“Then how do you explain this?!” he shouted.
At his feet was a box stained from the inside. It smelled of melted chocolate. On the side of the box was stamped: THE LAST STRAW(BERRIES)!™
Even if I had associated with the kind of people who might tar and feather berries and ship them to me, this seemed like more of a 3 p.m. issue. I crouched down and examined the box, which was addressed to 1F. Which was not my apartment number. It was Don’s.
“Oh,” our super said, storming off with the box under his arm.
Don, too, had the mayoral streak that comes with twenty years of living in the same building, but he smoked too much weed to get wound up about it. The notes Don taped to the front door were upbeat scribbles about what not to do with one’s plastic bottles and what to do when closing the front door. Be gentle! Leave this world better than you found it! Peace & love, Don. I overheard him doling out lectures to new tenants about newspaper stealing that were so heartfelt, I felt guilty. Even when it was my paper that was getting stolen. He left sandwiches for the crack addict who sometimes slept in our vestibule with her knees tucked into her T-shirt, the scent of her lack of other habits seeping into the hallway and under my apartment door. Rolling a towel beneath my door became part of my nightly ritual. I suspected it was part of Don’s, too, though for a different reason.
So inspired was I by Don’s hempish embrace of the world, I salvaged a wobbly end table from the street, drowned it in disinfectant, and put it in the hall outside my door. I also put a disposable glass vase on it, which Don took to filling with flowers. With a fluorescent hallway bulb as their only light source, the flowers were doomed to perish at an epidemic rate. And yet Don replaced them regularly and without fanfare. When he got wind that I’d be publishing a book of my own, he seemed legitimately concerned that I would be made uncomfortable by the flowers.
“In what way would flowers make me uncomfortable?”
“Well, now that you’re famous,” he explained, “you’ll probably get creepy things all the time.”
I tried to imagine the world, now gone, from which Don hailed—a pre-Internet world in which there was only one brand of fame and you either were or you weren’t.
“That’s not how book publishing works,” I told him.
In truth, I had already received a piece of fan mail. It was in the form of a VHS tape from a hoarder in Boise who had read an excerpt of my book. The tape featured an hour of this guy speaking to the camera in front of a backdrop of board games and piles of Tupperware containing foods in competing states of decay. He talked about his gig as an SAT tutor while some birds chirped in a cage off camera. He was sane and harmless in the way that people who have grown to expect little from the world are sane and harmless. To this day, I’m not sure how he got my address but I choose to remain unconcerned about it. For one thing, I don’t live there anymore. For another, who am I to hoarder-shame anyone when I’m the one with the VHS player?
* * *
One night, after a bad day at work, I returned home to find a single iris resting on the building’s stoop. It was big and floppy, plucked up by the root. I spotted it from down the block. I couldn’t understand why the flower was outside and alone instead of in the vase and in the company of other flowers. But I had a hunch as to who had put it there. I twirled the stem between my fingers, glancing down at the note that had been left underneath.
Written in unfamiliar ballpoint, it read: To our beloved neighbor Don of many years … you will be missed.
I dropped my bag and sat on my stoop, where I reread the note several times. I felt that shameful charge in the nerves that occurs when something big happens. Before your brain has a chance to parse if it’s good big or bad big, the information goes into a kind of processing center for all eventful things. I wanted to cry, but I had wanted to cry before the introduction of the flower. It felt cheap to cull the emotion from one less-than-ideal day in order to have the ideal response to Don’s death.
You will be missed.
Proportionally, I hadn’t known Don well enough to burst into tears—but I also hadn’t known him little enough to go inside like nothing had happened. I called my old roommate in LA. I was unsure of where to put this tragedy that was not entirely mine. I wanted to drag it up to the roof of emotionally miscellaneous occurrences and leave it there.
“Well, that’s the thing about New York,” he said.
“There are a lot of ‘things’ about New York,” I groaned.
“True,” he conceded. “Except for death. Death is New York–specific.”
I balked at this. Death is not a regionally specific experience. It comes for us all. Death and taxes. Actually, just death. The Cayman Islands don’t have taxes.
“I mean the way New Yorkers handle death,” he clarified. “They don’t know how to mourn for people they only sort of know. It’s too abstract for such an opinionated culture. That’s why 9/11 was such a mess.”
“Oh, is that why?”
“I gotta go,” he said. “I’m going to a party in Venice.”
“Fine,” I said. “I hope you get trapped in traffic forever.”
I picked up the flower and took a big sniff. Alas, as Don could have told me, irises don’t smell
