Apartment 2f Part #2

My apartment is growing steadily smaller. Someone or something is squeezing me, little by little. There’s nothing I can do.

The “shrinkage,” as I call it in my internal monologue, has a set of rules. The severity depends on my time outside of the apartment. A quick run to the corner store and back may only lose me a square inch. My work shifts, on the other hand, press those walls in by multiple square feet. When I have to leave, I set alarms on my phone to remind me when I have been away for five, ten, twenty minutes. Picture a pale man in the super market, sprinting between the freezer aisle and the canned goods, an alarm blaring in his pocket the whole time. This is me! 

Until the beginning of this episode I was very happy with my cozy studio, which is rent-controlled and had come to me through a very dear friend. It is close to a major subway station and some of Central Park’s most charming areas. I’m known at a few local restaurants and bars. The people I encounter on the street are polite and handsome—I have always felt safe here. According to the floorplans I have diligently drawn each evening, the square footage of my apartment has decreased by over 200 square feet. Not much of a bargain now! And yet, by this point, money is the least of my issues.

Before the shrinkage, I commuted to Midtown five days a week, where I worked as the manager of a steakhouse that caters to a very elite clientele. You will have heard of some of the regulars. These people would refer to me by my first name, or even, in some cases, by terms of friendship like “bro” or “boss,” and they didn’t hesitate to call my personal number when they would like a table on short notice. I was so happy to make that happen for them. When my shift was over, I liked to take a stroll and enjoy the night. On occasion I’d even smoke a cigarette; an unhealthy pleasure, to be certain, but one I felt I was entitled to. 

It was a life of contentment. I once heard that the Ellis Island immigrants, after their processing, would wander the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn until nightfall, when they were too weary to go any further. Wherever those immigrants happened to be at the depletion of their energy, was the place that became their home. Often for life. That’s not so distant from my feelings about this studio. The last time I left New York was nine years ago, when I returned to Tennessee to bury my mother.

It was a month ago when I first noticed the “shrinkage.” I woke up at seven o’clock, as I always do, and as I was pouring water into a tea pot, I was struck by an unplaceable feeling of dread. At first I believed I was being watched. There was someone else in the apartment! I grabbed a knife from the block and spun around to face my room. But, there was no one there. I could see every inch of my snug studio; the bed pressed against the north wall, the walnut coffee table, the chest of drawers that had been following me since college. There was no place an intruder could hide. I chuckled at myself then, that I should overreact so badly to a moment’s unease. I was sure that what I had in fact felt was the phenomenon of deja vu, a time delay between myself and myself. But when I placed my tea pot on the stove, I was shocked to see that there was no longer a gap between my stove and the wall. Wasn’t that gap there before? The gap that had claimed wooden spoons and pieces of dry rigatoni? I ran my fingers over the drywall and confirmed there was no space at all. And now I knew the source of my dread. With trepidation I turned back to face the studio and I shuddered. There were no gaps anywhere. My book cases were crushed against one another; the rugs were bubbling up where the walls were pushing them forward. I sank to the linoleum as the tea pot began to scream.

There were the practical issues to be considered. But as I went off to work I became certain of one thing, which caused me the greatest distress: This had not happened overnight. The changes to my apartment had been going on for some time, I was sure of it. That I had not noticed that until now increased my sense of shame. I bought a tape measure from a hardware store before my shift began. I hoped that my employees would read my obvious agitation as aloof professionalism.

When I moved in, my apartment was 340 square feet. I could remember the realtor’s words precisely. I mentally repeated the number all through my shift like a mantra. When I returned to my apartment, despite the late hour, I immediately got to work measuring the place, making a floor plan with some scrap paper. It was worse than I feared; my apartment now only measured 305 square feet! What’s worse, I could tell by sight alone that my twelve-foot ceilings, which all my acquaintances admired so much, were now barely ten feet high.

I spent the night pulling my furniture into the center of the room, afraid it would soon be knocked over or even crushed. When I awoke, I took the measurements of the room again. Still 305. I didn’t know the rules yet; at that point, I would have done anything to be sure of them.

All I could think of for the next two weeks was the apartment. For a while, I held out hope that the shrinking would end. I was certain it wasn’t in my head, and I had each night’s floor plans to prove it—I tacked each one onto the wall above the mantle. But while I knew I wasn’t mad, that didn’t mean the shrinkage would continue indefinitely. Each day, as I locked the door behind me to go to work, I was convinced the event was at its end. Each night, I was wounded anew.

On my days off, I didn’t leave the apartment for anything. I ate delivery meals, insisting that they be delivered right to my door. I saw no one. The mess created by my displaced furniture made the studio unsuitable for hosting. I told my friends I was sick and that I would see them soon. It was autumn then, and I opened my window to feel the cool air on my face. Down below on the sidewalk, people continued to shop and to walk and to hail taxis, to go off to work or a film.

One morning I called the landlord.

“How’s it going, L____?” she asked. “It’s been a while. Still loving our little building, I hope.”

“Yes, it’s just… It’s just that…”

“What is it?”

I balked.

“There’s a plumbing problem. My sink. It’s clogged.”

“I’ll send Dean over this afternoon.”

“I’d like you to come as well.”

“Why do you want that?”

