The Aviators
Fiction by Margo LaPierre
6:31 PM
My neighbour-across-the-hall answered the door wearing a floor-length fur coat and aviators. Evergreen branches stuck out over her shoulder. A glistening glass Christmas tree bauble hovered just behind her left ear.
“Happy New Year! Come on in.” She held open the door with one arm and held back the tree with the other and a gentle shower of gold glitter drifted onto her shoulder and settled into the pores of her fur coat. Once inside, I could see that the tree, which had been draped in tinsel that was shedding over the parquet flooring, had been placed directly in front of the door, blocking the paths to both the bedroom and the bathroom. Impossible to pass by without a tinkle and sway of ornaments, without skin-irritating scratches from the wire boughs. White lines across my forearm raised in pink welts like cat scratches. In the kitchen, a saucepan of apple cider was bubbling on the stovetop; my neighbour produced a bottle of rum from a cupboard and poured some in. I took a seat and zoned out into the evergreen oddity that had overtaken a third of the apartment. My neighbour’s back was to me, she was stirring the pot. The digital clock on the stove was an hour later than it should have been.
“What’s your New Year’s resolution?” She swivelled from her hips to face me. She still had the aviators on, I couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t wait for me to answer.
“Mine’s to be more outrageous.” Her arm lifted and swept, rather elegantly, toward the main hallway. “So, what’s on the menu for tonight?”
“Javad’s having a thing.” I thought of my fingers, counted them on the mental map of my body, though my hands stayed crossed on the table. “He lives on the eleventh floor, remember? But let’s start at Jasmine’s. A friend from work invited me to her friend’s party, and that’s in our building too. And we can stop by Dunc’s at some point.”
Our condo building was part of a newish mega-complex neighbourhood by the water- front. It offered a choice of three layouts for its several hundred units. Over the years, we’d gotten to know our neighbours upon discovery of mutual friends, or when our dogs licked each other in the elevator, or when we sat next to each other in pedicure stations at the nail salon. In winter, wind tunnels created by the desolation of concrete and glass whipped our hair and funneled garbage high into the air: sometimes tenants would find empty granola bar wrappers, or discarded receipts, even rogue business cards stuck in the corners of our balconies while we sucked briefly on Belmont cigarettes. Like I said, garbage. Mechanical cranes, ever-present, hung across our changing sky like flowers whose heads were too heavy for their stems.
Each floor was a carbon copy of the one below it. Visiting people who lived in the building was a comfort — you always knew where the bathroom was, the light switches, how to adjust the thermostat when it was too hot, where the broom closet was when someone dropped a glass. On Fridays and Saturdays, you might find yourself — in a living room identical to your own, the same billowing view and everything — jazzed up by the mercurial moods of energetic strangers gathered around a granite countertop.
This repetition of form had also become a signature of my frequent nightmares, a coping mechanism I’d developed while half-lucid to escape whatever personal demon was chasing me in my sleep. At the point a killer would barge in to serial-kill me, or a pervert would grab at my limbs to child-molest me, or a stillborn would crack my body open, or an abusive ex would tell me they just wanted to talk, or a demonic toddler would shoot laser beams of evil from its nail beds, at the precise moment of mortal peril, I’d thrust my body into the air, flap my arms vigorously, and bust through the ceiling to the floor above, which, spatially, was the exact same as the scene I’d left behind, but miraculously devoid of any threat living or elemental. Crossing that threshold (it felt like breaking a hole through a giant KitKat) was a perk available only to me, the dreamer. A new beginning.
7:51 PM
My neighbour-across-the-hall jabbed a finger at the host, my work friend’s friend. The water from the sink was running over my hand while I waited for it to get cold. They were discussing whether or not the head chef of a restaurant deserves to be publicly shamed for managers docking servers’ tips when the server screws up an order or drops a tray. They both seemed to be agreeing with each other. They were both yelling.
9:26 PM
My neighbour-across-the-hall found the barbecue lighter and Javad found lined paper and everyone at the party wrote down the things they wished to leave behind in the previous year. Javad only had four pens and one of them didn’t work. We all crowded out on the balcony and my neighbour-across- the-hall read from the papers, lit each one ablaze, dropped them into the concrete corridor to great cheering applauses; then she cast off her fur coat and pulled off her silk shirt and she lit that afire too, and threw it sailing into the air.
11:41 PM
My neighbour-across-the-hall and I edged past the scratchy Christmas tree into her bedroom. She needed to get another shirt.
11:56 PM
My neighbour-across-the-hall’s cheeks puffed up like dense, springy pastries as she blew up balloons in Dunc’s condo. The floor was disappearing. I went to the washroom and there was no towel, so I wiped my hands on my thighs, and they turned darker. Dust bunnies gathered behind the toilet on the floor. Dunc and my neighbour-across-the-hall were standing with their heads almost touching and their hips very close, but shot off like twin magnet poles when I came back into the room. Dunc’s phone trilled and he answered on video chat and waved the phone high in the air so we could see the pretty girl, ands o she could see us. She told us to be free and take good care of her Dunc, and her eyelids shone like two temples across a lake. A friend of Dunc’s shouted Fifteen seconds! and we counted in unison, with the live video of that sparkling girl laughing along with the count, and when the numbers obliterated themselves on our tongues my neighbour-across-the-hall scooped me toward her unexpectedly by the small of my back and kissed me on the mouth, sucked my bottom lip, and let me go.
2:07 AM
My neighbour-across-the-hall led me down the hallway to the elevator; we stepped into the carriage barefoot, our shoes were in our hands. The doors closed and she pressed the button for our floor. In the mirror she was looking at me, and her eyes were soft and gentle.
“Your aviators!”
She startled, patted the top of her head, her pockets, swung around as though they might be here, in the elevator.
“Fuck!” she yelled. “We have to find them. I have to go back.”
“Did you have them at Dunc’s?”
“I dunno.”
“Did you have them at Javad’s?”
“I dunno.”
“Did you have them at my work friend’s?”
“I DUNNO!”
“OK,” I said, “let’s go back.”
We texted, called, retraced — it was no good. The aviators were gone. Defeated, we unlocked our doors and said good night across the hallway. Her Christmas tree clinked distantly.
10:15 AM
The next morning, my neighbour-across-the- hall texted me, severing me from a nightmare in which I was alone in a room with no ceiling. I found my aviators. They were in my bedroom. Sorry. »