The Building Manager's Lament

by

Greg Rock

The first floor apartments were flooding again, rust-colored water spurting from every faucet like a minor plague.  The noise roused David Lissoneux from bed, whereupon his toes found the squish of wet carpet.  Despite the polished exterior of the apartment complex, everyone inside knew the truth.  The place was falling apart.  This had been the case long before his tenure as building manager.

But everyone blamed him anyway.

He tried fiddling with the basement valves, but really had no idea which did what.  Some of the first floor tenants had already come out to complain.  Angry faces in hastily assembled pajamas, bathrobes.  He told them a voicemail had been left with the plumber who was unlikely to arrive until morning.  Most simply grumbled and shuffled back to bed.  They had work in the morning, and what could they do besides give hard looks.  Most could be counted on to be amicable in that passive-aggressive manner.

Except, of course, Mr. Muniz.

David paused before that door. Apartment one zero three.

Mr. Muniz was the only tenant who preceded David’s arrival as building manager.  Not even Tobin Langford, the owner, who lived on the fourth floor, could recall when the old man had moved in.  David rarely saw him leave his apartment except to sign for a weekly delivery of Old Crow, or extinguish his cigarettes in the dirt of the decorative ferns.  The undeniable stench of wet dog lingered in the area around his door. The building didn’t allow pets.

David knocked. Mr. Muniz appeared in soiled evening wear, t-shirt, and boxers.  His yellowing feet and grim toenails were soaking wet.  White hairs crawled from his nose and ears in absurdly long curls.

David explained about the plumber.  Somehow the blankness of Mr. Muniz bespoke mighty rage.  He gripped an old-looking glass with an etched flowery design.  Inside sloshed copper-colored liquid.  Hard liquor, no doubt.  His teeth seemed arranged by bar fights and unlucky breeding, some sharpened into tiny nubs, most missing.

When David had finished explaining about the plumber, Mr. Muniz puckered his lips and spoke.   “Yaarg fucking useless,” was  all he said.  He often welded words like a profane metallurgist.

“There’s no call for that language,” said David.

Mr. Muniz sneered.   “Issndere?  Issndere call when you can’t stop this place from flooding.  Oraaargwe gonna float down Oyster avenue.  Aargwe a cruise line now?”

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said, trying to keep it civil.

“Yaarg a useless queerface,” spat Mr. Muniz, slamming the door in his face

David walked away, face flushed, invisible rage needles nicking his neck.  He didn’t understand that kind of behavior.  Did Mr. Muniz think calling him names would somehow enhance his managerial capabilities and/or cease the flowing of rust-colored water?

He returned to his apartment and checked on Huey Lewis safely asleep in his terrarium, pebbled skin glowing under the heat lamp.  Iguanas didn’t officially count as pets.  They weren’t messy or loud, and their hair didn’t stick to the furniture.  The reptile had a quiet dignity, which he loved.  Besides there was no way he could have left him behind.

Huey Lewis was the unofficial centerpiece of his apartment’s southwestern motif.  Augmenting the look were two Cacti that sat in beside his stereo speakers and glazed bowls from his day-trip to an Indian Reservation.  His wallpaper was the color of Monument Valley at sunset.

David rested on the harpsichord bench, all four stories and forty apartments of the place weighing on his legs.  There was something incredibly tiring about the building, and it wasn’t just his job.  Each week new faces arrived carrying old wine boxes packed with compact discs, enthusiasm.  Those vacating crawled away in the night, leaving stained mattresses, autopsied sofas.  The building was a wayfaring station.  Most tenants stayed only a few months, a year at most.

Except, of course, Mr. Muniz.

To them, his job probably looked easy.  It had to him, at first.

Before this, he had been part-owner and operater of the Scottsboro Reptile Kingdom, which had gone under on account of poor publicity.  The animals all had to be sold to zoos and pet shops.  But there wasn’t enough time.  Some of them had to be disposed of quickly.  He had taken responsibility, clubbed several toads into a smear of green and red behind the snack shop.

Those noble creatures followed a cycle.  People were different.  Troubles came at you twenty-four seven, and without fair warning.  It certainly didn’t help that nothing in the building had been built to last.  Bathroom fixtures made of thin aluminum.  Non-working fireplaces still managed to leak gas.  In the past month the laundry room had twice caught fire.

