Love Thy Neighbor
On the love and hatred of neighbor, blood feuds, the indignities of apartment living, and anger.
The idea (and title) for this piece came to me nearly a year ago, after the culmination of a long series of altercations with my neighbors. I tried to write it in various ways, but never felt as if I was capturing the full scope of the conflict. Eventually, I moved on to other projects and assumed this one would remain unwritten. This winter, however, I finally committed to reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is itself a meditation on love of neighbor, and in reading it I was inspired to revisit the aborted drafts. Two iterations on the theme I found compelling and worked on in tandem. I expected to prune one or the other, but in the end was convinced that they function best as a pair. Thus, what you have before you are sister pieces, intended to be read in order, the first informing the second and possibly vice versa.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to record audio narration of my newsletters in the hopes of reaching those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to read them but might listen to them during a commute or workout if given the option. It ended up being more of a process than I’d expected, but I have a finished product that I’m (relatively) happy with for my first-ever attempt at narration. You can listen to it below. Thanks to my brother for the title artwork and to you, for reading (or listening).
Love Thy (Nextdoor) Neighbor: A Thought Experiment
A thought experiment: imagine that you live on the second floor of a two-story apartment building. Knock knock. It’s your landlord. He tells you that he’s about to rent out the vacant unit next to yours. “Only thing is,” he says, “I’ve got two applicants. The first is a little family. Mom’s a hospice nurse, dad stays at home with the kids.” He lowers his voice in exaggerated incredulity. “Five! Five kids. One starting kindergarten, one a bit younger, two-year-old twins, and a brand-new baby!” He whistles. “Wouldn’t wanna be in their shoes, tell you what.”
“Why are you bothering me with this?” you ask, trying to stifle your irritation. “Who’s the other applicant?”
Your landlord’s jolly face contorts in disgust. “A goddamn pedo,” he spits. He draws out each syllable, pee-dough. “But,” he continues, softening, “feller’s paid his debt and all that, so I figured I oughtn’t discriminate against him for it. Honestly, I was hoping you’d tell me you wouldn’t live next to a sex offender—wouldn’t tolerate it—and then I’d have a good excuse to send him packing. Well? What do you say?”
You’re astonished by the man’s seemingly limitless capacity for wasting your time. “Frankly,” you tell him, “it’s none of my business who you rent it to. I find it a little inappropriate, to be honest.” You glance conspicuously at your watch. “Look, I need to get back to—”
“Hypothetically,” he insists. “In theory. Who would you pick for a next-door neighbor?”
“Jesus Christ,” you blurt out in exasperation. The fastest way to get rid of him, though, might be to play along, and before you can summon the will to refuse, images of possible futures flood your imagination. First, the family: the mother rushing around in wrinkled scrubs, frazzled exterior, but there’s something about her solemn gray eyes, a rarefied aura of spiritual centeredness, as if they’ve seen something, something ineffable. There’s the father—earthbound, compared to his wife, his life deeply enmeshed with the lives of his children and preoccupied with the mundane day-to-day tasks of childrearing. He’s unpretentiously handsome, humble, a bit shy, but a great dad who, if you could fault him for anything, it would be that he is sometimes too quick to spare the rod. His children, though they love and respect him, know that he is a soft touch and sometimes take advantage of that fact.
Speaking of: the kids all look just like their mother, gray-eyed and golden-haired, except for the baby, who has dad’s auburn complexion and green eyes. You picture them growing up, imagine the sound of their laughter and quarrels, hear their shrieks echoing off the apartment building on a hot August night. Dad’s setting up a telescope on a tripod in the parking lot. One by one, they become silent as their turn comes to peer reverentially into the Milky Way. Then it’s January: at first, they’re throwing snowballs, but after one of the twins gets hit in the face, they shift gracefully into an effortless armistice, banding together to build a snowman. As they finish construction, they convene for a moment: something’s not right. The oldest comes up the stairs and knocks shyly on your door, one, two, three times. “Excuse me,” she says, nose running, her cheeks scarlet from the cold. “Do you have a carrot we can borrow?”
Then you picture him: mid-thirties, overweight, wire-frame glasses eternally slipping down the greasy bridge of his porcine nose. He wears shorts year-round; the two of you never speak, but there’s no denying that his unkempt goatee and adult acne repulse you. He gives you the creeps. Then—it’s irrational, but you can’t help it—you see him peaking out his window; he’s discreetly watching the kids as they thrust the carrot into the head of the snowman, and… You shudder, disgusted by the pedophile, but also by your own bigotry, because you, after all, created him.
Your landlord is still staring at you expectantly. “Well?” he asks.
“If you’re seriously asking me this, rent it to the family.” You start to shut the door, but he jams his foot in the way.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“Yes,” you sigh, “I’m sure. Now get out.” And he does.
Love Thy (Upstairs) Neighbor: A Thought Experiment
A thought experiment: imagine that you live on the first floor of a two-story apartment complex. Knock knock knock. It’s your landlord. He’s come to tell you that the gravy train is over. The vacant apartment above yours will soon be occupied, no way around it, and he’s sorry, but the unit has hardwood floors, no carpet, and you’re going to hear every footfall, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
He sees your crestfallen face and takes pity on you. “Look,” he says, “I’ve gotta rent the place out—I’d go bankrupt letting it sit vacant. But,” he adds with a conspiratorial grin, “I’ve actually had two tenants apply for the place. I’ll do you a favor; since you’re the one who’ll have to live with them, I’ll let you cast the deciding vote.” He stares intently at you, expecting you to exhibit something resembling relief or even gratitude.
You’re unsure. “Okay,” you reply warily. “Tell me about the first tenant.”
