CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dorian looked down the bar searching, but through a trick of prospective, he wasn't able to spot Mioko squeezed in among the crowd. His date snoozing on the table, Dorian made his way to the door.
He kicked a beer bottle out of his way as he moved past an inebriated young scenester holding up his girlfriend's hair as she wretched red wine into the gutter. There was something strangely intimate about their immodest display and Dorian was momentarily transfixed, but he kept walking.
Dorian climbed the stairs solo, hung in a melancholic trance. He'd gotten so sick of sitting at home wondering why he wasn't able to make himself cry over Althea, that a casual tinder had seemed like the best possible alternative. But the company had been so unbearably lame, he hadn't even managed to bring himself to rouse the girl and drag her home to his bed. At one time crying had been as easy for Dorian as laughing. In his twenties anything could be misconstrued as the deepest of heartbreaks. There had even been a strange bout of tears that had poured from his cheeks after he'd slumped down pathetically to the curb when he'd discovered an unexpected closing of a favorite Chinese restaurant. But somewhere along the line his tear ducts had turned to concrete.
Reaching his door, he pulled out a shiny key and inserted it into his new front door lock. The adjacent door of apartment 22 opened a crack. Ivan's timid face appeared in the exposed fissure, breaking the seal on his place perhaps for the first time in a week. The fresh air instantly equalized within his apartment, so that their shared hallway filled with a musty fetor.
"Dorian," Ivan whispered.
"Oh, hey Ivan."
Ivan pushed the door open another inch.
"Got a new lock, huh? That bastard downstairs really fucked the last one up good, didn't he?"
Dorian turned around to face his neighbor. "You saw him?"
"I see everything."
Dorian was unsettled by the fanciful statement.
Ivan motioned to the closed circuit camera above his door.
"Oh, right."
"You wanna see something?" Ivan asked.
Dorian hesitated. See something, as in go inside Ivan's apartment and see something?
Dorian had always been leery of his neighbor across the hall, unable to quite figure out Ivan's particular brand of damage. Until the morning last September when he'd been leaving his apartment, saying goodbye to Althea who'd been luxuriating in his bathtub, when he'd heard a discordant squeaky voice coming through Ivan's door; a mouse billowing through a loudspeaker a mile away. Trying to get a handle on the situation, Dorian had finally yelled back through the thick metal door, and had just barely been able make out the words "Help me. I'm stuck."
Stuck in crazy land.
"Call the police, I'm stuck."
Dorian had dialed 9-1-1, playing along with the crazy man next door. During the half hour wait for the fuzz, Dorian had done his best to keep his distant high-pitched neighbor talking. When the cops had finally shown up, a heavy-set Dominican who clearly had morning wood for Dorian's southern bedfellow, had spent thirty minutes trying to kick Ivan's door down while Dorian and Althea watched. Ivan's voice had been getting even fainter, and the words that were still exuding were sounding even less coherent.
Another half hour and a set of emergency services unit cops had shown up--the kind that cut people out of their cars, or dig victims out of rubble. They’d immediately gone to work with "the Rabbit", a pump action jaws of life that they clamped into the corner of Ivan's door, and with a series of pressurized pops, had managed to rip the metal from it's hinges. This too, had taken an unbearably long time, and with a dozen FDNY, NYPD, and ESU responders in the hallway, it had been next to impossible by this point to hear Ivan's squeaky far off voice anymore at all--leading the cops to speculate aloud if they were still trying to rescue a member of the living. Finally, the last hinge had blown, and suddenly the Hoover dam had broken. Ivan's door had surfed out on a massive wave of debris flowing through the open fissure, crossing the tiny hall into Dorian's apartment. After the avalanche, and the god-awful smell, they found a human arm sticking out from the bottom of a twelve-foot mountain of soiled miscellany: newspapers, videotapes, magazines, tools, cardboard boxes, plastic bags. So many plastic bags. The squeaky voice had been connected to that hand, and as the emergency services guys had dug, they finally managed to uncover a face. Then a torso. And at long last a set of legs.
They'd pulled Ivan out from his mountain of hoarded crap and began to cart him off. In an adrenalized state of unfamiliar goodwill, Dorian had asked his ailing neighbor if there was anything he needed, anyone Dorian should get in touch with to come and see him at the hospital. Ivan had whispered breathlessly into Dorian's ear, words he could still perfectly remember: "Just make sure nobody touches any of my stuff."
Ivan pulled his ill-fitting year-old door open another inch, "Come on in, I won't bite."
"Um, sure," Dorian said, relenting.
