Complex - South View

"So I guess you heard..." I didn't know exactly how to respond. ------------------------------------------------------------ Of course they were close, I knew this the way I knew ------------------------------- the way I knew bullets and rockets are close, and March and spring. "Yeah, there was a note ------------------------------------------------------------------------  "He left me the complex."  There was no right thing to say.   "Oh. Well that could be good for you, right?"  "Hah." She was right.  How many times did we bump into each other at the nearby laundromat and talk until our clothes were dry and room temperature about the injustices of her uncle's building management.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------  She lived there, I lived in the next building, which shared a wall.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  He was very polite, but due to a contract he signed long ago everyone within range of his building had to use his lousy cable and internet service.  If you used your own ISP, you were still billed for his, which included telephone and premium cable.  He was likable and his voice was gentle, but he had drinking buddies in the department of health, so violations went uncited as we watched the cockroaches grow larger and larger in our bathrooms.  He was charming and allowed dogs in his building, but he made us feel powerless and trapped in an-------------------------------------------------------- Unthinkably, I broke the silence with ---------------------------------------------------------------------  The weight was unbearable, so I replied, "Yeah, definitely, nobody deserves to die."  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Her parents vanished when she was a pre-teen and he raised her. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- He maintained her the same way he maintained his building. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Whenever she complained to him about the conditions and demanded an improvement, he would apologize and draw up some sort of plan, and as penance buy her something really extravagant for which she has no use but felt obligated to be grateful.  His plan would never be implemented, or never make it past the initial phase before falling into neglect, --------------------------------------------------------------------- and as her complaints grew more dire, his apologies grew more emotionally overwrought and ----------------------------------------------- the penance became more extravagant and more useless, especially since she had no room to put it so she ends up donating it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  She was self-cleaning, but the shadow he created in her was dark enough to see the stars at noon under.

Faced with the grizzly prospect of having to settle the books, pass an honest inspection, and decide what to do with the building, we realized our only option was ------------------------------------------------------------------------  "Do you want to be a landlord?"  "Fuck no! I would burn this place to the ground if I didn't care about the neighborhood so much."  She felt guilty as her words echoed. -----------------------------------------------------  "But if I'm----------------------------------------, I should probably still live there, right?"  After a long pause, she confesses, "I feel so overwhelmed right now.  All I really want to do is leave everything and run away."   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  "I understand. -------------------------------------------------------------------------  If you did, you would be defined by the mess you ran away from for a long time.  What do you feel overwhelmed by?"  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  "Since he died, I've been hearing the sounds more and more.  I don't think it's rats, I think he is haunting the building."  We joke about the rats in her building all the time, ------------------------------------------  She had not mentioned ghosts before, but she sounded frightened and vulnerable and had latched onto something as so many feelings passed through her fingers.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  I took this opportunity to make another mistake.  "You should move into my building while you handle this.  Or you could stay in our spare room for a few months, I've been fixing it up. Mark wouldn't mind." ------------------ In my ham-fisted kindness she only saw more clutter. "Definitely not. Why should I put you guys out... and what if the ghosts follow me?"  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------  I asked her more about the ghosts.  -----------------------------------   "I've blocked them from my conscious mind for as long as I've known you at least, but they have haunted me for years. Now his death has made me realize that what I thought were rats were ghosts all along.  They charge into the doors of my perception, wielding keys that they broke in other doors long ago and thus can not be used to gain entry.  But I hear them struggling and fumbling; the jingling grows debilitatingly loud so I open my doors to them just to make the sound go away, and out of mercy.  And maybe if I let them in from the cold they will -------"  When you discover that someone is haunted by the same ghosts as you, it is basically like saying you have the same credit card number as them.  You must breach the topic gently or you -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  As I poured out my explanation, I noticed that I was floating and drifting away from the momentum of my words.  ---------------------------------------------------------------------  She tried to follow me to listen, she was so -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- but I floated straight up into my building, ------------------------------------------------------- she was hesitant to allow our ghosts to interact, that hers would overpower mine somehow.  As my door swallowed me, I tried to yell out that Mark and I are pregnant, and that we are tied to this complex for the foreseeable future, and that her abandonment would condemn us to the next morally corrupt slumlord who -----------------------------------------------------------------, but I am not sure if she heard me.  She sent me a text message from ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ and her phone will be out of service.  I found my laundry neatly folded ------------------------------------------------------

Documentarian

Rain was visiting old friends at a spot that, if you were keeping track, was the place to be from 8:30PM till around 10, at which point the people to be had branched away from tapas and $15 drinks and into their chosen industry, whether it was designer chemicals, performance art, combative fornication, or professional-grade sleep, the type that people announce via social media like it were a Kickstarter campaign. Nobody with a life cares about basil-infusion after 10PM.  It was 9:15 when Rain arrived; she and her friends have never been here, but her friends brought along a tour guide named Brent, who was anxious to meet Rain.  You could hear every conversation in the room, but not understand a single word anybody was saying.  It seemed designed to allow you to speak and feel like you were heard, and listen the same way people listen at karaoke.  They catch the headline like a song title then return to their own internal dialogue until it’s their turn to sing.

Rain was visiting old friends at a trendy spot in LA, when it occurred to her how much time had gone by since they had spoken.  She walks in and thinks about the past 5 months.  Same job, same apartment, same wardrobe… as she approaches the table and notices a carefully groomed stranger talking to her friends, his messenger bag precariously draped over the round back of his chair, his eyes wandering to meet hers as they have been scheduled to, she realizes “Right! Boyfriend.”  Or rather, committed relationship at least; they haven’t really discussed titles.

Brent has a parlor trick where he can take any subject and segue to his effective panty dropper line of “I am an indie documentarian”, in 5 sentences or less.  Rain has read the same book of parlor tricks, so she replies, “So, please forgive my ignorance, what makes you an indie documentarian… are there corporate documentarians?” Just as Rain’s curt dismissal caused Brent’s scarcely contained rape fantasy to surface, the waiter approached the table and announced, “I’m sorry everybody, but the excessive narration of this story has sucked all of the oxygen from this room.  Please put on these masks or you will die.”  Nobody could talk for the rest of the night, so they survived. The end.