DWELLING The Novel - Chapter THIRTY-TWO: The History of Civilization
Ndusen watched his boss from the other side of the glass sitting inside his dim realty office, counting out stacks of twenty-dollar bills by lamplight. It took all of Ndusen's willpower to push open the door and enter the dark office.
"There you are," Axlerod said, checking a handwritten list. "Listen, Ndusen. I got a little thing. I want you to pull the fuses for apartments 9, 10, 17 and 22."
"Pull them?" Ndusen asked.
"Yeah. When the power comes back, tell those tenants the blackout made problems with the breaker boxes. I'll let you know when they can have their power back. A week or two, tops."
Ndusen was bewildered.
"But, will they not notice that their neighbors have regained power."
A tiny glint of a smile appeared on Axlerod's lips. The sight of it made Ndusen's stomach seize.
"Might feel a little singled out, huh?"
By far the most brazen transgression yet. What started out as subtle manipulation, deceptive and mean spirited, was now adding up to what Ndusen deemed a complete betrayal of human decency.
"Your father, he would never approve of these tactics. I do not think I will be able to perform this task for you, Mr. Axlerod. You cannot ask this."
Axlerod set down his stack of bills and looked up at his employee with such disdain Ndusen could feel the plasma draining from his appendages.
"Get the fuck out of my office."
Ndusen stoked a small fire in the otherwise dark courtyard. Kondwani, Alile, and Dziko sat nearby chopping vegetables, freshly harvested from the now bountiful garden. Stella poured water from a hose into a large metal pot. Picking up the pot, Stella made her way towards the fire, but tripped, spilling water on the concrete between the buckets of earth.
"What is the good of this woman?" Kondwoni said in Chichewa.
"Mama, please." Alile said.
"Please, what? She is useless, can you not see that?"
Stella looked to Ndusen hoping he would stand for her. Ndusen poked at the fire. He shook his head, but kept his eyes averted.
Inside the building, all on his own, Chisulo climbed down the pitch-dark stairs with a flashlight. Dorian and a Wall Street bro (a prototypical douche the artist wouldn’t have been caught dead with if it weren’t for their adorable and unexpected guide) along with Wall Street’s glossy skinned girlfriend, followed a few paces behind. They reached the third floor and Chisulo knocked on apartment 9. After a moment, Mioko opened the door.
"Oh, hi," she said, surprised by the tiny visitor.
"We are cooking in the courtyard, if you would like to join us." Chisulo said smiling at her warmly.
Mioko was a little taken aback at the sweet offer. She looked to Dorian, but he just shrugged and smiled. She wondered if this was somehow a scheme Dorian had concocted to win back her favor with what she imagined to be an impressive bag of tricks. But the young boy's face was filled with such innocent warmth, Mioko doubted Dorian could elicit such genuine good cheer from another human to service his bidding. Even so, her asocial tendencies made her lean back on her heels, but her apartment tomb was equally uninviting.
"Yeah... it does sound nice," Mioko said. "Should I bring anything?"
Chisulo shook his head.
"No. Just come."
Chisulo reached out his hand. Mioko accepted his small palm, and the boy smiled reassuringly.
"Do not be scared," he said "I have this flashlight."
Mioko couldn't help but smile back.
Chisulo lead them downward, carefully lighting each stair.
In the courtyard, the enormous pot of stew on the open fire was starting to boil over. Alile and Dziko watched in horror as Stella and Kondwani moved in a slow hostile arc, ready to rip each other’s limbs.
"If I am so very stupid and you are so smart, why do you not try to insult me in English for a change?" Stella yelled.
"You are COW! Moooooo!" it was the worst insult Kondwani could conjure in the foreign tongue. Lashing forward, Kondwani struck Stella’s shoulder with the frying pan in her hand. Stella recoiled; shocked the elder woman had actually stuck her.
"Stop! This instant." Ndusen wailed, slapping down the frying pan. "This is over. You cannot hit my wife!"
"She is not your wife!" Kondwani screamed. "I am your wife."
Chisulo lead Mioko by the hand, followed by Dorian and the others, out into the garden to find his family cleaving at each other in their native tongue.
"What does this stupid girl offer this family, Ndusen, tell me that?"
"You must calm down!" Ndusen said.
Chisulo was undaunted by the now familiar squabbling, "I have brought dinner guests."
The entire family turned their heads towards Chisulo and his uncomfortable guests.
The superintendent’s embarrassment was palpable.
Morris stood alone in his underwear, pointing an industrial flashlight into his gloomy refrigerator. Offering nothing but the putrid stench of decay, he closed the fridge. Trying for the freezer instead, water gushed, soaking into the bottoms of his socks. Reaching inside, he pulled a package of half-frozen ground beef, and brought a freezer-burnt edge to his nostrils. Sour milk, Durian Fruit and Bubonic plague all mixed into one. There wasn't much that disgusted Morris, but the decaying hamburger meat traversed the bridge. He tossed the aging ground cow back into the pool of defrosted liquid where at least it would be contained.
