By the time I’m home from work, the longest stuffed monkey in the world is hanging its head in my apartment complex dumpster. Seven feet of monkey, beautiful almond fur, four-foot legs dangling with its throat crushed against the rim. “Rough night?” I ask, and pull the car into a spot.
Lately we’ve been getting emails from our apartment complex, subject line TEENAGERS, that encourage us to call the cops if we catch any youths loitering. This is an aggressive escalation from their last request for photographic evidence of people not picking up after their pets – flash photos of men in ski masks, I guess, dropping shits discretely in the night. I climb past two teen girls in the stairwell, fear beneath their eyes, begging me not to rat. By the time my mouth opens, I’m already up the stairs.
This is the kind of place where a car alarm sounds every night from somewhere, presumably the parking lot, though we can never rule things out when living above an amateur DJ. It is a different car every time – sometimes we can even see them from our balcony when overlooking our U-shaped asphalt colosseum – though usually we only spot the neighbor’s crusty maltese, yapping on its patio, outside alone in all weather. Once a month a fire truck arrives as if scheduled, red lights raving across faux brick. EMTs move in and out, hit their vapes when no one’s looking, but otherwise their habits are a mystery.
After several days of our oven not igniting and several maintenance requests unanswered, I finally get the leasing office on the phone. “No one has even been out to look at it,” I tell her, “I don’t understand the problem.”
“Did you scan the QR code on the front?” A woman named for a continent snaps. “When you do, your phone will sound an alarm. Hold your phone behind the stove until you hear a clang, and then your oven will turn on.”
“Oh,” I say, “I’ll give that a try.”
The complex sends another email, subject line POOL SAFETY TIPS. It wasn’t written by a person, but I don’t blame them; I would have hired the stuffed monkey, too. Next I get an email from a man who informs me that there is metadata inside every picture I have ever posted that could lead someone to my address. Cool, I email back. I’m off on Mondays, if you’re free.
My partner gets a text one afternoon, standing at the kitchen island. “I heard about the fire,” he reads out slowly, “Hope you and your loved ones are safe.”
“The what?” I reply.
That evening we walk to the other campus of our complex, over a mile from where we live. We don’t get out there often, only when the treadmills in the gym are broken and we have to use the second gym, or if we want to scry the algae blooms in the second pool, or if we want to encounter elderly women with early-onset dementia in their silver Honda Civics who don’t quite know how they got to Baltimore from Northern Pennsylvania. Admittedly, that only happened once.
On that evening, without a teen in sight, my partner and I round past the second pool and there it is: opaque plywood fence, waft of char, bright orange paper: NO TRESPASSING. ACTIVE ARSON INVESTIGATION.
“Well shit,” he says.
“Isn’t this the building we toured?” I ask, squinting up at the scorched-out windows, the blighted shell of siding. Popcorn ceilings traded for a better view of the rising moon.
“I thought that was over there,” he points across the parking lot, toward the building wrapped in Tyvek that burned down this time last year.
The next morning I watch drone footage of my apartment on fire again and receive an email from the complex, subject line WE ARE COMING FOR YOUR DOGS. I am lying on the carpet beside my cat, who is deep in thought. “Look, that’s where the couch is,” I tilt my laptop toward him and tap the screen repeatedly. “And our fireplace. Those should be our bedrooms – that’s where we are right now.” He stands to stretch, takes five steps away from me, and lays down again.
