Trouble at 4B

           Frank Leary, 68 years of age, lived in apartment 4B in a drowsy, decrepit building on the corner of Gaston and Avery.

           With most of his days spent reading encyclopedias and passing judgement on pedestrians who spoiled the urban view from his window, he found peace in the silent company of his one-bedroom apartment at the very end of an otherwise vacant hallway. Short, stocky, and with a figure resembling a crouching toad, he was, in all respects, a peculiar man with an equally peculiar set of likes and dislikes. This included, but was not limited to, a rare appreciation for the calm, rhythmic wagging of his dog’s tail; a mild irritation with foamy coffee; and a surprisingly unparalleled loathing of the dripping faucet in his bathroom, which he was both too inert and close-fisted to fix.

           In the same way, Frank was, to put it lightly, no big fan of stereotypes.

           “They’re a cheap, embarrassing excuse for character development that gives viewers nothing of substance to hold on to”, he would tirelessly exclaim to his grandchildren the one time a year he took them to the movie theater. A former scriptwriter himself, he believed this gave him the indisputable right to insert his ‘objectively correct’ opinion into every movie-watching experience. But despite Frank’s inherent peculiarity, he was far from unintelligent, and the irony of his being was not lost on him. Deep down, beneath his cold, callous exterior, he knew he matched the ‘bitter old man’ stereotype through and through. Of course, having dealt in absolutes his whole life, he knew this fact, too, with absolute certainty – although nothing would pain him more than to admit to it. This subconscious resentment for his own hypocrisy brewed within him a burning desire for seclusion. For Frank, this seclusion would be incomplete if not accompanied by a deafening silence that hung in the air like cobwebs on a tall bookshelf.

           One might then attempt to imagine how severely Frank’s expression soured (more so than usual), when, upon opening his front door one day, dog leash in hand, he was met with an unfamiliar character. A young man, who looked as though Frank had caught him in the middle of knocking, stood before him in a pair of sensible brown pants and a white collared shirt, both of which he had clearly taken care in ironing. Fresh-faced and boasting a warm smile, the man carried with him an air of youthfulness and a sense of wonder. He knew he had his whole life ahead of him, and this only added salt to Frank’s perpetually festering wounds.

           The dog, a small, scraggly mutt that had become Frank’s personal burden after the passing of his wife – mirroring his owner in appearance, but not in demeanor – barked with delight at the presence of another human being, particularly one so radiant and energetic. The crisp, high-pitched barks resonated off the cracked and musty walls of the hallway but were quickly brought to an abrupt end by the kick of Frank’s heel to the little burden’s side.

           The stranger, despite being made clearly uncomfortable by the treatment of the dog, did not break his smile. In fact, while introducing himself as Frank’s new, next-door neighbor who had just moved into apartment 4C, his smile only grew warmer. Once the echo of his words slowly ceased, a brief silence descended between the two men. Suddenly, with a low grumble and slight nod of his head in acknowledgment, Frank yanked the thick nylon leash and hurriedly made his way down the hallway.

           Whilst the busy city streets burst with excitement and anticipation for the weekend, a profound, burning anger situated deep within Frank’s gut had made him feel nauseated and lost, for he could not understand why or how someone might move there. The building was on the verge of collapse and had hardly been in an attractive part of town, thanks to which Frank had gone almost a decade of living in complete, unsullied solitude at the end of the long hallway. Disoriented and overwhelmed by the news he’d just received, he collapsed onto a bench and convinced himself that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be so bad.

           But, lo and behold, not two full days after his first encounter with the new resident, Frank’s initial hunch seemed to have been proven right.

           The day had started splendidly. The street outside Frank’s window was empty, as it typically was on Sundays, with only the occasional squirrel making an appearance on the pavement below. The usual morning coffee was rich and foamless, and even the dripping of the bathroom faucet appeared hardly noticeable. Perched over his elbows at the rickety kitchen table, Frank breezed through a section on African sand gazelles in the third edition of Weisman’s Encyclopedia, astonished by how such a small, dainty animal could reach such incredible speeds.

           Suddenly, a faint sound caught the attention of his finely tuned ear. Ruffling his brow, he soldiered on with reading about African sand gazelles, considering them to be much more important and worthy of recognition than the happenings of some irrelevant ne’er-do-wells. However, despite his best efforts to drown out the noise by means of intense concentration, the noise only seemed to grow louder and ever-more present.

           Surprising as it may seem, despite his persistently resentful attitude, Frank was not a confrontational person. He, too, then, was surprised when he found himself marching with great zeal to apartment 4C, convinced that his new neighbor was the root cause of his grief. After all, this had never happened while the apartments around him were vacant. With a powerful knock on his neighbor’s robust, wooden door, Frank’s voice boomed:

           “Can you please stop making so much noise? You’re disrupting my peace!”.

