by Jessica Bates

          One morning when the light was still yellow-tinted and not yet white, I hauled a load of laundry down a flight of stairs to our apartment complex’s shared washer and dryer. There are only eight units here, four on the lower level, four above. I started the wash slowly, relishing each dirty piece of underwear, happy about building a life with my lover, dirty sheets and all. As I loaded panties, shirts, socks into the machine, Elizabeth, our neighbor in G, watched The Sound of Music. I could hear it humming through the walls, the only thing any of us shared aside from the laundry room and part of an address. I smiled as I heard the words Soon her Mama with a gleaming gloat heard, and I smiled as I thought of the scene, all the kids and Fräulein Maria and their frantic puppet show. Once I told my sister that I wanted six children. It was the perfect number, I told her. The Von Trapps had seven, and that was one too many. My sister, who was obsessively acting out motions in fives or numbers divisible by five, disagreed. She said five was the best number, and I thought of her then tapping her fingers on the bedroom wall, opening and shutting doors (one-two-three-four-five!), counting her steps down the hallway, leaping so that her feet would only touch the carpet five times. My sister said that five was the best number, and she thought if she failed to shut the door a fifth time that one of us would immediately die.

          Roberto Bolaño tells stories like my mother, not in a linear fashion, but around an entire universe. You think he starts moving in a straight line, but his line is not only curving, forming wide ellipses and sweeping arcs, it is also traveling around multiple geometric planes. My mother, when asked what’s for dinner, will start with what happened at work that day, what song was playing on the radio, who called her while she was in the grocery store, and sometimes she’ll forget to tell you what’s for dinner. The plot, simply, is that our neighbor is dead, and the only time I thought of her fondly was the day I loaded laundry, singing along with the Von Trapp children and thinking of my sister. I, like Bolaño and my mother, want to tell you more, what car was driving by, what she did right before she died, what flowers were blooming and which ones were shriveling into themselves, like Elizabeth. She died yesterday. Any day a reader newly finds this, Elizabeth will have always died yesterday, and therefore here, I am always alive.

          The neighbors below us have two small children, and one day the toddler put his fleshy hand to the wall and exclaimed, “Hot, hot!” His parents rolled their eyes, because although they were excited about Barkley starting to use words, he was in no way using them correctly, which made communication just as difficult as when he merely cooed and giggled. But this day Barkley was right, the wall was hot. Every time we showered or washed dishes above them, the hot water gushed from the old, rotting pipes, filling the walls below ours with hot water. After several minutes of trying to communicate with his parents, Barkley gave up and went back to his train set. Later that night the mother cradled her newborn in her left arm, and as she reached for a towel in the bathroom, her right hand sensed a heat radiating from the wall. “Barkley!” she cried, “you were right! The wall is hot!” Then the mother scrunched her face up, because walls aren’t supposed to be hot, especially not hot enough to make your fingers throb, and she called in her husband, who called the landlord, who called the plumber to fix the pipes.

          The plumbers were in our apartment banging and clanking into the wall to expose its innards. My fiancé had just gotten two new microphones, and he connected them by a short bar, mimicking with the microphones the placement of each of our ears and the jumbled space between them. As a sound enthusiast, one who hears a noise and is suddenly lost in its meaning, the physics of the sound wave, the bouncing of invisible reflections from their origin to his perked ears, my fiancé wanted to record the plumbers busting through our wall with a sledgehammer. He told Carlos, the English-speaking plumber, that he would be recording, and Carlos said, Cool, buddy. Through headphones he listened to each sound as he captured it, each bass heavy thud and each melodic syllable that the plumbers spoke in Spanish to each other, and he smiled imagining them at work just two walls away. His ears had grown to him like a second set of eyes, but better, like x-ray vision.

          When the work was finished for the day, the plumber asked if we knew the woman in G. He said that he knocked on her door to tell her the water would be turned off for a few hours. He could see her through the open blinds sitting in a chair, he said, her neck craned backwards and mouth hung open. He noticed she had headphones on, so he banged more loudly on the door, thinking she was sleeping deeply to some of her favorite songs, probably Beethoven or some shit, he said. I thought she could have been listening to The Sound of Music, maybe: There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall and the bells in the steeple, too. Maybe she’s dead, the plumber told us. Maybe she is, I said, I’ve never seen a dead body except for at funerals. The plumber told us that he had seen two dead bodies, and that one was a man named Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson was pretty old, he said, and the job at Mr. Wilson’s was taking place mostly outdoors. On the last day of the job, the plumber went to tell Mr. Wilson he had finished, and when he found Mr. Wilson’s door locked he easily picked it and let himself inside. He knew something was wrong right away, he told us, and he went from room to room with an eerie feeling, while saying Mr. Wilson!, but not expecting anything good to come of it. Then he saw Mr. Wilson lying on his bed, hands folded gently on his stomach. In Mr. Wilson’s kitchen, Carlos called the police and the list of numbers Mr. Wilson had posted on his fridge, he said, not wanting to be blamed for killing the old white man.

