The lofts loom large in the mythology of the neighborhood. New genres of indie rock were invented there; someone made the first cat meme in Photoshop there (allegedly).
But new things are generally not made at the lofts these days. The people who live there are concerned either with making enough money to afford to keep doing so, or are resting on their laurels, having done so already, and lacking the urban desperation from which subculture springs.
You are one of the former group. Your room ($2200, 8x8 sqft) was left mostly furnished by a previous tenant who departed unexpectedly, but there are still some necessities you require. You do not have time, unfortunately, to spend on shopping: you didn’t take any time off of work for this move, and must clock in 8-hour days throughout the whole thing. Remotely, of course.
The leaseholder, who burned out months ago and fled the city for a commune in rural Pennsylvania, recommended that you get a mailbox or a package locker elsewhere in the neighborhood. “The package room is notorious,” she told you. “I’ve heard stuff disappears.”
But you don’t have time for a package locker—not the getting of one, nor the going to it.
The room is expensive and you must work to pay for it. Your industry and its associated milieu comes with certain expectations, in terms of lifestyle. You don’t want to live any further out in a cheaper neighborhood, because most of your friends and coworkers live further in, in more expensive ones. You like this area, and the building still has a kind of cultural cachet. You want to be cool. You are cool, now, because you live here. You could throw a party, if you wanted to, and people would come just to say they’d been. You won’t, but you could.
***
Your package from Amazon has been delivered. Your package from Amazon has been delivered. Your package from Target has been delivered.
The notifications fill up your lockscreen as you work. You’re itching to finally get your reading lamp, so you can stop using your phone’s flashlight. When work is over for the day, you want to be totally done with screens. The east-facing windows fall dark early in the afternoon and you’re left working, hunched over on the floor in the dark, the glow of your laptop illuminating your face until 6PM finally comes.
You were warned about the package room. One of your roommates, who for the past three consecutive nights you have seen in the company of different, but uncannily similar-looking blonde women, told you that he’s had a hard time finding stuff in there. “I’ve hired a Taskrabbit to go through and look for shit for me,” he says. “Twice.”
“And they found it?”
The roommate shook his head. “No, man. Not even. Another $60 down the drain. It’s like a black hole in there. Would not recommend.”
Your stuff has been marked delivered. You must go get it. You’re an adult and you have good problem solving skills: it’s why you’re so totally indispensable at work. Surely you’ll be able to find a few packages in a room.
***
There’s barely space to move inside the package room. No room to swing a cat or any other punitive implement. The ceiling light towards the back of the room doesn’t go on when you flip the switch; the package-crammed shelves extend into shadows, deep into the long, narrow room.
Why are there so many packages? Who are these people? Do they all still live here? You know people come and go often—people must forget to change their address, or fail to put on mail forwarding. Or they’re having too much fun living it up in the city to come down and get the stuff they bought.
Dinah MacBeth, 4D. Eric Porter, 3J. K. J. Bargarran, 1Q. Phoebe Manderley, 2B. The names go on and on. Boxes from Amazon, from Chewy, from subscription services and direct from China. There are food delivery boxes, stacked up, with a layer of dust on them. How much rotting organic produce will sit there forever inside its sealed foil package? There are see-through plastic envelopes with just a hat or a pack of nails inside. Huge, heavy furniture flat-packs stacked to the ceiling, unclaimed.
You push them all aside, searching. Despite the sure presence of perishables, the place smells antiseptic: cleaning solution with overtones of paint and dust.
Shifting boxes, envelopes, mailers, from one shelf to another, careless of the ostensible floor-by-floor sorting system, you look everywhere. And still, you can’t find your packages. Fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes go by. You’re sweating at this point, cursing under your breath, frustrated.
Your phone’s flashlight illuminates the shelves as they go back, into the bowels of the building. You spot a mop and bucket, and some paint cans. Apparently the super uses the package room as additional storage. You can see packages down that way too, but surely yours, delivered mere hours ago, would be close to the front….? You check your phone again—yes, they were all delivered. Left in mailing room. Ugh.
It’s a weeknight, and you’ve got to work tomorrow, and you’re tired. If you were like some of your roommates, on sabbatical, with plenty of “runway,” you might have the energy to keep looking, and reorganize the whole place while you were at it for the benefit of other tenants. But for now you admit defeat, trudging back to the elevator, resigning yourself to another night without a reading lamp or a toothbrush holder, feeling bitter and betrayed at your thinglessness, the lack of what you paid for a modern itch somewhere below your sternum.
***
After work the next day, you launch a new attack, freshly determined to find your God-given goods. Stepping inside the package room you find yourself disoriented for a moment. It’s just as crowded with parcels as it was the day before, but you could swear that they’re different, somehow, a whole raft of new boxes. That’s impossible—people have been in and out of here, rearranging stuff as they look, that’s all.
