The man upstairs had emailed me before, but usually just logistical exchanges or funny memes, like that one of Grumpy Cat, where he looks angry but his thought bubble reads, “I’m not angry. I’m happiness challenged.” He’s even sent the occasional article: Before our family vacation to the Cape, I received a piece from Discover on an ocean-borne skin fungus proliferating because of climate change. But the Bucky article was, in all honesty, exactly what I needed that day, thematically, and I found myself wondering a bit more about the man upstairs. What does he do up there on Wednesdays? What other publications does he read? What is he wearing? I’ll often hear his socked footsteps. Some days, he’ll be still for hours; then, I’ll hear a flurry of feet padding on the wooden floor above me, like he’s trying to finish things up before end of day. Sometimes he plays music. Or draws a bath. Or listens to music while drawing a bath. Today, instead of blocking out this ambient noise, I realized I’d been filing it away, noticing each sound, letting each instance of aural information create a picture, an architecture of his day. A map of his Wednesday, a secret message to me, the lady living below.

       I decided to take a walk. As the sidewalk became the bike path, I encountered a man in jean shorts stomping on the pavement. His eyes remained trained on the ground, even as bicyclists rang their bells and passed on his left. I looked closer and realized the man was squashing beautiful red butterflies, their wings covered in intricate patterns. I was so startled I couldn’t speak, so I waved my hands to get his attention. He turned sharply, surprised, his face tense as he attempted to determine if we’d met before, a look that made me feel like an intruder in my own neighborhood. I was about to ask him why he was squashing insects, when he thrust a fat arm forward and pointed behind me to a tree encircled by a bright yellow band of sticky tape about a foot wide. In fact, several trees were surrounded by similar tapes, each covered with red butterflies, some still giving little weak wing flutters of attempted escape. I turned back, but the man was already walking away, mumbling something about “invasive species.” He tugged on a leash (I hadn’t realized he was walking a dog) and jerked his little Bernese puppy away down the path.

       At my laptop later, I learned more about the Japanese lanternfly, how you’re actually supposed to squash them. The article even included a picture of a smiling man lifting his foot mid-stomp. The lanternflies first appeared in the U.S. in 2014, arriving on stone-laden ships that docked in Pennsylvania. Now they’re on my bike path, destroying all flora. The article provided an interactive map. When I swiped to zoom in on my neighborhood, a deep-red circle blossomed, centered on the entrance to the bike path I walk every day. Several paler circles branched off from the dark one, forming a Venn diagram of insect destruction. The epicenter was where I met the man in the jean shorts. I didn’t realize how right he was. I vowed to better educate myself about local issues in the future.

       Back home, I considered the peach tree in our backyard. It’s guarded by a metal fence to keep out deer. They lounge in our backyard when it gets too hot. It is a beautiful tree; I planted it in the fall after my daughter gave me a gift certificate for my favorite nursery in the Catskills for my birthday. We always used to joke about that Simpsons episode, where Marge accuses Lisa of never playing with her peach tree, so she runs outside and twirls around it while singing a song. It was our little inside joke: anytime she’d ask for something—new clothes, an iPhone, money for the arcade—I’d look at her sternly and say, “You never even play with your peach tree.” So, after she moved away for college, I planted a peach tree in our backyard. It suddenly occurred to me, staring at it, that no peaches were growing on it. I went outside to investigate and realized the leaves were torn to shreds. The fence was intact, so it wasn’t deer. No evidence of lanternflies, so I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. How had this destruction happened without my noticing?

       I realized I was crying, so went back inside and knocked a few items off my to-do list: pleas for the library’s silent auction, petitions to add a stoplight at the dangerous crosswalk downtown. Halfway through, though, I noted that my email tone was off. My subject lines felt strained, and my opening “I hope your week has been going well!” felt almost caustic. Even simple sentences seemed edged with aggression and sarcasm. My closings—usually a strength of mine—felt like pleas for help. Instead of “Sincerely” or “Kind Regards” I found myself typing cryptic sign-offs like “Hold on to Hope” or “I’ve Had Fun.” Frank, my therapist, has urged me to notice dark thoughts before they build, but that morning I was picturing life as only a long list, knocking items off of it until we die.