Morris wondered if he should go downstairs and try to find an open take-out window, but the six-flight effort and potential for human interaction was just too much to face.
Then he saw it sitting on his kitchen table. Hungry? Why wait. Snickers. The wrapped brown bar just where he’d left it. Such incredible discipline. But he wouldn’t eat it. Not now. Not ever.
Shutting the freezer door, a vague sense of nausea had taken over from hunger, so he lay on his mattress and tried not to think about anything edible. But as always happened when he tried not to think of a particular thing, faint wafts of stewed meat and firewood flowed up the fire escape, invading the greasy rear window screens of his apartment. These unfamiliar smells in and of themselves were rather disconcerting, but not nearly as troubling as the voices working their way up the back of the tenement. The voices seemed much closer than Morris was used to, and yet they didn’t seem to be emitting from within his own prolific mental population.
Ndusen and his family sat in a circle around the fire sharing stew with their guests.
"This is delicious," Mioko said with a smile.
Stella smiled back, "Thank you. We made it together." Kondwani eyed Stella coolly.
Dorian surveyed his surroundings. His fire escape looked down onto this courtyard. He pondered how he could have possibly missed a miniature farm six stories below.
"You grew all these vegetables out here?" Dorian asked.
"Yes," Stella said, continuing as the goodwill ambassador for the family, for the first time enjoying the contempt in Kondwani's glaring, envious eyes. "It is our family project," she said enunciating flawlessly.
"When I was just a mwana, Chisulo's age," Ndusen said as he put his arm around his son affectionately. "When Malawi was still known by Nyasaland, the earth beneath our feet was a like-match to happiness. No phones, no screens. Simplicity. Complexity in my country, when it did arrive, only led to chaos and greed."
"Not so different here," Mioko remarked.
"My children, in America, they won't know these simple ways unless I teach them," Ndusen said.
Chisulo poked at the fire with a stick.
"These skills can be necessary, even here in this most modern society," Ndusen said. "We think other people making our possessions is progress. But we do not question what that progress really means. Since humans started to stand up straight, there has never been a society so strong, yet so entirely helpless."
The Wall Street trader smiled, "Civilization's need to destroy itself is the only consistent trend in the history of civilization."
"Now there's a cheery thought," Dorian said.
"Yes," Ndusen said. "We are like addicts of a drug. Financial disasters, natural disasters. We feel terrible, but we cannot help it, we just need more. More, has become the global economic model."
"You see a dark age on the horizon?" Dorian asked. "Waring tribes? The end of society as we know it?"
Ndusen pointed up to the pitch-black structure towering above them.
"I see a dark age here, now."
Dorian wasn't so sure he tracked a correlation between temporary power failure and the end of times. It wasn't like America had run out of coal, let alone natural gas or nuclear plants. Likely just some clusterfuck with the overtaxed grid, or human error. It wasn't like Dorian was a climate change denier--or whatever the environmental cause of the week was--he just didn't quite buy that the plane was going down and nobody had bothered to figure out how to build a parachute.
Mioko blew cooling air onto her spoon. "I guess impermanence is only frightening if you're clinging to the present." Her simple little smile made Dorian want her like no other he could remember.
Dorian took a bite of stew, his eyes glued to Mioko across the fire. He couldn’t be sure if it was just a flicker, but he thought he perceived the faintest twinge of eye movement back in his direction.
Mioko climbed slowly back up the pitch-black stairs with the little yellow flashlight Chisulo had leant her. In over twenty years in the tenement, this was the first time she had ever experienced any kind of camaraderie with her neighbors. It was a foreign feeling, if not entirely unpleasant, and she wondered if this was what it was like in a village. To actually know the people who lived around you, their stories, their hardships, instead of just catching fleeting glimpses on the stairwell. The focal points of her neighbor’s lives leaked through the walls: their music, their laughter, their tantrums, the invasive high notes of their orgasms--but those details really didn’t add up to meaningful understanding.
As Mioko stepped onto the second floor a door opened momentarily, then shut again. It was one thing to see your neighbors and pretend to know them, but something else entirely to sense them in the darkness without their averted eyes, the feigning of a busy day. The lack of visual cues made her groundless. Mioko continued upwards, but she was beginning to feel uneasy now as she reached the third floor.
She shined her flashlight down the hallway before proceeding from the relative safety of the stairwell. Pulling her keys from her pocket, she unlocked her front door as quickly as she could.
A whisper punctuated the darkness, "Boo!"
