The Apartment

I will never forget this apartment. It will never be confused for the Ritz Carlton, or accused of being the nicest of all places. Its wasn't the nicest of any place. It was like that friendly but ugly dog who wanders onto the porch from time to time. Who you feed but can't bear to look at. It is like an apartment with the mange.

People have died here. On other carpets. I'm sure if you tear up this office surplus scalp of a rug, there would be blood stains beneath. Maybe a lip-glossed pentagram. There might be a civilization of dead bugs under there, pennies, and popcorn kernels. GI Joe guns. Hairs from dead heads. DNA and dust. Dust from broken dreams and hard times kept neatly between the medieval tack-strips. 

Beneath the gray bargain paint they slathered on the walls are many other colors. I bet you there are at least five shades of yellow under there. The various states of a dying banana. An avacodo green. A baby-shit brown, which was instantly regretted. Various hues of white. And a timeless shade of cream all of which spanned across decades. There might even be some wallpaper under there that a bored divorcee stayed up late one night watching Johnny Carson to hang. 

This apartment was her new beginning. A second chance. Her husband hated wallpaper and forbid it. This was her little act of rebellion after the divorce, a simple flower pattern, buried under there, as lost in time as she. 

She was murdered here. Of course, the realtor didn't tell me that. It was 1982, after all. There have been dozens of tenants since then. 22 to be exact. Mail still comes for 9 of them, and for five others who claimed this address. Her husband came here shortly after she hung that wallpaper and brutalized her one last time. He was drunk and small. Smaller than the army man that their son lost in the barhroom vent, who is still there. Still on a mission from a 5 year-old general who never gave him the order to return home. Dad killed mom, the boy, and then himself. 

The hat trick. 

If I can't have you. Famous last words. That army man is buried in lint and dirt and dust and toenails. He is MIA to the rest of his troop that were bagged up and thrown in the trash with baseball cards and He-Man toys. Relocated to a landfill somewhere. Deployed, they might say, to decompose slowly over a thousand years in the dirt. A war against worms. It made all the papers. People used to drive by this apartment and look up to Apartment 8 and feel less about humanity for a few blocks. The neighbors said they heard four shots, then nothing at all. 

But they changed the carpet and painted over her floral wallpaper as though she had never been here at all. They gave the old girl new skin. And someone else came, who was a much simpler story. The neighbors told him what happened, but he didn't seem to care, nor did he mind the ghosts. He stayed here more than he lived here. He didn't live much at all. 

The divorcee and her boy are quiet as two mice in the pantry. There have been roaches from time to time. Ants once in the summer of 93. They came back for a reunion in 98, but were swiftly annihilated in the Orkin genocide you'll not read about in textbooks. It was just their luck in life that they chose the apartment of an exterminator. They, too, became ghosts. But no one considers the ghosts of ants, nor do they try to summon them with Ouija boards or candle-lit séances.

Flies have lived here and summered in the kitchen, dying routinely in the front room window sill come winter like a Palm Springs retirement home. They lie in state like presidents in the capital rotunda until a spider removes the body after the appropriate observance. Spiders have rented here, though they seldom come down from the attic. Cobweb spiders once saved this apartment from a bedbug infestation, only to be thanked to death by a can of Raid. 

How this apartment fell briefly into my hands is of little matter in the scheme of things. I was not a tenant, but I am a visitor. No better than an ant. It was unfurnished but for a new bed and a chair, and when I had the time, I would come by and sit like Lincoln in the memorial and meditate. Tourists at my feet. 

I'd watch the walls. Stare at the off-white ceiling that had been painted-over after a past tenant smoked exactly 14,737 cigarettes in this room. One pack a day for nearly two years. Still, you can smell his Pall Malls when the air is just right. He died on the couch watching Monday Night Football and decomposed for several days before the stench alerted the neighbors. Death makes for strange bedfellows. 

I took a lover, or she took me, in that strange and fateful way people are assigned to one another. And this is where we made love to save a few dollars on hotels. In a place neither of us belonged, nor should have been. There will never be a record of us being here. No lease with our signatures. No mail with our names on it. Nothing of ours lost in the fibers of the Timberwolf Gray carpet, or the cracks of a vent. Our initials won't be carved on the wall to be covered by the landlord's surplus paint — Cloud Gray, they call it. The most neutral of neutral colors. Our shadows cast temporarily against the walls by a thrift store lamp. We are tourists. 

The last tenant left some things in the refrigerator we didn't dare eat. Some bath towels in the linen closet. An unused bar of Ivory soap. A ballcap for his head. Unused luggage. She might have left some hair in the bed or the drain. Maybe there are stains on the sheets of children unrealized. Of pleasures undone. Of more broken dreams, sinister or otherwise. 

This was our getaway. Our crummy little timeshare that she breathed life into in slow exhalations. There was only us and the few roaches that wondered through the remnants of their former habitation before they were nuked. This was their Nagasaki, 1945. There was nothing for them to do but pick up the pieces and move on. But I wonder what they would say about it. I bet it would be something like — They did it again. Or maybe, with a little more defiant attitude — I have survived the annihilation!

