Chapter 4 （Sticky） Notes of War
(Sticky) Notes of War
Theo
The envelope sat dead center on her doormat, crisp and clean, looking entirely too expensive for what Theo assumed would be either an apology or a very polite “fuck you”.
She'd been awake for sixteen hours, her hair had someone else’s blood in it, and her keys were still dangling from the lock because her hands had apparently forgotten how to complete basic motor tasks.
The envelope could wait.
Except… it couldn’t, because her brain had already registered her apartment number on the front, written in what was unmistakably a pretentious fountain pen. And now she had to read whatever fresh hell her neighbor had composed in response to her (admittedly) over-the-top, sleep-deprived threat.
She grabbed the envelope, stepped inside, and kicked the door shut behind her.
The paper was thick enough that she had to slit it open with her hospital ID badge.
Impractical? Maybe. But she had never owned a letter opener in all her twenty-eight years, and she refused to let Catherine Matthews make her feel inferior about it now.
Inside, a single sheet of matching stationery bore three lines in the same elegant handwriting.
Thank you for the kind offer, Theodora.
But I will have to decline.
I have no doubt that your sutures would be crooked.
- 14D
Theo read it twice. Then she laughed, a short bark of sound that startled her in the quiet of her apartment. The woman had managed to insult her surgical competence and still maintain perfect grammar. It was impressive, in a deeply, deeply, irritating way.
* * *
The next morning, Theo stopped at Yorkie’s bodega at the end of her street and bought a pack of neon pink sticky notes. Pink was the only option that wasn’t yellow, and yellow felt far too neutral for what she had planned.
That evening, she stood outside 14D with her pen hovering over the blank square of paper.
You have mastered the fundamentals of
playing a goddamn instrument.
I get it. Now stop playing after midnight.
-14C
She pressed it to Catherine's door at eye level, then went inside and waited.
The response appeared the next morning, written on a bright green sticky note.
Building bylaws do not specify quiet hours
for musical instruments (I checked with management).
But I will be mindful.
-14D
Two nights later, the piano stopped at 12:01 a.m.
Theo lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, phone in hand, the time glowing accusatively in the darkness. One minute past midnight. One minute past her original complaint. Catherine had moved her cutoff time, but she'd moved it to the exact moment that rendered Theo's request technically invalid.
The next sticky note went up before Theo left for her shift.
“Mindful” didn’t work last night.
You went beyond midnight.
-14C
Catherine's response was waiting when she got home at eleven p.m.
I appreciate your vigilance.
But to clarify, my practice ended at 12:00.
If you’re hearing music later than that,
it may be an auditory hallucination secondary
to your sleep deprivation.
-14D
Theo pulled the note off her door and studied it in the hallway's dim lighting.
That night, the piano stopped at 12:00 a.m. Exactly.
Theo sat on her couch with a cup of tea she'd forgotten to drink, and listened to the silence that followed the last chord.
* * *
They exchanged notes for four more days after that.
Tuesday’s note was lemon yellow, left on Theo’s mailbox before dawn:
If you are unable to sleep, I recommend the following:
(1) Earplugs, moldable silicone, not the foam kind;
(2) White noise: waves, rain, traffic (walking into it may help);
(3) Moving out.
-14D
On Wednesday, a blue sticky note appeared next to Theo’s keyhole, so precisely centered that she wondered if Catherine used a ruler. It read:
If you must leave retaliatory notes,
please refrain from doing so before six a.m.
You drag your feet loudly, and there are
limits to even my fortitude.
-14D
The reply:
It’s not retaliation if you started it.
-14C
(P.S. I tried earplugs.
They did not block you out.)
She stuck it to Catherine’s door, resisting the urge to add a smiley face, which she knew would annoy her.
And so on, the back-and-forth unfolding in silent, mounting increments. Theo found herself nearly looking forward to the next note, though she would have denied it under oath or torture.
She also noted with absolute disinterest that the piano music had changed.
Catherine played shorter pieces, and always in sets of three.
It wasn’t the kind of practice that suggested preparing for a recital; there was no build-up, no changing repertoire, just relentless drilling of the same handful of pieces.
On Thursday night, the music stopped at 11:30 p.m and Theo sat on her couch for exactly thirty minutes before going to bed.
* * *
Two weeks Saturday, no piano.
