NEWSLETTER

TEXT BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, PHOTO BY BEN RITTER

We moved into a house a few blocks from the Marcy projects at the end of last summer. The day we moved in, one of our neighbors asked me how much I’d paid to rent our moving van. I told her, and she said, “I’ve got to get me and my kid the fuck out of here. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

In time, it became obvious the place next door was a drug den. A constant flow of completely ravaged humans trudged up and down the steps, puking and throwing garbage out of the windows, pushing shopping carts full of drywall over the sidewalks for fun. You could hear them screeching and wailing and beating on each other through the walls. It turned out they were a group of crackheads who’d been in the building so long they had squatters’ rights and couldn’t be evicted. They’re notorious on our block, apparently, for moving en mass into houses when they’re being renovated or sold, like flocks of fucked-up geese.

Around November, I quit drinking and got insomnia. These “neighbors” played loud music at unpredictable intervals at any hour of night and it filled me with murderous rage. My doctor prescribed me Trazodone—some sort of sleeping pills—and I started using earplugs. I thought I was in the clear.

Then one Friday night I went to bed. All was quiet. The pills kicked in and I was dead asleep when at 3 AM I heard the sound of murder through the wall. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” screamed the woman, and, “You kill me and I will chase you and rape and kill you in hell, bitch,” screamed the man, stuff like that, with audible beating and kicking and slamming into walls, then scrambling up and down the stairs, and then it sounded like someone was stomping on the ceiling. I woke up. In my drug haze I got out of bed. My room is on the top floor. I opened my bedroom door and felt an icy breeze. A shaft of moonlight spilled in from above. I looked up at the ceiling, at a hole where the door to the roof should have been. I saw the clear ivory ellipse of the moon, and calmly thought, “A crackhead has broken into the house through the roof by ripping off the door and is standing behind me with a kitchen knife. He will put one hand over my mouth to muffle my screams and another hand will press the knife to my throat while he drags me back into my bedroom where he will slice my head off and rape me before going downstairs to do the same to my roommate. Then he will steal our computers and our DVD player, eat the food I left out on the stove, and leave the front door open.” I waited a minute or two to see if this was going to happen. It didn’t. I was still very messed up from the Trazodone.

I made it downstairs and knocked on my roommate’s door. “I think we should call the police. The neighbors are killing each other and I think there’s someone in the house.”

“The police are already outside,” she said.

I looked out the window and there were three or four cruisers parked out there, and a bunch of cops sitting on our stoop. Remember, I was on Trazodone for all of this.

I opened the door and said, “Hey, can you come in here? Someone stole the door to our roof.”

I should also mention that it was the middle of winter, and very cold.


TO BE CONTINUED:
IT HAPPENED | 1 | 2 |

< PREV

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

NEXT >

POST A COMMENT [SIGN IN] Hi, in case you haven't heard, you can now sign up to become a "member" of Viceland.com, which entitles you to all sorts of amazing benefits like pictures and a nickname. Click here to make your own profile. You can still comment if you don't, but you gotta do it all 'nonymously.

Name:
Comment: