by Lee Conell
When Martin had first started out as a super in this building, a little over twenty-five years ago, the tenants had had more money than him, but the majority didn’t have that much more. There were schoolteachers, musicians, pharmacists, guys with union jobs. That wasn’t to say there weren’t still assholes to contend with. Always in Manhattan, always everywhere, there were plenty of assholes to contend with. But over time, there’d been a kind of evolution in what an empty apartment meant to Martin. Once it had represented a potential home for a potential asshole. Now it represented a potential investment property for a sure-thing asshole.
Ruby wouldn’t like that thought. She had told him, when she was still in college and deep in her literature classes, that he should never generalize, shouldn’t call the tenants assholes in a group like that, they were individuals, each with their own history of loss and trauma, they had actual names, they weren’t just their apartment numbers. Martin had tried to explain that she wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t figured out for himself. He was aware that just as his full humanness didn’t register with all the tenants, theirs didn’t always register with him, despite the fact that he often had to deal with their anxious phone calls and their bags of garbage and sometimes, when the plumber was running late, their literal shit. But trying to think about what personal history of loss and trauma might cause a tenant to scream at him for failing to change a light bulb in the lobby right away was, frankly, beyond Martin’s paygrade. Sometimes people just behaved badly because they had the power to behave badly. And every year, the tenants behaved worse, it seemed. When he first became the building super, a couple of guys in the building had always helped Martin shovel the sidewalk during blizzards, no questions asked. This past winter, though he had only gotten grayer and his back had only gotten worse, nobody had once offered to help him shovel when it snowed.
Still, why whine? The building had never been a utopia and things always changed. People, storefronts, cities. Even the dioramas and animal models in the Museum of Natural History changed, became more interactive or accurate or whatever—Ruby once told him the museum people had added a belly button to the blue whale. The only thing that didn’t change were the old men like Martin whining about how things were always changing. That was why he should be focusing on meditation. In meditation, you created a home out of constant change. You lived in the moment, which meant there was no past and no future and, in a way, no death.
Yet only in a way. Because Lily was dead. It had been sad when the other rent-controlled tenants had died, but Martin hadn’t been nearly as close to any of them as he had been to Lily. Which was maybe why he was having this vision now of Ghost Lily spinning around in her apartment, spinning faster and faster, and did Ghost Lily know that Martin had helped move out the furniture, his back stooped under the weight of her favorite sofa? Did she know that Martin himself had let in the demo crews?
The vision did not stop there. After surveying her destroyed apartment, Ghost Lily swooped vengefully from 5A down through a long-defunct dumbwaiter shaft, zooming her spirit self past strata of primordial linoleum, ancient concrete, steel beams, the wire mesh for plastered walls, the entrails of deteriorating doorbell cables, an abandoned gas main that had supplied the residents’ lamps before the building got electric lights—until she reached the basement apartment and shouted at Martin’s gray head, in her chirpiest tone, “And then the super woke up!”
And Martin woke up. He’d fallen asleep. Heat rose to his face. Had Ruby noticed his less-than-mindful dozing? Her wide forehead was a little sweaty, her hair a tangled whirl. Thankfully, her eyes were still closed.
This wasn’t his first Lily-is-back moment. Over the past few days, Martin had begun to hear her voice in his head—commercial bubbliness with an edge of mockery. Yesterday when he was putting out rattraps, she had said, Martin creeps toward the glue traps under the kitchen sink. Those suckers will catch a rat easy as one, two, three! When she was still alive, any time Martin had gone to 5A to plunge the toilet or fix drains, Lily had narrated his actions. She used the same tone she had deployed as a voice-over actress to sell laundry detergent decades ago, in what she called the foreign country of her youth. “Martin leans over the drain and scoops out, oh, is that a sparkling clump of wet hair?” “The new rattrap Martin’s installing snaps into place just like that! Those cute diseased critters won’t know what hit ’em!” “Martin mops the Gatorade off the floor with not just the vim but the vigor required of a middle-aged man living in late-stage capitalism!”