He launches into the following spiel: “Salt of the earth, these folks. A young couple. The mom is a hospice nurse—a wonderful woman—and the dad stays at home with the little ones. Seems about as gentle a fellow as you’d hope to meet.”
You scowl. “Little ones? So they have kids?”
The landlord winks. “Boy howdy, they do. A five-year-old, a four-year-old, and twins, must be two or thereabouts from the looks of ‘em. Cuter than buttons. And another one fresh outta the oven.” A beatific expression comes over him, as if he is moved just by contemplating so wholesome a collective.
Involuntarily, you glance up at the low ceiling of your first-floor apartment. The sudden movement doesn’t escape your landlord. “Look,” he says, somewhat defensively. “I told ‘em that the place was too small for so many people, but they said it’s the most they could afford on her single income. And they were such nice folks. How could I turn them out in the cold? Seems mighty unchristian.”
“You’re a Christian?” you ask.
Annoyed, your landlord rolls his eyes. “It’s a figure of speech.” He shakes his head and sighs. “Didn’t realize I’d need to be so explicit, so literal with you.”
You nod—you won’t die on this hill, not today. “Tell me about the other applicant.”
It’s your landlord’s turn to scowl. “I ain’t too sure about him, to be quite honest. First things first, and just to be entirely upfront with you, he’s a sex offender. Tried to diddle some kids a few years back, got caught, and did his time. I don’t much like the look of him, but the landlord from his last place said his checks cleared and he was a model tenant. I guess he has some, uh, ‘work-from-home’ job, and when he’s not doing that, he’s playing computer games with his headphones on.” His upper lip curls. “Seems a bit antisocial by my lights. What kinda man just sits around, the whole damn day in the dark, listening to his earbuds, not making a peep?” He snorts in disgust.
Inexplicably, your landlord continues to expound upon the improbable peace and quiet you will enjoy if you choose the sex offender as your upstairs neighbor: “Spooky. Downright chilling, I’d say.” He mimes tapping the ceiling with an imaginary broom, calls up to an imaginary neighbor: “I mean, hello? Anybody up there? Still alive, you damn pervert, or are you dead?” He laughs, a little too mirthfully. “I mean, who needs that, not knowing whether your own neighbor is up there staring at a screen, or keeled over in front of it?”
Remembering his offer, he looks back at you. “Well?” he asks. “Should I let the family know they can move in as soon as they’re ready? I suppose I didn’t sell the pedo to you all that well. I reckon you don’t want to be sharing air with some pervert off the street.”
“No,” you start to say, but even as the word tumbles past your lips, your voice bounces off the ceiling of your apartment, which suddenly feels tomblike, mausoleum-like. You reconsider. “But. But, but, but…” You become pensive, philosophical. “Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance? The man did his time. Should one little mistake really follow him around for the rest of his life?”
And isn’t that right? You’re starting to convince yourself. He might be a decent fellow, a quiet fellow who made a terrible mistake. Besides: you’re not a prepubescent boy. Or was it girls he diddled? —no, no, allegedly diddled. “Look,” you say to your landlord, “for all we know, he could have been falsely accused. All he wants to do now is move on from the injustice. Shouldn’t we help him?” You see the scowl returning to your landlord’s face; he’s opening his mouth to argue. Before he can: “It might even keep him from falling back into old patterns.” Optimistic, but yes—surely having reliable shelter, a place to call home, can only aid in the man’s rehabilitation, can only ward against recidivism?
Your landlord looks at you skeptically. “I thought you said he was falsely convicted. What do you mean, old patterns?”
“Right, right,” you mutter. “Falsely convicted, most likely. A misunderstanding, maybe. But even if it wasn’t, he still needs a safe haven, away from temptation, to keep him from reoffending—”
The landlord frowns, then interrupts you as if he has just remembered some crucial extenuating circumstance. “Excuse me. I, er, misspoke. For the sake of argument, assume epistemic certainty. We know he’s guilty.”
“How do you know?” you protest. “What do you mean, epistemic certainty?”
“Pick your ethics: for our purposes, he’s a bad, bad man, unrepentant, perhaps incorrigible—but unobtrusive. He’s a ‘good’ upstairs neighbor.” His fingers wink air quotes as he contextualizes for you the tenant’s moral value. “And the family—very good people, ethically speaking, by whatever metric one measures such intangibles. We’ll just say that the world is objectively better off for their being in it. But through no fault of their own, they make your life a living hell, necessarily, just over the course of their day-to-day existence, by virtue of their spatial relationship to you. They’re ‘bad’ upstairs neighbors, as it were.”
Your head begins to swim. “Why are you talking like—”
“No!” he exclaims. “Just answer the damn question! Would you rather live beneath quiet John Wayne Gacy, or loud Mother Theresa?”
“What? Aren’t they both dead?”
“Larry Nassar, bound and gagged, or Dolly Parton learning to juggle?”
“Why would Dolly Parton want to live—”
“Adolf Eichmann’s corpse or living Oskar Schindler?” he recites frantically. “Paraplegic Pol Pot or Carl Sagan opening a bowling alley? Jeffrey Epstein, hanging from the rafters, or Greta Thunberg’s farm-animal sanctuary?”
“Greta Thunberg? She doesn’t have a—”
“Adam Lanza wearing slippers, or Harriet Tubman, but she drops a crate of ball bearings every hour on the hour? Emperor Palpatine force-levitating in the apartment above yours,” he practically screams, “or the extant Ewoks, celebrating their victory at the end of the original trilogy for all time?”
“Stop it,” you cry. “Enough! This is ridiculous.”
Suddenly drained of spirit, your landlord sputters a final, gasping hypothetical. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he pants, “and their donkey, or I keep it vacant?”
A surge of indignant reproach washes over you. “Keep it vacant,” you tell him, and shut the door.
