But he needed to model for Ruby the soul-widening power of a single exhalation, the way it might make even their cramped, dark living room seem expansive, empty. Lily’s apartment was empty now. A vision drifted into Martin’s mind: Lily standing in 5A as a ghost. Her skin was as blue as when he’d found her, but her lined face had become a new smooth fabric. This Ghost Lily spun around inside what had been her apartment, her eyes widening as she registered the changes. Her home, 5A, all torn up, in the middle of a total renovation, a gut job. Her home, 5A, the victim of her despised free market. The furniture gone. The floorboards ripped away.
These days the apartments in this building were often gutted as soon as a long-term tenant moved out or died. The building was almost a hundred years old—prewar, the Realtors liked to say in hushed, incantatory tones. New tenants praised the character of the building’s brick and limestone façade, lauded the attention to detail found in the scrollwork on the columns beneath the front awning. But they were increasingly eager to rip up the building’s insides, the black-and-white bathroom tiles, the cramped kitchens. They usually preserved just enough original details to claim the apartment still had “prewar accents,” which would help if they decided to sell the place down the line.
When Martin had first started out as a super in this building, a little over twenty-five years ago, the tenants had had more money than him, but the majority didn’t have that much more. There were schoolteachers, musicians, pharmacists, guys with union jobs. That wasn’t to say there weren’t still assholes to contend with. Always in Manhattan, always everywhere, there were plenty of assholes to contend with. But over time, there’d been a kind of evolution in what an empty apartment meant to Martin. Once it had represented a potential home for a potential asshole. Now it represented a potential investment property for a sure-thing asshole.
Ruby wouldn’t like that thought. She had told him, when she was still in college and deep in her literature classes, that he should never generalize, shouldn’t call the tenants assholes in a group like that, they were individuals, each with their own history of loss and trauma, they had actual names, they weren’t just their apartment numbers. Martin had tried to explain that she wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t figured out for himself. He was aware that just as his full humanness didn’t register with all the tenants, theirs didn’t always register with him, despite the fact that he often had to deal with their anxious phone calls and their bags of garbage and sometimes, when the plumber was running late, their literal shit. But trying to think about what personal history of loss and trauma might cause a tenant to scream at him for failing to change a light bulb in the lobby right away was, frankly, beyond Martin’s paygrade. Sometimes people just behaved badly because they had the power to behave badly. And every year, the tenants behaved worse, it seemed. When he first became the building super, a couple of guys in the building had always helped Martin shovel the sidewalk during blizzards, no questions asked. This past winter, though he had only gotten grayer and his back had only gotten worse, nobody had once offered to help him shovel when it snowed.
Still, why whine? The building had never been a utopia and things always changed. People, storefronts, cities. Even the dioramas and animal models in the Museum of Natural History changed, became more interactive or accurate or whatever—Ruby once told him the museum people had added a belly button to the blue whale. The only thing that didn’t change were the old men like Martin whining about how things were always changing. That was why he should be focusing on meditation. In meditation, you created a home out of constant change. You lived in the moment, which meant there was no past and no future and, in a way, no death.
Yet only in a way. Because Lily was dead. It had been sad when the other rent-controlled tenants had died, but Martin hadn’t been nearly as close to any of them as he had been to Lily. Which was maybe why he was having this vision now of Ghost Lily spinning around in her apartment, spinning faster and faster, and did Ghost Lily know that Martin had helped move out the furniture, his back stooped under the weight of her favorite sofa? Did she know that Martin himself had let in the demo crews?
The vision did not stop there. After surveying her destroyed apartment, Ghost Lily swooped vengefully from 5A down through a long-defunct dumbwaiter shaft, zooming her spirit self past strata of primordial linoleum, ancient concrete, steel beams, the wire mesh for plastered walls, the entrails of deteriorating doorbell cables, an abandoned gas main that had supplied the residents’ lamps before the building got electric lights—until she reached the basement apartment and shouted at Martin’s gray head, in her chirpiest tone, “And then the super woke up!”
And Martin woke up. He’d fallen asleep. Heat rose to his face. Had Ruby noticed his less-than-mindful dozing? Her wide forehead was a little sweaty, her hair a tangled whirl. Thankfully, her eyes were still closed.
This wasn’t his first Lily-is-back moment. Over the past few days, Martin had begun to hear her voice in his head—commercial bubbliness with an edge of mockery. Yesterday when he was putting out rattraps, she had said, Martin creeps toward the glue traps under the kitchen sink. Those suckers will catch a rat easy as one, two, three! When she was still alive, any time Martin had gone to 5A to plunge the toilet or fix drains, Lily had narrated his actions. She used the same tone she had deployed as a voice-over actress to sell laundry detergent decades ago, in what she called the foreign country of her youth. “Martin leans over the drain and scoops out, oh, is that a sparkling clump of wet hair?” “The new rattrap Martin’s installing snaps into place just like that! Those cute diseased critters won’t know what hit ’em!” “Martin mops the Gatorade off the floor with not just the vim but the vigor required of a middle-aged man living in late-stage capitalism!”
For a full twenty years, he had lived with this, an old woman making fun of him. After Lily’s death late last year, a silence descended.
But since Ruby had returned to the building, Lily was back in his head. Her voice didn’t show up all the time, just once or twice over the course of a day, when, in quiet moments, he’d hear her saying things like, Martin is marching forward into the chilly morning, he’s sweeping up the mouse droppings like a man with a plan! It made him feel a little crazy (why was his mind calling forth Lily’s voice?), a little haunted (was this voice actually Lily, somehow, séancing in his brain, or was it all a big grief-fueled hallucination?), and also a little wonderful (because it was Lily, Lily who was dead, practically present again).
A few days earlier, Billy the Exterminator was at the building. Martin had asked him, “Do you ever have dreams about the animals you’ve seen dead at work? Or visions? Or, um, auditory hallucinations?”
“They’re not animals,” Billy the Exterminator said. He was a small tight-muscled Italian man from Sheepshead Bay, in his early fifties, just a few years younger than Martin. “You got that? They’re not animals I’ve killed. They’re pests.”
“Okay, fine. You ever have bad dreams about pests?”