Also, I'm doing this in an effort to keep blogging, but I have little of interest to say these days. Just fighting to not be so sad.
Emily slides her bag off her shoulder and hears the snores creep through the uninsulated wall. She follows the rhythm of quick inhalation, pause, two, three, four, and whistling air escaping. She imagines the air trapped in the man’s fat nostrils. He must be fat to breathe like that. Emily muses how completely unabashed one is in sleep. Making such raspy noises with no worries wafting in and out with each breath. Oblivious to the quivering walls and wide-awake neighbors. Sleep brings truth, she thinks. And perhaps the man is actually conceited, but Emily hears him, sometimes, moving about, trying to make as little noise as possible. This can’t be easy considering his size. Emily saw him most recently a month ago(?), looking uncomfortably snug in the back of a taxi. He had seen her too, she knew, because he threw his gaze to the another window when she looked his way.
Emily brews her tea and curls up with her knitting needles armed. She works on a pair of socks in burgundy. The TV next door blares. The fat man is awake and watching another game show. He always turns up the volume when he wakes up. At night he watches game shows, in the morning, cartoons. He watches movies on weekends, sometimes keeping the same one running back to back. Emily isn’t sure what he watches during the day, but thinks he’d switch to sitcoms. She never hears the news or talk shows through the walls. The man does not track the outside world.
Her hands stop purling when she hears a loud cough from upstairs. The woman upstairs, Emily knows, stays in bed most days sick with some incurable disease. Emily only sees nurses ever going up there, never the woman coming down. Emily imagines she is thin and covered in translucent skin. Late at night, she hears the woman’s moans, and Emily’s not sure if the woman moans in her sleep or moans because she can’t sleep. The socks are for her. Emily plans to leave them outside her door. One of the nurses will take them in. A woman in that condition does not want young, pretty visitors.
When Emily turns the heel, she tucks her work into her bag and heads to bed. She pauses in the kitchen, listening. Silence above, TV next door. She tilts her head towards the floor and listens for Aaron making movement. Aaron lives below her and spends more time awake at night than asleep. She hears the faint electronic gunfire from Aaron’s wartime video games. Instead of following her drowsiness to bed, she wanders downstairs to visit him. She doesn’t bother to knock since he won’t hear her. He never locks his door claiming he has nothing worth anything to anyone.
Aaron sits in the corner of the room, splayed out and almost horizontal in his chair. His eyes glow in the bobbling light from the TV. He squints at Emily, but his fingers keep darting around his video game controller. Who’s winning, Emily asks. The terrorists. Us, Aaron says. Want to play? Emily declines and watches Aaron shoot civilians to gain life points. Are you hungry, Emily wants to know. Aaron forgets to eat. She believes he subsists on soda and pizza from a shop two blocks away. They are open until 2 a.m. She remembers two times she saw Aaron shuffle out of the apartment complex and up the street. He walked with short, slow steps; hood up and hands in pockets. She doubts he does this more than once a week. So once a week she brings him part of her dinner. She’d bring more if it ever got eaten.
She spends several hours sitting with Aaron, making one-sided conversation. He doesn’t seem to mind.
*
Emily doesn’t own a TV, so sometimes she sits close to the fat man’s wall and plays game shows alongside him. Unbeknownst to the fat man, Emily pulls her ottoman close to their shared wall and whispers answers into the wood. She won’t say them too loud, lest the man hear her and think she’s trying to outsmart him. Emily thinks a man his size might feel his mind is muddled and slow to match his body, even if it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s fear that keeps him so large. Fear freezing him in his chair. Emily would be scared to face daily activities dragging a dozen extra Emilys around with her. She hears the night nurse and the afternoon nurse laugh with each other as they switch shifts. They are just outside, breathing the fresh air of the evening. Emily hopes the woman upstairs does not hear their laughter. She thinks a sickly woman like that, one who can’t (or perhaps won’t) come outside, might loathe hearing others enjoy their lives. If I were dying, I’d want to live it, she thinks. Not wait it out, locked away. Emily thinks fear keeps the woman in bed. Fear of enjoying life and hating to leave it.
Aaron is not home when Emily walks in later that week. She picks up the dented pizza boxes and soda bottles and leaves Aaron a plate of spaghetti and garlic bread on his recliner.
*
She sees a doctor conversing with the evening nurse when she arrives home. Emily assumes the older woman is a doctor by her bag and matter-of-fact tone that trickles down to Emily’s ears. Never the same doctor twice, of the half dozen Emily has heard speaking to nurses in the hallway. This doctor glances at Emily in the parking lot and says nothing. The upstairs emits slight squeaks and gurgles all night. The TV next door crackles static until four in the morning, and muted gunfire surfaces. Emily listens, wrapped in her unraveling blanket, and considers the emptiness of the noise. The mechanical sounds keep her awake until the fat man turns his TV to cartoons.
*
On Saturday, when rain sluices down the window panes, Emily wakes before sunrise, startled by the haunting thunder. She curls up with a blanket and lemon tea, waiting for day to overtake night and filter through the storm. The rain drowns out all but a tiny hissing snore from the fat man. The intermittent whistling air halts as the fat man rolls over. Emily counts the couch spring squeaks as he rolls: two to start, three more for the torso roll, and two for the legs that flop to follow. *
Non living is a quiet thing filled with pieces of sound that mimic actual existence. Non living resides on a lower frequency with little need for activity or interaction. The way Emily sees it, a person’s frequency wavers along at an internal level until interaction causes the frequency to jump. *
Emily can no longer be certain a fat man lives on the other side of her wall. She hears movement in slow drags. She thinks the fat man has been replaced by a walrus whose breathing rattles his nose rolls and whose body slugs along the carpet in grunts and groans. A walrus and his perpetual frown. *
Emily hears little from below for the next three days. Upstairs the coughing grows more distressed. Next door the TV remains mute for days at a time. Emily imagines a catatonic walrus staring at the silent, blinking screen. One evening Emily hears a loud series of thumps on her ceiling, like a stack of books hitting the floor in a domino effect. She hears the night nurse’s muffled voice speaking low the floor and two pairs of feet moving in discrete steps.
Emily can’t remember what day she last saw Aaron. Was it three days ago? Or was that when she gathered up the previous week’s rotting plates?
*
They take him out in a blue body bag. It’s such a dark blue that it is almost black and Emily wonders why it’s not black. She sees them wheel the body down the sidewalk, to the unlit ambulance.
She wonders what its like to exhale and feel everything slip far away. She exhales on the window, blurring over the body bag.
Will she one day wake up zipped into the black space of a blue bag?
Through the glass, the ambulance lights drift silently from view.
images by sunderland book group, no second chances, and aimless direction (respectively)
Initial thought(s): I like it. A lot. More to come.
ReplyDelete--graeme
wow. why couldn't i read good stuff like this in school? I had to read dumb stuff.
ReplyDelete