If you missed the first chapters here is where it begins... CHAPTER 01
I'm also extending the How Does Dwelling Make You Feel Contest to this chapter, and you can read the rules here.
Without further ado here’s...
Dark water rushed towards the gutter.
Ndusen stood outside the tenement building spraying down the sidewalk with a garden hose.
He paused to watch the expensively dressed youth as they passed him by on the sidewalk.
They seemed so determined to get somewhere. Their eyes never left the stream of Ndusen's sprayer, their only concern was the possibility of an accidental discharge on their top dollar designer jeans.
As they shuffled past, it gave Ndusen a deep sense of his own utter invisibility.
Inside their cramped first floor apartment, Ndusen's wife, Kondwani, the consummate matriarch, stood at the tiny counter packing porridge-like maise-meal into handfuls of Nsima. Her hands moved the very same as her mother, and mother's mother before that. Only Kondwani had exchanged a straw hut filled with coal smoke for a plaster box permeated with the faint rotten-egg smell of leaking natural gas.
The beautiful young Malawian in her late twenties, Stella Muluzi, stood at the stove next to Kondwani. The older woman handed Stella maize patties as she finished shaping. Kondwani knew full well she was distracting the young woman from the rapeseed and pumpkin leaves that were Stella's responsibility to prepare. Nsima was the main attraction, so naturally that was Kondwani's domain, but the side dishes were in truth what gave the textured porridge much taste, and both women knew that Stella's dishes were starting to burn.
Kondwani turned her neck to a degree that she was yelling directly through her young companion's head. As if the sound would gain amplification by traveling in one of Stella's earlobes and out the other.
"Ndusen the nsima is ready," she bellowed in Chichewa, waves of tinnitus reverberating through Stella's eardrum.
Ndusen stood in the cramped bedroom, peeling off his coveralls.
"I will be there in a moment," he called back in response.
Ndusen's daughters Dziko, Alile and his little seven-year-old son Chisulo, sat around the table waiting patiently for the meal. No coloring books, or plastic toy clusters anywhere in sight, let alone the typical western array of electronic distraction.
Ndusen entered the kitchen area, buttoning his shirt.
"Mika's family is having hamburgers for dinner tonight," Chisulo announced as their father joined the children at the table. "Can we have hamburgers sometime?"
"Is there a cow someplace that you are hiding from me?" Ndusen asked. "Under your bed perhaps?"
"No." Chisulo said.
"Then how do you propose we make this hamburger?"
"From the meat at the store."
"Ah yes, the store. How silly, I must have forgotten. But if we begin to eat the store's hamburger, might they not run out? Then will Mika be forced to be eating our Nsima? And who will be blamed for pilfering his hamburger?"
His son was stumped with this circular logic.
"And let me ask you, where did this store animal of which you speak come from? Did it walk to the store all by itself?"
"No, in a truck."
"A truck? A cow raised in a truck?"
Presiding over the table, Kondwani turned an impatient eye towards Stella who still stood by the counter working to rescue her scorched garnishes.
"Stella, bring the nsima to the table," Kondwani said, putting the strictest of schoolmarms to shame.
Knowing better than to ask one of the children for help, Stella began to place the serving dishes in front of each member of the family.
"On a farm. It came from a farm," Chisulo said.
"Aha. Have you seen this farm?" His father asked.
"No."
"Then how do you know if it is safe to eat their cattle?"
Chisulo scrunched his already compact face.
"It's not safe?"
"Perhaps."
Kondwani took her seat across from her husband.
"But then again," Ndusen said, "perhaps not."
Stella moved round the table with a pitcher and bowl. Starting with Ndusen, Stella poured water over his hands so that he could rinse. Ndusen looked up and smiled at Stella with his kind eyes.
"Thank you," he said.
It was negligible attentiveness, but it was all he could risk without a skirmish beginning across the table.
"You are welcome," she spoke back with deliberate English elocution. Stella's command of the language was finally bearing fruit and with every new sentence she crafted, Ndusen could sense a cloud brewing in Kondwani. Even after seven years in New York, Kondwani was unable to pronounce but the simplest of phrases through her own thick Malawian accent. Kondwani eyed Stella closely as she poured rinse water for her family.
Foregoing English completely, Kondwani addressed her husband in their native tongue, "Do you have more work in the building tonight?"
"Do I ever not have work in this building?" he asked in Chichewa.
Kondwani kept her eyes on her husband, while Ndusen rolled his nsima into tiny orbs with his fingers, hoping to finish the meal without a battle.
Ndusen climbed the stairs, the meal swishing in his gullet. A uniformed City Marshal trailed behind him. This was Ndusen's building and the Marshal let him take the lead.
