Unreasonable

Jordan Hagedon

It happened suddenly one week that their apartment became flanked on either side by new neighbors. Until then, Marina had not realized that the two apartments were available. Only last week, the Bellaires had smiled at her as they took out the garbage. Only a week before that, Mr. Aswad, who lived in the other apartment, had shown them cigars in a curiously carved wooden box on the elevator. And now, it seemed that they had silently packed up their apartments and disappeared. Their building was downtown, so it was no surprise that the apartments were immediately snatched up. Still, it unnerved Marina to know that the transition occurred so quickly. She hadn’t seen a single box or moving van. They had just up and left.

Now, there were new neighbors. Perhaps, Marina reflected, this was a good thing, despite how quickly it had all happened. Marina had always appreciated neighbors in the past. When home alone at night or perhaps over a long weekend while Andrew was away, it was comforting to know that the bumps and muffled thumps she heard could be explained away as due to neighbors. It would be horrid, she thought, to be asleep at night with empty apartments gaping like holes on either side. Empty apartments invite trouble. Squatters, demons, rats, mold growing black and unchecked… Anything could happen in an empty apartment. The thing to do, Marina decided, was to embrace the new neighbors, and so she mentally waved a final farewell to the Bellaires and Mr. Aswad.

However, as the new neighbors settled into their apartments, it became clearer and clearer to Marina that theyweren’t the Bellaires and Mr. Aswad. It wasn’t simply the fact that they were new and unfamiliar. Even though she had liked the old man with his penchant for cigars (which he had never seemed to smoke, as the air from his walls and door had remained ever fresh), and the Bellaires had been at least a good chat if they bumped into each other at the mailboxes or the front door, she hadn’t felt too attached to them. They had kept to themselves, and she and Andrew had kept to themselves, and the three apartments had gotten along comfortably for nearly a year and a half.

No, it was more than them being new. Marina did not like the new neighbors because they were noisy. They were very unusually noisy. From the right side, where Mr. Aswad had lived, in the corner apartment wedged into a square-ish crescent, three college boys slammed doors and cheered whenever they played video games with such intensity that Marina was certain the pictures would fall from her walls. On the left side, in the apartment that had housed the quiet and dignified Bellaires, lived two girls and sometimes a baby. The two girls spoke to each other so loudly and so aggressively that it took nearly two weeks before Marina and Andrew realized that they weren’t fighting; that was just simply the level at which they talked.    

At first, the noise had seemed like it could be conquered. Yes, it was distracting, but Marina was determined to ignore it. She was writing her first book, a complete history of the ritualistic use of sheep, and was resolute that she be done with the first draft by fall. It was just like when she used to study at home amongst so many brothers and sisters, she thought. But the sounds weren’t the same. They were sudden and strange and amplified so peculiarly that they seemed to reverberate throughout the walls and floors.

When the girls were yelling on the left side, Marina would go into the office and shut the door tightly against them. She would remain there, writing furiously and feverishly reviewing every word as she placed it on paper. When Andrew came home and heard the two girls screaming, he would come into the office, and Marina would read aloud to him. “Who knew there was so much to sheep?” he would say, and would kiss her loudly so that the sounds of their lips and laughter would block everything else out.

But the office was not a constant source of solitude and relative focus. The walls of the office and the kitchen were shared with the boys on the right. When they were home, Marina found it nearly impossible to get much work done. She had tried to move her laptop to the bedroom or the living room or even the kitchen, but her books and research and notes were all in the office. She often found that, just as she was getting into some sort of groove, she had to double check a source or a note on draining blood, and she would have to dash off to the office to check.

Because of this, Marina felt forced to try to work in the office. She would plug in her headphones and listen to music as loud as she could. But it could not blot out the incessant chatter and yells of the boys. She felt as if she were drowning in sound.  Oftentimes, Andrew came home and found Marina teary-eyed and sitting with her hands over her headphones, as if smashing them into her ears helped. He would take her by the hands and pull her out into the living room, where he would have a glass of water waiting for her, fresh and cold, and they would take sips of it together, silently reminding each other that they were alive and living together, and this was their home, and nothing could be better than a home between lovers.

Before long, the noise began to seriously interrupt Marina and her work. She found herself typing out the words that the boys spoke to each other instead of thoughts on particular muscle groups. She tossed and turned at night, listening to the girls’ screeching, and awoke dead-eyed and battered. She spilled coffee on a freshly printed illustration. Her music grew louder and louder. Her ears began to ring constantly. She sighed deeply and often. It seemed, to her, unfair and unfathomably sad. She had just begun to hit her stride. 

