Through the Wall

A short story

Through the wall assorted pornographic moans and gunshots, screams of orgasm and death, screeches of tires and heavy metal, roars of cars and electric guitars. Sounds you can’t escape from in 600 square feet of living space.

Jerome stared at the wall where his one photograph, a picture of himself and Kitty visiting Union Pacific’s Big Boy, shuddered from the sound waves. That was ten years ago, and six before she left. Jerome, you’re a loser, she told him. You never do anything. You sit at home and you never do anything. All you do is glue together your little trains and watch videos of other people gluing trains.

The TV on the other side must be the size of the entire wall.

How many nights had he sat on the couch eating his TV dinner (there wasn’t space for both a couch and a dining room table) and trying to watch his train videos on his computer (there wasn’t space for both a desktop and a TV) struggling to hear Conductor Erikson’s instructions for carving the foam that would eventually become an extremely realistic waterfall display that Jerome would situate beside the viaduct just outside the scenic country village in his model train layout, over the intrusions of sex, violence, and rock music blasting through the drywall?

Pretty much every night since the neighbors moved in, a young fashionably dressed couple, a man with neatly parted hair with some that draped down his forehead, strong cheekbones and jaw and a big watch, a woman with short wavy brown hair and dreamy eyes. Jerome saw the moving truck with its advertisements emblazoned on its side, one of which was a train, which drew him out of doors to look at it and the pair unloading their boxes and furniture. Through the open door he saw a chandelier and stainless steel appliances. Nevertheless, he overheard the man loudly explaining to the uniformed movers that this abode was just temporary until they could find a suitable house in this new city.

They caught Jerome staring after he had been there a full eight minutes, a half-inch tall plumber figure forgotten in his left palm.

“Honey, who’s that?”

“Man from the leasing office?”

“He’s in sweats. You really think he’s from the leasing office?”

“How long’s he been standing there?”

“I don’t know. Honey, can you please--?”

The man walked up to Jerome with a confident smile. “Hello sir. You live around here?”

It took Jerome a minute to find his words. “Right there.”

“What?”

“Right there.” This time he gestured toward his apartment.

The man’s smile dropped all pretenses. “Oh. Right next door to us? Fifteen-oh-three?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” The man folded his arms. “Well. It’s nice to meet you. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re very busy.” Sand on the pavement rasped under his pivoting heel.

Jerome watched him go. The woman kept looking at him, leaned over to her husband and whispered something, which made the man turn around again. “We’re very busy,” he repeated to Jerome.

“I know,” Jerome said.

After that they went inside, and the two movers carried in the rest of the boxes and furniture. Jerome recalled that a package of ten N-scale tracks would be arriving that afternoon, and he’d better head over to the leasing office to see if the postal service had dropped his package a few hours early.

That same night he listened to a two and a half hour movie through the wall that involved a lot of shooting and swearing. An hour into it he realized he would get no sleep, so he got up to paint the crenellations onto the castle on the hill overlooking his town. When slipped up a second time with the brush he determined he was too tired and sat down to read a modeling book on the sofa with a cup of chamomile, but his eyes were too tired for that too. He nodded on the couch until he heard the last big explosion of the movie followed by rap music in the credits. Then he heard the man exclaim that it was the best TV he’d ever owned and he couldn’t believe they’d gotten it just that day for only $600.

The day after the couple moved in was a Saturday, so they were home watching TV from around ten in the morning until past Jerome’s bedtime. As soon as the TV turned on Jerome made himself a bologna and pickle sandwich, grabbed a mineral water and a magazine, and went over to the leasing office. The lady at the desk smiled and said “Good morning Jerome.” He went over and told her about his trains. Eventually she said she had calls to make, so Jerome sat at the coffee table, ate his sandwich and read his train catalog. If he ordered a bag of moss, he could really texture the rocks outlying the falls. What kind of trees did he want for the forest atop the overlook? Evergreens? 48 of those for just $10.95. “Twenty-three cents per,” he muttered. “A heck of a deal, a heck of a deal.”

Kitty hadn’t thought so. “What a fat waste of money that is,” she used to say whenever he sliced excitedly into a box, green packing peanuts overflowing. “When are you going to get a job to pay for that crap?”

“I have a job.”

“I mean a real job.”

“I have a real job. I save the curators lots of time dusting and--”

“You make barely minimum wage at the museum. At least my shift leader just gave me a seventy-five cent raise last month. And what’d I do? I bought us a new toaster. Something we both use. What about you? You buy another train set. You lock yourself away like a troll in your room. You won’t even sleep with me. You just want to be left alone. Well, I’ll leave you alone. I tried. I tried.”

