the complex kirsten noelle hubbard Remy arrived in front of her apartment complex a few minutes after two-thirty. Her stomach was a swarm of bees, buzzing exhilaratingly, and she had to battle the urge to scream. She had gotten the job. She was sure of it, and after the hotel manager’s call a new life would commence like a delightful dream. Her complex was hugged by the serpentine crisscrossings of metal stairways, leading up and down and every which way, with the claustrophobia of an Escher drawing. Whenever a tenant was climbing upward, the metallic thuds of their footfalls would echo through the courtyard. It was a bother, but one she could grow used to, like the el train rushing by or a heartbeat. But whenever a tenant fled downward, the result was a terrible chaos of crashing, a reverberating cacophony that still caused Remy to wince while she did the dishes and to jerk out of sleep in the night. Sometimes she would wake thus, and in her trembling sleep-fog it would seem as if there were extra doorways spanning her walls, carved by shadow and streetlamp, leading to nightmarish imaginary places. In terror she would yank the string on her bedside lamp, and the doorways would blink away in the sudden light. Then she would lay there in bed feeling foolish, until sleep pressed back behind her eyes and she turned on the dark; and then the dreams came. Empty filling stations with broken windows. Being lost in citrus groves, and running down labyrinthine furrows that twisted and turned in an endless maze. Burnt hills, sickly under a hot pale sun. She would wake only to the stinging memory of endless failed interviews. She had moved into her studio apartment only five weeks ago, and she had been out of work for four of them. Her last waitressing job had been her last forever, she had promised herself. She was determined to find employment at a hotel reception desk, but nothing was going right. The new lipstick, perfect in the drugstore, had been glaringly bright in one hotel’s mirrored lobby walls. In another hotel a tear in the side of her skirt had been noticed too late, and the humiliation had been intolerably potent when she was forced to lift her hand from it to shake. She was obsessed with handshakes. Hers had been too weak during the first few interviews, her hand like a cool limp bird; and after that too firm to overcompensate, the horror of bones shifting in her grip. The hotel managers rejected her by every means possible: inside a crisp, razor-edged envelope at the bottom of her mailbox; by telephone a week later, or the next day, or that very evening; right there in the office, ten minutes after she had entered. Ten minutes after the handshake. That had happened on three separate occasions, and after each she had fled home and wept, her face smashed into her dingy pillow, her interview clothes looped over the bedframe. With each pain, she was learning a truth about herself: If she made that poor of a first impression, what would she ever be good for? Not reception, surely. If she could not be a satisfactory first impression for herself, how could she possibly expect to be that exact thing, a first impression, for something so large and important as a hotel? She began to dream about waitressing again. Those reoccurring dreams of confusion in which she dropped food, lost orders, or even forgot about entire tables until they accosted her to yell. Once she dreamed she was fired before a busy dining room, which was something that had really happened, her first month out of high school in a truck stop diner back west, something she yearned to forget but never could. But now: rapture. Remy despised the subway, and that afternoon she was down to the last of the hotels within walking distance. She had never been to this particular one, sitting among a grove of trees to the west of the nearest park. It was only three stories, but it was lovely, pale tan with white awnings and big windows, so out of place in the city that she wondered why she had never noticed it before. She straightened her skirt, took a deep breath that caught halfway out, and wrapped her fingers around the doorknob. A jingle bell dangling from the doorknob gave a mild ping to announce her arrival. The front desk was polished mahogany, and there was a circular window behind it made of frosted glass. The walls were glazed with the gentlest green, like mint ice cream, and she could hardly restrain her fingers from caressing them. But best of all, right there in the lobby, was a little waterfall splashing into a pond gilded with koi. It was almost unthinkable to imagine herself working there. Remy knew she could be happy forever, sitting behind the mahogany desk, waiting for strangers to ping through the doors, listening to the cold hush-rush of the waterfall. The man behind the front desk turned out to be the hotel manager. He sat her down in a cream-colored couch beside the waterfall. “We need someone immediately,” he said. That afternoon her