Then, the people in the apartment building upped and went. No one saw it coming. It was as though a viral mist had entered the place, drifted up the stairwells and onto the upper floors and corridors to seep beneath the door to each apartment, cloud the rooms, and affect all who lived there.
Their bodies remained, but their spirits were gone. Each mind left the body for another place known only to that person. Daily routines appeared to go on as normal. Coffee, laundry, and working from home because these were pandemic times. But this event was not a demonstrable effect of Covid, which was receding anyway. The people in the building looked fit and healthy, no one was coughing or feverish. It was almost as if the viral mist had strengthened bodies by emptying minds. As if the bodies grew healthier when the brains stopped engaging with the immediate surroundings.
Back in the building, the residents passed one another in the hallways and on the stairs as though in a waking dream. They murmured hello or nodded. But they did not stop to talk, a habit already ingrained during lockdown but deepened now. They no longer found anything to say from behind the face masks because the brain with its language, with its how are yous and fine thankses, that brain had left the building. It was busy somewhere that mattered more to that person. So no, they did not talk, although they sometimes peered at one another and into the eyes of their neighbors as if expecting someone else. Someone important. A dead parent or a childhood friend.
We know now that most of the residents had gone back to their old towns. When they moved like ghosts through the corridors of the building, they saw not those corridors but the remembered front doors of the first street, the fire hydrant on the corner, the nervous dog forever barking at the corner house. When they looked out their windows, there was the first street on a Sunday afternoon. Lawnmowing, coffee drinking, window cleaning, porch sitting. When lockdown came to an end and the children played once again in the park below the apartment building, the residents heard the voices and games of the old gang from the old playgrounds.
The elderly ones returned to a world mostly in black and white, the world in the photo album carried from one home to another throughout life. The cherished album, the only possession worth saving in a fire, they had been heard to say. They said this, but now they could enter it.
Take Bill, for example, an old man from Apartment 1B. He went back to find the two girls he used to play with in summer.
The girl on the left always brought her dog, a Collie named Pal. When she died decades later in another town, her memory mostly gone, she called for Bill one last time, demanding that her daughters bring “That boy. That boy! The boy I used to play with!” The little girl tells this to Jack now, as they sit on the grass together again, stroking her dog. She says, “When I die, I will call out to you. I won’t remember your name, but it’s you.”
Sometimes, in the residents’ flights, returns, disappearances, lapses, escapes – what should we call them – sometimes, the world came (it comes) with scalloped borders. Verb tenses go haywire. For the man in 3C, a widower, it was the first television. It is the first television. Again. Mother drops down to the floor to be with him, kisses him; he holds her tight and inhales the scent of her. Inside the scalloped border. “Don’t sit so close,” she says, kissing his cheek. “It’ll ruin your eyes.”
Over in 9D, an old girl who has run out of love for her cheating husband goes looking instead for her first friend. Hot summers, running through the sprinkler together. Never to part. Arms around one another, goosebumps on wet skin, knees knocking. She moved away and that was the end of it. She became a single photograph, a treasure, and after that, a floater memory with no place to land until now.
For those a half a generation or so behind the ones with scalloped pictures, the world shimmers in Kodachrome. The aging woman with sore joints living in 2B was once a dancer with springs in her legs. Her mother drove her to ballet school every day. Mother and daughter were intensely attached. Then the daughter reached adolescence, lost interest in dance lessons, and began to argue during those car journeys. The arguments deepened and slipped into other spaces and she broke away. She was afraid of her powers, but she was fighting for them. The mother, for the rest of her life, missed the daughter who was once sweet and biddable, and who pirouetted in leotards and floaty costumes. The woman from 2B goes back to find her mother, to thank her mother and say sorry but it could not have been otherwise.
While looking for her mother, she comes across her beautiful blue bicycle leaning against the back of the brick house. Choosing freedom again, she pushes the bike into the street, neatly places one foot onto the lower pedal, swings her leg over the bike to find the other pedal, and she is away, staying upright to gain speed, then finding the seat and coasting around the corner of the street. She heads to James Street for a sleepover with a friend who would prove so faithful and long-lasting.
As she rides across the town, she thinks about the redheaded boy who gave her a 45, a Beatles single. The old girl speaks up during that bike ride to tell her younger self that she could have been nicer to the redheaded boy. He loved her first; she would love him later. The first lesson of love – it’s all about timing.
From the start, James Street was a second home. The mom drinks coffee in the kitchen and the dad plays opera in the garage. There is love in that house, different from the love in her own. It seems easier, more fun, less conditional. That is interesting. It’s an early door opened onto something other. Something as yet unknown and far away.
Yes, the apartment block is bursting with ghosts and their paraphernalia and places, their cinematic scenes. In a serendipitous turn, an old guy from 8C returns to the lake of his married years, and there, he bumps into a younger woman from 3A.
She is the little girl perched right at the end of the dock. He is the fellow sitting on the dock with his wife leaning over him, clasping his shoulders. His mother, very old, rests in the foreground, cooling her feet. In the past, though separated by family and generation, the man from 8C and the woman from 3A must have known one another a little, if only by frequenting the lake between their towns, and sharing space on the dock. Yet here in the apartment block of their futures, they are strangers, even after returning to the lake several times over. They fail to recognize one another when they pass in the stairwell or the lobby of the building. There is a flicker, a startled look between them, then it’s gone.
The pandemic is a memory now, even if it has left grief and a residue of anxiety behind it. The world has gone back to work. Nobody masks or tests anymore. Nobody knows when the next one may come. But the apartment block has not moved with the times. A ‘return to normality’ was not desired.
We who live on the surrounding roads still catch sight of the residents during the day. They come and go in haste, buying food, then scurrying home. At night, the building is dark. We believe they are happiest at night. Slipping quietly into the photographs they hold in their hands. Young again. Traveling back to their hometowns.
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