Of course, everyone blamed him.  Not the owner or those fly-by-night Ecuadoran construction crews.  The baby harpsichord reflected his tired eyes.  Sleep wasn’t coming.  He tickled out a few blind notes, hoping for a melody.

Someone knocked at the door.  Hard angry raps.  Then the unmistakable voice.  “I know yaarg in there.”  Mr. Muniz stood outside, still gripping the flowery glass, further down his road to inebriation.  “My fucking water is soakith carpet.  I need carpet steamers.”

“I know,” he said.  “Tomorrow.”

“No. Steam it now.”

“Pardon?”

“Steamit now, queerface.”

Enough was enough.  David pushed the door, but Mr. Muniz wrapped his butcher’s fingers around his throat, his breath toxic as roofing tar.

“Yaarg dead, Queerface.”

David knocked Mr. Muniz into the larger of the two cacti.  The old man growled in pain, and snatched a corkscrew from the faux marble kitchen top.  Besides the labored breathing of both, the only sound was the squish of wet carpet.  Mr. Muniz charged forward with a murderous yelp.

David dodged, and his shin bit the hard edge of a glass coffee table.  The pain shot through his entire body, and he knocked an accidental elbow into the old man.

Mr. Muniz stood there, dumbfounded, corkscrew buried to the hilt in his chest, dark blood slowly gooping onto wet carpet.

Raw terror seized David.

“Yaarg,” croaked Mr. Muniz, “fucking steam clean.”

Then he collapsed, dropping right through the coffee table, sending it to pieces.

Then, with a great big gurgle, the flooding stopped.

David stood shock still.

The old man twitched a little.  Dead.  Or good as.

A helicopter shuddered overhead, snapping David back to the now.

He rushed to shut the door.  It was self-defense, clearly.  The old nose-haired freak had lunged at him with a deadly weapon.  He hadn’t even touched the guy.  It was just one of those things.  Random acts you hear about on the local news.  The police would understand.  They were known for their understanding.  He picked up the phone to call them.  But his fingers seized up.

The shining operator voice came on, and he hung up, frightened.

Prostrate on the floor Mr. Muniz looked old and weak, incapable of slicing a tuna fish sandwich, much less a man.

The police would ask questions.  He had a New Mexico bench warrant, sworn out years ago for illegal animal possession.  A komodo dragon he’d been keeping in his bathtub.  It was shortly after that, he had lit out for Scottsboro, started over.  He was tired of starting over.  But even if he could prove self-defense, Tobin would certainly frown upon the killing of a tenant.  David would be fired.  No respectable reptile zoo would touch him.  Forget about securing a bank loan to re-launch the Scottsboro Reptile Kingdom.  Huey Lewis would lose his terrarium, his heat lamp.

David felt his panic blossom. He would lose everything.

A knock came at the door.  Then another.

He threw his Aztec-design shawl over Mr. Muniz, screaming across the living room. “Who?”

“Plumber,” said the small voice behind the door, “Esteban. Plumber.”

David took a moment before opening up.  The diminutive Esteban stood there with his toolbox, and the sour expression of someone awoken at four in the morning.  “Where is the problem?”

It took half a second for him to remember.  “The flooding.”

“Yes.  You said emergency?”

“It stopped.”

Esteban’s voice went up a full octave in confusion. “It stop?”

“Yes.  So you actually don’t need to come down.  Didn’t need to.”

Esteban coughed, annoyed.  “But I am down.”

“I know,” he said, “I know that.  I’m looking right at you.”

“Why did you say emergency?”

“It was an emergency.  At the moment I called, it was.”

“Emergency means big problem.”

“I know what it means.  And it was.  At the time it was.”

The plumber eyed him with suspicion for a long drawn-out moment, craning his neck to look inside the apartment.  There was no reason he should want to look inside.

David closed the door, slow enough to watch the anger flare up in Esteban’s green eyes.  Wonderful.  He’d made another enemy for life.  With his back against the door, he listened to the plumber’s footsteps fade down the hallway.

He sat on the couch, untangling spaghetti thoughts.  At least the body had ceased twitching.  The situation came into focus.  Mr. Muniz was dead, and that was regrettable.  But the man had no family.  No friends or visitors.  He was just a busted down old man that had tried to kill him.  No reason David should let this incident ruin his life.