       But then I glanced over and saw the photo of Bucky the frog, where he almost seems to be posing for the camera, and I gained some perspective on my own life. There was Bucky, continuing his journey among daily slights and inconveniences. But the reader is also asked to identify with the young son, so caught in the swell of life he didn’t realize he’d forgotten about a thing—a being, named Bucky!—that he’d loved so much, and had let it live out his sad little existence in an aquarium so hidden behind appliances it took a week before anyone realized he’d died.

       Calmer, I could hear Henry licking the rug again. He does this. He’s a great dog, but has started following me around the house. Even if I go upstairs just to change into shorts, he plods up the stairs behind me. He has a face that makes him seem perpetually sad, so it’s hard to stay mad at him. We rescued him from Mississippi, and his arrival was a blessing. He has a limp—many rescues from the South have buckshot in their legs—but Henry has never shown any signs of trauma. He’ll climb right up into your lap if invited, even though he’s fifty-seven pounds! He’s such a good boy. Suddenly, he stopped licking, got up, and went to look out the patio door. Usually, I wouldn’t notice, but I sensed he wanted to go outside. I opened the door, and, long story short, we ended up lying in the grass together. I rested my head on his stomach and listened to him breathe for a full ten minutes. I don’t know what came over me!

       Then I heard a swooshing sound. The man upstairs had opened a window. Was he hot up there? Did he have a pair of special shorts he liked to wear around the house? I couldn’t help picturing him thinking about me up there. How did he know I needed that article? Does he press his cheek to the wooden floor and listen for my footfalls? Settling into the grass, my head rose and fell with my dog’s breath. I gazed up and willed the man upstairs to pop his head out for some air or put on some music. Neither thing happened.

 

II

        I came back inside to find my husband dancing in the living room. He used to be into adventurous music—minimalist drone, French modern composition, psychedelic free jazz, all newly re-pressed on vinyl—but recently he’s been revisiting bands from his youth. That week, it was Weezer. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Weezer. I just heard enough of the Blue Album the first time. I started to ask my husband about his day, but right when I opened my mouth, he did that thing where he pretends to be onstage, as if he’s suddenly a member of Weezer rocking out in front of fans, so he can’t possibly respond to my pedestrian concerns. I gave him a look, but he smiled to let me know he meant it good-naturedly, and he somehow managed to hug me while also playing air guitar. It’s hard to get through to him in moments like this. Anything you do, by definition, will be halting the fun, so I just smiled and walked away. He mimed an invisible lasso, spinning it, roping me, and playfully pulling me back towards him, but I laughed so he'd stop and retreated to the office. My husband shifted seamlessly to drums for the opening beats of “The Sweater Song.”

            I love my husband. He embodies the best qualities of a child: eagerness, recklessness, hunger for the small details of life. But sometimes I just want to be able to read in bed or discuss potential tiles for our upcoming bathroom renovation. He was exactly what I needed when we first met. I was in a protracted process of separating from my first husband. He was quiet, introverted. Most of my colleagues didn’t even realize I had a partner, even though we’d been together for a decade. Sometimes, he’d startle me when he’d speak, because I would forget he was in the room. I usually had to fly solo on my city adventures: watching three Italian Neorealist movies in a row at the Film Forum, or launching an impromptu Sazerac tour of Brooklyn when all those bars started featuring absinthe. It was fine at first—he was an artist, he needed time alone to recharge—but soon I was pulling away, then a trial separation, my sudden relocating upstate, years of discussing whether divorce was really the answer.

       I met my new husband while swimming laps at the YMCA. As I toweled off, he rested his hairy arms on the side of the pool and complimented my goggles. Just so you understand, I wasn’t looking to meet anyone. I was skeptical of men outside of the city. But there he was: reckless, confident, sexy in swim shorts. He took me to a Middle Eastern place that only served one signature cocktail. He sat beside me in the booth and turned his whole body towards me when I spoke about my life. He listened, asked questions. Whenever I proposed a future outing, he immediately said, “I’d be into that.” When we got pregnant three months later, I was terrified he’d leave town in the middle of the night or start taking classes in another state so he could stay away. But there he was, steady, smiling, parading around our apartment showcasing baby hand-me-downs, even while I was still reeling from the pink cross on the pregnancy stick. I share this story to explain: I realize my husband isn’t that bad. Many women would love a man who buys expensive vinyl and dances to Weezer in his underwear. But just imagine if that husband did that every day.  

