When I hear the girl’s scream pierce the cracked plaster between the new guy’s apartment and mine, I do nothing.
My eyes widen, waiting toward the wall in the 1:00 a.m. dark. My back tenses against the mattress. My legs stiffen beneath the covers in the center of the bed.
My breath halts. the way it froze in the grip of Rod’s icy fingers on that night two winters ago when his elbows pinned my breasts to our bed and his hands compressed the tissue of my throat, his thumbs collapsing my airway. Flattening my larynx. So when I opened my mouth to try to scream, it did not make a sound
Silence now.
And then a thud. Perhaps a faint scream.
Perhaps I am imagining.
I unclench my fingers and pull apart the heavy covers. Test my feet on the floor. My knees wobble. I tiptoe barefoot to the bedroom wall and press my ear against its smooth cool.
Maybe thudding with the bass of the new guy’s stereo. But just the ticking of a pipe swishes within.
I tip-toe across my apartment, to the opposite wall, maybe echoing with the shrieking laughter of the old woman’s favorite late-night talk show. But against my palm, the plaster flattens, as lifeless as a blank TV screen. Then a thump. A far-off wail. Maybe out on the city streets below. I tip-toe to the balcony and peer down to the sidewalk, where teenage girls used to squeal beside the boys they liked as they pedaled toward the last suburban train. Back before the sidewalks emptied, eerie, silent, save for the wailing sirens of police cars, flashing their blue rays into vacant storefronts as if with some kind of ultraviolent cleansing agent, some cure for the strange new virus that has come to hover above the whole earth, to choke the air, strangling the lungs of the rare masked pedestrians who dare to sneak down the downtown sidewalks beneath my balcony.
But tonight, far below, no one is wandering. The only wailing is the wind.
I clutch the railing. Inhale to slow the palpitations in my throat—a heart condition that the doctors in disheveled white coats on TV have warned might turn deadly, even in young people like me, if I were to breathe a contaminated stream of air down there, beyond the safety—and the isolation—of my apartment walls.
A crash against the plaster. A rattle of the dishes on my kitchen shelves.
I march across the floorboards to the wall that separates me from the new guy’s fist.
But as I raise mine in response, to pound my reprimand, shout my threat to summon the police, I hear Rod’s long-ago curse, spat out after my hands grasped at our old apartment’s doorframe, after my feeble cry for help bounced and slid down the outside hallway’s walls. “Now you’ve done it,” he declared as he slammed the door against my fingertips. “Now the police are going to come, and now I’m going to get my gun.”
I know that if the blue beams of police flashlights were to sweep up tonight from the streets and pierce through the new guy’s door, he too might flash a revolver in response to the police pistols, and then bullets might rip apart the plaster.
My hand drops. My palm opens, empty. The silence stretches out the length of the wall. As the blue-lit numbers of the clock on the stove flash past one by one, cleansing the last echoes of the girl’s screams from the quiet darkness of my apartment, I imagine a corresponding blue glow in the room next door. Perhaps a football game replaying on the TV screen. Or maybe a more scripted sort of gore, flashing through some slasher plotline, perhaps prompting the girl’s frightened screams. Perhaps that crash was simply the slamming of a cabinet as the new guy retrieved snacks to accompany the horror film.
Perhaps any actual horror was only my imagining.
*****
I started imagining the details of the new guy’s life the night he emerged, mysterious behind his mask, from our building’s elevator.
As the doors slid open, his frame blocked the entrance with the bruising bulk of a football player, perhaps an offensive tackle a few years ago on his college team, his torso wider than the pizza box in his big-knuckled grip, ready for the game later.
The bill of his back-turned cap, which bore Rod’s favorite team logo, tried to suppress the tufts of brown hair punching out in all directions from his head. The edge framed his blue eyes, steady above the blue edge of his mask, as his eyes pierced the hem of my miniskirt and scraped down my bare legs to my heels.
I stepped toward the elevator to slide down to the mailboxes—to the packages of stilettos and party dresses I had begun ordering in my isolation, in anticipation of far-off, imaginary parties—when the girl materialized.
In the shadows behind him, she wore no mask. Only a kind of grimace, her lower lip twisting. Her eyebrows arched, as if trying to form a protective canopy above her body. She shuffled off toward his new apartment behind the stubborn wall of his back.
Then the elevator doors closed into a barrier again between me and them.
Through the wall later, though, I heard him yell.
“Football, baby!” he said. “Let’s pound some skin!”
His bare feet no doubt thumping one after the other up onto the coffee table, his hand stretching out with a beer bolted to one knee. On the other knee, perhaps the girl’s palm was poised light, tentative.
I set my novel down, reached for the remote, and then: The flash of blue jerseys. The thud of pummeling bodies. The roar of leaping crowds that Rod used to join, jumping up from the sofa when we had last watched together, two seasons ago, when the hits and tackles had seemed far away, only in two dimensions on a screen.
Rod, one-time high school quarterback, homecoming king, would point to the field and explain the game to me. I had only watched football from my own high school’s bleachers, where I had glanced up from the textbook in my lap, incredulous at the cheerleaders winking at the padded, muscled specimens. Uncertain then of the difference between the pass and rush, fellatio and cunnilingus, field goal and touchdown.
With every score, the new guy’s whoops reverberated through the wall, four, five seconds late, as if his cable were caught in a delay. I waited, suspended my breath, then sighed, smiled. As if I were watching with an approximation of a crowd—forbidden since the start of the contagion. Or maybe, more simply, an approximation of a partner.
Together, afterward, the new guy’s voice entwined with the girl’s on his balcony. The sour scent of her cigarette twisted with his marijuana smoke, drifting in the dark past the brick wall between us.
I stiffened, alert. Extinguished the light of my screen. The darkness closed in, as black as that first awful night in our old living room when Rod’s joint had pierced the gloom pressing down after his first punch. After my first stunned lurch. The air rushing from my stomach, which had been pulsing with laughter only moments before, as I had celebrated my victory in some bet against him on some football score.
Then Rod’s rush of remorse. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I just need some pot to calm down.” And then his promise, flimsy, disintegrating like the ash falling to the floor, never to lift his hand again. As his arm wrapped around my torso, his kisses calmed my lips, and his palm pressed against the back of my head.
The headboard of the new guy’s bed thumped and lurched later that night against my wall. Interwoven between the rhythmic thuds, the girl’s porny squeals. “Yes!” she squeaked. Then “Yes? Yes?” squeezing the inquiry between her nostrils into higher and higher registers, while the new guy’s growl crescendoed underneath.
When I slipped my hand under the covers, between my legs, tensing against the mattress in the center of the bed, when I held my breath and my eyes toward the wall in the 1:00 a.m. dark, I was not sure whether I was imagining it was him.
Or he was Rod.
Or I was her.
*****
She goes silent after her more ominous, horrible screams.
The hum of a TV show, the rattle of a cabinet, the only sounds each subsequent night through the wall.
Perhaps she slumps against it, unconscious, where it crashes into the floor. Or perhaps on the couch, she sinks silent, unresistant against his manipulations of the remote.
Or maybe the murmur of their reconciliation, the whispery tick of their kiss, falls too low to be perceived beneath the drone of my cable news—a simulated hum of humanity to animate the pages of the novel in my lap, the disembodied characters drifting through my mind like silent ghosts.
But what if she herself has become a ghost? What if her body has decayed, shriveled into one of those rotted skeletal statistics that twisted across the blue light of my laptop screen when my fingers, still bruised from Rod’s grip, trembled over the keyboard to search for help?
Back then, the articles and the online chats with the legal experts and social workers all recited the epitaphs on a million women’s gravestones to try to block me from sending the reconciling texts and emails that I had drafted to him.
Those unsent emails have decayed in my computer now. As have my unsent drafts to the social services and legal organizations to volunteer my help in return. Their continuing entreaties for my time and donations tumble down daily in my inbox.
To be read next week. Next month.
The novel in my hands suspends with the rattle of a doorknob. Then the slam of his apartment door.
I leap from the sofa, grasp at my doorframe. My pulse pumps in my throat, my fingers slipping against the door. Slivering a narrow opening.
And then there she is.
The girl strides down the hallway, passes by my door. Her smooth, unbruised face grinning into the glow of her phone, which brushes against her springing curls. As she saunters off to the elevator, out into the night, her laugh bounces about the hallway walls.
I press the latch noiseless back into place, flatten my back against the door, and release my breath. Not all angry words solidify into icy fists. Not all screams signify danger.
No harm in disregarding her screams.
*****
A shout announces the start of one of the new guy’s raucous parties the next evening, and in the responding cheers, the girl’s cry is doubtless rising, uniting with the treble that collapses into the thumping beat of the bass.
