The Landlord
It wasn’t a house, yet the ceilings were high and the air and the light, expansive. Maybe the time I’m telling you about started earlier. The realization, this idea of a living space, I mean. My place in it. When I was even younger than the time I want to describe. Here: thirteen or fourteen, at a wedding in Chicago. I’d come outside into an alley where the Chicago sunset was frozen, as it always is, in mid-explosion. I don’t remember the pills I’d taken—I think I’d been doing a lot of ephedrine dressed up in gelatin capsules to look like black beauties, green and clears, or maybe I’d had something from my mom’s medicine cabinet. And so, when I heard the rats scratching inside a bucket, at first, I thought they were behind my eyes, lodged in some cortical blind behind the harder bone of consciousness. And it is here, in this idea of something liminal and fortified—maybe this is what I want to describe to you.
This time. The rats. The city had posted warning notices about them on telephone poles and on tenement walls, black and white graphic drawings of their fat, slick bodies, two or three times the usual size. I sat out in that alley and smoked and listened to the scratching and wondered about it until the band inside began Billy Squier’s “Lonely Is the Night.” When the song ended my head was such that it hadn’t really ever begun. And in the void, the scratching shot up from the bucket, no—behind the bucket, a black shape, and then two black shapes. The first crawled out of a basement doorway. It was several feet long. It paused, rose on its haunches and reached up. It tugged at something, lifted it and rubbed its muzzle on it. Then it slipped into a hole tagged with gang graffiti that said RAZ, and which looked like a caption, and I thought, that’s its name, RAZ.
The other rat climbed out of the bucket with a fried animal in its mouth, a leg from a chicken or a joint of lamb. I could see its teeth, little fang-like pearls gripping the bone. Then it dropped into a shadow and was gone except for its long tail that had been threshed at the end like a cat o’ nine.
Inside the wedding “There Must Be Some Misunderstanding” kicked in with great fanfare. Someone was screaming the lyrics as though their hair were on fire. The first rat reappeared and scaled the wall, latched like a tree frog to the brick surface. It hopped onto the lowest rung of the fire escape and began climbing the latticed stairs. The other one came out of the hole, looked around, then followed.
What I want to describe here is this moment when the rats were gone—when the music stopped and I closed my eyes and a calm static sped through my heart and pulsed with its own voice and seemed to speak a wordless language of solitude about how alone I was and would be. For those few seconds I could feel everything that had happened to me and everything that would happen to me riding through my blood, overlaid in a kind of thick textured darkness behind my closed eyes and I felt my adolescent loneliness as fully as I ever would. I was filled with my lonely breath. I was the god of my solitary self, alone there in it.
I left Illinois. I was seventeen, living in Boston, but I wasn’t a student. I’d ended up in the city by some small miracle of incongruous chance. All the students looked identical, which is to say they all looked as if they were projecting onto me some kind of erasure, painting over me my own invisibility. I lived in a back room at my job at this doughnut shop until I could find a real apartment. I had called a listing in the Boston Herald and the voice and I set up a time. And then, as I was crossing the street, I nearly stepped on a rat in the gutter’s water trap. On its side, curled up as if napping beside a crushed juice box and a twisted dirty t-shirt. And I heard Billy Squier come through one of the nearby windows.
The landlord watched me pause there, then approach—he looked like he was squinting and sniffing the air. He was one of those people you don’t ever notice. I mean not ever in your whole life. Unless you have to rent from him.
You the guy? he asked and I guess I knew what he meant because I said, yeah, and then followed him down the concrete steps to the door of a basement flat. He began slipping different keys from his giant ring into each of three cylinders. The door was black and had dents and the bruised lighter black of the soles of someone’s shoes. It looked like it had been pried at over and over. He said, It’s been vacant for several months. Then the door coughed and slid open along the police lock.
You in school? he said.
No, I said.
Employed?
Yeah, down the street, Steve’s Donuts.
Oh, I like that place. You know Jimmy? Jimmy Gates? He’s in there all the time.
I’m nights, in the back.
The apartment smelled like mold and stale Freon, smelled like one of those profoundly lonely places where you could die and no one would know it for a week.
All right, he said. A thin rim of light leaked from behind a closed door across the room. A vent fan rubbed and coughed there.
