1.
He often dreams of buildings and sometimes he finds himself thinking about all of the apartments he has known, or more accurately, he thinks about three of the apartments he has known. The first apartment complex he recalls was a low unassuming structure of only two stories situated at the intersection of two busy roads. His apartment was on the second story with a view of the parking lot accompanied by a soundtrack of random automobile traffic. He was working at a nearby slaughterhouse where he would stand all day at a conveyor belt with a sharp knife and dismantle pig carcasses as they passed by. After work he would return to the apartment which he had furnished with a chair, a mattress, and a stereo system. There was a gun in the apartment, an old rifle his father brought back from the war. It leaned in the back of the closet behind a row of empty hangers. He did not know what to do with it. He had not yet read Chekhov, and he suspects that the rifle, which he never fired, should not be mentioned at all. He does not actually recall living in this apartment but when he thinks of it, he imagines himself returning to it at the end of the day exhausted and smelling of meat. He trudges up the metal staircase to the second floor and trudges down a menacing hallway to a door with an inelegant metal or plastic number affixed to it, let’s say number 29. Inside he puts an album on the turntable, Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones. He stands at the sink soaking his hands in hot water until they can once again function. Ramen noodles are heated and consumed while standing at the kitchen counter. He opens another bottle of beer. He turns over the album, sits in the chair, and listens to side two. He sleeps without dreaming on the mattress on the floor under the watchful eye of a paperback copy of On the Road and a small electric alarm clock that will shock him back to waking life in the darkness before dawn. He doesn’t remember much of this apartment except that it was not the pleasant apartment living experience he had imagined. He had moved to the city following a girlfriend, who he came to later realize had moved there to get away from him, not in the hopes that he would follow. In the parking lot one morning he found a sarcastic note beneath the windshield wiper of his car. The previous night, returning home late from the slaughterhouse, he had parked haphazardly over the line. The note read: Nice parking job. People like you should take the bus. He kept the mean-spirited and amusing little note for years, but it was eventually lost along with most everything else from his life at that time.
2.
In another part of the world at another time in his life, he happened upon the next of the apartments that would feature in his reminiscences late in life. It was an apartment within an apartment, a small space subdivided from a less small place in a dark brick building on the island of Manhattan. He arrived in the city and traveled by cab and then by subway to an address that his girlfriend, who had recently moved there after graduating from art school, had sent him. The address was written on a small piece of bright blue paper in her careful handwriting. Her writing made the English language appear beautiful and hieroglyphic, like characters in a sad story that he did not quite understand. Thinking of it now, he wishes that he still had that blue piece of paper. He no longer remembers the address, though the subway stop was Bleeker Street. Her apartment was on the top floor, a walk-up born with the construction of a wall that bisected a room that might have been a dining room. The apartment had a door and a closet and enjoyed a small view from half a window. Presumably, the apartment next door, the other half of the erstwhile dining room, enjoyed the rest of the window. The closet had been retro-fitted with a toilet and a tiny sink. After maneuvering into the closet, it was necessary to stand on the toilet in order to close the door after which one could step back down to the floor and so on. A hot plate, a rice cooker, and a miniature refrigerator impersonated a kitchen. They spent little time in the small apartment. She was working three jobs to pay her rent. He wandered the streets waiting for the brief interludes between her shifts. He thought he might be feeling like Lou Reed, though he and Lou Reed had little in common other than a leather jacket. He tried to imagine Lou Reed wandering the streets also not looking for work. When she finished work at the Chinese restaurant or the ad agency or the Irish pub, they would go back to the apartment to use the closet and then they would eat rice and then they would lie on the floor for a while holding each other on the futon. When she had an evening off, they would browse used bookstores for Eastern European fiction and books on typography and architecture or walk through art-gallery openings eating free cheese and drinking white wine or they might see a subtitled film in a musty theater frequented by old shabbily dressed men and women sitting alone. One evening, shortly before his departure back to the horizontal spaces of the Midwest, she opened her apartment’s half of the window, and presumably her neighbor’s half opened as well. They had been drinking wine and she was maudlin. On the window sill sat a small yellow flower pot in which a frail plant was attempting to grow. She picked up the flower pot as if presenting it to him in a ceremony. Then she dropped it out the window. They leaned together out the window and watched the bright little flower pot fall five stories, growing smaller and smaller until it shattered quietly on the sidewalk below. See how far I go, she said. They continued drinking and at some point later that evening she endeavored to crawl out the window with partial success. As the apartment building careened through the bright night, her head and her torso led the way like a tragic hood ornament. He remained inside the dark apartment with his arms around her waist, holding on tight amid the wailing of sirens and car horns. Like an anchor, he mixed metaphors. And again. Like a piece of unwanted furniture, he thought. He knew then, or perhaps it was only later that the knowledge reached him, that it would all soon slip away.
