I’m uneasy about the landlord. He looks off. A man with strange, swollen eyes and a wisdom-tooth-surgery smile that makes me pity him for some reason, even as he pulls the “it’s the last open unit in the building, very nice unit, won’t be available long” sales tactic. I’ve never liked landlords—plenty of people don’t. But something about the way he’s smiling at me with that broken-looking face, his body arched, small, yet gangly, draws me in and repels me at the same time.

Something about him just feels lonely.

The other thing putting me off is the smell of the leasing office—or maybe it’s the landlord himself. A fragrance somewhere between an herbal tea and plastic, like hot polyurethane. The room is furnished with all the modern standouts: a minimalist desk,

color-swath posters, lamps that cheekily explore what it means to be a lamp. And there he stands, behind the desk, like the Quasimodo of an Ikea showfloor.

What am I thinking? I know better than to judge a book by its cover. He probably hurt himself a while back in some terrible accident—or was just born this way—and here he is trying to do his job, and here I am, weirded out by the way he looks. Am I really so shallow? The smell I’ll probably get used to, and feeling weird about the landlord has to be some moral fault of my own. The rooms looked nice enough online, far cheaper than average, and if I’m being honest with myself, that’s all I need to care about.

So I reply to his sales tactic: “Yeah, I can imagine they’re in high demand,” or something like that. “Can I tour it now?”

He nods, mutters something in his lumpy voice, smiles again, and puts his heavy meatloaf of a hand on my shoulder as he leads me out the door and into the building’s main hall. I don’t like feeling him touch me. There’s an odd gust of that medicinal smell, maybe his cologne, and a quiet wave of claustrophobia, though it’s only the two of us in here.

But again, I have no business being so stiff. Some people just need to touch other people every once in a while. I don’t think I’m one of them, but he might be. He might need that sort of thing. Maybe that’s okay.

The building is quiet, tranquil, even. Its bones feel old, brick and ornate in some places, though its edges and amenities are modern. Lots of glass, metal rivets, exposed I-beams. More abstract posters. The smell persists, but I’m already getting used to it as we enter the gym on the first floor.

“No one’s in here right now,” the landlord says as we look out over three empty rows of treadmills. His voice sounds truly unnatural. Like it’s coming through a sponge. “I don’t know why more people don’t use them.” And I feel sorry for him again, wondering what it was that mangled his face, his hand, his voice. Or maybe I feel sorry for the gym. I don’t know. My current apartment building is so small, but teeming with people and all their baggage. I may be unused to seeing such large and empty spaces.

We take the elevator and walk down the hall to the apartment I came for, number 401. I’m happy to see that it’s as well-furnished as it was in the online photos. More Ikea shit. It’s a studio and the bed’s fully visible from the kitchen. I won’t mind that. I don’t plan on bringing back any partners any time soon. No friends either. That’s exactly how I want it: to feel like I have a space of my own. To get away from the stifling, squeeze-through hallways that exhaust me. This will do just fine.

Another meatloaf on my shoulder, the smell of vegetal plastic. And for a split second, I think I hear the landlord whispering something in my ear. I turn, and he’s silent, lips too far from me for that to have been his whisper. The AC kicks on—probably what I heard. He’s staring at me with that odd face, eyes expectant, hand heavy upon me.

“What do you think?” he asks. So much about him rings wrong.

But he’s been nothing but kind and polite, putting a hand on my shoulder, probably just to let me know he’s there. Isn’t that something people do?

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I’ll take it.”

* * *

The smell’s gone, so that’s nice. Well, not gone, but not on my mind anymore.

I have a busy week ahead and I lock in at my PC to work, game, work. I thought I would need to go grocery shopping at some point soon, but I somehow bought way more food than I needed around the time of the move, so it looks like I’m set for a while. Normally, I’d head out at some point to walk around the neighborhood. But I feel remarkably content to decompress after the chaos of the moving-in process, which is all a blur in my head now. It’s hard to remember where I put everything. Weirdly hard. But it always is when you move somewhere new.

A week passes this way, and I go down to the gym for the first time to run on a treadmill. The treadmill works fine and the gym’s posters, glass, metal, and brick all feel as nice as they did the day I toured. A show is playing on the TV that I thought wasn’t coming out until next month, though who am I to know. I’m listening to a podcast and vibing and everything’s fine.

