XV

By Martha Whatley

 

Somewhere along the road we will stumble
Upon our fate, ingrained into the
Earth like a message and only then will
We truly understand the implications
Of our lives’ decisions. Fate might reveal
Itself to us only for a moment,
As a kind of self-induced epiphany,
Both when we least expect it and most need
It but some of us simply won’t ever
Face its exposure. There are times, however,
When fate will present itself to us
Uninvited, and this creates problems.
Natural order versus disorder.
Paranoia. Obsession. It will consume you.
—Étienne Villion

“So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life, real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.” —Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism.

The light from the fourth storey of the apartment block threw fractured shadows onto the sidewalk. This street was barely lit, and in the kind of area you wouldn’t walk through after dark. Every building here was a carbon copy of the one next to it; weathered brownstones with jagged metal fire escapes spilling over the roofs down to the courtyards, and with floor to ceiling bay windows along the front.

Six months ago I stood in my realtor’s office, broke and just out of grad school. He told me there was nothing in this city that I could afford and just when I was about to give up, he let out a sigh and with a strange reluctancy in his lowered voice told me there was an apartment. When we pulled up to it, I thought I understood his apprehension as this neighborhood was run down and beat up as hell but I had no idea. I held the details of the letting up to shield my eyes from the sun and was drawn to it – pulled in – which was strange because I’d never lived anywhere this edgy, and nor had I felt any desire to.

Rue de Mystère. The only street name in this city to be in another language. My realtor had begrudgingly told me that an old French architect had designed and built not only what became my apartment, but the entire street before he went insane and killed himself. When I asked where this happened, the hesitance in his eyes and puffing out his cheeks told me it was in this space, the space I was about to commit to and make my home. On the right hand side of the fourth floor, with an interior not unlike any other, and barely big enough for one person is where he existed. Apparently the neighbors, used to his bizarre intrusions to measure the walls for movement at all hours, reported his uncharacteristic absence and five days later the police broke down his door and found him in the bedroom, dead and contorted in a pool of his own blood.

Sure, it freaks me out sometimes, but loads of people live in places where people have died and besides, I had to rent this place. I was desperate and it just felt right…

I’ve lived here for a little over six months now, and you’d think that I would have met at least some of the other people who are here but I haven’t. I hear things in the hallway from behind closed doors. Hushed voices, stumbling over problems. It’s a strained atmosphere, but the people here are private and I guess I need to accept that a neighborly welcome in a big city is pretty unheard of. Doors slam at all hours of the night and the bowed wooden floorboards creak rhythmically. People do live here, but I don’t know or see them. A few months ago, I overheard a conversation from the hallway, but when I looked through the spy hole on my door, I realized it was shattered and all I could make out was a kaleidoscopic reflection of two figures, shifting distortedly in the dimness.

They were talking about him, Old Étienne Villion, the self-destructed architect who created the walls I existed in. His old tenants ignored the French pronunciation of his last name and took to nicknaming him ‘Villain’ because of his apparent reputation for eccentricity and disruption within the confines of his street. I had got the impression that old Villion’s presence had given his tenants a reason to speak to each other. Since his death, a silence has reigned over us. I barely know the people here and the little evidence of life I am ever exposed to shows itself to me in the early hours, especially from the apartment opposite mine. These two people, a woman and a man, said something about the this particular apartment, but they lowered their voices so dramatically that I could only determine syllables and the sounds of Gs, Js, Ss and Cs. This couple didn’t live on my level, I can be sure of that, as there are only two complexes per floor on either side of the central staircase, and there was a guy living on the fourth with me. I had never seen him either, but his studio was always pitch black with music blaring out from under the door.

I usually came home to find the entire complex encased in darkness but this day was different. The light that penetrated the dirty glass of my neighbor’s window excited me, it was the first time I’d noticed it since I’d been here and I recall my nervousness at the prospect of finally meeting someone else who lived here. My key crunched in the lock as I entered into my hallway. The complex is visually stunning. It has a huge oak staircase that runs centrally through the five flights, ascending in a continuous, vertical zigzag, and begins fifteen feet from the heavy front door. Everything inside this building is dark oak and dirty cream. The wallpaper hangs in dilapidated peels from the picture rails revealing equations, lists of numbers and measurements scrawled all over the naked walls, and although I always thought how weird it was, I didn’t really pay that much attention.

