When I was younger, my father would always tell me that, if someone shows you who they are, believe them. As I grew older, I never much liked that train of thought. I had this sneaking suspicion that there were whole worlds hiding behind his veneer of austerity. Maybe it was his working-class background that didn’t give him the time or energy to explore the depth and breadth of life, or maybe it was his lack of education that inhibited his imagination. Either way, he just had this very straightforward way of looking at the world. “Call a spade a spade,” he’d tell me over my mom’s famous pot roast and mashed potatoes while he sipped cheap red wine. I’d listen to this with some amusement, but as I grew up, I started to think how similar a spade looked to a club.
In my college years, I developed a knack for reading people, or so I thought. I majored in English, so it was natural for me to imbue upon complete strangers entire life stories, character arcs, and personal triumphs after just looking at them for a few moments. I’d sit in parks reading Dostoevsky or Chomsky — or whatever littérature du jour crossed my path – while I watched people. I’d watch them pass by, doing what was probably something completely banal, and turn it into something grandiose and sublime. I loved living in these worlds because they gave me comfort. They allowed me to be in control. They let me be in control, and in a world so often run by madness, it was satisfying to give it parameters. Maybe that’s what Shakespeare meant by “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Even after I graduated and got a job, I continued this little tradition. In fact, as my life got more chaotic, my fascination with other people increased.
This all culminated a few years ago when I moved into an apartment on the eleventh floor in Beijing, China. It was a dilapidated east-facing building with large floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked a similar 16-storey building, with the windows facing each other, kind of like two ex-lovers chirping at each other from across the bedroom. At first, I hadn’t seen this as remarkable — the opposing buildings. I barely noticed the outside world when I was busy slouching through the banality of my own existence. In fact, I usually kept the curtains closed, but one day I heard a loud bang outside and rushed to see what it was. It was just fireworks celebrating the Lunar New Year, but when I looked away from the dazzling spectacle, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one who had rushed to the window. Most of the building across from me had too, and that sight of dozens of strangers watching the fireworks from their windows directly across from me produced a sensation that I find hard to quantify, or even describe. Every window was a world, and every world held infinite possibilities. Needless to say, I didn’t close the curtains anymore.
The more I looked at the building the more I discovered the intrigue lurking within the secret lives of others. It began to fascinate me, even more so than before — the little habits people form when they think no one is watching. I became enamoured with becoming a voyeur, but not just any lazy-eyed voyeur. I wondered about the guy on the ninth floor who incessantly walked in and out of his bedroom wearing only his boxers and house sandals while his daughter lay on the bed facedown playing with an iPad. Back and forth he walked, seemingly unaware of this neurotic tick that satiated his daily anxiety. Or how about the couple on the twelfth floor with the 75-inch TV that played Chinese World War 2 dramas with bumbling Japanese dotards flailing towards conflict, destined to fail and to be disappointed — perhaps like all of us inevitably are.
Every window had a different story, and every story had an entire world to explore. Within reality was the possibility of another reality, each based upon some tangible observation that was a building block for something expansive and delirious. Was the half-naked man mentally unstable, and was that his daughter or a succubus to be chained to a radiator between quick romps? How long before the old married couple just died halfway through an episode and the TV flickered conspicuously until the power bill came due? Did the old man on the eighth floor, who smoked cigarettes at two-hour intervals, possess a checkered past and dark secret? I began imprinting backstories onto them, making up pasts that existed in some ephemeral reality folded upon our own.
The old man was once 25 years old, and he woke up one day wondering what it would be like to kill someone. He wondered what that power would feel like — to take someone’s life and live with it. Would he feel guilt, regret, or relief? How would he do it, exactly? He thought about the best way to get away with it. It would have to be someone he didn’t know and had no connection with to avoid suspicion. He thought about how he would do it anonymously and swiftly.
It couldn’t be a gun: too loud. It wouldn’t be a knife: too messy. It couldn’t be his hands: too weak. He decided on poison: quick, effective, and easy to deploy. But where would he get it? He considered whom to murder carefully for weeks and eventually settled on a middle-aged, overweight female cashier with pudgy ankles at a neighbouring supermarket. She was single and introverted. No one would miss her, he mused. No one would come looking, he concluded — at least not vociferously. He took a risk and ordered a vial of poison from the dark web. When she got off work, she waddled carefully through the snow to her car, where she reached out to open the driver’s side door. She got into the car labouriously, squeezed her thighs together and put her purse on her lap. She fumbled with her keys and wiped her dripping nose with the hand she used to open the car door. Forty minutes later her car was wrapped around a tree three blocks from her apartment. She was not killed by the accident but by the carefully placed poison. Slow and steady. The perfect accident.
No one came to look for the 25-year-old man. He had peered over a dumpster and into darkness to watch her grasp the handle. The next day, he looked in the newspaper to read about her death. And finally, he visited the supermarket to confirm it. He returned home and waited. No one came. He kept himself busy and no one came. He lived somewhere in between, and no one came. After a while, he stopped worrying about someone coming and lived his life normally. Forty years later he found himself smoking a cigarette by his window, looking out at a man on the eleventh floor staring at him. He took a deep drag and wondered what it would be like to kill again.