He had tried too, but he had figured out it wasn’t working before she did and left with most of their things. He never really thought about her when she was there in front of him, brushing her hair in the mirror, scrolling through her phone with her feet up on the end of the couch, rearranging the furniture every three months. But after she left he thought about those things she did all the time. Really he was glad not to have to wait for his turn in the bathroom for forty-five minutes every morning, not to have to squeeze onto the far end of the couch when he wanted to sit down, not to have to adjust himself to new floor plans all the time. Poring over his work he thought of what she’d say if she could see him.

Although she left with most of their things, Jerome did not miss them. He could make do without the pots and pans if he bought TV dinners, because she had left the microwave. He didn’t need more than one set of bedsheets. He didn’t need any lamps because there was the ceiling light in the bedroom and one in the kitchen. Her lamps had been unsightly, anyway.

When his watch beeped four Jerome picked himself up, brushed the crumbs off his lap, and walked back to his apartment. Rounding the corner to his building at the end of the lane he could hear the TV. The pulses and swells of music nettled as he grabbed a package of frozen mac and cheese from the freezer, stuck it in the microwave, dialed two minutes that he spent standing like a tree rooted in the center of the room, hands clenching and unclenching in painful rhythm that sought to eliminate sound, the worst of the five senses.

He had often thought about that. Jerome ranked them sight, touch, taste/smell together, and then hearing. Hearing was a burdensome obligation. “You’re not listening to me,” Kitty complained. An obligation to talk. “That’ll be $34.99,” said the clerk at the train store. An obligation to pay up. A knock on the door. An obligation to answer it, pay the rent, talk to the Mormons, etc. Now imagine being deaf. Being deaf meant you could walk around without anyone bothering you and you could look at, touch, and taste/smell the things you wanted to. Deafness equated to freedom.

And now the TV. A lustful hasty bombastic slave-driver with a whip of pandering and demands of hedonism.

Jerome clocked his screen time for that entire week at seventy-seven minutes, twenty-eight seconds. That was how long it took him to watch the tutorial video on how to mechanize your figure skaters on the frozen pond below the castle that overlooked the late 19th century station once per each day he was working on that project. Did that make him a slave? His parents’ and school teachers’ self-awareness instruction came back to him, but he could firmly answer no, because he was a servant to beauty, to Right Order, which equated the same way as deafness and freedom. And come to think of it, he wouldn’t mind being a slave to something beautiful.

In his third week of sleep deprivation, Jerome visited the leasing office.

“Sorry Jerome, no package today,” said the lady at the front desk whose name he could never remember.

“I didn’t order one.”

“Oh. Well, what can I do for you?”

“The people next door have a TV and it’s always too loud.”

“I see. And you’d like me to talk to them about it?”

“I’d like you to make them stop.”

“What time of day is it on too loud?”

“All the time. It’s on all the time, and it’s always way too loud.”

“Okay. If it’s on past 10pm or before 7am I can help you, because the hours between are supposed to be quiet hours.”

“It is on during quiet hours. All hours should be quiet hours, but it’s on during the hours between 10pm and 7am.”

“Okay, Jerome. What’s the apartment number? I’ll make sure someone stops by.”

“Apartment number one-five-zero-four.”

“Alright. I’ll see what I can do.”

Jerome stepped back from her desk, made for the door, hung just inside long enough to watch her write something down on her notepad. The bell that dinged as the door swung closed behind him reminded him of the bell on his new locomotive.

Jerome waited a day for the TV’s noise to stop or at least diminish. At precisely twelve minutes after midnight he heard the man next door remark what a spectacle this director’s movies always were, the bloodshed, mayhem, and barbarism of the invaders juxtaposed to the civilization and culture of the natives. “A milestone in cinema, a real envelope pusher. He somehow rolls Malleck, Tarantino, and Kubrick all into one.”

Jerome thought about shouting through the wall that unless they were talking about a children’s train show narrated by either Starr, Carlin, or Baldwin that he had no interest in hearing about it.

The next day he revisited the office. The woman looked up and smiled at him as he came up and stood three feet back from her desk, mindful of the cushion Kitty called “personal space” that sometimes stretched up to ten feet or even encompassed their entire apartment.

“What can I do for ya, Jerome?”

“The people next door.”

“Oh, that’s right. They had the loud music, right?”

“TV.”

“I’ll make sure I get on that. I’m so sorry. What was the apartment number again?”

“One-five-zero-four.”

“Yes. I’m writing it down right now.”

He read her handwriting upside down to verify. “Thank you.”