For a full twenty years, he had lived with this, an old woman making fun of him. After Lily’s death late last year, a silence descended.
But since Ruby had returned to the building, Lily was back in his head. Her voice didn’t show up all the time, just once or twice over the course of a day, when, in quiet moments, he’d hear her saying things like, Martin is marching forward into the chilly morning, he’s sweeping up the mouse droppings like a man with a plan! It made him feel a little crazy (why was his mind calling forth Lily’s voice?), a little haunted (was this voice actually Lily, somehow, séancing in his brain, or was it all a big grief-fueled hallucination?), and also a little wonderful (because it was Lily, Lily who was dead, practically present again).
A few days earlier, Billy the Exterminator was at the building. Martin had asked him, “Do you ever have dreams about the animals you’ve seen dead at work? Or visions? Or, um, auditory hallucinations?”
“They’re not animals,” Billy the Exterminator said. He was a small tight-muscled Italian man from Sheepshead Bay, in his early fifties, just a few years younger than Martin. “You got that? They’re not animals I’ve killed. They’re pests.”
“Okay, fine. You ever have bad dreams about pests?”
“No,” Billy the Exterminator said. “I dream more about the chickens. I do feel bad about the chickens. The chickens and the cows. I grew up on fast food and I didn’t think about it, but then I saw one of those animal cruelty documentaries. Made me rethink my whole childhood. A secret for you, Martin.” Billy the Exterminator breathed in. “I’m vegan.” He breathed out. “Don’t tell any of the guys.”
Martin had stared for so long that Billy the Exterminator added, “I’m kidding.”
“Are you?” Martin asked.
* * *
—
Forget Billy and his fast food and all his pests. Forget the interlinked web of tenants’ complaints he carried in his head like a map. Forget the blue whale’s new belly button. Forget Lily and her voice and her death. Meditation was supposed to lift you out of harmful neural pathways, build up the brain’s gray matter. What did that mean? Martin wasn’t sure, but if his work as a super had taught him anything, it was that people always wanted to build something. If you didn’t have the money to build a new apartment, why not build your gray matter? So: back to the breath.
Was Ruby’s breathing kind of shallow? Normally, when he meditated alone, Martin wore noise-canceling headphones, but he wasn’t wearing them now. He had wanted to get a sense of how mindful her meditation really was. Her breaths definitely weren’t deep enough. She was stressed, probably. She kept calling the museum job she was interviewing for today her dream job. Dream job. One of those terms used by overeducated upper-class adults, that she’d picked up at college, or from Kenneth’s daughter and her friend, Caroline, probably. The idea that a job was a cloud, a fantastical package of nine-to-five wish fulfillment. What would Martin’s dream job be? He had never had one. He just had jobs for getting by. Like this one as a super, which was a good job, which required no college degree, which came with a rent-free apartment and health insurance and all of that, a fine job, but not a dream job; instead a job that often gave old dudes nightmares about dead tenants.
He looked over to the answering machine. No blinking red light. No urgent messages. Ruby still had her eyes closed, but she winced a little, like she’d finally heard Martin’s thought
s running amok. Or maybe the floor really was too cold for her.
“You need a cushion?” Martin said.
Ruby’s eyes opened. “What?”
“Might be more comfortable with a cushion, is all. Or if you want, next week, I could make you a meditation bench like mine.”
“You made that yourself?”
“Yeah. I made it out of the floorboards in Lily’s apartment. As kind of, you know, a memorial.”
Oops. Not smart. Ruby’s eyelids did their cry-prep crinkling thing that he knew so well from the weepy moments of her kidhood. She had loved Lily as Martin had, as a kind of family member, a grandmother figure. Lily, who had been estranged from her own family, often babysat Ruby, taking her to museums, the park, marathoning movies on VHS with her, or sometimes just reading to her from her many perpetually in-progress manuscripts—a treatise on capital in the new millennium, a Trotskyite rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, a novel about a Victorian factory worker who gets away with killing her overseer. All those childhood days spent with Lily had meant Ruby was wrecked when she’d heard of her death. She had called Debra and cried on the phone to her every day for two weeks. Now Martin waited for the tears. But Ruby only shook her head.