As they passed the third floor, Ndusen could not help but wonder yet again what had really become of Sal Agnelli. A decades long resident, Sal had reminded Ndusen of one of his village elders back at home, a lethargic cat, always leaning in close to convey some worldly insight through sour breath and an easy smile.
The Wall Street type and his decoration girlfriend that had since moved into number eleven were oblivious to the previous tenant's unexplained disappearance. Which was how the owner, Moshe Axlerod preferred it.
When Ndusen had asked if he should mention anything to the new tenants, on the off chance Sal returned, his boss had replied that, “No one wants to live in an Unsolved Mysteries episode.” Ndusen had never seen the show, but had little trouble interpreting his boss's meaning. Mr. Axlerod, the purportedly devout Orthodox Jew, who from Ndusen’s vantage seemed to care about little other than showing off his affluence with expensive clothes and fast cars. Who’d left the old neighborhood for “Strong Island when the Lower East Side went down the shitter.” Who commuted a few times weekly to his multiple properties in his loathsome old neighborhood in order to bark orders and slowly enact the machinations of his true passion: underhanded trickery.
But as with most of the building’s predicaments, the weight of the disappearance matter had fallen on Ndusen. In the absence of anyone else even taking notice, Ndusen had been the one to file the missing person’s report down at the 7th precinct. The hardest part had been overseeing Sal’s daughters when they came to pick up his belongings. Not much had remained by way of a legacy. The furniture was mostly laid to rot, but they did find a few antique books that they seemed pleased with. Little solace for the mysterious loss of a father.
Reaching the fourth floor, Ndusen pointed out apartment eleven to the Marshal, who quickly began taping an "Unconditional Quit Notice" of eviction on the door.
The Marshal turned to leave as a grizzly packrat in her late fifties, opened the door and looked at the notice, suddenly furious at Ndusen.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" demanded the packrat.
"Posting a notice," Ndusen said, wishing he could find words that might be of some comfort to this woman.
"I pay my rent. Piss off," she said.
"Not according to our records you don't." The Marshal was already halfway down the stairs, and didn't turn back with his closing instruction, "You got six days, lady."
The packrat looked to Ndsuen for a second opinion. He strained for his most solicitous timbre. "I am very sorry," he said.
A distasteful business to be sure, but Ndusen had his orders. Decrees that were on the rise of late. It seemed that every wealthy young person in the country suddenly wanted to live in these little one-bedroom flats. To hear the old lady at the Economy Candy Market tell it, back when the neighborhood was called 'Klein Doitchland,' upwards of six hundred people lived in Ndusen's building, which now leased to a measly forty-two. What started as the Gateway to America gradually descended into the heroin infested Lower East Side, which was now resurging as the trendy L.E.S. The rents on Axlerod's apartment would triple, in some cases quadruple, every time he flipped an older residence, lifting the apartments from their rent-stabilized restrictions. Axlerod liked flipping apartments.
The packrat wasn't interested in apologies. “Listen here you little suck-egg dog. If you think illegal harassment, suing me repeatedly for unpaid rent that's already been received, three baseless dates in housing court and a piece of goddamn paper's gonna make me vacate my apartment, you got another thing coming!”
The packrat spat on the ground by Ndusen's feet.
“Get out of my sight.”
This Ndusen could do. He turned, taking a deep breath as he walked back down the stairs.
Just as he cleared the packrat's sight, boring down into the back of his shirt, Ndusen spotted an even more dreadful interaction in the making.
He hugged the wall to avoid contact at all cost with Morris Hacking, trudging up the stairs in construction clothes, his hard hat swinging by his side.
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
UPDATE - HERE'S CHAPTER 04
Thanks so much for reading & Steem on!
Yours In The Chain,
Doug
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife @zenmommas for years of support during the writing process, @ericvancewalton for his trailblazing, inspired collaboration and incredible guidance, @andrarchy for his mind blowing insight and friendship, @bakerchristopher for being an inspiration as a human artist and bro, @complexring for his brilliance and enthusiasm, Masie Cochran, Taylor Rankin and @elenamoore for their skillful help in editing the manuscript, and to @opheliafu for the fantastic illustrations she created exclusively for the novel's launch on Steemit and to Elena Megalos for her wonderful character illustrations. I’d also like to thank Eddie Boyce, Jamie Proctor, Katie Mustard, Alan Cumming, Danai Gurira, Stephan Nowecki, Ron Simons, Dave Scott, Alden Karr, Missy Chimovitz, my dad Andy Karr and late mother Wendy , and everyone else who helped lead me to this moment.
I am a Brooklyn based writer, film & commercial director, and crypto-enthusiast, my projects include @HardFork-series an upcoming narrative crypto-noir and my novel Dwelling will soon be premiering exclusively on Steemit, and you can check out more of my work at dougkarr.com, piefacepictures.com, and www.imdb.com/name/nm1512347
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