Love Thy Neighbor: A Genealogy Of Quarrels
“I must make an admission,” Ivan began. “I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors. In my opinion, it’s precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
When our (former) downstairs neighbor, Darlene, moved in, I decided to introduce myself to her straight away. I had been on good terms with the previous (much younger) tenant—had helped her with little things, moving furniture, catching and releasing spiders—and I intended to be on good terms with Darlene, too. I saw that she was old and relied on a walker; accompanying her on the day she moved in was a middle-aged man, unloading her U-Haul truck, helping her get around. I watched them for a while from my window. After they had both gone inside, I went downstairs and knocked on the door. The man answered.
“Hi,” I said in greeting, sticking out my hand. “I’m Benji. I live upstairs with my wife, Hannah. I just wanted to introduce myself.”
Before the man could say anything, the old woman came tottering down the hall. “You’re my upstairs neighbor?” she blurted out. “But you’re so skinny.” I stared dumbly back at the stout widow. “I thought you must weigh five hundred pounds!”
Before I could ask her what she meant, the ceiling above us began to emit an oddly familiar clacking-and-scraping sound. It took me a moment to recognize it as our terrier’s nails as the little dog traipsed aimlessly around our apartment upstairs, because I had never heard them amplified thusly, as if the ceiling were vinyl and his stub claws the malfunctioning stylus of a record player. Then came the stampede: my petite wife’s footfall in the upper unit carried spectacularly through the smaller, unfortunate apartment. Hannah did sound much larger than she in fact was. Thud. Thud. Thud thud thud. The ceiling was so low that her feet seemed to slam not above me so much as atop me, on me, and I could feel the apartments’ communal framing shake. I could not escape the sensation that I was being buried alive, as if each of Hannah’s steps were the blow of a hammer upon the nails of my own coffin.
“Is that your wife?” Darlene asked, glancing up at the thundering ceiling, which was further away from her head than mine by almost two feet. Then, in mock comprehension, she answered her own question. “So she’s the one who weighs five hundred pounds.”
My face reddened; I fought the instinct to flee.
Instead, I forced an awkward chuckle and shook hands with the man, who introduced himself as Joe, Darlene’s adult son. He was helping his mother get settled into her new space. “Mom,” he said, “stop it.”
“It’s so loud,” she insisted.
Faced with the same circumstance today, I would tell the sundowning crone to get used to it, that such was the unjust and undignified nature of apartment living, and to consider herself lucky that she had managed to avoid upstairs neighbors for the bulk of her golden years. But back then I was soft. My heart had not yet been hardened against the plight of the elderly; I saw her and thought of my grandmothers, lonely widows themselves. I pictured my father’s mother, how—even in her last days, when she was sick and in pain and perpetually confused—her face lit up when she saw me, beautified by love. I imagined her living beneath a man my age, in similar circumstances. How would I hope he treated her? Easy: I apologized for the noise and told her we’d try to keep it down.
Then, in a mistake of unparalleled naivete, in my sentimentality I offered my phone number to Darlene and to her son. “Call me,” I told them, “if you ever need anything.”
Joe never did, but Darlene needed one thing often: an ear to register her complaints, which usually centered around the noise generated by Hannah or myself as we went innocuously about our lives, vacuuming, sweeping, closing the front door too loudly or too often. Even our walking became a point of contention, and I slipped into a dual role, wherein I was both the source of the elder’s misery and her succor, her only outlet. My phone would ring; heart sinking, I’d answer. “Hi, Darlene.”
“Do you have a herd of teenagers up there?” would come the voice of the senescing widow on the other line. I’d apologize—sincerely, much of the time, at least at first. I understood that it sucked. Not because we were especially noisy—we weren’t—but because she was an old woman in her twilight years who had lived most of her life in a nice house, with her nice husband, an Argentinian painter (and, to hear her tell it, saint) who she’d married before she was old enough to vote. Now, he was dead; instead of a house, a rented condo, a downstairs coffin. Instead of her paintbrush-wielding lover, a television frozen on Fox News that—no matter the volume—could not drown out the quaking ceiling, the stomp-scratch-clicking, the noise.
I felt for her, and so I indulged her. Her calls followed a predictable rhythm; after my apology, Darlene would complain a bit more and then wax sentimental, reminiscing over her deceased husband. Finally, she would turn the conversation to one or the other of her two favorite, still-living men: Jesus Christ, or Mike Pence. I’d listen long enough to be polite and then excuse myself, but only after promising that Hannah and I would redouble our efforts to limit the commotion. When our renewed vigilance inevitably proved insufficient, Darlene wouldn’t call again right away; instead, she’d sometimes open her front door and scream impotently up the stairs at Hannah or, in her more severe escalations, attack the ceiling with the butt of a broom. Despite her unremitting rudeness, we were kind to her. She had a sweet tooth, so we left her baked goods; Hannah, after sweeping our deck, would go around the apartment complex and clean the ingrate’s patio, too, though as far as we knew, Darlene never went outside.
Although I did not feel so at the time, I was still a young man. I know this because, in my many months of laborious and futile peacemaking, never did I compromise the tenuous détente by exploiting my inherently superior position over our powerless neighbor; Hannah and I walked on eggshells, on our tiptoes, in our own home for nearly two years. Idiot youth that I was, I still thought to turn the other cheek; I still believed in the possibility of goodness, that we meek might inherit the earth, might love our neighbor as ourselves. I was not an exemplar of perfect love; my thoughts, I am ashamed to say, would sometimes turn to the wickedness I could visit upon the old woman, the revenge I might exact.