handshake had been perfect. Her laugh had been cool and easy. She had walked away after the interview with her shoulders squared, her braid a bound piece of silk, her skirt moving just right, and she had felt his eyes follow her out. On her way home she had nearly skipped. When she reached her complex, she pounded up the stairs, too ecstatic to be mindful of her neighbors’ peace of hearing. In her tiny studio she sat on her pull-out couch and tucked her knees beneath her to keep from pacing. She had never been so confident in her life. There hadn’t been a single moment of awkwardness or stray of eye contact, and all her anecdotes had gone just right. And the hotel manager’s last words, called to her retreating back: “I’ll be in touch with you soon, Remy,” he had said. He had used her name. She wondered: how exactly would he contact her? By phone, she decided. He had been too kind, too accommodating to communicate with something so dreadful as a letter. But how soon would he make the call? This was a quandary. She didn’t know the standard of things when it came to hiring; all she was familiar with was the opposite, the letdown. She figured he’d probably call tomorrow. However, her interview had gone so inarguably well, what if he called that very day? That very hour? She stood and seized the telephone from its perch on the kitchen counter. Unfurling the cord, she brought the device to the coffee table and sat it in the middle, where she could reach it at a second’s notice. She pulled her knees back beneath her, settled back into the couch cushions, and fell asleep. Someone blasting down the stairs awoke her with a gasp. Remy listened to the footpounds as they faded, her heart battering inside her chest, and tried to make sense of her dream. In a landscape of green hills she had been kneeling before a pond filled with golden fish. She had been dipping her hands into the water, but the fish kept darting away from her fingers. Frustrated, she had reached in up to her elbows, leaning farther and farther, balancing precariously, but the person on the stairs had terrified her awake before she had fallen in. Suddenly, she remembered the interview. It seemed as if it had been days ago, but she had only slept for a couple hours. She thought: what if the hotel manager had called while she’d been asleep? He couldn’t have, she eased, because she was a light sleeper and the ringing phone certainly would have jolted her awake. Anyone ascending or descending the stairs outside woke her, no matter how exhausted she was, and the phone had been placed only two feet away. Besides, it was too soon for him to call. It was five now, and the interview had concluded at two-thirty. He might have even gone home by now. She knew most working shifts ended at five, unlike waitressing shifts, which could be scheduled for almost any time. Yet weren’t the front desks of hotels manned late into the night? And why was she so certain the hotel manager would call from the hotel, anyway? Wasn’t he just as likely to call after work, from his home phone, at any time in the evening? Outside, someone began to climb the stairs, with slow, deliberate clangs. Each step plucked her nerves like an electrical shock. With sudden fury, Remy flew across the room and hurled the window open. “Can’t you step any quieter?” she yelled. “Please?” A door slammed, and she knew she had missed the person. She banged her window shut. She felt hungry, then, and crossed the studio to her tiny corner kitchenette. The refrigerator was filled with a gasp of stale air and little else. There was a squashed paper sack of avocados she’d splurged on because they reminded her of California; rotten now. She had intended to make guacamole, until she realized she did not know what else was in it. Then there were three half-empty condiment bottles lining the inside of the door: ketchup, yellow mustard, and a hickory marinade. In the cheese drawer, nothing. In the vegetable drawer, nothing. Crammed into the butter shelf, an empty tub of cream cheese. She had finished it that morning with her fingers. She sat down again and tried to let her mind wander, but her hunger only intensified. But the thought of leaving the apartment for something to eat was impossible, unspeakable. What if the hotel manager called while she was away? She didn’t have an answering machine. She imagined the phone ringing and ringing, and the manager growing more and more frustrated, until he hung up in a huff and crossed her name off a list with a fat black marker. “I’ll go at night, then,” she announced out loud. From her dresser drawer, she drew out a book she had been re-reading, a lurid romance novel she would never admit she enjoyed. She was devastated when she realized she had only twenty-three pages left. She read as slowly as she could. By seven she had finished the book and her stomach felt scraped raw, as if someone had viciously sandpapered the inside. The light outside had darkened to a deep, visceral