With the construction next door at 505 Haggart Street, I’d thought things were turning a corner. But now construction has begun at 503, two doors down from me. On Saturday there were people coming out of 503 with debris and throwing it into a dumpster in front of my building. Which was distressing, because at least at 505 there has never been weekend work, except once for the emergency chimney intervention. Whereas at 503 they’re doing off-hours work right off the bat, in the demo phase, which bodes poorly.

Of course, saying that 505 Haggart is next door is not really adequate. The preposition that can capture the relationship between my apartment and 505 Haggart Street doesn’t exist. The only thing separating my apartment from 505 right now is about three layers of lead paint. That has been true since the first day of the demo, when they stripped out the walls on their side, leaving a negligible and highly permeable barrier. If you leave any object in my hall or bathroom, it has a fine layer of what looks like moondust all over it in perhaps four days, which was not the case before. Fumes get through freely, too.

But most importantly, there is no sound insulation between the two structures. None. I easily hear people talking in their inside voices over there. My building is no more than twenty feet wide, so that’s as far away from it as I can get, when I’m home. So we’re talking full-on construction, in my immediate proximity, with no acoustic buffer at all. Granted, there are no steel girders or heavy machinery. For the most part it has just been men with tools. Drills and hammers and of course saws. My hatred of power saws is a passion for the ages, which neither time nor death itself can quell. I’ll probably become a ghost after I die, and someone will consult a medium and say, “Why won’t she lie quiet in her grave?” and the medium will say, “It’s because she hates power saws so much.”

So the noise is horrific, but you also feel every sound. It’s odd. One day I could tell they were trying to move a very long heavy plank or beam through the first floor. I could feel one end knocking into one wall, and another end knocking into another wall. Without even thinking about it, I was reading the tremors, and they were giving me a 3D map of what was happening next door. I suppose it’s something people can just do, but I’d never quite realized it before. Under these circumstances, it’s not a pleasant sensation. It is not a mode of perception you want to have.

Now I’m looking at this dumpster directly below my bedroom windows and I can see at least three different decades in it. There’s Seventies fake-wood paneling, pine cabinet doors with brushed-aluminum knobs that could’ve been bought at Home Depot anytime in the past thirty years, and some pink-and-navy wallpaper that looks like it’s from the 1940s, or maybe somebody bought it on Spoonflower two years ago. Also splintered wood — grayish planks, sort of petrified-looking. The original floorboards, probably. You have to assume that every material that has been used to build or decorate homes in the past century is getting pulverized in this giant mortar of a dumpster, and aerosolized into a plume that’s dissipating in the wind, along with whatever substances got laminated into the floors and walls when people applied fresh coats of paint or polyurethane. So I’m probably breathing a mix of PCBs, asbestos, Final Net, coal dust, and every other bad chemical of modernity. There’s probably a micrograin of thalidomide somewhere in my nostrils right now, but I don’t even care. Pollutants have dropped to the bottom of my list of concerns. I can’t bring myself to worry about what I can’t sense, because the sensory inputs are overwhelming. The dumpster is essentially a giant bell. Every time somebody throws something into it, it makes a really loud clanging noise that cuts through earplugs, headphones, white noise. I tried to work on Saturday but couldn’t, and I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t get work done on the weekends.

I messaged Sam and I was like, “Are you the developer of the 503 Haggart project, too?” and he said no. Apparently there’s no relationship between the projects at 505 and 503. I’m not naive, but I think it’s kind of wild that it’s legal for this to be happening — to have one developer reconstructing one of these houses, and for another developer to come in and start doing the same thing right next door, in this row of little wood-frame structures that are sitting on a gigantic century-old tangle of water and gas and sewage and electrical infrastructure. It seems like a hazardous situation to me. And from an urban planning standpoint, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work to drop all these little construction sites into the middle of a densely populated residential block.

What it does to traffic, for instance — like every other day, they’ll block the whole street while somebody drops off bathroom tiles or hauls away a full dumpster. Dumpster hauling is an operation I’ve seen many times, but still it never ceases to amaze me, the amount of time these guys spend trying to make the truck latch onto the dumpster. There’s some kind of mechanism, two parts that have to click together. They’ll be out there for half an hour, just trying and trying to establish contact with the dumpster, and the whole time, or at least when they’re in reverse, the truck is emitting this very loud electronic stridulation, not the regular beeep beeep, but a really weird, extra, we’re-not-fucking-around noise. I’m sure the drivers are frustrated, but if you’re watching from a window looking down, you can’t see the driver, so the frustration you’re feeling is not reflected back at you. There’s no mirroring of affect. All you see is this truck inching forward and backing up, failing to hook itself to the dumpster, and then inching forward and backing up again at a slightly different angle, and the impression is of an unflagging can-do optimism. Like, I know I’m gonna get it this time. And all the while, it’s making this noise like a French police siren had a baby with a cricket.

And it’s like, of course you can’t hook your truck to the dumpster. Because the dumpster is parked on a street, and there’s a car parked in front of it, and there’s like five feet of clearance between them. This thing you’re doing is supposed to be happening in a place with a lot more room. That’s how the mechanism was designed. You’re supposed to back that ass up in a straight line. It’s not supposed to be happening at an angle. It just makes me want to shake my fist like Hitler in that Downfall clip when I think about the fact that this scene has been playing out with increasing frequency on streets all across this city, and presumably in every other hyperdeveloped city, for years. And meanwhile humanity’s thought leaders and problem solvers taught computers how to make their own beer commercials, and gifted us a new form of search that provides misinformation while guzzling all the fresh water on Earth, and invented a new kind of money that’s totally made up, exactly like every other kind of money, only this kind has a poorly understood relationship to JPEGs. Yet nobody could take twenty minutes to figure out how a dumpster that’s parked on a street can be hooked onto a truck in fewer than fifty tries.