      The light had shifted. The office walls were a darker purple. It was quiet. How long had I been sitting there? My husband seemed to have left. I could feel the man upstairs above me, sitting in his ergonomic chair, gazing at the floor, a pink dotted line stretching from his eyeline to mine, like in an old comic. Even solid walls couldn’t impede our connection. The sound of a heavy plastic container lifted onto a glass shelf brought me back—my husband had refilled the Brita. When he shut the fridge door, the dotted line disappeared. A can popped open—my husband having a beer at 3 p.m.—and Weezer’s Pinkerton started up. I had things to do in the other rooms, but stayed in the office.         Another me walked into the living room and took my husband’s hands, even as he jokingly danced away. She, that other me, led him upstairs and showed him the rooms where the man upstairs lives. Notice the differences. These are his books, all shelved by subject: artist biographies, Zen studies, probing memoirs, elevated crime fiction. These are his rugs, simple but thoughtful. These, his carefully curated Soviet movie posters, purchased when he was writing his thesis at Oberlin. Everything means something, everything was chosen. Look, touch, but, most importantly, notice. Look around. Look through these spaces. Try to remember. Let’s live in these rooms again.

 

III

      Things escalated with the man upstairs today. It’s Wednesday again, later in the day than he usually writes. I’d forgotten he was up there—he’d been so still, until this landed:

“We should travel together. Life is too short.”

       I’ve been on a productivity kick, unsubscribing from email lists, so it was the only new message in my inbox and its arrival felt punctuated, as if all other communication at that moment was arbitrary. Receiving that question felt like something physical. I turned around, almost expecting him to be standing in the doorway.

       I was about to close my laptop—I needed a moment to recover—when another message appeared. Just as it arrived, I heard the wheels of the ergonomic chair roll away from the desk one floor above, like sending that one final email had completed his work for the day. I heard the bathtub start to fill. The day was winding down for the man upstairs. I knew he liked to end his day with a warm soak. I clicked open the email: an image of a gray kitty with one arm raised, hearts and stars pouring out of its paw, and written below: “Stop in the Name of Love.” Nothing else. With no additional context it was hard to know what it meant. Was he undercutting the seriousness of his previous message? Was he dropping clues in hopes I would make the next move? Was it not related to the earlier message at all? Was there something in the name of love that he really wanted me to stop? Regardless, there was no arguing he’d just taken things to the next level.

       I had to speak to my husband soon. I stared at the kitty on the screen, softly closed my laptop, and lit my inspirational candle, the one I save for when I’m drafting an uncomfortable email. I shifted my back against the lumbar support pillow attached to my chair. I breathed into it—the way Frank, my therapist, had suggested—letting the chair accept my weight. Hold me. Take my weight. Here. Support me goddammit. The soft quivering light made my eyes blur. I was inside the candle’s flame and could see through the walls. A tangled mess of plumbing, passing just feet from my desk. I could hear water rushing through. A shushing sound. A waterfall. Pieces of the man upstairs passing by me as I worked. I hadn’t realized. Tiny hairs. Skin cells. Body oils. Liquids. The bath water settling around him like a sheet. Tiny disturbances in the water table when he shifted to get more comfortable. Maybe lifting a leg to hang out of the tub, or crunching forward to refill the water when it turned lukewarm. His belly poking out of the water like an island or peninsula. Then, stillness again. Water eroding microscopic pieces of him, moment by moment. His skin, a ridge along a sharp turn in the river, delivering the water to me. A soup for me to drink.

      I decided to take a walk. I kept my eyes trained on the path for flickers of lanternfly. They usually dart away just before your sneaker lands, so for every three stomps you get one good squish. I extended my walk to find more of them. At the path’s end, a park worker lugged a heavy commercial vacuum out of a truck. He turned it on and sucked lanternfly egg sacks off the side of a large oak. He noticed me but didn’t stop sucking. I nodded to him as I passed.