When I come back to the room and shower, I’m thinking about another weird thing—I don’t think I saw anybody. No one at all. I was running for an hour, and I walked down there at 7 a.m., came back at 8:30 or so, and you’d think I would’ve seen at least a neighbor or two in all that time. Funny.

But the water pressure in my shower is good, the temperature is hot, everything about this place feels like an upgrade, and not a soul to bother me. I am alone. I am content.

* * *

A week later, work is still fine. Particularly uneventful actually, but I’m okay with that. I’m not gaming as much as usual, though—I used to play online regularly with a few college friends, but haven’t in a while, since I was gearing up for the move. Now I never seem to be online at the same time they are. So I stop booting up those games altogether. I also find myself forgetting my phone for hours at a time. I went a little dark on folks before I moved in, and now it’d feel a bit weird to reach out after such a long silence. What would I even say: hey I moved in a week or two ago, thanks for not helping, not that I asked you to? It’s funny how a transition like this creates distance, fundamentally changes you, but just a little. Fewer hours spent gaming, texting, and doomscrolling can hardly be a bad thing.

When I’m actually working, I’m sending spreadsheets out to my bosses and maybe getting a reply a few days later that says, “thanks next one’s due in two weeks,” and then I just do it. I’m watching less TV, so that’s good too. When I do tune into something, it’s all shows I’ve never seen before. Streaming libraries seem to be releasing something new every day, which has always been disorienting, but since I moved here it has felt a bit absurd.

I’m reading instead. Catching up on my backlog of books. They don’t change, feel familiar and foreign in the best of ways. New place, new me, old books.

Some days I read aloud, which I’ve never done before. I know no one’s listening, but it feels needed, somehow.

* * *

One day the shower won’t get hot. I deal with it for the morning, but after my run the next day—not a soul in sight—I come back and the water’s still cold. Two days is too much.

I check my email, which is way full of spam, and there’s nothing from the landlord about the water situation. So I leave my room and go knocking on 403 to see if they have the same problem. It has been a couple months now and I haven’t even said hey to my next-door neighbors. Don’t even know what they look like. But here I go.

I knock. “Hello? Anyone home?” And of course no one is. I try 405. Same deal. 407. Empty. Of course, they’ve all gotta be at work, and here I am waking up anyone who’s not at work with my doorbanging. Not wanting to make more of a scene or piss anyone off, I write a note on a scrap of paper from my place and leave it on 403’s doormat, asking about the hot water.

Another day or two and the water’s hot again, so that’s nice. Then I go down to the gym and, on my way back, see their doormat. With my note still on it, untouched.

Odd how it hasn’t moved, but easily explained—they could be out on vacation or something. So I pick the note up, since the hot water problem’s all resolved, and the note itself feels…weird. Way weird. Thin, in my hands, like I could poke through it just by pushing. Dry. The text looks faded.

Suddenly, someone’s coming up to my floor, and I pocket the note and move back from 403 to my own apartment door so I won’t look creepy. It’s the landlord, exiting the elevator with a man a little older than me. I smile at them, but the landlord barely looks my way, if at all. Sure, busy guy, lots of faces, I guess. My eyes also linger on the man he brought with him, who looks a little like one of my exes. I can’t help but eye him to make sure, and it’s long enough that he should be looking back at me. But he doesn’t notice. And I keep watching him, and he pretends I’m not even there. Is that my ex? No, it can’t be—he’s missing the trademark forearm tattoo.

I watch the two walk down the hallway and enter 407. Once I’m back in my own living room, I wait and listen through the thin door of my apartment for the sound of 407’s door opening again, for both of them to finish their tour, so I can catch the landlord on his way back down and ask whether he knew about our hot water issues.

I pass the time for a couple hours, looking at the note I wrote. Wondering why it looks like this. I never hear the landlord return down the hall.

* * *

I keep up my routine for a long time. I wake up, and eat, and go down to the gym, and work, and I go grocery shopping. At least, I think I go grocery shopping. I know I do because I sort of remember getting in the car and my keys are in my pocket and the fridge is still full of food that I didn’t have last week, but it’s like the actual grocery shopping part just passes by me.

