September 2009

“You want some advice?” she asked.

“Absolutely. Please.”

“Move out.”

With that, she reversed and tore the hell out of there.

~*~

Weeks later, after I got laid off of my job for reasons I’d rather not go into (if they didn’t want us to drink on the job, why keep booze in the break room refrigerator?), I had all the time in the world to spy on my neighbor, or, put more accurately, to keep tabs on him. On a scattering of drunken occasions, I even worked up the nerve to knock on his door, but never to any avail. Other times, I awoke in the deepest night with the residue of a nightmare I couldn’t remember printed against my retinas like an afterimage: the pale arm extending from a cracked-open door, palm up with the fingers slightly curled, as if in a beckoning gesture. This image filled me with a dread and revulsion of an intensity I cannot describe and kept me awake, every light on, till the sun came up. As the weeks piled on, I grew listless from being cooped up in my apartment and took to driving downtown to the Lazy-I bar to pound beers and look at the women. At length, the bar began to occupy more and more of my time, until I was going there every day, squandering my unemployment check so thoroughly that my ability to pay next month’s rent was at first compromised and then made impossible. Seeing as I was drunk most of the time, I never sweated the looming prospect of my homelessness — never, that is, until the end of the month grew nigh and the reality of eviction became impossible to ignore.

I stopped going to the Lazy-I and started doing my drinking inside my dank little apartment. I listened to the thumps and rattles and low mumblings from next door, the scrapes and squeaks and taps against the wall. I thought about the delivery girl and the elongated arm reaching toward her and couldn’t stop obsessing over what manner of being might be attached to that arm. When I was very drunk, I watched TV with the sound off, my chair pulled right up to the screen, leaning forward to soak up the radiation and dragging my finger around the plasma screen to draw iridescent comets over the faces of sitcom actors. Always with a cigarette jutting from the corner of my mouth. I stopped shaving and showering and grew a natty little beard. All around me, trash and flies abounded.

During all of this, I started calling grocery delivery services from listings in the phonebook’s yellow pages. My orders consisted of beer, mostly — but the orders weren’t the point. It was the person who brought them that mattered. The first couple of calls I placed, I asked if they had an Asian girl they could send, which didn’t go over well: one lady called me a creep, while another recommended I call an escort service. So I had to just roll the dice and hope to get lucky. One night I did.

Through the fisheye lens in my door, I saw her standing several paces back and biting her lip, the pretty Asian girl. Quite suddenly, I was conscious of my bedraggled appearance, but it was too late to do anything about that now. So I opened the door.

The girl took a look at me and wrinkled her nose, though whether that owed to my appearance or my stench or a combination of the two, I couldn’t say. She made to give me the groceries I’d ordered (a jug of cheap red wine, a twelve pack of Natural Ice, and some canned pasta products), but I didn’t move. She shook the bags by their handles and said, “Are you gonna take these are not?”

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Okay, look. I’m going to leave this shit right here, seeing as you already paid for it.” She lowered the grocery items to the ground. I had paid by credit card over the phone and should have been made to sign a slip, but she didn’t look to be in the mood to quibble over this.

“I just want to have a word,” I said. “You don’t have to come in or anything.”