First thing first, he would need to disappear the body from his apartment.  This place was too exposed, too many angry tenants traipsing to his door at all hours.  He had to stash Mr. Muniz somewhere more secure for the time being.  The basement would do fine.  But to do that the body needed more than an Aztec throw-shawl.  From the closet he grabbed an unopened Frida Kahlo bed set.  A birthday gift from mother.

Mr. Muniz was flecked with wet carpet fibers, and shards from the glass coffee table.  All kinds of incriminating apartment debris.  Could they match carpet fibers to his apartment?  With numbed fingertips, he picked individual strands from Mr. Muniz’s face.  The man’s eyes were closed, thank god.  He didn’t need to stare into that particular abyss.  Then a moment of clarity.  Here he was sitting next to a dead body, picking off carpet fibers one by one, practically begging to be caught.  He shook the dust mites from his skull.

Conveyance.  He needed something to carry Mr. Muniz down to the basement.  A supermarket cart had been lying abandoned in the alley behind the building.  He went outside, and carried the unwieldy cart up the stairs, and into his apartment, wheezing like a faulty suction pump.

The Frida Kahlo self-portrait bed sheet covered the body nicely.  Fitting a full-sized man into the front of the cart required extreme folding of limbs, bending of stiff elbows.  Even after that, the body retained the hard-to-mistake outline of a human being.  He threw the Aztec throw shawl over, and studied it from a distance.

This would have to do.

The cart wheels rattled like hell, booming in the atrium.  He jabbed at the elevator button, and the orange light bloomed, gears kicked in cavernous ducts, bringing the car up.  The doors startled open.  Someone was inside.  A young woman in a nightclubbing outfit, flesh bubbling over the crest of her tube top.  He knew her, though not by name.  She lived on four, and went out every other night.  She was friends with Tobin, the owner, and her business was her business.  He wheeled in the cart, and gave her a curt nod as the doors rolled shut.

She gestured to the button panel.  “What floor?”

“Basement,” he coughed.

“Oh, I’m going up.”

He noticed the four button already lit.  She hit the circle marked B, smiled. “Looks like you’re in for a ride.”

He gave her a tired smile. In no mood for that sort of thing.

She smiled back, chatty, probably wired on something.  “Working late, huh?”

“Plumbing crisis,” he said.

Her eyes seemed to keep flitting to the cart.

“My rug,” he said by way of explanation.  “I’m taking it downstairs.”

She nodded as if confused as to why he had brought up his rug.  She probably hadn’t been wondering about it at all.  The elevator jolted to a stop.  Something wiggled loose from the folds of the sheet and clanked to the floor.

It was the corkscrew, slicked with blood.

“Whoops,” she said, “too much wine tonight?”

He said nothing, and scooped the corkscrew behind his back.

“Me too.”  She mimed drinking from a bottle.  “Glug, glug, right.”

“Glug, glug,” he said, so as not to appear strange or distant.

The doors had not yet opened.  The elevator was like that.  Slow.

“This place is falling apart,” she whistled.

The phrase that burned through his ear like a fiery cotton swab.

“GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK,” he screamed.

She backed into the corner, which in the cramped space wasn’t far. “Jesus,” she whispered. “What’s your deal?”

He began to apologize, but the doors finally opened.  She hurried to her apartment, as if worried he might bash in her skull.  Now he’d done it.  Now he’d really done it.

The doors shut.  Now began the downward trajectory.

The white concrete basement was choked with antiques.  Items he dreamed of unloading at weekend flea markets and road shows.  Tobin had warned him about using the space for personal storage, but no one came down here.  It was cramped, and smelled of leaked oil.  No interest to anyone but the arachnids.

He wheeled the cart with Mr. Muniz between a roll top desk and a hand painted sign for “Fresh Peaches. Ten Cents a Bushel.”  Tomorrow he would drive the body out to the desert.  But here within the future yard sale, would have to do for now.

David moved to shut the light when he heard that familiar welder’s diction muffled under the bed sheet, making a ripple in Frida’s slight mustache.  “Yarrg motherfucker, yarrg queerface.

Mr. Muniz wasn’t dead.

