Michael felt that he was making great progress. He was beginning, he was sure, to articulate the prime issue at the base of all the bad news the New York Times had to print. He was trying to imagine what kind of blog or article he could author, when the eviction notice was shoved under his door. It had only been six weeks . . . no, no, nine . . . no, eleven. Just eleven weeks, but he was rent-stabilized, and the collusion of city government and greedy landlords made it possible for prompt evictions when there was potential for rent that could soar.
Working after midnight for days, Michael drilled forty-eight holes along the sides, top, and bottom of his door and similarly placed holes in the doorjamb and along the floor. He used a handheld cordless drill to do this work, and it took him seventy-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes. Through these connective cavities he looped twined wire hangers, two strands for each hole. This reinforcement, he figured, stood a chance of resisting a battering ram if it came to that.
He also used melted wax to seal the cracks at the sides of the door so that the police couldn’t force him out with tear gas.
His beard was filling in, and his hair had grown shaggy. He looked to himself like another man in the mirror: the man who answered the phone for the absent Michael.
He filled the bathtub to the overflow drain in case the super turned off the water.
On his iPhone he read the newspapers, studied the Middle East, Central America, and the Chinese, who, he believed, had gained control of capitalism without understanding its deteriorative quality.
Finally all those boring political-science courses that he took when he thought he might want to be a lawyer had some use.
He was well on his way to a breakthrough when the landline rang.
He always answered the phone because, in a discussion with the man in the mirror, he inferred that if no one answered, they might use the excuse that there was some kind of emergency behind his coat-hanger reinforced door.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Michael Trey, please?” a pleasant man’s voice asked.
“He’s not here.”
“Then to whom am I speaking?”
This was a new question, and it was very smart—very. This was not just some befuddled contrarian thinker but one of those unofficial agents that pretended to protect freedom while in reality achieving the opposite end.
“My name is X,” he replied, and suddenly, magically, Michael ceased to exist.
“X?”
“What do you want?”
“My name is Balkan, Bob Balkan. I’m an independent contractor working for the city to settle disputes.”
“I don’t have any disputes, Mr. Balkan Bob. As a matter of fact, I might be one of the few people in the world who does not disagree.”
“I don’t understand,” the independent contractor admitted.
“I have to go, Bob.”
“Can you tell me something first, Mr. X?”
“What’s that, Bob?”
“What do you want?”
The question threw X out of Michael’s mind. The man that was left felt confused, overwhelmed. The question was like a blank check, a hint to the solution of a primary conundrum from an alien, superior life-form. It had ecclesiastical echoes running down a corridor heretofore unexplored in Michael’s mind.
“What do I want?” Michael repeated the words but changed the intonation.
“Yes,” Balkan Bob said.
“I want,” Michael said. “I want people everywhere to stop for a minute and think about only the essential necessities of their lives. You know, air and water, food and friendship, shelter and laughing, disposal of waste and the continual need for all those things through all the days of their lives.”
Balkan Bob was quiet for half a minute, and so Michael, not X, continued. “If everybody everywhere had those thoughts in their minds, then they would realize that it’s not individuality or identity but being human, being the same that makes us strong. That’s what I’ve been thinking in here while the rain’s been falling and the landlord was trying to evict me.”
“But Michael hasn’t paid the rent, Mr. X.”
“I have to go, Bob,” X said, and then Michael hung up.
Eight days later the electricity was turned off. The grocery delivery service had brought him thirty fat, nine-inch wax candles, so he had light. It was all right to be in semidarkness, to be without TV, radio, or Internet. Michael had his five folders and the knowledge of a lifetime plus four years of college to filter through.
Two days after the electricity went off, it came back on. Michael wondered what bureaucratic and legal contortion had the man with his hand on the lever going back and forth with the power.
Just after the lights flickered back on, the phone rang.
When it sounded, Michael realized that there had been no calls for the past forty-eight hours—not his mother and not Melanie, who worried that her demands had brought him to this place.
He always answered the phone but rarely stayed on for more than a minute.
The phone didn’t depend on the power system. Maybe the phone company had cut him off for not paying his bill and then, at the behest of the city, had turned the service back on.
“Hello,” X said.
“Mr. X?”
“Bob?”
“How are you?”
“Things are becoming clearer all the time, Bob,” X said. “I just don’t understand why you cut off the power and then turned it back on again.”
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
“But you’re working for the people that did, or at least their friends and allies.”
“Do you feel that you are at war, Mr. X?”
“I’m just an innocent bystander who has made the mistake of witnessing the crime.” X was much more certain about things than Michael was.
“I recorded your statement about what you wanted. Someone in my office released the recording to the media. You have lots of friends out here, Mr. X. If you look out your window you’ll see them in the street.”
“I’d like to, but there might be something there I don’t want to see. And I don’t want anyone seeing me.”
“No one wants to hurt you,” Bob said in a very reassuring voice.
“No one wants to kill children in Afghanistan either, but it happens every day.”
“You haven’t come out of your apartment since we got hit by Hurricane Laura.”
“And here I don’t know anything about you.”