You know, like it’s so routine you forget it happened. Like when you wake up on Sunday and can’t remember exactly what you did on Friday—can’t grasp the sequence, the exactness of it—but you know you went grocery shopping.

I wonder if I need to get out more.

Sometimes I see the new guy from 407, the one who looks like my ex. Not that I need to specify who’s who around here, since there doesn’t seem to be anyone to confuse him with. He’s walking around our hall, coming and going, but he never so much as looks at me. I suppose that’s to be expected in most apartment complexes these days, though. People don’t want to be bothered. Hell, that’s why I came here.

I go down to the gym and see 407 on the treadmill once. I don’t know why, but I’m feeling a little socially needy that day, so I choose a treadmill nearby—not the one right next to him, but two machines over. He runs, and I can hear him, see him, but…I don’t know.

It’s like I can’t feel him. It’s like there’s no wind from where he moves, no scent. Like a mime has built a box around him and the small, invisible things a person makes can’t pass through.

What do you call it when there’s someone there, but you still feel like you’re the only person in the room? When life becomes so routine that it feels completely unseen—lost, even to you?

I know everyone feels that way a little bit, but what do you actually call it?

* * *

Another few weeks and a very grumpy-looking woman moves into 403, which is odd, because I don’t remember anyone moving out of 403. Then again, I never met the people who lived there to begin with, the ones who never picked up my note. If there was someone there at all.

But how long’s it been since I moved here—a few months? Could 403 have gone unoccupied that long, in this economy? At that price? I don’t know.

At the gym one day, I see both 403 and 407 on treadmills. Though I’ve enjoyed having the space to myself, it is a little nice having more than just me down there, even if none of us talk to one another. They look a little lonely too, though 403 looks more frustrated than anything.

At one point I ask her when she’ll be done with the leg press. She doesn’t reply, does another five reps, then gets off of it. It’s a little rude, maybe, but I can’t let it get to me. It’s the gym—people are sweaty and tired and anxious about themselves. They’ll always be a little rude.

More people move into the other apartments on the fourth floor, and there’s something reassuring about knowing my floor is full of people. For a while there it felt like I was the only one here. Still, I don’t know if I want to talk to any of the newcomers at this point, having gotten used to blank stares and silence. You want to talk to someone when you first get the chance, but the longer it goes the harder it gets to introduce yourself. I feel a whole lot of that.

Then someone moves into 401.

* * *

I’m applying filters to data in yet another spreadsheet at the desk across from my bed and I hear keys in my front door. It swings open and the landlord comes in, weird and wobbly as ever. Behind him is a scrawny, academic-looking guy, kinda cute.

“Hi,” I stand, obviously a little confused, concerned. They didn’t even knock, didn’t send advance notice—this must be a mistake. But the landlord doesn’t acknowledge me and neither does the academic. They’re looking at my closet.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” Nothing. Now that’s rude.

“Sorry,” I say, stern, as the landlord takes the academic into the bathroom and the academic says something to compliment the shower. “I’m busy working,” I say. “Do you need to tour the apartment?”

No response. “Hello?”

Then they come into the hallway by the bathroom, where I’m standing, and they move right past me. They pretend I don’t exist. Somehow they don’t even touch me, even though the hallway is hardly a few feet wide.

“Excuse me,” I say. “What are you doing in here? I need to work. Please?”

Nothing. Can they actually not hear me? They’re looking at my bed, which is well-made, even though I don’t remember making it.

“How long do you need to be in here?” I ask. It’s one more attempt at normalcy, one more opportunity for them to snap out of whatever it is they’re doing.

But they don’t. The two of them walk around the apartment and the academic compliments the floors and the wall art and the nondescript view from my window. And the landlord talks about how no one really uses the gym, though he wishes they would, and I’m starting to feel a little sick.

“I’ll take it,” the academic says. And the landlord pulls out a lease, right then and there, just like he did for me, and the academic signs and the landlord puts his misshapen hand on the young man’s shoulder. Then he leaves, and the academic and I are alone.

My mouth is open. I try again.

“You can’t just—did you just sign a lease for my apartment?”

The academic doesn’t reply. He’s staring out the window, absently, and reaching his hand down to feel the bed.

