13 January 2013
It was during the first snowstorm of the new year. The color green was something you saw in pictures tacked to the wall or in a memory from what felt like years ago. I was living alone in a studio apartment in a shitty section of west Cleveland. Everything was the same color in that neighborhood, even in the summer. It was the kind of dirty grey that gets swept up into the air of unfinished basements and cold storage warehouses. There were no stairs to get to my apartment. I was as far down as you can get without going under. I slept in the same room as the oven, but I liked the smallness of it. When I was young my sister and I used to zip each other into suitcases. We would drag the suitcases up and down the stairs, and all around the living room, laughing hysterically.
That first morning I wrapped a scarf around my neck and lit the stove. I tripped over my shoes on my way to the sink to fill the pot. I looked down at them accusingly, as if anyone but me could have put them there. I looked up after kicking them across the room and that was when I saw him for the first time. I wouldn't find out until later that he had been there for weeks. Inches away from me as I slept. An arm's reach as I showered and dressed each morning. He sat with me while I overcooked my eggs and searched the internet for a cat to adopt, each time deciding against it because I could imagine it snowballing into two or three until I became one of those women.
The outside world that day, and every day since I had been living there, was a white swirling mixture of ground and sky. Set against the bright seamless backdrop was the outline of a man. He was fading in and out with each gust of wind, like a Polaroid gone backwards. But I saw him. I saw the tip of one of his pink fingers poking out of a hole in his glove. His hands were up against his mouth which was covered in a thick dark beard and his breath came in a long slow billow of white smoke, like the mouth of a gutter under a frozen street. His hood was pulled up over his head which made his eyes ever brighter in the shadow. I couldn't tell what color they were, but they seemed to have a reflection inside them like the round outline of a flashbulb in the eye of a magazine model. I didn't scream. I felt nothing like adrenaline, or dread. Or that feeling when your heart beats so fast it makes you want to throw up. Nothing like that happened. If someone told me that they saw a strange man staring at them through their window I would have expected to hear them say, "And then I screamed and dropped my glass and it shattered and I ran to the phone and dialed 911 and then I ran to my front door and pulled the deadbolt across and then I hid in the bathroom with the door closed and I couldn't stop shaking." But I didn't do any of that. I stood completely still as if someone was holding me there, and I watched as the man I saw so clearly disappeared into the endless white.
< 2 > There was nothing in my apartment that anyone would want. My possessions were piled in and out of boxes and I didn't even own a real bed. I had a mattress on the floor that tripled as a couch and dining room table. I did own a laptop but I took it with me to work. I didn't own a TV, or a toaster oven, or even a decent pair of shoes. I just decided that since there was nothing for him to steal, and I was sure he figured that out if he took a good look, that I would go on about my day despite his strange appearance outside my window. It felt less like a decision to ignore it, and more like it didn't happen at all. Or like it happens all the time. And that is exactly how it ended up. Each morning while I boiled water and ladled my mug into the steaming pot, I saw him. I didn't own a tea kettle either. I didn't see why people spent money on things like that when they could function perfectly well without them. But anyway, each night when I came home from work and my apartment was dark and quiet and anyone would think that I should be scared, I wasn't. There was no one waiting for me behind the shower curtain. Nothing was ever out of place. There were never any footprints circling my apartment, or scratch marks around my doorknob. I came and went peacefully and each morning I shared a moment with a stranger whose eye brows curled up like a puppy and whose fingers were always bent across his mouth.