I conducted this exercise for weeks, starting from the top floor and working my way down. Every person had a story, and every story had a dark surprise. There was the woman on the fifteenth who had a closet full of fairies, and a man on the tenth who didn’t have a shadow. Or how about the apartment with wallpaper that complemented the tenant’s appearance, or the thirteenth-storey woman who grew a new husband every evening and raised a new child every morning? The stories kept flowing as I continued this exercise religiously, until one evening when I got down to the seventh floor, first apartment on the left. It struck me as odd almost immediately. The only items in the apartment were a
collection of white bed sheets hanging from hangers. All white with white towelettes on checkered tiles. It had no personality — this seventh-storey apartment. I moved to the apartment to its right. The same view greeted me: another empty apartment with white hanging bedsheets. As my eyes moved onward, the white sheets were like dominos crashing into each other until I finally reached the end of the building.
The entire seventh floor was a curious collection of white bed sheets.
But why? Where had they come from and what purpose did they serve? I carefully observed the floor for a few days to see who was collecting the bedsheets and who was replacing them but saw no one. It seemed that the bedsheets just existed, that they were just there for the purpose of being there — a confusing reminder of how existence is both banal and strange, both present and unexplainable.
I tried to construct a narrative around the bedsheets, but none came to me. There was no one there for me to glom onto — no nervous tick for me to observe that would lead me to conclusions and worlds full of gloom and wonder.
There were only white bedsheets in a hollow white void.
I decided that I couldn’t move on with my exercise until I found out what was on the seventh floor in the building opposite me. At first, I concluded that it may be a brothel and that the bedsheets were rotated late into the evening to accommodate nervous Johns with chubby-cheeked wives, but that sort of business model wouldn’t be well-suited for such a conspicuous location in the heart of a major metropolis. I had to explore it myself. I needed to step outside of my narratives and into a much starker reality. There would be no possibility of finding an alien spaceport with an interdimensional bedstead, or a series of hive apartments that produced youth-producing honeysuckle.
No, there had to be a realistic explanation for the curious collection of white bedsheets. There just had to be.
I continued to watch the seventh floor for another week, just to make sure. Then, one random Monday afternoon I made my way to the building across from me. I entered the elevator and pressed the seventh-floor button; the doors closed with a creak that sounded more like a curious moan at my unsolicited visit. It didn’t take long for the nervous elevator to arrive. The doors opened and I edged out cautiously. I was met with a deluge of activity — people bustling back and forth between open doors carrying large white bedsheets defiled by casual nappers and long-term sleepers. There must have been 15 or 20 people scattered throughout the hallway skipping between rooms with carts of stacked and disheveled white wonders. I wondered why I hadn’t seen anyone when I watched through my window, but quickly noticed they were only collecting sheets nearest to the hallways, too far from the windows for me to see. I stopped a young man abruptly and asked him what was going on here.
“We’re cleaning white bedsheets,” he calmly replied.
“Yes,” I interjected, “but WHY!”
He looked at me curiously, almost like a parent would look at a child when asked a question that seems so obvious to adults.
“Well,” he matter-of-factly stated, “because they don’t clean themselves.”
He moved on. I stood there confounded as I observed the bevy of activity and marveled at the simplicity of his response.
“I suppose they don’t,” I whispered to myself as I turned around to the stalled elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor.
I returned to my apartment feeling like an unwritten story — not composed and ill-conceived. Was the explanation for the mystery so simple? Was the seventh floor simply a place that cleaned white bedsheets, no matter for whom or for what reason they needed to be cleaned? Was there no cabal of cult members that needed an endless supply of white bedsheets for virgin sacrifices? It seemed not. It seemed like it was just a cleaning agency. I cursed Occam and wished to spit on his grave.
I returned to the window and looked at the building. Everything seemed rosy on the other side. There was the murderer on the eighth floor smoking a cigarette, and the old couple’s TV was turned on as they held hands with devilish delight, and even the man who had no shadow made a rare appearance. And of course, there too was the seventh floor with its row of apartments with endless white bedsheets. I counted the number of apartments stretched out across the seventh floor: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and finally eight when I reached the end. I took a deep breath and sighed, moving my sights one row down and onto the first apartment on the left. It felt like a relief to move on, on to other stories and other possibilities that were far simpler and far less confusing than a row of apartments on the seventh storey with endless white bedsheets that simply needed to be cleaned.
I thought about my father’s words again — “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” It was so easy for him to see the world for what it was, but not for me. For me, it is far easier to make it all up as I go along. There is not a less enviable position to be in than having the parameters of your reality defined by others. It’s far easier to be the one concocting the tale than to be sublimated to the pen strokes of objectivity, especially when those strokes are so definite and undeniable. So, I deny them because I can. I deny them because it’s easy. I look past them because it’s not always about what’s on the page, but what’s beneath it — a distorted reality where I can live in comfort and safety from the menace of truth.
I shook my head to bring the building into focus again. All of this was becoming a bit too much. I craved my mother’s pot roast and her mashed potatoes with one cracked egg “for texture,” as she’d say. That place is my safe space. Sunday dinners, drunk father, and blunt advice with a pinch of whimsy to taste. I miss those times. I miss that world. It’s a sad yet even-handed reminder that simplicity is a feeling that can only be found in memory. I took out a notebook, diverted my eyes to the sixth floor, and began again.
On the sixth floor, there was a 40-year-old woman who harboured a dark secret…