Instead, a pinned note on the stairwell bulletin board:
ATTN: RESIDENTS OF 14C AND 14D
If further “disputes” are to be conducted via sticky notes, please refrain from using the public spaces. The lobby is not a forum. We recommend personal delivery to the responsible party’s door.
- Building Management
A small postscript, in Catherine’s handwriting, sat underneath it:
Tsk, tsk. I expected better of you, Theodora.
That one nearly made Theo smile. Nearly.
She caught herself before the expression fully formed and reminded herself that she was still supposed to be annoyed about this whole situation.
Except she wasn't. Not really. Annoyed would have been easier to maintain.
What she actually felt was something closer to anticipation, which was significantly more inconvenient.
Theo read the last postscript again, then uncorked it so she could add it to her collection, for reasons that were none of anyone’s business.
* * *
Week three of their little tête-à-tête brought weather so cold the windows sweated, then froze the sweat into beads of ice.
The soundproofing in the building was a joke.
Every creak, every muffled conversation, every shift in the HVAC system was amplified and piped directly into her skull.
The only exception was 14D, which had gone silent.
Theo considered what that meant. She knew, from the doorman’s gossip, that Catherine was a pianist of some repute. Well, formerly.
She could have searched what happened on the internet, but that felt wrong somehow. She had no idea what happened to that version of Catherine, but she did know that she now spent her days teaching music to private students. She suspected this required an inhuman tolerance for mediocrity.
The next time the music started, it was just before midnight. Not a nocturne or a waltz, but a simple scale, ascending and descending. Deliberate, slow, approaching unsure. It continued for exactly ten minutes, then stopped.
There was no note in the morning.
And Theo almost missed it.
* * *
The following night, Theo got home at two in the morning after a brutal shift. She’d lost a patient. A few, actually. Her hands still shook when she tried to unlock the door, the keys slipping and clattering against the floor.
She stared at them for a second, then crouched to pick them up, moving deliberately, like she wasn’t entirely convinced her body was still listening.
When she opened her door, she found a lavender sticky note lying on her doormat:
Saw the pile-up on the news.
Hope you’re okay.
The piano will be off tonight.
-14D
It was the first time Catherine had acknowledged Theo’s work, or even her humanity. And the fact that she’d managed to slide it under her door despite its stickiness was seriously impressive to Theo’s tired brain.
She pulled out a pink sticky note from her bag and wrote five words before she could overthink it.
It was rough.
Thank you.
-14C
Theo picked up Catherine’s note and stuck it to the inside of her medicine cabinet, just above her toothbrush. She stared at it for nearly a minute before going to bed.
Catherine's response took longer this time, nearly two days. When it finally appeared, the handwriting looked a little less controlled, as if it had been written quickly.
The Brahms last night was sloppy.
My apologies.
-14D
Theo read the note twice before she understood. Catherine was apologizing for her playing. Not for the volume or the timing, but for the quality. As if Theo would notice. As if Theo cared about the technical execution of whatever piece Catherine had been working through.
Except she had noticed. The music the previous night had sounded different, gentler, less precise. She'd been half-asleep, but some part of her brain had registered the change.
The realization that she was now familiar enough with Catherine's playing to notice variations annoyed her even more than the woman herself. She tried to ignore it while writing her response.
I didn't notice.
I was asleep before you finished.
-14C
She'd meant it as neutral information, but Catherine's reply suggested she'd taken it differently.
Good.
That was the point.
-14D
* * *
The shift happened so gradually that Theo couldn’t say she consciously recognized it.
The piano that used to jolt her awake now marked the edges of her evening like punctuation.
Catherine played earlier most nights, nine p.m. instead of midnight, sometimes even 7:30 if Theo had mentioned an early shift.
The volume had dropped, too, not dramatically, but enough that Theo had to actively listen if she wanted to hear the details.
She hadn't asked for any of it. Catherine had just...adjusted. Quietly. Without announcement or acknowledgment.
Theo sat on her couch one Thursday evening with a medical journal she wasn't reading, listening to something that sounded French and difficult, and realized she'd been doing this for twenty minutes.
Just listening. Not working, not studying, not trying to sleep through it.
Actually paying attention to the music filtering through the wall.
The recognition came with an uncomfortable awareness that she'd stopped bracing herself for the sound weeks ago. Somewhere between the formal complaints and the spite-practicing updates, the piano had stopped being an intrusion and started being just there. Part of her evening. Part of her routine.
She wasn't sure when she'd allowed that to happen.