CHAPTER 1: RECLUSE

...moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1843)

It is the dead of winter: 4:30 a.m. Again. My apartment window is open because the heat in this tiny 20x15 studio is stifling and the chill air I am trying to usher in is like water in a desert. I keep the pleated fabric blinds almost all the way down to the window sills because as a young teen a neighbor, I believe, watched me maybe nightly through my bedroom window for I do not know how long. I told my parents, but they did not believe me. Then, one day, trembling, excited, angry, I pointed out the knob of tree stump there behind the bushes, pushed right up against the house directly beneath my window. The shoe prints in the powdery dirt there were large. Clearly a man’s. Spent cigarettes frayed to pulp by the weather lay half buried in the dirt. A nice fresh one, 3/4 smoked, was lying there as well. That was a long time ago.

The baseboard radiators crack and pop all night on three of four walls of my apartment--when the old fashioned overhead light is on, I can practically see the air shimmer with rising heat like it shimmers each July when it rises from the sun baked street--so much heat for such a tiny space. But it is not July. It is February. The coldest month of the season here in the Northeast. I cannot breath. I feel like I might suffocate. I wake up gasping like a fish on a sun baked dock.

What were the builders of this apartment building thinking? It is state subsidized housing. Why can't the superintendent fix the boiler? Surely the cost of running this place is as high as it is because the heating system is inefficient. Because maybe the thermostat is broken. Or the insulation is insufficient. Or something. But the superintendent is old and apparently content with things as they are. Or is maybe just lazy. Or reluctant to change. A lot of people can’t change Or reluctant to inquire. Apathetic about possibilities and will not ask questions. He will not open a can of worms. (He refers to all problems as cans of worms that he would rather not touch.) Even when it might be to his benefit. I just do not understand that mentality.

Dusk comes early now. As early as 4 p.m. In those hours of darkness after dusk and before the Cardinals and Nuthatches start their chatter, I sit here night after night and just listen. I am on the first floor. I prefer an upper floor. I asked for one. But this was the only space that was available on such short notice. I joke to myself that I hear everything, so perceptive I am. So on alert. I hear animals creeping across the snow, their little feet breaking through the hard iced over surface with a crunch. I hear their every movement through my open window. The night air is so still, I practically hear them breath. Every crunch of a leaf or crackling twig makes my muscles tense. My jaw tightens and I hold my breath and wait. I like to think that I am not this preoccupied. How I fool myself! I am absolutely vigilant.

I hear each footstep on this neighborhood road, sometimes laughter or whispers. Mostly from strangers, teenagers, or occasionally residents of this shelter, walking together in twos or threes to what we have been calling the drug house just down the hill on the same side of the street as us. The young ones are the kind of edgy kids we never used to see on this side of town. A drug house was pretty much unheard of here. But the East Side has become a little run down over the years. Mostly since Main Street went to shambles and the businesses moved out.

Daytime mostly, I sometimes hear screams, but they are not from the kids. I hear the corpulent husband of the pale bedraggled woman three doors down back over by the woods berate his wife in his scratchy, low life voice. Yes, I have gotten a glimpse of them both. Sometimes in so many words he lets her know that dinner sucks or like some selfish idiot she smoked his last cigarette and now he’s out, or maybe he yells out of habit for no reason at all. His voice is a raspy grunt that is difficult to follow, but you get the idea pretty fast.

"Get away from me," she says. I imagine her pushing him away, backing through the dining room maybe into the kitchen. "Get off of me! Leave me the fuck alone, you bastard!"

She repeats it again and again. I can tell from her voice she is crying now. He probably has her pinned against some nicotine yellowed floral couch, his fat greasy bulk on her thin chest. Maybe she can’t breath. I want to go over there. Call the police. Pull him off. Send him away. And then sit her down, tell her She is worth something. But it is not that easy. It takes years to get that kind of abusive low life crap out of your head.

I do not hear them every day, or even every week. (I am not even sure if my housemates are aware of them. I think I am just fine tuned to that kind of chaos.) They fight a few times a month maybe. My windows are open all year and the sound travels. I imagine it's worse in the summer, when their windows are open. God knows how often he harasses her. And each time my adrenalin pumps like it is the first time I am hearing him, hearing them, and it is all I can do to stay put. It completely unnerves me.

I hear the branches of shrubs scratch against the wooden siding of this worn safe house every night. Of course it is worse when it is windy. That is when they sound like bony claws picking at the curls of old paint. I am usually just sitting here in my sweats in my uncomfortable hand me down kitchen chair with the fraying grass seat staring at this computer (thank god for this computer): reading email, blogs, or looking at art on the internet, my link to the living. I check to see if she has been released from jail yet. I want to know when to run.

I know how to fill my time. I know how to make use of it. I always have. Left with too much idle time I start to panic. I know how to get lost in books too. And there are a lot of books downstairs in the common room. Mostly romances, but I have seen a few juicy reads tucked between those paperbacks as well. But I do not get too lost. Not so lost that I lose awareness. I am always aware.