I’m Living here goddammit

Nic Guo

The hole in the ceiling began expanding slowly and without indication of where its sojourn might lead. The weekend Rob’s mom drove down to see the new place, it appeared, a series of cracks on an unevenly painted surface. Rob had heard something shatter the night before—now the source of the disturbance was clear, a four-by-four sheet of plaster that lay shattered as if from a kiln, surrounded by a ring of powder. Rob was the sort to value empirical evidence as confirmation of a singular timeline. He felt his anxiety massaged now that he could trace what had generated the noise. Other nights he would be plagued by the sounds of the city past two in the morning. Indistinct voices. The burning of rubber. Three gunshots, maybe fireworks. Fireworks, Rachel had told him, were sometimes used by cops looking to cover up incidents. What incidents, he’d wanted to know, but Rachel could only shake her head. Bits of conversation drifted up to the ninth floor, some of which struck Rob as totally bizarre. They were like snowflakes sucked back up into the sky. Recently he had heard something that sent his mind spinning out of whack: you know, I’ve never worn an intentionally slutty costume.

Rob spent the morning organizing. He moved his muddy boots from the doormat into the closet. He recycled letters from the bank, the university, ConEd, and some receipts from the store. After breakfast, he put the toilet seat down, scrubbed enough mildew from the shower curtain, and waited. 

They arrived with their day bags: a nylon duffel for Vincent and a beaded sling for An Li. Vincent wore tinted glasses, was clean shaven, and had rather wimpy-looking legs in contrast with his imposing torso. An Li was also somewhat big, wavy black hair parting to reveal the center-third of her face. 

“You were supposed to text me,” said Rob. “I would’ve helped bring those up.” 

An Li fried homemade potstickers while Vincent sat at the table. Rob had gone to play tennis at the park with a friend. Vincent stared into the vapor cloud that shrieked off the pan as it drifted up into the ceiling, a mist that hung like the train of a sheer wedding gown. He had to be careful not to let himself get absorbed in dreams. Rob’s father had been the dreaming sort, dreamt himself all the way to Hong Kong, which may as well have been outer space.

“No wonder the ceiling started to peel. Robert’s got to give his super a call.”

“Won’t you?” 

“Do what?”

“Do Rob a favor,” An Li said meaningfully. 

“That wouldn’t be a favor,” said Vincent. He put on his glasses and dug a carton of orange juice out from the fridge. “Have I told you about the oranges my mom used to grow in the orchard? The trick is to scoop all the extra pulp. The stringier, the better.” Vincent took a swig and made a face. “Sugary,” he said. Then, walking over to the sink, he started to add water, stirring with a chopstick, focused on pace and constant direction. It was imprudent to stir things clockwise, then counter—or counter, then clockwise—that could only end poorly. 

By the time An Li had finished frying, Vincent still hadn’t moved from the counter. He’d populated the space with a mishmash of pitchers and cartons, carefully measured levels of orange juice and water. 

“The kid’s got to learn, Annie,” he said. “It’ll be good for him. You’ll see.”

Rob had played three sets of good tennis. His serve, usually erratic, found its mark more often than not, leading to victory over a considerably stronger opponent. The imprint of floodlights still lingered in his vision. Mosquito bites swelled at his ankles and shins. His rotator cuff glowed orange. After tennis, he shook hands with Usman, confirmed next week’s rematch, then went to Rachel’s Midtown apartment. Rachel had been on a conference call. She was two years older and what she lacked in passion she made up for in dedication. Rob sat on the sofa while his girlfriend chatted animatedly with Sutter, Lexington, and Sheryl. He picked up a glass of white wine that had been out when he arrived.

“Rach,” he said, “I don’t feel so good.” The floodlights went on swimming in Rob’s eyes. They expanded and shrank—they turned into wheels and rolled to the back of his head. 

“Why don’t you go, then? I’ll text you in the morning.”

“I think I will.”

“Feel better. I’m going to hop back on this call.”

“See you.”

It was half past eleven when Rob entered the lobby. The doorman, who was in-training, asked him to wait while he retrieved a package that had come. After a few moments had passed and the doorman’s curly head still hadn’t resurfaced, Rob said he would come back tomorrow. 

