Prefacing this by saying that this is a break from what I usually do on here. Throughout the strike I’ve been thinking about other forms of writing, of expression, and decided to write a piece of fiction. This is the rough result of my endeavor. I decided I wanted to share.
I remember telling Sharon the yard looked nuclear holocaust-y after I first moved into the apartment complex. This was over two years ago, and nothing had changed much since then. Sometimes a thin layer of ice would glaze over the dirt and concrete. Sometimes bruised and browned leaves would accumulate in a pile before brushing by. And every once in a while, a weed or bulb would peep through, only to disappear – as if realizing it’s better to be dead than alive here.
I could have done something about it, although it was simpler to pretend I couldn’t. Technically, the yard was only accessible to the first-floor tenant, but the landlord assured me that if I played my cards right, I could get in good with my neighbor and use it from time to time. I don’t remember how I responded, but I don’t have a green thumb, and the thought of hosting outdoor dinner parties or gatherings felt out of reach in the way things in my life often do – putting up curtains, mopping up the dust that gathers in one specific corner of the living room, buying snacks.
I never saw my neighbor. He was never around or I was always around and therefore never watched him enter, or leave, or loiter. It wasn’t like I was particularly curious though. I moved a lot growing up, and the idea of attaching myself to the people who lived nearby, of bringing over a bottle of orange wine or shortbread cookies, seemed like a performance of cordiality that had to be learned early on in a life. Besides, we were all renters here, transients who would most likely be priced out sooner than later.
I was polite enough though. I gave everyone a cute smile, disarming them with my underbite, and hinting to the women in the building – through a baroque gait and forced vocal fry – that I was tender and uninterested. I told Sharon about it once. I don’t want women to ever feel like I’m dangerous so I’ll do everything in my power to show them I’m gay. She raised an eyebrow at this and reminded me that many gay men are dangerous.
--
By now I had furnished the apartment with a healthy blend of cheap Swedish pieces, Craigslist discards, and a bunch of orphaned tchotchkes that had been left out on sidewalks and stoops. I noticed it in me a couple of days before; the truism about a healthy home and a healthy mind had begun to resonate. My place was done enough, and perhaps that’s emblematic of a semi well-adjusted man, I thought. I must have told several friends this, even using the word perhaps. I knew then, as I do now, that convincing someone is convincing yourself. I was suddenly in the mood to have a guy over.
Sean was a 46-year-old oncologist from Charleston who was visiting for his favorite niece’s birthday. They had seen Kinky Boots the night before, and he had a night off before his husband – a retired landscape artist – was to join him for the weekend. We had a perfunctory chat on Grindr, where I told him I wasn’t in the mood to get drinks but he was more than welcome to come over. He wasn’t comfortable with that right away and asked if we could chat a bit longer. I told him that wasn’t a problem for me, and that I generally was someone who preferred to establish some sort of intimacy with a stranger before sex. However, tonight, the part of my brain that usually controls reckless desires and impulses, was broken. He thought this was funny and reminded me that it was my frontal lobe acting up. I added that no one in my immediate family had died of cancer thus far, to which he said I was fortunate. He enjoyed some more of my polite prodding before announcing that I seemed safe and cute enough. He’d be over in twenty minutes.
--
Sean rested his head against my headboard, opting for the polished oak over my bare chest. I watched as beads of sweat fell off his face onto my duvet and began to shift my body towards his, having a sudden inclination to baste in whatever his pores were excreting. At my touch, he got up and apologized. He said that he suffered from something he referred to as post-nut guilt. This was a thing he carried from his youth, and no matter how fun sex with another man could be, he’d never feel entirely good about it afterwards. I didn’t find this particularly profound, but I was sympathetic in the way one must always be for their queer elders.
He stood up from the bed, grabbed his underwear from the floor, and walked over to the window. He said I was too old not to have blinds and began to do a series of stretches. I watched him and resisted the impulse to offer the compliment he was clearly fishing for. His body was better than mine, but his previous withholding suddenly emboldened me – I wasn’t going to give this man what he needed to feel decent about himself. I turned my gaze away, giving my best Lot’s Wife, and then back again, giving my best Lot’s Wife. I zoomed in on the muscles in his thighs, at his bulging veins, before taking a big picture look at him again. There was a noir-ish quality to the way the moonlight hit his body. Jean Genet would have said something about it, his rugged beauty. Too bad I had decided I wouldn’t.
