three stories for a tuesday
The man first felt the tingling on the train. It began in his toes and slowly moved up towards his skull, each vertebra activated. He burst from the station and realized his fingers looked paler, almost translucent. He walked on. By the third block his hands had all but disappeared. As he passed the school he didnāt notice his head had disintegrated and his shoulders were quickly fading. His torso felt warm, a scarf flew from his body, his hat was long gone. When he reached his destination nobody noticed, as the man was just two shoelaces scuttling in the wind.Ā Ā
Though they, like most machines, have on/off switches, and are operated by a trained individual, many people do not know that buses have minds of their own. That they breathe with their own life and we simply comply with their whims by refilling the diesel. It is easier to tell the public that the bus drivers are driving the vehicles when in reality it is much more like a walker guiding a dog. There is some control over the busās movement and direction, but like a canine companion they can choose when to slow down, speed up, take an unexpected turn, or simply stop. Buses have heartbeats and, many too, attitudes.
Anyone who rides buses often would be unsurprised by this truth. It, however, upsets the idea that man has power over machinery, so many, when they learn this news, discredit it as rubbish. The next time you are on the bus, pause, and take in the signs of mechanical life. Notice how the bus reacts with aggression when a car is double parked in its stop, how territorial the vehicle becomes. Notice how each movement is taken with aches, grunts, and lurches, much like how your grandfather moves. Notice how in the morning, full of elderly riders, the bus moves with caution, and in the afternoon, filled with teenagers, it lurches with annoyance.
We bus drivers never spoke this truth aloud. I had begun to wonder about five years into driving, when my bus began acting up. She wouldnāt turn when the route had temporarily changed, if a difficult repeat rider came aboard sheād grunt, money from some would be spit back out and for others she would demand a second payment. I looked foolish, of course, unable to drive, and I was embarrassed. But the mechanics cleared the bus and I began to understand there was a partnership here, that I wasnāt in control how Iād thought I was. Some of us believed the rumors and others thought them foolish, but we made comments about it constantly. When a bus would break down weād knowingly say, Sheās got a mind of her own, and those of us who believed would shake our heads. Accidents and anomalies didnāt surprise us. City buses, unlike their school or charter counterparts, were known to be stubborn.
My usual route was the morning. I shuttled people to their jobs, children to school. It was peaceful to manage a rush hour together, machine and man, linked through years of understanding. One evening I picked up a shift from a colleague down with the flu and I was driving through the night. Finishing my shift I locked the bus and began my walk through the depot. It had rained all through the day but the evening had opened up to a clear night sky, light from the crescent moon rained down on the lot, an endless concrete expanse withĀ potholes and divots. My head was heavy with exhaustion but as I looked up I caught sight of a bus moving across the lot to begin its early morning route, the bus driver at the helm fast asleep, the bus turning gracefully out of the depot on its way to begin the next day.Ā
The first apartment was in the city center. It was housed in a sprawling brick building that from the inside seemed to go on endlessly and from the outside was barely noticeable. It took up less than a city block, nestled between single family buildings and other apartments, and having been built several hundred years ago, the trees, planted inaugurally, had sprouted into giant elms that gave the building a constant shadow. It was built of a brick rapidly degrading and was decorated with fire escapes doubled as porches. Families that had passed down the modest square footage of 1-3 bedroom apartments generation to generation lived alongside new tenants: the man recently divorced in 4c, the four twenty-somethings crammed into the two bedroom in 2F, the devoted dog-walker on the first floor. It had been her first home in the city and she lived there for only one year. Browsing open apartment listings had taken her nowhere. Eventually, she found herself pacing streets, writing down phone numbers from For Rent signs, calling every landlord in a ten-block radius. It had been a time of housing instability in the area, even more than now. This landlord had just been the first to call her back.Ā
Her apartment was on the third floor, a studio facing east. Every morning, sunlight flooded through the sheer curtains she had hung up, and by late afternoon the apartment was dark and sleepy. The room was modest: a small kitchenette sat on one end of the long space and her bed on the other side. A radiator was tucked into the bathroom and clamored violently all winter long. She littered the floor with small lamps but left everything else rather bare. In the evening when she got home from work, her ritual began with a tall entryway lamp on which she also hung her keys. Removing her shoes she flipped this light on and then tiptoed around her space, tugging each cord, pressing each plastic dial, until the room was aglow with soft yellow light. When she first moved in, the super had explained that this building wasnāt only a great place to live, it was unique in its height. When the building was constructed, heād said, the city had mandates for taller ceilings. But the people were shorter back then, can you imagine! Heād laughed and walked out of the empty apartment, setting the keys on a lone counter. A week later the lightbulb burnt out. Calling the super was more conversation than sheād like, and thus the lamp routine was born.
