In the darkness of four o’clock in the morning, he pulled on the handle of the door of the three story walk-up where he lived to see if the lock held. The door swung open like an offer. When he left for work the previous day, he had pressed with tape to the thick glass door a note telling the occupants of the building that the lock on the door was faulty and that they should make sure the door was properly closed before enetering or leaving. The note still held to the cool glass, written large in line after ragged line of thin black ink, a quick urgent note written in the haze of another morning arriving too soon. Either no one had paid attention or the lock was damaged. And in this neighbourhood, he thought shaking his head. Listening for the click of the lock and making sure the bolt held fast against the frame of the door, he turned to the stairs and climbed the two short flights up to his appartment. 203. If you added the two and the three it made a five. Was that a lucky number, he wondered. So far any luck coming from numbers were confined to the promises from weekend papers and shitty magazines. In the six months he’d been living on this street he discovered that he shared the same block with a crackhouse. No luck there, he thought. The occupants and frequenters of which would, several times a week, and around four in the morning, wake up the neighborhood with their moans at the eventual rising sun and the knowledge that soon they would be coming down and fall to an earth that didn’t want them.

He sauntered up the the two short flights to his door, casually brushing his shoulders and his cheek against the marked-up walls searching for some respite from the heat, and smiling like a wasted fool — which is what he was. The door to his apartment could easily be kicked down. A strip of the thin layer of wood covering the face of the door had been pealed off long ago, presenting anyone showing up at his door with a look of run downness and despair. He often wondered about this and how it might affect his chances at romance.

He turned the key in the lock and walked into his apartment. When he first found this place it was an ovrercast day in early January — the end of two solid months of apartment hunting in the grey pissing down rain. Hunting that took him from the westside to downtown with landlords and landladies screwing up their eyes as soon as he revealed that, no, he wasn’t married or engaged, or had a girlfriend, that in fact, he was only looking for a place for himself. Why didn’t he just lie, he thought later. It would have made things so much easier. He could have just said, in response to looks of expectancy, uh yeah, I’m looking for me and my wife, or girlfriend or fiance.

Yeah, right.