Ivory Towers

It’s a beautiful town until you get to the high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts. A product of the dying days of utopianism, built in a time of blind excitement. Not everyone’s dream home.

There’s not much to do in the daytime so I like to take walks. The corridors are narrow but wide, the light is pale, the shadows are stark; they never fail to draw me on—there’s always more. You get used to the fire extinguishers and the pissy staircases, but occasionally you’ll find some evidence of activity. Not much—a crisp packet or condom—but enough to suggest you’re not alone. Rarely you’ll see another person. But you hear them. You hear them mostly at night, disembodied voices drifting over seas of nothing.

24. 11. 07
The day I caught sight of the Old Man.

Just as I’d passed into the corridor, wandering one morning, away from the room, the cigarettes, and the infernal, never-ending television, I saw him. A vision in motion, split through the forehead by his doorframe, staring my way, and moving back to his private space.

I didn’t stop, I didn’t run; I continued my journey past his room, because I had found something. A cigarette on the cold tiles, still burning. And then I stopped, stooping down to pick it up, avoiding the peephole. I put it to my nose, because it smelled fragrant—scented with vanilla, or perhaps coconut. The filter was stained crimson, and there was another, feminine perfume that lingered. So there was a woman in there, too.

How tempting to stand sentry at the corner of the staircase, to watch the Old Man kiss goodbye to his lover. I had time enough. I wondered if he was too old for it. I wondered if they were having sex at that very moment; smoking cigarettes, puffing, grinning at each other as they lay in a hard clinch. So I hovered for a while, listening, and I distinguished a clink. The sound of glass against glass. Drinking at this time of the morning, poor bastard. Bukowski and his whore. So I left them to it. How wrong could I have been?

27.11.07
The day I spoke to the Old Man.

He had left his room for some reason; and we both walked straight into an elegant collision. In his hand was a crystal champagne flute, and the liquid dashed across my shirt; my chest wet with Taittinger. The first point of contact with another: he grimaced as he surveyed the damage, then looked up at me and ushered me into his flat with a sprinkle of apologies. As he fluttered into the kitchen to find some cloth, I soaked in my surroundings.

Not at all like my flat.

Deep plum carpets, elegant divans, Belle Époque chandeliers softly glimmering against cut glass mirrors: Versailles as a bedsit. Louis XIV walked in and tossed me a flannel for my shirt.

“My most profound apologies,” he said, dabbing at his mouth as if with a napkin. “Would you care for a fill-up?”

From nowhere, a Balthazar of champagne was brought.

The juniper incense and the cigarettes he smoked mingled into a wall of overpowering perfumed clouds. In my vision I could see only my own room, a grey square in a grey rectangle building, where in this corner winked a miniature palace of red and gold.

I asked him who he was, and how could he afford to be so... drenched in opulence. He didn’t tell me who he was. Then again it was a stupid question.

“‘We cannot afford to do without luxury,’” this transient Wilde smiled. “In a world full of ugliness and brutality, this is the best we can do. Why am I the only one to do it? But I suppose it won’t be long before they find me. I stand against man’s decline, and if man wants anything, it is to decline.”

We drank a toast to that.

“Do you have friends? Visitors?” I asked, thinking of the woman he had previously taken in.

“You’re here, but apart from that—no.”

Candlelight flickered over his worn features. That was the first time I noticed that he wore eye shadow, foundation, and lipstick: the same lipstick from the cigarette. So there was no woman.

Next came a heavy Chartreuse: warm syrup and fire in the belly.

“Have you been out recently?” he asked me.

No, I hadn’t.

“Don’t,” he said, “It’s getting much worse. And if one wants to live perfectly, one cannot compromise. Compromise is the end of freedom.”

And so we talked—fragments of vague resistance until, drowsy from alcohol and smoke, I rose from the divan and bade my host farewell, tripping out over the thick carpet. But before I had left, he placed his warm hand on my elbow and said, with his moist eyes shivering: “There’s a war on, you know.”

The door closed, echoing twice on the cold walls. The strip lighting hummed.

2.12.07
I saw the landlord—the ultimate landlord. In a corridor he walked by, in the direction of the Old Man’s flat. In his hand, an official, stamped document. To live like that was not only absurd and decadent—it was forbidden. The landlord knew the rules; he knew what was allowed and what was frowned upon. He even smiled to me—the wretched smile of the opposed—as he walked the stairs to take away that smiling, glittering soul.