 

IV

       I might try ayahuasca. It’s been a week since I decided to speak to my husband about the man upstairs, but then he shifted and started performing tiny atonements. Wildflowers suddenly appeared on my side table. Antique bird feeders dangled from trees in our backyard, bluebirds dancing along their lips. He even bought an ornamental carafe from Etsy to refill my morning coffee. I’d thank him as he poured, but he’d silently back away without interrupting my New Yorker article. He also started experimenting with new recipes. I always tease him that he only knows three dishes: tacos, white bean soup, and broccoli penne. But I started finding cookbooks of different regions stowed around the household, hidden in hutches or between novels on the fiction shelf. Specialty ingredients arrived by mail. We’d felt like separate beings in a shared space, but suddenly we’d returned to our courtship dance. One moment he’s leading, then me, my husband responding to vibrations I’m unknowingly secreting. The second I miss him, he appears, carafe in hand. Then, when I’m once again ready to confront our inevitable, he backs out of the room, performing a socked moonwalk and making Michael Jackson sounds until I laugh and forget what I was going to say.

      My friend Carol attended an ayahuasca ceremony for her fiftieth birthday. She talked with an old tree for hours, finally forgave her father, and came home refreshed and eager. Hearing her experience, I was ready to attend. But then she spoke of the others. The woman who curled up on her side because her bones were crying. The woman who yelled at the ceiling because it was the patriarchy. I wasn’t certain any longer. Our neighbor Janice also tried it. She quit her job and now makes sculptures in her garage. She seems happier, but she’s two months behind on her mortgage. I just don’t know.

 

V

        It’s colder now. It’s been weeks without word from the man upstairs. I think his missives were jolting me into reflection, so I haven’t felt like writing again until today. After that excited flurry of September, things slowed on our block. People have already left for the holidays, and deer families don’t visit our backyard as often. Even the lanternflies have gone away. I walked all the way to the end of the path—the one that ends by the ice cream shop, not the library—and only spotted six on my whole trip. Four were already squashed. I waved my sneaker over the other two until they skittered into the grass where they’ll have a better chance of survival, I hope. Maybe they hibernate during winter? I’ll need to check. I know they have an average lifespan of a year, so they’ll be dead soon enough anyway.

       At the end of the path, I took an unusual route home, zigzagging through residential streets and into some neighborhoods I’ve never known the name of. I ended up passing Janice painting in her garage. I know her from book club, that’s when she detailed her ayahuasca experience, but had never known where she lived, and now here I was at the end of her driveway. A “For Sale” sign stood in her yard. From the sidewalk, I called out to say I was sorry about the impending move, but she waved away my condolences. She’s selling the place for much more than she paid and moving to St. Agatha in Northern Maine. “Downsizing,” she said. She bought a small fixer-upper cabin, but since she’s so old she says she probably won’t fix it up much. The important thing is, she says, there’s a long empty room with gorgeous wooden floors and one long northern-facing window, which she has heard is good for painting. It’s the studio she’s never had. I was going to ask why St. Agatha, but she anticipated my question. She’s been doing that since her drug weekend. An old college roommate of hers, who passed away years ago, grew up there. Janice had always admired her and wanted to visit, felt she’d understand that roommate better if she experienced where she’d grown up. She bought the cabin after seeing a two-minute video of someone walking through its rooms.

       I think she said something about “downsizing” again, but I didn’t hear, because only then did I realize she was painting instead of sculpting. I’d wondered if I had misheard her the first time. She waved me over so I could get a better look. It was a simple painting, but something—one element, or two, you couldn’t quite land on it—was shifted, so everything felt heightened, more present and alive. A single clothesline crossed the frame from left to right on a slight downward slope, with a colorful blanket, maybe a rug, with brightly colored stripes hung on it, its weight suspended by only two clothespins. On the right, I could see the edge of a garden, a human-sized sunflower peeking over its chain-link fence. On the left was a peach tree, which I liked because it reminded me of my own. Maybe it was the muted pink-and-gray sky, almost too uniformly colored, or the hyperreality of the caftan—I’d decided it was a caftan, possibly one of those Native American-inspired blankets that were so popular in the ’90s. The caftan hung center-frame, spread out like a sail, like it was being held by the wind, presented to us, the viewer, by the wind, even though everything else appeared still, but something made the picture vibrate and I felt I was experiencing a memory I’d never had. I asked her about it, expecting her to wave me away. She took a long time to answer. It wasn’t a memory, she told me, just something she saw clearly. “It just came to me,” she said twice. Instead of figuring it out, she painted it. She didn’t even outline as she normally does.