It went on for about a week that way. I continued to start my car ten minutes early with the keys dangling in the ignition, so it could thaw. I guess in hindsight that was a pretty stupid thing to do in west Cleveland anyway, random man or not. But I mean I just lived my life normally, with the exception of my gloomy window friend stopping by more and more often. Once while I was watching TV late at night, something caught my eye at the window. Of course it was him. I just kept on eating my popcorn until I was full and there was still half a bowl left. I hated to waste food, and I always felt bad for the little birds that hopped over the snow, and wondered what the hell they ate in this neighborhood at twelve below. So sometimes I would throw food outside for them. Or for the squirrels. So I went to the window. I had never really…confronted the man. I stayed a room's length away from him as he peered at me sadly. But that night I guess I got brave. I got up and saw his outline like the moon must have been fat and shining right behind him, casting a line of white around his face. My eyes went to the top of the window to unhook the lock, and when they returned to him there was only the snow. He had been erased by its pale hand. I put my face into the cold, that kind of cold that feels more like fire than ice, and I looked for him. The snow was covered in a layer of glass. I threw the leftover popcorn and it rolled like dice across the ground. There were no signs of his tracks. I noticed, as I pulled the window back down, that there was no moon that night.
< 3 > The next morning I saw the white grey billows of exhaust fumes pouring out of a piece of shit station wagon in front of my apartment. I saw the woman's eyes, and they were glossy and dull. I had seen her baby basset hound eyebrows before, on the man at my window. She just stared at the door as if she was waiting for someone to come out. I came out. She drove away.
It happened that way three times. Not all at once, but spread so far out across two weeks that I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a déjà vu, and that yes, this had really happened before. The fourth time I decided had to be different. Something about her felt so much like the man at my window, but maybe it was just her coming and going. And her staring. And those eyebrows arching up. But her hands were not covering her mouth; they were white and exposed even in this weather, and they were gripping the steering wheel. So I could see that her lips were moving tightly against each other, and on top of each other, pulling in and out of her mouth. This fourth time she didn't drive away when I walked out onto the ice. I stood waiting for her to do it; to drive away as she always had. But she just looked ahead at the road, and then back into my face. Then I saw her hand move to the door, and the window rolled down. I walked towards her casually, not like someone who had seen her on three previous mornings, but like someone who was going to ask her if she needed directions. Or if she was alright. So I did ask her that, because I wasn't sure what else to say.
The wind stole the words and spread them out across the trees and the pavement and the kicked over silver trash cans. She said nothing. She looked like she might drive away again. She put her hands back on the wheel and looked straight ahead. But then she turned and looked past me at my apartment. I looked back then too, like maybe I was missing something. She was looking at the right side of the house, at the space between it and the neighbor's fence, which was all of four feet. It was the space where I saw my window friend each morning standing, waiting to watch me curse at my hair for making me late.
< 4 > "Are you looking for him?" I asked. Feeling as soon as I said it, the longing to take it back. I wasn't sure what I would say if she asked "Who?" Oh, just that man who stares in my window every day. The one who for all I know could be a serial killer casing out his next victim. I know that's what people would think if I told them. But it didn't feel like that at all.
But she didn't ask me who, she didn't say anything for about a minute, she just stared blankly back and forth between me and the apartment, and I knew that I would be late for work again. She looked like she was about to say something, her mouth kept moving and tears starting falling into it from her eyes. I remembered the landlord speaking to me in broken English, telling me how grateful he was that he didn't need to help me carry furniture. I remembered him telling me that a couple had lived there before me. And he kept saying something in Spanish that sounded like "tragic." And he kept shaking his head.
"Do you need help?" I asked, coming a little closer to the window. She just kept crying, harder now. I squeezed my cell phone for the time and saw that I was still early. I always turned my car on too soon, and by the time I got inside it the snow was pouring from the roof like rain.
"You can come inside and we can have some tea if you want." I said, imagining myself using a soup spoon to dish her out a ration of hot water.
"Or maybe you just want to talk? Is that why you keep coming here?" I just kept talking. I didn't know what else to do with her.
"What's your name? I just moved here a few weeks ago, actually I guess it's been more than a month. I don't know anyone. I work downtown at a magazine. I do graphic design." She started to calm down a little and looked at me.
< 5 > "Amy," she said quietly
Apperence • Opuss № I