Ivan closed the door and Dorian contemplated making a run for it while his neighbor undid the chain inside. Ivan finally opened his door wide enough for Dorian to see the dank inner chamber of his abode.
Dorian awkwardly walked inside and peered around at the house-broken towers of magazines, the blocked rear windows, the shabby old furniture buried under ancient piles of flotsam and jetsam; the newspapers, the VHS tapes, and the tamed, but still seemingly infinite assortment of plastic bags. Six months of lifting his unhinged door in and out of place, of sleeping in the tiny trench by the entryway that he'd almost died in, of scampering up to the top of his mountain and dragging thirty pound bundles of yellowed newsprint down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, and Ivan had eventually made some progress.
"Tea?"
The thought of consuming anything bourn of that place made Dorian queazy.
"No thanks."
Ivan sat down at his computer, flipping on the ancient PC. On the screen was a staticky black and white overhead video image of the hallway. Dorian momentarily considered working Ivan into his new project somehow, the old hoarder and his screwy habitation was nothing if not interesting, and certainly a fixture of the expiring neighborhood, but Dorian quickly pushed the notion away. He was too disgusted with the thought of standing there for more than a couple minutes, let alone bringing in an easel and trying to paint the guy.
"Evidence as a deterrent," Ivan said. "Ever since that nutcase Morris slashed my bike tires and threatened me with a box cutter few years ago. He knows that if he ever tries anything, even comes to my door and thinks about it--I've got evidence."
Ivan shuffled through footage, multiple instances of Morris slamming his fists on Dorian's front door. Wandering the hallway. Staring menacingly at the camera.
"It's a closed circuit," he continued. "Motion sensitive. Been recording this hallway half a decade..."
Dorian nodded, but he wasn't listening anymore. He'd had enough of Ivan's extraneous narration and he was starting to feel boxed in. Living in the tenement had its charms. Not just the proximity to the fresh faced talent cramming the sidewalks downstairs, but also the isolation tank that his apartment provided, high enough above the streets to block out the incessant honking, yelling and cat calls at all hours of the day and night. It was the perfect combination of exposure and withdrawal. Yet key to that cocktail was keeping his distance from the cyclically twisted inner narratives of the property's Ivan Hershbers.
"You said you caught Morris destroying my lock?" Dorian interrupted.
Ivan turned back to him, keenly aware of Dorian's agitation. Pivoting to the computer, he clicked a file on the desktop labeled Dorian. Erik Satie's "Gnossiennes Number 1" began to play. The empty hallway appeared again. Slowly two figures emerge down the hall. Dorian and a young woman. They entered Dorian's apartment, a dissolve showed them leaving. Another woman, another night. And then another. An endless stream of female strangers walking the halls, some escorted by Dorian. Most leaving his apartment alone.
Dorian watched, his face slowly melting.
"Every choice we make," Ivan said, as the blown-out black and white night visits continued, "leads us to become the person we may or may not want to be."
The haunting music slowed.
"You cut this together? Dude, fuck you! This is a complete invasion of my goddamn privacy."
Ivan looked back at him, surprised.
"I thought this might be of interest to you."
"Super creepy, Ivan," he said grimacing. "Fuck man," he added, at a loss.
Dorian turned to leave.
"I see that damn camera moving with me again, I'm gonna snap it off."
Crossing the hall, Dorian slammed his own door behind him, leaning up against it.
His face started to crumple, but still no tears. He swallowed hard as the images continued to sink in.
Some payback. After he'd snatched Ivan from the crushing weight of his own demise. That was the last time Dorian was gonna save anybody's life.
If you missed the first three chapters of Dwelling the Novel, here is the table of contents:
BEHIND THE KEYBOARD
Believe it or not this actually happened… the part about the avalanche anyway. My old next door neighbor in the lower east side tenement hoarded for decade upon decade, building huge piles of stuff in trenches he could barely squeeze through, until one morning it all came crashing down.
Kind of an interesting metaphor for our inner worlds. Difficult memories and feelings we pile up but don’t quite process... and then entire columns eventually come crashing down. I like to think most of us learn from these experiences, instead of just starting the stack again. I’d give myself mixed reviews on that front.
Yours In The Chain,
Doug Karr
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife 
DWELLING BLOCKCHAIN COPYRIGHT © DOUG KARR, 2018
I am a Brooklyn based writer, film & commercial director, and crypto-enthusiast, my projects include @HardFork-series an upcoming narrative crypto-noir and my novel Dwelling will soon be premiering exclusively on Steemit, and you can check out more of my work at dougkarr.com, piefacepictures.com, and www.imdb.com/name/nm1512347
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10% of all profits from Dwelling will be donated to Amnesty International.