My neighborhood is a pretty friendly one. I’m in a major city, but one of the quieter areas. Though incidents occur from time to time, I would say that this is a relatively safe neighborhood. However, something has been bothering me for a long time. There is a guy who lives in an apartment building around the corner from me who is constantly loitering in front of his building. That’s not illegal or anything, but he is definitely there more often than not. I remember riding the bus home late one night and seeing him there just after midnight. Was he waiting for someone or just bored?
I was going to write him off as just a guy who had no life, but then something happened. I was walking home from the 7/11 one evening and saw that he was having an argument with some guy in front of the apartment building. The guy I see all the time is a pudgy Hispanic guy in his early 20s. The man he was arguing with was tall and white. He wore a leather jacket that must have cost at least a few hundred dollars. The Hispanic guy smoked a cigarette and gestured slightly as he talked. The white guy waved his arms and shouted like he did not care who heard him. As I passed by I heard him say, “I can burn your whole building down and nobody will even know I was there.” That stopped me dead in my tracks.
There was a fence around the driveway that blocked my from seeing the two men from where I was standing. The white guy did not lower his voice. He threatened the Hispanic guy again, this time with a curse that would make everything he ate taste rotten. It wasn’t the threats that he was making so much as the confidence with which he said everything. Like he knew nobody could help the other guy. The Hispanic guy was speaking more softly. He said something about how the other guy was high on his own power. At that the white guy got very quiet. For a few seconds all I heard was the sounds of traffic down the street.
“Carlos,” said the white guy. “I got your whole fuckin’ family in a vice. You think I’m doing this to get off. Me, it’s just the way of things. You can’t be on top without somebody to step on.”
“That’s dark, bro,” said Carlos. “You really believe that?”
There was silence for another moment. Then Carlos cried out. “What happened?” he said. “Why can’t I see?”
“It’ll come back in the morning,” said the white guy. “But for now, I want you to think about what happens when I don’t get what I want. You push your luck with me again, maybe I don’t give it back to you. Think about it.”
He walked away from Carlos. I saw him get into a Lexus that was parked in a red zone just a few meters from where I stood. Fortunately, I ducked behind a hedge before he could see me. After he drove away, I peeked out from behind the hedge. Carlos was fumbling his way up the stairs to his unit. I waited until I was sure the Lexus was gone and approached him.
“Who’s there?” he said as I placed a hand on his back.
“I saw what happened,” I said. “I’m going to help you.”
“I don’t think anyone can help me,” he said.
“Well, I know I can get you up to your room,” I said. “Come on.”
I helped him up the stairs. When I worked in retail, I had to assist legally blind customers once or twice. Carlos was new to the thing, so we had to move very slowly. I had to help him find the keyhole in his door and catch him when he tripped over the threshold.
The apartment was a decent size. Too big for one guy, really. But there was no one else there. The lights were all on. When I asked Carlos where everyone else was, he shook his head. “Ivan has them.”
“Has them where?” I asked. There were pictures of a big happy family on the wall. Carlos must have at least a dozen cousins. There was a painting on the wall that looked like something Jackson Pollack would have done. It was cool.
Carlos sat on his couch staring at the coffee table in front of him. Except that he wasn’t staring at anything. “This is such a fucking shit,” he said.
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “What’s Ivan got on you? Maybe I can help.”
Carlos didn’t say anything for a solid minute. I think he was weighing his options. He didn’t know me. Maybe he could find a way out of the situation without my help. But I don’t think it was desperation that made him say what he said next. I think it was curiosity.
“What do you think about people?” he asked me.
“What?” I said. That was a big question. I might have expected it from a philosophy professor, but this was an unusual situation for a Socratic conversation.
“Good? Bad? Do you trust people?” he said.
“Are you trying to figure out if you can trust me?” I asked.
“No, I’m trying to figure out if you would trust me.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not gonna lie, I think most people are fucking cowards.”
“Are you a coward?”
“No,” I said. I said it without hesitation, which surprised me a little. There was a time when I might not have been able to say it with such confidence.
“What do you think about me?”
“I think you’re a guy who’s between a rock and a hard place,” I said.
“That’s all?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I think you’re lonely. I see you out in front of your place all the time.”
“I have three brothers and one sister,” he said. “Maybe I just need a little air.”
“That’s not it, is it?” I said.
Carlos sat back and closed his eyes. Again, he was silent for a minute or two. I looked around the apartment. It wasn’t just a place to crash, it was a home. When you find a place like that, you can feel it the instant you step inside. The people who lived here had laughed together and cried together. They had shared many meals, gone skiing, and binged “Squid Game”. I know what it’s like to live with people who do not trust you and what it’s like to live with people who do. Good people can fill a space even when they are gone. Carlos was still finding his bearings now that he did not have the usual people to lean on. Weirdly, losing his sight seemed to have given him focus.
“I’m gonna show you something,” he said. “Come on.”
Carlos stood up and walked around the sofa. He was still fumbling a little, but not all that much. He walked a little haltingly, like blind people who use those sticks to feel around. But all he had was his hands.