So finally I was like, fuck it, and I bought a baby monitor for the space heater.

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And then when it finally does get hooked on, the dumpster’s front end lifts ever so slightly and starts moving so slowly toward the bed of the truck, and you can hear the motor straining and straining and it honestly takes at least fifteen minutes to get the bottom edge of the dumpster up onto the lip of the flatbed. It’s like you’re contemplating a whole other paradigm of motion, a whole other concept of the relationship between ambulation and time. Like, banana slugs and dumpster-hauling trucks: these are life forms that take . . . it . . . slow. And there don’t seem to be any rules about how often a real estate developer can commandeer a municipal thoroughfare for the purpose of staging a posthumanist encounter with dumpster temporalities.

These renovations, or reconstructions — I don’t even really know what you call them. It’s not quite new construction but it’s also not just renovation. Extreme makeovers? I’m sure when they do them, they put in new framing. They must. Otherwise it would be like in Poltergeist, where the dad is like, “You moved the headstones but you left the bodies, didn’t you!” You know: “You put in subway-tile backsplashes and rainfall showers, and you added another floor and a deck, and you replaced the old siding with the new kind that looks like moody wide-wale beadboard, but the one thing you didn’t change were the wooden beams that have been holding these places up since Grover Cleveland was President!”

That would be too insane even by New York City real estate standards, so there must be new framing. But it’s not like we’re talking craftsmanship for the ages. It’s common knowledge that the newer construction in the neighborhood is not top-notch. I’m not just referring to rumors about people getting electrocuted in the shower. I heard it straight from the city inspector who came out here to see if our building needed to be condemned after a guy in a pickup truck drove through the wall of my downstairs neighbors’ living room. This inspector told me that if a pickup truck had driven through the wall of one of the newer buildings on the block, like 508 Haggart, it would’ve collapsed immediately. This was in 2007, I think, so it wasn’t a case of: “Well of course it would collapse. You could take out a pylon of the Brooklyn Bridge with an F-150.” This was when pickup trucks were normal size.

508 Haggart has one of those very plain, institutional brick facades, and the window frames and balcony and fence are all mismatched, like the contractor went to Buildings R Us and got whatever was on sale. There’s a bunch of places like it around the neighborhood, and I kind of appreciate them because they remind me of those sweatpants that say I HAVE GIVEN UP down the side. But the inspector was clearly referring to all the recent and semirecent construction in all styles — not just Contractor Eclectic, but also the ones that are sort of vernacular Herzog & de Meuron, and the ones with the beadboard facades, which are supposed to look rustic. There’s one down the street that’s dark slate blue with black window frames, and I have to admit I think it’s rather handsome.

Lisa and Michael did major repairs, obviously, after the pickup drove through the wall, and for all I know the building was stronger than ever afterward, and they’re very conscientious about upkeep in general. But it doesn’t change the fact that I live in an old house whose front wall has been driven through, and that has been subjected to all the ordinary jostling experienced by a building on a New York street corner, plus the constant vibrations of the huge amount of construction that has been going on nonstop in this neighborhood for fifteen years. Plus that random earthquake. And, most recently, months of shaking from construction in the adjacent building, and now there will be months of somewhat less forceful shaking from the building two doors down.

My building is on the end, unsupported on one side, and on the other side there’s going to be these two reconstructed row houses that will collapse if anyone drives a pickup or a car or an e-bike into them. I lie in bed at night trying to fall asleep, and every time a truck passes I feel like I’m in one of those vibrating motel beds, and I think, “Was it always this shaky?” I honestly don’t know the answer.

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Before the incident this afternoon, I was starting to think maybe the worst was over. The 505 project started the first week of October, so it’s coming up on the six-month mark. The major stuff must be almost done. There was no noise from next door this morning. Sunday was quiet, yesterday was a holiday, also quiet, so today was my third quiet day in a row, which was amazing. I wrapped up an edit and decided to exercise for the first time since I don’t know when. I could feel some buoyancy in my mood. I was repeating to myself all the ways in which living two doors down from a row house that’s undergoing prolapsed gut renovation is different from living right next to a row house where the same thing is happening.

So I’m in my bedroom stretching on my yoga mat, feeling better than I have in a while. And then there’s this burst of extremely loud construction noise from next door. And the animal that has been living in my ceiling starts just, like, freaking out.

A few weeks ago I started hearing something scurrying around in my kitchen ceiling. There have been mice in the apartment before. They kind of come and go, and they don’t bother me. But I’d never heard anything in my ceiling before. I don’t think mice are heavy enough to be audible through the plaster. And I kept hearing it.

I texted Lisa, who seemed unfazed. She said I should talk to Laszlo, the exterminator who comes once a month to preemptively check the building, which I did. He said it might be a squirrel and might go away on its own. He doesn’t handle animals in ceilings, it turns out, but he told me he could recommend someone if need be, and asked me to keep him in the loop.

