The Last Tenants

Abstract

The Last Tenants Yume Kitasei (bio) The building was constructed in 1923. Or maybe 1924. The ink on the records filed with the Department of Buildings was badly smudged, and anyway it doesn't matter. There were thirty apartments in the building, four floors, and a live-in super. An old man lived on the fourth floor. He had always lived there, he had always been as he was. He wore a bow tie that was stained and faded, but correctly tied without the aid of a YouTube video. It is not that he was an expert in bow-tying, but he had once tied it perfectly and thereafter resolved never to remove it, even in the bath. He was missing his front teeth, which we all knew, because he turned his head to smile at us as we rushed past him on the stairway. In January, he moved out of the building. Sleet slashed against the window, and the living room radiator hissed and rattled its bones while he packed. He put his collection of broken watches in a dented old pot along with a half-empty box of spaghetti noodles and a can of Campbell's soup. Not tomato, but something else, low sodium, good for the heart. He carried all the boxes out himself, one at a time, from January first through January thirtieth, disappearing each time into the back of a blue car with Pennsylvania license plates. He left a stack of books under the mailbox for us to paw through, mostly fiction by authors named John or Jonathan. I didn't take any, but other people did, one by one, until there was only a copy of an Iceland Travel Guide published in 2009, which no one took even though we all intend to go to Iceland someday. Maybe. And then he was gone. There were three families who moved out in the month of February: a couple, a mother and a child, and Mrs. Lemon with the cats. Her name wasn't really Lemon, was it? Probably not. The cats were named Roquefort, Manchego, Camembert, and the little kitten, Feta. Mrs. Lemon was lactose-intolerant. She moved to Florida because she said it was time. She couldn't take another New York City winter. She gave the kitten to the young man, Raf or Ray or something, who lived on the first floor and smoked a lot of weed. Ro or Remi subscribed to the Sunday New York Times, dissected it for the crossword, and generously left its corpse for the rest of us to take, partially stuffed back into its bright plastic blue bag. We don't know where the couple moved to, probably Westchester, but the woman with the child said she'd found a place down the block that was cheaper and sunnier, with stairwells that didn't smell like cat pee in the summer. Just in [End Page 137] the winter probably. All buildings smell like cat pee at least sometimes. The landlord listed the vacant apartments. We expected new neighbors to move in because that was a natural law of the city: the eternal churn of people coming and going, like the way sunlight sweeps across the old brick and tan façade each day between eight in the morning and one in the afternoon. I could tell time by the way that yellow light made its ascent as I worked away at a desk in my living room. But now that I think about it, I didn't see anyone move in. Perhaps they did when I was out. You know, I have a busy social life; I go for dinner and drinks with people I'd like to be friends with and plays and movies with people I am. So I wouldn't necessarily have noticed not noticing anything. And I didn't. There was a woman on the second floor who always did her laundry while wearing a bright Stanford sweatshirt, like any of us would be impressed by that. What she was known for was the way she left her garbage bags in the stairwell bulging with good intentions going sour. She moved out in...