Dead Languages (29 page)

Prompted by no more compelling motive than having nowhere else to reside, I moved here three months ago and soon became aware that below me lived a woman who was quite as alone and secretive, as inaccessible, perhaps even (and my heart cheered at the possibility) as near to death as I have been all my life. And yet I never saw her.

It was, I confess, the most inadmissible of all evidence upon which I spectacularly misjudged the woman downstairs. Her voice, echoing in the pipes and elevator shaft and settling in the attic in which I live, demanded my attention because she spoke, as a child or an old person does, to no one but herself. She talked back to the radio and television and extrapolated from the Bible, altering the tone and theme of her discourse as easily as she changed channels or turned pages. There seemed to be, nevertheless, a hidden order, some obscure coherence to her monologues.

Her mailbox did not have her name on it and its emptiness was never invaded by even the most insignificant piece of junk mail. Not that I received fierce love letters from exotic points, either, but at least my name was scrawled across the slip of paper taped to my mailbox. Occasionally I took the elevator, when it was empty, down to the first floor mailboxes, adhering to a strange and unfounded belief that communication—some unexpected epistle—would arise from nowhere, from nothing, from no one.

In the early morning she often stomped around her apartment and banged her hands against the walls, sending slight vibrations upstairs, where I lay awake, listening to the sounds of her insomnia. She cursed and placed herself in the throes of what I took to be an elaborate ritual, laden with gestures and movement and meaning.

Even more curious were her eating and cooking habits, which were disturbingly irregular. At noon I smelled meat cooking, and at midnight eggs frying. She was a pathetically ineffectual chef, burning most of what she cooked. The smell of heat and smoke crawled into my apartment. She broke cheap glasses and plates.

I flattered myself, of course, to think that I, with my finely tuned sensitivities, was well suited to the task of decoding her bizarre behavior. It is true that at first I only sporadically jotted down my impressions of her and was not even especially aware that I was doing so. But in less than three weeks I was enthralled with the prospect of collecting all the details of her apparent disorder and listing them, cataloguing them, categorizing them and ordering them until I solved her puzzling existence.

I realized—what a nervous moment that was!—that my character was of no use to me here, was in fact a hindrance. Perhaps, then, this was what so attracted me to the challenge: the healthy egotism on which I have survived all these years had to be discarded if I were to succeed in comprehending, not to mention getting acquainted with, this elusive woman. I did nothing else but keep lists of what she was doing or, rather, what I thought she was doing. With thin, sharpened, charcoal pencils, in my minute and uniform if illegible handwriting, I wrote endless columns of numbers and words. And still I did not understand her.

I paid such strict attention to her habits that I was able to discern the room to which she was going and from which she was coming by counting the number of taps and scrapes she made with her cane. Sometimes she would tap her cane nervously—perhaps twenty times consecutively on the same spot on the floor—and I heard no concurrent footsteps, while other times I could tell she was walking but I would hear no sign of the cane. Moreover, she did not limp. I am quite sure of it. She did not limp.

There was a slight crack in the metal heat vent on the floor of my apartment, through which I was able to see just the darkness of her room. For hours at a time I lay face down alongside the vent and put my eye to the slit. The only light ever present in her room radiated from, I think, the television screen. She never turned on a lamp or an overhead light. Every night I wrote that her room was dark the moment the sun went down.

At night, usually, or in the very early morning (how she read without a light I had no idea; I supposed she simply knew the quotation) she repeated the same Biblical passage, from Isaiah, until the words slurred in her mouth. Each time she began the passage as if she were a demure schoolgirl methodically, knowingly reciting the correct answer.

On that day deaf men shall hear
when a book is read.

Then she would bang her cane against the low ceiling, taunting the author of the passage to come down and answer for it.

And the eyes of the blind shall
see out of impenetrable darkness.

When she got excited, she dropped her book; the thud sounded more like a heavy suitcase than even the most lavish and carefully annotated and footnoted edition of the Bible.

The lowly shall once again
rejoice in the Lord, and the
poorest of men exalt in the
Holy One of Israel.

But if she had memorized the passage why did she need the book? On the other hand, how could she have read it without light? Each evening I wrote down when she began, how long she read, how many times she repeated the passage, over which words she stumbled, the last word she uttered.

