THE OLD APARTMENT
by Will Burchard
CHAPTER ONE
Three stories lie dormant before me, the paint chipping away like ash. Lead collects in the wind, bringing with it cigarettes and crumpled, unlucky scratch tickets. Three floors still standing, decaying and withering but still more alive than you are. If I had the strength I would bury this old apartment building with you, and I would kneel over your grave every day praying that these memories wouldn’t shoot out from the clay and the dirt. Still, it stands before me, a monolith and a tomb. “Are you ready to go inside?”, my sister Jean asks. I can’t see her eyes through her dark tinted sunglasses but I can hear the tears in her voice. She is one year younger than I am, 17 at the time of our fathers passing. We both had grown apart from our dad in his final two years, as school and social life began to dominate our time and empty bottles began collecting at his doorstep. I probably had not been to his house in over a year. We both grew up here, spending weekends in Providence while living with our mom in the suburbs further south. As we approach the door it feels far from a home. I get an eerie sense of dread, a heavy feeling of the undertow of regret pulling me into the depths of remorse.
Instinctively I reach for the doorbell. Then I realize that no one is home. I start to go inside when I feel a rough, calloused hand on my shoulder, I turn around quickly and stare into the brown eyes of an aging drunk, Peter, one of my dads last tenants. His hand is clasped around a bottle of Guinness and he is teetering from right to left. I brush off his hand and he introduces himself, telling me what a great man my father was. His words have little impact and I barely pay attention to his ramblings. Since my father passed away barely a week ago, people have been coming up to me and telling me what a fantastic man he was and how sorry they were for my loss. They all claimed to know him so well. Some of these people I grew up with and trusted. Many of them, however, seemed to only show up around the time of his passing. All of them wanted something. This is the sad, terrible thing about death. Once your soul has escaped these mortal boundaries, nothing that once belonged to you is sacred. Everyone from close friends and distant relatives felt they deserved something from my father, and after seven days of this I was beginning to realize that we didn’t owe these people a Goddamn thing. Yet I smiled and nodded and sent Peter stumbling back into his apartment. Finally, we entered. A winding auburn staircase greeted us, polished wood gleaming up twenty feet. I ascended, holding on to the railing like I had done so many times before in my youth. The wood felt cold, weathered, a far cry from a father's warm embrace. We finally made it to his apartment. I turned the key and stepped inside. Growing up, the first thing I would hear when I entered this old house was the sound of classical music. The soft hum or loud booms of opera and orchestras never stopped playing. Growing up with you I had just as much exposure to Beethoven and Chopin as I did the latest popular music on the radio.
Now, there was only silence. It was a haunting, still sense of quiet, the sound of two decades of memories sinking into the ground. I notice your encyclopedia collection first, kept inside an antique wooden bookshelf with glass frames. I remember sitting on your lap and getting lessons in history, science, and astronomy from these dusty leather bound books. Although the knowledge in them is now likely old and outdated, they were my very first teachers. I never took the books with me, and to this day I wonder what has become of them. In the dining room clutter is all around, the piles of junk beginning to consume it. I sift through these piles of papers to find old tax documents, bills, and countless papers and drawing my sister and I brought home from school. Chicken scratch handwriting and smudges of crayon accompany note of “I love you Dad.” Some of these must have been from almost ten years ago. He never threw away anything we made at school.
Across the room were piles of vinyl records and several antique record players. The black discs were beginning to collect dust. I was told many of them could be worth a good deal of money, but I couldn’t think about that right now. I couldn’t even read half of the titles, Italian and German composers from hundreds of years ago. I wish I had paid more attention to the music that you cherished so much. It was once your livelihood, although you stopped playing professionally long before I was born. Still, the sounds of your viola playing were constant growing up here. As the years went by and I grew older, I heard you play less and less, the sound of beautiful stringed music replaced by the hollow clank of empty liquor bottles. I found your viola across the hallway in the bedroom. I opened the case and placed my hand on it, wiping away a layer of dust. I put the instrument to my chin and the bow to the strings and tried to make a sound, but all that I produced was a screeching echo. I wasn’t half the musician you were, although you tried so hard to pass along your knowledge. For a while, you succeeded, buying me a classical flute and driving me to lessons for years. I remember the proud look on your face when I walked away from a classical flute competition with the first place medal, the way you embraced me and kissed me on the cheek and told me that I was a natural, just like you. After five years of lessons I switched from flute to guitar, finding more inspiration in the sounds of Pink Floyd and Nirvana than Bach. I could see your disappointment at the time, and now I am left wondering, if I was such a natural, why didn’t I just play both at once?
I walk up creaky, dusty stairs and reach the attic where my old room was located. Model planes and trains adorn the shelves, countless projects I built with my dad. He had this fascination with trains, and spent plenty of time detailing and building model train sets. He eventually passed on the hobby to me, and we began building them together. Down the hallway is the room where you kept your train set, a painstakingly detailed replica of a city with tracks that run the length of the entire room. Miniature cars and buildings add more layers of detail. I haven’t been in this room in years, and I had forgotten how impressive it all looked. I haven’t built models in a long time, but I can still remember carefully piecing together the different sets with my him, all the while the sounds of classical music reverberated through the house. I don’t know what became of the model set in that room. I refuse to linger on it, bothered by the notion that something he had invested so much time had been dismantled and thrown away. I wish I had done more to preserve it for his memory, instead it is just another unanswerable regret swimming in the currents of my subconscious. I can’t look at the models any longer and I leave the attic behind me, never to set foot in the room I grew up in again.
Will Burchard is a native of the Providence, Rhode Island Area. He now lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This is his first contribution to the Whydah Gally, and Chapters II and III will be published over the next week or so.
Will Burchard is a native of the Providence, Rhode Island Area. He now lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This is his first contribution to the Whydah Gally, and Chapters II and III will be published over the next week or so.
