"Destabilized" by Laurence Klavan
Originally published in Thrice Fiction (August 2015)
Jerry thought he was dreaming but slowly realized he was not. The sounds were real and coming through the wall again—the ceiling, to be exact. This was a surprise, for he’d almost never in the thirty years he’d lived in the apartment heard anything from his neighbors. He’d been protected by the thick cement of pre-war construction, cosseted by a time when people valued privacy (not like now, he thought, when young people paraded what used to be secrets: what they ate, how they voted, whether they shaved down there or not). In the eighties, there’d been that bass player plucking above him at all hours, but Jerry couldn’t remember if he’d gone up in his pajamas to politely complain, which had been his wont. Now, so many years later, it wasn’t music but munching and slurping, as if a giant dog or two or more were chowing down ravenously. And at—he squinted with disbelief from the bed to the clock—three A.M.!
Jerry wanted to give his new neighbors a mild piece of his mind, but at his age, he always felt a general fatigue which now forced him back to unconsciousness. His anger was drowned by a dream, the way his oatmeal had been submerged by milk every morning by his beloved mother, whom he saw again now, even more years ago, sixty-something, he realized, for he was seventy-three….
*
In the morning, Jerry barely remembered what he’d heard, accepting that memory and imagination often merged now, became indistinguishable. It was only when he entered the elevator and saw a new tenant, a twenty-something girl with her dog, that he recalled. Yet it hadn’t been her in the flat above: her tiny Chihuahua had its head poking from her purse, and the animals over him had—must have—been huge.
“Russian wolf hounds, you think? Great Danes?” Hal asked, over their weekly diner brunch of bagels and eggs.
“Not sure,” Jerry said, his enunciation clogged by cream cheese. “But they evicted the old musician up there, with some loophole in his lease. And someone else moved in.”
“I hear new young idiots in my building now, too. They seem to have all kinds of animals. Purely for show, of course. Until they get tired of them. Like their technology, always traded in.”
Jerry nodded, not responding. Unlike himself, who kept his cards close, Hal was a voluble hard-liner, even more hostile than he to the next generation. Both were retired—Jerry from men’s underwear, Hal from women’s shoes—and both benefited from rent stabilization. This was a policy that decades ago policed the raising of rents. Landlords were always trying to evict them for this reason: Once they were gone, the prices could go market rate. Jerry understood the frustration; his place would probably fetch thousands if freed up, and he paid just seven hundred and fifty.
Hal, however, had no sympathy, was at once more nostalgic and more judgmental than Jerry.
“We moved into these neighborhoods when they were slums, and we made them livable. Now that they’re gentrified, they’re taking advantage of our effort by poaching our apartments. Whatever happened to the idea of village elders in this country? They should be paying us to stay, for our wisdom, not always fabricating reasons to force us out.”
Jerry just shrugged, knowing there was no point to interrupting Hal when he was on a roll. He also knew that Hal resided illegally in his place, rented it off the books from a friend who lived full-time in Florida. If the landlord found out, he could legitimately boot Hal. But Jerry never said that.
“It didn’t sound like dogs, though,” Jerry said, reaching for the jam. “Not normal dogs, anyway. This was different.”
It had come back to him: his dusty memory was like a cold car that needed time to warm up. Or was it being with another person that encouraged him to recollect more details? They said company was good for the old, for lots of reasons.
“What do you mean?” Hal seemed annoyed at being disallowed to continue his rant. Then he pressed his lips together, as if forbidding himself to say something. “That’s ridiculous,” he muttered, before stuffing another mouthful of omelette between his teeth, making impossible any other expression.
Jerry’s senses were growing keener the longer he was exposed to another person, before he was sentenced to solitude again, which made his mind soft and slow. He suspected that Hal knew exactly what he meant about his new neighbors and was too afraid to say. Why?
“You gonna eat those onions?” was all Hal asked, stressing the innocuous.
Afterwards, Jerry wondered: Had he only imagined the meaning of Hal’s reaction? He wasn’t sure, for he was sure of less and less these days.
The idea of company inspired him to make a second stop. On his way, Jerry felt he was being followed, first by the swallowing sounds he had heard above his bedroom and then by a hissing or sniffing, like that of a bull about to charge—bulls, for there seemed to be several of whatever it was behind him. When he turned, however, Jerry just saw an empty sidewalk with a slimy trail that disappeared around a corner. He didn’t have the courage to investigate. Or was it, as usual, only the energy? He wasn’t sure.
