It began when my downstairs neighbor decided one Sunday to turn up his radio and leave it there. It began when I pounded on the floor, then went to an old man’s apartment and for a long time rang his doorbell, and for good measure knocked loudly, like someone who shouts dramatically, I know you’re in there! Only I wasn’t shouting, and the letter I placed under his door was brief and polite.
The next morning he came upstairs: frail, unshaven—anxious, appearing to make amends, introducing himself as Eddie. But he was unable to recall any whimsical moment when the radio was too loud, asking more than once if I’d file a complaint with the Board, and waving my letter as though it too wished to have a word.
Before he left, I extracted promises, but after a few peaceful days he began to slip back, as the old ones often do, only now he spoke of me as his friend, looking around before he wrote down his unlisted number. By winter I was entrusted with a key—“in case of emergency”—even if the one emergency I had in mind involved his bedroom radio, and its evil twin in the kitchen—old-fashioned, cathedral-style monstrosities, as they both grew steadily louder, meaner, until they took on an overheated, Outer Limits life of their own, somehow overwhelming his attempts at trying to control them. Then I show up, bravely turning each one down as if lowering a kettle’s flame, before I realize that Eddie, my neighbor and new best friend, is nowhere to be found.
It’s those nights, when a middle-aged man, who has moved for what he suspects will be the last time—that man will do what he has to in order to remain content, even if it means writing his furious letters, or hurting himself as he hammers his fist on the floor, or says on the phone unspeakable things—all in the name of peace and quiet.
But I mustn’t blame myself. I prayed that downstairs a silence might occur, so welcome and profound it would demand its own day of observance, and then the next day, and the next. It did. When a week of silence went by it was time to call Gustavo, the building’s super, sharing my suspicions and concerns, and say nothing of radios or an extra key, or the letters of mine which I searched for and took back quietly—all of them, every word.
Grey Sparrow Journal 