Tonight, in a different era, she found herself only a block away from her old building. Leaving a colleagueās party she walked west, tracing her old route from the train station home. The cafe was still in business but its hours had changedāno longer a late-night workplace. The market that sold meats at considerable markups seemed to have changed ownership, a flashy neon sign in place of the familiar hand-painted one. where the laundromat had been was an empty lot, the grass barely peeking through the pavement. Dumped trash spilled into the sidewalk.Ā
She turned onto her old block and noticed the trees first, how beautiful they looked in early spring, how they seemed both larger than before and yet somehow exactly the same. She counted the ten rings they must have grown in her absence. The old building startled her; she didn't remember it imposing such a presence on this block, how wide it really was. The ivy that crawled up the entryway, the stoop her neighbors would gossip on, the communal mailboxes that never seemed to all close. It rented such a presence in her memory,but here in front of her, she thought it was completely ordinary, almost surprisingly boring. Scanning the windows she moved through her former neighbors: the family on the first floor that moved away before her, whose infant daughter she would play with in the lobby. The man she flirted with on the top floor, name never acquired, was he still around? Moving back and forth she squinted in the night searching for any evidence of change. Even a new crack would do! And then, she saw it. Where it had always been, nine years since and ninety years prior sat her old window. A rush of warmth filled her body, the reassuring feeling of familiarity. But something was off and she couldnāt put her finger on it; the space emitted a soft uncanniness she didnāt remember from all of her late nights home many years back, when she would look up at her dark window and feel the relief of arrival.The windowsill was falling apart; chunks of stone held on barely and nobody had figured to replace the flower pot she had once maintained, if poorly. The window was slightly open and a thick curtain danced in the chilly breeze. And then to her horror, she noticed: the lights. Ten thousand watts of unforgiving blue overhead LED blared down, penetrating the fabric and opening out onto the street below. The woman decided she would return tomorrow.Ā
The city found itself in a streak of gloom. The sun had not shown itself in days and it was evident in the way its people held themselves: heads were hung low, small talk was kept to a minimum. She stood in front of the building again. Nothing changes that much, she thought, gazing at the fire escapes lined with downtrodden plants. In ten years it will look the same and I will know it even less. She rummaged in her bag for a set of keys she had unearthed from the depths of the past. Arriving home the night prior she was giddy with alcohol buzz and potential, and subsequently turned her present apartment upside down searching for two small ordinary keys from many years ago. Her cat had followed her around the apartment, witnessing the one-woman show of madness. The floor held: boxes pulled out from under the bed, suitcases brought down from the closet shelves, shoe boxes usually filled with printed 4x6 pictures strewn across the floor. The woman was grateful only a nonhuman creature was witness to the mess. If anything, cats understand territory.Ā
To her delight, this time the lights were off in unit 3B, making gazing up at her old home much easier than the night prior. That light, she scolded to herself, horrible. Though it was late morning, the cold weather meant the elderly women who usually guarded this building were off duty, their hunched backs and grumbled Hi dearās held off for another day. Her fingertips grazed each buzzer code, stopping on her old unit for a moment, then continuing onwards. Looking up, facing the building right at its center, she felt an incredible sense of loss. Like a dollhouse she saw the bisected view of the communal hallways, the wood-paneled lobby, the similar layout of units going upwards and sideways. She could see her people cooking in their apartments, nine years ago, today, and she could feel this emanating from the structure in front of her. The loss was that nobody else could see what she could see, all radiating from this decaying brick structure.
When neither of the keys fit into the front door, she was unsurprised but disappointed. She jimmied the key in the lock but it was useless. Her forehead resting on the window she looked as far as she could into the dark vestibule, a child looking longingly in a shop window at something they cannot afford. With a thrust she pulled the key from the lock and confronted the reality that it had been changed sometime in the past nine years and nobody thought to inform her. She was getting irritated. A squirrel ran across the path leading to the door, stopping in a frenzied state behind her. Its beady eyes met hers. The creature, though emanating anxiety, grasped firmly to a held seed. It was a joke among residents that squirrels in this part of the city were well-fed. They were huge, she had conceded, and in their bulk they guarded their territory more fiercely than other common gray squirrels. She was intimidated by the creature, felt it was kicking her out of its space and she had better comply. But in a blink the squirrel was running away, across the front yard and up the tree. She watched it climb higher, jumping from branch to branch, legs spreading like a frog, its tail choreographed in a frantic dance. The sound of a door buzzer shocked her back to life. She turned the handle and walked inside.Ā
The elevator doesnāt work, the maintenance man had explained to her when she initially toured. Never has, never will. This had only been annoying when she moved out, as by that time she owned several pieces of furniture and many small lamps, all which needed to be carried down five flights of stairs. He kept his word, she thought, though she tried the elevator call button to no response. Some actions were meant to be repeated even if they were useless, and most of these actionsāpressing the broken elevator button, checking the empty mailboxāare fueled by the often dubious hope that this time will be the one. This wasnāt the one, so the woman ascended the stairs.
