Chapter 3
Chapter Three
WAR OF THE WALL
HUDSON
Returning to the peace of my apartment is, ordinarily, the thing I look forward to most at the end of the day.
Not because I am anti-social. It’s selective.
But I spend ten hours a day being the sharpest person in every room I’m in, it’s not arrogance, but the job.
It’s a billable fact. That takes something out of a person, something only silence and order can return.
It’s not normal silence, but crafted. In my well-ordered space with no ambient noise or competing sounds, just a clean absence of everything that isn’t mine.
It is the physical expression of the fact that a mind functions best without clutter.
But for months she has been dismantling it, one recording session at a time.
I change out of the dark-charcoal cashmere suit that I’ve spent all day in.
One that I’ve had for years and still fits exactly as it should because I take care of things, my body, and my clothing.
I prepare something that qualifies as dinner and pour two fingers of scotch, maybe three, because the day earned it, I earned it, and carry both to the kitchen island where the renovation plans for 8A are still spread from last night.
I’ve done everything right, and it still feels like it won’t be enough.
I stand at the counter and eat, because eating is not the focus, these floor plans are.
I’m not trying to build more space, exactly, but build the right shape of space. Looking at them now, the idea of combining apartments, mine and the empty one above, I’m not sure what I think more space will solve. It’s not like I’m starved for anything now.
The co-op board is still sitting on the approval, everything waiting on them.
Waiting on a woman that could be aged anywhere between sixty and eighty-five, and I don’t have any indication which way it’s leaning.
What I do know is that Mrs. Saraceno runs this co-op board like she would a small country.
The Richmond is her fiefdom, and she makes sure everyone knows it.
Which is why I know that if I want the apartment upstairs, she is the domino that needs to fall for the rest of the board to agree.
I look at the plans until they stop telling me anything new, I have them seared into my brain as the idea of something I can’t let go of until it is unequivocally mine.
But I gather up the papers, pick up the laptop, and tell myself it will be a productive evening as I head into the bedroom to settle against the headboard, and shift to my actual job.
Tonight, I have countless documents to read through on a merger I’m leading, and a review of the depositions I have scheduled for next week.
With dinner, drinks, and introspection done for the night.
I’ve decided the rest of the evening belongs to work, which is the kind of decision that, in my experience, holds until it doesn’t.
It stays quiet long enough that I almost believe tonight is different, having been lured into a false sense of security into the silence and concentration I need. But fifty-two pages in, she starts.
First a vibration in the wall that I might have, in the very early weeks, talked myself out of noticing. Now I notice it immediately, some receptors in me that have been involuntarily synced to the frequency of her.
I have spent considerable effort over the course of my adult life constructing a very reliable filter for what gets through and what doesn't, and it has served me well, professionally and otherwise. I notice what matters and ignore what doesn’t.
It is a system I have never once had reason to question. That changed.
First her voice seeps into the paint, then it smashes through the drywall.
And then gradually her actual voice, shaped by whatever character she’s inhabiting tonight, gains definition as it crawls through the partition between us.
Moving like it has somewhere it has to be, which for some reason, always seems to be my ears.
I read another page, but her voice becomes something that makes the words in front of me stop making sense.
Everything I’m looking at loses all narrative momentum.
The only concepts being constructed in my brain are the ones she is crafting.
The deposition schedule becomes abstract and morphs into desperation of the characters.
This is what I find most unreasonable. Not just the hours or volume.
The fact that she finds me. Every. Fucking.
Time. I have tried earbuds, earplugs, music, a legal history podcast so deliberately dense it should have been impenetrable, and she continues to find the gap between the podcast and my attention and moves in.
My brain, which I’ve spent a considerable amount of time training to concentrate under conditions that would constitute a hostile work environment for most human beings, simply stops cooperating.
Abandons me completely. Through a wall, apparently, and into a dungeon I now have an involuntary working familiarity with.
I close my laptop and stare up at the ceiling.
This can’t go on much longer. Except I know she can.
This is, I think, for what must be the hundredth time, not sustainable.
I am a man who requires sleep, focus, the ability to wake up, go to the gym, without being kept awake listening to her performing muffled orgasms. I require the basic human ability to sit in my own bedroom and read without my concentration being dismantled brick by brick, or word by word.
When she first moved in and told me she was a voice actor, I had assumed this meant commercials.
Maybe I would hear her when whatever streaming service I’m watching decides that my premium subscription isn’t premium enough not to have commercials anymore, and therefore requires me to upgrade.
Which I do, again. But what it actually means, in practice, is a woman moaning at a level that would alarm anyone who didn't know the context, and frankly still alarms me even when I do.
Sometimes I think the crescendo that comes through has the sole intention of aggravating me.
All because I was rude to her the day we met.
I know she isn't doing it to me. But I also don't know that.
I turn the volume up on the podcast versus the winged captor I’m being forced to listen to against my will thanks to my neighbor in 7B. But somehow now I am half listening to both, with the podcast losing ground by the second.
I take the earbuds out, and stare at the wall, that is, the only thing between me and her voice, and doing an insufficient job of it.
The day she moved in, I had been having a good morning.
This is the most important contextual fact, and I would like it on record.
The most important part, I’d say. My statements were prepared, the discovery was organized.
And I was wearing my ‘lucky’ tie. I don’t typically believe in things like that, signs and superstitions, but this one tie has produced me more victories than anything else.
Even though I am the common denominator of it.
After the pattern emerged, I reserved it for the most critical cases.
It never let me down. Until that morning.
I had left early enough to avoid the elevator bottleneck that happens when everyone's morning schedules converge. I narrowly avoided Mrs. Saraceno. Claire and I managed not to fight that morning about the same things we had been arguing about on loop. See what I mean? Lucky tie.
And then she came tumbling in.
I clocked it all in the second before impact and had approximately enough time to register that there was no version of this ending well before I was doused in something that left me pungent and smelling like licorice.
I fucking hate licorice. Ruining my blue silk tie and staining my white shirt.
I left early enough to avoid the bottleneck, but not to double back to shower and change.
So I made the game time decision to keep going, and just praying to god the smell would dissipate. It didn’t.
Next is the part I have replayed more than I should have and continue to hold against her, because she gathered my papers with the frantic good intention of someone trying to fix a thing they can’t fix, and she handed them back to me in a stack that was, on the surface, orderly.
At least by her standards. I took them. Tucked them back into the folder, and hurried out the door.
It wasn't until I was standing in front of a judge.
I flipped open the file I shuffled all the papers into.
Smack dab between the financial reports to be used as evidence was a page from a script or a manuscript.
Some paper that had been living in her box alongside everything else spilled out on the floor.
And what was on it: a graphic detail of a sexual encounter between a human woman and a creature with three tentacles all being used for different pleasure that I genuinely did not know how to process in the thirty seconds I had before I needed to continue speaking.
I froze. And as I stood in a courtroom trying not to gag from my tea-soaked tie, with a page of alien erotica where my closing argument should have been, I fumbled.
All the people in that room saw it. My girlfriend at the time, Claire, saw it, and it became a story that followed me for weeks afterward, like nicknames in boys’ locker rooms. Where suddenly everyone has an incredible memory for this one thing you wish they would forget.