Vacuosity

Tick for tap

Someone upstairs has a habit of tap, tap, tapping on the floor most nights around bed time. It's enormously frustrating, partly beacause it's loud, and partly because I wonder what they're doing. Whenever I hear it, I have half a mind to barge up there and bang on their door. Occasionally, if it goes on too long, and I get really fed up, I take the heaviest book I can find, and hurl it at the ceiling with all the force I can muster. It makes a satisfyingly tremendous thud. The tap, taps usually stop immediately. Right now, Barabara Kinsolver's The Poisonwood Bible gets the honour.

It reminds me of an appartment Julia and I had when we were first married. Every night when we went to bed, we'd hear tick tick tick through the wall. Then we noticed that it wasn't only at night, but during the day too. It sounded as if the guy was tapping at the wall with a small chisel, planning eventually to come right through. It drove me insane. I couldn't figure out what this man was doing, or why he tormented me so. Sometimes, when I could bear it no longer, I would pound my fist againt the wall to no avail. The tapping would continue, unrelenting. It was rhythmic, but not precise. Tick, tick, tick, pause, tick, tick, tick, pause, pause, tick, pause, tick. Neither was it constant; sometimes it would stop all together for days, or even weeks.

Firmly resolved to address the matter with this man (I knew it was a man as I had seen him on rare occasions) I banged on his door, often, but he would never answer. I grew fitful, waiting for the opportunity to pounce on him, but he never left, and he never entered.

For months this went on, the ticking, the pausing, the hovering by the door, the ears pressed to the wall in an effort to decipher the sound. It was mechanical; it had to be. It was too rhythmic to be sustained for so long. But what? And why? During this time, the man went unseen.

Life went on. We were in debt almost 7K on the credit cards, and money was slim. I often used one card to pay the bill of another. Things were getting progressively worse financially. Jordan was born, and I knew I had to do something to increase my earning power. I quit my mailroom job, and went back to school. Through all of this, the mystery of the noise next door went unsolved.

When the money from the student loan had been used up, I had to find a job that I could do while in still in school. Julia, Jord and I moved downtown where I took a part-time job as a superintendant.

A few weeks before this happened, I came across the man next door by chance. He had ducked out to the grocery store for a few provisions. He was an elderly man, mid-sixties, who apeared gentle and mild; not the sort at all who would come through your wall. I said hello, prepared as I had always been to bully this man to tears; though that plan was short-lived. It quickly became evident that my neighbor was, for all intents and purposes, deaf.

With this information, some things fell into place. I soon realized that the noise seemed exactly like a noisy ceiling fan. Our man next door wouldn't even have known that anything was wrong.

The irony was that by this point, we had become so accustomed to that ticking, it didn't bother us in the least.

posted by David @ 10:54 p.m.