At her door she sat in silence for a moment, looking it over and noting any changes. The scratches from a previous tenantās dog were still in the bottom left corner but a new coat of paint had been applied. The new tenant had seasonal decorations on the door and a matching doormat, which she found both tacky and endearing. The woman looked up and down the empty hallway, a long corridor of uncovered bricks and doors every ten feet or so. It was silent except for the occasional violent clang of a radiator pipe, which nobody batted an eye at once theyād lived here a couple of days. The constant bangs were a melody that brought communal griping; it was their song. She pressed her ear to the door and heard nothing, just the sound of her own short breaths. She knocked on the door lightly, and then harder, and counted to thirty in her head. Nothing. She did it again, louderāknock, count, hold breath. Silence. She rummaged in her coat pocket and picked out the keys: a large (now useless) communal key, and the smaller, meant for a single door. Into the keyhole she placed it, jiggled it to the left and then to the right, a muscle memory reactivated. She opened the door and stepped inside.Ā
The smallness of the space allowed her a safe entry, to scan for signs of life, witnesses to her breaking and entering. She locked the door behind her without looking back, a maneuver seeped into her body akin to breathing, eating, something done thoughtlessly. The room was quiet, unoccupied, and decorated to the nines. The room breathed a life her apartment never had: furniture, linens, trinkets, books, shelving, desks, the whole of human sentiment wasĀ crammed into the single room. The walls were lined with framed photographs of a happy couple, candid shots of them and their friends. The voyeurism excited her, to reimagine a space in the hands of someone else, and to admit they may have been a better match for it. But her sense of ownership prevailed, quieting any potential guilt she could feel.Ā
The woman quickly began her work. From the kitchenette she borrowed a barstool, from the sofa several decorative but firm pillows she thought were lucky to finally have a use. From the bookshelf she found the sturdiest books and from the coffee table she plucked dusty artist monographs. She shook free a milk crate filled with knitting yarn, promising each thread it would be returned to their rightful place soon. With the barstool positioned in the center of the room, she began to stack: monographs first, milk crate next, then the thick literary collections affectionately dubbed door stoppers, and finally/lastly the pillows, then the woman. She wobbled the way acrobats do as they ascend a pole and beckon their partner to jump upon their hands. The rocking motion of her creation frightened her with an excitement sheād not felt in years. She knew the old apartment held emotions long suppressed and each passing minute in it unraveling the layers of change. The acrobat sways and the whole room gasps. From her position at the top of the room she could see out the window to the tenement building across the street, her birdās eye view shot straight into the apartments of work-from-homers and families going about their weekday morning, totally unaffected by the crime being committed right across the way! She saw the room in its present state and she saw the room the day she moved in, its empty floors and white paint still drying and her measly belongings stacked in a corner near the mattress. From above she saw her friends who had come to visit and left her life since, the lovers who had done the same, the belongings that accumulated and left and the lamps she still held with her. It made her sick with nostalgia. Nauseated she reached upwards, a last Herculean effort, and unscrewed the lightbulb.Ā
She returned to her home, now, in the present day, to an apartment so similar in its outward appearance but when bisected, looking in as if a dollhouse, it exhibited an entirely different world. It held relationships and love and sentiment and laughs and cries she couldnāt imagine, the walls separating each tenant neatly. The woman had tossed the lightbulb in a city trash can, wavered, and then threw the small keys in as well. She returned to her living room and turned on each lamp with the dance of ritual. Something had settled into her body, a curiosity, an itch she couldnāt help but scratch, and its entrance that day had left her exhausted. Later in the evening, as she prepared to sleep, she pulled from a recently organized kitchen drawer a set of several keys, long unused and dusty. On her nightstand she set her second apartment keys and slept soundly until morning.Ā
thank you to meghana and mrittika for invaluable editing help and friendship <3Ā
