The Apartment: A Novel

by Greg Baxter

  The day after that, my father flew back to St Croix. My sister made me promise to get him to JFK so early that he couldn’t possibly miss his flight. I drove him there and left him at the kerbside, and he said, I’ve got three and a half goddamn hours, I’m checked in already, and I have no bags to check. So I told him I’d park and come in. That morning the clouds had vanished after a week of dull weather, and it was clear – the sky was light blue and bright, and there was a touch of winter in the air. You hungry? he asked. Not really, I said. So we sat at the bar of a Mexican restaurant and he ordered a vodka on the rocks. It’s a bit early, I said. What does time mean to a guy who lives on a sailboat? he asked. Besides, how long’s it gonna be before we get another drink together? Okay, I said, and I ordered a beer. We sat at the bar and periodically looked up at the television, which was playing what the bartender told us was a Puerto Rican soap opera. I had a feeling this would be the last time I saw him. Or perhaps I knew for sure. I think I may have tried to take a picture of him in my mind, to memorize him exactly, so that I would carry the image all the way to my death, and think of him then, as a man in his late fifties, happy, drinking with his son at an airport, so that I could tell his memory goodbye. I did that with everybody in my family. But if that is what I’d tried to do with him, and with the others, I failed, because I can no longer picture them – I only see disconnected parts of them. He’s a tall man – six foot four, an inch taller than me – and shaves his head. He wears cheap baseball hats and sunglasses indoors. My mother wears large, thick glasses and has a cackle, and my sister has blue eyes, which exist as blue and hazel speckles in the brown eyes of her children.

  I was living in Norfolk at that time, temporarily, after my return from reservist duty – actually in a little motel on the interstate outside Hampton. I had come back from Iraq with a little bit of money and an idea. When my mother left for New York, I moved back to the desert and prepared to return to Iraq as a private contractor, putting my business together, contacting people, selling my strategy, organizing my visa, tendering for jobs, drawing up contracts, working out my security. Every dime I had, I invested in my business, and my apartment was the tiniest shithole you could possibly imagine. It was in one of those brown-wood, two-storey blocks typical of that city, with a row of doors on the ground floor and a wobbly, uneven platform that you walk to reach the doors on the floor above it. I was on the ground floor. The light came through my green curtains in the way that daylight goes through water – underwater, you look up and see the light dappling and shimmering on the surface, but you look around and see the light is diffuse, and beyond it is a fathomless black mystery. That was what my place was like at times. I spent hardly any time there. I showered at a gym in the building where I rented my office. Across the street from my apartment was a halfway house, but except for the fact that they lived behind a high, barbed-wire fence, you could not have distinguished the inmates from anyone else in that neighbourhood. Poor blacks and poor whites, poor Latinos. Addicts. Prostitutes. Thieves. Gangbangers. Dealers. Murderers. Drunk drivers. Rapists. They just sat on benches and smoked cigarettes, and from time to time a fight broke out. I had some upstairs neighbours, a couple of very tall teenage kids who lived with their grandmother on the second level of the apartments, and they and their friends used to stand along the platform, smoke weed, and stare at them. What are you staring at? one might yell. The kids said nothing. Who knew what satisfaction they took from it? Then another inmate would start cursing, just screaming at the bench he was sitting upon. Then a few more would start screaming at my neighbours, telling them to mind their own business. Then, when my neighbours refused to relent, a hysteria swept through the inmates. One woman might start repeating, No, no, no, no, no, no, NO, louder and louder, longer and longer, until it became the ridiculous and unnervingly comical sound of a child refusing to eat, and then another might start weeping, and so on. This could last hours. Only when the staff could get the last man to calm down did my neighbours withdraw. Nobody ever gave me much hassle. I stayed out of everyone’s way. Perhaps they assumed, by the conservative cut of my hair, or the fact that I displayed no sign of madness or addiction, that I was a criminal of a higher class, the real fucking deal. Some Russian assassin. I worked that assumption and it may have kept me safe. Things happened in that building that would horrify the average middle-class person. I mean beatings, assaults, daylight robberies. I ignored it. I didn’t have a television or a radio, so I had to ignore it the old-fashioned way. I hummed to myself, or did push-ups. I had a girlfriend once who laughed at men who exercised to rid themselves of stress, and so I always laughed a little at myself doing those push-ups, but I was desperate. When there was nothing to do, I drank a lot of coffee. I had one of those Italian espresso makers you fill with water and put on a range, and I added cardamom to the grounds. The scent of cardamom reminded me of the coffee I drank in the Middle East, in Qatar, in Iraq, and my last hour there after my work on the FDE, in Queen Alia International, by myself, a sand-bound sailor on his way home, at the Four Seasons lounge, staring out the window toward the invisible city of Amman, which was buried in haze. I would travel right back through that lounge on my way to Baghdad as a civilian contractor. I must have gone through ten cups of coffee a day. Maybe that’s what the average American drinks. Usually I was in the office from five a.m. to midnight. My apartment was just a few blocks from the football stadium, so near that on Sundays the roar of the crowd seemed like a great godlike breath trying to blow us over. I had not specifically sought a place by the stadium, but I liked living there, because it fed my hatred of the kingdom of ambitious stupidity, of the loud and gruesome happenstance of American domination. I hated that noise, and that stadium, and I hated everyone in it, and I sat for long periods of time on a couch I’d bought for nothing at a flea market, listening to the celestial ecstasy of the dumb luck of being born American. That collective whoop. I hated that country and every man and woman and child and bug alive in it. I had no idea what I wanted in life then, but I knew that I hated America, and I wished that it or I did not exist. And while I thought this, on Sundays, the stadium responded with great, ecstatic, dumb breaths. And when I went to my office, I dressed in a decent suit and put an American flag on the lapel.

