The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  On her way to the river, she passed a church doorway where a thin guy with dreadlocks slept beside a pit bull terrier. All of a sudden the pit bull snorted and the skinny guy turned over. Ruby was sure he was going to see her standing there, gawking at him, she was sure he was going to say something to her, curse at her.

  But when he turned over she saw that he was wearing a black sleep mask.

  Lily had a collection of sleep masks, even though she never flew anywhere and the shades on her windows were thick. One of the sleep masks was just plain black silk. One was covered in paisley. One had the elongated orange tubes of an owl’s eyes. One of the sleep masks was bright pink and had NAP QUEEN written across it in a floral cursive. When Lily napped, she snored. Her snore sounded like a voice, a high and nasal whine.

  Her father had been hearing Lily’s voice in his head.

  Ruby walked faster.

  A streetlamp shone through a garbage can’s crosshatched gridding so that its pattern was projected onto the sidewalk. On a lobby window, a bright yellow sign advertised Mandarin lessons for pre-k students in the neighborhood. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from ten in the morning to twelve thirty in the afternoon, right near where Ruby was walking, the temporal lobes in a bunch of new brains would be endeavoring to distinguish tones. She could almost sense the residue of that cerebral striving in the air.

  Ahead of her was Riverside Park. The Hudson’s salty-muddy stink gave her a small rush of joy. She wanted to get as close as she could to the river’s stench. Once, when they were in high school, she and Caroline had walked down to the Hudson to have a picnic on the pier. It had begun to storm and the girls had taken their container of hummus and their soggy sandwiches and their pita chips and thrown them into the river. The food hit the Hudson with a fwap-fwap-fwap. “A sacrifice to the stinking river gods!” Caroline had hollered to the Hudson. She and Ruby had held on to each other, bent over with laughter, soaked.

  Ruby imagined dropping herself into the water now—not exactly in a suicidal way, but just in an effort to get closer to that wonderfully awful smell. The river would be so cool. Its water would taste like sewage and soaked-through pita chips. Its fish would sweetly drift. There would be no pane of glass or fish tank separating Ruby from them. They would nibble at her toes, maybe. Try to swim inside her head to get at all the juice in there. Her own thoughts and organs would go diorama-still and the fish would be the only life left moving.

  Her father had looked at her in Central Park like she was nobody he’d want to know.

  Ruby walked down the pier. In the summer, this place was full of people talking, dancing, fishing. In March, it was pretty quiet. Her legs felt like they were about to give out. Near the end of the pier, a bench had been placed beside a streetlamp that hadn’t turned on, even though it was dark out. Its sensor system was probably broken, its streetlamp circadian rhythms were off, or maybe its bulb had just burned out.

  She plopped down on the bench. From out here the George Washington Bridge looked not like a powerful pathway, but like lights on a string. At an adjacent bench, a jogger stretched.

  Then the top of the streetlamp started to move.

  What had seemed like part of the streetlamp, like structural ornamentation, was actually darkly iridescent feathers: a perched starling. Disturbed out of its nest, maybe, and awake. Ruby envisioned flocks of roosting birds that looked like the material stuff of blue scaffolding or torn garbage bags or oxidizing scrap metal. What if everything that she’d dismissed as inanimate was alive in this sort of way?

  She kept looking intently at the starling. Her stare caused the jogger to look intently, too, to seek out what she saw. A woman walking her poodle saw the jogger, paused, and glanced over at the streetlamp.

  A chain of close looking could start here with Ruby. They might bring the whole city to a standstill if they looked hard enough at what was thought to be a common bird. They might, all together, change the way people saw.

  The bird called out, and then it went very still again, and Ruby wanted to make something. A sound or a sculpture or a diorama. After a few more moments, the bird flew away. Then the dog-walker departed and the jogger jogged past, and Ruby looked down at her own empty hands.