“Imagine what she’d think,” I’d say to Hannah after getting off the phone with Darlene, “if we just stopped making an effort. We wouldn’t have to do anything, just… no effort.” Yes, I’d think, maybe we’ll show her how bad things can get… But we never did; we remained steadfast in our neighborliness. Not once after listening to the crippled old harpy lament her lot (and our role in it specifically) did I rejoin: that’s tough titty. I never told her to lose my number, to fuck off and die.
And so it came as a welcome surprise when, despite my never suggesting it, Darlene, in a display of hitherto unimaginable good manners, did fuck off. (I do not know whether she eventually also died.) It happened suddenly. She suffered a fall, and—though for someone of her advanced age and impoverished constitution, there are no unserious falls—this fall was not too serious, as falls go. I suppose it was just serious enough: a Goldilocks fall. It resulted in no broken hip, was no death sentence, but it put the fear of God in her son, who because of it decided to relocate his mother to some ostensibly safer environs.
On moving day, the widow called me for the last time. She was sentimental, feeling uncharacteristically fond of me, despite everything. Darlene could not bring herself to forgive Hannah, who she considered to be inconsiderate and a nuisance, and spoke neither well nor ill of her, but as for myself… well, I had been raised right, she told me, and my parents ought to be proud. Darlene voiced her hope that I would eventually come to Christ (I demurred—a soft ‘maybe’), stated her opinions on Joe Biden (unfavorable) and the ascendant novel coronavirus (fictional), then said her final goodbye.
Hannah and I had much reason to celebrate and little time in which to celebrate it. Before the month was out—before we’d even grown accustomed to walking like adults, heel-toe heel-toe—we had a new neighbor. Angie: another spinster, but not nearly so old, in her mid-fifties, perhaps, a spring chicken next to Darlene. She still drove and (thank God!) left her apartment almost every day for work or leisure.
I had learned my lesson, or so I thought. I exchanged numbers with Angie but was not overly friendly. She was the first to text: to thank me for shoveling snow from her walk and digging out her car. No problem, I texted back. For two years, this was about the long and short of it. I shoveled and was pleasant; Angie minded her own business.
At some point during Hannah’s pregnancy, Angie noticed and congratulated us. She expressed sympathy and concern to see Hannah climbing, day in and out, the stairs to our apartment; it was the most we’d ever spoken. When the time came, we went to the hospital and were gone for a few days. We returned with Angie’s third upstairs neighbor. She texted me: I left a little something for you on the porch. A onesie for Graham. It read “New To The Crew.” A bit big, but he’d grow into it. I sent her a picture of our newborn son, swaddled in his bassinet, and a quick text of gratitude. Thanks. So kind of you.
It is impossible to identify now the exact nature of my mistake: did I wrongly take myself to be exchanging neighborly pleasantries with a sane woman? Or was I in fact, and did my error lie in imagining that the sound mind cannot, if sufficiently perturbed, become unsound? Were there signs I missed that could have forewarned me of what was to come?
Perhaps. Angie’s flare of neighborly warmth was short-lived, and fair enough. When communications returned to the status quo of long-term radio silence, I thought little of it. Hannah and I, being sensitive upstairs neighbors, continued to live according to the strict asceticism Darlene had taught us: as monks, contorting our feet like ballerinas, stepping always in pointed, pained silence. During those hours in which Angie was away we went about our chores hurriedly, vacuuming and mopping before she returned and foregoing our labors altogether on those days she remained at home.
There was one problem: the newest initiate to our order, so silent during those probationary first weeks, proved soon to be an incorrigible noisemaker. The colicky novice screamed during the day, to be sure; but his most piercing and incalcitrant keening he reserved for those final hours before the first hint of dawn, when it is no longer night, and thus too late for an eleventh-hour turn of fortune, but not yet morning, and thus too early to surrender to one’s inevitable fate.
Hannah was the first to suspect that all was not well. “There’s no way she doesn’t hear us,” she told me. “She probably hears me crying, too—she probably hates me and thinks I’m a terrible mother.”
“No, no,” I offered distractedly. “Voices don’t carry through the floor in the same way. It really is the vibrations that are the worst—footsteps, dropping things. Even Darlene never complained about music or talking.” I said this to comfort Hannah, but I believed it, too. That’s physics, right? Besides, there was one room in our apartment where sound carried with uncanny fidelity: the bathroom, for whatever unfortunate reason, and so I assumed that what we could hear in there was the exception that proved the rule. But, just to make sure, I checked with Angie when I next saw her. “Hannah’s worried that Graham’s screaming is bothering you,” I ventured. “There isn’t much we can do about it, obviously, but I’m really sorry if it is.”
This exchange took place in person, so I wasn’t misinterpreting the subtlety of text. Was she just being polite? “Oh, don’t worry about it—I can barely hear it,” she told me, smiling. Was it the cumulative fatigue of fatherhood pulling wool over my eyes, that allowed me to feel grateful for our good neighbor, relief at her low-maintenance understanding? Did I deceive myself? Should I have detected behind her placid eyes the seeds of resentment that must have been burrowing, even then, into the warm soil of the woman’s soul, that fallow but fertile vineyard that would soon erupt into row upon row of wrathful, sour grapes?
We could not concern ourselves overly with Angie’s wellbeing; our lives revolved around trying to feed our son, who, for the first nine months of his life, struggled mightily with the all-important oral technique requisite for the survival of all young mammals: that is to say, sucking. Our world shrank to accommodate only the barest of ameliorative routines, into ever-tightening spirals of despair. I slept little; Graham slept even less; Hannah slept least of all. Every week we saw a nursing consultant or pediatrician, for all the good it did. In her medical opinion, Graham’s doctor had just one pithy response to any and all of our woes: his weight is fine, keep doing what you’re doing. Which is to say, unintentionally or no, fuck you, you’ll get no quarter here.
