The Sound of Pages Falling Open

The voice comes through the wall every Tuesday night. Sometimes Thursdays too, but Tuesdays are reliable. I know this the way I know my dentist's schedule. I'm Kelsie Swenson, thirty-four, claims adjuster, and I notice schedules for a living.

I was lying in bed at ten forty, no pajama plan, one sock on, when the murmur started. Low, a man's voice, too quiet to catch every word but I didn't need every word. I knew the rhythm by now. My building is from the forties and the plaster between my bedroom and the apartment next door is about as thick as a cereal box. So I get the voice. Not the words, not always, but the sound of them.

He was reading that German guy again. Rilke. I only know it's Rilke because three weeks ago he read something out loud with more breath in it, and I caught the name Archaic Torso, and I googled it at midnight in bed like a weirdo. So now I know my neighbor reads Rilke to nobody, or to himself, through a wall, on Tuesdays.

"That's not for me," I told my ceiling. "That's just a guy who talks to himself."

But I didn't believe it. You don't read poetry out loud at ten at night with that much care unless somebody's supposed to hear it. Even if the somebody is an accident.

I had never seen him. Three years in this apartment. I know his floor creaks in the hallway, the third board from his door, the one that sounds like a dog toy. I know he does dishes around nine and the pipes carry it over and it sounds like bells in my kitchen. I know he gets deliveries from a place called the Midtown Archive, because once the delivery guy knocked on my door by mistake and I read the label.

I did not know his face. That was the part that got me. I'd built a whole guy out of a voice. Tall, probably. Quiet hands. The kind of man who owns a lamp with a green shade. I'd been doing this for months and I couldn't stop.

The voice stopped. I lay there another ten minutes like an idiot, waiting, then rolled over and went to sleep.

* * *

Janis found me at the coffee machine the next morning. Janis Churchill, 35, same office, same floor, my best friend since the parking lot argument over a space six years ago. She won that argument. She wins most of them.

"You've got the face," she said, filling her mug. "The listening face."

"I don't have a listening face."

"You absolutely do. You've had it all week. What is it, poetry night again?" She stirred her coffee with a pen, which is a Janis thing I've given up correcting. "Who reads poetry out loud alone? Tell me."

"I don't know. A guy who likes poetry."

"Or a guy who wants somebody to hear it." She pointed the pen at me. "You should make a move."

"On a voice? Through a wall?"

"On the voice, yes. Through the wall, eventually, I'd hope." She leaned against the counter. "I'm serious. You've been single since what, Clay? That was two years of watching you order takeout for one and pretend it's a lifestyle."

"It is a lifestyle. It's an efficient lifestyle."

"It's sad is what it is." She sipped. "Okay. Bet. One week of coffee runs. I buy, or you buy. You make a move on the voice next door."

I laughed. That was my first mistake. "And how exactly would I do that? Slide a love letter through the wall?"

"Yes," she said, way too fast.

"Janis, I don't even know what he looks like. He could have a face like a fist."

"Then find out. That's the fun part." She set her mug down. "A week of my lattes, Kelsie. Real ones, from the good place, not the office sludge."

I should have said no. I want that on the record. Instead I heard myself say, "Fine. But you have to define move. What counts?"

"Any contact he didn't initiate. And it has to be honest. No pretending you're a census worker."

"That was one time and it was a survey."

"It was a lie." She stuck out her hand. "Deal?"

We shook on it in the break room like we were closing on a house. My hand was a little sweaty. I blamed the coffee machine.

* * *

It took me four days to write the first note. Four days, and it was nine words.

I don't know what I thought would happen. Probably nothing. Probably he'd find it, look around the hallway confused, and throw it out. That was the version I told Janis on the phone Thursday night while she cackled.

The layout is this: our doors face each other across a shared entry hall, narrow, with one lamp that flickers. My apartment is 3B, his is 3C, and at the bottom of both doors there's a gap, maybe half an inch, big enough for a folded piece of paper. Everyone's got that gap. Nobody uses it.

I wrote the note at my kitchen table Wednesday, threw it out, wrote it again Thursday. The final version said:

You read out loud on Tuesdays. The wall is thin. What was the thing about the statue? Your neighbor with the creaky floor.

I don't have a creaky floor. But he has a creaky hallway board, and it seemed fair to give myself one too. Anonymity through fake floorboards. Janis would say that's not bold. Janis would be right. But it was a start, and I folded it in half, then in half again, until it was a small stiff square I could barely hold.

Friday night, after the dishes, I stood in the entry hall in my socks with the note in my hand. The flickering lamp did its flicker. His door was closed. Light showed under it, thin and yellow.

"This is insane," I said out loud, to nobody, which given my week felt consistent.

Then I knelt down. The hall floor is cold. I slid the note into the gap under his door and pushed it with two fingers until I felt it disappear on the other side. Then I stood up fast, walked into my apartment, closed my door, and stood with my back against it like I'd just robbed a bank.

