My Neighbors Are Absolutely Insane (And So Am I)

I want to be very clear about something before this story begins. I am a reasonable person. I pay my bills on time. I return shopping carts to the designated area even when it's raining. I have never once used the express checkout lane with more than twelve items. I am, by every measurable standard, a functional and sensible adult human being. What happened to me was not my fault. I need you to understand that before we get into it. Because what follows is going to sound like a series of catastrophically poor decisions made by someone with no self-preservation instinct and possibly some unresolved issues with authority figures. And while that description is technically accurate it is also deeply unfair and I will not be accepting criticism at this time. My name is Zara Cole. I am twenty-four years old. And three weeks ago I moved into Pelican Court Apartments, which the listing described as "charming," "vibrant," and "full of community spirit." It did not mention that the community spirit in question was absolutely unhinged. The first sign should have been the elevator. Not that it was broken — though it was, and had apparently been broken since 2019, a fact that nobody mentioned when I signed the lease and that I discovered only after arriving with six boxes, a mattress, and the naive optimism of someone who had not yet learned that life was a participation sport played against opponents who had been training longer than you. No, the elevator itself wasn't the sign. The sign was what was written on the out-of-order notice taped to the elevator door. DEAR RESIDENTS, it read, in handwriting so large it occupied three full sheets of A4 paper taped together, THE ELEVATOR CONTINUES ITS JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY. WE SUPPORT ITS PROCESS. STAIRS ARE ON THE LEFT. THEY WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN. UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. It was signed: — Management. P.S. The heart wants what it wants. I stood in the lobby for a full thirty seconds reading this notice. Then I picked up the first of my six boxes and started climbing stairs. By the third floor I was reconsidering every life decision that had led to this moment. By the fourth floor I was reconsidering the concept of possessions generally. By the fifth floor — my floor, of course it was the fifth floor — I had arrived at a zen-like state of suffering that I can only describe as what I imagine marathon runners feel at mile twenty-three, except marathon runners chose to be there. I set the box down in the hallway outside apartment 5C and stood bent over with my hands on my knees trying to remember how lungs worked when the door to 5B directly across the hall opened and a man walked out. He was — fine. He was objectively, irritatingly, completely unnecessarily fine. Tall, brown-skinned, with the kind of effortless put-together quality that suggested he had never once in his life sweated through a shirt while carrying a box of books up five flights of stairs, which I resented deeply and immediately. He looked at me. I looked at him. I was bent over, wheezing, with my hair doing something that I could feel without seeing and knew was not good, wearing a shirt that said WORLD'S OKAYEST HUMAN and had, at some point during the stair journey, acquired a mysterious mustard stain that I had absolutely no memory of. "New neighbor?" he said. "Dying, actually," I said. "But thank you for witnessing it." Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. An awareness of a smile. "Noah," he said. "Zara." I straightened up with what remained of my dignity, which was not a lot. "Do you know if there's a lift repairman or if the elevator is genuinely on a spiritual journey?" Noah looked at the stairwell. "Mr. Okonkwo says it needs time to find itself." "The elevator." "The elevator." I absorbed this. "And Mr. Okonkwo is—" "Your landlord." He paused. "He'll introduce himself. He has a whole — thing." "A thing." "You'll understand when you meet him." He picked up a bag from inside his doorway — gym bag, of course, naturally, because this man was the kind of person who used gyms voluntarily — and gave me a look that contained something I couldn't read. "Do you need help with your boxes?" Every independent bone in my body prepared to say no. Every other bone — the ones that had just carried a mattress up five flights and were currently considering early retirement — staged an immediate coup. "That would be incredible," I said. By the time we'd made three trips Noah knew that I'd moved from Lagos, worked in content writing, hated cilantro with a passion I usually reserved for people who talked in cinemas, and had once accidentally live-streamed myself eating cereal for forty-five minutes because I'd been convinced I was just looking at my phone. He knew these things because I told him. All of them. In detail. I do this when I'm nervous. I just — talk. Everything that's in my head comes out of my mouth in roughly the order it occurs to me which is not always a logical order and is frequently a regrettable one. To his credit Noah did not flee. He did look mildly overwhelmed by the cereal story. But he finished helping with the boxes, set the last one down in my living room, and said "Let me know if you need anything" with what appeared to be genuine sincerity rather than the polite noises of someone backing away from a potentially unstable situation. He was back in his apartment before I could say anything else incriminating. I closed my door. Stood in the middle of my new living room surrounded by boxes. Told myself that I had not just catastrophically overshared to my neighbour within the first twenty minutes of moving in. The mustard stain on my shirt caught my eye. I had absolutely catastrophically overshared. Mr. Okonkwo introduced himself at seven thirty that evening by knocking on my door in a rhythmic pattern that took me a moment to recognize as the opening bars of a song I couldn't quite identify. He was a compact man in his sixties, wearing a dashiki in a shade of orange so vivid it seemed to generate its own light source, and he was holding a small potted plant. "Welcome," he said, extending the plant toward me, "to Pelican Court. Where we are all, in our own way, still becoming." I took the plant. "Thank you. I'm Zara—" "I know who you are." He said it with the calm certainty of someone who knows most things and has decided to be gracious about it. "I know everyone who lives here." He tapped his chest. "The building speaks to me." "The building," I said carefully, "speaks to you." "In its way." He looked at the plant in my hands. "That is a peace lily. Do not overwater it. It does not need as much as it asks for." He paused significantly. "None of us do." He then turned and walked back toward the stairwell with the unhurried dignity of someone who had said exactly what needed saying. I stood in my doorway holding the peace lily. "Mr. Okonkwo?" I called after him. He turned. "The elevator," I said. "When do you think it'll be fixed?" He looked at me with deep, patient eyes. "When it is ready," he said. And then he was gone. I looked at the peace lily. The peace lily offered no commentary. "Right," I said, to both of us. "Okay then." At nine forty-five pm, just as I was beginning to feel like the evening might end without further incident, something knocked on my door and then immediately knocked again before I'd even moved, and then knocked a third time, and I opened it to find a man in his late twenties wearing full camouflage — jacket, trousers, even his socks, which I could see because his trousers were tucked into them — holding a clipboard and looking at me with the intense focus of someone conducting extremely important business. "New resident?" he said. "...Yes?" "Felix. 5A." He clicked a pen with practiced efficiency. "I need you to confirm some information for the neighborhood security log." I looked at the clipboard. There were many, many questions on it. More questions than I would have expected for a neighborhood security log. Questions like Do you own a microwave? and How often do you look directly at pigeons? and, in a different ink color at the bottom, On a scale of 1-10 how much do you trust the government? "This is a lot of questions," I said. "Security is comprehensive," Felix said, without a trace of irony. "The pigeon one—" "Critical." He clicked the pen again. "The pigeon situation on this street is not what it appears to be." I looked at him. He looked at me. He was completely, absolutely serious. I took a breath. "Come in," I said, because I was clearly not going to sleep anyway and the universe had apparently decided that my quiet life was a suggestion rather than a plan. Felix stepped inside with the focused energy of a man on a mission. The peace lily watched from the windowsill. To be continued...