Then yesterday I was woken up at five-thirty by similar sounds from my bedroom ceiling. Among the scurrying noises I could hear small hard objects dropping, so I told myself it was only a squirrel, cracking nuts for breakfast. And then last night I heard scratching and squeaking in my kitchen, but the squeaking was the radiator and the scratching was coming from the backyard of 505 Haggart, where two pieces of aluminum siding were rubbing together in the wind. I was so relieved. It kind of shocked me, my relief response. Partly it was relief that I wasn’t hearing the animal, but partly it was everything else, all the reasons for worry, in concentric circles, rippling outward from my life to the world in general. My own situation is not dire, objectively speaking, but wow, as you move outward from me, things get dire really fast. And it was very intense to feel any kind of relief about anything at all.

I let myself hope that the squirrel had moved on. But this morning I was awoken at the same time by the same noises I heard before.

I texted Lisa and Laszlo, “Hi I’m hearing noises in my ceiling again. I’ve been woken at 5:30 past two mornings by an animal moving in bedroom ceiling.”

Laszlo texted back, “Someone needs to go on the roof and look for openings, but right now it’s too dangerous because it will be icy up there.” Lisa said they’d have someone come as soon as it was safe.

And I’m thinking, OK, it’s Lisa and Michael’s building and their son lives downstairs, so if Lisa doesn’t think immediate action is needed, I probably shouldn’t be too concerned. But after what I’d been hearing the past two mornings I was nervous about letting things drift along until the thaw.

So this morning I tried to tape some steel wool around my kitchen and my bedroom doors. There’s a hole in the plaster in my hallway, high on the wall near the skylight. It never bothered me before, but now I’m scared something’s going to come out of the hole and into my bedroom or kitchen. It would probably come in under a door, but they’re old doors in old frames, and when they’re closed, there are little gaps at the sides and on top. At the widest points I can stick the tip of my pinky in up to the knuckle. I haven’t completely lost my mind. I don’t think a squirrel is going to roll itself out like pizza dough and wriggle into my kitchen in pancake form. I guess I’m imagining a scenario where you start with a quarter-inch gap, and then you gnaw until it gets wide enough to get through. I don’t have a clue how long it would take to make a hole of sufficient size, but I know mice can scale surfaces and get through spaces you’d think would be way too small for them, so maybe other animals can, too.

So now I’ve got steel wool around the edges of the doors, and you can see it when the doors are closed, this wadded-up charcoal-gray fiber kind of splooging out. It’s got tape around it at intervals, so there’s a scalloped effect, which gives it a wacky, almost Memphis Group vibe. And it looks totally insane. Really hideous and completely insane. I put so much time during lockdown into finally tackling the kitchen’s aesthetic issues, but now everything needs a fresh coat of paint, the plants are dead, there are sploogy doors and dirty drop cloths on the kitchen floor, because the rugs got ruined when the pipes burst. The drop cloths are all wrinkled and pushed around, and you can see the linoleum again. It’s just a mess in here. I still haven’t finished putting my bathroom back together from when they fixed the pipes. The drawers from the bathroom dresser are still stacked on the hallway floor, and they’ve been there since December.

But anyway I finished the door project, I started exercising, there was this massive burst of construction noise from next door, and this animal in my ceiling moved. Rapidly. In my bedroom ceiling. My nonconsensual housemate started running around frantically, right above my head.

I thought: Did somebody make it angry and it’s in its Hulk incarnation now? It sounded so big. It also sounded like there were bowling pins in my ceiling and this thing was just knocking them down. I tried to make a video but then I realized I never pressed record. I felt bad about scaring the animal more, but I felt I needed to document what was going on, so I pressed record and I stamped my feet and I made a video of periodic foot stamping and this creature reacting. At one point it seemed to try to run down into the wall. It was actually really sad. It ran down and then up again. When it tried to run down it made this thumping noise — it sounded like it had a kettlebell. I involuntarily went “UUUUHHHHhhhhh.”

I texted Lisa and Laszlo, “I think it might be an emergency, something is reacting to construction noise, and it sounds large.” I sent a link to the video and added, “First I heard it responding to construction noise. When I made the video I stomped my feet to make it react again. That’s what the stomping noise is.”

Lisa responded, “I messaged Sam to ask if they’re causing the noises.”

“It’s not construction, it’s an animal,” I texted back.

After a few minutes she texted again. “We spoke to Connor. He said there’s some aluminum in the yard of 505 that was blowing in the wind.”

“No, I heard that last night,” I said. “It’s not that.”

She said they were trying to find someone but none of Laszlo’s referrals were available.

Then Laszlo texted, “I watched the video but it’s impossible to distinguish between your stomping, the construction, and the other noise.” Lisa said she couldn’t distinguish among the noises either. “Could you please make a video hitting a pot with a spoon three to five times for an auditory reference point?”

In other words they were watching the video thinking, “This is so incredibly noisy, she is being so loud and there’s so much ambient noise, there’s construction ten feet away, it’s just a total cacophony in there, how does she expect us to hear the animal?” They didn’t realize that the cacophony was the animal, because it was literally unbelievable. It sounded like there was a fucking twenty-pounder up there.

I made another video, standing in the spot where I made the previous one, and I banged on a pot with a spoon and said, “This is what it sounds like when I bang on a pot.” Then I stamped my foot and said, “This is what it sounds like when I stamp my foot. Other than that, and when I went uhhhh, every sound in the other video is the animal in my ceiling.” And I sent it.