It has thudded against the plaster each weekend now for weeks.
His amplifier blasts his defiance of the quarantine orders issued by the white-coated officials pleading on TV. His speaker pounds in time with the jabbing of my alarm clock ticking closer and closer to midnight until I finally fling the covers to the edge of the bed, thump my feet to the hardwood floor, and suspend my knuckles in front of my bedroom wall.
But through the surface reverberating like a drum, my feeble knock would only blend into the percussion, I realize.
My palm opens, empty, lifted above my head.
The music pauses. Like a long inhalation.
And then the melody crashes down and the whoops rise up and the voices ring out singing and swinging and swerving wildly off-key.
There is nothing to do but surrender to their sleepless joy, bursting through the cracked plaster against my palm, as my hand begins pulsing and my toes start tapping and then I am twirling and skipping and spinning all through my dark apartment. The way I once would dance with Rod, waltzing haphazardly in our living room to pop anthems in 3/4, knocking over lamps while we jumped about to jagged hip hop songs, laughing until my stomach ached as his big frame toppled over in an attempt at some sort of floating ballet to a ballad about long-lost love.
At the end of the song, breathless, I open my laptop in the dark. Search the loudest lyrics and add the title to the top of a new playlist. Then the next. Its mournful chorus soars, expanding to the whole width and depth of my apartment, throbbing now with the increasing volume of the speakers.
So that in their stillness later after the final fade, the silence seems to stretch all the way back to the last strains from Rod’s amplifier in our old dining room. On the night when I had set out our final supper, one of my extravagant feasts, when I had hand-rolled the ravioli and tucked in the ricotta while his big fingers had cupped the candles on the table to protect the matchstick’s fragile flame. He had turned the lights down and turned the stereo up, and his vocal cords had hummed, deep in his throat, with the jazz saxophone. Which still echoed in the darkness of our apartment later in place of my soundless scream.
Since then, what use was there for music. Or for food.
But over the hum of my microwave on the evening after the new guy’s party, the sizzle of his steaks grilling on his balcony drifts in to my kitchen table. To my glass of tap water. My flattened novel. My broccoli now soaking into the cardboard tray.
I push away the vegetables and open my laptop. I start a grocery list beneath the last evening’s playlist, adding the ingredients for the intricate recipes I had made for Rod. Back when I believed in my ability to assemble happiness out of spices and herbs.
The next evening when my grocery order arrives, I blow the puffs of dust from my pots and pans and set my china plate beside my engraved silverware, my long-stemmed goblet. The cork pops and the olive oil sizzles and the knife chops and the risotto bubbles and the asparagus roasts and crackles and whistles and my feet spin from the stove to the sink to the balcony, where I plate the first course and light the candles, sputtering in the evening breeze.
Then, carrying over: the clink of the new guy’s drink.
I sip my sparkling wine.
And then I skip to the mirror to slick lipstick on. Slip on red high heels. Shimmy into one of the black sequin gowns I have just unwrapped.
Like floating into a party, I glide back onto my balcony to the beats of the new guy’s playlist that I have recreated, the guitars and tenors tinny on the tiny speakers of my laptop turned all the way up, trying to broadcast happiness out into the whole wide city night.
“Such a beautiful evening. Such a wonderful meal,” I imagine the new guy would say. His hand on my knee as he offers me a forkful of the second course.
Then after the cheesecake, his lips. Sweeter, smoother than Rod’s.
“How are you feeling?” I imagine the new guy asking the next afternoon, just after noon, when his cabinet rattles my kitchen wall, shaking the stovetop grates as I rewarm the remnants of last evening’s feast.
His plate would be aligned with mine on my table, I imagine. Our laptops would be pushed aside with the morning’s work. And the emails would be accumulating without a sound, burying those pleas from the social services ever deeper in the grave of my inbox.
I cross my thighs and adjust the skirt of my business suit, the ruffled blouse denying the emptiness within the kitchen walls that now form my makeshift cubicle. I place my palm down on the adjacent kitchen chair where the imaginary new guy’s knee might be.
“How are you, Handsome?” I ask aloud.
The cords in my larynx rasp and crack. I hold my breath, startled by the unfamiliar timber of my own long-silent voice.
*****
“Hey,” he says.
His door slams into the next Saturday afternoon’s stillness, and my fingers flinch against my front door handle as my letters and packages slip down in my arms.
In his grip, a bulging black trash bag heaves down the hallway to the garbage chute, past my entrance, where he turns his face toward me.