Then Sean noticed the yard. He released what seemed to be a blend of a dry cough and a laugh and told me Gregory would die if he ever saw it. I replied that it was a good thing I’d never meet Gregory or seem him again, but he ignored my non-joke joke, and for the first time in our brief relationship asked me a question. Whose job was it to tend to it? I said I wasn’t sure. The management company had never made any moves to do anything about it. Perhaps it was my downstairs neighbor’s responsibility, I said, aware for the first time in a while that there was indeed someone who lived below me that I never managed to know. He nodded but seemed frustrated, as if an injustice had been committed, as if I was the one committing said injustice.
He finished with a single sun salutation, let out a grunt that felt like a quartered version of the one he let out when he came, and moved to grab the tight-fitting white shirt that was clinging to the side of my bed. I refused to be the guy who couldn’t read social cues and discerned from the speed in which he redressed that he no longer wanted to share my company. But before he had the chance to excuse himself, I offered to walk him down. I knew it was getting late, and I knew that Gregory was taking the Acela and would be in early. He told me there was no need, and I explained that I didn’t possess the hospitality of a southern gay man who saved lives, but that the front door had been acting up, and I needed to make sure it locked from inside.
In the building’s small foyer, he thanked me for the fun night and kissed me on the cheek. It was there that I decided he wasn’t a bad guy, but that his paternal condescension, which reawakened the parts of me that would never stop feeling like a useless child, made me anxious. I was itching for him to leave, but he lingered. His face told me that there was another injustice being committed, and I followed his eyes to the small white table with mail strewn all over it. I told him, almost defensively, that something was going on with our deliveries and that instead of using our boxes, the post office people have just been dumping everything. He did that fusion cough-laugh one more time, made a comment about not missing what life was like in your early 20s – suggesting that he already forget I was pushing thirty – and walked out.
The door locked on its own, and I turned my attention to the table he had just eviscerated. I didn’t have the same disdain for it, knowing full well that checking my mailbox was another one of those things I would avoid. I sorted through a bunch of junk before finding the latest edition of a quarterly magazine my mother had gifted me for my last birthday, an uppity rag for wine connoisseurs, something I wasn’t. This month’s cover featured a couple in a lounge chair sipping a deep red from glasses with fat stems. I left the magazine, picked up the bills I had forgotten to grab earlier, and then spotted a familiar package, a small cardboard rectangle. The label on it read “Hims,” and I remembered that I was due for a new shipment of the topical finasteride spray I had on subscription.
Although I wasn’t bald or balding, I stressed over my thin hair. It wasn’t a daily preoccupation, but there were moments where I’d have this insecurity flare up. I’d inspect my head for days, read forums, and convince myself that normal shedding was anything but. Finally, when the stress reached its apex, I would seek out Sharon. And with a serious desperation, I would ask her to be honest with me. Was I going bald? She would always reply the same way. She wasn’t sure, but it could very well be possible that I was losing it.
I was about to open the box when my eyes hovered over the label once more. I saw then that the package wasn’t addressed to me, but to my downstairs neighbor, a Max Howard. I said his name out loud, alone there in the foyer, as if it were some sort of revelation. After over a year of living in the same building together, I learned that the man with a hellmouth for a yard was named Max. And like me, Max may or may not have been balding.
--
My second summer in the new apartment was unremarkable enough. Faced with the perpetual threat of unbearable heat, I had purchased a window air conditioner. The day it arrived, I tried to install it myself, but upon lifting it I was assaulted with a lower back spasm so acute and concentrated I could do nothing but release the machine and fall to the floor. The air conditioner, therefore, stayed planted in my entrance hallway, and every morning when I got up to make coffee, I looked out at it and promised that tomorrow I would pay someone to help move it to its rightful place. Outsourcing is the sincerest form of inaction.
Until then, I left the windows open and developed what turned out to be a nice habit of working in bed. I acquired what felt like this morning mania, a burst of energy that enabled me to answer several emails within a few hours without the usual trepidations or procrastinations. When I was younger I had made a comment to a therapist about wishing that I could bottle up the euphoria one feels when on drugs and access that high whenever it felt far away. I felt this way about this jolt of productivity when the inevitable midday fatigue arrived. If only I could spray it all over myself and work fearlessly through the day into evening.
