The Corridor

Abstract

The Corridor Ryan Eric Dull (bio) Alex greer was ready for a change. His job in Baltimore was directionless and his relationships were stale and more and more he felt himself pulled back to Providence, where everything had been fresh and everyone had been alive with passionate intention. On slow afternoons, Alex looked up maps of old streets he half remembered. He perused job listings, applied to a few. He didn’t seriously consider that he might get an offer until he got one, and then it was all scrambling and panic. He was sixty miles out from Rhode Island with a U-Haul full of furniture before he found an apartment ad that seemed all right. Nine hundred square feet on a street he thought he could remember, a nice street, with personable old buildings and a lot of brick. The ad was completely misleading, and the building manager seemed to know it. The apartment was a studio, barely five hundred square feet. “New floor,” the building manager said as they stepped inside. “New moldings.” “This is small,” said Alex. “Oh no,” said the building manager. “No, it’s big.” “It’s not. Look at it.” She looked. An apology flickered in her expression, but she didn’t say anything. She looked and looked. She was an older woman, and small, and she was wearing a huge, gauzy scarf, like something from another century. It would have taken a lot of work for Alex to be mad at her, and he was exhausted. “I can see how it would seem small,” she said. “Thank you.” “But there’s more.” “Where?” The building manager walked Alex to the near corner of the east wall. She gestured, fingers together, to a gap between the east wall and the south wall that stretched from the floor to the ceiling and couldn’t have been more than six inches wide. Alex sighed. The building manager continued to gesture, stabbing toward the gap until Alex came over to look at it more closely. The gap was, in fact, a corridor maybe twenty-five feet long and never wider than about six inches. It had no lights, and so after the first few feet it was dim, nearly dark at the halfway point. At the far end, it opened into another room, only a sliver of which was visible. Alex could see sunlight on a hardwood floor. He leaned into the corridor. His ears brushed the walls. The sharp smell of fresh paint tickled his brain. “How do I get over there?” “However you like.” “Is there another door, or—?” [End Page 99] “No. Just this hallway.” Alex furrowed. “This isn’t a hallway. You can walk through a hallway.” “It connects two rooms. Look at it. It looks like a hallway.” “But how am I supposed to get through?” “You’re not supposed to. You can do it or you can not do it. Whatever you like. Personally, I think it’s nice to have a little extra space, even if you don’t end up using it.” Alex stepped back from the corridor. He was dizzy and tired and he wanted very badly for this transaction to somehow be acceptable so that he could unpack the van and be done moving. “Why is it this way?” he asked. “Why did they do this?” “Before all the renovations, this used to be the middle of the building. And this,” the building manager said, reaching toward the east wall but not touching it, “used to be the elevator. Maybe you can imagine it.” Alex could. Now that he knew to look for it, the apartment had very clearly once been the hallway near an elevator. The east wall dimpled slightly where the door had been covered over. “That elevator was no good. Dingy. And small. The new elevators are beautiful. You saw them. They’re beautiful. You should have seen the party when we opened them. And we freed up all this space. Of course, you can’t get rid of an elevator shaft, not really.” “But why not just extend the wall?” The building manager shifted. “People like to hear nine...