The Tenants

The hallway in my apartment had too many doors.

I counted them as I walked, slippered feet shushing across carpet that hadn't been carpet yesterday - yesterday it had been the cheap laminate the landlord installed before I moved in, gray planks that always felt slightly damp. Now it was carpet the color of old teeth.

Five doors. Six. Seven. My apartment had two bedrooms and a bathroom. That should've been three doors. The hallway should've been eight feet long. I'd measured it once, when I was deciding whether the hutch from my grandmother would fit.

I didn't remember leaving the bed. I remembered the lamp clicking off, the cat curling against the small of my back, the slow descent into the part of night that belonged to no one. Then the hallway.

The first door was mine. I knew this because the brass plate above the knob said MINE in my own handwriting, the loops of the M too round, the way I'd written them in third grade. I didn't open it. I was afraid of what I'd find inside a door labeled "mine."

The second door breathed. Not the door itself - something behind it. A long inhale, a longer exhale, the rhythm of a sleeper much larger than a person should've been. I pressed my palm to the wood. It was warm, then cold, then warm again, in time with the breathing. When I took my palm away, a dark print remained. The print didn't fade. I watched it for what felt like minutes, willing it to lift, and it only deepened.

The third door was open a crack. Yellow light leaked through. I heard a woman humming a song I hadn't heard since my mother used to sing it over the kitchen sink. My mother had been dead for nine years. I didn't look through the gap. I told myself not to look.

The fourth door was locked from my side. There was no keyhole, only a deadbolt I didn't remember turning. I tried the bolt. It wouldn't move. Something on the other side began to knock, politely, the way a guest knocks. Three soft taps. A pause. Three more. I backed away.

The fifth door was the one I'd been looking for, though I didn't know why I was looking. I couldn't say how I knew. Above it, the brass plate was blank. The wood was the color of river silt. When I touched the knob, the metal was wet, and something under the wetness shifted, like the skin of a sleeping animal.

I opened it.

Inside was my bedroom. My actual bedroom - the one I'd gone to sleep in, the one I was still, presumably, asleep in. The lamp was off. The cat was curled at the foot of the bed, a smudge of black against the white duvet. And in the bed, under the covers, was me.

I was sleeping with my mouth open. I looked smaller than I thought of myself as being. The vein in my temple ticked. My hand was curled under my chin like a child's.

I should've been afraid. The fear was supposed to come then, the cold sluice of it down my back. It didn't come. Instead, I felt a great, terrible tenderness. I wanted to tuck the blanket more firmly around the shape of my own shoulder. I wanted to whisper something kind into my own ear.

I took a step into the room.

The me on the bed opened her eyes.

She didn't see me. Her eyes were open but unfocused, fixed on the ceiling. Her mouth moved. She was saying something, very quietly, the same thing over and over. I leaned closer. The cat lifted its head and stared directly at me, and its eyes weren't the cat's eyes. Its eyes were what was breathing behind the second door.

Get out, the me on the bed was whispering. Get out get out get out get out.

I didn't know which of us she was talking to.

The hallway behind me had gone quiet. The breathing had stopped. The humming had stopped. The polite knocking had stopped. There was only the cat, watching, and the me on the bed, whispering, and the long terrible silence of doors that were no longer interested in pretending.

I turned to run.

The hallway was gone.

There was only the bedroom, and the bed, and the me in it, and behind me - I felt them behind me, I didn't need to look - the tenants of all those other doors, finally came out to see who'd been walking past their rooms.

The me on the bed stopped whispering. She took a long breath. She sat up.

She looked at me.

Her face was my face, and her face wasn't my face. Her smile was wrong in the way that a photograph of yourself could sometimes look wrong, where every feature was correct and the sum was a stranger.

"You took so long," she said, in my voice. "I was worried you weren't coming."

She slid out of the bed. Her bare feet made no sound on the floor. The cat didn't move.

She walked past me, into the hallway that was no longer there, and as she passed I smelled my own shampoo, my own sleep-warm skin. She turned at the threshold and looked at me with great fondness.

"Go to sleep," she said. "You've had a long night."

She closed the door.

I was alone in the bedroom. The cat was still on the bed. The lamp was still off. The shape under the covers was gone, but the indentation was still there, the soft hollow of where a body had been. I climbed in. The sheets were warm. I pulled the covers up to my chin. I closed my eyes.

I woke to gray light and the wrongness of an unfamiliar ceiling.

It took me a long moment to understand that I wasn't in my bedroom. I was on the floor of the hallway, curled against the baseboard, the carpet beneath my cheek smelling faintly of dust and something older. The cat was sitting beside my head, watching me with ordinary cat eyes. The hallway was its right length. Eight feet. I could see, from where I was lying, the door to the bathroom, and the door to the second bedroom, and the door to the room I slept in.

Three doors.

I sat up slowly. My neck was stiff. My mouth tasted like I'd been breathing through it for hours. The cat trilled at me, a small interrogative sound, and bumped her head against my knee.

I told myself I'd been sleepwalking. I'd done it as a child. My mother used to find me standing in the kitchen at strange hours, looking at nothing, my eyes wide and my hands hanging useless at my sides. You're a wanderer, she'd say, leading me back to bed. You always come back.

I got to my feet. The bones in my knees cracked. I walked down the hallway, counting under my breath the way you count the stairs in the dark. One. Two. Three.

The door to my bedroom was closed.

I didn't remember closing it. I'd always slept with it open, because of the cat, because of the air, because I'd never liked the idea of being shut in.

I put my hand on the knob. It was warm.

From the other side of the door, very softly, I heard someone humming a song my mother used to sing.

The cat pressed against my ankle. I looked down at her. She looked up at me. Her eyes were ordinary. Her eyes were her own.

I didn't open the door.

I stood in the hallway in the gray morning light, and I listened to the humming, and I tried to remember whether, when I'd climbed into the warm bed in the dream, I'd ever climbed back out.