Thin Walls

The woman on the ground floor knows the couple upstairs by their feet. Left one’s heavier. Paces when they fight. Right one stands still by the window — she can tell by where the floorboards creak, which is where the radiator is, which is where you’d stand if you were looking out and didn’t want to turn around. They go quiet around ten. She turns her lamp off when they do.

The couple on the second floor don’t know they have an audience. They fight about the window. He opens it. She closes it. He opens it because he can’t breathe. She closes it because the street comes in — the bus, the rain, somebody’s music from a passing car. They love each other in the gaps between the arguments. The gaps are getting shorter but neither of them’s counting.

The man on three works nights. He sleeps through all of it — the fighting and the quiet and the lamp going off below. What wakes him is the pipes. Four-thirty, every afternoon, the building shudders when the heating kicks — a single thud that travels through the bones of it, floor to floor, the way a heartbeat travels through a chest you’re pressed against. He sets his alarm by it. He has never set an alarm.

The fourth floor’s empty. Has been since July. Nobody opens the window. Nobody closes it. The radiator ticks on at four-thirty and ticks off at eleven and in between it warms a room where the only thing that moves is the light crossing the floor from east to west the way it crosses every floor, the way it crosses every room where no one lives, which is the same way it crosses every room where someone does.

The woman on the ground floor turns her lamp off. The couple goes quiet. The man on three sleeps through the thud. The fourth floor ticks.

The building holds.