I clap, loudly. Several times.

“Hey, dipshit! My lease wasn’t even up,” I say, though I’m not entirely sure about that. I feel like it wasn’t due for a couple months but I really couldn’t say how many. Or what month it is right now. Which shakes me for a moment, but I focus back on the matter at hand. That he still cannot hear me.

“Hello?!” I yell.

Then he turns, as if he can see me, and I feel relief and a bit of excitement—God, finally, someone sees me—until he walks forward.

Through me.

Into the hallway behind me.

Somehow, again, we do not touch. I feel like I’m moving out of the way, but then I don’t remember moving out of the way.

Then something happens. Like when you wake up on Sunday and can’t remember what you did on Friday.

And I catch myself looking at him standing in my bathroom, washing his face with my hot water, in my sink, and I feel like I’ve been watching him for hours. Something has flipped inside my brain, and I don’t even care that he’s here. I just feel happy for the company. I don’t remember caring.

Just like I don’t remember grocery shopping. Or moving out of his way in the hall.

Or what month it is.

What the hell is going on?

* * *

I spend a while screaming at him, trying to touch him, to get his attention, but pretty soon my brain flips again, so to speak, and I realize that I’m sitting on the bed, watching him work, and have been for a while. Then the reality of the thing comes back, and I freak out again, shouting, clapping, pressing my palms to my temples and trying to put together the pieces of this puzzle, but then time passes, and I come to.

Every time I do, a little more of the fear fizzles out.

At one point in this blurry cycle, I try to leave the apartment. I can’t. Like with grocery shopping, I put the keys in my pocket and go to leave and feel like I’ve left but I haven’t. I also go to my phone to call my friends, my parents, and am typing in their numbers or a message, only to look a few minutes later and see that I haven’t sent anything and my phone is not where I left it.

Then, next thing I know, it feels like days have passed and I’ve once again forgotten I wanted to leave in the first place, somewhere between watching him get dressed and seeing how calm he looks when he reads.

Like when it’s Sunday and you can’t remember what you did on Friday, I can’t remember wanting to leave.

The fear that should accompany the facts—when I can focus on them for long enough to hold them in place, when I can put them up to the light and see them as facts—vanishes as soon as I let them go. The grocery shopping, the lost name of this month, the academic, hell, even the fact that I can’t smell 407 sweating in the gym—holding it all is like cupping water in my hands and watching it drain from a hole between my fingers that’s so small I can’t see it. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.

And it just feels like life again.

The fridge somehow stays stocked. The closet still has clothes in it for me. I can use the computer to get my work done, though he can somehow do the same. I’m getting dressed one morning, and then he’s getting dressed using clothes from the same closet, and I don’t remember seeing anything in there that wasn’t mine but somehow he still got his own clothes out and put them on.

I sleep in the same bed he does. But somehow, we do not touch.

I wonder if this is all that different from the life I had before. I also wonder if I’m a little happier, maybe, to at least have someone to watch. Even if not someone to interact with.

So I watch him. And I live, just like I did before, and I watch him.

* * *

Weeks pass. Then someone moves into 403. Again.

She’s gorgeous, and I can see the academic ogling her whenever we go down to the gym together. I feel jealous, of course, and have to remind myself that he’s never even spoken to me.

He tries to speak to her though. He sees her just like I see him, and he tries to have a full-blown conversation with her while she’s toweling off on a bench. I smile and shake my head and tell him he’s barking up the wrong tree, and he is, because she acts like he isn’t even there. But he keeps trying, gets all worked up about how she won’t talk to him while she’s doing crunches. I laugh—a lot—and don’t stop laughing even as I join him back in the room.

Then he’s depressed. I try talking to him about it. I apologize for laughing. He cradles his head on the edge of the bed and mourns for her, himself, something. I know how he feels. I can almost remember it. And I sit with him and try to put my arm around him and tell him he’ll be okay.

Time passes, and I think his brain flips just the same way mine does. He seems okay again.

Another day, I go down to the gym, this time alone. And I see another unusual sight: the woman from 403. Not the gorgeous one from 403 that just moved in, but the first one that arrived—grumpy face. She’s down there at the gym. And she’s looking at the gorgeous girl that just moved into her own apartment and seems frustrated, or uncomfortable, or angry, more than usual.