Meanwhile it was dawning on me that my vision of a nutcracking squirrel was probably a pipe dream. I’d been in a state of denial. Because despite having put all the steel wool around, I somehow had not quite voiced the R-word to myself, nor had I pictured an R-word up there. But now I was doing both.

Lisa texted, “Sam is going to send his guys to check it out. He says it could be debris from the roof addition.”

That information might have upset me even if this ceiling situation were not 100 percent Sam’s fault, but it is. I’ve lived here a very long time, and we’ve never had this kind of visitation before. This was the first winter all my pipes froze solid, and it’s also the first winter there’s been a cold soulless shell of a house on the other side of my bathroom wall. That’s obviously not a coincidence, and this isn’t, either. The causal link is not self-evident, but I feel certain this would not be happening if it weren’t for the construction next door. Just like I’m certain that, unless there’s a type of construction debris that panics, and has little feet that scratch frantically against drywall, this thing that I’m hearing is not construction debris.

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I don’t think Sam is trying to make my life difficult. His comment about debris is part of a larger behavior pattern where he’s super responsive and helpful within the parameters of the horrible situation he’s created, so whatever anyone says to him, he’s like, “Oh, let me put your mind at ease, I bet it’s just the siding.” He tells you what you want to hear, that’s clearly his MO. It’s how he manages the residents and owners of buildings near his worksites. I don’t understand why he bothers, since as far as I’ve been able to determine he could tell us to go fuck ourselves and there would be nothing we could do about it, other than complain to the Department of Buildings, which would do nothing, and would do it in 2026. That’s assuming there’s even any grounds for complaint. It’s not clear that he’s broken any laws or violated any regulations.

I do kind of get the sense that he genuinely feels bad, and that’s part of why he has been accommodating. Like when he called off work during Christmas week at my request. Or in our first phone conversation, after they put the first hole in my wall — which occurred in literally the first five minutes of the demo at 505, in October. I was at my desk working, a writer with a book contract and no day job and a whole winter of writing stretching ahead of me, a vast beautiful terrain of empty time, with little bits of freelance editing that just made it look even more pristine, like copses of conifers on the tundra. Then I heard some commotion next door and a crash, went into the hallway, and found chunks of drywall on my floor and the head of a sledgehammer poking through the wall.

He’s on the ladder brandishing this foil container and he goes, “She’s smart.” And from that point forward, she was she.

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Shortly afterward, the head of the demolition crew came over to fix the hole and we exchanged numbers. Sam called me to apologize. He said something like, “This is what’s going to be happening and hopefully it won’t be too disruptive.” I said, “I have enough experience living and working near construction sites to know I’ll be unable to work from home while construction is going on at 505, and if you had given me notice I could’ve applied for residencies or done so many other things to prepare for this. I left my job months ago and renting market-rate workspace is not feasible for me right now, and neither is paying double rent, and neither is permanently giving up this apartment, so my options are limited, and this could hardly have happened at a worse time, and it is going to be extremely disruptive, at best.” Which sounds passive-aggressive, but how can it be passive-aggressive to say, “Yes, you are fucking my life up,” after somebody says, “Apologies for putting the sledgehammer through your wall, there will be many more months of this, I hope it’s not too disruptive”?

After I gave him this spiel, he sort of laughed nervously and said, “Oh nooo!” jokily yet sympathetically, the way a friend says “Oh nooo!” if you report something disappointing or mildly upsetting. Which was a strange response. He could be a sociopath who’s good at imitating the nuanced weirdness of real emotional reactions. But it seems more likely that he’s a normal person doing shitty things within a system that permits him to do those things, while also feeling bad about those things.

When I say the system is permissive, I mean, for example, that a developer apparently has no legal duty to foresee that if six guys spend a couple weeks bashing the interior of an old house with sledgehammers, the house’s chimney might become destabilized. Nor is there a duty to foresee that if you strip out the windows and insulation in a wall, exposing pipes to an unheated space on a ten-degree day, those pipes might freeze. That was during the Christmas construction hiatus, and I was so determined to write during my window of guaranteed quiet that I ended up staying in the apartment for three days without running water or heat and with nothing but two space heaters to keep me warm. I wore fingerless gloves and my father’s old army blanket over my winter coat, wrapped around me and tied at the waist with a cardigan, and then a gigantic XXXXL hoodie over all that, and a scarf wrapped around my head over the hoodie, basically a roly-poly bundle like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass when she’s about to turn into a kitten. If you’d knocked me over, I would have fallen to the floor without injury, but then I would’ve just rolled around helplessly unable to get back up. I only vacated when the pipes thawed and burst, flooding both apartments in my building, although Connor and Olivia were out of town, fortunately for them. I went to sleep on my brother’s couch, but that never goes well because the couch is also where Potato sleeps, fitfully, and fartfully, so after three nights I decamped to an Airbnb to wait for the plumbers to finish fixing the pipes, spent seventy-two blissful hours there, then had a full-blown panic attack contemplating my bank balance minus the cost of the stay.

Apparently the main node of ice, and the main point of vulnerability for future refreezing, was a juncture right behind my toilet, where different pipes diverge toward the sink and shower. Sam’s initial proposal for dealing with this was to use an electric pipe warmer, or pipe cozy, with sleeves for additional pipes — picture a slanket for a thirty-foot dachshund. He sent a photo of this product to me and Lisa and Michael. It was in a bright-blue package with chaotic typography all over it, like if Dr. Bronner’s sold plumbing supplies, and there was a jagged yellow bubble that said FREEZE-NO-MORE, and an image of the pipe cozy kind of looping around.

