I.
The apartment had a strange and abiding habit of swallowing noise. It was on the ground floor of a brownstone on a quiet street in Manhattan, and though it was tiny, and lacked doors, we could not hear each other calling from different rooms. The wi-fi password was ‘city garden’ and I believe that’s really what the owner saw. Not the deep layer of dirt coating the floors that turned our socks black as we took our first steps around the rooms, increasingly confused. Not the dust heaped in every corner, fluffy as fleece. Or the silverfish undulating across bookshelves. Or the cracked toilet or the broken air-conditioner or the sink long leaking water into the warped wood around it. There was a compacted stratum of document files and dog toys and ripped books and heavy silver trays and dead cockroaches and photo albums and tangles of wires jammed tight under every piece of furniture. And a mottled grey stripe running along the wall from bedroom to bathroom, a story about the self and how it is steadied in the night.

It did have a little green courtyard, although it was full of overgrown vines and horse flies and broken glass and broken furniture. The friend who had inspected this