       Only then did I notice the other canvases. There were hundreds of them, some incredibly small, others massive. A few were in the process of being stretched. She’d removed everything else—the only-ridden-once bicycles, the tool chest, the old weight bench from her second marriage. Now, it was just canvases. Some leaned against the walls, others she hung up. Janice kept painting as I circled the room to take them all in. There were stands of trees, the nearby mountain where people hike with their dogs, the little wine store downtown at night. There were faces I didn’t recognize, a family playing pickleball, a child putting a letter into a mailbox. But most were people-less, emptier, like she’d given up on figures because she couldn’t quite capture them. I kept circling. There was her period of dark blues and deep purples—eggplant-shaded silhouettes of pines on a horizon, tiny splashes of white in the sky, stars, maybe comets. There was her redder period, muted browns, yellows, an overwhelming impression of desert and desolation, a flatness, a possible impulsive visit to Arizona she never told me about. I turned to the next batch, but they were being taken away. Men in identical white shirts and back braces were loading them into a moving truck at the end of the driveway. There were so many of them; the garage emptied quickly. I stood still and they flowed around me. Soon, it was just Janice on her low stool, painting on her easel. Then, just Janice on her low stool. Then, just Janice, standing in front of me, telling me to “take my time, there’s no rush,” before she was gone too.

      When I got home, it was night. I could hear the man upstairs shuffling around, winding down for the day. I listened. It was time to say something. It was hard to give name to the emotion that formed after his removal from my life, but I understood the reasons. For many months, he’d been only working four days a week. Wednesdays were free, so he spent the day up there. Upstairs, so he wouldn’t be in the way. He started meditating. A hushed British voice and softly pinged gongs. He discovered micro-dosing. My husband. He started ordering mushroom-laced chocolate bars from a man named Freddy upstate. He’d go upstairs, take mushrooms, try to write—he’s convinced he’s a late-blooming novelist—but usually he just lay in bed. One day, he ended up reading the article about Bucky. My husband isn’t a nature guy, but those chocolate bars are intense. They turn you into a different person. A better person? Maybe. I miss that person, yes. He only existed for a few months. The chocolate-bar man upstate stopped responding on WhatsApp, and we live in the suburbs, so we didn’t know who to approach. We’d finally zeroed in on a possibility—there’s a man on the local bus who carries a purple purse and is always reading Proust—but, by then, my husband’s work decided they needed him in the office five days a week. He hated that, but didn’t say anything. I offered him weekends for his mushroom adventures, but he shook his head. “That’s our time,” he said. I’d never heard him use that phrase. I didn’t realize that’s how he thought of weekends.

      There’s a splashing upstairs, water rolling off a body—he’s stood up in the bath. Soon, he’ll wrap a towel around himself—the yellow one from Target that he insists brightens the bathroom—and come downstairs. I always hate that. Our neighbors have a direct sightline to the base of our stairs, and he poses, nearly nude, on the second step, daring them to see. There are things I want to tell him. Things that were better, but there are also things that have changed. He’s moved on from Weezer to some awful band that sings about lightning crashing, but he also knows a lot about birds now. He must’ve gotten that app. He pointed to a birdfeeder out back and said, “Oh, that’s an ovenbird.” I’d never known the name before. He’ll also watch foreign films with me at night, even though he hates reading subtitles after 9 p.m. I hear him stepping onto the stairs, coming down to prepare dinner. He’s excited to make this salad he heard about, of purslane and blueberries. His bare feet come into view, pausing at the top of the stairs. Is it better to tell him? To point to the things. The things to keep.

       He’s standing in front of me. The yellow towel is wrapped around his head, a turban, and he’s naked from the neck down. I laugh, which is why he did it. I’m about to go wash the blueberries for him, but his expression shifts. He’s seen something. I think of things to bring up—a sudden necessary errand, a new store, a funny quirk about a neighbor—so that his sudden awareness would slip away. But he takes my hands and holds them, rubbing along the tops of the veins in my fingers with his thumbs. He’s seen something and moved towards it. I watch him stroke back and forth, back and forth; he’s always been tactile. On our first date, he kept adjusting his grip when we held hands, like he was trying to encounter the entire landscape of that part of my body. He gently tugs my hands, drawing me closer. I bring my feet together and imagine my soles sinking into the floor. My husband inhales and asks, “Is there something you wanted to tell me, baby?” I look at him. The towel has come loose, a corner hangs alongside his face. I think of those trick mirrors, the ones turned toward one another. Dominoes stacked on their side stretching away, each containing your image. So many versions of you disappearing into the distance. I think of those mirrors while he waits for me to answer.

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