The People of Valleyview Apartments
Outside, my neighbors, most of whom I only vaguely recognize, are scattered across the front lawn. Our building has sixteen
units spread out on four stories. Because it’s a weekday, I assume the assembled crowd is made up of remote workers, night-shift
workers, and the ones who don’t work—I suppose that’s me, now.
Most tenants only stay in this building for a year or two before moving on; it’s not the kind of place you want to lay down
roots in. At five years, I’m one of the old-timers. I pass the most recent addition to the building, Fighting Couple, as I
make my way down the cracked front path. I recently saw them at the supermarket bickering about a cucumber (apparently, they
had one that went bad, and they were both accusing the other of not using it fast enough). Also, the stairwell below their
suite always smells like hot dogs, which seems like A Very Notable Thing. Right now, they’re silent as they stare bitterly
at their phone screens, though that probably won’t last long.
Neither of them looks up as I walk by, gravel crunching under my slides. I cross my arms and tuck my elbows into my palms,
avoiding eye contact as I try to listen to the small crowd that’s gathering just past them.
Of course, I normally avoid my neighbors.
I’m not about to engage in small talk with the people stuck living here alongside me.
It’s not that I think they’re all bad (some seem to be a tad fucked up, but nothing too wild); it’s that there’s no reason to create permanence in our relationship.
We’re simply passing through one another’s lives (in as distant a ship as possible!).
If I’m about to leave and I hear another person in the hallway, I always do the right thing and spy out of my peephole, waiting for the coast to clear.
Most of what I know about my neighbors has been gleaned via the sights, smells, and sounds that come from their units; the
TV shows and arguments they choose to blare; the marathoners who stomp up or down the stairwells at ungodly hours. Oh, and
the worst offender: the never-improving-but-always-practicing pianist. They just love to taunt me.
Now, dread sets in as I overhear: “Bet it was teenagers.” The sentiment comes from Divorced Dad. He lives across the hall
from me and always wears a cell phone holster. He recently purchased a brand-new Hyundai Santa Fe, which seems to vaguely
indicate that he’s completely lost the plot in life.
“There ain’t no teenagers coming into our lobby at night.” That’s the man I think of as Old White Perve (OWP)—for obvious
reasons. Given my upbringing, I’m very familiar with his type. He’s always red-faced and sweaty, and often sports a free-with-purchase
Molson Canadian shirt tucked behind a giant belt buckle. His jeans are worn well past what would be considered fair, and the
years of pressing his junk against the crotch area have stamped a heartbreakingly detailed shape into the denim. He taped
up a poster of some girl in a bikini from 2004 on the wall behind his parking space, as though the parkade is his personal
garage. Currently, he’s wearing a worn, open bathrobe paired with greige boxers, his pale, knobby knees exposed. “The vandal
had to be someone who lives here,” he continues, eyeing Fighting Couple with suspicion.
A vandal. That’s what I am. A criminal, technically. I curl a little farther into my bathrobe as sweat pools beneath it.
Fancy Widow is leaning against the trunk of a tree that’s been strung with Christmas lights for over a year, blowing smoke from a slim cigarette.
She scares me the most of all my neighbors.
Last week she took out my laundry and left it wet on top of the machine the instant my cycle was done.
I don’t dare confront her about it. Her apartment always emits the odor of stale smoke, which I actually don’t mind because it’s slightly more pleasant than the smell of whatever Old White Perve is burning for his dinner.
She shakes her head at the men as she exhales yet another plume of smoke.
But she doesn’t add to the conversation.
Neither does Uniform Family (I’ve never seen them in anything but their specific work attire: there’s Medical Scrub mom, Calgary Transit dad, and Tim Horton’s son).
I notice a few absences: Never Here Guy (a hiker-type young man who must have a partner with a better apartment since he’s .
. . never here); and the constantly rotating cast of recent college grads on the second floor—so featureless and interchangeable I’m never quite sure if I’ve seen them before or if they just look vaguely familiar.
“Don’t worry,” Weird Girl Beside Me starts as she struggles to shift her squirming orange cat from one shoulder to the other.