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. It was Friday. He reads Tuesdays.

I made tea. I washed one mug. At nine the pipes sang his dishes across the wall and I stood in the kitchen listening to it like it was a radio show. It's just a guy doing dishes, I told myself. He does them every night. But I caught myself smiling, and I didn't like that I caught it, and I liked it anyway.

Saturday I checked under my door eleven times. Nothing. Sunday, nothing. Monday I left work late, came home with groceries, stepped over my own mail, nothing.

Tuesday I got home at six and made dinner and ate it slowly and did not check under the door, on principle, until eight. I'd lasted four days. I could last two more hours.

The note was there. Folded the same way I'd folded mine, twice, small and stiff. My name wasn't on it, obviously, there was no name. Just handwriting, small and even, the kind of handwriting a person uses when they write all day for a living.

It said: The statue is the Archaic Torso of Apollo. Rilke. And yes, the wall is thin. I'm sorry about that. And about the floor. It's the third board.

I read it four times. Then I sat down on my hallway floor, cold boards and all, with my back against my own door, holding a piece of paper like it was evidence in a claim.

He knew about the third board. He knew I knew. The creaky floor wasn't mine, but he'd given it to me anyway, and that felt like something. That felt like a door opening a crack.

I got a pen.

Then I stood there holding it over a notepad for like ten minutes. What do you write back to a man who apologizes for his plumbing? I finally wrote: Your handwriting is too neat for someone who lives alone with a creaky floor. What else do you do in there? I want the whole list.

Two days later his reply came. The whole list, apparently, was this: restores old books at an archive three blocks from my office. Does not own a television. Makes bread on Sundays, badly. Once tried to learn the guitar and quit.

He signed it this time. Ashton.

I sat on my kitchen floor with that name in front of me and felt my stomach drop through the building into the basement. Ashton. I knew an Ashton. I knew an Ashton from work, or almost from work, a guy from the Midtown Archive who came in twice a month to review damaged-property claims on their building and their collections. Tall, quiet, glasses, always in a shirt with the sleeves rolled to exactly the same place. He sat in our lobby for an hour at a time and said maybe nine words.

No. Couldn't be. Ashton is not an uncommon name. Probably.

I called Janis.

"Say the name again," she said.

"Ashton."

"Ashton what?"

"He didn't put a last name. Just Ashton. Like that's a normal thing to sign."

"Kelsie. Look at him. Monday. Walk down to the lobby and look at his mouth while he talks and tell me if it's the mouth."

"You can't identify a voice by looking at a mouth."

"You absolutely can. That's how lip readers do it and they get paid."

"Nobody pays lip readers, Janis."

"Figure that out later. Monday. Look at him."

* * *

Monday I got to work early, which never happens, and I sat in the break room with my oatmeal waiting for the archive guy to show up for his nine-thirty meeting with claims. The break room has four chairs and a table that wobbles and a fridge that hums like it's offended. At nine-fifteen the door opened and Ashton walked in with his laptop bag and his sleeves rolled to the usual place, and instead of going to wait in the lobby like he always does, he looked around, saw only me, and sat down across the table.

"Morning," he said.

And my oatmeal went cold in my mouth, I mean I stopped chewing with a full bite in there, because that was the voice. Not similar. That was it. The exact pitch, the exact slow careful way of landing on the ends of words, the voice I had listened to read Rilke through a plaster wall while I sat on my bed like a weirdo. It was coming out of the face of a man I have passed in a lobby twice a month for six months.

"Morning," I said, out loud, like a person. Inside I was screaming and also laughing and also sort of falling over.

He opened his laptop and started typing and said nothing else. That was normal. That was very him. But then, without looking up, he said, "You're Swenson, right? Property claims."

"Yep. That's me."

"You handled the water damage file on our east stacks in March. Good work. Clear report."

"Thanks. I try to write like the reader is standing in the flooded room."

He looked up at that. He almost smiled. His mouth did this small thing at one corner, and I swear to God I had heard that mouth do that small thing through a wall, in a pause between stanzas, some little huff of air he lets out when a line lands right.

"You read out loud," I said. Stupid. Just said it, no plan, no cover story.

He kept typing. "Sometimes. Helps me hear the meter. Books are meant to be heard, half of them. People forget that."

"What was the last thing you read?"

"The Odyssey, actually. The Fagles translation. I do voices."

"You do not."

"I do a passable Zeus. A terrible Athena."

He went back to his laptop. I sat there eating cold oatmeal and staring at him like a cat at a goldfish bowl, and he either didn't notice or was kind enough to pretend. Three blocks. His office is three blocks from mine. He walks past my building maybe. The voice had been commuting this whole time.

At nine twenty-five he closed the laptop, stood, nodded at me, and left. At the door he paused and said, "Good bread is achievable, by the way. It just takes practice. My first four loaves could have been used as doorstops." Then he was gone.

I put my head down on the break room table.