I told him there was no way he was going to put a Freeze-No-More behind my toilet, plug it in, and leave it unattended nights and weekends as it buzzed like a Tesla coil until a drop of condensation collected on the pipes, and the Freeze-No-More started sparking, and the whole block burned down. Back channeling, because it seemed impolitic to question his plan in front of Lisa and Michael. He responded, “Yeah I knew you would say that.” I said, “I am not going to bicker with you about whether it’s safe to have an electric slanket on my toilet pipe.”

We ended up deciding I would have a space heater in my bathroom, running constantly, to keep the vital node ice-free. I remove it when I shower, and I guess a space heater in a nonsteamy bathroom should not be too worrisome, but my nervous system is activated these days in such a way that many things are more worrisome to me than they might have been otherwise. I’m on high alert, waiting for the next unpleasant surprise. The next hole in my wall — there have been two so far. The next glimpse of men in hard hats looking down through my skylight. The next bone-cracking jolt or gross chthonic rumble welling up from the depths of 505. The next hair-raising batch of search results, like the ones I got when I googled What does a distinct fishy odor from a construction site mean. They were pretty much unanimous, all down the page. They said, IT MEANS RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

Who knew that certain plastics smell like three-day-old fish stew when their molecular bonds are sundered at high temperatures? As might occur, for instance, when somebody is cutting HVAC ducts with a laser, or a chain saw, or some similar implement. It’s not a faint olfactory resemblance. It’s like a Lutheran church basement on lutefisk night. Whatever compound is responsible for fish smelling like fish, that same compound is produced in large quantities when these substances melt. However, on scrutinizing the search results, I saw that toxicity is not the main danger posed by these fumes. The issue is that if this odor is wafting out of your electrical wiring, it means you’re about to be engulfed in an unquenchable inferno. But if it’s wafting out of melting ductwork, it just indicates HVAC installation. So all’s well that ends well?

I think most people would be in a state of mild hypervigilance after a monthslong series of this type of experience. And my normalcy bias has decreased to the point that it feels as if anything could happen, up to and including structural collapse. They say space heaters aren’t dangerous anymore, but I still found it impossible to achieve any semblance of relaxation or focus with a space heater running in my bathroom. I kept getting up to check on it as if it were a newborn, except what you’re worried about with this newborn is that it’s a pyromaniac.

So finally I was like, fuck it, and I bought a baby monitor for the space heater. What’s another $90 compared to what 505 Haggart has already cost me. Not so much out-of-pocket costs, although those have been considerable — my electricity bill is stratospheric thanks to my constantly running air purifier, for instance. It is the opportunity costs that have been crushingly exorbitant. It was critical that I make headway on my book this winter, and I think there’s an excellent chance I would have, had it not been for this disruption. I was itinerant for months, trying to work in different places in and out of the city, wasting varying amounts of time attempting to settle into each place. I’ve been writing and editing in New York City my whole adult life. I don’t need to be able to hear a pin drop. All I need is a noncacophonous, minimally habitable space that I don’t have to spend half my savings to access. But such a space proved absurdly elusive. Finally I decided to start working from home again. Well, I didn’t decide. I just started waking up in the morning and not going anywhere.

I’ve been trying not to dwell on the fact that Sam is entitled to do this to anyone, anytime he wants. His demo crew can descend at any moment on the elderly, people recovering from surgery, parents home with infants — whoever. No consent needed in the City of Yes, as our mayor has dubbed the Big Apple. As in: Yes, you can develop this real estate.

If the chimney had fallen through my skylight and I had been killed by glass shards, my family could sue Sam. If a worker was injured or killed, the worker or their family could sue, theoretically, although that seems more theoretical than ever now — I don’t see a lot of undocumented New Yorkers seeking out contact with our legal system in the foreseeable future. But in the eyes of the law, everything Sam has done up to this point is 100 percent fine.

Everything he’s done at 505 Haggart, at least. He could be facing ten wrongful-death lawsuits related to other projects. If that’s the case, I don’t want to know. I don’t know his last name, I’ve never seen him, I prefer to be in the dark. I picture him as a finance bro, because that’s what the guys who developed the house behind me on Packer Street were. They had finance jobs and the Packer Street house was like — they were like artists with day jobs, but instead of making art they developed real estate. Sam responds to every text before you finish hitting send, which seems to fit that profile, you know, some kind of rise-and-grind productivity thing.

The rat bait is a giant syringe of paste that smells like a bistro dumpster on a hot night. He put it on a piece of bread that I supplied.

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He initially told me the project would last five to six months, which was laughable. He also said he wasn’t going to put an extra floor on top of 505 — I remember that clearly, because I asked him about it the first time we spoke and was relieved when he said no. Weeks later, after the chimney crisis, I heard people clomping around up there, not staying on the 505 roof but straying onto mine. I asked him, “Why are there people on the roof again?” and he responded, “The tiny house.”

I was like what the fuck, but then I realized he meant a small yet human-scale dwelling. I asked, “What tiny house?” and he said, “There’s going to be a tiny house,” and added: “I told you. Didn’t I? The architect was originally a maritime architect.” And then: “It will be cool.”