“Neilson in 3C told me something catchy the other day, during one of our meditation sessions,” Martin said, once the threat of sobs passed. “He said a good movie, a good TV show, a good story almost always begins with action. But if you want a good day, that begins with inaction.”
“Inaction, huh?” Ruby rubbed at her temples. “Well, I’m pretty skilled at inaction. I can’t believe you meditate with that idiot.”
“He’s not an idiot,” Martin said. “He’s just a tenant.”
“Same difference.”
“Ruby,” Martin said, but he was smiling, glad that Ruby’s don’t-generalize-about-the-tenants-empathy-for-all campaign had clearly ended. Ruby smiled back, encouraged. “I’ll never forget when he left that message on the machine at two in the morning,” she said. “Right before I had to take the SAT. Totally hysterical because he’d seen a mouse.”
“But you still did good.”
“Imagine how brilliant I’d have done if 3C didn’t wake me up with his fear of rodents. Well. It doesn’t matter now.” Before Martin could study her face, figure out if she were telling the truth, she yawned. Probably, instead of meditating, they should both be trying to sleep. Martin had only gotten a few hours. Ruby’s voice had kept him from sleeping until one (even as Debra snored away). She had been on the phone with Caroline. The girls had been close friends as children—all the playdates and imaginary worlds, the molding of clay spoons and plates for their dolls, the classes at the Art Students League. But despite the time she’d spent with Caroline in her youth, Martin had never felt Ruby properly understood the differences between them. In the middle of their hushed conversation last night, Ruby laughed a triumphant hoot of a laugh, and he thought he heard her say, “Listen, Caroline, the thing about my dad is . . .” before lowering her voice again.
The way she’d laughed had put a feeling in Martin’s chest like a stone. The thing about my dad is.
The thing about Martin’s own dad was he’d been an angry man. The thing about Martin’s own dad was sometimes he’d smack Martin if Martin so much as smiled at him funny. The thing about growing up with a dad like that was Martin would never have laughed about his father on the phone. So it was progress, really, that Ruby could laugh at him.
“Let’s get back to meditation,” Martin said. He closed his eyes, tried to feel the cold of the floor beneath him. He breathed in. For the sake of his own heart health, he must forget the barbed sound of Ruby’s laugh.
Although Ruby was an only child, sometimes Martin felt he had dozens of daughters housed within her. There was the outer-daughter husk—tall, dark-haired, thick straight eyebrows often raised and face often pink—and then inside that? Not just the Ruby who stayed up late the night before a job interview, laughing about him on the phone, but also the one who had studied hard all through high school, peeling the dead skin around her cuticles, the girl her teachers had labeled (less like a student than like some scholastic specimen) “bright and creative,” “determined to succeed.” And also the Ruby who, in college, had asked that Martin and Debra buy her sculpting clay in lieu of the contributions they had insisted on making toward her tuition. And also the Ruby he had taken to the Museum of Natural History as a little girl, the hair-in-braids Little House on the Prairie–ish Ruby who had looked at a diorama of a wolf and said, “I want to go inside there, please.” And when Martin said no, it wasn’t allowed, you could look and learn, but not go inside the diorama groups—she had cried and then cried over her crying, wiping her running nose on the back of her hand until the skin gleamed like the wolf’s glass eyes.
The older she got, the more Martin’s task as a father seemed to be learning to differentiate all the Rubys in his memory from the present one. When he’d heard her on the phone after midnight, he wanted to ask her to quiet down, but couldn’t think of a way to make the request without sounding as though he were treating her like a past Ruby, which Debra had told him they must avoid. “The goal is that she doesn’t revert because of moving back here,” Debra said one evening after they’d hurriedly made love, worried that Ruby would come home early from a dinner with Caroline. “It feels like we’re the ones reverting,” Martin said, as Debra buttoned her blouse with the rushed movements of an adolescent mindful of her curfew.
