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There are many dignified ways to die in your own home. Should such misfortune ever find him, Gale Dekarios had hoped for one of those. Carbon monoxide poisoning, perhaps. A sudden structural collapse culminating in the upstairs bathtub falling atop his head. Or maybe erroneously ingesting the leaves of some toxic exotic plant in his morning tea.
He did not, however, expect death by The Cure.
Yet here he is, one frayed nerve away from using his own hair as a garrotte as he anticipates the next stage of the cycle.
It’s almost every hour, on the hour. That same song repeating. Always that song, nothing else.
He doesn’t even particularly dislike The Cure. In fact, as a lonesome adolescent, they often kept him and Tara company in his bedroom too. But he challenges anyone to listen to the same song all day, every day, blasted at full volume through the paper-thin wall of his apartment, and not fall further into insanity with every play.
If they would just play a different Cure song, he’d be satisfied. Even the B-side would suffice. ‘Halo,’ for instance, criminally overlooked, complex, mournful, everything this song wasn’t. Subtlety. Texture. Taste. A song for grown-ups with headaches.
Nevertheless, like clockwork, it begins. The same quirky guitar riff to open. The same naively cheerful bassline. The same unrelenting, glistening optimism of someone who has clearly never worked a tenured position in an underfunded humanities department.
“I don’t care if Monday’s blue…”
Gale clamps his hands over his ears and breathes deeply. He has tried everything. Meditation. Noise-cancelling headphones. Mentally screaming into the void. Almost writing an academic essay entitled “On the Weaponisation of English Rock Bands: A Case Study in Domestic Psychological Warfare.” Yet nothing can stop the muffled sounds of Robert Smith’s angelic voice from drilling a hole deep into his skull. Tara goes out during the day, and he does not blame her at all. He would do the same if he had anywhere to go and the energy to go there.
“Tuesday’s grey and Wednesday too…”
He’s drafted a note three times already, but every time he bottles it.
First try: Dear Sir/Madam/Other,
It has come to my attention that you have a particular devotion to a certain song that you like to play every hour or so. I, your humble ear-having neighbour, was hoping (nay praying) that you may perhaps consider the purchase of some headphones so that the building may once again become habitable. Therefore, you may still enjoy your singular song at all hours of the day (and night), and the other residents of this apartment block, which happens to have rather thin walls, may remain Cure-less.
Your friendly neighbour,
Gale Dekarios.
Second Try: Dear Neighbour,
If you could turn the music down, it would be greatly appreciated. I am a professor at the Blackstaff Academy (they don’t need to know that part is a little white lie), and I desperately need my beauty sleep, for my students’ sake. I would be happy to provide headphones to help keep the noise to a minimum, so that we can all live in harmony in this place.
Best wishes,
Gale.
Third try: TURN. THE. FUCKING. MUSIC. DOWN.
“Thursday, I don’t care about you…”
He should probably venture outside his apartment and ask around to see if the noise is bothering any of the other residents along the corridor. It must be, surely. He knows he is sensitive, but there’s no way that others cannot hear it too. Perhaps someone had already made a complaint about it. Perhaps it did not go well for them. He must admit he does not know what his neighbour looks like, having only been notified that someone else had moved into lovely Alfira’s old apartment when the music started thundering through the walls. The possibility of them being bigger and scarier than him is the sole reason why he hasn’t sent his notes already, but he’s about two sensory triggers away from saying ‘fuck it’ and giving them a piece of his mind. Whatever piece he can spare.
Her Spotify Wrapped is going to be extremely short, he thinks to himself as he brews some chamomile tea in his favourite mug to try and calm his nerves. He breathes through his nose. Four counts in, seven hold, eight out. He rocks a little forward and backwards in his seat at the kitchen counter in an attempt to self-soothe.
It doesn’t help.
“IT’S FRIDAY, I’M IN LOVE!”
He slams his mug down on the counter with a little more force than necessary, but he’s had enough. He’s cracked. Finally, at the end of his tether. He rises from his seat and throws on his worn but trusty purple woollen cardigan and marches towards the hallway. The noise level is excruciating out here, even the vase in the corner holding some murky water and three wilted chrysanthemums is shaking to the beat.
