The Empty Apartment

There was still winter in his life, and summer breezes wouldn’t blow through for years. The night began as any other, with silence. Within his dream, the dread woke him, like men in caves many thousand years ago, hearing the dry footstep of the saber-tooth on the grass. Like fingers softly scratching along the wall. Walls of an empty apartment.

Next door had been empty a long time, he remembered, sweat breaking on his brow, dampening his pillow. Other nights were different, by then he didn’t sleep anymore. One night, with the moon full and silvering his windowsill, he sat at the edge of bed, holding his head in his trembling hands. The thin, chittering giggles were bad, but when he heard, faintly through the walls, the high piercing laughs — like a woman at the edge of hysteria, but not scared.. then he took to gripping his gun through the night. Later, he began sleeping in the kitchen on a mat. This room shared a wall with the other apartment too. The sounds that he heard through the thin kitchen walls were louder, more guttural. Coughs and wheezes like a boy old beyond his years, dying from consumption. And in their midst, the laughs, widely spaced, as if death was a bad joke.

That year, as he looked for another apartment, the answers from the management office were first polite, then soon, impatient, angry. “That unit has not been rented yet, sir.” “Didn’t we tell you already? There’s no one there!” Then, the avoidance. By now he had come to hunger for this, his personal terror.

Another morning, shuffling down the hall, red-eyed and unshaven, his clothes rags hanging from his shoulders, he saw the door open. He shrank against the wall, and crept forward. There were soft voices inside. He looked into the space, his body flat against the wall opposite the door. A grey-looking man, tired, his eyes blank, walked up to look at him, the room behind him much like his own living room, except nude of furniture. The man’s hand held her much smaller hand. And from the hand, his gaze went to the face: small, bony, face creased by un-child-like wrinkles, topped by a bow in her hair. And on the mouth, a smile, with a thin, dry tongue slipping out to lick its edges. His eyes held the smile, its broken outline. He ran down the hall and stabbed at the elevator call button. He pressed it many times but it wouldn’t come.