Apartment 5C

The bugs died in pairs when they finally crawled out. I saw the bodies in our old room, lying together on the fireplace mantle that we had never used. We only knew that they lived in the walls and were more aggressive than fleas when they became relentless in early spring. The landlord agreed to stop charging us rent if he ignored the problem until August. I never found any evidence of them in our room when I washed the sheets and sprayed Lysol around the edge of the wall to keep them inside.

I layered myself before bed, long johns, gloves, a hat, and oversized sweatpants to keep them from biting. I would slip into one of his giant hooded sweatshirts and pull it down to my knees. They still found a way through the fabric folds. We thought we had gone without bites one morning until one crawled out of our sleeping bag and bit him on the forehead. The bite was sharp, a red welt spreading above his eyes.

“Bastard!” He cried and smashed it into the peeling wall.

His blood smeared on the panels during its death struggles, but it did no good to capture them, more would always come. The next night we moved our air mattress up to the roof and huddled in the bitter March night. We could ignore the problem and stay in this situation as long as we were together.

We lined the hallway with garbage bags on moving day and when I returned they had all been thrown in the dumpster. The things that we needed to sterilize were all spilling out, the few novels I owned, my high school scrapbook, hemp jewelry I made before I was sent to boarding school my senior year. I jumped in and began to sob when I saw that my copy of 'Norweigan Wood' was covered in rancid water. I reached down to pick it up and the cover art melted off in my hand. The pages were melded together and ripped apart when I tried to open it.

When I was twelve I went to a fundamentalist teen sexuality workshop in Florida, at a church with oversized screens and a smooth-faced pastor. He began by gluing two pieces of brightly colored construction paper together.

“This is what happens when a man and a woman become one,” he said.

“You leave a piece of yourself behind,” he said and tore the papers apart on the big screen.

He held them up and only little scraps were left.

He was my first boyfriend and the first man I lived with. I moved into the apartment in September the day I submitted my leave of absence paperwork to school and by December we were living together. Depression is a series of impossible tasks and cleaning up the apartment was one for us. Our co-dependency enabled us to endure it.

My new boyfriend was away in Puerto Rico for the holidays and I thought that he wouldn’t return. I lay on my bed as the snow fell outside and turned the pages, avoiding the garbage that covered the floor of my room. I bought cigarettes when I didn’t have the energy to eat and left the butts all over the windowsill. He brought me chicken quesadillas from the burrito shop he worked at before he left for Christmas, and placed them at the foot of my bed after I had lain there all day.

The tears were helpless as I wiped the remnants of the book on my shorts. I’d borrowed it from a friend in the last winter and read it cover to cover. I climbed on top of the soggy bags to pull myself out, my smooth rubber sneaker sole slipping on the edge of the dumpster as I fell backward. Putrid garbage water sloshed around my ankles as I looked up and wondered just how I had landed here.

I had returned today for the rest of my clothes and a few CDs I had left. The front door was open. As I passed by the bathroom I saw a pile of filthy piles left by the tub, dripping from a half-finished bleach job. In an attempt to salvage our home, he had stood barefoot in a tub full of bleach and scrubbed the chipped tile walls. The soles of his feet were a shocking white color afterward. The hairs on the back of my neck always stood on end at night, as I splashed my face with frigid water. No one told me Albert DeSalvo killed his last victim here because it was just accepted. The bathroom was ten degrees colder than the rest of the apartment.

I was alone most of that December, watching 'Maury' and 'Reba' on the old TV in his room and smoking dry shake that someone had left. I heard knocks on the front door but saw no one through the peephole. I ran into his room and locked the door behind me to drown out the banging. I popped an Ambien a doctor at the emergency room at had given me and drifted into oblivion.

I had never been cared for by a man until he took me to the ER. An angry rash had spread all along my back and the itch made me start hyperventilating. The doctor gave me Benedryl and a bottle of Ambien to help me sleep, but the rashes and rapid weight loss continued. I drank cheap wine at night and tried to ignore it. He would kill anyone who tried to touch me, so I glazed over when I found out he had given me mono. I never asked what he did when he went away.

I adopted a kitten for us on one of his trips, huddling with her at night in his room. The cold always seeped in through the walls as I pulled a thin blanket up to my ears. I almost set the apartment on fire a few days before, dropping a box of pasta on the stove when I was high and forgetting to turn the burner off. I returned to a kitchen charred with black soot and spent days scrubbing to hide the evidence it had gotten that bad. I named her Baby and let her nibble on my fingertips.

My backpack was sitting in the corner of my bedroom next to an empty can of Lysol. I unzipped it and looked through the things I still had left, ripped jeans, a leopard print tube top, a D.A.R.E t-shirt, and a black sweatshirt. He always said everyone who lived in my room became reclusive and depressed, a black shadow figure running through the halls at night. We thought it was the Boston Strangler, but could never be sure. I never had the energy to eat, the tobacco smells, the constant stream of footsteps, and the ground-in grime covering the apartment weighed on me heavily.

I opened the closet and saw the scuffed leather toes of my combat boots. Suddenly, I felt elated and hugged them close to my chest. I had my laptop stolen the day I moved in, but I was starting school again soon. I was hopeful that this time I would finish. I saw the rows of bugs along the walls as I gathered the last of my things. It itched a bit, and a red rash began to spread over my arm as I shut the door behind me.

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