During those months, we were entirely alone—the meal train had long ago left the station, leaving us stranded in our misery. The handful of friends who had not forgotten about us could not understand our predicament; we were like shades in a bardo, neither living nor dead. In the bitterness of our solitude, I sometimes imagined that only Angie—more than our best friends, our parents, our own flesh and blood—could possibly understand what we were going through. Because she heard us. She must. And she forgives us, I thought. And so, when Angie texted me one afternoon to announce that she had accidentally backed into Hannah’s car and was prepared to give us her insurance information, it did not occur to me that the communication was perhaps brisk, brusque, a tad chilly. Indeed, before even checking the damage (which was minimal) I was celebrating the opportunity to forgive Angie in turn, to unyoke her from the only burden of stress over which we had power.
“Hannah!” I cried joyfully. “Hannah! Angie has hit your car; I told her not to worry, to never mention it again, nor even to think of it!”
“What?” Tears of catharsis pooled in her eyes; as they brimmed over and spilled down her cheek, she released one sob, wracking and hollow, as if expelling some poison from deep within her soul. Grace, grace, she agreed; it felt wonderful to have, if only for a moment, grace to bestow upon our poor, long-suffering neighbor, who was after all a sinner like we.
I must not overstate the spiritual significance of the fender-bender. The damage to the Subaru was virtually nonexistent, more scuff than scrape, and inflicted upon a car of at best middling value; furthermore, I myself had backed into Hannah’s car only a few months prior, hitting it in nearly the same spot. Nevertheless, I am sincere when I say that we were relieved by the incident, because—on top of our immediate troubles—we felt terrible for Angie, the only person in the world who (we believed) knew us, but did not hate us.
And perhaps there was something to it—to our forgiving Angie her little trespass—because it seemed that around that time, things started to get better, a little easier. The sequence of developmental stages that had driven us to despair gradually gave way to new phases: Graham crawling; Graham eating solid food, rice crackers and pureed fruit; Graham, once or twice, sleeping through the night.
It was November, so the weather could not mirror our psychological state, which was something like Noah’s and his family’s when they saw the dove, the olive branch, the rainbow. Like them, we stepped wobble-legged into the light, kissed waterlogged earth. We both felt the tentative glimmer of hope and were almost embarrassed by it, a spark so fragile and vulnerable within us that we dared not even speak its name lest we smother it in tinder. We were a season out of sync: the world had moved on from hope and harvest and had settled in for autumn’s bleak finale.
Spring within, winter without; Graham’s first snowstorm. Thanksgiving; much to be thankful for, surely. We had already forgiven Angie; now we forgot about her. Until came the afternoon when we remembered. Hannah was in a hurry to get to work; I was feeding Graham and preparing him for his midday nap. I heard Hannah take the dog out, bring him back inside, and leave. Then, my phone rang. It was Hannah, calling from her car as she drove to her office.
She was upset. I could tell from her shaking voice that adrenaline and cortisol still coursed through her veins. Here is what happened: she took our dog, Raleigh, out. Never a fan of the cold, he quickly lifted his leg against a snowdrift directly in front of ours and Angie’s windows. He had toileted in this locale not exclusively, but consistently, for many years (strictly number one). Of our pet worries about the ways in which we might unintentionally offend our neighbors, Raleigh’s urinating there, in the bushes, did not number. Even Darlene at her most pedantic had never taken issue with Raleigh’s answer to nature’s call.
Angie did—perhaps she had been bottling it up for months, years. She opened her door and pointed at him. Trembling with cold hate, she asked Hannah: “Are you letting your dog pee in my garden?”
My sweet, conflict-avoidant, neighbor-loving wife was struck dumb: how to respond to an accusation so vitriolic and, at the same time, ludicrous? “Oh… I guess, uh, I mean, he pees here sometimes—”
Angie cut her off. “Well, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.” She spat the last word and slammed her door before Hannah could say anything else. By the time Hannah finished recounting the confrontation, she was at work. I was quaking with fury. I started to protest, insisting that I’d go talk to Angie as soon as Graham finished his bottle and was down for his nap.
“Don’t,” Hannah said. “Please don’t. Just, when you take Raleigh out, take him out past the parking lot.” She took a deep breath. “I’m late. I gotta go.”
As I rocked my son to sleep my thoughts circled like vultures over carrion love of neighbor, which had rotted in a second, corrupted until it was an unrecognizable mound of putrid black hate. I am not a man usually given to anger; it is one of the few vices that plagues me only rarely, only in extraordinary circumstances. I am envious, covetous; I am proud. I am uncharitable in my thoughts and a cynic. I am gluttonous and slothful. But wrath remains to me a relative stranger, and—although at that moment I felt him knocking on my door—I did not answer.
Instead, I went straight about the work of preparing my defense. As my son passed into unconsciousness, I recited to myself the litany of kindnesses that I had done for Angie, the many ways in which I attempted, falteringly but steadfastly, to be a good neighbor. The list was not so long as I expected: for two winters I shoveled her walk, and we forgave her when she hit our car. There had been a recent phase, too, where Angie convinced herself that our apartment complex was under siege by a troupe of homeless burglars. When she confided in me, I humored her (“I’ll keep an eye out.”) but she probably considered this a kindness done unto me—a warning—rather than vice versa.
But there was so much more, so much that she could never know! The kindnesses done via negation, the evils from which we, at great expense to ourselves, spared her! How could she know of our monastic austerity, the years of creeping about on bloodied toenails, like thieves, like imposters in our own home? She heard only our failures and hated us for them. She could not love me for the times when I had plucked a can of cat food from my son’s hand just as he went to throw it; she begrudged us (I was sure of it now) the ruckus of Graham’s playing on the rug, not knowing that we confined our developing boy to that small, inadequate cell so that he might not disturb her through the linoleum!
