The Buzzer

When the door buzzer went off and after the first jolts of shock passed through her sleeping-rousing-waking body, Lupe thought it had to be someone for her downstairs neighbor. Blinking wearily, heart pounding, she reached for her phone, groping the empty space next to her right hand. Remembering she had moved it to the other side shortly before falling asleep, she rolled over with an exasperated huff, the blankets tangling around her body. The light of the screen burned her eyes. She had a nightlight in the room, but its glow was soft and yellow, pleasant to look at even through the blur of her impaired vision. Her glasses were somewhere back on the other side, likely having found their way halfway under a pillow in her sleep.
            3:02 AM. That felt significant somehow. Who else was looking for someone besides her downstairs neighbor? He was strange. Always unnerved her for a reason she couldn’t pinpoint. She could see him now, standing out on the back porch directly underneath hers, head already turned towards her as she descended the stairs, eyes watching her with intense focus as she passed. It always stressed the hell out of her. The back porch stairway connecting all the apartments in the building wasn’t the most spacious. The space between someone’s private porch space and the stairs could be crossed in a single lunge. She always tried to hurry past him, while still trying to not appear so frantic. Really, beyond the staring, the man hadn’t done a thing to her. But that look—almost pathetic, on her less generous days—set off every alarm bell in her head. The image was so clear behind her eyelids, she jolted again, nearly dropping her phone. Her skin itched. It felt like he was there, staring at her from the closet doors just across from her bed. She exhaled breathlessly at her own sudden fear of looking over the blankets bunched up around her to confirm. Of course, he wouldn’t be there.
            The buzzer didn’t go off again. Straining her ears, she couldn’t pick up any other sounds, either from inside her apartment or the back-porch area just outside her windows. Off in the distance, she heard several pops, maybe eight or so. Lupe played the ‘Gunshots or Fireworks?’ game in her head and determined it must have been gunshots. No fireworks went off with a rhythm like that. There were far more reasons to fire a gun in the middle of a September night than there were to set off fireworks. She didn’t know anything about guns, was there even something that went off that many times in a row like that? Were there 8-bullet chambers? Magazines? Did she even count right? She’d have to remember to ask her friend, Duncan, in the morning. He knew plenty about guns.
            Easing back into her pillows, she found sleep hard to grasp. Her heart slowed back down to a more relaxed rate, but her brain couldn’t quite turn off. She couldn’t hear any signs that her roommate had come out to investigate the sound. It didn’t sound like an accidental press of the buzzer. It was an acceptable length, just long enough to be intentional but not annoying. Someone wanted to press the buzzer. At 3 AM.
            Then again, the apartment buzzers were out in public space. The front door to the apartment building wasn’t behind a gate. The buzzers were all along the side of the door, easily within reach of any stranger walking by. It could have been a drunk, stumbling around the neighborhood, waiting for the first buses and trains to start up again. After all, she did live only a block away from a train station and three different bus routes. There were more than a handful of regular transients in the area. Any one of them could have pressed the buzzer.
            But why her buzzer? It wasn’t even the first one. Was it some kind of robber scoping the place out? How common were robberies in a building like hers? On the third floor, it was the top floor of the building. Surely not even robbers would want to waste time climbing three flights of stairs up and down, especially burdened with whatever they had stolen.
            Still, the reality of being a female human sunk in. There was always that maybe irrational, maybe rational fear of being the target of a home invasion. It was never just a fear of robbery, but always a fear of rape and murder—and not necessarily in that order. The same kind of fear that made her think she was pregnant when her period was just a second late, even when she was a virgin. It didn’t have to make sense to strike fear deep in the pit of her stomach. Rationally, she knew it wasn’t likely. Robbers would want easy hits, fewer chances of getting caught. Hell, if they got all the way up here, they earned whatever they wanted to steal.
           Lupe felt eyes on her, just over the hill of her blankets. She opened her eyes, blinking the drowsiness out. The opposite wall had her shoe rack, the shapes blobs of dark colors. Against her conscious efforts, the dark blobs shifted into something that resembled a face, peering at her over the edge of her mattress, as if it was lying down on the floor next to her in mimicry of her own position. She pulled her feet up, tightening into a ball.
            This was stupid. Just go back to sleep, already, she thought. It was nothing. Go back to sleep. At the very least, if she wasn’t going back to sleep, she could easily resolve her fears by sitting up and looking at her room. Glasses or not, she didn’t need much vision to confirm her room was clear of intruders. She didn’t even have to sit up much to look at her bedroom door, to look at the space between the door and the floor. The hallway light was left on during the night for any late-night bathroom trips. If there was someone near her door, she’d be able to see it from the light.
            God, why did she think that? There was no one outside her door. Repeat it, she thought, there is no one outside my room.
           It would be impossible, even if they managed to get their doors open without alerting her or her roommate. The hallway just outside her room was creaky as all hell. Most of the hardwood flooring in the apartment was. It wasn’t really possible to move around entirely silently, much to Lupe’s chagrin. A childhood of being chastised to ‘pick up her feet,’ as her mother called it, gave her a relatively silent walk. She had a way of rolling her feet to their sides or walking on the toes of her feet to minimize sound. Careful. Almost ballet-like. She had accidentally snuck up on more than one person in her lifetime, including her mother. The floor outside her room was especially creaky. It was impossible for anyone to cross that length without making considerable noise.
            There is no one outside my room. Look, you fucking coward.
            This was all her neighbor’s fault. The creepy fuck. Some other creep was looking for him and accidentally buzzed her door, just above his. She could be back to sleep now. She could have never woken up at all and slept pleasantly through the whole night.