As if she, too, is reckoning with a troublesome new guest. As if she, like me, has her own academic.

Grumpy face tells the academic to stop ogling her roommate, and the academic does not hear. But I do.

“He’s been eyeballing her since she first moved in,” I tell her, half just for me, half forgetting that she can’t hear me. She keeps her grumpy face on, my words no comfort to her.

I think I can see the pattern now, after watching her, the way she looks at them. How we only really see those who come after us.

* * *

Someone else moves into 401. A third.

The academic does not take the arrival of his first new roommate well. Much worse than I did, in fact. He picks up his laptop and throws it, making plastic splinters and a hole in the wall that isn’t there the next day.

The laptop, too, is replaced quite quickly. I turn around and look back at the desk one time and it’s back. It’s a good thing too—how else would I get my work done?

The new roommate is older, a middle-aged man with a dopey face who puts too much product in his hair. I talk to him like he’s my dad sometimes, telling him everything I’m thinking, trying to make peace with all of this. One night, when we’re all laying in bed together, somehow not touching, the academic starts talking to the older man too, and I’m listening, curled up and considering what he says. The academic tells stories about the time he sold a $70 bike to a childhood friend for $20. About how he once cheated on a physics exam in high school. About how he has a crush on Alien-era Sigourney Weaver. The middle-aged man is quickly snoring, unable to hear either of us, of course.

Somewhere in there, I pipe up and start telling my own stories. Stories about how I first discovered peach-flavored ice cream, which I love but few ice cream parlors sell. How, at a previous job, I once submitted the wrong data and my manager nearly fired me. Little confessions. Little tales.

At first the academic keeps going with his own narratives, and I can hear our voices blending into one another, stories overlapping. It’s sort of like conversation. Closest thing I’ve had to it in a long time. A little like chorus music, when two different melodies are being sung at once. Then he goes quiet, and I look over, and he’s turned toward me, and I swear he’s looking at me, looking right at me.

* * *

Weeks pass. But I really should stop calling them weeks—I have no clue what they are. Haven’t since the moment I moved in, I realize. I thought a few days had passed between when I put that note at 403’s door and when I picked it up again. But then the note looked like it had been there forever. Who knows. It felt like several months between when I moved in and the academic came. Then less time before the middle-aged guy showed up. And less time again, for the next one.

But when I can hold the puzzle to the light for long enough, when I can keep the water in my hands, I see that I’m probably the one with the screwy calendar. That there’s a chance the landlord is bringing them in like clockwork. That I’ve been here for a very long time. Living.

Not caring. Flipping and forgetting. Trying to keep the water in my hands.

More people move into 401. There’s a punk girl who constantly sings to herself, which drives the academic mad, but the middle-aged man—who can, as expected, see her—seems to like her, in a fatherly sort of way. Then there’s a mafioso-type lady who wears furs and ruby red lipstick whom the punk girl stays away from. A man with bad legs comes in next. He walks around the apartment with forearm crutches, and the mafiosa calls him Rumpelstiltskin, Stilts for short. We all move furniture out of the way for him, sometimes, to make sure he can get around okay. Others arrive after that.

I go crazy, a little bit, when the water’s in my hands one day. Surprised it took this long. One afternoon, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and the middle-aged man is beside me,

looking at a porno mag, and the punk girl is singing Miss Murder in the hallway and the basketball player is leaning against the wall looking at the room with empty eyes. His eyes, lightless, probe the room for a strangeness he can’t define. An older lady moved in a few days ago—his first roommate—and he’s processing it, looking around. Almost as if he’s looking for us. For the roommates he cannot see.

And it hits me.

A terrible thought I’ve toyed with before, but haven’t yet held so high to the light.

That I am not the first.

That there is no reason there couldn’t be someone in here who sees me like I see my new guests. Someone who knows me. Who came before. Who has tried to talk to me all this time and couldn’t. I don’t see them. I don’t hear them. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

And, there, on the bed, I start shaking, and saying things I have no control over, my voice quickly lost in the sort of desperate, uncontrolled muttering sound we make when we’re all talking at once, which does not sound at all like music. And I get up and scream and go crawl into the bathtub and cry.

