“Oh,” she said. “You are home.”
“Yes,” I said, unsettled by the way my voice hung in the air. A fruit fly landed on my arm and I brushed it away. The superintendent tried to peer around me into the apartment and I widened my shoulders to block her view.
“I just wanted to make sure that you were aware of the laundry situation,” she said.
“Sorry, what situation?”
“The washing machines. They’re out of order.”
“Oh?” The floor shifted under my feet.
“Thieves,” she said bitterly. “Broke them right open. The repairman should be in later this week. In the meantime, I’ve been telling people to use the laundromat down the block.”
I nodded, thinking she looked thinner, with dark pouches under her eyes. “Okay.”
“It’s hard to believe what some people will do for a handful of quarters, don’t you think?”
A soft rustling came from the apartment behind me and I looked over my shoulder. When I turned back, the superintendent was watching me closely.
“Was there something else?” I asked.
“Well, now that you mention it, there was one other thing. Mr. Colombo—he lives next to you, you know. He mentioned that he’s been hearing noises from your apartment.”
“Oh?” I glanced down the hall at his unit, feeling him on the on the other side of his door, listening.
“He said he heard the sound of, well… someone being emotional.”
“I see.”
“Apparently, it’s been disturbing his sleep. Now, I don’t mean to pry, but I was wondering if you’re—”
“I’m fine,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.
“Well. If you need anything…”
“I appreciate that.”
“All right. Have a good night, Mr. Mallory.”
I shut the door and fruit flies swirled around me, then settled on the walls. I wondered how they perceived me, if they recognized me as a fellow creature, or if I was just some colossal force of nature to them. I leaned in close to an individual and stared at its tiny red eyes. I let it feel my breath on its wings. When it didn’t move, I slowly raised one hand and extended my index finger. I paused with the tip of my finger millimetres away from its delicate exoskeleton. Then I lowered my hand and looked around, overwhelmed by the thought of returning my apartment to a state of livability.
The old man next door was watching an action movie, the bass vibrating through the wall. I grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter and took a long slug. Warm fingers pushed up my spine. I carried the bottle into the bedroom and stopped. A large pile of change shone on the nightstand. No pennies, no nickels or dimes. Only quarters. I stared at the money, then turned off the light and eased into bed, listening to the staccato pulse of machine-gun fire next door. Eventually, the old man’s television went quiet. I watched the interplay of light and shadows on my ceiling, unable to sleep. Kim had lost the power to hurt me, the hurled rock having broken whatever spell I’d been under, but Jasmine still tumbled around in my head. As I began to drift off, a faint, whispery sound came from out in the living area. I held my breath, hearing it again, a match rasping against a strip of phosphorous. I went out to investigate and the sound intensified, growing urgent. Something was trapped in the cupboard under the sink, scrabbling and banging about. The longer I stared at the door, the louder the noise became. With my heart thudding in my ears, I gripped the handle and pulled. The garbage can under the sink had been knocked over, rotten food and scraps of plastic everywhere. In the middle of the pile, not looking the least bit afraid, sat a large grey rat. It glared at me defiantly, like an old man who’d been disturbed on the toilet. “Sorry,” I said. The rat watched me for a moment, then seemed to decide I wasn’t a threat and shuffled off to one side, as if inviting me to join it in the cupboard.
“No,” I said. “That’s all right.”
The rat gave the rat equivalent of a shrug and returned to its feast. I shut the cupboard door and fell back into bed.
I woke to the sound of the building collapsing around me. The windows bucked and shuddered. Outside, giant apes were pounding on the hoods of cars, flipping over garbage bins, scaling the walls of my building and heaving at the framework. Coming fully awake, I recognized the storm for what it was. Hurricanes didn’t generally happen on that side of the continent, but gale force winds occasionally roared in from the sea to batter my windows and fling debris around the parking lot. The appliances were dark, the power out. I pushed to my feet and headed for the balcony door. The entire neighbourhood had gone black. Bright shards of insanity flashed through my head. A spray of coins across linoleum. The superintendent on her hands and knees, naked from the waist down. An ancient hand reaching out of a heating vent. A hard gust hit the building and the sliding door bowed inwards. I pictured it exploding, blowing glass into my face, my eyes. I stayed where I was, willing it to happen, wanting to be sucked into the night like a stack of paper blown from the window of a speeding car. The glass unflexed. Feeling compelled to be out in the thick of the storm, I threw on my jacket and stepped out into the pitch-black hall. The walls sighed as I felt my way past the old man’s unit and down the stairs to the main level. I shoved at the back door and the wind pushed back. On my second try, the wind ripped the door from my hands and threw it against the side of the building. I staggered out into the parking lot, dodging plastic bags and billowing sheets of newspaper. The sky was bright orange, the road littered with branches. Looking up, I saw the pale man at his window with a lit candle. He raised one hand and I headed for the road. I clambered over an uprooted tree and jogged past a streetlight fluttering on a wire like a paper clip on a string. The wind filled my head, my jacket ballooning behind me as I made my way through the empty streets, heading downhill, towards the ocean. Whitecaps flared in the distance. But as I approached the road that hugged the coastline, terror jolted me to a standstill. The ocean had breached the seawall. A line of darkness surged over the road and stopped just short of the spot where I was standing, then drew back and slipped out of sight. Beside me, a flag banged at the top of a pole. I felt like a sleepwalker, woken to find myself in true mortal danger. A red truck glided past me on the street, the driver oddly familiar. I thought about waving him off, but he approached the T-junction at the end of the road so confidently that I assumed he knew what he was doing. The moment he made the turn, another wave flooded the road. The water couldn’t have been that deep, but the back end of the truck started to drift. I could see the driver fighting with the wheel. The sea retracted, hauling in its catch. The truck spun in slow motion. For a moment, I could hear the faint drone of a car horn over the roaring wind. Then the truck reached the edge of the seawall and went over.
Waves advanced a third time, the trees along the road all bending in the same direction, away from the sea. I tore my eyes from the spot where the truck had disappeared and sprinted up the slope, letting the wind carry me past darkened houses and storefronts, over the fallen tree and back to my building, where the remains of a heavy clay pot were strewn about the parking lot. A chained garbage bin kept arrhythmic time to the storm. The pale man’s window had gone dark. I felt my way up the stairwell and down the hall to my unit, where I locked my door, picked up the phone, and dialed 911. A bored operator came on the line. I gave her a rough outline of what I’d just seen and she repeated the story back to me in a skeptical monotone.