Sheyowledonce during transit, a sound that echoed in the hallway with the authority of a critter who wanted the building to know she’d been displaced.
Then his door closed.
I stood in my apartment. It was mine again, a single occupancy, the way it had been before a man with glitter on his collar had knocked on my door three months ago and changed the molecular composition of every room.
My apartment was quiet, but not the good quiet. It was the old quiet, the one I’d lived in for two years, the one that used to feel like peace and that now felt like subtraction or suffocation or some other S word that ended in “-hitty.”
Hiro looked at the door, then looked at me, then looked at the door again.
“He’s across the hall,” I told him. “Twenty-two feet away. You could smell him if you were a hundred years younger and your nose still worked like a dog’s nose should.”
Hiro was not reassured by the measurement. Nor was he pleased at being called old. His eyes were accusations pretending to be irises.
General Tso jumped from the refrigerator, padded to the front door, and sat in front of it with his back to me, facing the exit through which the person who had earned his tolerance haddeparted.
“He’s across the hall,” I told the cat.
General Tso’s tail twitched. The twitch communicated that twenty-two feet was twenty-two feet too many, and that I was personally responsible for his suffering that would surely follow.
I made tea and sat at the island.
The stove light was on.
It was 2 p.m. on a Saturday. Benji had been gone for fourteen minutes.
I lasted until 2:19.
Chapter 31
Benji
The hallway between 4A and 4B was twenty-two feet of beige carpet, a fire extinguisher, and two overhead lights, one of which flickered. Peter had been meaning to report the light to maintenance, but it now served as a navigational beacon marking the midpoint of the journey between our worlds.
He knocked on my door. Nineteen minutes. The man had lasted nineteen minutes.
I opened it in four seconds, which was its own kind of tell, because I’d been standing in my kitchen holding a mug of water I didn’t want in an apartment that was mine again and that felt, after three months of 4B, like wearing shoes that used to fit but were no longer quite right.
“You left this,” he said, holding the mixing bowl.
“I told you to just hang on to it.”
“I know, but I’m returning it. It doesn’t fit in mycabinet without a mixing bowl reorganization, and I haven’t done a reorganization yet.”
“You came across the hall to return a mixing bowl fourteen minutes after I moved out.”
“Nineteen. And the mixing bowl is yours.”
“The mixing bowl has been in your kitchen for three months. It doesn’t know any other kitchen. It’s going to have separation anxiety.”
“Mixing bowls don’t have feelings.”
“This mixing bowl does, and it’s now offended that you see only an inanimate object rather than a fully sentient being capable of so much more than not dribbling milk all over the place. This mixing bowl has emotional significance.”
“Do you want the bowl or not?”
I took the bowl.
He was standing in my doorway in his socks and his evening T-shirt. His eyes were doing the thing they did when his walls were down, moving past me into the apartment that wasn’t his but that he was scanning anyway.