            Pressing her knees together, she tried to ignore the quiet urge to pee. It wasn’t pressing, but in another hour or so, it definitely would be. Why now? Why now?
            The bathroom was only five feet away. Just a few creaky-floored steps away from her bedroom door. The hallway light illuminated her path. No surprises.
           That is, except for the darkness of the kitchen at one end of the hallway and the darkness of the living room at the other.
The shadowed shapes of her furniture could easily conceal a person. Someone could be sitting at her computer chair right now, watching the hallway for movement. They would be able to see her, clear as day, while she’d have to squint and approach to make out anything for sure.
Her need to pee intensified.
Look, she rationalized, it’s two birds, one stone. Get up to go pee and you get to see that the apartment is empty. No one is here but the people that live here. So get up. Get the fuck up.
She didn’t move. Her leg muscles ached from the tension.
Somewhere from outside her windows, she heard a cop car drive by, the distant sirens having a calming effect. That was a nighttime staple. Something normal. Not like a buzzer at 3 AM. Not like someone just lurking in her living room, waiting, not stealing a single thing. No one actually did that outside of movies.
Carefully, she extended her legs, shivering from the cold of her bedsheets. With a deep intake of breath, she pulled herself free from the blankets and sat up, spots popping in front of her eyes from the motion. The light beneath her door was undisturbed. A single, blessed line of light. She sighed, a kind of relieved laugh. Reaching behind, she grabbed her glasses and put them on. She got out of bed with the lack of grace typical in the early stages of waking. She pushed herself up with help from the nearby wall, her feet creaking the floor beneath.
She opened the bedroom door and stuck her head out, peering up and down the hall. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness, to see anything in the darkness at both ends beyond the implications of a person.
Hand gripping the doorknob tight, she blinked several times to dispel the images. The strange shape on her computer chair in the living room wasn’t a man—her neighbor, her mind supplied—but was, in fact, the throw blanket she left on it earlier the day before. In the kitchen, there wasn’t a man at the back door watching her, but the combined shapes of the aprons that hung on the door, alongside her reusable grocery bags.
See?
Nothing.
She pitter-patted to the bathroom. It was a quick pee. She washed her hands, inspecting her face in the mirror. She looked calm. She was calm. For the first time since waking, she felt her mind relax, the noise of fear dimming down. Wiping her hands dry, she left the bathroom as quickly as she entered and returned to her room. As one last hurrah to her unwarranted paranoia, she took stock of her room, in case her fictitious intruders snuck in while she was busy.
Her room was tiny. Just enough to fit her queen-sized bed, a dresser, and two shoe racks. There was a closet just on the other side, the bar and shelves clearly arranged at a child’s height level. No one was behind the door. No one was in her bed. Pulling open the closet doors, she couldn’t see anyone hiding inside, tucking their bodies into the corners. Besides, there wasn’t much room. It wasn’t filled to the brim, but she used her closet space well.
That’s that, she thought.
Lupe crawled back into bed, pulling off her glasses with practiced ease, settling back into the warm cocoon of her blankets. Smiling to herself, she burrowed her face into her pillows, looking forward to a peaceful sleep, at least for the rest of the night.
Outside her bedroom door, the floor creaked.

***

Nergal Malham is a tiny Assyrian born and raised in Chicago, currently residing in Japan. She received her MFA from Roosevelt University. Her work has previously appeared in Cleaning Up Glitter, GASHER Journal, The Bookends Review, Seeds Literary Magazine, The Thought Catalog, and Hemingway's Playpen. She dreams of one day being a pug.