  A new feeling buzzed in her. She had made that woman with the dog stop and look, too. Ruby had done that. The sense that she had figured something out about the city, or at least something about staring at things in the city, lured her into fearlessness. She took out her phone. Many new messages from Andy.

  All i want is my property back ruby.

  I can go to great lengths to get my property back.

  But! I don’t want to go to great lengths.

  I knoooow you are there . . .

  I know where you live ruby, and your dad

  She scrolled back up to the photo he had taken of her father looking sick and old, like a man lost. Like a man without family.

  So compassionate, the people in the gallery would murmur. Her father’s image a part of Andy’s spectacle of empathy. So tenderly wrought.

  No. She could still have the last word. She had untapped power. She had just changed the way a group of strangers saw the world around them! True, she had only changed their perceptions for a moment, but a moment could be everything. People lived inside nothing but moments.

  Her father had taught her that.

  She texted Andy back: I’ll see you at Caroline’s party and we shall talk!!

  He wrote back: Great!!!

  13 AN EIGHT-FOOT JUMP

  After he’d told Ruby to leave him alone, Martin spent several hours walking park paths lit by streetlamps. There was a time not so long ago when walking alone in the park at night would have been extremely stupid. Now it was only mildly stupid. He walked all the way over to the east side of the park, to the Conservatory Water, where in a month or so New Yorkers would begin racing intricate model boats. For her eighth birthday, after reading Stuart Little, Ruby had begged for a model sailboat. “We don’t have the money right now for a model sailboat,” Debra had said, “but this building has plenty of approachable rats for you to befriend.”

  “Stuart Little isn’t a rat, he’s a mouse,” Ruby had said, and began to cry.

  He kept walking, past the Alice in Wonderland statue, the Met, the Great Lawn. He told himself he was looking for the owl, but mostly he was thinking about how the branches above his head teemed with hidden inhabitants. Mites and sleeping squirrels, and the squirming, ever-wakeful fungi that ate through the heart space of trees, creating cavities where other things could live. When he reached the Reservoir, he leaned against the fence and looked out at the dark water. Although it was almost eight, joggers ran past him. Was Debra at her banquet now? He called her. She picked up right away. “How was the panel?” he asked.

  “It’s tomorrow. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the park.”

  “Did you take Ruby out for dinner like I suggested?”

  “Not yet.” He couldn’t imagine eating food. His stomach hurt.

  “Go take her somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I mean nowhere fancy but somewhere.”

  “The Chinese place she liked shut down. It’s baby clothes now. It’s boutique baby clothes now.”

  “You’ll figure it out. I’ve got to run to dinner myself.”

  “We’re kind of fighting. Ruby and me.”

  “God. Martin. I said just for today, could you try—”

  “She let the woman from this morning into the building.”

  “She did what?”

  “She just told me. She let the woman into the building. Lily’s cousin.”

  “Are you serious? Is she still in the building?”

  “No,” Martin said. “Ruby said the woman left pretty soon after.” But Debra’s question gave him pause. Suddenly he wasn’t sure. Ruby had said
the woman had left, but what did Ruby know? When Debra hung up, he walked for a while longer. “Do you have any change?” a voice near him said, only it felt less speechlike than like a scrabbling against his inner ear. Martin didn’t turn to look at the person, but the voice chucked him out of his trance. It was night, and yet still, still, he wasn’t off work. He had to play hide-and-seek. The intruder might possibly be gone, as Ruby had suggested. But now something told him she was still around, and Martin had learned to trust his instincts when it came to building issues. The building wasn’t alive, exactly, but after twenty-plus years taking care of it, Martin had become half convinced that even brick and drywall and marble tile had their own patterns of respiration, their own heartbeats. It sounded romantic, put like that, but it wasn’t. It was scary as fuck—this idea that the structure he lived inside, watched over, was sentient and that maybe in certain ways it watched over him. Maybe in certain ways it spoke out.

  Especially when something was off.

