Water Works

Surprise. More like a big fuck you. No water in your studio. No water in the building. No water in the entire fucking neighborhood.

You knock on your neighbor’s door for the first time. It’s a little past seven in the morning, but you can hear the T.V. through the walls. He’s up. Why you assume it’s a he, you don’t know. Your landlady said someone was moving into 5C right around the same time you were moving into the building. “Alex living in 5C”: Could go either way.

Well, "Alex living in 5C" is refusing to be sociable or neighborly for that matter. You knock again. Just in case, you give him a second chance to redeem himself. No answer. You bite your bottom lip and then venture downstairs to see if Dan the super is around.

It will turn out he’s not. But in the moment as you make your way down the stairs, you hear this awful noise echoing against the concrete walls, traveling upwards as you descend.

"DON’T YOU DARE CALL ME ANOTHER NAME."

It was the woman’s voice you heard all along. You couldn’t even hear the man before. Not until you walked right past 2A and picked up what sounded like a man’s voice; muffled, as if he was speaking with a sock in his mouth. She was crying. No, more like moaning. More like the whimper of a wounded wild animal.

Why that metaphor? Wild animal. As you push the glass door open and walk into the street, you think: “The hunter is sometimes weaker than the prey.”

At the Midnight Express next door, you order a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas. They’re not serving coffee. This is when you find out that the entire block and not just your building is without running water. You realize you need to pee pretty badly.

The construction workers outside are making a raucous affair out of turning the water back on for a hot second. You watch the water, muddied with sediment, gushing from what appears to be a complex network of massive pipes underground.

The waitress behind the counter sucks the air through her teeth, muttering: “Brown water. This is going to stay brown for days.” You comment on the brown water to be friendly, and she responds with: “Makes me happy to be living in Brooklyn.” Then you explain to her how you just moved from Brooklyn—Williamsburg in fact—to the Upper East Side. You don’t know why you keep talking. The words just come out, and luckily she’s somewhat responsive.

“I’d drink bottled water for at least a week if I were you,” she advises. “And when you get home tonight, run the water. Just let it run for a good minute or two. You’ll have to. It’s going to be dirty for days.”

Later, as you make your way down into the train station to take the 6 to work, you toy with the idea of letting the water run all night. You imagine every tenant in the building doing the same. It would be analogous to performing some kind of surgical procedure on the building: Collective bloodletting if you will, one of those ancient medical practices that probably did more harm than good but felt necessary and somehow logical.

Opening the vein carefully to let the water out and then collecting the liquid in exquisitely wrought bowls of glass: Here is the first harsh word spoken aloud. Followed by the echo of an empty room. Then the name replaced with silence.