SHUDDERVILLE

I’ll begin my story here.

Every word of it is true.

A man with a goatee moved in next door to Sophie. He was lean and tan with greasy brown hair and wire-rim glasses. He surprised her one warm spring Saturday afternoon by walking into the foyer wearing nothing but a pair of baggy shorts and a yellow fishnet T-shirt. His bare feet landed
pat-pat-pat
against the floor.

“Oops,” he said, nearly bumping into her. “Excuse me.” He checked his mailbox and sorted through his mail, saying, “Junk, junk, junk.”

Back in her apartment, Sophie poured herself a glass of wine and lay down on the sofa. She rested the wine glass on her stomach, closed her eyes and tried to picture the goateed man naked. She ran her fingers through his greasy brown hair, but whenever she tried to kiss him, he melted in her arms. He kept dissolving on her.

On Sunday, Sophie slept in with the
Times
and croissants from the French bakery down the block. Cassie called, but Sophie was too tired to do anything. She had no social life to speak of, but that didn’t bother her. Overwork and exhaustion had become her best friends. They helped her not to think. Sophie had decided that the combination of drinking and not thinking was a great way to get through life.

She drank mostly at night, never during the day, always when her car was parked safely in the underground garage. She drank and stayed up late channel-surfing past Dave and Jay and Jimmy and Conan, and sometimes she found herself thinking about the goateed man next-door. Once in a while when she got home from work, she’d linger by the mailboxes, hoping he would come out and check his mail. Occasionally she heard strange noises coming from his apartment, as if he were rearranging the furniture.

One night, Sophie had a dream she was lost in a strange city. She drove around in circles, while the tall buildings receded into darkness behind her. She turned a corner and was instantly struck by a strobing red emergency light. A crowd had gathered around a car, its steaming chassis smashed into a telephone pole, the victims inside eerily silent. The woman seemed to be asleep. Her green polo shirt was stained with blood. Beside her, a faceless man slumped over the steering wheel.

Two firemen worked the jaws-of-life, trying to pry open the crushed door on the driver’s side. Their helmets and jackets were off, sweat popping out on their foreheads. One of them leaned into the car and held the sleeping woman’s hand. “Help is on the way, hang in there, Sophie.” In the distance, someone was weeping.

She woke up gasping for breath. Was she dead? No. It was just a bad dream. Leaves rustled outside her bedroom window. She heard a muffled thump, and her heart pounded, but then she remembered the goateed man next door.

Restless and bored, she went into the kitchen to get the bottle of Stoli she hadn’t killed off yet and a carton of orange juice. She sat in the living room drinking screwdrivers until the bottle was empty. There was nothing on TV but old Godzilla movies back-to-back.

Around midnight, the room grew very long all of a sudden. “I’m wasted,” she said out loud, and the room got longer and more stretched out, like an image pressed on Silly Putty. The sofa cushions seemed to shift around beneath her, as if they were made of marbles, the fabric cold and corrugated against her skin.

She stood up, took two steps and fell on the floor, laughing. She lay sprawled across the carpet, greatly amused by her lack of balance. But just as abruptly her throat closed around the laughter, and she started to weep. “My little girl.” Her lips trembled around each word. Tears streamed down her face, curling across her cheeks and trickling into her hair. Her life had exploded into a million pieces, and yet she was still alive. Disgustingly alive and kicking. She had all of her fingers and toes. Whoopee.

Thwump-thump
.

“Stampede,” she giggled, getting to her feet. She grabbed the empty bottle of Stoli like a security blanket, tiptoed over to the living room wall and rested her ear against the painted wood.
Tharrrrrump!
It sounded as if the goateed man was pushing all his furniture over. It sounded like he was wrestling elephants.

Then she heard another sound, a persistent
bang-bang-bang
, like a fist hitting a wall. And a voice rising in anger.

Sophie went into the kitchen, scooped a glass out of the dishwasher, hurried back and rested the glass against the wall. She could hear even better now. Two men were arguing, their dueling voices like a needle flicking across a radio dial—all static and loud bursts. She couldn’t make out the words, just muffled outrage and indignation. Then the voices stopped and a door slammed.

Sophie stood blinking numbly. She wanted the voices to come back. She wanted to eavesdrop on other people’s lives. She was sick of thinking about her own tragic life. She put the glass back in the dishwasher and dropped the Stoli in the trash, then noticed her hands were sticky from the orange juice. She washed them in the kitchen sink and plucked a paper towel off the roll.

Bang-bang-bang
. Somebody was pounding on her front door. Visitors! Great. She ran into the foyer and said almost too anxiously, “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s your neighbor, for Pete’s sake,” a grumpy male voice hollered from the hallway. “Tobias Mandelbaum!”

“Just a second.” She straightened her T-shirt and swung the door open and there on the threshold stood a little old man with twinkling blue eyes and a soft peak of white hair on top of his head. He wore a plaid short-sleeve shirt, brown corduroy pants that bagged at the crotch and canvas shoes the color of moss. “Well, hello, young lady!” he bellowed.

“Um… hello,” she said.

His face was cragged and bony and he leaned heavily on a wooden cane. “I came to see if that young man was driving you nuts, too?”

“What young man?” she asked, although she knew perfectly well what young man he meant.

“The one who moved in between us!” He held out his liver-spotted hand. “My name’s Tobias Mandelbaum, by the way. Apartment 204.”

“Oh. Hello.” They shook hands. “Sophie McKnight.”

“Sophie, now there’s a name. You don’t get a lot of Sophie’s nowadays.” He smiled and scratched his chin. “Sounds sort of familiar, like I should know you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No? We’ve never met?”

