Floor by Floor
The smell hits you before the building does—dog shit and döner in equal measure, one warm and one rank, both permanent. That’s Wedding, my neighborhood in Berlin. I live on the second floor of a multi-family pseudo-Altbau a short walk from what might generously be called the area’s commercial center: bookmakers, phone repair shops, more bookmakers. I moved here by choice. That tells you something.
After Sara and Paul relocated to somewhere with fewer noise complaints, people assumed the building would start feeling quiet. They were wrong. My housemates are among the most attentive, dedicated neighbors a person could ask for. Let me introduce them.
Above me live Hulk and Hulkia—Ulrike and Ferdinand Kastrowski, a construction worker couple caught in a gamma bomb accident somewhere on the A3 between Oberhausen and Aschaffenburg in the late eighties, who have been enormous green monsters ever since. Too many Twilight posters mean they can’t rise before sundown, so they begin around midnight: hurling furniture, anvils, and occasional aircraft wreckage onto the discount laminate, performing some ancestral Czech ceremonial dance in iron boots and full steel plate armor until the sun comes up over Central Europe. I fall asleep somewhere around dawn, armed with sleeping pills and an industrial-sized box of earplugs. It works, technically.
Next door, Mr. Prtzuioplsxvbmd returns from his morning shift at the animal incineration facility and immediately begins shouting at his entire household—wife, children, cat—for approximately four and a half continuous hours without stopping for air, which I’ve timed and find genuinely impressive from a physiological standpoint. The moment his vocabulary exhausts itself, Mrs. Prtzuioplsxvbmd seizes her window, armed with a frying pan and a vocal register that rattles the plumbing, while the kids and the cat pile on. The whole thing wraps up about thirty minutes before Hulk and Hulkia wake up. Accidental scheduling, but it prevents direct overlap, which I appreciate.
Below me: Chantal. Honestly, she’s fine. Small, heavy, not particularly interested in the outside world. She collects Diddl mice and watches reality TV and has been doing this since dropping out of school at fifteen, and she asks very little of the universe in return. She’s quiet. Until Rolf arrives. Rolf is her boyfriend, a committed fascist, and the proud owner of a 94,000-watt sound system. He and his associates transform the apartment—inexplicably pink—into an underground party venue seven days a week: racist rock, techno versions of songs with titles like Twenty Centimeters, bass frequencies powerful enough that I have to grip the window frame to keep from being launched from the building. A baby screams in there sometimes. Nobody has explained whose.
And then there’s the apartment that doesn’t appear on any floor plan. Somewhere inside my head, Elin and Hanna live—Swedish, blonde, twin sisters who make their living as models and have no objections to inviting me over telepathically when things get bad. We bake cookies. They spray each other with milk and laugh about it. There’s a pillow fight. We’re all naked. ABBA plays. When we’re done, they deploy their psychic abilities to simultaneously explode the heads of the Kastrowskis, the Prtzuioplsxvbmds, and Rolf’s entire crew, then seduce the building manager—using their physical advantages—into filling the newly vacant apartments with cute, willing fashion girls who name me their permanent king.
It’s a detailed fantasy. Very detailed. I’ve had a lot of time to develop it, somewhere between midnight and sunrise, gripping the window frame.