At twenty-seven, YouTube sensation Ben Leonards is married to his work. If he's not whipping up lasagna with a side of science experiments, he's running statistical analysis of bitcoin during explosive behavior periods.
When a friend asks him to org...
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The reception indicator on my cell phone remains zero. Every logical and illogical place in Tall's apartment failed to get even one bar. This apartment is a dead zone. I plop onto Tall's recliner, and my sneeze breaks the silence. Next time I have reception, I need to at least download some music. After five years in a house with two young boys, Mom, her husband Manu, and two dogs and three weeks with Kora's cries and an apartment full of people, the quiet is overwhelming.
I sniffle as the dust tickles my nose. Lack of tissues isn't a good reason to keep wiping my nose on my hand. The next best thing is toilet paper. I sit on the toilet lid, blowing my nose while flipping through the memes from Bazil's old messages when the phone slips out of my hands and falls on the tile floor of the bathroom. Please don't break, please don't break. I lean down, and a series of dings fill the air.
Of all the places in Tall's apartment, this is the first one with cell reception. I pick up the phone and see notifications crowd the top bar of the screen. But the reception indicator is at a zero. I lower the phone down towards the floor, and one, two, three bars appear and then disappear as I lift it back up. The only way to get reception is if I sit on the toilet with my arms down to the floor. Marvelous.
The selfies of Ben in Linda traversing New York fill my feed. I peer at his face in the hope of deciphering if he is happy. I want him to be happy, but no matter how much I tell myself that he doesn't have to be happy with me, that's what my heart desires. Ben with me, not with Linda. Hearts are hard to negotiate with.
Me: how're you feeling? did mike go back to the hotel for the night?
Me: what's the wifi password?
Me: having fun in new york?
Neither Angie, Tall, or Ben answer my texts, and it's too late to call Mom.
Only after my arms fall asleep and my fingers cramp up do I stop scouring the social media and checking on the latest answers I got for the apartment viewings lined up for tomorrow. As soon as I'm back in the recliner in the living room, I sneeze again. I'm the last person to get excited about cleaning, but dusting the apartment that stood empty for three weeks might cure the incessant sneezing. It's not like I have anything better to do.
Fifteen minutes into it, dusting proves as dull as I've always feared it would be. What wouldn't I do for a chance to talk to someone on the phone. My second preference is to watch a show or browse on my laptop, but there's surprisingly little I can do without the internet. I need that wifi password because there must be wifi here. Who doesn't have wifi? There is no computer or TV that I can see. Maybe his laptop is stored out of the way, and he wrote the wifi password somewhere where he can find.
My dusting abandoned, I search the shelves, the drawers in the living room and kitchen, rifle through the hallway closet, and move into the bedroom. Maybe people don't put laptops into bedroom closets, but a router might be there. The sliding door reveals rows of clothes from the last fifty years that smells like mothballs and stacks of old newspapers and magazines on the floor.