I was in one of those early grooves, responding to a client’s notes about a mark-up we had sent him, when I heard, just outside, metal scraping against concrete. I stopped typing and crawled to the window at the other side of my bed. I looked out and saw a man. He was tall, muscular, and had a belly. I couldn’t make out his face, but I noticed that his facial hair was short and patchy, he wore a Ramones shirt that had been cropped, and his work pants with chic paint stains all over were so long he had rolled them into oversized cuffs. He was dragging rusted patio furniture onto the concrete by the dead earth. I stared for a while, not because I felt any way about discovering Max, who was hot from a distance, but because I had suddenly conjured an absurd image of him sitting at his table, sipping a beer, and looking out at the pathetic slice of land before him – an American nightmare.
He walked back inside his unit so I returned to my email. I had promised my boss that I would address these notes as soon as possible and worked through them for another hour with ease. I fired off the email and opened my phone to text the building’s handyman. He said he would be more than happy to help me install my window AC and could be over before the day’s end. It’s then that I heard another sharp metallic sound, more severe than before. I felt a strong desire to look out, to see if it was possible for metal to break just from dropping it, but a part of me also knew that the world is full of inexplicable noise and sometimes it’s better not to seek out answers. I also didn’t want to think of myself as an interloper.
--
Despite the way we met, neither Jacobo nor I have any patience for twee. I had taken myself to Whole Foods to find endives for an alternative version of a Caesar salad I wanted to make. I had been to Houston for a conference the month before, and had tried the salad at an overpriced steakhouse that attracted middle-aged women with a taste for Zinfandel and Zoloft. The salad was the only decent thing on the menu, and I had been craving it for days.
Jacobo was talking on the phone as he picked out a box of Cremini mushrooms. He was going on about dividends or something, and I felt immediate regret for tuning into the one conversation that could only exist to remind me of my chronic financial ignorance. I turned away from him when I heard and then saw several packages of tightly packed herbs fall to the ground. I watched as he bent down, which in turn caused his Airpods to fall out of his ears and bounce every which way, out of sight.
His quirky gracelessness was charming, and as I joined him on the floor to help, he looked up at me and apologized for being a mess. I saw that he had long, feminine eyelashes and a pronounced philtrum, which for whatever reason I found extremely attractive. I told him not to worry, that I too was often a mess, but that today, so far, I had been moving through the world with a surprising amount of poise. He laughed as I put the mints and sages back in their spots, and I wished him good luck before walking over to check out.
I was in bed blasting my calves with a Theragun my dad had gifted me for my birthday when my phone lit up. I had a Tinder message, and was about to ignore it when I remembered something Sharon had said over dinner a few nights earlier. She said, from then on, I would only be allowed to complain about how hard it was to date in the city if I actually went on dates. I opened the message, and it was from Jacobo, who I had presumably matched with at some point during my bi-weekly swiping marathons. He asked how my poise was doing. I told him I hated mushrooms and wanted nothing to do with anyone who loved them.
--
I find that sex is only good if you have a lot of it with one person. We had been dating for a few months, and Jacobo was licking the side of my ear while I grazed my fingertips over his collarbone, another feature of his that’s overly pronounced. The TV in my bedroom was on, playing the film Dark Passage, but I was fully absorbed by him – his dark eyes, his mouth slightly agape, the comforting menthol-y scent of aluminum deodorant emanating from him armpits.
At this point he was staying over nearly every night of the week, and I was no longer vacillating between excitement at this development and fear of its sustainability. We knew each other’s bodies well, and I had never had that before. I was about to remove his briefs, when we both heard a terrifying clang outside. Shocked into flaccidity, we looked to my bare window and I saw that Max, for the first time in a while, was outside, shovel in hand. He was chipping away at the hard dirt, and while I couldn’t read determination on his face I knew that he had to be possessed by some sort of passion. It was nearly 2:00 AM.
Jacobo asked who he was, and I told him a neighbor I had never met. Neither of us knew what to do with this sudden disruption, and after a few minutes of staring out at Max, who was now grunting each time he jammed the tip of the shovel into the Earth, Jacobo suggested that there must be something keeping things from growing down there. That was probably true, I said, having explained to him the reason behind the wasteland outside my window during one of our early hangs.
