December. A winter wind batters the outside of my apartment building, accosting it with tiny ice pellets, which ping loudly off the exterior cement and glass, while I huddle under all the covers I can find, rubbing warmth and feeling into my limbs, my aching skin. The apartment itself is warm—hot even, so that the plants are all dying, but the outside of my body remains cold and pricked. It didn’t used to be this way…
Mr. Waters died in June. The flashing emergency lights woke me and I watched from my seventeenth-floor window as they wheeled him out the front doors into the ambulance. He had been the oldest tenant in the building.
Since June, I am the oldest.
The building was constructed in 1981, atop an Indian burial ground they say, with asbestos in the popcorn ceilings and poison in the bathroom tiles. Every few years, someone leaves crude printouts in the elevators warning of imminent death.
(“Management is liars!”)
I first noticed something wrong in July. There was an issue with the pipes and the water was turned off for several hours. Never has my throat been so dry. My eyes—it hurt to move them! I couldn’t cry, even when my thoughts turned to my dear late wife. Then the water returned; the tears flowed.
I also began to have the most despicable taste in my mouth, intermittent but unmistakably foul, like garbage, along with the feeling of a pill stuck in my throat. But I wasn’t taking any pills. My breath became shameful.
Not everything was awful. There was a most-wonderful sensation of fullness on the weekends, as if I was more whole, and a pleasant drowsiness at night, when all the lights had been turned off. I became attuned to my inner workings, aware of all my hidden surfaces; my moving parts, like shafts; and all who inhabit me.
Mr. Waters left a note before he died—
(“embrace it peter.”)
I am Peter.
He was apparently delirious. Demented and forgotten. No family, no friends.
The building has been in much better condition since he died. The elevators don’t break down as often. The electricity is stable.
Every day, I exercise.
Then in November the owners announced a plan to sell the building: to a corporation that would demolish me and use the land for something else. I cannot let them do that. The news so worked me up, the fire alarm went off—again and again—as the tenants kept gathering outside and the firemen climbed the stairs within. How vacant I felt. How easily I might have killed them…
But one mustn’t think like that.
It’s a winter mood, that’s all. After all, it’s my first winter really.
Spring will come.
And if with it come the yellow-vests and their machines, I’ll manage. They’re toys. They’re not mine. They don’t live here. A few accidents, a dead construction worker or two.
I’m taking off my blankets now. Yes, I am.
I am indeed.