Probably the simplest thing would have been to leave the room in darkness, retreat back to his apartment where he would try to sleep, or watch Huey Lewis while playing a peaceful fugue, lulling himself to a state of forgetfulness.

But the bed sheet continued to ripple.  “Yarrg queerface.  Gemme outta here.”

Maybe it was all that whiskey pumping though Mr. Muniz’s heart.  The old man was either too pickled or too stupid to know he was dead.  Both maybe.

“Shut it,” he said.  “Just shut your mouth.”

“Yaarg fucking fuck.  Lemutta here.”

“Shut your mouth.  You’re dead.”

“I’m alive yaarg ugly queerface.  Gemmeauddadis.”

David picked up a block of wood, the broken leg of an old nightstand he’d planned on re-sanding.  He held it high above his head, threatening, before realizing Mr. Muniz probably couldn’t see him.  He dropped it lower.  “If I call the ambulance,” he said, “what are you going to say?”

The almost dead man went silent.  You could hear cars squeal outside.  Drunk motorists letting loose on dark streets, feeling horse-powered and invincible.

Finally the bedsheet rustled.  “I’ll tell them that yaarg tried to kill me, queerface.”

David brought the leg down several times with adequate force.  He heard nothing but the rush of fluid in his ears.  The corkscrew went within the folds of the Frida sheet.

Tomorrow, the desert.

Back at the apartment, David slept hard.  His dreams were about the murder in different settings, and permutations.  In one version, Mr. Muniz was his ancient mother, and the apartment was the karaoke bar on Third.  Onstage, they grappled for the microphone, and the right to sing a song, someone spilled wine.

He awoke early, and knew nothing would get him back to sleep.  Thoughts of what he had done and who he was, a murderer twice over, immobilized him.  His stomach felt like a cement mixer, his bowels moved in liquid form.  He wrapped himself in his blanket and moved over to the harpsichord, bowing his head to the keys.  Too tired to wring a melody from his diseased head and aching body.  Too tired to think about the drive into the desert.

“Yaargh.”

At first he thought his mind had gone. But the sound came again, unmistakable.

“Yaargh.”

He threw off the blanket, searching for the source.

“Yaargh.”

The central air vent carried noise from all over the building.  Each time someone threw a party, every apartment was provided a soundtrack.  It was another quirk of the building that engendered passionate hatred from the tenants.  If he could hear this in his living room then so could the entire building.

“Yaargh.”

This was a joke.  This was almost funny now.

Then he heard the knock.  Outside stood Tobin Langford, the owner and fourth-floor occupant.  A man-child with entitled sandals and plaid board shorts.  He owned several properties in the area courtesy of his real-estate queen of mother.  “Good morning, sir.  What’s this I’m hearing about a flood.  Are we on top of it?”  He spoke in annoyingly excessive salutations.

“Yes, we are,” he said.

“Yaarg,” whispered the air vent.

Tobin pricked up his ears.  “Sounds like a cat in the wall.”

“Yes,” he said.

Tobin strained to hear, lifting slightly on his arches.

“Hmm,” he droned.  “You’ll take care of that after the carpet steaming?”

“Yes,” David coughed, “but I’ve got to take a little drive first.”

Tobin gave him that look.  As in don’t take advantage of my kind heartedness, Iguana freak.

“It is, technically, my day off,” he said.

And it was.  Technically.

Tobin buried his eyebrows far down.  “Tread lightly, David,” he said.  Then he left, probably late for an early breakfast.

David waited an hour and a half for the carpet steaming van to arrive.  They parked on the side of the building, and snaked their tubes through the emergency exit, which set off the fire alarm making for another fucked headache.  He gave the guys keys to the first floor apartments, and they set to work with their tubes, and whatever it was they did with them.

That was as much responsibility as he could handle.  He needed a moment to regroup.  He fetched Huey Lewis and headed outside.  His afternoons were usually spent like this, lying on the grassy traffic median, soaking up the sun and watching the occasional car or bus blow past.  The sun burned up his skin, but he felt like a microwave dinner that had only warmed around the edges.  Huey Lewis scampered free on neon grass.  No concerns beyond his next meal of grub worms.

Elevator girl entered the building.  She wore a dull beige blouse and long skirt.  Respectable work clothes.  She glanced at him with something beyond the usual disgust and/or irritation in her eyes.  Maybe she knew.  But she couldn’t.  She’d seen him heading to the basement yes.  The bloody corkscrew.  But what could she really know.

