Documentary Grade Paranoia

Jael hasn’t had fingernails since Valentine’s Day. The beds weep a clear fluid that dries brown along the edges where she picks at them, and the skin around each cuticle peels back in thin strips she can see light through. She rolls the strips between her thumb and forefinger while she watches the door. They pile up on the carpet beside her knee like shavings under a carpenter’s bench.

The notebook lies open on the floor with its spine split. It’s a Mead Five Star, college-ruled, and she presses so hard that the back of every page stands up in ridges a blind man could read.

At 8:13 p.m. Mrs. Lambert, 5D, carried two black Hefty bags down past the landing. She double-knots her twist-ties. After she went back up, I checked the bags at the curb. They give when you squeeze them, all the way around. That is the shape a body makes when you fold it.

Her eye socket grinds against the brass rim of the peephole. She forgets to blink, and the eye dries until the hallway smears. She writes without looking. The pen goes through one sheet and into the next, and the paper tears under the heel of her hand, and her hand keeps going.

She lifts her head off the door, crack, and it takes her a breath to decide the neck is hers. She has been folded against the peephole since before the radiators came on. The apartment smells of burnt coffee and unwashed skin. Every mug she owns stands on the kitchen counter, and every one holds a cold mouthful of coffee that has skinned over like a cataract. She drinks from the cleanest one, and the skin breaks against her lip, and she carries the mug to her desk.

The desk stands against the wall she shares with 4C, and the monitors on it light the room blue. The left screen holds a true-crime series called Neighborly. She has paused it on the hands of the man the show calls the Suburban Strangler. His cuticles are pushed back. His nails are buffed to a dull shine. The producers have folded a pair of latex gloves on the steel table beside his hands for the camera. The pause button on her remote has cracked where her thumb lands.

Ward’s hands look like that.

Ward, 4C, showers at first light and again after dark. Each shower lasts as long as the Suburban Strangler’s confession. I have timed both. He uses Irish Spring. It comes through the bathroom vent. Two showers a day means a man gets dirty twice a day.

She uncaps a highlighter with her teeth. It is a yellow Stabilo Boss, because accuracy deserves the proper tools. She drags the felt tip across the line about the showers and stars it and keeps pressing until the ink bleeds through the page.

When the streetlights come on, Rocco’s beagle comes down the hall, and its nails go tik-tak, tik-tak on the bare oak. Rocco follows in a Carhartt jacket with the leash wound around his fist. They come back while rain still runs down the window, and the beagle leaves no prints on the boards.

Rocco, 4B, walks the dog when the streetlights come on. It rained all evening, and the dog came home with dry feet. Where do they go?

Her hand cramps, and the back of it stands up in ridges like the back of a page she has written on. She tries to straighten her fingers and they stay curled in the shape of a pen, so she pries them open with her other hand one finger at a time, like loosening a dead woman's grip.

The pen lives between her teeth when she isn’t writing. She has chewed the cap flat and split it, and it leaks blue onto her tongue, and the corners of her mouth have gone indigo. The walls in this building are drywall and a coat of eggshell paint, and she keeps her ear to them.

After dark the pipes in the shared wall scream and water hits Ward’s tub. He is on time. She knows his shower by ear. The spray runs long and flat while he stands under it, breaks up when he bends for the shampoo, and goes long and flat again, and his bare heel skids on the porcelain when he turns. She starts the stopwatch on her phone. The app keeps every lap. She scrolls them on the toilet the way other women scroll pictures of their grandchildren.

She writes it down.

BANG.

It comes straight down through the ceiling over her desk from Mrs. Lambert’s apartment, and the clock in the corner of the left monitor reads 2:14. The blow lands like a grown man rolled off a bed onto his face, and the monitors shiver on their stands.

Then a dragging starts, and Jael follows it across her ceiling. It moves in one long pull from the desk to the kitchen door, stops while somebody gathers the load up again, and goes on toward the hall.

Jael climbs the stepladder she keeps beside the desk for this and presses her ear to the ceiling with her cheek flat against the cold plaster. The paint has blistered where damp works through from upstairs. She pops a blister with the chewed end of her pen, and water runs down the wall in a thin line that splits and splits again, like a vein.

The dragging reaches the door upstairs. Then the weight goes down the stairwell, one step and a pause, one step and a pause. By the time her eye finds the peephole, the landing is empty and the sound is going down toward the lobby.

She writes it all down without turning on the light. She can feel the ruled lines under the pen. She has always worked well with her hands in the dark.

The next morning Ward sits at a window table in the Acropolis Diner on the corner with his hair still wet from the first shower. He has combed it straight back, and the teeth of the comb still show in the furrows. His glasses have round lenses in thin gold wire. He whistles “Ode to Joy” under his breath while he reads a menu he must know by heart.

Jael takes the chair across from him. The vinyl seat gives under her.

He raises his cup off the saucer and tips it toward her. “Do you want coffee?”

The steam comes apart in the draft from the door. His teeth glow too white. On the last recycling night she dug an Amazon mailer with 4C on the label out of the building’s bins. It held an empty box of Crest 3D Whitestrips. At the CVS on the corner the same box sits in a locked plastic case, and the tag reads $49.99. A man who bleaches his teeth will bleach anything.

“I’ll take a cup.”

He orders it for her when the waitress comes. He orders it black without asking.

“You look tired, Jael.”

“I haven’t been sleeping.”

“These walls are paper.” He smiles, and the skin around his eyes stays flat. “I hear you pacing at night. I hear you writing.”

Her coffee arrives. She wraps both hands around the mug. The heat finds the raw nail beds, and she holds on anyway until her eyes water.

“How do you know I’m writing?”

“A pen on paper sounds like a mouse inside the wall.” He sets his cup down and turns it by the handle until the handle points at her. “You write hard, Jael. I can hear the pages tear.”

She watches his hands. They are clean and manicured, and the cuticles are pushed back like the Strangler’s. A callus sits on the side of his right middle finger, too wide for a pen. She decides a handle made it.

He sees her looking and spreads his fingers on the table. “Everyone listens. Most people don’t write it down.”

She stares at him and he stares back, and the coffee between them goes cold.

“Mrs. Lambert takes her trash down at 8:13 every trash night.”

“What about her?”