She moved in about a year ago and seems to be about my age, but that’s where the similarities end. She’s always wearing these
ridiculously bright outfits that are practically screaming for help, and she changes her hair color every month. Right now,
it’s a shade of crimson red. She’s never tried to talk to me, which is a point in her favor—but our walls are criminally thin,
and she’s always blasting true-crime podcasts. It’s hard to drift off to sleep when words like “severed head,” “semen sample,”
and “decomposing” are whispering through the drywall. Also, one time in the shower I heard sobbing coming through the walls.
Very awkward because I’d been in the middle of singing to myself and didn’t need the feedback.
“It’s going to be on camera anyway,” she continues, staring pointedly toward the lobby doors, replenishing my dread.
Is there any way I can destroy the footage before someone uncovers it?
Fancy Widow stomps out her cigarette on the sidewalk like it’s the nineties and then she starts marching across the alley
to Corner Coffee & Food. An odd feeling I can’t quite understand creeps into me at the sight of the diner. I’ve popped in
there on my rare work-from-home days when I need a coffee (always to go). It’s a mom-and-pop shop managed by the owners’ grown
son. He’s overly chatty and friendly with his customers in a way that always makes me feel weird for not being like that. I usually don’t linger.
Just then, another fire truck rounds the corner at the end of our block, near the city’s second official sketchy McDonald’s.
The firefighter that muscled me out of my building hustles over to where the truck is pulling up, chanting some numbers into
his radio. The siren hits a piercing decibel this close by. A new batch of firemen spring from the truck with concerning urgency.
My gaze crawls back to the old brick cube that is Valleyview Apartments (the valley in its namesake must be the giant construction pit next to it, and the view must be all the goose poop that speckles the front lawn).
But during this entire endeavor, I never seriously considered that this building might actually . . . burn. The redbrick and
sandstone cornerstones mark it as belonging to a time long before anyone alive today can remember. Something that’s survived
this long against the odds can’t just burn down, can it?
Practically half the plots on this street are construction sites with signs out front showing off concept art for new, luxury high-rises.
When I found this building five years ago, I was hunting for a place in my budget that could keep me close to my office and the nicer parts of the city where my colleagues hung out.
I’d toured several brand-new units, with their marble countertops, heated bathroom floor tiles, and spacious balconies.
But while my colleagues could afford to splurge on that kind of abode, I did the math and realized my hefty student loan payments and the bills I was helping my mom pay off left my disposable income in a tragic state.
Every time I pass by those cheery drawings of the kind of lives other people get to live, I get depressed.
It’s always seemed inevitable that one day this duct-taped shit show of a building would get mowed down too, but I never imagined
it would be in a blaze of fire. I figured I could cling to the lease just a little longer, until my promotion, when I could
actually afford to move on.
But even if this place doesn’t burn down, once the footage of me vandalizing the lobby gets viewed . . . Bile burns in my empty stomach. What if Irene kicks
me out? This is the exact opposite of the trajectory I’d planned for myself when I moved in and made my most recent Five-Year
Plan. I’m contemplating the logistics of having to move somewhere else, probably even worse than here. With my job in limbo,
could I even afford to hire movers?
My breath catches. The box in my closet. The irreplaceable one.
I hadn’t thought about it since I shoved it in the back of the top shelf, just over three months ago. It was a simple, benign-looking
box. The size of a hatbox and wrapped in brown paper with the words scrawled on top: For Mona. With love, Dad. His writing was so neat, such a contrast to his rumpled shirts and grease-stained knuckles. It always seemed to me as if
it couldn’t have come from his hands. I swallow over the intrusive lump in my throat as I stare at the building, smelling
for signs of smoke beyond the usual aroma of alley piss and garbage. If the place burns, then . . . Well. I should know there’s
never enough time.
I make out my friend with the stache calling into his radio, “An elderly lady on the stairwell . . .” There’s a staticky response
in return.
My landlady, Irene.
My head swims as I search the crowd even though I already know she’s not here.
I would’ve heard her saying something sassy by now if she was.
I watch the front door like a hawk and almost collapse in relief when, through the window, the silhouette of a firefighter guiding someone into the front vestibule appears.
The front door opens swiftly after, but it’s not Irene. The firefighter is guiding a guy with extremely pale skin, hunched