It all depends on if they are a nihilist or an existentialist. If they believe that life has no meaning, and never will have meaning, or that roaches have the capacity to bring meaning to things. Frankly, I don't know roaches well enough to say to which philosophy they ascribe. 

They will get nuked again, surely, but they have a little bit of time to occupy this space as we had. The difference between have and had is filled with sorrow. Sometimes it was only me here. Sometimes it was only her. But sometimes we were here together. Two adults playing house in a place that didn't belong to us. A place that the fat fingers of fate placed us in. 

It sometimes felt like we were mannequins in a Utah desert nuclear test city — Doom Town. A scientist would drive up in an old Buick and take pictures or what the explosion did to us after 18.6 kilotons of power. Lo and behold, and much to their chagrin, there we were. Together. Very much unaffected by their nuclear detonation. We were two roaches crawling up a wall. Two mannequins whose faces hadn't melted away with the old big bang baby. 

But our time was ending as the landlord sorted through applicants for a new tenant who soon would replace us. Squatters, I guess you could call us. Lovers, in the meantime. But there will soon be a new dopey tenant who will change his address, pay the bills, get mail, pass a kidney stone in the toilet, suffer the flu, clog the sink, take out the trash, hang pictures, put up a Christmas tree, order a pizza, lock himself out, all those little things we will never get to do together. We will not change our address or our situation, but we will go on and haunt other rooms. Share the same space until another bomb is blown and fate decides how to rearrange us.

The new tenant will not know the funny things we said within these walls. He will not have the privilege to see her modeling lingerie, or to see what we did in that bed trying to be quiet because the walls were paper-thin, crumpled like elephant skin. And soon we will have to give up that shiny golden key and in that dope will move, and out we will go. Back to the occasional motorlodge, or cheap motel, or hotel, or the backseat of a car. Or someplace we've never been — nowhere. 

What a frightening word "nowhere" is. Like nothing. I've been fortunate that our path has crossed for this long, but nothing, I am aware, lasts forever. Certainly not the coral-colored paint on the plaster kitchen walls, or the goldflake Formica countertop. Nothing lasts forever, besides for that stove that has been there since 1972, and has baked more cakes, brownies, and meatloafs than Betty Crocker herself. We might aspire to have the longevity of that stove. It is older than both of us. It will be alive long after us, swallowing glass dishes of noodles and sauce and regurgitating hot casseroles. 

I lie in the bed on the last night and wait for her to shower. We got a reprieve of another couple days and we took advantage of it. This is a crummy place, I realize. Nothing to think as much about as I have. Maybe it once wasn't, but it sure is crummy now, despite her beautifying it. It's the color brown without being brown. Cloud Gray. More like Elephant Testicle Gray. The smell of bug spray lingers in the air like a dollar store potpourri. It is probably toxic. But it doesn't matter. I am that last existential roach waiting for her in bed. Rubbing my legs together. Hoping not to be beaten by a shoe and to disintegrate to dust in the fibers of the cheap carpet. 

If the walls could talk. What a steamy romance bestseller they'd gossip. If they knew we were leaving, perhaps they'd mourn us. The passing of the lovers. Or they'd spill our secrets. Maybe they are spiritual. Or they dabble in astrology. "If walls could talk," they'd call their podcast. Maybe they liked us best of all because we never hung pictures on them. Never pounded on them to protest the neighbor's loud stereo. We simply lived and loved for a little while within them. We didn't stay long enough for them to get bored of us. 

But the bathroom tiles are perverts. The nozzles, absolutely filthy. The shower head is as incorrigible as Benny Hill. It's very unlikely that they've ever seen a beautiful woman like her shower before. There might have been one guy who splurged for a cute call girl who showered here. And that divorcee was pretty. But not like her. She is a Halley's Comet. A once in a lifetime girl. She has spoiled them the past few weeks as she has spoiled me. They, of course, don't know this is her last shower here, or else they'd throw a tantrum in some terrible way.  

The tiles might fall from the walls. The shower head would break and leak. The nozzles would refuse to turn off. It is the last time the floor will know her feet. If it knew that, it might roll itself up. That towel will drape her body no more. Never cling to her naked skin again. This is a tomb where in we go and hide, dead to normal life, and emerge again alive, revived, as boyfriend and wife. I will miss that burial in her. I will mourn this artless and sterile vault. This room with no view. 

How quickly first times turn to last and pleasure betrays us. It is quite heartbreaking. It makes me think of last times. We often don't know they are last times until they've passed. Do we? If I knew the last time I was going to see her in that apartment was the last time I saw her, I would probably have stayed longer. Even five or ten minutes longer. But I suppose it wouldn't have changed the outcome any. We still have to leave. We have places to go, things to do, people to care for and mourn, and life moves on regardless of our readiness. 

Rooms come and go. Lovers do as well. But not like her. Somethings you can't change like a curtain, or paint over, or replace. You can't fumigate emotions. We live in Doom Town and get nuked now and then by life. But we are still here, or there. Somewhere, which is far better than nowhere. We live through it. And we are something, which is always better than nothing. I would be a roach in the baseboards with her before I'd be anyone anywhere else. Or a ghost in the cupboard. Or a mouse in the pantry. Or lovers in a crummy Apartment 8 than strangers at The Ritz Carlton.