  About a month before I returned to Iraq, I got an email from Josephina’s mother. It was one of those emails that say, I don’t know if this address works, or if this is who I think it is, but I am so-and-so, and I know you from such-and-such, and I’ve been looking for you. I found you on the internet. I was sitting in my office downtown, twenty-two storeys up in a twenty-five storey building. It was around midnight. I had a nice view of the western half of the city, twinkling green and yellow and orange and red and blue and violet. The interstates made long white loops that carved the city into pieces. But for a moment, and I was never able to regain the sensation in a meaningful way, I realized the overwhelming blackness of the view. The sensation of suddenly noticing not only that the scene was more dark than light and more still than twinkling, but also that the darkness was far more intense than the lights, was like closing your eyes and opening them to discover that anything beyond what you perceive is attainable only in death. Beyond the outermost suburbs, where the black was most intense, the horizon rose into jagged, black, invisible mountains. There wasn’t anything above it. Maybe one or two stars, maybe a planet. It had been a long, long time since I’d thought about Josephina, and when I remembered her letter I immediately remembered that I’d written back to her. I’d forgotten this for a long time. I cannot recall much of what I wrote to Josephina, and it may be that I was not supposed to write back, that I crushed the sentiment of her farewell in the same way you crush the farewell of a person who says goodbye to you on a street by continuing to walk with them. I believe I told her something like: I will pursue a destiny of justice and righteousness in your memory. I mailed my letter and became an ensign.

  I telephoned Estelle immediately upon receiving her email
, and the next day I drove south to meet her. It was my first trip home since I’d left. The drive takes about three hours. The landscape changes gradually from sand and dirt and rock and cacti and brush to sun-bleached grass fields, deciduous trees, milkweed, blue palmettos, and little flowers like rock lettuce and dandelions. You take the interstate south for a while, but you have to turn onto a small state highway that doesn’t get much traffic. The day was warm and sunny, and incredibly bright. I really hated the place as a kid, and I had gone on hating it my whole life. In some ways I even recognized that what I really hated about America was the fact that I hated everything in proximity to this particular place, and the further away I got, the less hatred I felt. It was like some kind of epicentre, but there was no event, no tragedy, no cause. I was born to hate the place I came from. That day, however, I fought a curious and unexpected nostalgia as I approached. I was thinking of what I’d say to Josephina when I got there, and I had to tell myself that it was not Josephina I would be seeing, it was Estelle. I listened to the radio. Mexican music. Norteña music. I stopped at a roadside stand and bought some dried chilli peppers, not because I needed them, but because I wanted to get out of the car on the side of the road and stand in the sun.