The apartment lights were off. Not wanting to make any noise, Rob ambled inside using the walls and furniture as guideposts. He’d seen the doorman coming out of the music school, hoisting a case with brass hooks. He worked the late and early shifts; anytime Rob went out with friends only to return at three, four in the morning, he would stalk past the musician/doorman and manage a sheepish goodnight. Rob looked at the guest bedroom. It was boxed in by a vinyl wall used to convert one-beds to two-beds. The apartment was too small to sustain three people. He walked to the fridge and was instantly assuaged by the electric frost. Took a carton of OJ and brought it to the table. Behind a gauzy curtain, Rob watched shapes in the neighboring apartment twitch and flicker. Poured himself a glass and inched the curtain open, bit by bit, appreciating the clarity and utility behind each of these small, discrete actions. Clink. Swish.

The curtain gave way to reveal a woman. Rob had his nose up to the glass. Flecks of dust and fingerprint stains like bacteria in a petri dish. There was an oak table by the opposing window, the sill lined with wine bottles that housed soft amber lights. The woman was saying something. She wore a sage green camisole under a cardigan. Rob took a sip of his watered-down juice. Looked at his glass curiously and went on watching. 

“You slept all morning,” said An Li. Her son had come into the living room where she and Vincent had made themselves comfortable. She gestured for him to sit.

“What’s he doing?” Rob asked. Vincent was on the ground, poking at the entrails of Rob’s ceiling. 

“Didn’t I tell you that Vincent studies Neolithic settlements?” Rob shook his head no. “Apparently the patterns of the plaster are a bit like the oracle bones used in the Sui dynasty. He’s practicing.” Rob observed Vincent spread out on the floor. The “bones” were nothing but plaster and dust. An Li was a health insurance agent and had suffered two bouts of skin cancer by the time she turned fifty. She could do with a little stability in her life. Rob understood and forgave that. It made him feel good to forgive it.

“Do you two have plans for the day?” Rob would have preferred all adults to be occupied people. He felt that tension stemmed from an abundance of rest and inaction. 

“I think I’ll read,” said An Li.

“This’ll take awhile,” said Vincent, over his shoulder. 

For Rob, these last few months had been a spot of unprecedented freedom, having completed most of his credits the previous semester. He walked to the park and read his book, A Treatise on Two Colors. A dozen pages in and he’d become a nesting ground for small burrs, inchworms and aphids. Bits of gravel filled in the empty spaces of his sneakers. He stopped by the courts to see who was playing—nobody he recognized. He thought he’d surprise Rachel, who was undoubtedly hard at work. It was a muggy kind of hot; the air was steel wool and his lungs cotton. The porter at Rachel’s building didn’t register Rob’s arrival. He was playing gospel music from his cellphone and reading an article with a picture of Macron. It was a relief to encounter someone who kept to himself. Not like Rob’s doorman, who had started giving Rob funny looks when he came in from the street. Rob rode the elevator with an elderly couple who asked him where he’d come from. “The park,” he answered. “Ah, the park,” they chorused. Rob offered to walk their groceries in, but they declined. 

Rob stood at Rachel’s door. Light seeped out from underneath. He heard the shower running, a flurry of clawed footsteps—Rachel’s dog, Lemon—and Rachel singing in an unsustainable falsetto. After a while Rob got tired of waiting and left. He felt slighted even though he had showed up unannounced. 

Vincent had cordoned off a section of fallen debris in the kitchen with masking tape. He worked with just the stove light switched on. Vincent taught night school at SUNY. His regular class, Neo-Confucianism, had recently seen an uptick in registration, maybe in relation to the Stop Asian Hate movement. This presented its own challenges, because with interest came scrutiny, especially from department heads, but also from students with an agenda, with a thirst for social justice but lacking the intellectual capacity to make good on it. Spread out across his thirties and forties, Vincent had spent a cumulative decade in Beijing with stints in Shangrao and Taipei. And when he decided that the Party was growing a bit too powerful, he’d retreated to New Jersey, where he’d met Annie at a mixer for single forty-somethings. Speaking of Annie, where had she gone? Vincent had woken up to find the other side of the bed empty. He’d gotten started without breakfast, without brushing his teeth, without washing his face, which ached in a specific area behind the left side of his jaw. He hadn’t told Annie, but he was thinking about quitting. Shawn—Professor Shao—had gotten a veritable bounty of gifts at the close of last term. Shawn was about a decade younger than Vincent and had been born in China. He was tall; his outfits consisted of woolen shawl-collared sweaters, tapered pants and Birkenstocks. Shawn's stock had risen dramatically since going on hunger strike in solidarity with the Ukrainian Student Society. That week his cheekbones had somehow gotten sharper. A yellow-blue pin flashed off his gabardine lapel. 