I texted a response that I deleted without sending. I’m not proud of it, but that’s a big part of how I communicate with Sam — ellipses that undulate and then disappear. I never intend to just type without sending a message. I intend to say, “Yes that sounds really cool I can’t wait for the SS Insufferable to be dry-docked on my head,” but then I think better of it.

In short, he’s full of shit. But so are carnival barkers, three-card monte dealers, and riverboat card sharps — it’s part of the job, the great Melvillean tradition of being a confidence man. They have a lot on their minds and a lot of irons in the fire. They just kind of say whatever is expedient at the moment, and it would be silly to take it personally.

But the truth is, I do take it personally. The truth is, I want to fucking kill him. Because, not that long ago, I was a semi-together individual with some irons of my own in the fire, living in an apartment that had finally achieved the elegantly shabby je ne sais quoi one might hope for in a quaintly garret-like Brooklyn abode. And now I’m this wild-eyed person with scalloped rat barriers around her doors who watches her space heater on a baby monitor. And while real estate development is not the only reason for that, it feels like the primary reason right now, and Sam is the personification of that force in my life.

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Apparently, feeling helpless is a major risk factor for depression, and being depressed impairs your ability to help yourself. That’s a fun feedback loop. My current condition is not like when I would spend ten minutes exhorting myself to move my arm one foot so I could pick up my phone and call my psychopharmacologist. It’s not that bad. But these days, the path of least resistance is the only one I know how to take.

Which is why I’m in bed at three-thirty on a Thursday afternoon, watching What Happened, Brittany Murphy? Thankfully Lisa found a pest-control specialist who was available on short notice. His name is Jimmy and he came over yesterday. He went up on the roof and found a hole — not the hole near the skylight, this was a hole in the roof — and texted a picture of it to me, Lisa, and Michael. It was just a small hole, shot from overhead, but I was so disturbed by it for some reason. When he came inside he remarked, “The window is open up there,” meaning the window of the tiny house. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask him to. I was just staring at my phone, aghast.

He looked at the other hole, the one in my wall, and said, “That’s a good place to put the trap.”

It’s a sizable metal cage, a no-kill trap. He climbed a ladder and flaked off a lot of the plaster surrounding the hole, exposing broken wooden slats beneath, shoved the trap into the hole, causing bits of wood and more plaster flakes to rain down, and said, “Now for the bait.” 

The rat bait is a giant syringe of paste that smells like a bistro dumpster on a hot night. He put it on a piece of bread that I supplied. The squirrel bait is peanuts. He had this giant bag of peanuts in the shell and he shook about eight pounds of them into the cage. After he created this McDonald’s PlayPlace peanut pit, he added the bread with the rat pâté and said, “It’s going to be happy, whichever it is,” i.e., whether it’s a rat or a squirrel. I told him my concerns about something coming out of the hole, and he said he didn’t think I should worry, because the animal would have to jump from the hole and it “probably wouldn’t make it.” I guess he saw the look on my face because he said, “But I’ll put up this grate!” It’s removable, obviously, but it looks secure.

Right after he set the trap and left around 7 PM — I mean, right after he left — I stepped into the hall and heard a rustling and metallic rattling, not too loud, but clear as a bell. And I just stood there transfixed as these sounds emanated from the hole in my wall, thinking, It’s a squirrel it’s a squirrel it’s a squirrel. Due to the grate, I wasn’t worried that whatever was up there was going to make a leap for it. But it was still kind of horrifying, and as I’m standing there, mesmerized, a peanut falls out of the hole. Out of the hole and through the grate and onto my hallway floor. I did a sort of Cowardly Lion recoil, just a full-body cringe in terror of this peanut, and ran into my bedroom. I texted Jimmy, Lisa, and Michael that there was definitely something in the trap, and there was rejoicing all around.

And I thought, It’s a squirrel, happily eating peanuts, and soon to fall asleep in peanuts. When I woke up this morning there were peanuts all over the hall, like baseball stadium bleachers in 1910. Jimmy texted to ask if I could hear anything from the trap, and I said no, it had gone silent. He said if there was anything caught in the trap, it would still be rattling, so whatever it was must have escaped. But I was holding out hope that it had been caught, despite what Jimmy said.

So I was waiting in suspense today as Jimmy kept pushing his ETA back and back, having originally said he’d be here around ten. He got here at three, very apologetic. He said he’s overscheduled because pest-control specialists are in high demand in New York right now. The trap was empty and the pâté was gone, which to Jimmy confirmed that it was not a squirrel, because apparently a squirrel couldn’t have grabbed the bait without getting trapped.

But he had additional reasons for this conclusion, which he proceeded to relate. He said he’d peered into the tiny house yesterday and seen takeout containers. The rat or rats had probably smelled the takeout from a lower floor of 505, gone to eat it, and then, for whatever reason, ventured out of the open window and into my building’s crawl space. That was his theory.

He was like, “Well, we know what we’re dealing with. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to handle them with no-kill traps. But for tonight, let’s rebait, and I’ll adjust the spring, and we’ll see what happens.” But I was busy dissociating, because he had said them. Yesterday he was saying it, and now he’d switched, presumably because a squirrel in a crawl space is probably alone, but a rat in a crawl space is probably not.

I messaged Sam, “There are now rats crawling out of the tiny house and I think I might have a stroke,” deleted it without sending, then wrote, “please tell the maritime architect thanks it’s really cool,” accidentally sent it, and got a smiley face and folded hands in instant reply.