Jerome deduced that the couple both worked from home, as they seemed to be there most of the time. In the middle of the next day he watched them get in their car together, start it up with the radio ambushing them at full blast and pull away, the TV still on in their apartment. Forty-five minutes later they came back with coffee in time to catch the weather report.

Two days later he dinged into the leasing office again, and the woman frowned as soon as she saw him.

“Oh my gosh Jerome,” she said. “I’m swamped right now. August is our busy time. I’ll walk right on over as soon as I finish writing up this inspection. Is that okay? I’m so sorry.”

Jerome nodded. “That’s okay,” he said. He remembered empathy, and that saying an “I know how hard” statement that followed with a mention of the subject’s particular situation and the couplet coup de grace “can be” helped recruit people to your side.

“I know how hard being really busy with writing up inspections can be,” he said from the doorway before he left.

The next day Jerome got home from the museum and sat in his car for a moment, enjoying the last silence between traffic and his neighbors, and saw the leasing office lady walking up the sidewalk toward him. She skirted the parking lot, approached unit 1504, and knocked on the door. Jerome watched her knock again half a minute later, and this time the door opened.

He couldn’t hear what was said, but the lady who answered the door nodded quickly, smiling with all of her teeth, her eyebrows going up and her lips going down in a pout. The woman from the office pointed at Jerome’s door and said something with a big gesture that Jerome didn’t understand but that made the tenant lady laugh. The pair shared the laugh, waved at each other as the office lady backed away and returned from whence she had come.

Jerome waited until the door of 1504 closed, got out of his car, slunk to his apartment and closed his door quietly behind him.

If anything, the TV was louder than ever. Jerome pressed his pillow over his ears. He tried ear plugs. He curled up in his sleeping bag in the closet, shut the door, stuck in ear plugs and wrapped his pillow around his head. In this manner he was able to scavenge three hours of sleep. His drowsing abounded in dreams of them stomping on his trains, moving into his apartment and setting up their TV in it, making themselves at home, forcing Jerome to dwell permanently in the closet. Then they broke the closet door down and put a TV in there as well. When he awoke it was to the sound of the early morning news, loud enough to make him believe there was indeed a TV hanging just above him by the ironing board.

He fumblingly carved the foam boards that would soon be landscapes, decked in polyurethane and decorated with glue and moss. He had ruled out returning to the office to complain. Kitty’s nag came back to him: “You always do things the same old way. That’s the definition of insanity. You think if you keep doing the same thing that things’ll turn out how you want. Try something else. Use your head.” He grudgingly had to admit that she was right, just like his teachers had been when they told him to think outside the box. His own box.

He sliced off just a bit too much foam and nearly stabbed the mountainside with the scalpel in frustration. He surveyed his domain, the rolling forested hills with the farmer’s cottage centered snuggly among corn fields coated in frost, the river winding its way under the viaduct, through the village, depositing some of its waters in the pond where figure skaters danced. The village with its schoolhouse and children casting snowballs and making snowmen, the woodcutter with his oxen bringing firewood into town. Deer looking out through the trees pondering these human activities. A bear curled up in the dark and silence of his cave on the far side of the map where an observer probably wouldn’t notice him, away from the train and the town.

He put the scalpel down and paced to blow off steam. He pondered the engines whistling on the tracks, its engineers yelling at each other to keep the boiler cool. There was always something bothering him. He could never rid himself of being bothered. Something was always nagging or itching or talking or blasting sound at him.

He burst out the door and walked across the parking lot. Somehow the TV was even louder outside. It was dusk and the few stars the city would let him see in the sky twinkled elusively. Around the lot he paced, once, twice, five times, ten, twenty. After each circuit he listened for the TV, then started another lap. His ankles ached, as did his hips and back and shoulders from his night in the closet. Finally as he neared his door the twenty-third time he couldn’t hear any noise from the neighbors. When he tried the knob it was locked. He swore. In his ten years of living here he had never forgotten his keys, wallet and phone. This was their fault. He kicked a plastic bottle lying on the sidewalk, watched it slide off into the night.

He would have walked over to his car and gone to sleep in it, but it too was locked.

One hundred fifty-two laps later the sun began climbing up the sky. His legs were on fire, arms and head dangling abstractly, emotions muted by weariness. He dragged himself up the steps, rapped on the glass door of the leasing office. He knocked again, and this time someone, not the usual woman he met there but a janitor or maintenance crew man, opened it a crack. “Office opens at eight. Come back then.”

“I’m locked out,” Jerome pleaded, his voice raspy and strange.

“Can’t help you with that.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not what I do.”

“I’ve been locked out all night.”