The bones were coming along. Vincent did not know what he was doing, really. The truth was that the Neolithic settlements he studied had gone extinct for a reason. There was no hope for civilizations governed by omens and premonitions. And while the records showed all sorts of animal bones and turtle shells exhumed and divined, the precise methodology had been lost to time. So Vincent had resorted to a rather primitive and intuitive reading, finding shapes in the cracks on the ceiling. Lying on the scratched wooden floors of Rob’s apartment, so far Vincent had divined the following: baby in cradle, hurricane eye, mousetrap without cheese (or mouse), and boat without sail. 

An Li walked through an unfamiliar neighborhood. She thought an ex might’ve lived in one of the buildings she passed. She’d risen before the sun and spent the morning hunting ants in Rob’s apartment, trying to track their means of ingress. They made her think of an installation she’d seen, where a woman had traced the paths of ants crawling over a sheet of blank paper. There was no pattern to be discerned. It was more about the woman than the ants—she wanted to be praised for the attention she paid to these trivial, chemically-piloted bugs. An Li realized she didn’t give a shit about Vincent’s bones. By the time she had tracked the ants to a gap in the bathroom outlet, the sun had started to dawn and the ice cubes in her OJ had turned to U-shaped floes. She awaited the inevitable conversation with Rob, when he would confront her about her choice to remarry. 

I don’t understand why you’re with him. Are you lonely?

Can’t you see you’ve married a hack? The bones don’t say anything. He’s like a fool who sees his own reflection and laughs at it. 

She heard Vincent start to stir. Quickly, she gathered her things and exited the apartment.

An Li and Vincent left on Saturday to leave time to recover before work. Every morning the bones changed. At first, Vincent texted daily for photo updates. Then the texts started coming less and less frequently, until there was nothing. Rob went on seeing Rachel even though their relationship was bleeding out. Once he had been near her building and saw a curly-haired boy with a swimmer’s body on the fire escape. He couldn’t blame her; he had been eyeing the cashier at the Asian market. Sometimes he asked about her day. Sometimes he tried to make her laugh. Things went on as usual. Classes started again. A few weeks before graduation, Rob and Rachel called it quits. They took a walk in the park. Rob was jovial; Rachel forgot about work. They laughed about the aphids in Rachel’s hair. They each wished each other luck and promised to remain in contact. An Li and Vincent were set to return for commencement. Vincent, who last time had bagged some of the bones for further research, told Rob over the phone he was excited to share the fruits of his research. This time there would be answers. 

The evening before An Li and Vincent were set to return, Rob took stock of the hole in the ceiling. The main difference was that it turned various shades of coffee and cream. Its territory had also grown considerably—where before it had occupied a small section over the stove, it now hung over the sink, the stove, and part of the dish rack. Rob had the good sense to knock loose pieces down with a mop handle. Initially Vincent had requested that Rob leave the rubble as it landed for the sake of preserving integrity. “I’m living here goddammit,” Rob had replied.

His neighbor’s curtains were pulled shut. The darkness turned them opaque. Rob could not see down into the street. He was on the ninth floor, after all. The next step was to get a job, he supposed. How dark it was from his little porthole in the dreadnought that was the city. A glass of OJ was set out on the table and yet another in a long line of ring-shaped water stains had appeared. Rob had just stocked the fridge; it was about the only thing he knew about Vincent, that he liked OJ. He caught himself studying the overlapping rings that were no different from the hole in the ceiling. The neighbors were talking. Fireworks slithered and popped in the distance.

Nic Guo has published work in Oyster River Pages and was a runner-up for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and currently lives in San Francisco, where he practices workers’ rights law.