Jerry said nothing about it to Allison, whose apartment he had reached, three blocks north. The two never talked much, anyway, preferred just to engage in as near-silent sexual activity as they could (and the definitions of this had changed for each of them over the years, along with so many other things; Allison was only four years younger). When they had finished, he lay beside her, inhaling her hair, grateful they had at least given an impression of intimacy, performed a few excerpts from what would have been a complete concert in the past. He was reminded of people who move pieces of furniture from their old home into their new, to evoke what once had been familiar. Jerry was thinking about homes because Allison was, too.
“So,” she asked, “what do you say?”
“About what?”
“About what I suggested.”
Jerry sighed. Allison was serious and gentle, a widow and retired art teacher whose stabilized apartment was in a building being sold, in order to be demolished and recreated as luxury condos. She and other tenants had been promised new digs, but she feared they would be awful rooms in a nearby SRO hotel. Allison had been asking about moving in with Jerry, an event she couched in emotional terms—their getting closer, making a commitment. But Jerry secretly wondered if she would have asked a man whose apartment wasn’t also stabilized. Was he being used by her? He didn’t know, but it made him wary. (This leeriness was nothing new. He had also hesitated decades earlier, when his late wife, then-fiancee Grace had wanted to cohabit with him. Then he had feared losing his “space,” his emotional independence. Now, his anxiety, like most everything else, was more practical.)
“Let me chew it over,” he said, stalling. He knew he could not do so for long, not because he feared losing Allison, as he had feared losing Grace, but because both of them were—oh, why go there? Why again remind himself of mortality?
In the awkward silence that followed, Jerry thought he heard something in the apartment below them. It was the same kind of growling and mastication, this time mixed with a dull and tinny hammering, like a large spoon being banged rhythmically against a pot. But Allison was too hard of hearing to notice.
*
The next day, Jerry received a call from Hal’s sister, Muriel. Hal had fallen and was spending the night in the hospital. Jerry was the only friend of her brother’s that she knew (Jerry thought he might be Hal’s only friend, period), so she wondered if he wouldn’t mind visiting. The woman had an exasperated tone that Jerry recognized as typical of those who dealt with Hal. Though he disliked hospitals—doubted that they were ever as scrubbed clean as they were advertised, and his immune system wasn’t getting any stronger, etc.—Jerry felt he had no choice but agree.
He found Hal’s sister standing agitatedly in the hall outside his room. He had met her once before and while she still looked svelte and attractively coiffed, this experience had left her skin lined beneath what Jerry believed to be a facelift. (Muriel was two years younger than Hal, lived with her dentist husband in the suburbs, and attended to her ornery brother with a dutifulness born of birth order prerogatives that still held sway in old age.)
“Thank God you’re here,” she said, as if at last free to go. “He’s been driving me crazy.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Maybe he had one too many.” She imprecisely mimed taking a shot of booze; amused, Jerry thought that she was a teetotaler. “And fell down. He denies it, of course. He won’t say anything specific. He wants to talk to you.”
“It’s more likely that—” But Muriel wasn’t waiting for a second opinion: with a thankful grip of his wrist, she turned to go. As he heard her high heels skitter toward the elevator, Jerry finished in his head when he’d begun to say: It was more likely that Hal had been smoking dope, his oblivion-maker of choice. But who fell down after smoking dope?
“I didn’t fall down, I was pushed,” Hal whispered, conspiratorially, leaning up from his bed. Before beginning, he had glanced cautiously at the dressing screen set up to shield him from his roommate.
“Don’t strain yourself,” Jerry said, gently directing his friend back down.
“I didn’t tell Muriel,” Hal said, his bloodshot eyes darting back and forth once he’d hit the pillow. He seemed more agitated than embittered, his default emotion. “But I can tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“What I’ve been suspecting recently. What I couldn’t say until now.”
“Which is what? Who pushed you?”
“They did.” Now his eyes squinted with insinuation.
There was a brief silence. Jerry realized that Hal had been sedated, and the drugs had slurred his speech and maybe jumbled his mind. Yet while Hal seemed nuts, he was not incoherent.
“The new people who’ve moved in,” Hal went on. “I confronted them in the stairwell. They’re not people, not exactly. It’s hard to describe them.” He pointed to his drug-addled head. “But I figured out their whole deal.” And now he spoke so quietly that Jerry had to lean forward to hear, which wasn’t great for his lower back. “They’re from another planet. Not sure which one. They’re taking over Earth. They know it’s on its last legs—like us—what with climate change and all. They’ve gotten it cheap. And they’re either going to fix it up and flip it to make a profit. Or dismantle it and sell it for parts. Or simply save it, because they know how to do it and we don’t.”
“Like we did with our apartments so long ago?”
