“I left her food in your pantry,” I said. “It’s on the third shelf behind the oatmeal.”
“I know where it is. I organized the pantry.”
“Can you grab it?”
I stood in the doorway and looked past him into the apartment that had been mine for three months, at the stove light glowing, Hiro on his bed, and General Tso on the refrigerator. Everything was exactly as I’d left it—and completely different because I wasn’t in it.
“Good night, Peter,” I said after he handed me the cat food.
“Good night.”
“This is weird.”
“This is the correct weird,” he said, almost not sounding clinical.
“Both things are true,” I said, sounding far moreclinical.
“Both things are true.”
After that, the crossings escalated.
By Thursday, a pattern had established itself with the inevitability of a natural law.
I didn’t track the crossings the way Peter did, because I didn’t track anything the way Peter did; but I was aware of them the way you’re aware of your own breathing, a constant rhythm that you don’t count but that you’d notice immediately if it stopped.
Peter, of course, was counting.
In fact, Peter was keeping a notebook.
I didn’t know this yet, but I would, because Peter’s data-collection habits had a way of revealing themselves in the wee hours of the morning over tea.
On Monday, I crossed the hall four times. For the cat food and a charger I’d forgotten, to check on Clementine (who was in his apartment and who I could have checked on via text but whom I needed to see in person because seeing Clementine meant seeing Peter’s kitchen and seeing Peter’s kitchen meant being in the room where everything important had happened). And once at 10 p.m. for a glass of water, because my apartment had functional plumbing, but I didn’t care.
On Tuesday, I knocked at 6 a.m. because I heard a sound. The sound was Potato breathing, whichPotato did at all hours at a volume that could reasonably be mistaken for an Abrams tank crashing into a wall.
It was not an emergency. Peter opened the door anyway.
On Wednesday, Peter came to my apartment at 1 a.m. to return a single Post-it note I’d left on his fridge. It could have waited until morning. He brought it anyway.
On Thursday, there were fourteen crossings between us, including one at 2 a.m. when I showed up at his door claiming Princess Consuela was “acting strange.” Princess Consuela was sleeping normally.
“We’re not very good at living apart,” I said at 2:47 a.m., sitting on his counter with tea.
“We’ve been apart for four days. We’ve crossed the hallway forty-one times.”
“You’ve been counting?”
“I’ve been observing a pattern.”
“You have theexactnumber.”
“Forty-one. Approximately sixty percent initiated by you, forty percent by me, with an average interval of three hours and twelve minutes during waking hours, decreasing to ninety minutes after 8 p.m.”
“You’ve calculated an interval?”
“The data presented itself.”
“Peter Loupier has a spreadsheet of our hallwaycrossings, and I’m obsessed.”
