High Rise

Photo by Vitor Paladini on Unsplash

Neighbor, Apartment 706

It swept across my window like the shadow of an enormous bird, only it wasn’t flying. It was falling.

I was prepping lunch with Núbia, my maid. We have to work together now, because of the pandemic. My cook’s too old to ride the bus here—she’s high-risk—and my other helper, who does the heavy cleaning, has a small child and no one to look after it. I wouldn’t want all three maids crowded in here anyway. (In the favela they live piled on top of each other, a petri dish for the virus.) Thankfully, Núbia’s agreed to live with me, in the little room by the kitchen. I made it nice, with a fan and a TV. Some nights I hear her on the phone with her mother, crying. She must feel guilty being here, so safe and comfortable with me.

The other apartments have maids who come and go every day like there’s no quarantine; they’re putting us all at risk. I said as much in our Condo Association meeting over Zoom, but no one listens. Everyone does whatever they want, and who’s going to stop them? Certainly not our President, who calls this a “little bitty cold.” Well, at least Núbia’s good company.

If she hadn’t been with me when the shadow passed over the kitchen window, I’d have thought I imagined it. It was like a shade had been pulled and then lifted. In that split second, I remembered Vovó Dulce, my mother’s mother. She used to live in the countryside, in the Great House of a sugar mill that was our family’s since the Portuguese civilized this place. It’s been sold now—chopped up for government housing projects—but Vovó Dulce held on as long as she could. We used to visit during the São João holiday, when we’d make a bonfire in Vovó’s front yard and set off firecrackers. She’d sit on the porch, tiny and shriveled like an old passionfruit. She used to tell us stories about the Devil appearing to her as a red goat. Once, on the porch, she screamed. It sounded like a crow cawing. After we ran to her, Vovó Dulce said she’d seen “the shadow of death.” Then she counted us, one by one, to make sure we were all there. I thought she was crazy, until a farmhand ran to the porch and said there’d been an accident—a truck piled high with sugarcane had flipped on the road outside the gate. The driver was dead and so were some poor souls caught walking when the falling cane smothered them.

Every day I wake believing I’ve got a tickle in my throat, or that my breathing’s shallow, or that I’m more tired than normal. What is normal now?

When that shadow fell across Núbia and me, we stared at each other. For the first time, I saw that her eyes are hazel, not brown. They have flecks of green and yellow in them, like a field. I grabbed Núbia’s hand and held it, wet from washing vegetables, and rough—so rough—even though she’s thirty years younger than me. In that moment, her hand so warm in mine, her face close enough to kiss, I thought: Who is this girl? How can I not know the color of her eyes?

After the shadow lifted, we heard an empty thump, like a sack of flour hitting pavement. It was only after I let go of Núbia’s hand and phoned the doorman that we discovered the truth. It wasn’t a bird or a bag of flour. It was a little boy.

Building Manager

The shit I’ve seen in this building, you wouldn’t believe. There’s actual shit: three floor’s worth of flooded toilets after the hippie in 1305 decided it was a good idea to flush cloth wipes. Then there’s the mental shit that I clean up every day. (I tell my wife: I’m the building psychologist, social worker, peacemaker.) When Ms. Ivanilda,