Wendy Brandmark
Why did it frighten me? That ordinary room. That little apartment in the weariness of afternoon sunlight.
It looked like the living room of a house, yet was complete in itself with a kitchenette in the corner and a tiny windowless bathroom. The armchair sat across from the turquoise sofa bed as if in conversation or as if their conversation had ceased and they could only contemplate their faded covers.
The janitor stood in the doorway. "All you need," he said.
I saw myself making up the sofa bed every night and wandering through the small spaces torn from a house of generous dimensions.
There was something about that sunlight which hung over the room. It seemed in its weariness to mock me, as if it knew all of life and my life too. I looked back at the janitor. He had not noticed anything. His face showed only impatience with me. Could I not decide?
He offered to show me another apartment. I shook my head. Though I could not continue to pay for a hotel, that crisp little room eating up my savings, I didn't want to see any more apartments that day.
In the end I chose an efficiency in a squat brick building which cost more than I could afford. It was a similar shape to the other one, even the sofa was the same turquoise blue, but it looked new as if it had not yet known the life that the other had seen. It was clean and fresh with windows which faced the back and so let in very little light. A cool room. Still I could not forget that other apartment. It seemed to comment on its younger cousin.
I made a life for myself there with the table snug in a corner, the ripples down the walls from the reflections of the Venetian blinds. At night when I pulled the bed down from the wall with its covers waiting for me, I felt the room held me in its arms.
My windows faced the backs of buildings and a yard where the bins stood. Every day before dawn I heard garbage trucks and men cursing. When they left, it was still dark and I shut my eyes again, calmer. On weekend mornings I felt uneasy in the quiet room without the garbage men to wake me and let me sleep again.
I knew no one in Denver except the other doctoral students who were younger than me and married, some even with families. I rarely saw anyone in the carpeted hall of my building though I knew there was a woman who lived next door to me because I had heard her singing. Once when I needed the vacuum cleaner which was shared by the apartments on the floor I knocked on her door to see if she had it, but though I heard a television she did not answer.
And so I lived there a month, two months, a clean life, my classes in the morning and in the afternoon my tea with honey, my pads for writing beside me at the snug table, the Venetian blinds moving when the wind came down from the mountains.
On the first holiday I woke before dawn to hear nothing, no garbage men cursing. The college was shut so I stayed in, glad that in my apartment I did not feel the sun or know its loud face. I kept the Venetian blinds closed all day, and the Murphy bed pulled down from its closet in the wall was where I wrote and drank tea.
That night I went to sleep with silence in my throat. Two people entered my dream, a laughing woman and a man who could not contain her. The woman lay down on my bed while the man wandered around the room picking up objects. "Don't touch," I shouted. By touching he might steal them. Did my shouts wake the woman next door? She never spoke. I sat up in my bed, looked around the room where no one was, or ever was, but me.
The next day I felt exhausted as if I had been dragging the woman and the man from my dream all night. I pulled up the blinds to see the unceasing blue. I decided to go out, just around the corner to warm myself and shed her laughing face.
For the first time I saw people sitting on the steps leading into the building. The elderly caretaker and his ill wife and a couple of older women. I sat with the others watching the street, our faces raised to the sun. I had meant to walk but when I sat down I knew I couldn't bear the empty Sunday streets, the rolling of cars up and down Colfax. The caretaker made conversation but the others ignored him so he spoke to his uncomprehending wife and to me. I said my pleasantries and was waiting till I could leave.
I didn't hear him come out. He stood by the door, a slender man with an elfin face who held one hand to his eyes. He was staring not at us but the clouds which now and again drifted past the sun. I tried not to make it obvious that I was watching him. I wondered which of the doors was his in a building where every door, every hall on every floor was the same. Yet how did I know, for apart from the basement where the caretaker lived, I had never been on any floor but my own.
The caretaker spoke to me, and when I looked again the man had gone. Perhaps the sun which began to make my head ache had been too much for him. It reached its zenith on that chill day and bore down upon us. Why didn't we venture forth, our little group? We looked out at the street as if we were on a boat and could only contemplate the sea. One of the women, who was dressed and made up for a working day, stood up suddenly and went in. The janitor's wife leaned on him to stand. Now I noticed the house slippers she wore and the bow in her ancient hair. I followed them in because I didn't want to sit out there alone and could not imagine walking the still streets.
I was grateful when the holiday ended, and I heard my garbage men again; the slamming of the bins and their shouts tore into the morning. I fell back to sleep, woke only when the alarm sounded and the room was riven with stripes from the Venetian blinds. I wondered if I would see the elfin man again. So many people I pushed out of my mind but he stayed with me that wordless figure. He was familiar, yet like no man I had known, no father, no lover of mine. I remembered how one deep line ran down his cheek. I could not see the other cheek to know if this was repeated, some permanent groove, or if the line was a scar.
I got up from the bed slowly. The air in the room seemed clouded and I could see a layer of dust on the carpet and the turquoise sofa. I needed to vacuum so the newness would come through again. But the vacuum cleaner was not in the little room with the washing machines. I began knocking on doors because often the tenants forgot to return it. My woman next door didn't answer though I thought I heard a step. Was she standing there by the keyhole, if I braced myself against the door would I hear her breathing?