A while later, the mafiosa enters to do herself up at the sink, starting her day. She pulls ruby lipstick from a bag she brought in and gets hair curlers I’ve never seen before from the drawer where I keep my spare toothpaste and floss.

Then Rumpelstiltskin arrives, his right crutch thudding against the door as he enters. I half-expect her to shout, or to slap him. Ever since he arrived, the mafiosa has talked down to him—her way of handling the insanity herself, perhaps. Taking it out on him.

But as he hobbles in and gives himself an appraising look in the mirror, she scoots out of his way, sliding her things to the edge of the sink, giving him plenty of space to maneuver, to lean against the granite countertop, to look at himself in the mirror. She gives him room.

And I watch them. And I feel okay for a moment.

* * *

I go to bed, and wake up, and work, and go to the gym, and talk to them, and move the furniture for Stilts, and don’t go grocery shopping, and read more books, and look out the window as someone else sits alongside me—within me, even—to do the same. I go about my day, and despite the growing crowd, somehow the laptop is always available for me to work on and my clothes are always in the closet and the bed is always made or unmade, however I like it, and I can always use a treadmill at the gym.

It’s an okay life, I guess. As okay a life as I had hoped for. And I know I’m seen and not seen, and I’m living and not living, and time passes by a little faster and a little slower than I expect—but that’s just life again.

Eventually, the landlord comes in with yet another roommate for us. The new guest has these hip little circle-rimmed glasses and cradles a potted plant in her left arm. The landlord gives her the tour, and we all quiet down and watch her together, as if placing silent bets on what she’ll say, what she’ll like, how she’ll move. We do this when a guest arrives. At least, those of us who’ve seen it all before. The most recent roommate—the older lady who came after the basketball player and likes having photos of her grandkids up on our desk—is getting introduced to all this for the first time. She’s looking at the young woman with the plant and the landlord with the sweetest, most confused smile as she tries to piece together why they won’t talk to her. As she tries to be a good host. I need to tell her she’s okay later. To whisper in her ear, as much as I can, that everything will be alright, even though it is a little awful and scary. That she’ll get caught up in the living, same as we all do, and will soon forget her questions.

I whisper to others too, when it feels right.

I tell the punk girl she has good taste in music. I tell Stilts not to take the mafiosa’s insults to heart, though he has no idea she’s there. I remind the academic that he should stop stressing about cheating on his physics test. I know they cannot hear me. But I think it does something.

As the plant-carrying woman signs the lease—they always do—the landlord puts his misshapen hand on her shoulder and then turns to leave, to walk out the door. He’s passing right by me in the kitchen, at one point, and with idle fingers I reach out to grab the landlord’s hand before he goes.

The smell of vegetal plastic. Something I haven’t smelled, or noticed, in so, so long. Then I see.

All around me, touching me and not touching me, in me and beyond me, filling the room with infinite, muttering noise—people.

Faces. Heads of hair of every color, endless sets of eyes at all heights. People. Packed like atoms, clipping into and out of one another in every space, at every corner. Somehow I see all of them. Feel their density. Hear their chaos. Through the jittering mass, some of them see me.

The landlord turns abruptly with his strange, wisdom-tooth-surgery smile. He pulls his broken hand away, and the vision stops. He looks at me—not through me, but at me. Then, he turns and leaves.

I’m breathless, overcome. The water seeps through my fingers again. So many, so many people, here from the beginning, watching me, knowing me, thinking of me. And I feel and think so many things. And I think I hear them whispering things I cannot hear.

* * *

I begin clinging to the academic. I pretend to brush his hair while he works. I help him pick out clothes. I listen to his stories. I watch and smile and blush as he ogles 403. I hold him when we sleep untouching. I read my books aloud to him. I tell him how I’m feeling. I tell him I love him. I tell him that I think we’ll be here forever. Perhaps that does something.

Benjamin Ray Allee’s prose and poetry appears in X-R-A-Y, BULL, Revolution John, Roi Fainéant, and other journals and anthologies. His debut short fiction collection, MEDIAC, was published in 2025 by Anxiety Press. He lives with his wife in Athens, Georgia where he works in digital marketing, is drafting a novel or two, and writes arts and culture criticism when he has the inkling.