Complex

come hangout with us in our shared living space

It’s not really an apartment complex. There are dozens of plain beige rooms, three modern minimalist levels and two Ikea kitchens shared between the wide array of occupants.

Artem lives in 3 and has for a year. He gets up early for work, consequently, he is forced to use the kitchen before approved kitchen hours, and it’s likely that everyone hates him for this, but he would not know because he will not ask. Artem thinks everyone thinks he’s a serial killer, but he’s not. He just doesn’t like eye contact and he doesn’t want to engage with the others in the complex. It doesn’t matter if he is starving to death, if someone is in the kitchen he won’t enter except to pass through to the exit. He has friends, he’s not a crazy person, and he’s really not a serial killer but he is touchy. Sometimes the walls moan like a human cry, sometimes they make out words or consonants and vowels. It’s not a scary complex, but he hates the way the walls talk. It makes him feel insane. He found a dead rat in front of his door last week. He didn’t tell anyone but he cleaned it up. It was squished, busted out at the seams. Looked like it had been dead for a day or two, but he had only seen it that morning. He didn’t tell anyone. He wishes he lived alone with no one else’s animals. After all, it was probably just the neighbor’s cat.

Helen and Melissa room in 7, upstairs. They haven’t made any serious effort to get to know anyone but the landlady because she’s so sweet. The landlady leaves ramen packets on the dining room table for anyone to have. Helen is a hothead and Melissa is a big softy and they love eachother dearly, maybe they love ramen more than each other because last week they both stole ten packets each and neither really paid close attention to the other’s doings until they realized they’d had almost 20 ramens in one week. Helen yelled at Melissa because she should have been paying attention, especially after Nikki ate two ramens and then had to endure violent vomiting and diarrhea all day. Nikki is just a kitty, but Melissa should use her noggin, she’s not stupid she just does stupid things. Helen knows not to yell at Melissa in the house because the walls are paper thin, so she waits until they’re in the car together. Helen always drives. She knows she shouldn’t be mad, but Melissa shouldn’t be so frustrating either. She wishes they could afford to move to a house where she could just yell at her girlfriend normal-like. Melissa isn’t the only person who needs a good chastisement though. The dumb Chinaman downstairs could use a lashing too.

Hiro likes his food the way he likes his food, he likes his room the way he likes his room. He would like to say he likes his house the way he likes his house, but this isn’t his house. His room is maybe the only clean place on the whole property. Even the kitchen is a mess, but he’ll still cook there, he’ll clean up after himself. And if necessary he will complain to the landlady about those who are seemingly incapable of not attracting vermin. Hiro swore he saw a rat in the kitchen the other day and put out rat traps to assure that this would not be a continuous problem. He told the landlady to tell everyone and she did, but one of the lesbians upstairs stepped on one. Now whenever she goes into the kitchen, he can hear her loudly griping about how bad her toe hurts and how unsafe it is to lay out rat traps in a shared complex, especially with a cat. She pontificates with loud, elongated syllables, like she’s talking to a baby. She doesn’t know that he can obviously understand English. Hiro’s, like, fifth generation, no one even has an accent in his family and he’s never been to Japan either. Hiro doesn’t tell his parents about the lesbians upstairs. His parents technically don’t know that he lives here, or they would have a fit. They know something isn’t right, but they won’t ask and he won’t tell. They worry too much. Still he wishes he had a private house that he could keep clean. Live alone, keep things tidy. He can’t complain about it to his parents because he cannot tell them. Sometimes silence is best.

It’s silent in room 12. There’s a dead body in a messy bed beside a nightstand with half eaten TV dinners and a moldy copy of a James Patterson book. The pages are curling from the stench. Rats gnaw at the chewy parts of his face, and he thinks he doesn’t look so healthy anymore. There’s a great deal of insecurity and discomfort there.

Theron Simpson is always told she has a strong name. She responds by saying “it’s a boy’s name” and everyone thinks that’s funny. It’s gender neutral though. She’s not, someone at work told her she “presents hyper-femme”. That doesn’t mean anything specific to her. It’s not hyper-femme to her, it’s just being a woman. Mom always said “beauty is pain, Theron” but after a while it’s not that much of a pain, it’s just a routine. She likes her routines. “It’s the autism” says some online personality. She’s grateful that she got the ‘being pretty’ autism and not the trains and videogames autism. She’s inviting a boy over tonight. She hasn’t had sex in months and she can feel the empty inside of her and hates it. A glass with no liquid in it is just decoration. She didn’t want to be decoration she wanted to be used. Like really fucking used. She wanted this boy to grab her by the ankle and throw her against the wall like a caveman. He talks a lot of mad game, which is not a good sign, but he is the only prospect she has right now. She really wishes she lived in a more private space. Not to mention, she cannot live another night listening to her neighbors in 9 howling and moaning and slapping their wet genitalia together without some sort of recourse.