3.
The third apartment in his mind has a name and reading the name, Alta, fills him with bittersweet nostalgia, which of course is the best and only kind. Alta was tall and elegant, the tallest of his apartment buildings and the tallest around, standing out among a low-slung crowd of nondescript buildings at the edge of downtown, where the business district began to creep into the surrounding residential neighborhoods where old houses in decline morphed into cheap rentals, massage parlors, and used bookstores. Alta harkened back to another time and on sunny days people would still drag old kitchen chairs outside onto the sidewalk and tell rambling tales for their own amusement. The apartment building named Alta appears to him now in black and white like a photograph by Walker Evans. On his first evening in town, he was drinking with new friends in the alley behind a windowless cinderblock tavern that hunkered beside Alta like a beaten dog. The tavern’s motto was painted across a sheet of plywood affixed to building. Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité. The strange words appealed to him and to the regulars, of whom he became one, though they did not speak of them and few knew quite what they meant. That night he and his new friends, one of them, noticed a hole in a chain-link fence between the buildings. One of them must have suggested it and they climbed through the hole in the fence and then clambered up the metal fire escape and pulled themselves up onto the roof of Alta. Empty beer bottles and cigarette butts and a red plastic milk crate told them that they were not the first. Yet there was nonetheless a sense of discovery and awe as they gazed out upon the night sky looming over the sleeping town. There was a woman among his new friends there on the roof of Alta and that night she placed in his hands a book of matches with the name of the bar embossed upon its cover and inside the matchbook her phone number written in bright blue ink. He and his new friends could see all across the city, the meager downtown beneath a deep, deep sky full of mystery and possibility, the music club down by the river where years later he, and some of the others, would hear R. L. Burnside play the blues. He looked down six stories to the street below where broken glass glinted in the moonlight. He thought of Chekhov, or perhaps it was only later, looking back at himself there, a small figure on the roof of Alta looking down at the glittering shards of glass, that he thought of Chekhov. Down on the street the other patrons stumbled from the tavern and he watched their sad little drama as if watching a play. The woman beside him rented an apartment in Alta, and eventually he came to think of her and of Alta as almost one and the same. There were tall ceilings and lovely woodwork, high transom windows above the solid oak doors, smooth brass doorknobs and hardware patinaed by the years of passing lives. Original porcelain plumbing fixtures. The storied walls had been plastered by hand long before he was born. One day years later, when he was living alone in a faraway city, he learned by chance that Alta, along with the tavern and barber shop and the rest of the buildings in that block, had been demolished and carted away to a landfill. As he drifts into sleep he has a vision of the demolition of Alta, a building of his dreams, collapsing into itself more or less at the same time that the woman who’d lived in an apartment there loses control of her sports car on a freeway outside Baton Rouge. In Tuscaloosa the dust rises in a soft column skyward into the absence of the building and the lives it contained, and the woman, still alive, ejected from the sports car, flies suspended between two worlds.
Christopher Chambers is an editor, bartender, and author of two books of short fiction, Delta 88, and Kind of Blue (forthcoming in 2022), and Inter/views, a book of poems. He is co-editor of the anthology Ice Fishing for Alligators, and his work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Short Fiction (UK), Ninth Letter, and the Southern Review. He’s been spending a lot of time lately in Milwaukee.