Illustration by Tom Gauld. Click for larger image.The admittedly pretty rundown townhouse would sell better if the place could be shown and delivered essentially vacant. That had been the notion. The building’s good bones would be made evident, making it easier for a prospective buyer to dream.

Anyhow, the building belonged to a distant aunt of mine, a wealthy can-do woman who lived on another continent. And seeing as I lived on this continent, and was in a cash state that left me without a strong opinion on the tax code, I did not decline my aunt’s offer of living in the otherwise empty building, making myself available to show the place when opportunities arose, and just generally being there to make sure it was okay. I moved on in. The switch of neighbourhoods was somehow reason enough for me to stop seeing any friends. I didn’t sign up for cable and so had neither Internet nor television. And the radio, I don’t know, I’ve never liked it.

Living like that — at first it seemed a kind of luxury, but I guess I got a bit out of sorts. I remember a mid-morning when I was regretting an outfit of a particular pair of jeans and a brash yellow sweater, and then I stepped out to get the mail and realized I was in my undershirt and pajama shorts, realized that I’d never put on the regrettable outfit in the first place. Another afternoon, I found myself anxious about the upcoming election but then, walking past a particular poster, I realized that no, it was March and not October, and the election had been decided months earlier. I remember one Monday: I was under the impression that I had stocked the refrigerator with Armenian string cheese, too much of it, so much of it that I’d need to eat it at two meals a day for a full week in order to keep it from going to waste, and then I went to the refrigerator and found no string cheese there at all, just a sack of apples that I thought I’d only contemplated buying but then hadn’t.

That was the day I met my neighbour, Eddy. When he saw me there in the foyer, he kind of startled, birdlike. His hair was long and unwashed, and he was reading Being and Time, which didn’t immediately make me dislike him, maybe because I liked his hair and maybe because he carried it like it was a car repair manual. Actually maybe I startled first, before him.

I introduced myself as the niece of the landlady. I felt very nineteenth century doing that.

“Yeah, she’s so nice,” he said. “She’s letting me stay in my place a while longer.”
I figured he was lying, but I also don’t kick puppies. He went up the stairs. I went out the front door. Well, good, I thought to myself. In truth, I’d been kind of spooked living in that building all alone.

After that foyer meeting, when I’d hear all those noises that old buildings inevitably make, well, I would think to myself, oh, that must be Eddy, opening his door, flipping a light switch, pouring water over ramen noodles. Eddy looked through an old stamp collection, opened seltzer cans, caressed a fussy and small black cat I’d come to believe in. He creased pages in Being and Time, the only book — in my mind — that he had. Well, it wasn’t exactly love, but it was better than the emotions my mind had previously been coming up with to account for all those little sounds. I’d rather not go into those emotions.

Aweekor so later, I had a repeat of the phantom string cheese episode, except this time there was only one apple left in the fridge, and it didn’t look so great. I put on the brash yellow sweater that I’d not yet had the chance to regret in real life and ventured out. The repeat of the string cheese mistake had kind of given me a scare, and so I resolved to go farther than the corner grocery. About seven blocks away, I found a little family-run-looking gyro place. I went on in, making the bells that hung on the handle jingle as I did. The sound was as if somewhere an old-fashioned film strip needed to be advanced.

At the back of the shop, a man was pressing a waxed paper cup against the lever for a fountain Coke, and I really love fountain Coke, and maybe that’s why I found myself just walking straight over there, to right next to that man, to get myself a Coke — I could pay later, it seemed like that kind of place — and then that man — something about the tilt of his neck produced a tingle of recognition — mumbled “goddammit” as foam ran over the edge of his soda cup. Memories ambushed me: endless rounds of gin rummy, my dad drenched in sweat after a run wearing one of his button-up work shirts, a track made up of old tires submerged in a field, piles of pistachio shells. Sometimes I called up these little father memories on purpose, but they weren’t in the habit of arriving unbeckoned. That neck, that “goddammit” — they were familiar. But it couldn’t be my father; he’d been dead for more than a dozen years, a baker’s dozen, actually. But even if he’d been dead for just a day, it still would have been dead enough for it not to be him, there, cursing a soda machine.

I walked away from the soda machine. I went casually about my business, honest I did. I paid for my drink, ordered a gyro, paid for that, too, waited, and then, filled red plastic basket in hand, I looked around for a seat.