One bedroom, he said. You could make it two if you wanted. I don’t care so long as people make rent.
He went over to the door that was lit and grabbed the doorknob but the door just bumped and snapped. You could see a coat hanger had been twisted up, holding it shut from inside.
I’ll get that fixed, he said.
A human shadow flickered behind the door.
Hey, the landlord said. He kicked the door, then pushed it. The coat hanger pulled. He threw his body into it and there was a cracking sound, and I wondered if the landlord had been responsible for the damage to the front door of the unit. Then the landlord kicked the door, then kicked again, then pushed. The twisted coat hanger inside loosened. Then he threw his shoulder into the door and there was a cracking sound, and it sprung open.
There was a shirtless man crouched in the shower basin. He was turned away from us, the bones of his naked back, but there was nowhere to go. It was a windowless space, a trap.
No, the landlord said like a scolding: No no no no.
The man stood. He reached up to a small tear in the ceiling above the showerhead. I have dreams about this now. In the dream he jams his hands into the space and plaster spills down. He turns and only then do I see that it is a woman. She hisses at us, her face lacking any expression: a doll’s, or a Noh mask. Her breasts are small, and she has a man’s paunch below her ribs. There is her shirt on the sink, a blouse with hippy flower patterns from the 1970s. She turns back to the opening in the ceiling—it is too small for her body, but she reaches into it anyway. She grows smaller, lifting her bruised legs, their mottling expands as her legs contract, her even smaller feet now scrabbling over the aqua and black checkered bath tiles. The landlord and I back away and her shrinking head enters the cavity. In this dream, which I’ll admit has become as true to me as the event was, she pulls her shoulders into herself and rises. Plaster crumbles around the opening. The bones of her back dislocate, more plaster, some dark matter dropping, little black stones absorbing light as they fall to the enamel basin of the bathtub, and then this woman, the size of a large porcelain doll, pulls her body through. I recall this in the dream, which has fused with the actual memory, and suggests the truth of all the things I didn’t know yet.
In fact, the landlord and I were standing outside the closed door.
Okay, look, the landlord said. I’ll have them out by the time you move in.
Them? I said.
Whatever, he said. Look, let me show you the bedroom.
I heard a voice in an argument above, in the ceiling.
In the bedroom, a twisted sheet on a mattress on the floor. The room was cold. A small can scuttled from under the landlord’s foot. There was an obelisk of other cans, lids pried off and withered purple chemical gel inside. Three narrow windows were open. I heard scratching.
I have a portfolio of other properties, he said.
Tony was the owner of Steve’s Donuts. I packed wholesale orders into boxes. Trucks arrived in the very early morning and brought them to all the colleges. The order slips were lined up at night on the table. They listed what to pack, which truck wanted what. Usually I was alone after the day shift left and gone before the morning trucks came. The job paid in cash to respect your anonymity, but most everyone there was using an assumed name anyway. I worked in a long room among tall racks of blue and gray delivery trays, hundreds of dozens of doughnuts, a proof box for rising dough, a glazing station, and two Fryolators. Sex workers passed by the big storefront window. Hey Davie. They waved through the glass. They laughed, blew kisses through silent glassy mouths, said: I’ll be back, or, can I come in, can I have a doughnut, can you hold my gun for me for a while?
A broken broom handle was jammed into the sash of the tall window in the back to let in air. The fire escape outside hung like a collapsible spine over an alley. Beyond, a parking lot, a black square vaporized in the tall lamps. I’d climb out onto the fire escape and smoke and drink beer. Faint city noises from the other side of the building. But here it was quiet. The street lamps evaporated all the stars in the sky. A warm slotted light vibrated in the building beside me.
I stood on the fire escape, the black ironwork’s gravity an uneasy bubble over the alley. I lit a cigarette, the match hissed, and smoke curled and hung and then the silence opened up around it. I heard a chorus of chirping in the obliterated space of the ground below me. The dark of night opened too, and I saw the flux now of their undulating shadows, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, little slip-shapes oscillating and swarming, rippling like a brook. I crouched on the wrought iron and when I finished the cigarette I tossed it and embers of tiny orange suns cascaded and skidded down the fire escape. I saw below on the alley floor a small shadow hobble over and eat the burning little stick, then startle and leap back like a fat cricket. I climbed inside where three dozen glazed crullers lined up in the large box I’d left. A dozen Boston cream. A dozen jelly, two dozen French cut. Half a dozen laughing people passed the wide storefront window.
