Apartment number Three

Day one without a Facebook, I'm back in ann arbor, taking stock of everything. Got a new neighbor today. He's a seemingly dimwitted kid, but nice enough. Funny how it works, each time someone new comes along someone old has to go. I had come up through the fire escape and gone straight to my room. As such I had not noticed the situation on the second floor till I ventured out to pay the rent, late. Plue plastic gloves and police investigators on the stairs and a dead man in his room, that's all. I got on my bike and rode down William to State street.

It would rain, cooling the dense heat, dulling the intense flavors of the flowering trees and that hint of death smell which was still stuck in my nostrils. I would all but slice through the hot air, followed by a junket through the cool, damp, rain and...It occurred to me, I never knew the guy. There he was, dead and I was lolling around.

There was that one time, a couple months ago when to my surprise I discovered that an old bearded man lived in apartment #3, not an asian grad student like I had previously thought. That one time, I hauled several hundred pounds of film equipment up the stairs to my hovel, the bearded man held the door in silence. “Thank you,” I uttered. If speech was a heartbeat he'd have already been dead back then.

The investigator stopped me to ask a few questions. “That's about it,” I said to him. “I only met him that one time.” Wonder how long he sat there. It seemed to me a man who lives alone in a house full of college students in a town like Ann Arbor is bound to do some rotting before his death is discovered. I suspect only a shallow depth of loneliness will drown a man, and in our own private isolations, the ten or so other people in the house could not have noticed the breadth of this man's existence, let alone it's abrupt edges.

Come to think of it, sound seems to greet you more than people do, living in a place like that. Late at night, in the clutches of insomniac happenings I would startle at an habitual cough, rattling through the heat vent. It was a sorrowful hack. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only other person alive who could hear it, that cough that would be carefully inspected by blue-gloved hands and packaged under a white sheet, the remnants condensed into several pages of legal pad notes or Febreezed into deep, dark corners to diminish and degrade.