“Because… Because I believe this was a pre-existing problem, and I’d have to have a word with you if that was the case.” 

She sighed. “Sure, I can come too. I’m certain the sink was perfect when you moved in, but if it makes you feel better, fine. We’ll be there at two.”

When she hung up, I dashed to the grocer’s and bought fifty dollars worth of bacon. I dumped my grease into the drain until, sure enough, there was an actual clog. I opened the window, which used to be a proper bay, to let out the smell, and I lay on the bed with my clothes on until 2 P.M. I didn’t even eat the bacon.

I had hoped they would gasp at the door. I would admit I couldn’t tell them the truth for fear of sounding insane. They would soothe me, tell me that it made perfect sense, this really is bizarre, you’re a victim in all this, here’s a hotel voucher. Scientists and priests would work hand-in-hand to get to the bottom of this terrible mystery. In fact, what happened was my landlady looked at the pile in the middle of the room, turned to me and said without irony: “Redecorating, huh?”

Dean set his toolkit down on the kitchen island and found the source of the problem in a matter of seconds. Drain snaked, the duo headed for the door. 

“Now hold on,” I said. “That’s not all.”

“No?” Dean said.

“Doesn’t this apartment seem a little… small to you?”

“It always feels smaller once you’ve lived here a while,” the landlady said. “You buy a little furniture, let a bit of junk build up.”

“But look at the ceiling!” I cried.

“What, is there a leak?” said Dean.

I trembled as I unspooled my tape measure like a fisherman letting out a line. The metal ribbon ascended skyward and I hitched it into a niche in the moulding. “Nine feet and eight inches,” I said.

Dean and the landlady looked at each other, then at me, crouching in the corner. “Yes,” Dean said finally. “It is.”

“Well, it was twelve feet high when I moved in.”

“No, it wasn’t,” the landlady said.

“You could have driven a truck through this room!”

“No, you couldn’t have,” Dean said.

“Look at these!” I said, pulling my floorplans from the wall. “I’ve made one of these every night for the past two weeks.” 

The landlady looked them over. “But L___,” she said, “These are all the same.” Too roughly I snatched the papers back and saw that each grid paper showed a duplicate room. All that had changed was the growing shakiness of the drafting hand.

“All of these say 280 square feet,” I said finally.

“That’s right,” my landlady said. “That’s exactly how large this apartment is. That’s how large it has always been.”

I was dizzy as they left the room and I called my restaurant to tell them I wouldn’t be making it in to work tomorrow. Then I walked until the sun had set and the street lights glowed. I re-measured everything and found my ceiling had descended another inch.

I began to call out of work sick frequently. I wanted to ration my time away from the studio. All of my belongings were stacked in precarious towers on my leather sofa. My linen shirts and raw denim rested on top of my Japanese dishes, which rested on top of the collected works of Jean Piaget. My closets were shrinking; the doors to my closets were shrinking! I had to turn my body sideways and shimmy down an alleyway to use the bathroom, which was now so small I had to hook my leg into the bathtub when I toileted myself. A bookcase which was wedged between my kitchen island and the mantle had been smashed to splinters. The only thing that didn’t seem to be shrinking was the entrance, which now seemed as large as the doors of a cathedral.

Eventually, I was let go from the restaurant. There was nothing they could do with a manager who came in just once or twice a week. 

The owner called me up to break the news. He was kind about it in a way that deepened my shame to intolerable levels.

“What’s going on, man? You’ve been my rock for years and now all this. What happened to my rock?”

“I’ve been very ill,” I replied gravely.

“You’ve got cancer?”

“No, it’s not cancer.”

“What, you’ve got the HIV?” He said this a bit quieter.

“No, it’s not that either.”

“Drugs? Look, you can get cleaned up, half the guys in the kitchen work the program. We can get you something more part-time at one of the other restaurants…”

“It’s not drugs!” I said. “I’m ill, and I’ll continue to be ill, and it’s not your business what it is! So just fire me already.”

And so he did. I hung up the phone and laid down on the bed and let the phone rest on my belly. I now had not one obligation in the world, except perhaps to my apartment.

Each day, I would send out dozens of job applications, things I could do easily and remotely, yet on paper I wasn’t qualified for any of them. A middle-aged hospitality worker, it seemed, was condemned to be that, only that. by this point I couldn’t even cook myself a meal – my stovetop had disappeared entirely into the wall. My bathroom was now inaccessible; I was reduced to relieving myself in the sink.

And that was a week ago. Now, the sink has disappeared, too. I haven’t left this place since. If you think you can imagine the smell, I’m telling you you can’t. I don’t know how much space I have left, though there is not a bare inch of floor space left. I can’t find my floor plans anywhere; they must have disappeared into the walls.

The walls. They are coming down on me like the dirt on my mother’s coffin. Whenever I can manage the act of sleep, I awake soon in a coughing fit. This apartment no longer has air worth breathing. 

I’ve written all this down so that you’ll have an explanation of what you see in here, because I’m going to leave soon. I’m not sure what I’ll do next, whether I’ll try and come back here with a TV crew or try to forget about this place forever. I don’t know where I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t know what the rest of my life has in store.

The only thing I’m sure of is this: the next time I walk through that door, I won’t be returning. I won’t be able to bear it.