Quiet Hours

The bass came through the wall in three hard hits and stayed there. Abe’s pencil rolled off the desk and dropped behind the radiator. He sat still for a moment, listening to a song he did not know and did not want, then got up and found the pencil with his fingers.

The wall thumped again. Something heavy scraped across the floor next door. A man’s voice, bright and too close, said, “That’s the one, leave it there.”

Abe tore a sheet from the back of his notebook. He wrote in small letters and taped it to the neighbour’s door on his way down for coffee.

Quiet hours start at ten. Please keep the music on your side of the wall.

He came back with a paper cup and found an answer in looping handwriting stuck over his own note, smudged.

Sorry! Moving day. Last box is in. I’ll be quiet from now on. Felix.

Abe read it twice. He took it down so the tape would not ruin the paint, and put it in the drawer with the pencils. Then he sat at the desk and opened the file he had been translating since morning. The sentence he had been stuck on was still stuck. On the other side of the wall someone laughed, and a door shut, and the laugh went with it.

The quiet held until evening. Then a beat came up through the floorboards, low enough that Abe felt it in his wrists more than he heard it. He wrote another note.

The floor is not a sound system. Abe.

In the morning a new scrap of paper waited on his door, held by a strip of blue tape.

I was testing the levels for a wedding on Saturday. I kept it low. How low is low enough for you? Also, do you take your name off at night or is Abe a full-time condition?

Abe stood in the hall in his socks and read it again. He should have thrown it away. He took it inside and answered on the back.

Low enough that I cannot feel it in my teeth. Abe is the condition. The rest of me would like to finish a page.

He taped it to Felix’s door before he made tea. When he came out with the mug, the note was already gone. A fresh one sat in its place, written fast.

Page received. Teeth noted. I’ll use headphones after nine. If the wall still misbehaves, knock once and I’ll come down. Or up. I don’t know which flat is winning.

Abe did not knock. He worked until the light left the window, and the wall stayed still, and the stillness made the flat feel larger than it was. Near eleven a soft thud landed against his door. He opened it and found a folded page and, under it, a teabag in a little paper sleeve.

Emergency silence kit. The mint one. Don’t say I never gave you anything. F.

Abe held the teabag in his palm. He put the kettle on, because leaving it unused felt ruder than writing back. He drank the tea standing at the sink. It was too strong. He wrote anyway.

It was too strong. Thank you. If you must test levels, do it before six. I translate in the afternoons and the words do not survive a kick drum. A.

The answer came at dusk, taped so neatly Abe almost missed it.

Before six. Understood. What are you translating? I won’t ask the plot if plots are private. I talk to strangers for a living and then I come home and the flat is quiet in a way I haven’t learned yet. The mint was a guess. I’ll do better.

Abe read that one at the desk with the lamp on. He turned it over. His pen hovered. He wrote less than he meant to.

A novel. The plot is not private. The sentences are. Quiet is the point of this building, or it was. If the flat is too quiet, that is not my problem to solve. A.

He taped it up and went to bed angry at the last line, which was true and also not the whole truth. In the dark he heard a cupboard door next door, then water in the pipes, then nothing.

The notes kept coming. Abe told himself he was managing a problem. He checked the door before he checked his email.

Tuesday: You manage problems like a man who has practice. I played a wedding where the groom’s uncle requested the same song four times. I survived. Your wall can survive me. What do you drink when the tea is wrong?

Wednesday, from Abe: Coffee. Black. The uncle sounds like several people I have translated. Do not play that song through the wall as a joke. I will know.

Thursday: No song. Promise. Black coffee is a grim little religion. I’m at a venue until late. If you hear me come in, I’m trying not to wake you. If I fail, write it down. I like your handwriting more than I like being scolded, which is inconvenient.

Abe stood in the stairwell with that one and did not go back upstairs at once. The paper was warm from his pocket. He answered on the landing, using the wall as a desk.

Then stop being scolded. Come in. The third step from the bottom creaks. Avoid it. And stop telling me what you like. A.

Friday’s note was shorter.

Too late. I already like it. Third step. I’ll remember. Sleep, if you can. I’ve got a long one tonight.

Abe worked late on purpose. The German on the screen kept sliding. He made coffee at midnight and did not drink it. At half past two he gave up, put on his coat over his shirt, and went down to the stairwell because the flat had become a room where he was waiting for a sound.

He sat on the third step from the bottom, the one that creaked, so he would hear himself if he stood. The bulb over the landing was the cheap kind that hummed. He had the last note in his pocket and nothing useful in his hands.

A key turned in the street door at three. Cold air came up the stairs ahead of the man who followed it.

Felix stopped when he saw him. He had a kit bag on one shoulder and his collar open, and he looked younger in the bad light than the notes had made him, and more tired than the notes had admitted. His smile arrived a second late.

“You’re on my step,” he said.

“It is not your step.” Abe did not stand. “You were going to avoid it.”

“I was going to come in quietly.” Felix set the bag down so it would not knock the rail. “Sitting on it is a new rule. You didn’t post the rule.”

“I am posting it now.”

Felix looked at him for a long moment. The smile settled into something smaller. “You waited.”

“I could not sleep. The coffee went cold. That is not the same thing.”