           The door quickly opened to reveal the figure of the young man. His casual house clothes appeared just as neat and tidy as the brown pants and white-collared shirt he wore a few days earlier. Although clearly puzzled by this unexpected accusation, his quintessential warm smile once again did not waver. Whilst he was polite enough to apologize for any inconvenience he might have caused Mr. Leary, he also, nonetheless, insisted that whatever noise his neighbor might have heard was not his doing.

           Returning to his apartment, Frank noticed that the sound had disappeared. He scoffed under his breath, probably uttering an insult or two about the man next door. It wasn’t until a few days later that the same, aggravating sound had once again graced the otherwise hushed atmosphere of Frank’s home. This time, however, Frank’s incredibly short fuse led him straight to DEFCON 1 – filing a formal noise complaint to the police. For the next few weeks, as the noise persisted, Frank incessantly issued noise complaints, but to no avail.

           Embittered by the sense of duty that was so painfully lacking in the police force of the city, Frank could think of no one else to turn to but the building’s concierge. Intelligent as he was, he could also think of no reason why a decrepit, old building in a far from appealing part of town would even have a concierge, and he detested that part of his rent went into paying for this service. For this reason, Frank generally avoided speaking to him, unless it was absolutely necessary, like it was now. The concierge was a man slightly younger than Frank, with a long, grey face and visibly thinning hair. Generally insipid and terse, his expression for once revealed a sense of shock when Frank came to speak to him. Upon hearing Frank’s noise complaint, though, the concierge’s expression of shock would immediately turn into one of confusion:

           “Sir, the resident in apartment 4C moved out last week.”

           Whilst this came as a massive relief to Frank, it, strangely enough, did little to put an end to his daily exasperation. Even after the young man’s alleged departure, the seemingly sentient noise was a regular at Frank’s. It would arrive unannounced – sometimes during breakfast or the afternoon news – and would only leave after dark, when the few sounds filtering through the apartment was the whisper of the gentle evening wind and the soft tapping of branches against the cold, double-paned window.

           The menacing sound in question was more so an indecipherable ruckus than simply a noise – impossible to pin-down and often changing where it came from, it was a constant and ubiquitous force. Its peculiar nature made Frank wonder. Perhaps it came from the upstairs neighbor? Or from the building next door? Or could somebody simply be playing a cruel trick on him?

           Whatever the case, the weeks-long debacle had quickly tired out the old man, and the next morning, after loading his bags and dog onto the backseat of his old, rusty Ford Pinto, Frank Leary left his one-bedroom slice of heaven on the corner of Gaston and Avery.

           It had not taken him long to make it out of the city. As he made it to the outskirts, he watched the oncoming miles of workers making their daily commute towards the city center. For a moment Frank pondered whether they, too, faced a problem that, like himself, only they could understand, but upon remembering that he left the city to escape from the wretched noise, not to think about it, he mechanically switched on the radio as a distraction from his thoughts.

           It had been a long time since Frank had listened to the radio, or any music, for that matter. For a man so obsessed with silence, he considered music to be a sacred creative force. After all, listening to music was a favorite past-time of his that he once shared with his wife, and he intended for it to stay that way, as a memory cemented in time. As he allowed himself to reminisce over fond recollections of enjoying music well into the early hours of the morning with his wife, a bitter-sweet feeling enveloped him, and, as if by some curious twist of fate, her favorite song chimed through the speakers of the Ford: “My Echo, My Shadow and Me”.

           Almost as if he had been hypnotized, Frank made it to his country house, having completely lost track of time. Idyllic and quaint, the little white house sat perched on top of a hill, overlooking the rolling wildflower meadows and birch forests that spilled out below. Frank chose a comfortable looking spot of grass to sit on and gazed at the spellbinding beauty of the landscape, which was perhaps second only to the sight of the scraggly little dog chasing a butterfly.

           For the first time in weeks, Frank felt a sense of calm. He had, in a mere few hours’ drive from the city, all but forgotten the ghastly noise that had haunted him back home. He felt at peace with his own thoughts about coffee foam and African sand gazelles, and this time he thoroughly enjoyed his little canine companion’s rhythmic tail-wagging.

           When, suddenly, the noise reappeared.

           Bewildered and confused, Frank jumped to his feet. Running erratically in circles around the overgrown meadow, he searched desperately for a source of the noise as it rang through his ears, cruelly and carelessly.

           But there was no one and nothing there. There was no one to complain of, and there was no one to complain to, and yet the noise still persisted.

           In that moment, Frank fell to his knees, cupped his face in his hands, and cried. Hot tears dripped off his face and onto the ground below. Meanwhile, apartment 4B returned to its natural, silent state of being.