My heart burned like Cain’s as I contemplated all that we had sacrificed, only to be rejected so callously. Her garden? I wanted to spit: a fucking garden. Miserable cunt. Our asceticism, our denial of self! We had not allowed ourselves—not once—that simplest of pleasures: to feel at ease in one’s own skin, to feel at home in the universe. Constant vigilance—her garden?
Fucking spare me. Yes, there was a rosebush amidst the creeping ivy and overgrown hedges. But it was tended, to the extent that it was, by the same lethargic landscaper who was charged with maintaining the entire complex. The man spent the bulk of his billable hours lugging around a diesel-chugging leaf blower, billowing exhaust as he, termite-like, piled trash and plant detritus into arbitrary little mounds, which he abandoned to the wind until he returned the next week to begin the cycle anew.
I could feel my fury losing its proper object, latching as it was upon the nameless landscaper. I inverted its focus: her garden? Hers? Woe, woe unto you, o idiot tenant, o undeeded pretender—because the so-called garden was as much mine as it was hers! We all paid for the landscaping—did her rent include that extra ten square feet of neglected soil? Where was her property line? Was the sidewalk hers too? What of the parking lot, the mouse-infested storage units with their doors rotting off hinges, or the row of alders that buffeted them? Alders beneath which, I might add, accumulated an ever-expanding minefield of dog shit, because it never occurred to any of the other dog owners in this god-forsaken ghetto to clean up after themselves! Has she complained to any of them?
My spiteful reverie was interrupted by a cry on the baby monitor. Graham was awake, so I went to my son and read him a story as he finished rousing. Then, I bundled him in his coat and hat, leashed our dog, and trudged outside. Raleigh ran down the stairs, almost tripping me on his leash, but when he tried to beeline to the snowdrift, I just shook my head at him. He looked at me resentfully from the end of his rope, but I pulled him onward through the slush and muck of the parking lot, Graham on my hip, and finally coaxed the confused beast into urinating out there, twenty yards from Angie’s miserable garden. Steam rose from his lifted leg as he painted the snow, and while he relieved himself I stared vacantly at Angie’s closed door. I fantasized about knocking on it, presenting her with my pitiful charges, my crying infant, my shivering canine. I pictured her blushing with shame. I’m so sorry, I’d say. As she tried to sputter some justification for her outburst, I’d kiss her—I wouldn’t kiss her, I wasn’t insane—but I’d say nothing, kill her with kindness, and she would understand that I was Alyosha in my mind (or Judas), forgiving (or condemning) her with a kiss.
I wish I could say that my hatred dulled as the weeks passed, grew cold with the deepening winter, but it did not. It could not, because—as much as I wished to abandon it all—I was unable to cease my appeasing. I longed to forgo all pretense of civility, to stomp and dance all night, in my revelry to shatter the ceiling above that head I had come to loathe so completely. I longed to torment her as I had been tormented, to persecute her as I was persecuted. But my shame would not allow it; our advantage was too complete. We had the eternal high ground but could not leverage it, out of a fundamental discomfort with the injustice of our enemy’s handicap. So unevenly matched, to skirmish was to risk her annihilation.
I was well-practiced in the art of silence, so for silent months I nurtured my resentment at our belligerent neighbor. I despised her for her presumptuous ingratitude, but I tiptoed around the insult to my wife. I feigned tranquility, but in my heart, I took to composing feverish indictments, drafting and redrafting the declaration of my just war, analyzing and litigating the casus belli until I could recite it in my sleep. In those transient pages, I worried the feud like a dog with a bone, a boy with a hole in his pocket. In hindsight, it was inevitable that a spark would find the exposed fuse of my wrath and ignite it. The final straw came when my parents stopped by—in the middle of the day, a normal time for people to be moving around—and, in the process of maneuvering past Graham’s playpen, I knocked over a stool. I cursed and set it upright.
A few seconds later, a text. From Angie.
you guys have absolutely zero respect for me, as someone you share a living space with
BANG! BANG! BANG! The stranger was again pounding on my door. But it was not a stranger at all. Anger; Fury; Wrath. My mistress, an old lover; or it was me, had been me all along, my shadow, begging to be let in all these months, ever since our precipitous Fall, ever since we had been made ashamed in Angie’s Eden. I hated her. I hated her because, in the midst of our misery, in her unforgivable negligence, Angie had allowed us to suffer for her as well, to suffer for her, and we, in good faith, had suffered. And then she had denied it, had told us that she, in truth, had been the one to suffer. I told my parents to watch Graham, and I fled out the door and flew down the stairs. Then I became the stranger, became wrath.
BANG! BANG! BANG! My fist smarted against Angie’s door, which was also Darlene’s; it was the door behind which lived all miserable spinsters, all hateful busybodies. I stood at the gate of the garden of our exile, ready to reclaim its piss-drenched rosebush, to take back the row of corrupted alders and their windfall crop of dogshit. I had stayed too long my hand over those damnable hounds, and over their masters as well, those undeserving inheritors of civilization who shit all upon it. No more! I would drive him from it as well, that vulgar landscaper! His absurd little mounds, his abominable machine; his castles of garbage like Tibetan mandalas, built with crass disinterest and squandered to the breeze… After the third knock, I waited, barely breathing, heart pounding, delirious with rage. I didn’t know what I would say; I didn’t know what I might do, because I had given myself over to wrath.
The door opened; Angie peeked out. “Why are you pounding on my door?” she asked in a hushed snarl, and though she tried to master herself, she failed and her voice began to shake. Bitterness pooled in her mouth as she spoke and it spilled out in the space between words like saliva, like drool. For a second, I was startled by how unwell she looked. Her face was covered in tiny crimson scabs with pink halos; otherwise, she was white as a ghost. Her blue eyes were possessed by a kind of equine terror, as if she might stampede at any second, like she might trample me to death before thinking better of it.