As the weather grew warmer, the boys on the right seemed to always be home. Their door opened and closed with such regularity that Marina imagined them as being fixed on a great conveyer belt, cycling through the door one by one, then through the kitchen to slam all of the cupboard doors shut, then into the living room to scrape intermittently against the wall, then to the TV to turn the volume up and down, and then back into the kitchen to open all the cupboard doors for the next boy-on-the-belt to slam shut. She imagined herself taking a big stick and ramming it into the spokes of the conveyer belt so that, in a shower of painful sparks, the boys-on-the-belt would pile up and catch fire and die. 

“Boys are boys. Everyone is loud when playing video games,” said Andrew, laughing when she told him about her daydreams.  “God, I remember when I played at school,” he said. “There was a shooter game…” and he told her about different boys and different games and how they all had to retake a semester because they had spent so much time trying to beat a certain level that they had missed every single class.

Marina understood that he was trying to take her mind off of it. She understood that he was trying to make the boys relatable, to remind her to live and let live. But she was not sure that she appreciated it. In fact, during the midday hours when her productivity was usually at its peak, when she instead took a long, screaming hot shower because it was the only place where she could not hear them all, Marina found herself resenting his attempts to make the boys relatable. They were not relatable, Marina thought, shampooing her hair vigorously, her cheeks flushed red. They’re extraordinarily obnoxious. They’re unreasonable. She found herself coming back to this word repeatedly throughout the day. Unreasonable. Unreasonable. Unreasonable. 

The girls on the left side, too, seemed to follow an erratic schedule. At first, she thought the girls must be nurses who work the night shift, for they seemed to be their loudest anywhere from 9:30 to 11:30, at which time the door would open and shut, and suddenly their apartment would lapse into silence. But then she heard them laughing raucously at breakfast, or yelling things at the TV when she came back from her run at 3:30, and several times they woke her from sleep with a horrific argument or with a sudden and sharp cry from the sometimes baby. Does anyone in this building work? They can’t all claim to work from home, she thought. What could they be doing for money? How do they afford to live here? It’s extraordinary, she thought. It’s unreasonable.

Marina went down one day and complained to the manager. The office agreed that something needed to be done. Later, when she came back from her run, she saw little notes taped to each of their doors, and she felt a deep sense of satisfaction trickle down her spine and into her limbs.  Finally, she thought, and took a good, long, celebratory nap.  

Marina soon found, however, that she could hear them even when they weren’t loud. Once, in the office, when she was reading out loud to herself a series of sentences on an ewe that remembered the faces of thirty different women, Marina was interrupted by a sniffle followed by a low chuckle. Marina flushed immediately and shut her laptop and crept out of the room and closed the door firmly behind her.

Another time, when she was organizing tax documents in a drawer in the bedroom closet, she heard the distinct scrape of a spoon against a bowl and the soft crunch of chewing and realized that one of the girls on the left must be eating cereal. I can hear everything, she thought. Then a shudder ran down her spine. They can hear everything.

A relative quiet reigned for about a week or so. But, to Marina, this felt just as intrusive as the sound, perhaps even more so. Because the neighbors were being quiet (the baby still cried sometimes, and the boys still cheered, albeit cut short by a series of shushing sounds), Marina felt as if they could now hear everything she was doing. She shut cupboard doors softly. She stopped singing in the shower. The flush of the toilet shamed her. 

Once, during an unusually quiet spell, amid an exquisite sunset of reds and browns, Marina was awakened from a shallow nap by the sudden entrance of Andrew. Andrew got onto the bed and, bending down, began to kiss her all over, beginning from the base of her neck downwards. She was confused and sleepy, and the vermillion sun came in through the window, bathing Andrew in the blazing light until he seemed aflame. 

As Andrew kissed down her stomach, his fingers tapping secret messages along her thighs, someone in the left apartment began pawing through the closet. With every metallic scrape of a clothes hanger, Marina became stiffer and stiffer. “Stop,” she whispered, her legs and arms heavy as if they were filled with iron. “Stop, they can hear us.” 

Andrew kissed her hipbone deeply, his tongue swirling around its subtle point. “No one is listening,” he said. “They can’t hear any of this. We’re being so quiet.”

Marina willed her hands to move. She willed her heart to slow. “I know when they’re eating cereal,” she whispered. “I hear them talking on the phone. They can hear us. I can’t.” Andrew sighed and rolled away. The sun glowed a bright hole on the wall for a moment before slipping away entirely. A soft darkness filled the room. 

