steps

story from 2019

The rental agency calls three times in a row. I don't feel like picking up. They send a text that asks if I'm home. I say "No, why?" from the nudity of my bed. They respond "please disregard". I shrug and slowly start my day. Within thirty minutes I hear a ton of hammering somewhere downstairs. It annoys me when they pretend to care about the property to justify rent increases. I'm in the middle of staring at myself in the dirty steel kettle bubbling for coffee with a wet hiss when the walls start shaking. There's a sound like a huge, heavy object dragging slow across the building's foundations. After a minute of this, the clock on the stove and the fan shut off. The music I'm blasting from my room shuts off. I put on sandals and run down the steps to see what's happening.

Just outside my apartment's door, the landing floats, wires hanging and debris crumbling into dark skeletal spaces where the stairs were. I step lightly onto the landing to get a better look. At the lower landing where the stairs turn right and lead outside, the steps that should be closest to me are stuck at an angle like an oversized piece of furniture. The silence is broken by someone trying to tell another how to pull the stairs down. "Hey!" I yell. "What are you doing?" 

"Is someone up there?" The voice asks. As I shout a response someone's pulling the stairs again, drowning me out in the groans of the old row house turned apartment building. The top of the steps beat open a gash in the wall, a hole nearly the size of a wood pallet exposing beams crossing each other in crushed, slowly disintegrating disarray. A quick tug, then the staircase disappears, the voices vanish, it's all quiet. I shut and lock my door, back up to my room.

I sit on the roof, read, drink water and eat fruit in the sun. The day dazes me, I fall asleep on my back without meaning to. When I wake, the sun is falling and my legs are eaten up by summer bugs. I go back in through the window, remembering the power's off. It's after 5pm but I try calling the rental agency anyway as I walk down the stairs. It goes to voicemail and when I open the door to my place, now the landing's gone. I can see broken bits of it in moldy piles thirty feet down but nothing that could help me leave. Back inside, the food in my fridge sweats, asking me to cook it before it's worthless. Luckily the stove is gas, so I try to cook some chicken and rice with veggies by a candle that brightens with nighttime. 

After eating I call the number on the business card of Fernando the maintenance man, but my phone dies mid call. Nausea from the heat, badly cooked meat and the smell of a blown out candle lock me in discomfort. 

You come out from a light behind the shut door to find me writhing on the spiny futon. In the dark I hear you go downstairs, survey the ruins, come back and go into your room. The door's left open, I follow your long-legged stride to the desk lamp running on batteries. The more I say about it all, the more your fingers dance across fresh scraps of tech in silence. A few minutes make you a hooked staff, humming and gleaming in the dim disrepaired quiet of the building. Brandishing it, you use the tip of the hook to print me a floor tile, green and swirly like a marble. I realize your intention and look up, your eyebrows dance in confirmation. We go down the stairs and print dozens of tiles and foundational blocks of damp concrete. Collaboration as forgiveness(?) — Your eyes smile without your face as you pass me extensions and check my work behind me. 

Words haven't worked for us lately so you've held your tongue all this time, tired. The only sounds are magnesium-bright bursts of creation and my assembly of the landing. In a few hours the stairs'll be done, my bags packed and ready. It's bittersweet leaving like this.