Jacobo asked if I thought he was gay, and I told him I never had thought about it before. For someone so curious, it’s interesting that you’ve never wondered about your neighbors, he said. I agreed this was unusual for me, but had nothing else to add. I remembered the first time I heard the noise outside, and wondered why I had avoided investigating. I wondered if part of me had this instinct, a protective one, to avoid attaching myself to something that could become an epic preoccupation. I can’t afford another preoccupation, I ended up telling Jacobo before going quiet. He kissed me on the mouth, knowing full well that it would disrupt whatever place in my head I retreated to. He told me I should make an effort.to introduce myself sometime, or at least, to ask if Max could not work outside after the sun went down. I said yes, and we collapsed back onto the bed and fucked, the digging a pleasant constant in the background.
--
I went through all of the points Jacobo had mentioned at dinner the night before. Things had grown tense with us because of Max, and he refused to stay at my place until I addressed the noise. I eventually promised I’d write a letter and tape it to Max’s door. Jacobo, in sudden contrast with the severity of his prior ire, suggested I be reasonable in my writing, and for a moment I thought of pushing back at this supposition. I’m the most reasonable guy in the world.
What if he’s going to kill someone and bury them in the yard, I asked Jacobo. This began as more of a bit than anything else, and for a while Jacobo played along. We guessed who it could be. Someone in the building? An ex? A co-worker? Each question would only invite more questions about Max and his intentions with the hole. And each conversation ended with Jacobo reminding me that I could always introduce myself and ask.
I had convinced Jacobo to sleepover one night, and for an hour or so things went smoothly. I roasted a chicken and made mashed potatoes. We kissed and put on reality TV, and I let him worry about being potentially laid off. I told him that he wouldn’t be, that I never met anyone as competent. I could see that he internalized this, and I felt appreciated. He told me I was great and the most empathic person he’s ever met. We’ve made each other better, he said in earnest. He put his hand in my inner thigh and just left it there while we watched a housewife accuse another of enabling a cancer scam.
Then the digging came. I hoped we wouldn’t have to talk about it, but when Jacobo removed his hand, I knew our moment had passed. He didn’t say anything, but in the absence of a verbal indication of frustration, I told him that I had a new, dark thought. Maybe Max was digging his own grave. Rents just went up, and living in the city has become unmanageable. I grew somber because it seemed possible. Jacobo simply nodded and asked if I had any Trazodone he could take.
At some point, when we stopped fantasizing, I suggested, with a newfound seriousness, that maybe there was something deep down in the Earth that was preventing anything from growing. Max was simply excavating, trying to find the source of infertility. Sure, he was overly dedicated and didn’t have boundaries, but his effort was important.
Then Jacobo started to turn on me. He didn’t like my rationalizing and felt that my attempts to normalize Max’s behavior only took away from the obvious grief he had been causing our relationship. The digging was almost non-stop now, and the hole appeared to be at least a few feet deep.
Jacobo brought up writing a letter again, and when I wavered for a moment he moved towards the window and was prepared to yell down at Max. He was going to tell Max to stop and threaten to report him to the city. He told me the whole thing was beginning to feel unhinged, and that if I was going to be a bystander he had no problem making moves.
We were having less sex by then, and I started to feel him lose respect for me. It’s interesting how a seemingly insignificant event can reveal one’s values. I began to worry that he thought of me as the kind of person who would never take proper steps to improve the quality of his life. Although I never confirmed he felt that way, I was angry imagining him imagining that. I was angry not because it wasn’t true, but because it always had been true. He should have known that I was a passive observer of my own life, and he should have not cared.
The letter became a compromise, and I wrote two respectful pages where I asked Max if he could limit his digging to work hours, if he could share with me why he was digging in the first place, and that if the whole endeavor was to improve the land, I wouldn’t mind helping speed things up. Every time my language was too assertive, I’d follow with an apology, assuring him that I was actually quite easy-going. I read the whole thing a few times over, and was surprised at how complete it felt. Not only that, but I was excited at what could come of my reaching out. A group project, perhaps? I often worried that my hands, always soft to the touch, could afford to be more calloused. I wanted the people in my life – Jacobo – to know that I worked hard and played hard. I would get my own shovel and join him out there.
--
The city was hit with a tropical storm the night I was planning on posting my letter to his door. I was peering outside at the trees in the distance, flimsy and threatening to collapse at any moment, when I noticed Max. I wasn’t expecting him to be working, but there he was, in a raincoat, digging away at the ground. He was working fast, with a ferocity I hadn’t seen before. His digging felt jagged, devoid of the usual rhythm I had grown accustomed to. I didn’t understand this sense of urgency, and it made me uncomfortable.
