NEWSLETTER

TEXT BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, PHOTO BY BEN RITTER

It took about ten minutes to get two cops into the house, and they were the stupidest people I’ve ever met. I actually think they were mentally retarded. They were fat, and they huffed and complained as they climbed the two flights of stairs up to inspect the missing roof door.

They were like, “How do you know the roof door is missing?”

We were standing directly under the hole in the ceiling.

“How do you know it wasn’t missing when you got home?”

“Why do you think it’s missing?”

“Did you go up on the roof tonight?”

All I could get out of them was that they were responding to a domestic violence call next door.

“Can you make sure there isn’t a psychopath on the roof?”

“You want us to go up on the roof?” They acted like I was going to force them up there.

And it continued like this for 20 minutes, them grumbling and giving each other looks while I rolled my eyes and fought off the Trazodone, which was on the cusp of making me barf, and then another ten minutes while my roommate looked around our apartment for a piece of furniture they could stand on to look out on the roof. All of our furniture would have broken under the weight of half of one of them.

Then out of nowhere this Superman cop comes running up the stairs. Probably seven feet tall, gorgeous, with rippling muscles.

“What seems to be the problem? Did one of those crackheads steal the door to your roof?

“Yes!”

And in five seconds flat he had hoisted himself up and was out on the roof with a flashlight. “Nobody up here, nothing.”

And then he was down. Gleaming, beautiful, Christ Almighty. Seriously. “Don’t worry about the crackheads. They’re all too fucked up to do anything to hurt you. They might steal a door off your roof and forget what they meant to do. You should call a carpenter tomorrow morning.”

And that was it.

A few months later the crackheads got kicked out of the house to the left of us, and they moved to the house on the right side of us and set up shop for real. The principal crackhead in charge is a serious older dude named Slim. He checks in with me from time to time and I complain about the noise. Then there’s Don Juan. He offered me some meth after I told him I’d just quit my job. For some reason I made up this excuse about being sick instead of just refusing. I said, “I have a blood disease.” He said, “Look at my hands!” He held them up, and they were like monstrously huge! Like twice as big as his head, like weights he’s carrying around with these big leechy wounds all over them and fingernails like a dragon’s. Then he said he was dying of cancer. He kept winking with every sentence as though he was secretly talking in code. He also said there was a camera set up across the street from the crackhouse, which records everything—everything in the world that ever happens. He said I should drop in sometime, that we could hang. I went over there before I started to write this and knocked and knocked, but nobody answered.


IT HAPPENED | 1 | 2 |

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