Man in Attic
After the rain
The attic had holes in the ceiling, a little mouse that left pellets in the corners, and roaches that crawled out of the walls at night.
I placed a bucket in the corner to catch droplets, tar-blackened and rust-colored when it rained. That was my norm, a steal, a gift I’d landed. Four-hundred-and-fifty bucks a month in Fort Greene Brooklyn was a room anyone could appreciate. It wasn’t comfort but it was my ticket. I taped makeshift mesh to the window openings, tucked them in behind antiquated panes of glass as protection from the swarms of flies that gathered in the damp filth on the walkway outside.
The walls were old and crumbling, resisting nothing, not noise, nor stench, nor temperature, nor rain. But I could bike across the bridge into Manhattan or to most parts of Brooklyn in under fifteen. No heat nor air-conditioning, but an easy trade to be right where I wanted to be.
That first winter, right after I moved in, the landlord gave me a heated fan that blew a fuse after a week. Replacing it with an old electric radiator I shivered to sleep. I woke up every morning as if I’d been buried alive, the cold in my throat a reminder that I’d breathed.
It would only be short term. I’d save up money. I’d find a full-time job by summer. I’d have sacrificed and learned plenty. I couldn’t afford to spend much on an apartment after having done all that traveling, after having spent all my time and money trying to heal from being burnt out after working for everything, for nothing.
The bathroom creaked and leaked. A DIY plexiglass window in the ceiling dripped another collection point of rain, this time directly in front of the toilet, where the floorboards had rotted through, where when you sat you had to either consider the timing of the weather or shift your body to the side in such a manner so that you weren’t hit with roof-tarred droplets on your privates.
The sink was ancient, one faucet for hot, one faucet for cold, separated at such a distance to provide you with a true appreciation for modern developments in plumbing. One night while washing my face the rubber gasket inside one of the knobs broke. Hot water sprayed everywhere, but the shut off was downstairs.
I’d clean, but a misty layer of piss and grime seemed to cover the walls immediately. As if the place were a magnet for dirt, or perhaps the surfaces so deteriorated that nothing could take their filth away.
The bathroom was a box in the ceiling, a cutout for a window in an attic, turned into a ditch with a toilet and sink. An afterthought, a bank account, a source of steady cheap income, off the books, where wooden two-by-fours and unfinished plywood stuck out exposed and nailed to the elements. Small holes cracked and opened in the corners, at the roof, without insulation, no exterior siding.
Rotting wood, taking a piss, cold breeze freezing in.
To friends I’d refer to it as my halfway home, and not only because some of my new roommates looked as if recently out of penitentiary, but because it was halfway to the goals I had. A stepping point, a spot perfectly aligned for cheap short-term accomplishments. And yet everyone there seemed to have been unsuccessful at their attempts at leaving.
The toilet never flushed completely. You’d have to calculate your digestion schedule, staying late at work, or use an old sour cream plastic container to shovel water from sink to bowl. And when you used hot water to help your week’s worth of bowel movements go down, you’d learn that hot water melted poorly-placed-wax-seal. For weeks sewage seeped through the toilet flange and into buckets in the hallway below.
I dreamed one night of a roach crawling on my bed and woke up shaking something off my shoulder. In the morning I saw a half-dollar-coin-sized roach outside my bedroom door. My skin crawled, because I knew what was and wasn’t real.
Then we were quarantined. Self-secluded-stillness quieted the city. All the noise stopped. The BQE stayed empty. I melted into my bed trying to recover from early exposure to viral disease C19. I walked gingerly to the park, simply to read, sat down aged, out of breath, tired, needing sleep. It felt as if in one moment all the world had been forced to find peace, what we were grateful for now knowing. There I was trying to sleep it off in attic mid-recovery.
I’d been working as a barista but when the virus arrived I was two week’s short of qualifying for unemployment insurance. Every day I’d call the state. Claims denied. Months in a partial unemployment check arrived. I said nothing and finally, quietly, cashed in on this otherwise embarrassing citizenship of mine.
Eventually, and out of despair I took the task back up, each day searching for a career. The task, a tower I built balanced at the top of a mountain of mud. My own very desperate plan for what I wasn’t supposed to be achieving, for what wasn’t meant for a guy in the attic. I crawled, often in belief of what the state of my walls meant about me. There I was retelling myself that I were the storyteller in charge of the story I believed. And that if I believed something greater, then I’d be believing in me.
It’s the hard parts we remember. I located a trick, a device, a perspective that helped me deal with what I had no choice about. There was nowhere to go. The world was still. There were no jobs. It was better to be frugal and suffer. Outside wasn’t open for business.
The attic too held something hopeful and wild, the hard-fought self earned, a writer’s table at the alcove, sunshine crisp cracking through early morning. Like college dorms, cheap, scrappy, shared with roommates, but with hopes and dreams to make it out into the real world.
Awake through the long covid nights I’d often get a glimpse of the moon, passing over the rotation of earth; from the attic, sparse, but with a view of the edges, a quieted and calmed city, out over the rooftops in Brooklyn.
Two alcove windows. One in the peak of the roof facing the front of the house, and the other cut out of the side, a dormer. So that in the early hours of the morning the sun would rise through the front, then as the earth turned the sun would crawl around to the side, where as it set it would radiantly fade in defeat of unending cycle. Myself, only a witness.
When it rained or snowed and the clouds over the rooftops would reflect a deep yellow-amber glow, I would sit in my bed and from the panorama of my position watch the glaze of color light-up the world out both windows. Maybe it was the sensitivity of my world, or the sound of silence echoing out from the newly emptied roads, but the view itself brought with it something serene. The color alone providing consolation, that there were more at the edge of all our scenes. How hopeful the view after storm’s passing.