          His partner, probably tired of all the talking and ready to head home, walked to Elizabeth’s door and banged again. It was so loud that my fiancé winced, covering his ears with two smooth hands. Nada! he shouted to Carlos, shaking his head. Someone needs to call the cops, Carlos said as he packed up his tools. See you tomorrow, he said, and we waved.

          What if she knew she was dying, my fiancé said, and she put on her favorite music, stayed up all night to watch the sunrise, and then just drifted up or away, or wherever you drift. I nodded, considering that, and then I said: what if she got up and drank a cup of coffee, went down to the laundry room and started a load of laundry, and then, as she waited, she put her headphones on and just died, right there, with you recording it and her laundry just spinning away. Don’t be morbid, my fiancé told me, because dying is one thing, but dying and leaving your clothes damp in our shared washing machine is quite another. I thought the laundry would have added a poetic touch, but I didn’t say so because I was thinking of ghosts. The policemen came to our apartment complex, and we waited to be interviewed but that never happened. We imagined the cop sitting in Elizabeth’s apartment, waiting for something — the coroner? the homicide detective? her family? Do you think he’s drinking her tequila?, I asked my fiancé. The detectives in 2666 do that, they show up at a dead person’s house and sit and drink tequila while the body gets colder and colder, I told him. No, he’s not drinking tequila, he said. That’s crazy. Then we got high and my fiancé played guitar while I made up a song about Elizabeth in the style of Bob Dylan: Eeeeeee-lizabeth, started coffee, loaded laundry, put on her favorite song. My fiancé told me to stop, that I was scaring him, and I was scaring myself, too, so I stopped. We popped open cans of Miller Lite, tapped them together — to Elizabeth! — and we drank like only the living can.

          That night in bed I thought the room was darker than normal. We never saw policemen or firemen take Elizabeth away, and I wondered whether her body was still there in the chair as Carlos had described it, mouth open and drool pooled on her shirt. I was too afraid to ask my fiancé what he thought. With my chest pressed to my fiancé’s back, I tried to think about happy things: girls in white dresses with blue satin — no, that wouldn’t work. One word tickled the tip of my tongue, a shameful, ridiculous word: zombie.

          I woke up without a nightmarish zombie or ghost encounter, and for that I thanked the dream-gods. Carlos and his partner returned while we were eating lunch, and in an odd way we were excited to see them, to invite more life into our apartment. We told Carlos that Elizabeth had definitely died, although in reality we weren’t sure; we hadn’t seen her remains, we hadn’t confirmed with anyone. As we slurped down our spicy ramen noodles, Carlos told us that he had dreamt about Elizabeth, and that in the dream he told her he was shutting the water off and she said okay and she was walking around her apartment. Carlos told his wife that she had visited him, that she was thanking him for finding her, because who knows how long she would have sat in that chair had he not been there to fix our pipes. Our eyes watered from the spice. That was the first dead body I’ve ever seen, said Carlos, and my fiancé and I exchanged glances, remembering the story of Mr. Wilson. Carlos walked out to find his partner. He’s an Elliot, I said to my fiancé, recalling someone we once knew. Elliot, the type that enjoys telling stories, that gets intoxicated on details that aren’t totally true or false. Sometimes Elliots will forget what the truth is, since they’ve spun their yarn in so many different ways. They don’t mean any harm, but fact and fiction, to them, are one mangled, hairy, two-headed beast. My fiancé nodded and drank down the spicy remains of the ramen.

          The plumbing was complete and we were alone again, and although the pipes were fixed, there were still holes in our wall covered with sheer plastic, where I imagined blurry little ghosts hiding. I wanted to see a policeman or detective. I wanted to be asked questions: Did Elizabeth seem depressed? Did she contemplate suicide? Was there anyone who might want to cause her harm? But no one asked these questions, or maybe they just weren’t asked to me.

          Here is what I would have told them: A blue Chevrolet was driving by. A black bird settled in the branches outside my window. Elizabeth died. Our pipes were fixed.