“You need to relax,” said Andrew as he left. Marina pulled the covers over her body and turned over. She closed her eyes. It was their apartment; they could do whatever they wanted in it. In fact, Marina thought, that’s precisely what she and Andrew had done before, whatever they wanted. There had never been any of these problems with the old neighbors.   

She was still and blank for a moment. Then, suddenly, a rush of shame washed over her. What if, Marina thought, and the shame of the thought caused her to wriggle, what if the old neighbors had been able to hear her and Andrew? What if it wasn’t just that the new neighbors were so loud, but that the walls are so thin? What if — and here Marina flushed so red she thought she might burst into a sweat — what if they had been the loud neighbors? She began to cry and, after a moment, forced herself asleep.

When she awoke, sometime later, the room was dark and silent. The bedroom door was open. The rooms beyond were dark, too, and the door figured itself a gaping tunnel. Andrew was gone. There was a cold glass of water on the nightstand. Marina drank from the glass and then went to the bathroom and vomited up every drop. 

When the noise from both apartments eventually resumed its usual decibel, Marina was almost relieved. Now she could go back about her routines, secure in the knowledge that they could not hear her. She could hum while folding laundry again. She could rearrange the pictures on the wall. She could read aloud. She could discuss hair removal with her cousin on the telephone. Marina was free from the burdensome quiet. But she was not free for long.

The boys bought a Wii and started bowling and stamping the floor in frustration and victory. The girls bought a parrot and taught it to sing. Someone spilled an entire bowl of what sounded like metal beads. Someone began hammering away at something, perhaps a new wardrobe, perhaps a coffin. The boys bought a dog. The girls had a dinner party that lapsed into a wine tasting that lapsed into drunken squeals of laugher. 

Research on hoof patterns lay abandoned on Marina’s desk. She hadn’t touched her laptop in days. Andrew went down to the office and complained. The office explained that they understood and that they would reach out to the offending parties ASAP. “They’re not gonna give them another warning immediately,” Andrew said. “If you get three warnings, you get kicked out, and they don’t want to pull that drastic of a move just for some noise. It’s not like they’re abusing children or cooking meth. We don’t want to get them kicked out, do we?”

But that was exactly what Marina wanted. When Andrew was away at work, Marina would lie in bed, dreaming up ways to get them kicked out. She imagined breaking into their apartments and planting guns, cocaine, cable ties, ice picks, soiled women’s underwear. She imagined calling the police and placing a 911 report that she heard them discussing bombs. She imagined chain-smoking fifty-seven cigarettes and scattering the used butts in the hallway outside of their apartment. She imagined calling Child Protective Services on the girls and telling them that they beat the baby that was sometimes there, that they pinched it and slapped it and poured boiling water on it. 

Once, when Marina was half-heartedly doing dishes, the girls began screaming with laughter so suddenly and so loudly that Marina flinched and dropped the plate she was holding. It smashed all over the floor and her bare feet, and she got cuts all along the underside of her feet as she walked to get the broom. This is unreasonable, Marina thought, tears running down her face, biting back sobs. This is extraordinary.

One night, the boys on the right had people over to drink, and the music got so loud that Marina and Andrew could feel it thumping through their mattress in their bedroom. Andrew finally had enough and banged on the door and told them all to shut the hell up or get the hell out. The boys apologized profusely and hushed up immediately, dragging their dizzy, giggling girlfriends out into the hallway and into the elevator. Andrew came back to bed, nuzzling up to Marina, victorious, and fell asleep immediately. But Marina couldn’t sleep and lay awake, waiting for the inevitable moment the boys would come back.

Somewhere in the darkness near the head of their bed, someone coughed, and the sound shot through Marina’s body. She thought her heart was going to burst. She rolled over and checked her phone. It was 3:00 in the morning. It’s all day, she thought, tears streaming out of the corners of her eyes, it’s all night.

Andrew moved in his sleep, flinging an arm over her body, where it lay heavily across her stomach. Her stomach gurgled. A dull ache settled in. He was sleeping so deeply and so peacefully that Marina didn’t want to wake him, and so she lay awake until dawn when the sudden flush of an upstairs toilet roused her from the beginnings of a doze.

“We will just have to move,” Marina said, later that evening, setting her book down for the third time, as the sometimes baby cried and cried. She said this to no one in particular, perhaps herself, as Andrew was at work, and she was alone with nothing but a dog-eared book. “There’s just no way anyone could be expected to work in this environment. This is noise pollution. This is sonic warfare.” Then she bit her tongue and realized that she was not speaking out loud, but had been mouthing these words soundlessly to herself.