By Jim Eigo
Lying at the bottom of the breezeway: is that a near-naked body?
I stick my head out my apartment window. “Hello,” I yell at the motionless form some five flights below. “Are you OK?”
From amid the basement-level detritus, the figure stirs and snorts at the air, a freshly landed porpoise, blinking up into a distant sun, even as my eyes work to retrieve—him? I think so—from the pooled gloom at the base of the shaft and its endemic bed of trash.
“Have you lost your apartment?” I ask, then hope I haven’t shamed him. “Or are you on the lam?” I laugh. “What for? Who from?” The echo of my laugh rings hollow.
“Just catching rays,” my neighbor yells back. Yeah, I decide: It’s a guy.
I try not to sound too incredulous when I reply, “Have you tried the roof? We call it ‘tar beach’ for a reason.” Not wanting to sound like I’m disparaging his choice, I soften my remark. “You deserve to be lying on something loftier than a heap of discards,”
My interlocutor laughs with even greater force than he speaks. “Have you tried the roof?” he shoots back.
I tune into the other voices riding the seasonably warm air this afternoon, these from a story above, numerous neighbors celebrating Independence Day under the open city sky, a liberating break from their small, hot apartments, several of them speaking at once, but the whole disparate chorus unable to quite drown out the lone voice from below.
“—oof, oof, oof— ” Even after several seconds, my neighbor’s question still reverberates, up the deep well of heavy summer air, ever more faintly, an acoustic shiver through the wet heat, a shadow of its former challenge, the merest shimmer, sonic mirage.
“Have you given up on us all?” I try to purge my voice of any hurt feelings but fail. So I follow up one question with another and hope I don’t sound like I’m desperate. “Mind if I join you?”
But already, several stories below, the now-mute form appears to have receded more deeply into the murk I was only just beginning to rescue him from. The chatter from the roof above has become an audio canopy; it thickens as the city lumbers through muggy day into muggy evening. Even down here I can smell that the smoke of the burnt meats my neighbors have been sending up in offering to who knows what god, more of it sinking than rising, as more and more debris from the negligent partiers—plastic cups, half-eaten hot dogs, possibly rancid potato salad—drops past me at my window to join the considerable mound of refuse already at the bottom of the shaft and maybe burying the man I am no longer sure is still there. Do I follow him down to find out?
Not quite yet. Still, my downcast eyes try to drill through the deepening dark, well on its way to full black, so full that it’s rising now, a polluted lake, from the base of the airshaft. My eyes make no headway. I can hear that the annual fireworks show above me has begun its serial detonations across the broad electrified sky, but this year I’ll see not a flash of it, focused as I am downward. Funny how, in this now pitch-black, fireworks might be artillery fire, and how the sulfuric stench of its blanket combustion has all-but-snuffed all other odors out.
But not blotted out all other sound. Explosions continue to ramify till they shake the heavens and culminate in an almost painful moment of almost deafening silence. Then all my neighbors on the roof are moved to raise as one a cheer for freedom, a cheer I hear repeated eerily, up and down the city.