Outside Your Window

The Party Upstairs

1.

I was 14 when I met the man in the room.

It was the summer my Mom and I moved from our farm upstate to New York City. After the divorce, my Dad fought to keep "his" house, so we had to move into the spare bedroom of my grandma's apartment. It was a musky building tucked into a neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan, somewhere between Harlem and Washington Heights. It was a hundred floors of bodies piled on bodies, of dark spaces and strange sounds.

On the night after we moved in, there was one particular sound that really bothered me.

It sounded like a party, people laughing and yelling, all having a great time. My Mom was asleep on the twin bed we shared, so I was laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. After two months of a horrible divorce and two days of moving boxes, all I wanted was to sleep. But, I couldn't. The sounds seemed to get louder throughout the night.

When it hit midnight, I'd had enough.

As I walked up the stairs, it quickly became clear that the sounds were coming from the apartment at the end of the hallway. I could see a faint light spill out from under the crack; all the other apartments were dark, asleep. I don't know how the other neighbors didn't complain. As I walked closer, the sound grew louder and louder, like everyone's voice was running through a megaphone directly into my head.

When I knocked, I could hear the sounds cut out one by one, as if they had been pulled from the atmosphere. As the laughter dwindled down to silence, I heard footsteps walking up to the door. As the doorknob turned, a feeling of regret sank deep into my stomach. What was I going to say? What right did the new guy in the building have to stop a party?

But, when the door opened, my feeling of regret turned to something warmer, a kind of nausea.

The man who opened the door was older, my grandmother's age. He had big puffs of hair that came out of his temples like bails of hay. He looked directly at me, his eyes like a vortex. He didn't speak. He just stared, his lips moving but not making sound, like a question was swimming around his tongue. He had big, veiny hands that hung onto the doorframe. He tapped his fingers against the wood, creating a sound like spiders crawling down the walls.

I peered behind him, but all I saw was a dark room. I don't know where the people had gone, but they weren't in the living room. I knew there weren't too many places to hide.

"I'm sorry," I finally said, stepping back into the hallway, "I thought there was a party up here. I couldn't sleep."

"A party?" he asked. His voice was quiet, a scratchy whisper. It was like his vocal chords were made out of strips of paper.

"Yeah, but it's fine," I said, turning back down the hallway, "Sorry to bother you."

As I started walking, I could hear him step into the hallway behind me.

"No, please," he said, "Come in and meet my friends. We're doing a little performance."

I stopped walking and turned around. Outside of his apartment, I could get a clearer picture of the man. He was wearing a white tank top, which wrinkled down around his protruding belly and into his blue jeans. His posture was caved like a crashing wave, his shoulders fat and hairy. In a way, he reminded me of my Dad.

"A performance?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, rubbing his hands together, "There's a lot of people from the building here. They would love to meet you."

Maybe if my Mom was a "stranger danger" type of parent, I wouldn't have walked inside. But, in fact, she wasn't much of any kind of parent. My Dad was a narcissist, a word only uncovered for me after years of therapy. The world was his stage, so my Mom never had much of a voice. She never warned me about bad people because she never warned me about anything.