On the Other Side of the Wall
On the Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Bianchi 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