The guy sighed. “Okay. Stay there.” He closed the door and disappeared back into the partially lit rooms within. Three minutes later he reappeared with a large keyring. “What number?”

“One-five-zero-three.”

“Okay. Come with me.”

Jerome followed him back to his apartment, summoning up a smile and a thank you as his door swung open. The guy had already turned his back and was walking away. And the TV next door was already announcing the weather. Jerome collapsed on the couch and slept for three hours. Then he awoke and opened a container of yogurt, threw some corn flakes in it and ate. Through the wall he listened to the newscaster announce new construction on 8th and Broadway.

That afternoon he ordered a new hopper car. It wouldn’t arrive until next week, but he went anyway down to the leasing office to sit and imagine he was waiting for it in the relative quiet broken only by the phone and the woman’s voice addressing issues for callers. A few people entered but Jerome’s mind was far away and no place at all, so he did not hear what they said. He stared at the eggshell wall and daydreamed trains chugging across it like on the wallpaper in his childhood room.

He took notice when the man from next door came in, his sleeves rolled up and top two buttons open. He marched up to the front desk and leaned on it with his knuckles. Jerome watched. The woman at the desk finished her phone conversation and looked up at the man, who started speaking before the phone was on the receiver.

“Look,” the man said, “I placed a phone call yesterday morning about a leak in our bathroom ceiling. Whoever took my call assured me it’d be fixed yesterday afternoon. My wife and I left, assuming you people would make good on your word. This morning when the tenants upstairs turned on their shower, our ceiling started gushing. Now, I’m a professional who gives everyone his best, whether it’s the guy changing my lightbulb, the girl waiting my table, or the fella delivering my mail. And I expect the best from other people, too. If you say you’re gonna do something, I expect that you’ll do it.”

“Yes sir,” the woman began.

“Do you realize the inconvenience you’ve caused us by not fixing this situation immediately? We can’t get ready in the mornings when we’ve got water pouring down on us while we try to shave or brush our teeth, can we? At the very least tell those people upstairs not to run their shower until it’s all sorted out.”

“We’ll get this addressed as soon as we possibly can, sir.”

“I mean, I hate having to tell people how to do their jobs. But if they won’t do them, then--” The man cut himself off here and took a step back into three-foot personal space. “I’m sorry. I’m a little upset right now. Got some water in my watch, and I’m a little heated. I trust you’re liable to any such damages to my personal property due to your neglect.”

“They--we will make sure to handle everything, sir. Don’t you worry.”

“Well, I’d like not to worry. It’s easy to say that when it’s not your roof leaking. Anyway, I have to go. I have a business meeting on the computer very soon. Let me know when you’ll be sending someone by, because I can’t have them banging around in my bathroom while I’m meeting with the board. Give me forty-five minutes’ warning to clear out to the library.”

“We’ll be letting you know, sir. What is your apartment number?”

“Fifteen-oh-four. When will you get this fixed?”

“I’ll try to send someone by this evening.”

“Try.” The way the man said this word made it clear that it was his least favorite word.

An idea puttered around Jerome’s head as he listened. He sprang from the couch and crept to the door before the man could turn and see him, then dashed across the lot toward his apartment building.

He forced down his bubbling excitement, pacing around the train table faster than the train itself. Now and then he giggled and waved his hands. The hands on his watch clicked by slowly. It seemed that the faster he paced, the slower they went. Evening. What time could be called evening? It had to be evening, otherwise it would be suspicious. Evening. At least four hours until you could call it evening. He’d better start gathering his tools together so he’d be ready by evening. A time to get even.

Jerome took his tape measure, screw drivers, scalpel set, hammer, chisel, hot glue gun, paint brushes and paints, and piled them under the table together. What else would he need to bring? That was it, that was all his tools. He couldn’t bring anything else if he wanted to. What to put them in? He had a backpack somewhere, or a canvas tote. Would either of those be convincing enough? Maybe he’d wear a baseball cap, if Kitty had left one. He couldn’t remember. Would the couple recognize him? The only time they’d ever spoken was when they moved in, and he didn’t think they’d looked directly at him since.

There his tote sat bulging with tools of crime. No, not crime. Justice. He’d tried other ways. Now these people deserved it.

His body complained to eat, to nap, but Jerome disregarded it. He paced hours away, ignoring Kitty’s warnings. “That’s not very nice, Jerome,” she’d say. “You’re such a misanthrope. You always see the worst in people.”

“That’s not true,” he said aloud. “I see things how they are.” He put his hands to his ears. “La la la. I’m not listening.”