“Why?” I hissed. The hormones surging through my body demanded that I continue hitting, pounding, crushing, screamed for something to grind into sand, glass, dust. “What the fuck is this text?” Caged in the rigor of my bloodless fingers, I brought the phone up to my chest and pointed it at her like a pistol. “Like, what the fuck, Angie?”
She flinched away as if I brandished a club, a mallet I might use to strike her dead. “Well, what was that sound?” she howled. “What was that crashing?”
I could not have unhardened my heart to her in that moment if I’d wanted. Seeing her cower did nothing to summon my better angels; instead, it flooded me with a new variety of rage, a righteous rage, as if my mere physical advantage over her, as a man, was not an accident of birth or the unfortunate consequence of biology but divine right, the might of God, the mandate of heaven. It is shameful to admit, but important to confess: unconsciously, I interpreted her fear as guilt. Her cringing dispelled the most incapacitating element of my fury and I took a confident breath in. The burst of oxygen quelled the drive to fight or to flee, leaving in its place cold hatred, venomous contempt. “That sound,” I said, “was a chair falling over. Or my parents stepping on the floor. Or my son playing in the bath.”
I sensed that, like me, Angie had a litany of grievances that she had rehearsed madly to herself, over and over for months. She opened her mouth, but the recitation fled back down her throat and she instead moaned like a wounded animal. “That was a chair? What is it the rest of the time?” She said this as if I had told an obvious lie, and she was insulted by the blatant falsehood of the alibi.
My lip curled. “The rest of the time? We have a fucking one-year-old. Who the fuck knows what it is? Do you think we’re just up there making noise—” I raised my voice. It felt good, invigorating, to finally say it all aloud. “—to fuck with you?” I spat the last words at her, as if they were not adequate vessels to contain my malice.
“It’s constant,” was her response. She looped back to her original message from the text. “You guys have no respect for me. I share a space with you, and you don’t care about me at all. You have no respect for me.” Here her voice began to crack; her accusation had a hint of pleading, of panic.
“How dare you?” I continued. “We always think of you. We walk around on fucking tiptoes carrying our son—we’ve given ourselves back problems trying to respect you. It’s so uncharitable, after we’ve always gone out of our way to be good neighbors, to send this—” I waved my phone at her again. “Besides. The last time I asked you about the noise, you told me it didn’t bother you. Were you lying then? How should I have known?”
“It’s different now, it’s… changed.” She bit her lip and groaned as if trying to give birth to something too large for words.
I intended to continue my prosecution along the same line, but at that moment I remembered the garden and felt a renewed surge of indignance. “And for you to come out and yell at my wife,” I shouted, “over the fucking dog. If you can hear us, you know what it’s like for her. You see me out there with the dog three or four times a day, but come after her? A stressed-out new mom?” My returning anger animated me and leaked into my voice.
Angie froze for a moment. “I… felt bad about that,” she said. Then she began to cry. “I was sick that day… couldn’t rest with all the noise… but I felt bad for yelling at Hannah.”
I could feel my resolve waver under the onslaught of her tears. “Listen,” I told her. “We are honestly doing our best. Truly. We are constantly worried about bothering you,” I said. “But you can’t just tell me that everything is fine to my face and then lash out at my wife. Or at me. We’ve tried to be good neighbors. We deserve better than that.”
Although I had softened, it was too late; the floodgates were open. Angie continued to weep. “You don’t understand,” she insisted, “how loud it is. It’s all the time. This is my home,” she said, “and I’m sick and I can’t rest. And I can’t afford to move—I would if I could—but I’m stuck here.”
And just like that, my hatred fled me. Desperately, I reached out after it but grasped only pity. Spent of my anger, I saw us as if from above: an angry, imposing man shouting at a weeping old woman, waving a phone at her as she hid, terrified, behind her door. I was repulsed; it was shameful. I reached out and put a tentative hand on her shoulder as she sobbed.
“Angie, look. I’m sorry for getting so upset with you. Really. I know how hard it’s been. We just… we really are doing our best, and so it’s extremely demoralizing to feel like it’s all for nothing.” Then, I remembered something. “Can you wait here for a minute?” I asked.
She looked at me suspiciously through red and swollen eyes. She nodded.
I ran back up the stairs to my apartment. My parents were still playing with Graham. I went into the bedroom and opened a drawer. From it, I retrieved the birthday present I’d intended for my brother—new AirPods—and ran back to Angie’s door. “Do you have these already?” I asked.
She looked at the box and snorted as if I’d told a bad joke. “Yeah. I have headphones.”
“Noise-canceling?” I held the box out to her.
“No,” she said doubtfully.
“Take them,” I told her. “They aren’t going to solve everything—the situation is what it is, at the end of the day—but they work very well.”
Part of me expected her to refuse, but she didn’t. She took them. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”
“You’re welcome. It really is important to us that we live in some semblance of harmony with you,” I told her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the noise, and I’m sorry for losing my temper. It was wrong of me, and I promise that it won’t happen again. But please, please, don’t send me another text like that. Tell me when it’s too loud and then, if it doesn’t improve immediately, assume that I did everything I could, because I will.”
“Thanks,” she said again. “And it’s okay. I understand.”
I thought she might apologize too, but after a beat of awkward silence, I excused myself and went back to my family.
“Where’d you go?” my mom asked.
“Downstairs. I had to talk to our neighbor about something.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, we’ve still got a long drive ahead of us, so we better get on our way.” She knelt down and gave Graham a kiss on the cheek. “Bye, buddy. I love you. Be good.”