“It is close.” Felix sat on the step above him, not touching, coat still on. He smelled like a closed room and someone else’s perfume, faint, the kind that clung after a night of other people’s dancing. “Was I loud yesterday?”

“No.”

“Then why the ambush?”

Abe turned the note in his pocket and did not take it out. “You said you would be late. I wanted to see whether the third step was a myth.”

“It creaked under you. I heard it from the door.” Felix tipped his head against the wall. His eyes were already half closed. “I talked for five hours. I said congratulations until the word stopped meaning anything. A bridesmaid cried in the parking lot and I gave her water and told her the song would end. It did end. They all end.”

“You are bad at coming down from it,” Abe said.

“I am excellent at coming down from it. I just haven’t been home long enough to prove it.” He opened his eyes again. “You’re the translator. Say something precise. I’m too tired to be sunny and you’re clearly furious that you came downstairs.”

Abe almost laughed. It came out as a breath. “I am not furious. I am precise. There is a difference.”

“Is there?”

“Tonight, less than usual.”

They sat with that. A car passed on the street and drew a line of light across the landing, then took it away. Felix’s knee rested a hand’s width from Abe’s shoulder. Neither of them moved it.

“Come up,” Felix said. “Not in. Up. The roof door sticks, but it opens if you lift it. I found it on Tuesday when the flat was too quiet and I didn’t want to write you another note I couldn’t take back.”

Abe stood. His knee had gone stiff from the step. “You wrote several you could not take back.”

“You answered them.”

“I answer mail. It is a flaw.”

The roof door did stick. Felix lifted the handle and put his shoulder to the frame, and the door gave with a wooden complaint. The air outside was cold enough to clear Abe’s head. The city was a low shine past the parapet. Two plastic chairs sat near the vent, one of them holding a paper cup that had been there long enough to soften.

Felix dropped into the empty chair and nudged the other with his foot. “Sit. I won’t play anything. I don’t even have my phone out. Look.”

He held both hands up, empty. Abe sat. The chair was damp through his coat.

“Tell me the sentence you couldn’t finish,” Felix said.

“You would not understand it.”

“Try me anyway. I spent all night understanding people who wanted a song from 2004 and a song from their parents’ wedding in the same breath. I’m good at not understanding and staying.”

Abe looked at the parapet. “A man in the book keeps a letter in a book he never lends. The German says he is saving it. It can also mean he is sparing it. I cannot tell which cruelty the author wants.”

Felix was quiet long enough that Abe thought he had fallen asleep. Then he said, “Sparing it. If he’s saving it, he means to use it. If he’s sparing it, he knows what it will do to the person who reads it.”

Abe turned. Felix watched him.

“That is not how translation works,” Abe said.

“It’s how letters work. You’ve been writing me letters. You just tape them to a door so you can pretend they’re complaints.”

“They were complaints.”

“The first one was.” Felix’s voice had gone rough at the edges. “The one about your teeth. The one about the third step. The one where you told me to stop saying what I like. You already knew I wasn’t going to stop.”

Abe’s hands were cold. He put them on his knees. “You were supposed to be a noise problem.”

“I am a noise problem. I’m also home at three in the morning because a room full of strangers needed me to be awake, and the only person I wanted to tell about it has been correcting my tea and my step count.” He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs. “If you want me to go back to headphones and sorry notes, say so. I’ll do it. I’m good at taking a brief.”

The word landed wrong and right at once. Abe shook his head. “Don’t take a brief from me.”

“Then what do you want?”

Abe did not have a clean sentence for it. The sky past Felix’s shoulder had gone from black to a thin grey. His eyes were sore. Felix waited. That was worse than being asked again.

“I want the wall to be quiet,” Abe said. “And I do not want you to be a note I can file.”

Felix’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “That’s the most you’ve said to my face.”

“Do not get used to it.”

“Too late,” Felix said, and this time it was the note, spoken, and Abe felt it in the same place he had felt the bass.

He reached first. That surprised him more than the rest of it. His hand found Felix’s wrist where the coat cuff had ridden up, skin cold from the roof, pulse steady under his thumb. Felix did not pull away. He turned his hand and caught Abe’s, fingers sliding between Abe’s fingers, a plain grip, no performance in it.

“Abe,” he said.

“Don’t write it. Say it.”

“I wanted to kiss you on the stairs. I didn’t, because you looked like you might fine me.”

“I might still.”

Felix laughed once, tired and real, and Abe used that sound. He leaned across the small space between the chairs and kissed him.

Felix kissed him back at once. His free hand came up to Abe’s jaw, not careful, thumb against the corner of Abe’s mouth, and Abe felt the day’s stubble and the cold and the fact of being wanted without a scrap of paper between them. Abe’s other hand went into Felix’s hair, which was shorter than he had guessed from the landing, and Felix made a low sound and pulled him closer by the wrist he still held.

The kiss stayed a kiss. Mouths, breath, Felix’s nose cold against Abe’s cheek. Abe’s hand tightened in his hair. Felix’s fingers spread along Abe’s jaw and stayed there, as if he meant to learn the shape and keep it. When Abe drew back a fraction, Felix followed, one more press of his mouth, then stopped, their hands still linked, still in hair, still on skin.

Grey light sat on the parapet. Down in the stairwell, the building was quiet. Felix looked at him and did not let go.

Abe didn’t either.