purple. Was it late enough to go out? Maybe, maybe not, but her hunger rendered no choice. The closest market to her complex was the carniceria, a little Mexican meat market, a block past State Street. She usually frequented the co-op, but it was farther away and she didn’t want to be gone any longer than possible, just in case. She threw on her coat, locked the door behind her, and pounded down the stairs. The echoes of her footsteps blasted the cooling air like machine-gun fire, but she was in a hurry. The street outside the meat market stank like stale blood, corrupted by countless years of stocking dead flesh. The windows were crammed full of butchered hog and cattle carcasses hanging from their ankles. A carcass was pressed into the nearest window, its torn red flesh smogging the glass with grease. As Remy watched, an ancient woman tottered out, clutching a stained paper parcel with both hands. Her stomach heaved, and she knew she could not go inside. The wind picked up in gusty shudders, and she huddled into her scarf. Backing into the empty doorway next door, she paused to make calculations. The co-op was six blocks from her complex in the opposite direction. Adding to that four blocks to the complex from the carniceria made ten blocks, which meant at least ten minutes there and five more back if she ran, and who knew how long it would take inside. There might be a line. By eight twenty-three Remy was back in the apartment, empty-handed and empty-stomached. At nine-thirty, she removed the withered avocados from the trash can. She sat them on the table and looked at them. Five minutes later they were back in the trash can, and she was in the bathroom vigorously brushing her teeth. When the clock struck ten she was certain the hotel manager wouldn’t be calling, not that night at least. She wouldn’t be missing anything if she ventured out again to buy something from the co-op. But all of a sudden she remembered the bumbling old woman with her parcel, the stench of the animal carcasses, and the ache of her hunger was replaced by nausea. And besides, she loathed walking the streets at night. There were too many things to fear. Better to wait until tomorrow, in the morning. She pulled her bed out from the wall and stood beside it, glaring at the unmade covers, the squashed pillow. There was no way she could sleep now, not after that long nap, and so she shoved the bed back into the wall with a bang. She had returned all her library books without taking out any more. Now she wished she had simply slipped a random title off the shelves, for anything would be better than this, this aching frantic boredom. She blinked and the citrus groves were there. Swarms of them, littered with swollen fruit, overripe, obscene, and she mashed her fists into her eyes until they disappeared. She began to pace about the tiny room, until she was making a game of it, moving faster and faster from corner to corner, slapping her hands on the walls, pearls of sweat beading her brow, until the phone rang and she stumbled and fell. On her knees, she crawled to the coffee table. In her fervor to answer, she cracked the phone against her jaw and nearly yelped. “Hello?” she whispered. Ten wasn’t too late, not really. “Is this Remy?” a male voice inquired. “Yes, this is Remy!” “Remy, congratulations,” the man said, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “You’re the proud winner of a free monthlong subscription to the Sun-Times! All you have to do is give us your address, and your other infor--“ She slammed the phone down. Her palm that had grasped the phone felt scalded. She clasped it with her other, and then brought her forehead down upon her hands. Inexplicably, she felt a weariness she hadn’t known since waitressing, when she’d served a ten-hour shift in shoes that didn’t fit right. Behind her closed eyes, she felt the tiny studio walls pressing on her, and the stairways outside binding her in, like the coils of a constrictor, tightening, tightening. Someone was pounding down the stairs, and this time the footfalls seemed to shake her apartment walls. She stood and ran to the window, throwing it open and leaning halfway outside. “Shut the hell up!” she screamed as loud as she could. “You’re driving me crazy!” A door slammed, and then all was quiet. She remained at the window a moment longer, pausing to look down. The night was darker than usual, and looking out was like falling into an abyss. Between the rails of the stairway landings was only blackness. There was no movement below, no sign of life, no sign of a world existing outside her apartment. The cool air was a relief, however, and she left the window open before she crossed back to the couch. It would help keep her awake. He might call at anytime, she knew, and she couldn’t miss it. She would stay up all night if she had to. With her bare feet squared on the floor, her hands folded atop her knees, the phone in perfect reaching distance, she sat down to wait.