Startled, Mioko swung round with the flashlight, hoping to illuminate Trey or Dorian or anyone other than the person she found inches from her face. Mioko screamed, dropping the lamp. She wrestled with the door, twisting the lock, but Rube slammed her door shut.
"YOU'RE NOT WANTED HERE!" Mioko yelled "Go away. I'm calling the fucking cops."
She fumbled with the handle, holding back tears.
"Don't you wanna be friends with me?" Rube hissed.
"GO AWAY."
"I seen you drinking, getting high. I get you smack, that's what you want?"
"Why are you doing this to me? What did I ever--"
Rube slammed his open palm against the doorframe. Mioko screamed.
"What are you still doing here?" he asked leaning in next to her. She could smell his acrid breath, feel the heat on her face, but she couldn't see a thing. "Haven't you had enough?" He slammed the wall beside her again, her instincts told her run, but paralysis shot down her spine. "That wallpaper don’t cover the smell of smoke too good, does it?"
"Please..."
A receding whisper, "You’ll fucking die here."
Mioko began to tear up.
"Leave me alone. Please."
She was completely helpless in the pitch-blackness.
"Just stop. OK? I don't know what I did to you, if I crossed or hurt you somehow, but whatever it is, I'm sorry."
Mioko listened closely.
She slowly tried the door handle, expecting another slam.
But he was gone.
BEHIND THE KEYBOARD
Have you ever been truly terrified? Frightened for your life? Or accidentally scared someone else? Humans have a way of doing that to each other and themselves. If so, tell me all about it in the comments below.
Yours In The Chain,
Doug Karr
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife @zenmommas for years of support during the writing process, @ericvancewalton for his trailblazing, inspired collaboration and incredible guidance, @andrarchy for his mind blowing insight and friendship, @bakerchristopher for being an inspiration as a human artist and bro, @complexring for his brilliance and enthusiasm, Masie Cochran, Taylor Rankin and @elenamoore for their skillful help in editing the manuscript, and to @opheliafu for the fantastic illustrations she created exclusively for the novel's launch on Steemit and to Elena Megalos for her wonderful character illustrations. I’d also like to thank Eddie Boyce, Jamie Proctor, Katie Mustard, Alan Cumming, Danai Gurira, Stephan Nowecki, Ron Simons, Dave Scott, Alden Karr, Missy Chimovitz, my dad Andy Karr and late mother Wendy, and everyone else who helped lead me to this moment.
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
Please comment thoughtfully, up-vote and resteem and I'll gladly upvote your comments!
This is my favorite chapter to date. That moment of Mioko letting down her guard and getting to know her neighbors was special. This is what's missing in American society today. I remember in the neighborhood I grew up in most everyone knew one another. Now, it feels like everyone is so protective of their time they don't let people in.
There have been a few times in my life where I've felt terrified. Once my friend Juan was having an art showing at a gallery in Minneapolis. I was helping him set up and was in the gallery alone. A man walked in looking to rob the place and I was the only one standing in the way. He was mentally unstable and either drunk or high...he had a tool belt with a hammer and a few wrenches in it. He tried to push me into the back of the gallery but I slipped away then he came at me swinging the hammer. It was as though time slowed to a halt, there was no one there to help, and I thought I was going to wake up in a pool of my own blood (or not). After a few near misses he put the hammer down and started crying. I got him outside and we started talking and he confessed that his girlfriend threw him out of their apartment and he'd been living on the streets for a few days and was hungry. I'll never forget that moment for as long as I live. Great work, Doug!
Woah, that’s insane so glad it didn’t get any worse than that. Sounds like that guy was really lucky that it was an amazing person like you he came after and that you were able to open up to him like that. Impressive!
Yeah, it was one of the most frightening things I've ever experienced. There was no choice but to improvise. I'll never forget how much adrenaline was coursing through my veins.
Ndusen is certainly at the center of a lot of drama, I imagine this kind of drama was far from uncommon in general in cultures where men could have multiple wives, but Chisulo was quite clever in finding a way to get the others to put aside their public loathing. Funny how the Wall Street bro was in the area
That sounds like a horrible place to be put in, Rube is no stranger to death, not sure if Mioko knows his past... Scary enough even without knowing, though
It's not every day where a part of a story is directly based on experience, let alone with pictures! Crazy how someone can hoard so much whether it be plastic bags full of stuff or video footage or both! Creepy to be sure but I can see the appeal of never letting anything go
Good chapter as always, your characters are all so different and distinct, so they come to life more. great story thanks for share.
Wow such a amazing art , you are genious .
Nice story , i really like it .
Thanks for sharing @dougkarr
Upvote you .
The story is very beautiful and very realistic really you are a wonderful artist
And distinctive photography
Well done publishing
Amazing story I really Like it.Want to see more :D
Upvote you.
Interesting and exciting storyline , this chapter is captivating and fill with suspense