  I arrived around eleven. The town was as I’d left it. You hit a patch of houses built close to the road, many of them derelict – they were derelict when I lived there too. There’s a gas station. Then you hit some tracks, over which the old downtown stands, where there is nothing but empty offices, empty rusted mills, empty rusted warehouses, and a tall, rusted water tank with the name of the town on it. The task of renovating the old town was too formidable, so they just left it to rust to death. Beyond it, there is an amorphous collection of houses down lonely, woody roads, then you come to a large highway, and past that a series of strip malls appears, and suburbs that drift back behind them. Josephina’s house was not far from mine. I decided to speak with Estelle before I drove by my house. Estelle had not explained why, after all these years, she had suddenly looked me up, and until that mystery was solved I’d be too distracted to appreciate anything else. Nobody would be at my house. My mother hadn’t got a decent offer on it before moving to New York, so she hadn’t sold it. I didn’t have a key. I just wanted to stand outside it for a little while, or walk around the front and back yards.

  I pulled up at Estelle’s and turned the engine off. At that time I was driving an old metallic-green hatchback Toyota – a car that was as beat-up and modest as my little apartment by the stadium. The house was a red brick ranch-style bungalow with a two-car detached garage with an apartment on top of it, and a long but shallow screened-in porch. I do not remember the first day I ever met Josephina, but a photograph taken that day by my mother, in which Josephina and I are standing by bicycles outside that porch, hung on a wall full of pictures in our dining room. She had a green bike with a banana seat, and I had a black dirt bike. I watched the windows, on either side of the porch, for motion. It was a funny place to be, a funny thing to be doing. I pulled the keys out of the ignition, got out and walked to the front door. I rang the bell and waited. There was noise, some footsteps, then the door was unlocked, then it opened. There was Estelle, short, a little overweight, with short white hair, wearing a red shirt and tan slacks. She shook my hand with both her hands, and she said it was wonderful and strange to see me again. I was so tall, so handsome. Come in, she said. We sat down in her kitchen, at a small round wooden table with flowers in the centre and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a rooster and a hen. It was only when I noticed these that I realized I was sitting in a shrine to farm animals. Ceramic figurines, from the thimble-sized to the whiskey-bottle-sized, crowded shelves on the walls, bookshelves, and filled display cases. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens. The centrepiece was a large collection of photographs of Josephina as a child and teenager, which I did not linger upon.

  Estelle served me some coffee. She saw that I was a little unnerved by the animals. It’s what happens, she said. You collect, and one day you wake to realize you’ve turned your home into a mausoleum for your desire to have lived and died as a mother. She did not say that exactly. She may not have said anything at all. She offered me some food and I declined. I was starving, but I didn’t want to eat in front of her. The coffee was weak. I took a sip and pushed it to the side. I’m glad you contacted me, I said. I’m surprised you came, she said. Me too, actually, I said. When was the last time? she asked. Christ, I said, who knows – was I sixteen or seventeen? She smiled and shrugged. We realized simultaneously that we had no personal connection to re-establish, and it seemed, therefore, pointless to go on avoiding the subject of Josephina. It’s been a long time since I thought of Josephina, I said. I stood up and looked at those photographs. They were all the ordinary pictures of a child’s life. I said, It’s an incredible shame. She said, You and her were very close. Yes, ma’am, I said. I believe she was my only real friend here. She’s the only person I ever missed. Estelle looked out the window at her back yard, which was large, green, and reasonably clean, and had not changed since the last time I was there. She said the same thing about you, said Estelle. Do you mind if I ask you something personal? I asked. Not at all, she said. Are you sick? I asked. She turned from the garden to me, in half-astonishment, then realized what I was asking. No, no, I’ve been hunting you for years, she said. Ever since Josephina’s death. Really? I asked. She said, You wrote a very nice letter to her. You read it? I asked. Yes, she said. I don’t quite remember what I wrote, I said. I still have it, she said. I said, I’d rather not see it, to be perfectly honest. Did she say anything about it? Nothing, said Estelle, she just handed it to me and asked me to put it with everything else.