I signed a one-year lease with the landlord, but let me say it was for a different place. A flat on Hemenway Street. The doughnut shop was only a couple of blocks away. It took a single trip to move what I owned in a plastic garbage bag.
I was walking to my new apartment that night after my shift. I saw a flash in the sky, a flap opening in the dark above the top of a brownstone across the street. Dim phosphorescence stuttered and ticked where copper trim had passed through a hundred years into a chalky green. Perched high over the white spray of the streetlight was a silhouette of one of those plastic owls used to care away pigeons. The shadow flickered. Then flickered again.
But it was a real owl. It shuddered and its wings opened out and cocked, as if its bones were breathing beneath its feathers. The owl launched and dropped, seemed to half-tumble with silent wings, then drew into a swoop over the street. It skimmed the curb below. Its talons reached out, stabbed at the water trap of a gutter, and then the owl rose clutching something twisting and paddling in its grip.
At the apartment I ate a can of lentils and smoked. My skin smelled like burned cooking oil and powdered sugar. My belongings were lined up against the wall: a couple of changes of clothes, a grade school composition book, a plastic alarm clock, some books I’d already read. I had a framed five-by-seven photo, old and yellowed, of my mom and dad getting married. The frame was silver, pressed with ornate German or maybe French-looking patterns. My mom’s smile was profound. I finished eating. I raised my paper cup of Polish vodka and sipped and considered the meagerness of my worldly belongings. I poured another cup and soon my body turned into cigarette smoke and my mom’s smile in the photograph moved in and out of the smoke.
I woke on the floor in my clothes, the sun pulsing through the windows. The room was beautiful, empty and spare beneath the high ceilings. I showered and when I came back into the living room to get my clothes I saw that my belongings I’d set against the wall were gone.
I found the composition book later, in the hallway. The landlord came down the stairs. He looked startled.
Someone broke in, I said.
Oh, that’s a bad break, he said.
A thin slip of something passed between us just then. But I didn’t know what it was.
You call the police? he said.
Not yet.
Well, don’t expect much. My two cents: they’re all on the take.
Later, the cop asked if I had homeowner’s insurance. Because that would be the thing, he said. For next time. Homeowner’s.
Okay, I said. But what do I do?
About what?
Now. Next.
Well, you’d be robbed, he said. That’s generally how it works.
Down Hemenway street, behind an apartment foyer’s glass door, two people fucked wearily on the linoleum floor. A man sat on a stoop cradling a woman’s head in the broken light. A lightning storm in her brain seemed to be passing through her body—a switch in her circuitry flipping her back and forth, her body speaking in tongues. I passed the windshield of a parked car in which a man was holding another man’s unusually large cock. It seemed to glow in the window. The men nearly perfectly still as they watched me pass—the startled night eyes of two deer frozen at the side of a dark wooded road.
I turned onto a street so much like my own that I mistook it as my own. I crossed into an alley where the windows were lit and barred between the fire escapes. I realized then how profound the impulse was to look in, to want to see someone. But I didn’t see anyone real. In a dumpster, a pair of small washing machines were stacked beside two mannequins, a man and a woman, fashionable expressions staring from the vacant faces. The shadow of a rat, and then another, climbed the male mannequin’s shoulder and turned, sniffing.
Months later at dusk I would pass through the western edge of the Fens, a public garden near my apartment. I came to an unfamiliar hollow that smelled damp and earthy. Tall reeds rose like giant feathers. A shadow materialized into a man deep in the grasses watching me, and I recalled stories about this place, where men came for sex and were mugged or betrayed. Another shadow turned into a face. I kept walking as men appeared. I saw how fortunate it was that I was young and looked like them. A middle-aged local television sportscaster had been stabbed here. I remembered this now. The path opened to the street where they’d found him. And later, when I recalled that first dark shape in the reeds, I saw the mannequin’s face in the dumpster. I saw the rat curled along the neck, perched on a bare, hard shoulder.