My parents made as if to go to the door. Because they’d only planned on staying for a minute, both still wore their shoes. My heart skipped a beat as my mom’s New Balances collided with the linoleum. I imagined I could hear the silverware rattling in its drawer as Dad’s boots sent shockwaves rippling through the apartment.
“Guys,” I said, my voice coming out in a strained whisper, “try to step lightly, okay?”
“Okay,” my mom whispered back. Though they pantomimed stealth as they crept out, the door still slammed behind them and I flinched as it reverberated throughout the house. I went to heat up Graham’s naptime bottle and heard my dad’s motorcycle roar to life in the parking lot. It faded as he rode away until I could not distinguish it from the rest of the constant freeway commotion.
In the bedroom, I set up the blackout curtain and turned on our white noise machine before feeding Graham his bottle. Just as he had drifted off to sleep, over the nondescript, low-pitched drone that blanketed the room, a sound like a chainsaw tore through the dim space. It sounded as if it were coming from directly outside the bedroom window.
I bit my lip and held my breath, hoping against hope that the sudden, proximate blaring of an internal combustion engine would not rouse my son. I lay down softly on the bed next to his crib, every muscle tensed, my heart racing as if I were a mouse cowering in the lazy, looping shadow of some bird of prey.
Outside, the motor oscillated wildly, idling in gluttonous thunder and then screaming when the landscaper flooded it with gasoline, a banshee, a demon. Throughout the darkness, the scent of diesel prevailed, and I awaited the inevitable sting of the falcon’s talons, prepared for death. In my mind Angie’s pockmarked face appeared, her eyes like a spooked horse; her whinnying despair echoed in my ears. I pictured the cyclone that was, even now, billowing above her garden, a barrage of garbage and leaves conjured higher and higher, ever higher. Bark chips pummeled the window like hailstones; Graham stirred. The leaf blower crescendoed to its violent, virtuosic climax, idled for a brief coda, then sputtered dead.
Mercifully, my son still slept. In the inky blackness, I saw the landscaper turn away to go about his inscrutable work.
About a month later, I got a message from Angie.
Just wanted to let you and Hannah know that I found a new job and will be moving to Spokane at the end of the month. The moving people will be coming by, so I’d appreciate it if you could park your cars elsewhere while they load up my stuff.
Ever the obliging neighbor, I congratulated her and assured her that we would. I could not help feeling like a bit of a sucker at having given her a pair of $200 earbuds. I wondered whether she would return them before making the escape that she had, quite recently, described as a financial impossibility. Perhaps she would leave them as furnishing for her unlucky successors.
She did not. But it was a small price to pay; her leaving was the greatest gift I could have asked for. And she was gone in days, not weeks, going ahead of the movers. When the dust settled, we watched the owner of the unit interviewing potential tenants. At first, we were worried about her—that she might complain to our landlord, or to the HOA, about the trouble we inevitably rained down upon her unfortunate customers. But whenever we ran into her, she fawned over Graham and acted as if she were deaf, as if she could hear nothing at all.
We realized then that she had a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that there was no fundamental conflict between our units; instead of us being too loud, and it being her responsibility to tell prospective renters about the inherent conflict, she was eager to roll her eyes at oversensitive Angie’s complaints, at senile Darlene’s ridiculous expectations.
But she, of course, knew. Because our new neighbors were a young couple—early twenties, too young to expect the peaceful solitude that was not possible in a downstairs unit. They came bearing California license plates; they were grateful merely to find an apartment they could afford. I don’t know them well. Both work odd hours, service gigs, him at a brewery and her at a coffee shop; they love EDM, love to party, and host, in their small apartment, a rotating cast of couch-surfers and ne’er-do-wells.
It is wonderful. When I hear the bass begin to thump at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, I feel peace like a river. When the scent of marijuana wafts in with cigarette smoke through our open window—when I hear them shrieking and laughing out on the porch at midnight, doors slamming and cars starting before the bars close at half-past one—I feel utterly at ease. Because I know that when I wake up at six to begin my morning, I can stomp into the kitchen without fear; when Graham inevitably throws a toy on the floor or knocks over the vacuum, my pulse no longer quickens in panicked anticipation. They are living their lives with nary a thought for our wellbeing; and why shouldn’t they? They’re practically children. Why should they worry about the grown-ups upstairs or their fussy toddler?
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, I learned as a child, and love thy neighbor as thyself. These edicts were tattooed on my psyche, a spiritual brand that rendered me forever meek, an eternal cheek-turner, a pathological altruist. They were a part of me too ingrained to even imagine being free of them. But our new neighbors, with their unapologetic disregard, neither malicious nor beneficent—total disinterest, true neutrality—taught me a new set of axioms: everything is permitted, they preach as they rearrange furniture in the small hours to accommodate some reveler too drunk to drive home.
An unfamiliar SUV pulls into Angie’s old parking spot. Two German Shepherds bark from the backseat. A young man staggers out, and the dogs follow, running rabid through the parking lot, shitting beneath the alders. “Hey! Get back here,” he cries, but they heel to no master; nothing is forbidden.
The night is a mad symphony, debauched and obscene; the defecating hounds are howling, engines roaring to life; doors open, slam shut. A deep bassline begins to thrum beneath my feet. The man forgets about his dogs. “Yo,” he yells, knocking hard on the door, one, two, three times. “Let me in.” The door opens; the muffled bass is louder now, joined by snare and hi-hat, a glitching violin, a bleating, sampled scream. He discreetly lowers his voice until it is barely more than a shout. “Dude, I should be in jail right now.”
That is what he says, but what I hear is this: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Their ecstasy seeps through the ceiling and rises like smoke. I love him as if he were my own son; I love my neighbor.