pace, a soft dry rasp behind the plaster, and Mackenzie arched up into her old man in the striped dark and let the thing in the wall listen. Cody came with a long shudder and a fistful of pillow, quiet as a held breath, and she followed him over the edge with her teeth set in his shoulder, and then it was over, both of them slick and spent and tangled, their hearts hammering loud enough to wake the whole floor.

And the scratching stopped. Dead stop, like a hand lifted off a drum.

They lay there a long time, not talking. The sax man down the hall ran his eight bars one more time and quit. In the wall behind the headboard there was nothing at all, just plaster and cool air and a pale scratch shaped like a claw.

"Well," Cody said finally, into her hair. "Trap's not gonna fix that."

"No," she said. "Probably not."

Neither of them moved to get up.

Three days went by and the scratch just sat there, same length, same shape, like a scar the wall had decided to keep, and Cody put a mousetrap back there anyway because a man with a toolbox can't help himself, and the trap never tripped and the cheese never moved, and after a week he quit checking it. Mackenzie didn't quit. She'd lie in bed at night with her ear an inch off the plaster, listening to the radiator tick and the trucks on the street below and the mayonnaise argument starting up downstairs right on schedule around nine, and behind all of it, if she held still enough, there was a quiet that felt as if the world had stopped breathing.

The wall was waiting for something. She knew how that sounded. Fifty-three years old, twenty-two years at the plant, hood down and rods lit eight hours a day, and she was standing in her bedroom at seven in the morning in her robe listening to drywall. But a welder knows a seam when she sees one, and on a Tuesday, after the sax man's eight bars and the toilet in 4C flushing at 6 a.m. sharp, she saw one.

It was behind the headboard, about a foot above the scratch, and you had to catch the light off the streetlamp at the right angle to see it at all, a thin dark line running horizontal in the plaster, maybe two feet long, dead straight. She ran her thumb along it and the plaster gave, just slightly, soft the way wet cardboard is soft, and cold came off it, a narrow ribbon of air that had no business being in a building where the radiators hammered all day. She pressed her palm flat against it. The cold went right through her hand and settled in her wrist like she'd been holding a beer can too long.

He came out of the bathroom with his toothbrush still in his hand, fifty-five years old and gray at the temples, and he looked where she was pointing and his face did the thing it did at work when a weld came up bad. "That wasn't there."

"No, it wasn't."

He put his palm where hers had been and held it there a long time, long enough that she watched him decide it was cold and then decide to be reasonable about it. "Draft," he said. "Window's leaky, it's finding a channel in the lath. Old building. I'll foam it Saturday."

"Cody, it's October and the window's on the other wall."

"So the channel runs crooked. Walls do that." But he said it the way he'd said trap's not gonna fix that, flat and honest at the bottom where it counted, and he set the toothbrush down on the dresser and stood there with his hand on the wall like he was taking a pulse. The cold didn't move. The seam didn't either. And that was somehow worse, because a thing that stays still while you touch it knows you're there.

He foamed it Saturday. She watched him shoot the nozzle in and the foam went in and kept going, more than a wall should drink, can after half a can, and when he pulled the nozzle back the seam looked the same as before, dark and straight and cool, and they stood there in the bedroom looking at it together while the trucks rattled past outside. "Well," he said. "Huh."

"Yeah."

He didn't say anything else and neither did she, and that night they watched the news on the couch and heckled it and he put his arm around her shoulder around ten like always, and she leaned into him, heavier than she was at thirty-one and caring about it less, and she thought about the seam the way you think about a sound your car started making, with a low hum of dread and a strange professional interest. She wanted to know what it was. She wanted it to leave her wall alone. She wanted both things at once and couldn't sort them, so she let Cody kiss her neck and didn't sort anything.

"Bed?" he asked, plain, the way he always asked, and she said yeah and meant it.

They were careful, is the thing. They'd learned to be. Slow and rolling, breathing through the nose, the