  And something in the building was off. Ruby had thought the woman had left, but even after a childhood there, Ruby didn’t understand how many nooks the building held. This whole day, the intruder had probably been so close, roaming around, cursing Martin under her breath. And in some respects, the idea of her possible presence was a huge relief—it might explain away Martin’s anger today at Caroline, at Neilson, at Ruby. The vibrations in the building had gone awry because someone who wasn’t supposed to be there had snuck inside. Now that same person could get away with all sorts of mischief—theft, assault, who knew what—and Martin’s daughter would be blamed. Which meant Martin would be blamed. How was this possibility not clear to Ruby?

  Martin was not a jogger. But a new urgency filled him and, although his legs were already tired from the long walk, he began a sort of jog across the park. By the time he had reached the building, he was sweaty and stinky and his knee was twanging and his heart was going crazy in all the ways he’d been trying to prevent. Still, he did not even stop for water. He began his search. He looked for the intruder first in the basement, starting with the laundry room. No humans in there, but plenty of clothes moving around in the dryers, sweater sleeves flailing outward, trying to escape the centripetal force. He went next to the storage room, which was filled with open metal cages that apartment owners rented. They kept their skis there, their papers, their piles of legal stuff in clear plastic bins. Some of the cages were taller than others. Sometimes tenants became very upset if they got assigned an eighty-one-inch cage instead of an eighty-four-inch one.

  When Martin stepped into the storage space, the lights were off, but his entrance had unnerved some darkness-loving life. A rustling sound. Human? Rat? Scared, whatever it was. “Hello?” he said into the specific storage-room quiet, a wistful silence produced by unused skis dreaming of packed snow. “Hello?” So stupid. Skis did not dream! Skis were not wistful! They were wood. Or whatever. They were like the floorboards of 5A—dreamless, long dead, and oh, shit, he was letting himself think in the same dangerously sentimental way that had caused all those rich men to release starlings into the park leading to the death and displacement of songbird after songbird. The same dangerously sentimental way that had caused Ruby to buzz the intruder into the building in the first place. He wanted to hang up her plan for a diorama of Lily’s apartment, the one that had TOOOOO SENTIMENTAL O WELL scrawled across its borders. Those poor displaced songbirds. They must have gotten hungry. He was hungry. Some dizziness, a fuzziness to this darkness. He hadn’t had dinner. Power through. He’d find the intruder, he’d kick her out, and then he’d eat.

  He flipped the light switch defiantly. Fluorescent beams flickered. Just clutter in the room. He walked down the line of cages, peering around large piles of papers. The Lily voice was silent, but the rustling sound was back. Then he saw it. A rat, just a rat, which scurried from one wall to the next and disappeared.

  The intruder was not there.

  Next, Martin went to the small closet-like room given to Rafael, where he kept spare brooms and mops and floor cleaners. Theoretically, the intruder could have slipped in there at some point in the day—Rafael often left the door unlocked. The door opened with no resistance when Martin pushed. He hadn’t been in this room in some time, and when he stepped inside and switched on the light, he gasped. His first thought upon seeing the cluttered desk, the tower of books, the phalanx of lamps, was that Rafael had converted this place from what had been an extra-large utility closet into a scholar’s den, a room redesigned for intense pondering and to-be-or-not-to-be-ing.

  But the closer he looked the more he saw something bigger at play. This was not just a study: It was a gallery space for garbage that Rafael had found and morphed into something grander than itself. To Martin’s right, a series of broken umbrellas had been arranged on the wall like spokes in a color wheel, red umbrellas fading to orange umbrellas changing to green umbrellas to blue and to violet and black. Tiny miniature cars and dinosaurs moved between a series of textbooks that had been stacked on a shelf into a skyline of buildings with spines advertising statistics lessons, beginner biology. An ancient basketball hoop hung over this book city, its net yellowed like a sagging sun. Several cutting boards were mounted to the wall and served as picture frames. Onto each one had been pasted a photo of Rafael’s baby and wife.