I paced my hallway for a minute, beginning to feel the rage that had consumed Jacobo. Max was insane. I was suddenly prepared to knock on his door and shove the letter in his face. He had to make a change. My relationship to my partner and myself were at stake. So, I put my boots on and got as far as outside my front door when I stopped in place. A wave of embarrassment glossed over my anger. I thought about Max again, his face and hair wet. Instead of reprimanding him, I thought about joining him, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, I don’t understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, but I do know what it’s like to feel like you have to go all the way with something to find peace with yourself. I balled the letter up and threw it in the trash.
A few weeks later, Jacobo told me he got a job in Mexico City, which is how gay men break up with other gay men these days. He came over, and we both cried. He said I could join him, if I wanted, and then we both laughed. I helped him pack up the clothes he left over the months we had been seeing each other and convinced him to let me keep an eggplant-colored cardigan. I walked him downstairs, we hugged each other for a bit too long, and then I let him go. I looked at the white table for mail, but didn’t have any. I was about to walk upstairs when I saw Max, standing by his door. Had he watched our goodbye? What gave him the right? He was I had given him so much privacy. We stood frozen, unsure of what to say to one another, so we didn’t. He nodded, and I nodded back before climbing the stairs.
--
I had just spent two hours looking through mattresses online, trying to find what was best for a side sleeper. It was midday, and my apartment smelled like burnt popcorn. I jolted upright when I heard a knock on the door, put on a pair of basketball shorts and a white tank, and walked over.
It was Max, also tank-topped. He was sweating and had his shovel in his hand. For whatever reason, I wasn’t surprised. His sudden appearance felt organic and inevitable. He introduced himself as Maxwell, and I told him my name. He said it was a nice name, and I said it may have been Swedish or French, but that I was neither of those things. He let himself in, and asked me if I wanted to fuck. It felt like the only thing that could possibly happen at this point, so I remained cool as he grabbed my hand, took me into my bedroom with the certainty of someone who seemed to know my apartment.
--
He was pulling on my balls and whisper-asking if I was enjoying myself. My eyes were closed because the tugging was painful. I wanted to be agreeable. I never subscribed to the idea that lovers find it hot when you tell them what you want. The reality is that people find it hot if they can do whatever they want to you and you don’t ask questions. Wow, this is really happening, I told him. I repeated it like a refrain and finished on his face.
He said thank you before getting up and walking towards the door. I asked where he was going, but all he could do was give me a you-just-came-on-my-face grim before disappearing into the hallway. I stayed put for a minute, waiting to hear a sink or a flush or a sigh. I needed to know he was still there, but I didn’t want to ask. You never want to appear needy with a man you’ve wanted for a few weeks.
I finally got up and walked to my living room. I was nervous how I would find him, and I was plagued with an intrusive thought: what if he was dressed? His sudden departure would be a crushing blow after all this time I spent ignoring the flirtation building between us. I thought of Jacobo again. Just before he left for good, I sent him a text message. I apologized for all that had happened between us and then I thanked him for never being ambiguous. There was nothing worse to me than that. He thumbs upped my message, and told me that I was right all along. I wasn’t capable of loving someone who hated mushrooms.
My mind shifted back to Max. I conjured an image of him by my foyer, pulling the shirt over his head, crocs already on, the handle of my front door turning. He kisses the mezuzah on the way out, and I’m not even sure when I got a mezuzah.
When I found him, Max was still naked. He held the shovel over the coffee table I had just gotten from a nearby antiques store. His eyes were glazed over, unfocused. I asked him what he was doing. He didn’t respond and just stood there. Perhaps he was sleepwalking, I thought. Sharon struggled with it and once told me this story about how her boyfriend Serge would often wake up in the middle of the night to find her mounted on top of him. The first time it happened he got excited, but then she began to scream at him for not picking up the yogurt she liked.
