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A KNOCK. THE DOORBELL. I opened the door a sliver and saw no one there, but found a pie on my mat, along with a note from 9B that said the shelf had fit in the end, though he felt that we had gotten off on the wrong foot, so here was a chocolate pecan pie that he’d baked himself.
I took the pie in and examined it. I nibbled the crust and waited twenty minutes. Was I high? I checked my breath. Was I dead? I checked my pulse. Neither of these things, so in one night, I ate the rest of the pie. The baking tin I placed back on his mat with a note of thanks.
When we saw each other again in the hall, the mood had changed. I waited patiently as he broke down his boxes, correctly this time, and tossed out his trash.
I asked why he had so much trash. Was it a condition?
He asked why, was I a doctor?
In fact, I said.
Really?
I waited for the standard fuss over what I did for a living and the inevitable request that should he have any pains or discomfort could he come to me first? But Mark didn’t do that and instead did something that made me like him more. He shrugged off my being a doctor like it was no big deal, like it was just another job, which it was. To explain the trash, he said he was an avid home cook. For baking, he could go through two dozen eggs a week. He liked to cook for other people and have low-key gatherings where everyone eats and has fun.
Our hall had started to smell nice, of something rising in the oven or simmering on the stove. Sautéed onions and tomatoes. Freshly made bread.
A knock. The doorbell. I opened the door a sliver and there he was again with another question about the building—are the water pipes always so loud? do all of your burners work?—questions that led to other questions totally unrelated to what he’d initially come to ask.
Read books? he asked.
I shook my head.
You need to read this one.
He gave the title and I nodded my head.
You’ve heard of it then.
I shook my head.
He wondered if we should cohost a housewarming.
I said I didn’t want to do that.
Why not?
I said I didn’t like parties.
Who doesn’t like parties?
Me.
You? he said, then his right eye closed briefly, possibly to wink. Then he walked slowly backward, down the hall, with his face still toward me. Could be fun. Could be great. Mull it over, you.
As odd as my new neighbor was, a great thing about him was that while he was at my door, a quarter of an hour at a time, talking, he never asked me questions about myself. Whether I was married, had kids, wanted to get married, wanted to have kids, or what my life was like, he didn’t seem to care. Relieved of any expectation to respond, I could simply listen and fun-sway along in my head. If my on-service brain was the trenches, then my off-service one was a meadow. If I was part trench, part meadow, then Mark was a roundabout. On and on he could go without making any real progress.
He used to be in publishing and when he said that, I said wow, publishing, except I knew no one in publishing or anything about that field.
Yeah, I used to be at a house, he said so coolly as if he had immediately expected me to be impressed.
A house? I asked. A house and not a building?
The house was in a building, two whole floors.
Oh. But I still didn’t quite understand.
He said the job itself was stimulating, with lots of similar-minded people around, but corporate life stifled him, and he didn’t like the feeling of being a cog.
Did or didn’t? I asked, hoping I’d just misheard. Cogs were essential and an experience that anyone could enjoy.
Didn’t, he enunciated. He hated that feeling. So, he’d quit last year to freelance-edit and consult from home.
Previously he had lived in the West Village, Hell’s Kitchen, and the 80s of the Upper West Side, but never this far uptown. He liked to try out different neighborhoods and looked forward to what each new experience could afford. He asked for the official name of ours and I said there wasn’t one, which he dismissed as couldn’t be true. If you lived in as vibrant a place as this, you had to get the name right or else people would suspect that you were trying to get more street cred than you deserved.
I told him I had no street cred, so asking me about it was useless.
Yeah, but say he still wanted to discuss it, say it was our civic duty to find out. Was this area actually the Upper West Side or more specifically Manhattan Valley or Morningside Heights or SoHa?
SoHa? I asked.
Southern Harlem.
I said that was not an acronym I knew.
He complained about having too much stuff. Whenever I saw him during those initial weeks, he would wonder how through all his moves he’d managed to accumulate three copies of the same book, repeats of silverware, glassware, Dutch ovens, frying pans, reusable shopping bags, electric mixers. From here on out, a resolution. He wanted to be, or at least aspire to be, a person with fewer things.
So, outside his door, he started to leave filled boxes that by the end of the day were gone. Through my peephole, I watched other tenants come and inspect the items, then carry them away. Some even knocked on his door to chat and without exception, Mark would invite this tenant in or offer them homemade food.
For a while his resolution seemed to be working until Mark mentioned that his steep drop in stuff now bothered him and that he’d never set out to be a minimalist, after which packages started to arrive for 9B, in piles in the lobby, and whenever I saw him sign for them at the desk, he was holding large shopping bags, one under each arm.
Our ninth-floor hall had a window that was equidistant from 9A and 9B and aligned perfectly with the bathroom window of an adjacent building, less than an arm’s reach away. If I opened this window, I could touch the brick of that building, I could tap on the glass. Multiple times a day, the same man on the other building’s ninth floor sat in his bathroom, on the toilet, and thus in the center of both our two windows, framed by them, like an old painting. I called him Enormous Man, because even after three years, I still had no clue about his weight or height. He sat at eye level with you, motionless, his own eyes cast downward and with one sock draped over each bare shoulder.
The constant influx of new things into 9B and efflux of old things reminded me, yes, of a roundabout, but also of people who liked to eat while on the toilet, though I never saw Enormous Man eat.
* * *
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THERE WERE TWO PIECES of mail in my box today. The first, a Shen Yun brochure in a trifecta of colors, golds, reds, and greens—absolutely the number one show in the world, a must-see. (I’d never gone to a Shen Yun show but got flyers from them all the time, along with Chinese pamphlets about Jesus and Falun Gong leaflets about the terrible evils, like organ harvesting and imprisoning, that happened every second on Chinese soil. I didn’t know how these people found my address, but being on these mailing lists was an exercise in cognitive dissonance, that on one hand the four-thousand-year history of my motherland was glorious, and on the other modern China was the worst, so please turn to Jesus.)
The second piece of mail was a West Side Hospital brochure in our trademark color of calming ocean blue with a white font. West Side Hospital cares about your health, it said. Come learn more about our multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, evidence-based, team approach to care.
But if you came, wouldn’t you be sick or visiting a patient? Does anyone come to a hospital to learn more about the fortress itself?