by Eric Bennett
from the upcoming Fierce Wounded Things
Provoked by Manhattan’s chaos, I reveled in its fictitious thrill for years. In time, however, I began to feel like a hitchhiker dropped off in the middle of nowhere, the trip over before arriving at a destination. Suffering the need to discover the satisfying thing life is supposed to be, I move out of my midtown apartment where people live like fish in bowls and rent a flat in the Village above Tails and Snails Pet Store. It’s 1953: the year of poetry and pot.
My new apartment building is the G-spot of Greenwich Village, hard to find and fraught with sensitivity. Most of the tenants are writers, artists, or musicians–I am none of these. But living here makes me feel like I’ve acquired a new set of relatives, second cousins perhaps. We, every one of us, are the black sheep of our family, which creates an air of scandal over the entire complex. Yet looking out my ninth-story window, arms folded, I watch my neighbors come and go through the reflection of me on the glass thinking, These prodigals are all the family I need.
The thing about apartment living is that there are no innocent bystanders. Everyone is involved, like it or not, in everyone else’s business. Just this afternoon, for instance, I was foraging through my cupboards like a ruminating animal when there’s knocking. I open my door and filling the frame is Frigg, my across-the-hall neighbor. Frigg is a long limbed, unkempt man with a bony bird face and nervous hands. He’s convinced he can’t use his left brain. He tells me I smell like wisteria and that he can hear the universe hum.
“Universe means one song. Get it? Uni: one. Verse: song. We live in the one-song.” “I get it–I get that you need medication.” But Frigg listens to me like secondhand smoke, nose squinched, arms waving in front of his face. Then he lifts his hands to his mouth and speaks through his fingers, “My feet stick to the earth. At least I freed the four-footed creatures before the sky crashes down.”
I make a little bow. “Thank you very much, Frigg,” and slowly close the door.
There are lots of talkers in this building–that’s mostly what everyone does. Seeing how quiet I am in comparison, the talkers take liberties. They bend my ear about their lovers, their philosophies, their disillusionments. And I listen because that’s what I do.
Through paper-thin walls I hear my neighbor Nin arriving home this evening. She settles into her apartment, shedding clothes and the day. I picture her unbuttoning while staring blankly at the dirty window in her living room, but there’s nothing for her to see outside, only the abstract adventure of the city. Nin is talking to herself, the sense of her sentences breaking down as they pass through the sifting wall between our apartments: “…blood in the streets… …living in boxes… …her tongue… …old-fashioned corkscrew… …everything Freud…” The fractured meanings are a medicine I greedily digest, numbing my loneliness.
A bone-colored moon rises into the window and I become a ghost haunting these rooms. The apartment becomes a purgatory–a place to wait. I sit in it, lay in it, waiting. I don’t know what I’m waiting for but I sense my life grinding to a halt, boiling down to “what’s next?”
I pad about in substantial cotton socks, fingering random items throughout the apartment. I pick up and prop up on the pillow of my bed a black and-white image of me when I was eleven. I’m posing too seriously for the camera, a broad Arizona sky overhead and beavertail cactus and bulrushes as backdrop. Diffidence clouds my face, my future already explicit in my olden face. In time I fall asleep staring into my own eyes–sleeping through all the dreams I never made come true.
Limbs akimbo, I emerge from sleep the following morning with arms and legs entwined in sheets. Untangling is an architectural problem I’m solving–eventually I become my own. The growing light in the room dissolves the last of the shadows and though I’m still groggy, I recognize the sound of whirring wings. My eyes focus and I’m dumbstruck to see a hummingbird flitting above my bed. A rush of adrenalin crackles through me and my heart begins to motor fast. Leaning back, I lock my hands behind my head and consider the little green angel, dark tongue flicking. Perhaps this unexpected invitation to wonder is the Universe’s way of healing the emotional abyss in me.
I become aware of stamping and scraping sounds in the hallway outside my apartment. So, I tip on toes to the bedroom window, open it wider so the hummingbird can fly free, and then slip through the crease between the door and jam of my room. With no sense of how I appear, I open the front door and there on the red-carpeted landing is Nin attempting to trap an albino ferret. And kittens: mewling everywhere. The apartment manager, Auden, and his wife, Larissa, are plucking puppies off the stairs and putting them in a pillowcase. Auden is yelling at Larissa, commanding her to hurry up, that there are parakeets in the lobby, to never mind the gerbils–“We’ll never catch them anyway.”
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Someone saw Frigg opening the cages in the pet store last night. He must have been high” answers Auden.
“No,” I say smiling, “It’s just that he can only use one side of his brain.”
Auden’s face takes on an expression of energetic impatience, but he says nothing. I join the frenzy, scooping up kittens and dancing around rodents so as not to step on them. I feel explosive as a bottle rocket, alive with laughter. I stop for a moment and my heart wells in me and amidst the tumult, I’m certain I hear the universe humming.
This and other stories coming to you soon in Fierce Wounded Things by Eric Bennett. Explore more: