Apartment Zero

[bcholmes]

I dropped off a friend last night and ended up passing through my old neighbourhood. I lived in an apartment in an old, rent-controlled brownstone building in one of Toronto's affluent neighbourhoods.

That apartment has a lot of special memories for me; major friendships and other relationships were forged while I was there. It was the apartment I lived in after I graduated from university, started my first full-time job. It was a small, ground floor place. The kitchen was tiny. But it was a one-bedroom, which was important to me.

One night, I think it was December 1991, my friend Diane had come to visit. It was starting to snow, outside. We were on my ugly bamboo couch in the living room. Talking. And then the faintest of noises. A clink of metal. I was in the middle of saying something, and I stopped. I motioned for Diane to hold on a moment, and I got up and went to the balcony door and threw aside the curtains.

The man on the balcony was tall but bundled up in winter clothes; I couldn't make out any features. We both hesitated when we saw each other. Then I went for the door. It took me too long to get the door opened. He went over the side of the balcony and disappeared.

The layout of the yard meant that he'd almost certainly have to go around to the other side of the building and then out into the street. I told Diane to wait in the apartment while I went to the front entrance of the building. I arrived too late to see anything.

"I can't believe you heard something," Diane said.

But it was snowing that night. Diane and I bundled up in our coats. I got a flashlight, and we went out looking for tracks. We found his route around the building, to the front, across the road. He ran through the yard of a house. The house was lived in by the clergyman who served in the church immediately behind the house, the next road over.

The tracks took us to that road, and then became confused. Like the guy had stopped on the sidewalk and walked around in circles for a while, letting off nervous energy. There was a car two feet away from that spot. Engine started. Lights on. Sitting in place.

"We've lost him," Diane said. Me, I stared at the car. The lights in my eyes meant that I couldn't see anything inside the car.

"We won't find anything more," she said.

"I think he's in that car," I said. I read off the license plate number to her. The car took that moment to start moving away from us.

As we started walking back to my apartment, I was replaying the license plate number in my head. Diane, full of her own nervous energy, was talking frenetically. Her words all manifested as reasons why we couldn't have found him, couldn't have tracked him correctly, couldn't be right about the car. I told her that I intended to call the police. Give them the license plate number. But by then, I was no longer sure about the numbers. Diane had managed to distract me from my mental repeating.

The police arrived quickly. It was weird to explain. That I'd begun to suspect that someone was coming on to my balcony. I'd found pieces of food on one of the window sills a few times. It might have been from a house guest. But a peach pit? Have I ever had peaches in the apartment? And why my apartment? I was a guy, then. Lived alone. How could I explain why someone would repeatedly come on to my apartment balcony? Without revealing my suspicions. And my secrets. Me, a trans person, engaged in early experimentation with cross-dressing.

The police wanted to see if they could follow the tracks. The falling snow had pretty sucessfully covered them by then. But I told them about our adventures. I told them about my doubtful license plate number. A couple possible variations. ("I think it was XXXXXX or YYYYYY.") They called it in. Didn't look hopeful. I never heard from the police again.

Diane left a little while after that. For months afterward, I'd imagine I'd hear things on my balcony. I plotted about the best ways to corner the guy. To my knowledge, he never returned. I lived in that apartment for a year and a half after that incident.