The scratching in my walls was louder until it transformed into rats when they’d chewed through, the holes large enough to fit their surprising faces and bodies. I’d wake to several new openings exposing lath and plaster, balls of hoarded hair and packing straw, bottle caps glued with some kind of cement, shredded soda cans and plastic bottles, shadows of people I once knew, splinters of dreams I’d had while I half-slept, all of it now in the wall.
Whenever I saw the landlord he asked if I ever got my things back.
No, no such luck, I’d say. Maybe I’d mention the scratching rats.
The landlord would mention meddling ordinances, how baiting his buildings meant they’d die in the walls and toilets. Then he’d transition into all the other work his units needed, complaining about someone hired for a job who’d been a letdown.
One day I brought in a roll of copper flashing. A garbage bag I’d put down had been partially subsumed into a hole in the wall. When I tugged at the bag, a rat, its teeth clenched around the plastic, emerged from the hole and scampered up a pair of pipes. From the sheeting I cut ragged circles like little copper moons and nailed them over the holes until the walls blossomed with constellations.
I’d begun to notice the smell of gas, but it often seemed that I couldn’t trust my senses above the other, more feral smells in the building. And I was drinking to sleep because my sleep kept having conversations with the scratching in the walls, the scrabbling sometimes right by my pillow, and in half-dreams I worried that my eyes were closed, that I’d neglected to cut a new disk, that something was changing in me before I could wake and seal it off.
Soon, the walls everywhere else looked unusually clean and strange, free of holes and copper disks. At work I worked and drank and smoked. I packed the doughnuts with ordered discipline, a drunken expert, as if it was the one certain thing. I went home and ate and showered and half-dreamed, such that day and night became more or less the same.
I took up odd jobs around the building for a cut in my rent. I didn’t tell the landlord I was saving money so I could move. He gave me a master key. He told me he had the only other copy. I needed it to pass through a locked boiler room to get to the alley. Twice a week the other tenants left garbage bags outside their doors and I brought the trash down to the basement. I had to move quickly before the rats could gather in the stairs or by the doorway to the alley. I tossed the bags into the dumpster and heard the familiar dovish cooing and chirping.
I vacuumed the stairs where the building’s winter heat pooled as you went up. At the top was a penthouse unit that had never had a tenant as long as I’d lived in the building. I was curious one day and used the master key to open it. A huge skylight cast a bright rectangle on the bare hardwood floor, and as my shadow stepped into it I saw a glistening pile of fur coats against the wall. Cheap jewelry spilled over the side of a paper bag next to an old stereo receiver.
The kitchen, the bedroom—boxes, bags, strangers’ belongings scattered, and then I saw the framed photograph of my mother and father. My mother’s smile. Beside her were my other possessions. The landlord had said he had the only other master key. I took my things, closed the door behind me. I went down to my unit, gathered the rest of my life, and left.
Tony said I could sleep in the back of Steve’s Donuts again. I regained a familiar uncertainty about the world. At night I wiped down the packing table and slept there, waking when the morning counter help came in at 4:30. I mostly stayed out during the day. I saved money and devised alternate scenarios for my life.
A few months on, I caught the front page of the Boston Herald: column three, a picture of my building. My bedroom window, soot ringing the blasted glass.
There had been a gas leak. Someone was living in the unit. A man, an unnamed squatter who’d moved in after me. He died in the fire, probably in his sleep. The landlord had a record of abuses and this seemed to finally allow the city to prosecute him for a felony. I cut out the article and taped it inside the composition book I’d begun writing in.
At night I lay on the table beneath the large window in the bakery and listened to the smoke of the deep fryers cooling, popping from moisture, a siren chasing someone born into their life at that very moment, someone else shouting, an occasional collision of horns. By then I could identify the laughter of certain people who passed by.
When I went back to the old building the cranes were gone, the barriers and yellow tape pulled away. It didn’t seem any different. They’d rebuilt it to look like all of the other buildings. A woman watched me from behind a window. She saw me notice her and backed into the shadows of the room, where the once high ceilings were lower. I felt a strange ache. It reminded me of that ache as when, in a crowd, you accidentally see someone with whom you were once intimate. The feeling as you walk away, head turned, knowing you are different now, but unable to recall what it was that had changed.
First published in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of The Southampton Review.