  Estelle stood and placed both our coffee cups beside the sink. Did Josephina ever come to visit you, after you left? No, I said. Were you not boyfriend and girlfriend? We weren’t, I said. Estelle put her hands in her pockets and walked very close to the back door, still looking outward. Whatever she wanted to ask now, she was not prepared to ask it. She seemed a bit embarrassed, so I said: I think I still have her letter to me. Would you like it? Estelle took her hands out of her pockets and crossed her arms. After a while she said, What was that? The letter, I said. I could make a copy. Yes, she said, that’d be nice. Then she opened the back door and said, Follow me. We walked outside, into the warm sunlight, and she said, Remember this yard? I do, I said, and it’s strange to be back. I bet, she said. We walked to the detached garage. There was a little staircase that led up to the apartment’s front door. There was a padlock on it. Estelle took a small key out, opened the padlock, then took out another key and opened the deadbolt. She turned the knob and opened the door. The door opened inwardly, and she stepped inside, and I followed. I cleaned a bit this morning, she said. All the curtains were closed, so the room was black, except for the oblique rectangle of sunlight on the floor that the opened door had allowed. She turned a lamp on. She’d had to replace the bulbs earlier that day, as well. The apartment was a single large room – a converted attic over the garage, with a sink and a fridge and a bed and a desk and an old television set. Boxes were stacked three high against the walls. She was fascinated by the past, by her family’s past, said Estelle. Absolutely fascinated. If she had not been sick, I would have taken her to a therapist. I don’t know why she set herself a task she knew she could not finish, and that nobody else would take up. What kind of struggle is that? She sat on the chair beside the desk and shook her head.

  My memory of this day is tumultuous and murky. I do not trust a word of it. But a life is not a recollection of facts, and in Josephina’s impossible task I saw something that was, if not heroic, then at least refreshing. Her mother found it absurd because she could not understand an obsession with facts. But nobody obsessed with the past is concerned with the facts. In her letter to me, Josephina had written: truth has a qualitative, not a quantitative, value, and it is the very people ranting about the unattainability of truth who are
most likely to utilize lies to squeeze, subjugate, undermine, and mutilate justice. So she lived here? I asked. Until she got too sick, said Estelle. Can I open one of these? I asked. Go ahead, she said. I went to a box and got my keys out and cut the tape open. A stiff scent of must and old paper came out of it. I dug through it. Amazing, I said. Maybe when I’m gone, somebody will want all this. Maybe some museum. Yes, ma’am, I said. So you weren’t her boyfriend? asked Estelle. Well … I said. I only ask, she said, because she said you were her boyfriend. Estelle wasn’t looking at me as she spoke, because this was no longer small talk. We were young, I said. I don’t mind that, she said, not at all. Well, yes, then, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Estelle smiled, still without looking at me, stood and clapped her hands softly. I realized I’d been pursued all these years to say the very thing I’d just said, which, of course, was not the truth, not in the way that she wanted it to be, but it was a lie I was happy to tell, if it brought Estelle some peace. She said, I wonder if you’d do something for me. Of course, I said. I wonder if you’d just spend a little while on your own here, while I sit in the house. I said, Ma’am? She was looking at her feet, which were tapping the dark-stained wooden floor. She could not speak, or would not. I closed the box. Sure, I said. I’ll stay for a little while. She walked to me and took my arm and thanked me, and suggested that we say our goodbyes there. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye, she said. She held my hand again with both her hands.