He needed to move the body again.  To be safe.

David entered the basement, the body lay there, unmoving.  Bastard had probably swallowed his tongue.  He poked the sheet with the table leg to make sure.

Nothing.  Not a twitch.

He wheeled the body upstairs.  The keys to every apartment jangled on his belt.  David would stash the body in the old man’s apartment.  He tested the door, and found it unlocked.

Inside, the windows seemed painted black.  Old library books with cloth covers and mildewed pages were stacked everywhere.  This arrangement made the living room a miniature labyrinth.  Many books on the bottom were soaked, warped beyond repair.  Casualties of the flood.

On the kitchen table lay several library bills with monstrous late fees.  The more recent-looking invoices unopened.  Strange. Mr. Muniz had never struck him as a man of letters, unless those letters came together to spell “fuck you, queerface.”

The open microwave door threw mustard-colored light on the kitchenette.

Inside on the rotating plate were mounds of legal pads with crinkled yellow pages.

Mr. Muniz had been drying them.  The collection bound with rubber bands.

David removed the bands, which snapped back on his hands like a jellyfish’s instinctive sting.  Every single of the four hundred pages was filled with handwritten words.  Sentences zoomed to the very edge of the page in certain danger of falling off.  Along the margins were inspired doodles of men with anatomically impossible penises, women with individual breasts larger than their heads.

David read what appeared to be the title page:  My name is Solomon Muniz and this is my confession.

He threw the thing back in the microwave.  That was enough.  He didn’t want to know anything the man.  That would just make this harder.  He shut the microwave, and wheeled the body into the back bedroom, which was dark, and smelled of shut windows.

Something small and low to the ground growled at him.  The dog.  The one he had smelled the night before.  It looked almost as old as Mr. Muniz.  Fur diminished to whitened clumps, eyes milked over with weakness.  He kicked it away, but the thing kept trailing him, trying to jump his leg.

He rushed through the kitchen, navigating the labyrinth of books, nearly tripping over a set of Encyclopedia.  The microwave had swung back open.  Maybe he hadn’t closed it hard enough.  Those types did tend to swing back at you.

He grabbed the confessions and left.

Across the courtyard he could see Tobin Langford and the Elevator Girl knocking at his door.  A desire to confess grabbed hold of him.  As he approached them, the girl held her arms crossed, hostile.  Tobin nodded to Elevator Girl.  “Rita here tells me you two had an encounter.”

Rita.  Of course.  He’d known that.

David shook his head, interrupting what he knew was coming.  “I’ve been wanting to apologize all day.  But it was so embarrassing.  I have a very serious vitamin deficiency.  And I shouldn’t have been up so late.  I’m sorry.”

Rita softened.  What else could she do.  Civility, right?  Once you apologized like a whimpering dog, what else could they say.

“Okay,” she grumbled. “Watch yourself next time.”

“What were you doing up so late?” said Tobin, “cramming more junk into my basement.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m trying to get rid of some.”

David sat in his apartment, biding his digital clock, listening to the hum of the carpet-steamers.  They would do his place last, and that would be that.  No more obstacles.  He fiddled through the legal pads, straining to read the handwriting.  Most of the confession read like an unhinged rant.  Apparently, Mr. Muniz had been a night watchman for most of his life.  There were only a few lucid spots of narrative.  One was an incident where he witnessed a robbery across the street at the tire store and decided not to phone it in.  “At least someone is getting away with it,” he wrote.

David read the line several times.

It seemed a good place to stop.

After the last of the steaming tubes had been packed away, and tenants had climbed into their TV-washed beds, David folded the body of Mr. Muniz through the hatchback of his Honda like a collapsible card table.

He kept below the legal limit and used directionals deep into the black desert.

After a half hour of nothing but sand and sagebrush, he chose a random spot to start digging.  It took longer than expected, but he expected that.  When he pulled onto the highway, he was closer to Scottsboro than the apartment complex.  Funny.  All that random driving, and he knew exactly where he was.

By the time he picked a direction, the birds were singing, telling the sun to arise.

And it did.

End

Greg Rock hails from Queens, New York, and currently resides in Los Angeles.  He writes fiction and screenplays.