I called out his name again and again, and finally he turned to face me. He picked up the shovel and quickly plunged it into the wood floor. I can’t believe this is happening, I shouted at him. He did it again, and the whole apartment rattled. Wow, is this really happening? I
I felt my apartment beginning to collapse in on itself, yet I couldn’t move. They say one can be forced into action in a fight or flight state, but my feet were too heavy. Immobile, I managed to muster enough courage to ask him why he was digging in my apartment. I told him I needed to know what he expected to find beneath the floorboards. I asked and then I begged. I told him I needed to know why he was destroying my life. I then I apologized. Did he know I opened his package that one time? His hairline was better than mine, is that what he needed to hear? It felt like I said more words than I have ever said to anybody when he finally dropped the shovel. I heard that clang sound, the sound of what I had once assumed was metal breaking in half. He walked over to me, grabbed my hand, and dragged me back to my bedroom.
We stood by the window, and he forced me to look outside. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before, but he had covered the hole up. The patio furniture was gone too. I was shaking in place, his hands on the back of my head. He asked me if I needed a glass of water. I told him I wanted to know what this was all about. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to know, actually. He said it was for me. I was afraid, and asked why he would dig a hole for me. He called me a moron, and said he didn’t dig the hole for me, but he covered it up for me. I told him there were millions of other ways he could tell me he wanted to have sex with me. He smiled and walked out again.
I heard him pick up the shovel again, and this time my legs cooperated, and I ran to him as wood chips, like missiles, flew every which way. I asked him, in a whisper this time, if he knew when my floor would turn into my downstairs neighbor’s ceiling. I didn’t care if I was making sense, and my voice was hoarse. He didn’t respond and lifted the shovel yet again.
So, I lunged towards him. I don’t think I had ever attacked anybody, even to defend myself, but I loved my apartment. I attempted to pull the shovel from his hand and yelled at him. I said he’d wake up the neighbors, and after everything he could at least offer an explanation. I told him he owed me the world and that no one in his entire life had ever paid as much attention to him. I felt an unfamiliar confidence and my dick stiffened as we wrestled over the shovel.
With all of his force, Max pushed me down to the floor, and I closed my eyes, afraid of the impact on my back. As I fell, I felt a loose nail lodge itself into my thigh. I screamed and only when my voice died down did I open my eyes. I looked up and saw Max, face inscrutable, as it had been since the day I didn’t meet him, dangling the shovel over my head. Without hesitation, he rammed it into my face.
--
The delivery guy was five minutes late, but I was grateful he had even let me know he was on his way. He parked a truck outside my apartment building and brought out a queen-sized mattress out from the back. It was wrapped in cardboard, and I asked if he could help me take it upstairs. He apologized and said that I didn’t pay for that service and left me on the sidewalk with the mattress.
I attempted to lug it into the foyer with little success. Each effort to lift it hurt my back, and each effort to slide it failed. I made a lot of noise, but I finally got it to the base of the stairs. I took a deep breath, and then heard a throat clearing behind me. I turned around, and it was Max, hovering over me. He was wearing a tank top and green army pants. He asked if I needed any help, and I told him that my lower back had been giving out every other day these days and that I would appreciate it.
He grabbed positioned himself on one side of the box and had me stand on the other. We lifted together and pulled the mattress up on the stairs. He did most of the work, but I was able to at least hold the mattress up. I tried not to grimace as a sharp pain rode up my ass.
I was breathing heavily when we got to my door. He looked at the mattress box and asked if I was a side sleeper. I laughed, and Max smiled with an innocence that I couldn’t imagine he possessed. Can I be honest with you, I asked him? He nodded. I’m not a side sleeper, I told him. I pretend to be. Every night I get into bed and lay on my back. I play a white noise playlist and tell myself that my back will hurt less if I can manage to fall asleep like this. Then, after an hour, I roll onto my side, and tell myself that if I can’t sleep on my back, this is at least second best. After another few moments, I’m on my stomach and sound asleep. That’s why my back hurts, I think. He’s sympathetic and wonders if paying a lot of money for a new mattress will force me to find healthier sleeping habit. I told him that this was my hope.
He nods again, and we stand in silence by the door. I think of inviting him in, but I have nothing to offer. I left dirty clothes on the floor in my bathroom, and the night before I had shattered my last good glass while doing dishes. Unable to tolerate the silence, I thank him for helping me. He takes this as a sign, and I see his eyes look to the stairs. He says it was no problem and not to feel embarrassed. Sometimes his back hurts too. He gives me a polite smile and runs down the stairs. I think of calling out to him. Is it because of the digging? Does your back hurt because of the digging? But of course, I don’t. I open my apartment door and slide the mattress box inside.