Marcy and Kareem are not lovers. They’re friends, it’s just that Kareem got kicked out of his living situation and has been looking for another apartment for the last ten months. Room 9 is the biggest one on the second story, which gives them lots of space for activity. Marcy likes leather and Kareem likes being stepped on, especially if she’s got heels. And maybe he can’t control himself when something feels good, but more than anything, maybe he likes that the neighbors know that he feels way better than they do at that moment. Thank god she’s on birth control. They’re not together though. They don’t like each other like that, they’re just fleshy human toys for each other. Seriously, it may not sound like it, but they have ground rules so that no one catches feelings. Marcy was crying in the bathroom the other night, though. They’re friends, but she wouldn’t tell him why. So he cheered her up by making her give him head for 20 minutes. By the time she was licking her lips with a grimace, she said she felt better and they watched Evil Dead together. Kareem likes this kind of temporary housing. Marcy cries a lot though now. Today it was because something smelled really bad, and Kareem smelled it too. He doesn’t really think about it though, so it doesn’t bother him. Marcy hates it, she says she’s gotten really smell sensitive in the last few weeks. Marcy says she would move to a whole other state if it meant she could get away from this complex.

Alabama killed a man in self defense four years ago. Lesson learned, he doesn’t go to soccer matches anymore and he goes religiously to his AA meetings. Luckily, at this point, he’s basically too pickled to even experience the full range of human emotion, including righteous anger. Hell, half the time he spends dissociating in front of his laptop and wakes back up in his own body. After lawyer fees and media coverage and blah blah, he lost his wife and his kid and now lives in a shared housing structure, working from home in data entry. He wishes he could work from an office but the whole room is his office. He spends all day in room 2, and the house definitely talks. He’s heard full human words on hot days where metal and wood are expanding, and on cold nights especially when everything is contracting. He’s had full conversations with the house. He asks the house once a day what that fucking smell is. I mean come on, man, he’s 40 years old he doesn’t deserve to live like this. House always gives one word answers. First time it was “Ben”. Second time it was “rats”. This last time, just now it said “meat”. Yeah that is what it smells like. He thinks a rat named Ben got trapped in the wall and died. He doesn’t want to bother the landlady about it. Besides she has to know, and he doesn’t feel strongly enough about it to really care.

The landlady is not a landlady, she’s an on sight property manager. She loves the job, plays house all day, cured her empty nest syndrome after her daughter went to school in London. Smart girl. She’s been stressed out lately because she knows about the dead body but there’s nothing she can do because he insists on sticking around to keep an eye on her. The eye that’s flattened, dulled and sunk into his head. Luckily the property owners give her carte blanche with expenses so she uses a lot of Febreze and Lysol. He did love her so much. Does love her. She never loved him though. When he died there was a touch of relief not having to talk to him all day like she used to. Good old Ben. Nice man but not her type. The spark of relief was swiftly stamped out when his corpse started talking. She knew it was possible, I mean when she turned 50 she decided to become a witch, a real Alan Moore. It wasn’t the first time she’d spoken to the dead. Her husband was particularly chatty on occasion, and the dead always found ways of yapping without mouths. Her husband did it through Nikki, the neighbor cat for a while, warned her about Ben but she didn’t listen. He was just so sweet. Ben talks through the walls. He knows exactly how easy it would be for her to expel him from the house that he got mad at her when she brought home table salt for the occupants. He said “I will kill you and everyone in here if you even try.” Once when they got in a fight she found the gas line for the dryer loosened significantly.

The landlady shrugs as she sprays her Febreeze around room 12. With a sigh she mutters to herself.

“I wish I could afford to live somewhere else.”

And then she remembers that she doesn’t mind taking care of people. What would she even do in a big empty house except cry herself to sleep every night. This is fine. A little inconvenience is the cost of the human experience lived to its fullest.