“Exactly.” Hal winked, and Jerry saw the strained purple veins in his lid before he opened his eye again.
“But what happens to us?” Did Jerry mean the question seriously? He wasn’t sure. For the time being, he was humoring his friend.
Hal was thoughtful. “Not sure. They said that human beings worth saving, they would send to another planet that they’d make look like this one. And the rest of us, they’d just get rid of.” He drew a shaky finger across his throat. “It’ll depend. But I know one thing for sure: they didn’t like being called on it.”
Hal shuddered beneath his sheet. Then, impatiently, he yanked it down to scratch himself. Jerry sucked a breath down his congested throat. He saw a bandage that ran from the soft mottled skin of Hal’s rib cage to that of his waist. Yet it still couldn’t cover the large bloody gap that had been cleaved there by a weapon, claw, or tooth.
The next morning, Jerry was told that Hal had died. Muriel left the message on his old-fashioned phone machine, her tone a mix of sorrow, disbelief, and (he was almost positive) blame. Did she think that Jerry’s visit had triggered some sort of collapse? But how could it have caused the “hemorrhage” that apparently killed him? She wasn’t thinking straight, Jerry decided. But who could blame her? Hal’s last words to her had apparently been: “Hope you make it to the other planet.”
Jerry was surprised at how miserable Hal’s demise made him. When he blinked back to consciousness in the middle of the night, he found his pillow soaked with tears. He listened but heard no strange new sounds from the apartment above, though the sedative might have merely blunted his perceptions. Instead it was a smell that had awakened him.
He had no word to describe it but death: a sweet yet foul aroma that mixed human excrement with a flowery cologne, then mixed that with the odor of putrefying food—meat? Maybe. Jerry traced it to the outside hall and, when he opened his door, saw a yellow police tape stretched across the threshold of his next door neighbor’s apartment. The new, fortyish and burly super, Rich, stood beside a young policeman and both turned to the elderly man in T-shirt and shorts who peered out. Jerry realized it wasn’t the middle of the night but the afternoon.
“What’s up?” he said, his speech garbled by phlegm, the question he was aware comically casual.
“It’s Mildred,” said the super (whom Jerry didn’t like, felt was a toady of the landlord, always staring at Jerry, as if to assess his condition and the degree of his apartment’s availability). Millie was older than Jerry and had lived there stabilized for even longer. Rich appeared relieved and maybe excited by what was apparent, that she was dead. But Jerry wanted to make him say it.
“She’s…?”
Rich didn’t reply in words but instead gave a comic physical impression of how she’d looked when he found her: his eyes stretched wide, his mouth slackly open, his left hand raised and bent above his head, like an old movie vampire about to strike. Then he theatrically pressed and closed his nostrils against the hideous smell. The policeman laughed, in a whinnying way.
“It’s already been rented,” Rich added, his voice, like his nose, pinched.
The air stirred by Rich’s moving hand flew up Jerry’s shorts leg like a family of ants, and he quickly shut his door. He kept his back pressed hard against its wood, as if to fight whomever might try and force it open. He heard Hal’s words again, but hoped they were the ravings of a paranoid and tranquilized old man. Still, Jerry stood there as a sentry until his aching shoulders shook and sweat pooled at his waistband, his eyelids fluttering, the death smell acting as a kind of chloroform invented on some other planet than Earth.
They did not wait to start improving Millie’s apartment, which had not seen alterations (a new kitchen, a paint job, a floor wax) in years. Hammering, soldering, and drilling began almost immediately, the noise breaking through the right wall of Jerry’s apartment, as the other sounds had rained down through his roof.
And, like those sounds, these became different from any Jerry had ever heard. He could not place exactly the new auditory insults now being directed at him, but others had been added to those of animals feeding and pots being beat: a metallic whirring of gears, which veered into a crushing thump, as if a tank were rolling over toys or other beloved treasures; and a moaning of either pleasure or pain, like a ghost in an old story said to be the wind but which the main character knows is the voice of the dead. When the cacophony was at its peak, Jerry could hear nothing else, no matter which of his three rooms he entered, hands over ears.
Soon construction literally rocked the apartment building, shook it like an angry child might a dollhouse. Jerry felt the floorboards begin to separate beneath his feet; he looked down and saw the criss-cross of wooden beams that at once supported the bottom of his home and the top of his downstairs neighbor’s. As his apartment continued to be rattled and banged, he stared at spreading cracks in his walls that had not been there a second earlier. Bubbles of thick, white, milk-like liquid began to trickle and then gush from the fissures. Coated with it, Jerry was knocked to his knees and then his stomach, his head landing on disintegrating slats. One of his arms dropped limply between them, so that he seemed to reach down desperately into his neighbor’s living room (empty, abandoned), like a paratrooper trapped high in a tree and begging for help, which he had begun to do. He feared that many others on Earth were suffering the same way at this moment and that Hal had been as right as he had been insane.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because you looked a little red there for a second.”