She wasn’t surprised he recognized her name. The accident had made the six o’clock news. A shot of Sophie running from reporters had looped on Channel 9. An old photograph of Peter taken during his graduate school days had graced Channel 37’s Eye-Witness News. Peter’s blood-alcohol level at the time of the accident had been reported in the Daily Sun. She’d won her fifteen minutes of fame and had paid dearly for it.

“Sounds like somebody’s dropping A-bombs next door,” Mandelbaum grumbled. “It feels like I’m getting kicked in the behind!” He squinted inside, his gaze shifting from the dirty clothes strewn across the floor to the flat grey eye of the television set. “It’s so dark in here.”

“I like it dark,” she said.

“Did I tell you my name’s Tobias?”

“Yes,” she said. “You did.”

“Oh. Well, I’d like to continue this conversation, but it’s getting pretty late.” He smiled at her, exposing his long yellow teeth. “What time is it anyway?”

“It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“One in the morning?” He chuckled and wagged a gnarly old finger at her as if he didn’t believe her. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“Good-night,” she said and shut the door.

*

On Thursday evening, Sophie drank a six-pack while watching National Geographic specials back-to-back on TV. The first show was about a family of polar bears that migrated through a small Canadian town every winter, frightening the residents by rummaging in the town dump and sniffing around the schoolyard. The only way to get rid of the bears was to shoot them full of tranquilizers and transport them up north in a truck.

Sophie shuddered, thinking there wasn’t a parent in the world who would want a bunch of polar bears lumbering past their children. Cuddly as they looked from a distance, they were 1500-pound carnivores. A child was like a Pop-Tart to them.

Midway through the show, somebody knocked vigorously on the door.
Bang-bang-bang
. Sophie muted the TV and sat very still.

“Hello?” Tobias Mandelbaum bellowed from the hallway. “Anybody home? What—you moved away? Vacationing in Hawaii, maybe?”

She held her breath until he gave up and walked away. She breathed a sigh of relief and celebrated her near miss by opening a bottle of wine. She let a sip slide over her tongue before swallowing. The wine tasted mellow and warm in her stomach. She watched a show about sharks, and another show about jungle cats. The sharks were slow-moving Buicks in a blue fog. The big cats made lightning quick turns and killed their prey with a single swipe of their enormous paws. Most animal species stuck together in packs or schools, flocks or herds. But human beings separated themselves and sat behind locked doors. They drank themselves sick and pretended not to be home.

Sophie fell asleep, and when she woke up, it was past midnight. Outside, a fierce wind blew, buffeting the trees and tossing the leaves like hot kernels inside a popcorn machine. Feeling enormously lonely, she went into the kitchen, took a glass out of the dishwasher and rested it against the wall.

This time, she could hear a sweet piano melody. She listened for a long time. Once in a while, the goateed man would sing along with the music. His voice was nasal and low-pitched, but she became mesmerized by the sound of it.

The music stopped abruptly, and it took her a moment to realize that the power had failed and she was standing in the dark. She groped along the wall and felt her way back into the kitchen, where she rummaged under the counter for a flashlight.

Somebody knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” she said, waving her flashlight beam over the dirty clothes on the floor as she made her way into the foyer.

“Er… um. I just moved in next door.”

“Oh!” She opened the door and aimed her flashlight at the goateed man. He squinted and winced until she lowered the beam. He was carrying a tall white candle. “Hi there, neighbor,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but do you have any candle holders I could borrow?”

“I must have some around here someplace,” she said. “Come on in.”

He walked past her carrying the lit candle like a ghost. “Wow. Listen to that wind.”

She rummaged through the kitchen cabinets and pulled out three candleholders and two stunted red candles. She handed him one of the candleholders, and then screwed the stunted candles into the two remaining brass holders and set them on the table where she ate her meals alone.

“I’ve got some matches around here someplace,” she said.

“Allow me.” He lit the two stunted candles with his tall white candle.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome.” He had evenly spaced teeth. His irises were so black that the candle’s reflection was like a single torch inside a gigantic cave. “I hope my music doesn’t bother you.”

“What?”

“My music. I play it loud sometimes.”

“Oh. I hardly noticed.” The flashlight dangled in her hand, its yellow beam circling the kitchen floor. Rain thrummed against the roof, and the wind whistled through open places.

“You watch TV pretty late,” he said, and it shocked her to realize he might’ve been listening. “I can hear it sometimes. Your TV.”

“Really? I’m sorry. I’ll turn it down.”

“No, it doesn’t bother me, I just meant…” They slowly wandered back into the living room, where he lingered in front of the sofa, clearly not wanting to leave, but she wasn’t going to invite him to sit down. His narrow face was lit from below like a Halloween pumpkin, and his billy-goat beard made him look slightly satanic.

“Let me know if it does,” she said with a shiver.

“If what does?”

“If it bothers you. The TV.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Then in one breath he said, “I’m new here. I’m a botanist at the university. Did you know there are over a thousand living creatures in a single square foot of earth? And that’s not including microscopic life forms. Imagine that, Sophie? One square foot?”

She frowned. “How did you know my name?”

“Oh.” He blinked, embarrassed. “Mailbox.”

“Oh, right,” she said, escorting him to the door. “Of course.”

“Be careful,” he told her, pausing on the threshold.

Her eyes grew round. “Be careful of what?”

“Temptation,” he said mysteriously.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s just that… I know you’re in a vulnerable place right now.”

She cocked her head. “How do you know that?”

He didn’t respond.

“How do you know I’m in a vulnerable place?”

“Well, for one thing you left your garbage in the hallway last weekend, before you took it downstairs. Lots of wine bottles. Lots of liquor bottles.”