Miles Who Painted One Wall Pink
Taylor Thornburg
Miles’ landlord did his best, but it was still no good. He owned one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood. Everything was freshly painted over, but nothing had been updated. Not for several years. When the water from the tap came out brown, he looked embarrassed. He shut it off and said that it would go away. There was a draft. The floorboards creaked. Miles said that it was fine—he meant that it was what he could afford.
His friend KJ helped him move. She never lied, so Miles was not surprised when he opened the door and she declared it a shit apartment. Regardless, she was an efficient mover. What took Miles a day to pack, she unpacked in a matter of hours. It was gray, tiresome work, but she did it without complaint. She got the bed in the bedroom, the desk in the office, the couch in the living room, and the boxes in the kitchen. Miles had just begun unpacking the kitchen when she stopped him, pointing at a spot near the window. He jumped when it moved.
“You have roaches,” she said. “Call an exterminator. They’ll get into your stuff if you don’t kill them first. Then there’s no getting rid of them.” Miles stopped what he was doing.
“KJ, am I fucked?”
“Yes, but you’re taking it like a champ.”
They ate out that night.
Back in the apartment, Miles made his bed in the dark. The sheet-smell overcame the old-smell of his new apartment. He breathed it in and crawled into bed. When he opened his eyes again, the room was still dark. He felt disoriented; it was his bedroom—his new bedroom—but it still felt unfamiliar. The cars passing on the street below cast headlights through the window, and the glare made the walls look like they were breathing. Light came in angular slants, catching a shadow in the back corner near the closet. It looked vaguely human, about six feet tall, with arms and legs, and pitch black—darker than the rest of the room. Miles propped himself up on one elbow and asked, “Who are you?”
The shadow figure walked out of the bedroom along the wall. Miles followed it.
He watched it slip into his office. In the office, it crept along a wall to a door he did not remember being there. He followed it into a room he did not remember either. He followed the shadow through other rooms—some bathrooms, some waiting rooms, some ballrooms. He thought, “I don’t remember my apartment being this big.” When he woke up in the morning, he had a fever.
Sweat had soaked through Miles’ bedsheets, so he moved to the couch. The fever made him weak; his limbs felt heavier than he remembered, and the air in the apartment felt thick. His lungs heaved it in and out as he moved from the bed to the living room, where he collapsed a few feet away from the couch. Beads of sweat and drool pooled around his cheek on the hardwood floor. The couch seemed far away. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The floor looked as if it were rippling like water. Miles grunted and made himself get up again. With several faltering steps, he reached the couch, then fell onto it, rolled, and vomited over the edge. He spent several days like that.
When Miles was well enough, he saw a doctor. The door to the clinic’s office had a mirror on it. His reflection was gaunt and pale. While he had been sick, his cheeks and eyes had sunken into his face. His hair was slick with sweat and oil, and he’d developed a slight tremor. He no longer felt hot or cold, but still he shook. When the doctor returned, she said that his tests had come back negative for the most serious illnesses he could have had. She diagnosed him with influenza—a serious flu, but just that. She said it seemed like the worst was over and encouraged him to eat something hearty and drink plenty of water. Miles hugged his arms to his body, raw-boned. The doctor looked at him sympathetically and patted him firmly on the back.
Miles cleaned up at home. He took a long shower, grateful that the water was as hot as he wanted it to be for as long as he needed. He toweled himself dry and wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror. He looked better at home than he had at the doctor’s office, and Miles reasoned that it’d been the fluorescent lights making him look like death. Following his doctor’s advice, he prepared the biggest meal he had in his apartment—a frozen pizza. He ate it all in one sitting. When he finished, he left the apartment to get some fresh air.
It was a slow night. The moon shone in haunting tones as Miles walked to the neighborhood bar. He was one of the few there. He felt less like drinking than he felt like being out, so he ordered a soda and bitters and leaned back in his seat. A woman sat down next to him. She had long brown hair and green eyes, and she smiled sweetly, saying, “I haven’t seen you around here before.” Miles bought her a drink.
She had lived in the neighborhood for years, served on the neighborhood association, and loved her neighbors. Miles carefully watched her drink. When she finished, he invited her back to his apartment. She knew the building but had never been inside, so they left together. She kissed him first. He closed the door and turned around, and there she was. They fell onto the couch together and pulled the clothes off of each other. Miles leaned into her but stopped abruptly. Something got in his eyes. He cursed and rubbed it, and as he rubbed it, more detritus fell from the ceiling. He looked up. A crack was widening. Specks of paint and foam insulation began to fall through. The walls groaned and snapped. And cracked. Material from inside pushed outward. The lights flickered. When the room started rocking, the woman Miles had brought home stumbled to the door and ran.
The next day, Miles met KJ for coffee. He tried to explain what had happened the night before. “It’s like the walls came off the ceiling, and then the ceiling started opening,” he said. “The ceiling was really opening. There’s something wrong with this apartment.” KJ asked what he was worried about.
“That’s just it,” Miles shook his head. “I don’t know what to worry about. I don’t know what’s going on.” KJ had never seen him so upset.
“Do you remember when you broke our ankle on the trampoline?”
He looked at her with an expression that said, “So what?”
“You got over that too is all,” she said, looking down at her coffee mug.
“I need a better job. I need money,” Miles replied, “and a better place to stay.” He put his head in his hands absentmindedly. As she watched, KJ thought she saw a shadow pass over him. His features darkened, deepening the lines between his cheeks and his cheekbones and his fingers and his knuckles and his eyes and his body.
“I’ll come home with you.” She put a hand on his forearm. “We’ll look at it, and we can figure out what has to be fixed. If your landlord won’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves.”
“You think it’s just falling apart, is all?” he asked.
“It would be easier if it were,” she said. “Your landlord would have to put you up somewhere if it is—somewhere better. But we’ll see.”
“Yeah,” Miles thought about it. “Okay. Let’s go.” He downed the last of his coffee and got up. KJ followed him; they left the coffee shop together. Miles’ apartment was just around the corner.
On the way, Miles looked frightened, so KJ held his hand. He smiled at her and kept walking. At his building, he fumbled with his key ring before fingering the right one. He let her walk in ahead of him when he opened the door. They climbed the stairs to his floor together. At his door, Miles turned. saying, “Actually, I need to clean it up a little. Do you mind waiting here for a second?” KJ said no, she did not mind. Miles nodded and unlocked the door and went in alone.
KJ heard him shuffling things around from the other side of the door. He dropped something, stopped, and picked it up. The sounds grew quieter the deeper into the apartment he went until KJ did not hear him at all. She waited for a while. When too much time passed, she put a hand on the knob and pushed the door open. It opened into a long, dark hallway. “Miles?” she called. He did not answer. She followed the hallway down; it was longer than it looked, and it opened into a spacious kitchen. She walked through the kitchen. It opened into a sauna. She walked through the sauna. She walked through room after room calling for her friend. She went deeper without ever finding him. As she went on, the rooms got darker. They dimmed gradually—shade by shade—so that KJ realized only after she could barely see her hand in front of her. Finally, she came to a plain wooden door. It was difficult to make out in the dark, but it had a rough surface and a heavy metal knob. She slowly opened it. “Miles?” she called again, but she did not see Miles on the other side. All she saw was a soft pink accent wall, and it was beating like a heart.
Taylor Thornburg is an author and essayist based in Chicago, Illinois. His fiction explores strange yet humane ways of being. His other fiction can be found in the Garfield Lake Review, Thirteenth Floor Magazine, L'Esprit Literary Review, Valley Voices, Heartwood Literary Review, and elsewhere.