You hunt methodically this time. Starting at one corner, on the top shelf, and moving all the way to the junction of shelving units before returning, like a typewriter, to the next shelf down where it starts near the door. Lily Naismith, 3C. Quinn Fulton, 1L. Names jump out at you, repeating themselves every so often, like notes in a song. Your neighbors, ostensibly. Some of the things they’ve ordered look expensive—designer clothing, makeup, the lithium-battery warning stickers indicating expensive tech.
Suddenly you let out a yelp, your heart racing. A sound—a dull rhythmic thumping, like footsteps—from the darkness beyond, further into the black depths of the package room.
“Hello?” you call. “Is someone there?”
The super, fetching supplies? Someone else searching for a box? No movement in the shadows. No sound. You resume your search.
Christian Shaw, 2M. Spencer Duncan, 4A—that’s your apartment. But nobody by that name lives there now, as far as you’re aware. Was that the name of the guy who was in your room before you? The one who just picked up and left one day without warning, leaving the leaseholder in the lurch?
You pick up the box. It’s large, but not altogether heavy—a backpack, perhaps, or a jacket? The cardboard is good quality. You wonder if you should take it up with you. Ask some of your roommates if they know Spencer Duncan or have a forwarding address for him.
Thump thump thump.
You drop the box, spooked again. For a moment you imagine you had felt the sound, coming from the box… But surely it came from out there, in the dark.
“Hello?”
Nothing. As you peer into the black, the hair on the back of your neck stands up. How far does the room go? How far can it go? Now that you think about it, wouldn’t it run directly through the building’s elevator shaft, if it kept going in that direction like it seemed to….?
It takes all your willpower to force yourself to keep going, to turn and begin scrutinizing the packages on the other side of the room, under the one working light. You work through them, checking even the larger ones that couldn’t possibly be the small, cheap items you ordered. Instant Pots, air purifiers, bidets, beanbags. All the accoutrements of luxury loft living—unused, forgotten by their purchasers, quiescent and neglected.
Eventually, it’s done. You’ve looked at them all. Checked every name and apartment number.
And your stuff definitely just straight-up isn’t there—at least, not on the shelves closest to the door.
The darkness beyond beckons, more and more parcels lining the shelves, further into the room. Maybe the delivery guys were feeling frisky, or just wanted to place the packages on empty shelves instead of crowded ones, and yours are back there somewhere.
You step forward, your phone flashlight on, venturing tentatively into the unlit section of the room. As you do so, moving past the mop and bucket, the light immediately above flickers and then buzzes on. “Oh thank god,” you say, walking forward.
And then the light behind you, the one closest to the door, snaps off. “Fuck.”
Some kind of deranged motion sensor? What the hell?
You whirl back around, phone flashlight pointed at the door—which isn’t there anymore.
Only more shelves, lined with packages, extending into the darkness.
Is that—did you somehow get confused? You turn again. In the other direction, the same. You knew that. Shelves. Packages. Mop and bucket. Paint cans.
Your throat closes. You don’t scream. You turn again and walk forwards—in the direction of where the door used to be. Slowly and deliberately. You know the door used to be there, because there’s Spencer Duncan’s package, on the floor where you dropped it, and on the shelves all the parcels you just spent a full half an hour scrutinizing. The light above you pops on again as you walk under it, but the door doesn’t come back.
You keep going.
You know—in the way you know when a storm is coming by the pain in your knee, the way you know you’re about to get fired by the tone in a manager’s voice—that you have to keep going, keep looking for your packages. That if you stop and open anyone else’s, looking for something that might help you, you’d be in big trouble.
Hundreds and hundreds of names. Plastic bubble mailers, Fedex overnight boxes, USPS mailers with lovingly handwritten addresses. Where is everyone? Where are you? You call for help. You finally let yourself scream, over and over. “Is anyone there?”
From all around you, that horrible thumping sound answers. The fluorescent lights flick endlessly on above, one by on, as you begin to run, hurtling through the endless rows of shelving, crammed full of unopened items, goods, things, stuff, junk. The malevolence of the unused, the wasteful, pours through plastic at you.
You trip over a box and fall, skidding, to the floor. Maria Simone, 2V. A hairdryer, maybe, or a curling iron. You stagger to your feet again, but soon are unable to go on. You collapse onto a pile of envelopes, crammed into a break between shelves. A door-spaced shape where there is no door.
You rest your head on the wall, banging on it blindly. Thump, thump, thump. You scream, and bang again, until you’re tired. You let your hand fall against the surface before you. It’s gently textured, and it gives, ever so slightly.
It feels like a very high-quality cardboard.
love this