The Clockwork Reprise, Abigail Kortering ‘22

The Clockwork Reprise

The 1200 building on Park Avenue is chronically inconspicuous. It rests between a florist shop, run by an old woman the age of dirt with a shepherd’s staff for a spine, and a small playground, buried by newspapers from 1993 and a fog that never seems to lift.

There was a city planner around the turn of the nineteenth century. He was charged with creating a more affluent atmosphere for the street that has been run down since before it was called Park Avenue. To draw potential businesses and inhabitants in, all records of its previous name were expunged and it was dubbed a hand me down name. Whether to confuse property buyers and investors, or to manifest opulence, no one knows. It is, however, speculated that something changed on Park Avenue the day it was renamed, sending a ripple of insidious stillness across the entire street. This morning, the fog in the playground is not particularly thick or remarkable. It is the same as yesterday’s fog, maybe even a tad lighter. A man with a scruffy beard stumbles up to the bronze-handled door, a lukewarm coffee run out of steam in one hand, a saxophone case in the other, yesterday’s New York Times tucked up under his arm. He fumbles with his chainless keys, choosing the wrong one twice despite having lived on Park Avenue for over a decade. Finally, the keyhole twists and with a click the man backs up against the door, pushing it open. The New York Times slides to his elbow.

The mail is not locked up at the 1200 building. The man slides his wad of coupons and bills and a folded manila envelope out of the wooden slot box on the bottom floor. He puts them with the Times which hasn’t stopped slipping. Park Avenue counts the apartment numbers backwards, starting with the number 4 on the ground floor, and working its way up to number 1. Some say this is the work of an eccentric urban planner or a construction worker with a vendetta or an adolescent prank that no one bothered to fix. Regardless of its origins, that’s the way it’s always been, and the way it probably always will be.

Mrs. Achron has lived in Apartment 4 since the beginning of time. She was already the building’s unofficial monarch when the saxophone player first arrived over a decade ago and not much has changed since. She wakes up at 8:22 without fail. As the man slips quietly inside the building each morning around the same time—yesterday’s Times, lukewarm coffee, and saxophone case in hand— he finds her standing in the stairway for a smoke in her yellowing bathrobe and matted mint slippers. She watches. As the years go by, the inundated man thinks he can see her nose become more beaklike, morphing to match her hawklike presence. Once, she said good morning in a croaky, hacking voice. The man didn’t say anything, and neither did she for the next five years. But still, she stands, watching and smoking, puffs of sticky smoke swirling around and trapping themselves in the eggshell chipped paint of the hallway.

This morning, the man’s shoes are wet with dew and fog. There is no welcome mat to shuffle across to dry them at Park Avenue. As far as the man is aware, he’s the only one that comes and goes. The wooden stairs spiraling up to the fourth floor are not bowed with use like other historic buildings.

Apartment 3 belongs to a writer. Apartment 3 is arguably the worst of the apartments on Park Avenue, besides Apartment 2, but bad apartments make for cheap rent. The saxophone player knows this.

The writer doesn’t come out. The only way the man knows his neighbor is a novelist is because one time, during his usual morning routine, he inadvertently grabbed his mail (the cubbies for Apartments 2 and 3 being directly next to each other) and saw “Return to Sender” stamped in red on a manuscript. Finding a writing job is difficult in this city, just as it is in every city. The saxophone player knows about job difficulty. He would know. He has a tin candy box tucked behind his top cabinet

stuffed with dollar bills and quarters picked out of sidewalk cracks and gutters.

The man does not know who lives above him, in Apartment 1. Not quite a penthouse, but not without pleasant access to the roof maintenance trap door. Two years ago, someone moved in. The man, being his downstairs neighbor, baked butterscotch cookies that never made the arduous trip up the single flight of stairs.

Apartment 2 belongs to the saxophone player. He manages to find the right key on the first try. He’s considered color coding them in the past, but he never did. Sometimes he gets lucky, sometimes the folded, slightly crumpled pages of the New York Times slip from under his elbow and tumble down the stairs in a flutter of black and white, scrambling the pages so that the story about the famous athlete leads into a consideration of the current state of the economy.

Apartment 2 is always cold, except for when it’s not. The radiators never seem to pull their weight unless it’s 93 degrees outside, in which case the window air conditioner unit sputters and complains and drags its feet. The man sets his saxophone case down on the green velvet couch he found on the side of the road last year. There’s a suspicious stain on the left arm but it’s hardly noticeable if he throws the wrinkled pages of the New York Times over it. He hasn’t realized how battered the instrument case has gotten over the years. The leather is scraped off in some parts. He’ll have to fix that with expired shoe polish. He makes a mental note that he secretly knows he’ll shred to make room for next month’s rent.

