Dust and lead have long covered my metal skin, and like a sooty sentinel, I’ve witnessed many intangible movements of the street. Dry leaves tumble down from my cypress neighbors. A rat scurries in the garbage-polluted gutter, and I watch as the new tenants’ girl hurries by beneath me. I watch a cockroach, or two, skitter from overflowing garbage bins.
The day’s final blush was fading, and the blue of the sky was deepening. A jolt of electricity, and warm light explodes from me. It washes over the pavement and its cracks that keep widening, the patch of overgrown bushes behind the apartment buildings, and the tarred road. Across from which two figures approched. You see, I’ve memorized this pattern. Day and night, feet pounding and clandestine meetings, furtive gestures and hurried goodbyes, solitary figures with their heads bowed and hands in their pockets. I push back the encroaching darkness and reveal what would otherwise be shrouded. And in doing so, I see everything.
The figures soon arrived by the cypresses with bags of groceries in hand. They were faces I recognized: the lady downstairs who permanently scowled, and another who lived on the other side of the street, where the circle of my light could not reach. Here, we had another pattern: two women in wrappers cinched tight across their waists and shoulders straight from tension. Their harsh whispers reeked of judgment. The wind mostly always scattered their words, but their critical glances towards the third-floor window said a lot. They’d nod slowly, speak of ‘history’ and ‘reasons,’ then disperse with loud laughter and greetings whilst their eyes darted around for any lingering shadows that might have overheard.
Soon, another would pass by, with her hijab wound tighter than a newborn. She’d jog by (an evening routine she started about a month ago) in dust-caked sneakers, dripping in perspiration. She probably hoped the adrenaline coursing through her would be enough to reduce the weight of expectations she carried.
But we don’t talk about the teenagers that lean on the poles nearby, shrouded in the dark, with cigarettes between their fingers and sachets of gin in hand. No, we don’t. We mustn’t. We are to turn a blind eye to those ones, whose voices you only hear when they catcall women walking alone on the streets, when they accost men on their way home from work in hopes of some change, when they scare little children away from this corner of the street. No. If you avoid something enough, it would stop existing.
Patterns are monotonous. The people, the events, the weather, they are all predictable. The only excitement this corner had seen in a long time came with the arrival of the new tenants. It was a pair of father and daughter.
I remember the day strangeness began. The father had gone to work, leaving the apartment quiet. The girl, usually quick to hurry past, came by the cypresses and sat there, simply gazing at the clear blue sky. It was later that day, when the sun dipped low, that the commotion started, and the excruciating screams. I’d later piece together the story from the police van that arrived, the sight of neighbors dragging down the stairs two bloodied men, and the frantic, hushed conversations that followed.
“Ah! Can you imagine?”
“Burglars, on the third floor!”
“But the way they were fighting each other, like mad dogs! Wonders shall never cease in this compound, for real. Who ever heard of thieves beating themselves up inside the house they just robbed?”
“Something is not right, I swear. This is not normal.”
The conversations, thick, with fear and morbid fascination, spread like wildfire. A multitude of passersby gathered around the police van watching until the ambulance roared up the road and drove away with the two men. I could no longer see the girl amidst the chaos, she was gone.
But that wasn’t the weirdest.
It was another strange day, a melody fought through the hum of the keys and invisible gears of a piano, sliding along the slick walls of the third floor apartment. I had never heard this music before. Moreover, I wasn’t even sure it was music at all. The sounds, though they seemed to issue from an ordinary piano, conflicted my little flicker of consciousness. It seemed to portray the world in a strange way, like speech, like an image. A human’s heart might seize if that image revealed itself, I do not know. Soon, another musical phrase hung in the air. It contained a hidden meaning. I sensed it, but could not understand.
Then, out of the blue, cockroaches began to emerge from every apartment. Every single one. It was as if the music was drawing them out, from crevices, trailing down the walls of the apartment buildings, converging. Soon, the yard beneath me was filled with people, some wearing bathrobes, others barely dressed at all. They all had varying expressions of disgust and apprehension, as if a powerful and sudden fire had chased them outside and consumed their belongings.
The music coming from the 3rd floor had stopped, and you could see the little girl sticking out her head to watch the commotion. It was a spectacle. The roaches marched together across the yard, only to stop when they reached the road. No one knew what to do. You could hear the people speculating whether it was a natural phenomenon.
“All of them at the same time?”
Strangers from across the road kept inquiring, “What’s happening here?”
“Cockroach!”
“Yes. Like a river of roaches!”
“Get the kerosene!”
Soon they were doused, amidst the voices of protest from half the group. A match was lit, and the pile went up in flames that died down soon after, leaving behind soot and ash.
And I wondered, what if the music had not stopped? What if that strange melody had spoken to the people , drawn them in , just as it had drawn the cockroach parade? Would their disgust have turned into compliance? Would their apprehension have transformed into an unthinking march, their feet following the unseen rhythm, away from their homes, their lives? And no one would have escaped.
If they had looked up from the pile of black-brown ash towards the 3rd-floor window, they would see the girl smiling. This corner, I knew then, would never know monotony again.
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