My Neighbors Are Absolutely Insane (And So Am I)

Mrs. Patterson Knows Things

I met Mrs. Patterson on a Thursday.

Not by choice — by inevitability. Some meetings are like that. The universe schedules them without consulting you and sends reminders in the form of increasingly unavoidable circumstances until you stop pretending you can opt out.

The first unavoidable circumstance was the laundry room.

Pelican Court had a shared laundry room in the basement — which, like the elevator, had its own personality and set of opinions about how it wanted to operate. The washing machines worked on a system that I spent twenty minutes trying to understand before realizing the system was: put money in, press the button, and accept whatever the machine decided to do with your clothes as a spiritual exercise in releasing control.

I was on my second attempt at understanding the coin slot when the door opened and a woman walked in who could only be Mrs. Patterson.

She was small — not frail-small but the compact-small of someone who had spent decades being precisely as much as was needed and had never wasted energy on excess. White hair in neat waves. Clothes that suggested she'd been quite stylish at some point and hadn't stopped. Eyes that were sharp in the way of someone who noticed everything and catalogued it for later use.

She looked at me struggling with the coin slot.

"It only takes two-pound coins," she said. "And you have to wiggle it slightly to the left before pushing."

I wiggled. I pushed. The machine accepted my coin with the grudging click of something conceding a point.

"Thank you," I said.

"You're the new girl." She said it without inflection. Not rude — just precise. "5C."

"Zara."

"Edith." She moved to the machine beside mine with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for years and had optimized every step. "You read my note."

"The clarity tea. Yes." I paused. "I haven't tried it yet."

"Save it for when you need it." She loaded her washing with remarkable speed. "You'll know when."

"That's — slightly ominous."

"Most useful things are." She pushed her coins in — two-pound, wiggle left, push, perfect — and turned to look at me properly for the first time. "How are you finding us?"

Us meaning the building. Us meaning the specific collection of humans I had encountered in forty-eight hours.

"Everyone is very — present," I said, which was the most diplomatic thing I could think of.

Something shifted in Edith Patterson's expression that was, I realized, amusement. Deep and practiced and completely controlled. "That's one word for it."

"Felix came to survey me on my first night."

"He surveys everyone." She sat in the plastic chair against the wall with the manner of someone settling in for exactly as long as she chose to stay. "He's been surveying residents for four years. He has a very comprehensive dataset."

"About the pigeons."

"Among other things."

"Do you think the pigeons are — surveillance units?" I asked, because I genuinely couldn't read whether this was a building that collectively believed that or whether Felix was operating solo.

Edith looked at me for a moment.

"I think," she said carefully, "that Felix is a very intelligent young man who works in data analysis and is extremely good at finding patterns, and that finding patterns in things that don't have patterns is an occupational hazard for people like him." She paused. "I also think that the pigeon that sits on the ledge outside my kitchen window has been sitting in the same spot for three years and watches me make my morning tea with a consistency that I find, on reflection, unusual."

I stared at her.

She looked placidly back.

"The tea is good though," she said. "The pigeons haven't done anything about it yet."

We sat in the laundry room for forty-five minutes while our washing ran.

In that time I learned the following things about Edith Patterson:

She was seventy-eight. She had lived in Pelican Court for twenty-two years, which meant she predated Mr. Okonkwo's ownership by seven years and had watched three different management regimes come and go and had opinions about all of them. She had been a secondary school chemistry teacher for thirty-five years, which explained the precise eyes and the way she had of asking questions that seemed casual until you realized she'd been steering you toward a specific answer the whole time.

She had a cat named Gerald who had died four years ago at the age of nineteen and who she referred to in the present tense when she forgot herself, which she said happened more often than she'd expected.

She knew everything that happened in the building.

Not because she was nosy — she said this with the conviction of someone who had made peace with the distinction — but because she paid attention, and paying attention in a building like this was equivalent to having a real-time information feed about human behavior in all its forms.

"What happened with the last person in 5C?" I asked.

"Nice young man," she said. "Software developer. Left in a hurry about three months ago."

"Why in a hurry?"

"He got a job in another city." A pause. "Also he and Noah had a disagreement."

I looked up from my phone, where I had been pretending to scroll. "Noah."

"5B." She said it with the neutral tone of someone who was watching to see what I'd do with the information.

"What kind of disagreement?"

"The professional kind." She folded her hands in her lap. "Noah is—" She paused, selecting words. "He works in a field that occasionally creates conflict with people who aren't careful about certain things."

"What field?"

"He hasn't told you yet." She said it with the manner of someone who knew he hadn't told me yet. "He will, when he decides you're—" Another pause. "Settled."

"Settled how?"

"When he decides you're not going to leave immediately." She looked at me directly. "People leave 5C quickly. He's learned not to invest until he's sure they're staying."

I absorbed that.

"How many people have lived in 5C since he moved in?" I asked.

"Four." She said it simply. "Two years. Four residents."

I thought about this. About the help with the boxes. About Let me know if you need anything said with what appeared to be genuine sincerity. About a man who had learned to hedge.

"What does he actually do?" I asked.

"Ask him," she said. Which was not an answer and was also completely an answer.

Mr. Okonkwo visited the laundry room at exactly the point my washing finished.

He did not have washing with him. He appeared to have simply materialized with the particular inevitability of someone who was everywhere in the building at exactly the right moment, which I was beginning to suspect was less coincidence and more a comprehensive management style.

"Zara," he said. "You have met Edith."

"We introduced ourselves."

He nodded with the satisfaction of something going according to plan. "Good. Edith knows the building." He said it with the same weight he'd have used to say Edith knows everything, which I suspected was the intended meaning. "If you have questions."

"About the building?"

"About anything." He looked at the washing machine with the expression of a man checking on an old friend. "How is she running?"

"The machine? Fine, actually. Once I learned the coin trick."

"The wiggle." He nodded knowingly. "She likes to be approached correctly." He paused. "Don't we all."

He then turned and walked back out of the laundry room with the same unhurried dignity as always, and I was left with the distinct impression that he'd come down specifically to make sure I'd met Edith and was now satisfied and had moved on to the next item on a list I would never have access to.

Edith watched him go.

"He does that," she said.

"Checks on things?"

"Checks on people." She stood, began unloading her washing with the same efficiency as everything else she did. "He's been the landlord here for fifteen years. He knows when someone needs something before they do."

"Is that—" I searched for the word. "Unsettling? Or comforting?"

She considered the question seriously.

"Mostly comforting," she said. "Occasionally alarming. Rather like the building generally."

She folded her last item — a tea towel, perfectly creased — and picked up her basket.

"Come for tea tomorrow," she said. It was not quite a question.

"I have work tomorrow," I said.

"Evening," she said. "I know things that will be useful to you."

She walked out.

I stood in the laundry room with my damp washing and thought about a woman who had been here twenty-two years, who spoke about a dead cat in the present tense, who left clarity tea outside new residents' doors, and who knew things.

Upstairs, through the ceiling, I could hear the faint sound of someone moving around in 5B.

I picked up my basket.

"Gerald the cat would have hated me," I said, to nobody.

Then I went upstairs to start my second day in the most interesting building I'd ever accidentally moved into.

To be continued...