He led me into his room. “Sorry, I know I need to clean here,” said Carlos, stepping over a pile of dirty clothes. Don’t ask me how he could do that. A calendar of women in bikinis hung on the wall and a bong sat on a messy desk next to an unmade bed. He was a single man in his early 20s, all right.
Carlos stood in front of his closet. He grabbed my hand and placed it on the handle, fumbling slightly before he found it. “Go on,” he said. “I need you to see what’s inside.”
“Will it help me understand what’s going on here?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I looked into his eyes as if expecting to find the answer there, but of course they didn’t register anything. So I opened the door.
I would have been fine with a portal to another dimension or maybe even a guy with a knife, but what I found instead was a closet full of boxes and shoes and other random crap. Except for one thing: everything in the closet was made out of teeth. Molars, fangs, front teeth, tiny animal teeth, everything in the closet appeared to have been constructed by some weirdo taking the teeth out of animals of varying species and gluing them together so that they perfectly formed the shape of a normal object. There were even clothes made out of teeth, although I didn’t touch them to see if they still felt like fabric. I gasped, noticed that even the inside of the door and its handle were made out of teeth, and slammed the door shut.
“You okay?” he asked. I was bent over with my hands on my knees, taking deep breaths. There is something so deeply unsettling to me about teeth, especially so many of them so close together. Where did all those teeth even come from?
“Sit on the bed,” said Carlos. I did, and he sat next to me. My sense of self was returning. As long as I didn’t look into the closet again, I would be fine.
“It’s Ivan,” said Carlos. “He put a curse on this place. Because we wouldn’t let him move in with us.”
“Why did he want to move in?” I asked.
“I used to work for him,” said Carlos. “He fired me, said I was always showing up late.”
“Were you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yeah. But I don’t think that was really what he was mad about. I think he was mad because me and the other guys there used to hang out after work and get high together. I think he wanted to come with. But we never invited him because he was such a shitty boss. Then after he fires me, he shows up on my door–just like that, no text message or anything–and asks to move in with us. He actually had luggage in his car. Seriously.”
“And what happened then?” I asked.
“We slammed the door and called him a creep. Then I came home one day and they were all gone,” said Carlos. “My whole family, just gone. Not answering their phones, not showing up to work, nothing. If we get ‘em back soon, maybe my mom can convince her boss she was just having a family emergency, but I don’t know about everyone else.”
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“Yesterday. I called up Ivan and said I wanted to talk. He hung up. So I went around talking to everyone I knew asking if they had seen my folks, but nobody had. I called Ivan again. I had to call him like fifteen times before he would stay on the line. I think he liked that. He said he was coming over. That’s what you saw.”
“And the teeth?”
“Ivan wants me to come work with him again. He wants to be my friend. Wants to live with us and get high with me and all that shit. Or he turns everything in here into teeth. Even me.”
“What a fucking way to die,” I said. Again, Carlos was silent. My friend Rikki told me once that life is not a zero-sum game. If somebody else has to lose so that you can win, you’re doing it wrong. Maybe Ivan was turning the whole apartment into teeth because he thought everything was about consumption. Food, cars, women, everything was just something to use and throw away. It’s not the first time I’ve met somebody like that. When I worked in retail, I had a customer yell at me once because a part of the expensive espresso machine he just bought had broken. Even after we told him that the manufacturer would send him a replacement part for free, he acted as if we had snuck into his house and broken the machine. People, huh?
“Go back home,” said Carlos. “Come back in the morning. If you want. We’ll figure out what to do then. I think I know somebody who can help us. But I’m not going there when I can’t see anything. If you’re ready to go there with me, go home and get some sleep.”
“Okay,” I said. “You be okay here by yourself?”
He nodded. “I know my place.”
I went back to my apartment, turning the lights off in Carlos’ apartment before I left. Before I went to bed, I called my fiancée and told her a little bit about what happened. Not the full story, of course, but I told her that I was thinking about calling out of work tomorrow so that I could help somebody I didn’t really know. She asked if I was doing it out of empathy for him or fear that whoever hurt him would come for me next. I think her point was that it’s noble to help people, but you’ll stretch yourself thin if you try to save everyone. She has a way of putting things into perspective.
I’m typing this before bed. I’ve already texted my boss to ask if I could take tomorrow off. My birthday was last week and the company gives us the option to take the day off on our birthday. Since I didn’t do that, I just asked if I could have the day off now. She said that’s fine. It’s a mostly healthy work environment.
Perhaps I will go to help Carlos tomorrow. I am a little afraid of Ivan, but I don’t think I’ve ever made a decision out of fear that I haven’t regretted. If he gets everything he wants and moves in with Carlos, that might threaten our entire neighborhood. The best way to avoid toxic people is to insulate yourself with good people. Ivan won’t be satisfied even if Carlos and his family let him move in. I’m just not sure that Carlos and I will be enough to stop him by ourselves.
I can hear my housemate cooking dinner right now. He’s a night owl. It smells good. I hope I can sleep tonight.