At 5:30 he knocked on his neighbors’ door. His bag of tools slung over his shoulder, the metal jabbing against his back. A baseball cap pulled low over his eyes.

The man answered, bemused as he took in Jerome. “Yes?”

“I’m here to fix the leak.”

“Oh. The lady in the office said you’d be here this evening. We were just about to eat dinner.”

“It is the evening,” said Jerome, trying to conceal relief that his disguise had worked. “I get off work at 6. If you want it fixed tonight, it’ll have to be now.”

The man looked back into the apartment where his wife sat at the table, a baked potato speared on the end of her fork frozen midway between serving dish and plate. “Honey, the guy says he’s gotta do it now.”

“It has to be now?”

“Yes. Just cover those dishes and we can heat ‘em up when we get back.”

“Okay. Just let me grab my purse.”

The man went to grab his keys and wallet from the mantle. Jerome stood outside with his head down, feet shuffling while the couple slipped on their shoes.

“How long will it be?” the man asked as he and his wife squeezed out past him.

“Half an hour. I get off work at 6.”

“Alright. The leak is in the bathroom above the sink.”

“I know.”

He slammed the door behind them, waited until their voices receded before stamping with glee. He would sit down and enjoy a real meal, his first home-cooked meal in four years. Then he’d unplug the TV, lift it off the bracket on the wall above the mantle, carry it into the bathroom, and set it in the sink right below the leak. Justice. Fitting, poetic justice. He wouldn’t even need to use his tools.

“First thing’s first,” he announced, striding to and switching the noise off. He turned around and marched back to the dining area and stood to survey the apartment.

It was much as he had last seen it four years ago, except the paint was fresh, carpets were new and unstained, the countertops, microwave, fridge, and dishwasher were new. Only the electric stove was familiar. Jerome’s mouth twitched at the memories of Kitty bending over it to slide a roast or cake into the oven. No. Push those thoughts away. But as he hurried to the bathroom to find the TV’s grave, she followed him.

He looked back at himself in the mirror. Above the sink the mirror, above the mirror a row of lightbulbs, above the lightbulbs the ceiling with a brownish stain and sagging drywall. Seeping through it brownish droplets and memories of Kitty. Her face reflected in the drops. “Are they ever going to fix this? You’d better go ask them again. I think that sink in the room above us must have a leaky pipe.”

“Do you remember that crack, Kitty?” Jerome found himself asking aloud. “It dripped in your makeup. You yelled about it for ten minutes. Then you laughed. You laughed.” Then, for the maintenance man who, as it turned out, had just patched the drywall and given the source of the drip not another thought, she baked a plate of cookies and made Jerome show off his trains as entertainment.

The shower and tub. Jerome sat down on the edge of it and sighed. “You used to hum and sing quietly so I wouldn’t hear, but I did hear.”

He walked into the bedroom. A bookshelf with leather bound occupants, a bottle of seashells, wooden black bear bookends, a succulent in a little teacup on a saucer. A pair of slippers under this side of the bed. Floral bedclothes, minimally wrinkled and pulled up neatly over the pillows at the head. Kitty leaning over smoothing out the wrinkles because that’s how Jerome liked it. Kitty laying in bed reading. Kitty looking up at him. “Done with your trains? Are you ready to come to bed? Did you brush your teeth?” “You always asked me the same old questions,” Jerome answered from four years away. “I thought I didn’t like them. You made me help you out of your clothes sometimes. You laughed at how I blushed.” He shook his head. “You tried to teach me. I made you so mad. You yelled that I wasn’t doing it right, but then you laughed about it. You laughed. I forgot how you’d laugh after you were done yelling.”

“How could you do this to these people?” she asked.

“They asked for it.”

“You can deal.”

“I will. My way.” But he knew he couldn’t, couldn’t commit any crime in the home he had shared with her. “We had good times here, didn’t we?” he said, changing the subject. The words were bitter. “Or did I just think you were happy because I was?”

He was startled by a knock on the door. Jerome froze halfway between past and present, halfway between bathroom and dining room. His bag of tools by the door may as well have been a mile away. Had it been half an hour already?

The door swung open. A man in overalls with a tool belt, a step-ladder under his arm. He blinked at Jerome. “Oh. I thought I was on for this one. What are you—?”

Thinking fast, Jerome spoke faster. “Thank goodness you’re here. You’ll have to do it. I can’t fix it.”

The other workman shrugged, setting down his ladder. “Nice stuff they got here. That TV? Takes up, like, the whole wall. Some folks have it all.”

Jerome brushed past the workman and picked up his tool bag and turned to survey the room one last time. “Yes. Some folks have it all.”