He is unmasked this time. Beneath his steady eyes, pressing into my breasts, his lips spread open over a row of wide teeth, aligned like a white-jerseyed offensive line eager for the snap.
“Hey, I think I’ve heard you!” he says, snapping his fingers, finishing with the pointer finger cocked like a gun at my neck. “You’ve been playing some really dope music!”
“Oh,” I say. The sound is muffled behind the double layers of my mask. “I guess. Thank you.”
“Great taste in music,” he says, stopping, scraping the floor with the garbage bag. “I do some DJing just for fun at parties I have sometimes. You should come! I’m having one tonight.”
“Oh. Maybe,” I say, and my cheeks press up against the mask with my smile.
But as I lay the mask on my bed later, lay out all my new party dresses, unfolded from their flat envelopes like deflated bodies, my heart flutters in my throat, thumping with the palpitations.
I arrest the arrhythmia with a forced cough—the one sound, I remind myself, that has never pierced through the screams and thumps of one of his parties. In that swirl of music and smoke, surely no virus is choking the air, strangling the healthy young lungs.
Still, I will stay only a moment.
I leave the mask sleeping in the center of the bed, leave the lights burning in every room of the apartment.
Step, tentative, my knees teetering in my heels, the six steps to his door.
When my feeble knock blends into the bass vibrating the door, I try the knob. Slipping. Slivering a narrow opening.
And then blue and green beams are blasting through the dark, and a silver ball is flashing from the ceiling, shooting icy shards of light onto the bobbing backward hats of the big-shouldered jerseys that are looming over the girls’ swirling hair, their curls shaking like yellow pompoms, their red-polished fingers sloshing cups of vodka soda onto the floor, their blue jeans bumping up against the kitchen island, heaped with chicken wings and nachos and half-open pizza boxes, their legs knocking into the long leather sofa that has been shoved into the corner, against the wall that crashes into mine.
There, on a cushion at the end—in a mirrored approximation of the place where I have sat alone on my couch for countless nights on the other side of the wall—there is the girl.
She slumps down, her scowl contorted, her cheeks skeletal in the eerie blue uplight of her phone. Her eyebrows slice a flat line over her eyes, bumping and whacking like a dull knife blade through the mob of bodies.
I wedge myself next to the credenza, strewn with abandoned glasses beside a board of knobs and levers spread out like the open-kneed posture of a man. In the center, the huge subwoofer: an erect phallus throbbing against my wall.
It buzzes through my back, pulses up into my throat, my whole body enshrouded within the sound now.
I press into the plaster and alternate each foot against the paint behind me, as I did at the long-ago party that the backup quarterback insisted I attend, after he motioned me down from my university’s bleachers to thank me for his ghostwritten book report, then abandoned me in the cavernous house. Where I rubbed one palm clammy against the wallboard, the other slipping on the condensation of my red plastic cup. The same way I clutched the cold champagne flute at one of Rod’s work soirees years later, when he spit his disgust into my ear. “Try to look alive,” he hissed.
“You came!” the new guy yells, bounding toward me. “And you finally took off your mask! Aren’t you a cute one.”
His beery breath scrapes across my cheek. His fingers scrape up the side of his nose.
“Come dance,” he shouts into my ear.
He pulls my wrist out from the wall, toward the center of his apartment, and presses his palms low on my back, his belt buckle sharp against my waist.
“You like my party?” he shouts.
“You are the loudest neighbor I’ve ever had,” I reply.
He staggers back, stops his body.
“You never said anything!” he says.
I turn up my palms. “I guess I liked the company.”
He laughs. “Lucky for me,” he says.
He shrugs and dips me, deeper than Rod ever did, so that Rod’s face is dissolving, disappearing past the hazy smoke of the strobe lights, into the darkness beyond, as dark as the final night when I slid down our hallway stairs, my hands flailing at the banisters, Rod’s hands clattering somewhere above, rattling the dresser drawer for the gun, for the police fight, for the police lights that never arrived to break the midnight stillness of our neighborhood, where I stumbled through bushes, scraped along brick walls, rapped at the only lit window until a neighbor slivered the door, her eyes wide at my wild dishevelment, and then her fingers reached for mine and the latch clicked and stilled the dizziness.
The new guy grasps my hand and lifts it above my head. He is spinning and twirling and twisting me.
A flash of the island. The window. The balcony. The sofa. The girl.