As I was turning away, I heard her call to me. She was still in her bathrobe, leaning against the half open door as if she was hiding someone. Her long black hair fell in loose tangles around her face, and I smelled sweat on her.
When I asked about the vacuum cleaner, she told me to try the top floor.
"Don't they have their own?"
"Theirs broke. There's a man there hoards it."
After she shut her door I realised I still didn't know her name. I couldn't name anyone in the building but the caretaker.
I was shocked when I stepped out of the elevator. It seemed they paused, the carpet layers, the painters, those who had given my floor, my room such newness, had paused and never come back. The wooden floor was bare and the walls greying. The hall seemed to darken as if the sun had gone behind clouds, but there were no windows up here beneath the low ceiling.
I felt embarrassed knocking on these doors, intruding on people who had less than me. But I needed that vacuum cleaner. My room would grow dim and weary if I did not capture the dust. There were doors that didn't answer where I imagined an apartment empty maybe for years.
"Who are you?" a man's voice.
When I told him I was searching for the vacuum cleaner, he opened the door. It was the elfin man and now I saw that the deep line on his cheek had been a trick of shadows. He looked like an actor with his high cheekbones and dark brows.
"You'll bring it back?" he said as he pushed the machine towards me. I started to say that it wasn't his; it didn't even belong to that floor. "I still need it you see." He had a slight accent which went along with the charm of his smile. "You can leave it outside my door. No need to knock. Now if you don't mind I have something which occupies my every moment so I must bid you farewell."
The sun began to enter the apartment, just a stipple in the late afternoon. I had thought I was safe but I rented it in the fall when the sun was in a different place. One morning when I pulled up the blinds a beam lay across my arm. That light so honest showed me the sofa had begun to age or perhaps was not as young as I had thought. The carpet was spotted beneath dirt I had not lifted with the vacuum cleaner. I lowered the blinds and pulled the chords so that they let in only the barest light. I remembered that other room, that room dull in the sunlight which had bleached the life out it. The living room taken from some home and left to languish.
I thought if I vacuumed with great care, placing the machine over each square of carpet and letting it sit till the dust vanished, the newness would come through. I went looking for the vacuum cleaner and ended up once again outside the elfin man's door. He was wearing what looked like an old fashioned smoking jacket, glossy black with a sash. Maybe he saw my distress because he said, "I'm having a coffee. Will you join me?"
He asked that I take my shoes off before I entered and looked me over as if to make sure I brought no disorder into his apartment. I felt strange in my socks sitting on his turquoise sofa. I brushed my hand over it but no dust motes rose. "Your sofa looks so new."
"I vacuum it every week," he said.
He showed me the hose inside a compartment of the machine which I could attach to do the sofa. He brought a tray with espresso cups and tiny hard cookies that tasted of caramel. When I asked him where he'd come from he smiled at me.
"I'm from wherever I am."
His face confused me. The pointed chin and thin lips of a sly elf but above a high wide peaked forehead, and darkness which marked his eyes and heavy brows.
I now lived in twilight with the blinds always fully shut. The carpet would not yield its dust however much I vacuumed. I thought the elfin man was lucky to have his bare floors. I vacuumed the sofa as he had shown me but when I turned on the lamp it revealed each evening a new patch of aging. I tried not to look at the room, and once I went to the library and worked till it closed. But when I came back and turned on the light, the room seemed more faded, as if in the space of hours, it had lived years. I pulled down the bed, lay inside its closeted head till I could sleep.
In the morning after the garbage men had come, I decided there was no point in keeping the Venetian blinds completely shut. The carpet looked just as dusty and dull in lamplight. So in the exhausted afternoon the sun spread itself over my room. When I woke from a nap, I could not remember where I was. And it came to me in that moment before reason took over that all along I had rented the other apartment.
I had to go back and see it again and know that it had nothing to do with me. I could not remember the name of the street but if I walked up and down the streets of Capitol Hill moving from east to west I would find it.
It's funny how memory deceives. I would have passed right by the building if I hadn't seen the janitor lounging outside. It seemed smaller than I imagined and so ordinary. White stucco, a flimsy zigzag of stairs leading up to the front door. I stayed on my side of the road watching him. I could ask to see the apartments as if I was a stranger to them. Surely he wouldn't remember me. I walked to the end of the street, then kept walking because I couldn't, not that day. It was enough to know the building and the janitor existed.
Once again I stood before the elfin man's door with the vacuum cleaner. He asked me how I was getting on with vacuuming my sofa.
"I've just about given up," I said.
"You would want perfection."
I shook my head. "Because it makes no difference."
He beckoned me in. I remembered just in time to take my shoes off. He pointed to the sofa and I thought for a moment that he was showing me how successful I could be with the vacuum cleaner if only I tried much harder. Then I realised I was to sit down, me at one end of the sofa, him at the other.
"When I first came I thought I would only stay a short time," he said. "I would leave no traces."
But we're always leaving ourselves behind, dead skin cells littering the arms of the sofa.
