You may remember that I have taken up residence in a small
home in the town of Teaneck. It is next to a middle school and a turtle
conservatory of which I have grown overly found. The town is peaceful and the
nights are quiet. This subdued atmosphere however does not carry into the home
in which I am resident.
I now like with three other people. Without exception they
are all mad. Let us begin with the most humorous of the trio.
“They call me ‘The Rat’” were his first words to me. The
fat, heavily bearded, sharp toothed, Saudi Arabian man that was sitting in my
living room thought not to give me his name or extend his hand in greeting;
rather he offered a decidedly unflattering nickname and an unbalanced smile
while he continued to scratch his balls. This could have been our only
interaction I would have known enough about the man. My expression of surprise
must not have been well hid for he went on to explain the origin of this title.
“You see, in college, in the dorm, I would become very hungry, and at night I
would awaken and scrounge about for food, collecting in my bed and eating for
sometime before falling back asleep…like a rat!” The Rat looked at me
expectantly, perhaps waiting for a laugh, I let my cocked eyebrows relax and
said “So it is, it’s nice to meet The Rat” and turned upstairs to lock up all
my food.
The first few nights living with the rat were unremarkable
but then the nightly grumblings began. I would just finishing my reading and
having had a long day of work and class was half between dreams and wakefulness
when I would hear a long sigh erupt from The Rat’s room, or hole as he might
have called it. There would follow a period of between 40 and 50 minutes of his
stomping around, moving boxes and furniture, with a desperation that was
reminiscent of a beast in its final moments. The door you fling open and The
Rat would go vaulting down the steps, the sighing becoming more of moan. The
lights crept in under my door and the shadows of his movements danced on my walls.
I heard the refrigerator door thrown open and its contents assaulted. This
would go one for a period of minutes and then quietly all the passion gone The
Rat would stumble back up the stair and into his room. When the dawn came the
only evidence of the raid that had occurred were a misplaced bag of cheetos
forgotten on the stairs.
The resident in absencia is apparently named Brian. Although
only having meet him twice in the 6 months we have both been living there I
really have no proof of that. Brian lives in the basement and apparently
designs suitcases. One might consider Brian to be in these matters a relatively
normal renter; however, Brian is also subject to some rather strange
circumstance. To start, Brian is married. He has a wife and she lives just down
the street. She lives alone in a big house. Why does Brian not live with his
wife? No one knows. Brian also takes phone calls in the middle of the night
beneath my window in which he discusses rather interesting things; the “moving”
of things, the “purity”, and the “price” of these things without ever naming
the things. Brian also never comes upstairs or is in the kitchen despite not
having any access to a fridge or a stove in his basement. In fact Brian is
never anywhere but under my window smoking a “cigarette” or in the basement. In
fact The Rat has never even seen Brian. It is very possible Brian may not even
be real.
Finally we arrive at the master of this house, Olga. One day
upon returning home from week I realized that my room was absolutely frigid. I
saw that the heat was turned off. I assumed I must have mistakenly left it off
and fixed it and went on with my day. This would have been unremarkable except
this happened everyday for the next week. Now, some nights I come home pretty
late because of my class schedule and it is difficult to sleep in a glorified
ice box so I thought I must get to the bottom of this. The next day that I left
I placed a small rubber ball just behind my closed door so that if it were to
be opened it would be struck and sent to the other side of the room. Sure
enough upon returning home I saw the ball underneath my desk nowhere near where
I had left it and the heat turned all the way off. It was clear from this that
Olga (The Rat had not moved in yet and Brian leaves and arrives earlier and
later than I do) was sneaking into my room every day after I had left and was
turning off my heat. This is in and of itself is not a terrible thing. It is an
invasion of my privacy and it is rather annoying but Olga was also charging me
$50 extra dollars for heat during the winter. Heat that I was never getting to
enjoy! What a scam she was running! Ah but I out smarted her. For the Rat’s
room was still vacant. So every day before I left I would go across the hall
and turn the heat all the way up and leave both doors wide open. Thereby I
would suck all the out of the Rat’s future room and find myself nice a cozy
despite the treachery of Olga.
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