I started climbing the stairs, and was having trouble finding my keys. There were no lights above the staircases. It had been like this for months, we were just expected to rely on the natural light from the bay windows facing the stairs, so I was still searching for them until the fourth flight. As I put my foot down on what must have been the fifth or sixth step, I felt a difference in what I was standing on. It was liquid. I quickly jumped up the next few, but it just got worse. My heels slid with each step; this liquid was viscous, and I knew it wasn’t water. I strained my eyes in the dim light to see what it was but all I saw was a dark substance. The panes of the window were distortedly reflected in its uneven surface and after my eyes adjusted to what little visibility there was, I noticed that it was seeping over the top step in thick, gloopy streaks. I positioned my steps to the tightest inside of each one to avoid the mess, and hoisted myself up, using the banister until I was stood in front of my neighbor’s slightly open door with light pouring from it, illuminating the dust, in an almost perfect hazy triangle.

“Hello?” I called but there was no answer. I waited nervously outside the door for a few minutes in case someone was in there but didn’t hear me.

“Hell-oh?” I repeated, “You’ve got a…uh,” my shoes glistened a stained black in the escaped light, “uh….oh fuck…you’ve got a fucking leak or something out here.”

No one came to the door, so I pushed it open, and saw that the floor was covered in a thick, black substance. It was tar. There was tar everywhere in this room. The floorboards had been split, in chunks and gauges as if someone had ripped them apart. Level pools of tar filled the holes toward the back of the room, but the ones towards the door where I stood, looked rushed as the tar spilled out of the cracks, as if the person had ran out of time but needed to get this done regardless. I had no idea how someone could shatter solid wooden boards that created the foundations of a building, and I couldn’t see any tools lying around.

My feet were fusing with the floor, and with each step I took further into the room they dragged the tar further. My footprints were all over the place, frenzied, and it was now obvious that I had been there. The metal pot that contained the tar was on its side just behind the door, so I grabbed a tissue out of my already open bag and used it to keep my hand clean as I pulled the pot upright. I was debating leaving a note for the occupier of this wrecked space, and as I turned around to look for something to write on, I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

It stretched almost from floor to ceiling; a whole wall of predictions, foresight, prophetic notes and complete bullshit. This guy had pinned what looked like every fortune he’d ever had from a fortune cookie, horoscopes from magazines that were all for the sign of Libra, books and newspapers, quotes from people whose names I didn’t recognize, measuring tapes, genealogy charts, pages from an old-looking journal, blueprints, and other things to the wall. Walking closer, dragging my black footprints in the tell-tale direction of uninvited curiosity, I saw that a lot, if not most, of the things stuck up there had been crossed through with a marker, in the same way someone counting down on a calendar would do.
     
The thickness of the marker made the majority of things illegible to me, but of the ones that remained exposed, I could tell this person had a problem.

“Your greatest danger could be your stupidity”  —Fortune cookie

“You are about to meet someone who will become influential” —Fortune cookie

“Everything will now come your way” —Fortune cookie

“You will have a lot of questions but if you look around you, at things that might be too obvious, they will be answered.” —Libra horoscope

“Chaos can be controlled, but you will need to step back from everything to understand how.” —Libra horoscope

“Our fate, ingrained into the earth like a message” —Page from a journal

I heard footsteps ascending on the staircase outside and froze, but they soon passed and the initial fright had snapped me out of my intrusion, and I began to back away. As I looked up from this psychotic collection of prophecy, I saw a guy in the mirror and spun around, my heart pounding.

“How long’ve you been here?” he pushed his black hair from his eyes with a tattooed wrist, “What did you see...aw shit”, he winced, looking at the spilt tar and the carnage that lay spewed all over the floor.

His aggression and lack of shock at me being in his apartment threw me completely. I tried edging around him but he followed my clumsy gaze until we were stood next to each other.

“Uh…I live here,” I explained, motioning across the hall, “the stairs, uh, the tar, it had spilled out into the…” my voice faltered as it trailed off.

He had piercing green eyes and his body was a canvas. I could see inside the open collar of his shirt as he twisted his neck to follow me across the room, every inch of skin was covered in ink; from the back of his neck, down across his chest and right onto his hands.