Her eyes pierce into me.
Then he holds me still. “Stay after,” he says, his growl buzzing on my neck, his knuckles interlocking behind my back.
His cologne, mixed with the sweet, yeasty notes of lager, intoxicates.
“But isn’t that your girlfriend over there?” I ask, replaying her late-night porny squeals.
“She’s leaving,” he says, pointing to her long legs striding toward the door. “But no, didn’t work out.”
Just then, somewhere behind me, a scream. My knees lock. The skin prickles on my bare arms. My back tenses against his hands.
And then the drums pound down and the cheers rise up and the whole room is singing and swaying like some kind of drunken Pentecostal choir.
And it is just a raucous party. And I can stop imagining.
*****
The phantasm of the police lights floats in through his window, rotates around the empty walls, the cracks in the plaster absorbing the last echoes of the party.
The bass has wasted away into muffled thuds, a kind of soundtrack for the TV screen, its muted blue highlights replaying the evening’s tackles and sacks, the defensive line dancing over the quarterback, flat on his back.
I tense against the back of the sofa. In the same place where the girl was before.
“No,” I call out. “No more. Really.”
Across his empty apartment, the new guy looms over the island, slapping at the vodka bottle, clattering among the dirty platters and the half-drunk cups for an empty glass. A cap rolls to the edge. A smashed beer can rattles. Ice shatters into a million shards, skidding onto the floor.
He lurches toward me. Grinning, tripping in a kind of tipsy tango, both arms raised, waving, the drinks clanking, then the glass sloshing, insistent, icy, into my palm.
“Just one more, baby,” he says, his body hitting the cushion beside me. “And one more of this,” he says. He lunges to the coffee table, hunches his shoulders, protective over a spread of fragile powder, and razes an entire line in one long inhalation.
I sip. Give a little laugh. “Well, after this, I should go home,” I say.
He snaps back to the sofa and scrapes my face with his eyes.
A gust of cold air blasts in from the balcony.
“Because it’s such a long trip?”
He laughs, slaps my knee.
Then over the sting, his palm presses, heavy. “You can’t leave until we do some of this,” he says.
And then the alcohol in his saliva is scouring my lips, and the thrust of his tongue is shoving apart my jaw, and the spread of his knuckles is slamming at my pelvis and prying open my thighs, and my legs are churning and my arms are flailing and my face is twisting.
“No—not tonight,” I say.
His body halts.
“We just met,” I say, the explanation decaying, disintegrating beneath the scorch of his breath against my mouth.
His lips snarl.
His fingers twist into a fist.
He staggers to his feet.
“You bitches are all the same,” he says. His back spreads like a wall in front of me in the blue-bruised dark.
A pause.
Punctuated by a gulp of his drink.
And then a shatter.
Glass exploding against the wall.
Splinters.
Slivers.
Frozen in the air.
My eyes widen, waiting.
My breath halts.
My neck stiffens.
My fingers clench into the bare flesh of my legs.
And now my high heel is wobbling, skidding on the slippery floorboards, and my arm is swinging up, strange, foreign in front of my eyes, and my throat is choking on the thick, contaminated air, and my breasts are pushing through the denseness of the dark, to somewhere, up ahead there, the door, the six steps to my door.
But behind me, he is yanking my hair, stretching it backward, back to the sofa, slamming me against its back.
And his hand is slashing through the useless blue reflection of the police rays, far away, far below, beyond the balcony. Where the wind blows in with a faint wail.
Then the crack of his hand against my cheekbone. A flash of electric blue.
“You girls are all useless.”
His hiss twists into Rod’s as his spit shoots down. As his palm ascends again.
And in the cracked confusion of my skull, piercing, echoing through, I hear the girl’s screams.
Or are those cries mine?
Unfamiliar. Distant. As if filtered through the thick plaster of the wall.
Where, on just the other side, I imagine my apartment. As if I have never seen it before.
Silent. Bright. The lights still burning in every room.
The bed with the soft covers, padded with the party dresses and the protective mask.
The sofa with its thick cushions, where in the corner a novel is folded upside-down, awaiting my return to some faraway world.
The balcony with its cool breeze, with the sticky finished wine glass balancing on the railing’s ledge, where the extinguished candles taper off into black burnt wicks.
And the black, blank TV, mirroring the empty laptop screen on the kitchen table, where the emails are still accumulating with their silent pleas.
But no one answers. And no one will do anything.