“We’re not reverting, we’re accommodating.” Debra kissed him hard on the mouth. “Now put on your shirt, old man.”
Debra had long served as peacemaker between Martin and Ruby. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, to Martin’s understanding. If anything, the mother and the daughter were supposed to fight, while the father played hero, showing up for dinner with an air of bewhiskered mystery, of important business too difficult to explain. But when Ruby was growing up, Debra had often been out of the apartment, working all day at the public library’s Riverside branch and then taking night classes—first for her undergraduate degree, next for her master’s degree in library science. Martin was the one who worked from home, or at least from the apartments and hallways and boiler rooms adjacent to home. Ruby saw him hauling other people’s garbage, saw his fingernail beds turn black, saw him placate the worst of the whiniest tenants with a fake goofy smile on his face, like their submissive dog. Because Martin was responsible for making sure she got back safely from school, for making sure she did her homework, for yelling at her when she didn’t return home when she said she would, he’d had to deal with more rebellion from Ruby than Debra ever had. Martin always assumed that their relationship would improve once Ruby moved out of the apartment. Once she had successfully launched herself into her life, she would turn into a new Ruby yet again, a new daughter filled with nothing but appreciation for him.
Only now she was back, and things were just like before. They sniped at each other, they argued. Debra was still doing her best to improve their relationship. When Martin had asked Ruby if she thought her degree excused her from having to wash her dishes, Debra pointed out that Ruby had cleaned the bathroom the day before. When Ruby called Martin’s interest in bird-watching a prelude to a midlife crisis, Debra replied that if Ruby had a job like Martin’s, she’d need to stare at some nonhuman creatures for a few hours, too. When Martin told Ruby she needed to cast a wider net for her job interviews and not just trust that the Museum of Natural History would work out, Debra told Martin that Ruby knew what she was doing, and couldn’t they have some faith in their own kid? When Ruby stayed up late talking on the phone, Debra told Martin to wear his noise-canceling headphones to bed, because what else were the damn things good for.
But today Debra was going out of town, to Albany, to a conference for librarians where she would speak on a panel titled “Community Engagement and the Library: Mindful Outreach and In-Reach.”
Martin had gotten excited when he’d heard the title—maybe Debra was coming around on meditation. But no, she said she hadn’t come up with the buzzwordy title, and anyway, “mindful outreach” in this context just meant not being racist or sexist or assuming incarcerated populations shouldn’t have access to information.
Martin had first met Debra at a library downtown when she worked there as a clerk and he’d been studying for his pesticide-applicator certificate. One day he’d glanced around for a wall clock and his gaze went to the checkout desk, to Debra’s face, which was clocklike, too pale and too wide. She was not beautiful. Still, something in Martin jolted. Before he left the library that evening, he asked her out for coffee. A few years after they’d had Ruby and managed to save some money, Debra began to take night classes to earn her college degree, but only so she could do more meaningful work at the library. She didn’t want to just sit at a desk. She wanted to help people who truly needed the library’s resources. It was the only way she felt like she was in the moment.
Maybe she had no patience for meditation, but Debra was mindful in her own way, and fearless in her own way, too. Now she worked as a correctional services librarian for the New York Public Library. She supervised the volunteers who answered reference questions from incarcerated populations, half of them seemingly idle musing (“How does eBay work?” “When did people first start to dance?” “Please tell me about clouds and what are they made of?”), half of them serious and sometimes time-consuming to answer (“How do I get a job when I leave here?” “How much are homes outside of New York City?”). She also helped manage satellite libraries on Rikers Island, going into the jails once or twice a week, setting up tables in the gym, checking books out by hand. But lately the work—the endless cycles of prisoners, of tragic stories, of angry guards—had begun to burn her out. “Do you feel that way, Martin?” she asked once. “You’ve been a super even longer than I’ve been a prison librarian.”