  But no intruder.

  No intruder except Martin. He wanted to sit down on the floor of Rafael’s storage space. It would have been nice to spend time in the universe of trash Rafael had given order to. He ran his hand over one of the cutting boards with a photograph of Rafael’s baby beaming out and holding a stuffed rabbit. Ruby had beamed out at Martin like that once. But he shouldn’t think of her, or of their fight. He was not done looking for the intruder yet.

  Martin took the elevator up to the ninth floor. Once, a few years back, on a cold day, a very skinny man had snuck in and made it past the foyer. He had gone to the ninth floor and fallen asleep on the stairs that led to two doors. One of the doors went to the penthouse apartment, though Kenneth rarely used the stairway entrance since the elevator that opened into the penthouse was so much more convenient. The other door went to the roof. Martin probably would have gone a long time without discovering this intruder if he hadn’t been delivering newspapers that had arrived late in the morning. His shoulders had jumped when he saw the skinny man, wrapped in a Little Mermaid beach towel. The man had gotten up, rushed past Martin, and left the building without another word.

  He called into the ninth-floor stairway, “Hello there?” A twang to his hello, like he was trying to be folksy. Folksiness wouldn’t scare the intruder, nor would it draw her out. He tried again, a little gruffer. “Hello?”

  No response.

  He climbed the stairs until he stood between the two doors. Caroline’s party had started. The music through the door to the penthouse sounded like thumps and nothing more. He stepped up to the door that led to the roof, the door he would open tomorrow when it was time to clean up the bottles. Through its glass window, he saw a girl with green hair climbing the water tower. Although it couldn’t be long past the beginning of the party, Caroline’s guests were already crawling around the roof. They weren’t supposed to be doing that, but they always did. They wandered around drinking, taking photos, doling out their truth-or-dares.

  Martin entered the code that turned off the alarm, opened the security door, and stepped out into the cool of the evening. “You aren’t supposed to be here,” he shouted. “Get back in the penthouse or get out.”

  The green-haired girl, halfway up the water tower ladder, scuttled down again. “Sorry!” she called. “Oh, sir, I am so sorry! I thought this was Caroline’s property!”

  “It’s the building’s property. Get back inside.”

  Laughing—at Martin, at each other?—the group wandered toward the glow of the penthouse. Martin walked under the water tower. No intruder. He scooted behind the penthouse�
��s walls, trying not to get tangled up in cable wires. The adjoining building wasn’t as tall as Martin’s building, and so he peered down to that lower roof, just in case the intruder had somehow made the crazy leap and hurt herself. What was it, an eight-foot, ten-foot jump?

  Just black tar. Nobody down there. For a second, Martin thought about leaping himself. How amazing it would be to bound from roof to roof, mountain goat of a man, a basement dweller defying gravity to do his own dance across the skyline. But even an eight-foot jump could kill him, or mess up his back for good. He was far too old for this kind of thing—not just too old for jumping, but too old to fantasize about jumping, or skyline-dancing, or any of it. Oh, that dangerous sentimentality was back again.

  Still, could he be blamed for a little sentimentality right now, a little lyricism? The lights of the city were glowing like a dream. The bright windows like electric stitches, forming a seam that turned the night into a sewn-up thing. The super on the rooftop turns into a bad poet, searching for a seam in the sky when he is supposed to be searching for an intruder.

  But she was not up there. And he had looked everywhere.

  Maybe his instincts were off after all. Maybe it was just as Ruby had suggested. The woman had made her way to 5A, seen the mess of demolition and dust, and simply wandered outside once more, into the chill of the day.

  * * *

  —

  Back to the basement. The apartment was empty again. Post-park, where had Ruby gone? He checked his cell. Nothing. But his answering machine was blinking.

  Another message from Sycamore, could be. Maybe Caroline had gone ahead and said something to her father. Maybe Martin was fired. He brought his hand close to the little arrow of green on the answering machine. Go forward, play, play.