Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
I looked through a gap in the rear-window curtains and, sure enough, the townhouse appeared to be abandoned.
I was part of a painting crew and had permission to enter the unit in the high-density development, but I had misgivings. I didn’t want to intrude casually on an angry person taping up boxes of memories, or worse. It was prudent to check things out.
I could see some loose garbage and several tattered wingback chairs in the middle of the living room, but there was no friendly arrangement of sofa, TV and coffee table.
We walked around to the front door. The neighbours to the right, who shared a driveway, informed us they hadn’t seen our middle-aged male tenant for more than three months. They pointed out that the man’s car, parked in the visitors’ lot, hadn’t moved in ages. And they had made several official complaints about a bad smell.
Ordinarily, management had a sixth sense about vanishing tenants, but this person had flown under the radar because he wasn’t behind on his rent. An old legal settlement had been structured to make his payments automatically through a trust fund administered by an adult son.
We were told to see if the unit needed painting – but our first job, I knew, was to look for a decomposing body slumped in a corner. We opened the front door with a master key and walked in.
There was a sad, unpleasant odour – a bit like old cold cuts – but it wasn’t overpowering. I left the door ajar, and cool fall air sucked the despair outdoors. My partner went upstairs to examine the bedrooms and I went into the L-shaped living area containing the chairs I’d observed earlier. Thankfully, I did not find a corpse; but I did encounter a surprising little mystery.
One chair was empty and the seat cushion was crushed by use. One of the two chairs opposite was smothered in empty cigarette packages. The little cardboard rectangles were piled on the seat until the upholstered arms could no longer contain them, and they spilled onto the floor forming drifts that hid the legs. But there were no cigarette butts anywhere, and no smell of stale smoke, no nicotine discoloration on the ceiling (painters notice that sort of thing). I seriously wondered if the man ate the smokes.
The second chair was entombed by garbage: balled-up sheets of light blue waxy papers. I unwadded one and discovered it was a wrapper for a fish sandwich. Smears of white sauce on the wrappers seemed to be responsible for the bad smell.
The floor area framed by the chairs contained two more discrete mounds of refuse. To the left was a sloppy pile of vodka bottles, to the right a mountain of crumpled stationery.
“There’s a mattress on the floor,” my partner shouted from upstairs. “He’s still living here.” Distant closet doors snicked open and closed.
The tenant must have slept during the day, I thought, and only left the apartment at 4 a.m., when all the neighbours were tucked in. He probably bought vodka from a bootlegger, smokes from a 7-Eleven, and fish-wiches from a McDonald’s drive-through. His waking hours were spent in that wingback chair, sorting his existence into separate heaps.
I picked up one of the sheets of writing paper and flattened it.
“Dear …,” it began in a loopy, cursive script. “Words cannot describe the beauty that lives in your eyes and the pleasure I derive from the merest glance.” The penmanship was remarkable. But immediately beneath that lovely opening, the character of the writing changed drastically. Letters slanted aggressively forward in crudely printed blocks. “You filthy skank! You’ve pulled the heart from my chest with hooks, burned my eyes with wires …” Most of the page was left empty.
I unfolded another sheet. “My dearest … , I thought of you today when I heard sparrows singing in ravine hedges.” And then another blast of vitriol.
I read several dozen, and they were all the same: two lines of romantic ooze followed by two lines of nasty invective. But it didn’t seem to me as if the initial parts were written sober and then the booze took over. It was more like the woman in question was simultaneously an angel and a devil to the letter-writer.
We locked up the unit, went to the property manager’s office and reported that the tenant probably was not dead, just marching to his own banjo.
The adult son was summoned that very afternoon, and he found his father huddled in the hall closet, crying. The poor guy must have been there the whole time we were pawing through what was left of his life.
The man was removed quietly to hospital. At the property manager’s office later, his son said nothing about the letters or little about his father, generally acting as though he’d seen this film before and found the ending a little trite.
My drive home that evening, past hundreds of cookie-cutter rear windows, was unnerving. It was as if I’d been chatting with people in a movie theatre, then realized that somehow we’d all been watching completely different films.
Mark Thomas lives in St. Catharines, Ont.