Jerry was surprised by Allison’s question and embarrassed. He thought it amazing that he still couldn’t hide the way he felt, that even at this age, his skin would betray him with a blush, like a smoke alarm he thought disabled but which still went off when he simply burned the brisket. Yet he knew that what Allison told him had provoked an extreme response.
He had fled to her apartment from the disaster of his own. After they awakened together, Allison revealed that her building wasn’t being sold, after all: the real estate deal had fallen through and, for the moment at least, she would be able to stay in the home she’d leased for decades. Still, the news hadn’t changed what she wanted of him, and this was what had made Jerry blush.
“I’d really like to move in with you,” she said.
This meant that Allison had not been using him, that she wished them to be close no matter where, that she was even willing to give up her own valuable, stabilized home to make it happen (his place was a bit bigger than hers, it turned out). As was his habit, Jerry had been distrustful, which he understood now was an unhealthy way to live. Hal had died distrustful, not an ideal way to leave.
Jerry didn’t know what to say. So he placed a grateful kiss upon Allison’s pale neck, below her right ear, which made her redden, too, so that both were blushing (even though both had been casually nude and unembarrassed the whole afternoon, warts, he thought, wrinkles, and all). He smiled and looked years younger.
“The only problem is,” Jerry said, sitting up, “that my place is a mess. They’re fixing my neighbor’s apartment—she died. And I think they’re trying to force me out, too, by f—” he almost expressed himself with an utter lack of self-consciousness but hesitated and then proceeded politely, for he was from a more chivalric era, “fouling my place up.”
Jerry had hedged in other ways, as well. He had revealed neither the extent of the destruction from which he had escaped nor his suspicions. Had he been hallucinating it all? He felt calmer and chastised himself secretly for believing poor old Hal’s palaver. Yet his fear had been helpful, for it had chased him into Allison’s arms.
“How about we live here?” he heard himself say. “Your place is big enough, isn’t it?”
Allison nearly did a double-take; then she smiled and shrugged as if to say, okay, maybe, why not? She had been expecting resistance and hearing Jerry’s positive reply and suggestion both threw and thrilled her. She pressed her own kiss on him—on his mouth, because why beat around the whatever? Then Jerry noticed that her expression changed to one of sober thoughtfulness, as if she were assessing the nuts and bolts of how it would work, the moving in, the splitting of space. But this was, her squeezing of his hand said, a nice problem to have.
Jerry and Allison walked out to shop for dinner; Jerry did not want to return to his home that night. Slowly, each noticed that in the dusk the street—the entire city—seemed shinier, sleeker, more appealing: new, while still retaining the essence of what it had been before they’d entered. It was hard to describe. The neighborhood, which had been gentrified incrementally ever since they’d moved in, was now neither cold nor sterile, as it had increasingly seemed, but warm and inviting. Any objections were forgotten; they were going to like living there together.
“It’s as if,” Allison said, taking his arm, “we’re in a place almost identical but not quite, just a little bit better. Don’t you think? Like an illusion, like a—what do they call it?—a simulacrum.” She paused. “Is it love?”
Jerry considered the question. “Maybe.”
Then he looked up in the sky and saw something strange. It wasn’t the setting sun or the emerging moon. It looked instead the way Earth must appear from another planet, as if in fact that’s where they were.
“What are you looking at?” Allison asked.
He thought of his last conversation with Hal, when he himself had asked, “But what happens to us?” Then Jerry placed his hand over hers, protectively.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just imagining things. I’m just old, that’s all.”
Laurence Klavan has had short work published in The Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Literary Review, Vol. I Brooklyn, Beloit Fiction Review, Natural Bridge, Pank, Failbetter, Stickman Review, among many others, and a collection, "'The Family Unit' and Other Fantasies," was published by Chizine. His novels, “The Cutting Room” and “The Shooting Script,” were published by Ballantine Books. He won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His graphic novels, "City of Spies" and "Brain Camp," co-written with Susan Kim, were published by First Second Books at Macmillan and their Young Adult fiction series, "Wasteland,"was published by Harper Collins. He received two Drama Desk nominations for the book and lyrics of "Bed and Sofa," the musical produced by the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Finborough Theater in London. His one-act, "The Summer Sublet," is included in Best American Short Plays 2000-2001, and his one-act, "The Show Must Go On," was the most produced short play in American high schools in 2015-2016.