Something Vague

“There’s a man upstairs, kicking the wall,” I said to Phil. He looked at me from across the table. I watched his face change from passive to actively concerned. He wore sunglasses that were too big and probably too expensive. He sat across from me at a plastic table on a plastic chair in front of a big plate glass window with some slogans on it. Outside cars drove by this way and that, going far too quickly for me to verify that there were people inside.

“He’s been kicking it for two days now,” I told Phil. He sipped his drink through a straw. I like people who have verbs for names. Even though Phil’s name is spelled wrong, he’s still pretty good. Maybe half-good.

“Day and night?” he asked me. It’s not clear why we raise our voices at the end of a question but everyone does it. I guess some guy just decided it was cool and started doing it one day. Once I tried not doing it for a while - I went around not raising my voice when I asked questions. They were perfectly flat like a farmer’s field. I thought it was hilarious. No one else got it.

“Yes,” I told him, “all the time.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he told me and I agreed but didn’t say anything because he kept talking. His French fries looked like gold bars on the purple tray. I wished they’d never leave. I named four of them as he spoke.

“Guy would get tired, kicking like that for two days. He’d probably hurt his foot.”

“Maybe it’s a team of guys,” I told him as he ate a French fry. I winced.

“Now you’re just making things up,” he said. “Why would there be a team of men in the apartment above you kicking the wall?” He was sipping his drink again. The liquid made a scraping sound as he sucked his straw. It didn’t want to go.

“I don’t know,” I told him, “but it’s been going on for two days.”

“What did you do about it?” he asked me. I laughed when his voice rose and he looked at me, his eyebrows arcing over the top of his sunglasses like a sunrise. Over in the corner, children climbed through tubes and got lost and then found again.

“I tried doing that thing with the broom, you know, banging the roof. Thought that maybe that would stop it.”

“And did it?” My chair spun a little bit. I pushed it back and forth.

“He just kept kicking, but kinda changed his rhythm. Soon we were banging at the same time - rhythmically. Bang bang bang.” I smacked the table to show him.

“So then what did you do?” he asked. He had an ice cream sundae now. The vanilla was losing a war to the chocolate, the chocolate sliding over the vanilla like an avalanche.

“I wrote a poem.”

“You what?” he blinked. He looked at me and his jaw dropped a little. A car drove by outside with its muffler dragging. It made a terrible sound. I bet there were sparks.

“A poem. I wrote one. About the man upstairs.”

“Why would you do that?” he asked, letting his plastic spoon swoop through his sundae. It all fused together, black and white.

“Because it was beautiful.”

“The kicking was beautiful?” Phil asked me. There was a girl behind a counter on the right of me. She wore a weird hat with a logo on it. It wrapped around her head like a halo and then jutted out into a visor out front.

“It was beautiful. It is beautiful.”

“It’s just kicking,” he said. The bathroom doors swung back and forth as people walked in and then exited. I liked the image of the man and the woman on the respective doors. They had a lot in common, aside from the dress. I made-up a story then, about how they got married and lived together in a jet black archetypical castle and slept in a jet black archetypical bed and had three jet black archetypical children and then one fat red one because nothing ever stays perfect for long.

“It was beautiful. A lot of things are beautiful. I wrote a poem.”

“You make very little sense,” he said, staring through his sunglasses. The plate glass window reflected our image faintly, showing us as ghosts against a background of speeding traffic.

“So what. It was beautiful. I wrote a poem.”

“It’s a god damn guy kicking the wall. You get annoyed, you get angry, you get fucking pissed off. You don’t write a damn poem,” he said, his voice crashing over me like a wave. I half-hoped he would pick me up and throw me through the window. Glass shattering is one of my favourite images.

“It was beautiful,” I told him gently. And then, “do you want to see it?”

“Just shut-up and eat. You haven’t even touched your food and I’m nearly done,” said Phil to me as we sat at that plastic table. The salt from his departed fries lay spread across the tray like melting snow.

“Okay,” I told him. “Okay.” I picked up my white cup with a logo on it. He was drinking coffee now. We didn’t say anything more.

I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think the man upstairs would ever stop kicking. That he’d just keep going, rhythmically thumping against the wall. And that if we didn’t do something, anything, to stop it then what would keep our ghosts in the window from completely fading into the traffic outside.

We finished our meals and left.