Nights I pulled out the desk drawer and, sitting in my wooden chair, circled the aberrations on that day’s list—the screams I did not expect, the elongated silences, the sudden noise from her television—although after a while nothing could have surprised me except the emergence of a predictable pattern to her life. When the words and numbers squeezed together and vanished, when I saw but a pool of light at the tip of my nose, I went to bed.

I slept in two hour intervals—asleep two hours, awake two hours—until I was rested enough to stay awake. While awake in bed I wrote down in the yellow margins of the Bible what she was doing. There was something terrible about being awake that late at night, with the clock ticking and the lamp glowing, as I plotted the movements of a woman I never saw.

And yet what I have been trying to say, which I am having obvious (if understandable) difficulty relating, and which I now feel compelled to present because I am afraid that I am all too characteristically dwelling on the complexity of my own consciousness, rather than addressing the matter at hand, is precisely this: a week ago I detected an appreciable reduction in her actions. That day I made fewer entries than I had on any previous day. Maybe, I thought, I was not listening as well as I had before. Perhaps she was making the same noises and I was just not hearing them.

Her movements were still unpredictable and random but, in fact, much less frequent. In four hours she tapped her cane and turned the television on and off. Nothing else. I reviewed the lists and calculated a slight, if steady, decrease in the number of entries I had made, starting two weeks ago, though she had not been anywhere near as inactive as she started to be last week. Which left me with little to do except wait.

The lists grew shorter, dwindling to almost nothing, like a candle burning out. She broke fewer glasses, no longer tapped her cane, and rarely turned on the television or burnt the coffee. Instead of compiling a list of what she was doing, I maintained a log of the length of intervals between entries. The intervals grew longer. I listed what was not happening, what was not there. Every other day she read from Isaiah in a dull, somnambulistic monotone. Occasionally she stumbled into a chair or flushed the toilet. She slept for days.

Two days ago I stopped keeping lists because I no longer heard anything from downstairs. Not wanting to waste all those charcoal pencils and sheets of paper, I listed, upon waking, the side of my body on which I was lying, where my hands were, how many times the clock ticked in a minute.

I slept naked with my head under the pillow. The air was warm and I wrapped only a sheet, like ropes, around my legs. In the day I napped to recover from oversleeping. I gobbled aspirin to relieve my headache and slept even more. This past week I never went to sleep after midnight nor awoke before noon.

Until this morning. Asleep in dreamless, soundless empty spaces of time, I was awakened by her loud recitation of the Isaiah passage.

On that day deaf men shall hear
when a book is read.

In the dark, stumbling over furniture, I ran into the living room, turned on the desk lamp, and sat down in my chair. I wrote down what time it was, as well as what she was saying. She banged her cane against the wall and her voice rose to a pitch approaching a scream, her Bible reading uncontrolled for the first time, blurted out rather than chanted.

And the eyes of the blind shall
see out of impenetrable darkness.

All of a sudden she dropped the book, and I heard her gasp. Her breathing sounded like a child sucking on a straw. I opened the heat vent and put my ear to the grate.

No, she said. It is dark. It is too dark. Give me light. I am in black clothes.

I heard her cane, followed by her body, fall to the floor. She coughed uncontrollably. I wanted to pour water down her mouth. The seat of the chair felt cold, like a bed pan, under my naked buttocks.

There was silence for a while (perhaps as long as thirty seconds, I really don’t remember; I had, quite understandably, lost all track of time to the point of forgetting that I was wearing a watch). Then, wheezing, she took deep, heavy breaths until she had to exhale. She yelled an obscene word and gasped as she blew air out of her mouth for the last time.

I walked down the stairs, slowly, shaking the handrail, carrying a flashlight, trying to calm myself down. I banged on the door and rang the doorbell. I beat on the door with my flashlight and kicked it with my foot. I knelt down, and looked into the keyhole, holding the flashlight next to the keyhole so that I could see into the room. I did not see her body. Instead, right below me, near enough to touch, in a shaft of dim light which darted through the keyhole, surrounded by darkness, the handle of her white cane gleamed.

And now, before the other apartment-dwellers awake (and before, as it is so easy for me to do, I forget and simply go on), I will step into the elevator and close the door tight behind me. I will turn off the fan. Above me there will be a panel of descending floor numbers. Everything will be silent except for the rattling of the pipes and bars in the elevator shaft. And I will take this black box down into the basement where the noise stops and the light ends.