I noticed that there was nothing on the walls or on surfaces of the table or the kitchenette counter.
"But I have stayed more than a year. So it is important to maintain. You understand?"
It unsettled me what he was saying, like the odd conflict between his high wide brow and his narrow pointed chin. The steady anguish of his eyes.
When I asked what he did, he said he sold death.
I couldn't smile like he did at this.
He told me he worked in life insurance. "I am like the devil and Faust. They make a pact with me. If they pay money for their deaths, they will never die."
Because I thought him strange, I told him about the other apartment. I thought how much he would detest its worn dusty look. And yet he might understand why I could not forget it.
"Was it really so fearful?"
"I thought someone had died there. Or maybe half died."
He smiled at if I had made some amusing little comment. "I've always wondered what a last room would look like, and if I would recognise it when I came upon it."
"I'm afraid to see it again." I will be like a victim of vertigo who because she fears the height will plunge down.
"It seems you must," he said.
That Saturday I went back there. I didn't see the janitor lounging outside, and nobody answered when I rang the bell. Maybe I hoped he wasn't there. He came after I rang again looking sleepy, his hair dishevelled. I asked as I had asked that first time to see the efficiencies. He looked into my face for a moment as if trying to place me. Then he turned and lumbered down the hallway. When he paused with the key in front of a door like all the other doors I opened my mouth. I would say that I had changed my mind, I didn't want to see it after all. But it was not the same room. The sofa sat in a corner, there was an alcove for the bed and above it the high window shed no light.
I asked if there was another one but he shook his head "We're almost full up. Come back in a few months when the students leave. There might be something."
"Because I came before. You showed me an efficiency, only different. Maybe cheaper." I described it to him though it was painful for me to picture the room.
"You sure it was here? Because it don't sound like one of my apartments."
I thought he looked uncomfortable like a man who told a lie and now had to live with it. Or maybe I imagined his look. It could have been impatience I was seeing. He wanted to get back to his nap.
We were walking down the hall when I said to him, "It was a room with a peculiar atmosphere. As if whoever lived there had been very sad."
He was silent.
"Has anything ever happened in the apartments?" I asked.
"Nope. Everyone minds their own business."
I walked back after that, head lowered. I wanted only to shut my door and pull the Venetian blinds down. When I switched on the overhead light, the room confronted me. How shabby it was. The first time I saw it, the caretaker pulled the bed down from what looked like a closet. "You see. This room is two rooms, night and day."
I went to tell the elfin man about my visit for he had been the one to urge me. He was wearing a lavender shirt with buttons in a slant down the front like an artist's smock or something a patient might wear in hospital.
"Do you think it never was there?" he said.
"Where else? I'm sure I had the right building."
"That room waits for you. You open the door like the lid to a treasure box with jewels you've left for so long that they have grown dull."
Suddenly I didn't want to be talking to him. I said, "You think I dreamed it?"
He touched my cheek. His fingers were cold and dry. He pulled them back fast as if he had been burned by me.
That night it was so warm that for once I opened the window which faced the backs of the other buildings and the yard where the garbage bins sat. It was odd how silent it was out there even though I was only a few streets away from Colfax. I pulled down the bed, lay inside its closeted head and shut my eyes.
I knew I had to find the elfin man. When I came out of the elevator, I held myself back for I could not see any doors. I had got off at the wrong floor. Or was this really the top floor and I had taken the elevator too far? But I knew that the elfin man lived on the top floor, that there was no button in the elevator for a floor beyond.
The walls stretched blank, not even evidence of doors, like a blind man's empty sockets. Then I came upon a door in the green wall which I pulled. It led not to an apartment but up some metal stairs to the roof. I didn't understand how this could be and where was the floor where the elfin man lived.
I climbed though my legs were trembling and hot air rushing towards me made me dizzy. I thought I would go down now but then I saw him peering over the edge. He was all in black so that it seemed he was part of the pitch roof, rising from it against the startling blue sky. He was staring at something down below so intently that he did not hear me walking towards him. The sun bore down on me and my shoes seemed to sink in the hot pitch of the roof top, but he was so close to the edge that I continued, stretching my arms out as if I could pull him back. Then he disappeared. No sound. He was just not there anymore. I stood where he had stood but I saw nothing down below.
When I woke I thought the room had taken my breath. I ran to the window and braced myself against the screen, opening my mouth, gulping the air. My heart was beating fast like a trembling bird you might hold in the palm of your hand to feel its life.
I heard a woman's voice desperate as if she could no longer contain herself. My mouth was still open, and I thought for a moment it was my voice. Then I imagined the woman next door, her white body, her long black strands of hair. I understood that she was crying out with pleasure.
In the morning I thought my room had a sad look as if it knew I was no longer trying to make it young again. It is the same I thought as I gathered my books together to go to college. Which is why the janitor couldn't remember the apartment in that other building even after I described it to him. I had taken it with me and not realised. I put the books down on the table and began pulling up the blinds on each of the windows until the light which had begun to creep into the veiled room, cast itself on the sofa, the carpet and my face. Like a hand stroking me. And with that I went out into the day and the sunshine which began to feel like the heat of summer.