Meanwhile Jimmy briefly went out to his truck, and when he came back he said, “I brought them a treat!” It was a round foil takeout container full of chicken and rice. Not a side-dish container, a main course, and there was so much chicken and rice in it that it was kind of drooping. I think it was from a halal truck. It smelled really good. He nestled it in the remaining peanuts, lid on and everything, and put back the grate and left. This was shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, which is the middle of the night for rats. But when I came back up the stairs after letting Jimmy out, I could hear the cage rustling and rattling.

And so, I took to my bed.

---

I texted my brother and told him what was going on. “You need to move,” he said. To which I responded, “not an option.”

“Did you ever file a rental insurance claim?”

Back in December, when my pipes burst, he told me to file a claim on any property that was destroyed by the flooding. Maybe today was the day to call. Maybe it would make me feel better, or something.

Kevin Lark has been my rental insurance agent forever, but we’d never spoken. My only interaction with his office is to renew my policy, which I do through his assistant. I was surprised and delighted when he picked up and told me he had time to take my call. I gave him the rundown on the work next door and its effects, to which he seemed to listen attentively. Then I said, “For instance, we have this rat problem, and according to the pest-control specialist, the construction next door is probably the cause. He thinks they came over from there.”

This wasn’t especially relevant to my renter’s insurance, but rats are top of mind for me right now, so I threw it out there. I was saying, “So I guess my question is — ” when Kevin interrupted me.

“There is a huge rat problem in New York City,” he said. “They are everywhere.” He then launched into a monologue about the world-historical demographic explosion of rats we are witnessing. He went on and on, to the point that I held the phone away from my ear. But I kept having to check if he’d changed the subject, since at any moment he might start talking about my insurance policy. So I couldn’t help catching bits of his disquisition.

“ — and oh yeah, once they get a foothold, then you’ve really got a problem, and you’ll never get rid of them!”

“OK, OK, forget the rats,” I interrupted. “Can we turn to the broader situation? I think it’s possible that this construction could severely damage my apartment before this is over, and I want to know, if that happens — ”

But he interrupted my interruption to start talking about how there’s also construction everywhere, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. It’s going on all over the place in the town where he lives on Long Island, it’s driving everyone crazy. When he took a breath I jumped in.

“Is there anything I can do now that could expedite a claim later if, for example, I come home and find the ceiling in my apartment has collapsed?”

“Well, what would that be for though, if your ceiling collapses?” he said. “What would that claim be for? How would that be ‘loss of use’?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean — here’s the thing. You’ve gotta think about it. What are you making a claim for? You know what I’m saying? How would that be ‘loss of use’?”

We proceeded to have an argument about whether a collapsed ceiling would result in loss of use of my apartment. Eventually he conceded that it might, and told me I should document everything so I could prove what’s been going on and what caused it. He definitely used the word prove.

“What are you talking about, why is proof necessary, what in my policy says that the cause of damage even matters?” I spat. “And why would the burden of proof be on me? Are you seriously telling me that if my ceiling collapsed in the midst of construction in the adjacent building, I might need to show that a) my building was vibrating and b) the construction caused the vibration? How would I even document vibrations?”

“You could make a video.”

“What would a video of vibrations be?” I asked. “You mean water shimmering in a glass, or what the fuck? Should I get artistic with it?”

I hung up when he launched into yet another monologue, the theme of which was futility. I don’t remember the exact words, but I swear to God it was something like: “There’s really nothing you can do. There’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can do for you, and there’s nothing you can do.”

Like a mantra.

There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing I can do.

---

I am in bed again.In the fetal position. This morning I texted Jimmy and told him not to come today. He’s been here every day but Sunday to check and rebait the trap, always hours late. I figured that by now, a week in, we both knew the trap would be empty. Because, according to Jimmy, she’s smart.

On Thursday, the day of the chicken and rice, Jimmy was using they/them pronouns for the creature/s in my ceiling. He came back on Friday and once again, the trap was empty and the food was gone. There was a generous sprinkling of chicken and rice and white sauce on the floor of the hall, but whatever hadn’t been flung through the grate in the feeding frenzy had been eaten. Jimmy pulled the foil container out of the hole and it was factory clean. Spit shined. It was strangely terrifying.

That was the second day in a row he’d found the trap empty and the food gone. He’s on the ladder brandishing this foil container and he goes, “She’s smart.” And from that point forward, she was she.

That’s how the mechanism was designed. You’re supposed to back that ass up in a straight line. It’s not supposed to be happening at an angle.

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From the beginning Jimmy has said silence equals emptiness. No rattling, no rat. I’ve never doubted that he knows what he’s talking about, yet there was this gossamer thread of gnostic optimism. I mean, if Tom Cruise’s character in Mission: Impossible got trapped in a cage, I don’t think he’d be rattling it, do you? He’d be conserving his energy and waiting for his chance to make a move. If I were trapped in a cage I guess I also wouldn’t be rattling it, because I would be too busy lying in the fetal position watching What Happened, Brittany Murphy? In any case, when I woke up today, I found the thread had snapped. I had no hope that today might be the day we’d find her in the cage and take her to the subway and say, “Fly, be free.” So I texted Jimmy not to come, and I sat down at my kitchen table and tried to work. It was really noisy, so I had earplugs in, headphones on, white noise cranked up so loud that the white noise itself was making it hard to concentrate — it’s better than the alternative, but it’s like trying to edit in a wind tunnel — and I could hear a racket through all this. I heard what sounded like noise in my hall, but since there’s no auditory distinction between noise from 505 and noise in my hall, I thought nothing of it. And all of a sudden my kitchen door opened up. Not the door of my apartment, but my kitchen door. And a man in a hard hat was standing there.