“This place, it’s crazy. When I heard about it, about him, I thought it was pretty cool. You know, I’ve lived here for a while now but, it’s fuckin’ gettin’ to me now.” His voice dipped lower with the last sentence and I just stood there, blocked from leaving.

“Your floor, what happened here? Did maintenance need to check something? Wiring? I mean, that’s gonna be pretty hard to fix up, right?” I asked, confused.

“Ordered chaos. It’s gettin’ inside my head and I’m losin’ it. Your apartment, it was Villion’s wasn’t it?” He was twirling his hands together and staring right through me.
 
“…Vil,” I struggled to think straight, “…oh the architect? Yeah, he lived there…and apparently finished the job in there too,” I added with a nervous laugh.

“I haven’t slept in days. I don’t sleep much any more. Look at this place. That’s where he fuckin’ lived, right there, where he existed, paranoid and insistent on the uneven balance of the symmetrical and the imperfect.”

His tone changed completely, he was stern but confused and was talking about something that made no sense to me. His stress of the word ‘existed’ worried me, I started wondering what had gone on in my apartment and it instantly brought back the memory of my realtor, stood in the room with that same serious uncertainty.

“What are you talking about? What do you know about this building? Why don’t you sleep?” My questions were met with silence as he turned and faced the hallway, eyes fixed on the closed door of my apartment. I looked over at it too, but it looked the same as always, square and ordinary.

“Don’t you know about this complex? This street?” He asked. I told him I knew a little, but shook my head, no.

“This guy Villion, a rich old French guy, was obsessed with the polar extremes of symmetry and imperfection. He was totally alone, always was, and moved over here to escape.”

“Escape what?” As I reciprocated the conversation, I edged around him until I was stood in the doorway. I always thought there was a good reason for not having met my neighbors and I realized it was because he was a fucking nut job.

“Himself. He needed to get out, I need to get out.” He looked anxiously around the room and picked up and put down his foot three times, so that it created sticky tar lines between his sneaker and the floorboards.

“This whole area of the city was knocked down and was gonna be rebuilt to improve the neighborhood, you know, like a renovation. Villion had just got here and needed somewhere to use. The land was being auctioned off so he bought the street and started right in the center with this apartment.”

He walked through the tar and stood by the wall, scanning everything that was on it frantically. I was still in the doorway but was about to leave at any second when he ripped a thick blueprint off the wall, sending pins and other pieces of paper flying off and onto the floor. He unfolded it and walked towards me.

“Did you ever notice anything weird about this building?” he asked with a half smile.

I instantly thought of the numbers, patterns and shapes that were exposed under the peeling wallpaper, but didn’t want to fuel his insanity so shook my head, backing out of the door.

“Come back in here, you were in my apartment, I thought you knew this?” He didn’t wait for a response and ushered me back into the room, closing the door behind us.

“Look. He started with our building, right? It’s so fucking perfect. Villion was obsessed with flawed precision. This number, fifteen. It’s everywhere on this street. Look at our building,” he gestured to the blueprint; “it’s got five stories with two apartments either side. Each apartment is twelve feet high, right? Twelve multiplied by five is sixty; a multiple of 15. The width of each apartment is fifteen feet and the depth is thirty, which is…”

“…fifteen doubled.” I interrupted, nonchalantly. This was twee as hell, coincidence, and I just wanted to get out of there, when he smacked the blueprint with his fist, commanding my attention.

“If you don’t wanna know, you can just leave. If this is a joke to you, get out,” he threatened, offended. He seemed genuinely troubled and as we lived pretty close, I told him I’d stay for a few minutes and introduced myself.

“I’m Nate,” he said, “I used to work downtown in Paradise Lost , but they signed me off for a while ‘cos of this.” He explained, throwing his arms up in a pissed off way. I recognized the name of where he worked, Paradise Lost, it was a ultra-modern art gallery for new talent in the fashionable district of the city.

“Yeah, so…fifteen?” I tried to refocus the conversation.

“Ok, if you look at this,” he was outlining the dimensions of our building with a ring-crowned finger, “you can see each apartment is fifteen feet along, well, the section here for the hall is seven-point-five feet wide, which is half of fifteen. You have the half in the hall, surrounded by its two doubles either side. Yeah?” he checked I was keeping up but I was just nodding along out of politeness.
      