He was given the saxophone when he was 14. It was the only present his mother ever gave him. She became forgetful when his father left. For a while, he thought she may have forgotten she was supposed to be a mother. But his hopes soared when she handed him a shiny black saxophone case. There were a few dents in the corners and the saxophone itself was coated in a thin layer of age, but he didn’t notice because he was too busy smiling.

The man rubs the scruff on his chin. He’d thought about growing his beard out before, but wasn’t sure that would appeal to his audience. If he looks too scruffy, they might think he is homeless and he’ll be removed. He can’t afford that. After carefully untying his shoes, the man sits with his back to the couch and stretches his legs out to count his earnings. He’d been out all night, bumbling from the city’s only train station just before dinnertime to his favorite street corner near all the pubs where he’d stayed until this morning. He likes watching the people jostling along the sidewalks with their friends, chatting and swaying from a few shots too many.

He has earned six five dollar bills, two tens, a handful of ones and about two bankrolls full of scattered assortments of change. Tonight, a tall man in a suit that didn’t quite reach down to his ankles requested a song a little later than most of the most office workers who passed him by. The saxophone player doesn’t often get song requests. Most people he sees look straight ahead, throwing weathered coins at his saxophone case and missing nine times out of ten. This man stood for a while, a dark faux leather briefcase in hand. He watched. He waited for the song to end before approaching. His peppery hair was thinner from close up and a worn silver O engraved on the briefcase hand blinked in the street lamp light. “Take Five. Dave Brubeck,” he’d said reservedly. The saxophone player wet his lips and raised the saxophone to his mouth to play, but the man and his suit walked away.

That wasn’t unfamiliar.

Start a little conversion now, it’s alright, just take five. Just take five.

The words echoed in his mind. That’s how his friends sang it twelve years ago at university, swaying drunkenly in the apartment kitchenette. They’d used a bottle of ketchup as a microphone,

the shiny coolness of his saxophone pressing against his right thigh as he bent into the music, pushing himself forward as if to propel himself through worlds. Though I’m going out of my way, just so I can pass by each day, not a single word we say. It’s a pantomime not a play. The voices of his friends sang in his mind while his fingers flickered across sticky keys as they clicked rhythmically, familiarly. He hasn’t spoken to his university friends since their senior year, only a few long days after the last time he’d sung this very song. Now he was playing alone. It had been just after two interviews he’d had that day, one with an insurance company in Cincinnati, another with an up-and-coming jazz club in Chicago. He’d picked the club in Chicago. It never did come up. What would his mother say now? Would she be proud of him for blindly following a passion she’d inadvertently begun? Occasionally, around this time of the month when the envelope arrives, these questions surface, bobbing in the ocean of his mind like a barnacled buoy, pushing against the surface tension of his memory. He supposes if he really wants to know, he can always open this month’s manila envelope instead of shoving it under piles of acrid egg shells and years-old Chinese takeout containers in the dumpster around the back of the 1200 building, tucked away in an alley so the scent of rot and rats doesn’t drift into the noses of pedestrians. Perhaps this is another design feature to thank the city planner for.

He allows his eyes to flick over to the yellow envelope resting on the arm of the green velvet sofa. As always, his mother’s handwriting prints his address in thick, Sharpied letters. As always, there is no return address.

His fingers, nimble from years of jumping from rounded saxophone key to rounded saxophone key, carefully unwrap the string from the button of the envelope. As it opens, a photo slides out, small and torn.

A woman with short black hair smiles, a giggling toddler on her lap. The photo is torn halfway–only a man’s twill knee and the bell of a shining saxophone peek from behind the jagged edge, willing themselves to be seen despite his mother’s clear attempts to remove them from memory and, therefore, reality. The man stares at the photo, wondering if the ripped-off half had disappeared along with the tenderness in his mother’s heart. For a moment, he allows himself to imagine a world in which the photo is not torn, but when he looks up, the light in the bay window of Apartment 2 fades to a dusky green. Street lamps flicker on, casting an orange glow over the middle aged woman taking her dog out in fuzzy pink pajama pants. The man sighs, pulling his saxophone to him as he stands, hands pressing up on his knees. Yesterday’s Times slips off the sofa arm, losing its grip on the crushed green velvet. Today, he will not think of the photo with its jagged paper edge, nor of his university friends and their ketchup bottle arias. He will not wonder if his mother misses him, nor if his friends remember drunkenly singing in the university apartment kitchenette.

The man retraces his steps. Fumble with the keys. Lock the door. Regret never bringing the butterscotch cookies upstairs. Down the stairs. Hear the clacking of a typewriter echoing from Apartment 3. Smell a hint of smoke left over from Mrs. Achron’s cigarettes. Glance at the mail slots. Push the wooden door open with your back. Lock it from the outside. See the wisps of fog curl around the yellow plastic slide on the playground. Watch the old lady with her crooked back lock up the flower shop.

Tomorrow is another today’s yesterday.

Abigail Kortering ‘22 Scholastic Honorable Mention