I didn’t think he was a home invader. I took the hard hat at face value. I think I did briefly ask myself: Is he going to attack me? Is this a serial killer? Because I remember assessing the distance between us and looking at the objects on my kitchen table for something to throw. But that was just the millisecond between processing man in doorway and then processing hard hat. Once I’d absorbed the hard hat, I became certain he was there in some kind of work capacity. So, pro tip, I guess: If you’re a home invader, wear a hard hat.

I concluded that they’d now made a third hole in my wall, and this one was big enough for a person to pass through. They fixed both previous holes very promptly. So I assumed that, this time, they’d decided to be extra expeditious and send someone through the hole to fix the hole.

It seemed self-evident to me that this was what was happening. It didn’t even occur to me to doubt it. Because it was a logical progression along this trajectory of repeated incursions: the holes, the rat, the people on my roof, the dust, the fumes, the noise, the shaking. Sound waves and vibrations are physical entities. They’re not matter, they’re energy, but they are physical entities coming into my home. I’ve been hyperaware for months of the thinness of the boundary between my apartment and 505, and now it seemed as if that boundary was not tearing but stretching, morphing, getting convoluted, like a disgusting living membrane in a David Cronenberg movie. Like the nauseating cartilaginous whorls in the neck of that guy in The Brood. The same way I could feel the beam thumping against the walls, I could feel this egregious new interpenetration of spaces. It was a physical sensation. Body horror, you might say.

And I lost. My. Shit.

He was talking. He’d been talking from the second he opened my kitchen door, but of course I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. I ripped off my headphones and ripped out my earplugs, but I still couldn’t hear him because I was screaming, “Get out get out get out, get out of my HOUSE, get OUT!”

While a part of my brain wanted to know what he was trying to say, the only thing that really mattered to me was for him to uninvade my space. But he just stood there, still talking, and he looked like he was pissed off at me.

I stood up and started slashing my arm toward my front door like somebody on the deck of an aircraft carrier, going, “WALK! DOWN the stairs! And OUT! The front door!” Trying to communicate that if he would leave, I’d follow him out, and then he could tell me whatever he had to tell me.

I was trying to be forceful but dignified, which backfired, because I had started with a strong and classic statement, which was to repeatedly yell Get out! at the top of my lungs. And I only sounded more ridiculous when I started going, “Walk! Away! From my home!” or whatever. Whereas he kept standing there scornfully spewing words at me like Don Giovanni.

But he was less invested than I was, I suppose, because at some point he was like, “OK fine, whatever,” and he turned. And as he turned, he said, “We should’ve just let the fucking building blow up.”

And he just kind of stomped off. He left.

I rushed out after him — no holes in my wall — and into the street. There was a fire truck, at least two vehicles from National Grid with their flashers on, firefighters milling around, and more guys in hard hats. The street was blocked off at both ends. The little cement yard in front of 505 Haggart was now a heap of rubble with a big curved pipe sticking up from it.

My downstairs neighbors were nowhere to be seen, so I asked a firefighter what was going on.

“Gas leak?” He did not say duh, but there was an unambiguous duh in his voice.

I found the man with the hard hat who’d been in my apartment and apologized and asked if he could explain what had happened. Apparently, someone in the basement of 505 had simply fucked with the wrong pipe. There has been a strong new-car smell coming from 505 lately, which I’m sure is really healthy, and I guess the gas was blending with those fumes. Luckily someone with a keener nose recognized the scent and called 911, and this whole giant scene unfolded, which I’d worked straight through. I didn’t hear the texts from Connor and Olivia or from Lisa, because the white noise was too loud, and none of them tried to call me, I guess because they figured that if I was home, I would’ve come outside when half the first responders in Brooklyn showed up.

The man in the hard hat said Connor had let him into my apartment. National Grid procedure requires checking every unit before leaving the site of a gas leak. For comatose people or corpses. He also said it was a “Grade 3” leak. “And with a Grade 3, with a little flame or spark — ”

He made a globe shape with his hands and slowly pulled them apart while puffing out his cheeks and going pwaaaah.

I did not ask how many grades there are. There was probably already enough cortisol in my bloodstream at that moment to dissolve a penny overnight.

I said, “But is it safe to go in?”

He shrugged and said yes, but that I should open all my windows, especially if I’d been feeling weird the last couple of days.

I didn’t go back in right away. I sat down on my stoop and basked in relief. Now that the work at 505 had almost made the whole block go pwaaaah, somebody was going to make it all stop. The fire department would report this up the chain, and someone would tell Sam: “OK, that’s it. You’ve extruded as much chaos and mortal risk as we’re going to allow. You’ve reached the cut-off point.”

The firefighters packed up the orange cones and the trucks drove away. I went in. It was eerily, blissfully quiet. And the grate was no longer in place.

I thought maybe I would just stand there forever with my eyes fixed on the uncovered hole, and never look anywhere else again, but I realized that was not a practical plan, so I forced myself to look down. She was on top of the fallen grate, which was on top of some peanuts, nibbling a little piece of desiccated chicken and appraising me. She held my gaze for a couple of seconds and said, “What happened, Brittany Murphy?”

I asked her what on earth she meant.

“I mean there is no cut-off point,” she said.