“He was so impassioned by this, that he replicated this building fifteen times on either side to the exact proportions of the original. Our complex sits dead in the center of its row with seven identical buildings either side of it to complete the order of fifteen.”

“Why fifteen in a row though, surely that’s just a coincidence?” I offered in the way of help.

“Well, it fit perfectly with the requirements for the street layout – yeah this was a coincidence but it was so perfect that it fuelled Villion’s “meant to be” mentality and so he created this street with fifteen buildings on either side to complete the whole of thirty.”

“So he started off by building this right in the middle, correct?” I asked.

“Yeah, then he built outwards, seven other complexes on either side to give him fifteen.”

“Why fifteen? What was so significant about it that makes you think it’s such a big deal?” I wasn’t being rude but I still didn’t get what he was on about and needed a better reason.

“Its an odd number that can’t be divided in half perfectly but when doubled, creates a perfect whole. Fifteen is free from the constraints of theory; Numerology only spans from 1-9 and so fifteen, being a two-digit number, has to be broken down into the singular 1 and the singular 5, then added together to make six in order to be examined under this method. It’s separated from the bounds of explanation. As a whole, it is intangible but he brought it into the physical by the dimensions and construction of this street.” He looked at me as if by now I would have perfect understanding of his situation. I didn’t.

“So having the seven complexes either side relates to the fifteen ‘theory’ how?” I questioned.

“Well,” he sighed, like a teacher who tried his best to educate a student but failed, “seven can’t be cleanly divided into two, much like fifteen, but can be doubled to create an even 14. Thirty buildings lined this street with fifteen on each side. The concept of something so whole and perfect, fifteen for example, being split in half to reveal something so flawed, seven-point-five, had a tight grip on him. It is the basis of life, perfection can only be acknowledged if imperfection has been experienced. One does not exist without the other; it is the natural order and exactly this order that poisoned his imagination and fuelled his obsession. These paradoxes, ordered chaos, form the foundations of our very existences.”

I thought about how I was drawn to this street, its name, its neat row of identical buildings and its overwhelming feeling of order and control.

He broke my thoughts, “Look, I found this,” snatching another ripped out piece of paper from the wall, “it was left in your room, after Villion died. They took his stuff away but left all of his journals and one night, maintenance had been to service something in there and forgot to lock it up so I went in and found these.” He strode over to a cupboard and opened it, revealing a small stack of string-bound journals, bursting with loose leaves of paper.

“It’s a poem by Villion from when he was living here.1 It was carefully constructed under the rules of blank verse, which allows complete freedom under the government of iambic pentameter. Laws and liberty coexist. This partnership is everywhere. This street embodies it. Villion thought he found a way to control his fate, through living in this ordered chaos, from acknowledging the structured uncertainties of life he could somehow escape or reduce the inevitable. He thought he had it figured out; fate, he thought he got it but it killed him.”

Suddenly, nothing about the street’s design is comforting. These buildings aren’t homes, they are constructions, vehicles for an obsession that bore lunacy and for a few seconds I completely understand.

That night, Nate left the apartment and left his door unlocked. I let myself in and found his own journals underneath Villion’s. As I flipped through them, Nate’s, I read that he had walked through the city about a month ago and passed a homeless guy begging for change. As Nate walked past, the guy put his cup down and grabbed onto his arm, tightly.

“…same guy that’s there almost every day. We always see each other but never speak or acknowledge the other’s presence. Today, as I walked past, he threw down his cup full of dimes and quarters and reached up, grabbing my arm. He used my strength as a lever to stand and still holding on to me, leant in and said “You will know when you’re about to die because you’ll see your fate closing in on you.”

Nate had underlined, ripped out, circled and noted things in Villion’s own writing that mirrored this, and it seemed that Villion’s problem had spoken directly to him. Nate’s journal made it pretty clear that he believed in the idea of fate, but didn’t think there was an ultimate predestined plan. This encounter with the guy in town had shown him otherwise, as each day’s entry was complex and dark. Nate had gone looking for meanings in things and had found them; in horoscopes, in fortunes and had built up a collection of things like this. As each one came true, he had been crossing them off, and was left with only a handful. He’d bumped into people he hadn’t seen in years, and his psychotic preoccupation began overshadowing the real and merging into the fantastical. I got it. He thought he was being out run by fate. He left so he could beat it.

 

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