By Paul Rousseau
March 2020, NYC
I am quarantined in a ramshackle building constructed in 1920. The structure pitches sideward, slowly submitting to gravity’s insistence. Inside, the lights are dim, the hallways dark, the walls skinny and distempered. A smell of blight and obsolescence permeates the air. There are forty-two apartments; thirty-eight occupied, four vacant by death. I know the occupants of neighboring apartments by sound only: the plodding footsteps, the wailing newborn, the shrill blender, the blaring television, the nightly quarreling. I contemplate what they hear of my tenancy. A flushing commode? The beep of a microwave? The click of a dead bolt? Or do their noisy commotions erase my slim existence? I fear I could perish, and no one would know. Nevertheless, there are intervals when the apartments are quiet. It is then that I stand in my living room and listen to my presence: the hum of the refrigerator, the clanging of the radiator, the scuttling of cockroaches, the cooing of pigeons, and the scream of sirens.