He counts to ten and then pounds on the door. He is determined to stay strong and defiant. Really show them who they are messing with. He straightens his cardigan like armour and firms his stance. After what feels like an eternity, the door opens, latch still on.
She’s not quite what he expected. Waves of black hair fall over her shoulders, and she looks like she gets even less sleep than he does. A waft of cigarette ash and booze hits him, and he has to fight back the urge to choke. She eyes him through her smudged eyeliner as if to say, ‘Why have you invaded my peace?’ as if that’s not exactly what she’s been doing to him for weeks now.
“Yes?” she says with raised eyebrows and a sigh of discontent.
He is startled for a moment, and she stares back at him peculiarly. Finally, he gets a grip of himself enough to speak. “Good evening. I was wondering if you might…if it’s not too much to ask…consider turning the music down to a reasonable decibel so that the rest of us might get an ounce of slumber?” He mentally kicks himself for stumbling over his words, but there. He’s said it. He can breathe a slight sigh of relief.
She stares at him without emotion. Whatever is going on behind those hazel, glassy eyes, she does not want him to see. Then she snorts, eyebrows raised even higher. “Wow. That was a lotta words to say shut the hell up.”
His jaw tightens. His previous calmness floats away on a cloud. “It’s not just me who suffers, you know? The walls here are tragically thin, and I daresay the entire building is…”
“Bored outta their brainless skulls?” she cuts in with a smirk. She isn’t taking him remotely seriously, and he feels his anger rising by the second. “Yeah. I’m doing a public service. You’re welcome.”
“Public service?” He actually laughs out loud, brittle and incredulous. “Assaulting us hourly with the same saccharine jangle pop masquerading as music?”
She leans against the doorframe, smirking again. Like this is all a joke to her. “‘Saccharine jangle-pop’? Who the hell talks like that? Bet you write Yelp reviews in iambic pentameter too.”
“I do not!” He flounders, heat crawling up his neck and his face turning a beetroot purple.
“Dude, I was kidding,” she laughs and lights a cigarette right in front of him, blowing smoke into the hallway as if it were hers. She studies him for a moment before speaking again. “You know what your problem is, Professor Purple Cardigan? You’ve got a stick wedged so far up your ass, you probably taste pine every time you talk.”
Gale splutters, having lost sight of his point some time ago. He stares down at his mustard-stained cardigan where the hem is slowly unravelling, but, nevertheless, he takes it personally. “I’ll have you know this cardigan is a family heirloom!”
“Tragic.” She grins wolfishly. “Guess it runs in the family.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose, willing his patience into existence. He tries to get back on track with the reason he’s here in the first place, before he got rudely derailed. “I am simply asking—”
“And I’m simply saying ‘no’.” She takes another drag, eyes narrowing. “I like my music loud, and no one else has complained. So, unless you came here to dance, or drink, or, I dunno, actually live a little, you can take your purple cardigan and toddle back to your dusty little hobbit-hole.”
Something in him snaps. “It is not dusty! It is curated!”
She barks a laugh so loud the neighbour’s dog starts barking too. “Gods, you’re like a walking dictionary.”
“Thesaurus,” he corrects.
“What?”
“Dictionaries have meanings of words. Thesauruses have synonyms. So I’d be like a walking thesaurus.” He has no idea why he just said that.
She stares at him for a good while before turning back into her apartment.
He glares back at her, cheeks flushed, heart hammering far too hard for what should have been a simple noise complaint. “Goodnight,” he manages to shout, stiffly and with a hint of passive aggression.
She tilts her head, mock-sweet, from halfway behind the door. “Sweet dreams, Professor Pedantic. Don’t let Robert Smith bite.”
And then she slams the door in his face, seconds before the music roars louder than ever before.
It is suspiciously quiet today. Gale has not heard the song once, which ought to be a relief, but instead he is struck by how loud the rest of the world actually is. Dogs barking. Doors slamming. Someone vacuuming upstairs even though it is objectively the wrong hour for such a task.
Has it always been this noisy? Or had The Cure simply drowned everything else out? Could the world ever just stop spinning for five minutes? Enough to gather his thoughts together.
By evening, the air in his flat feels stale and thick, and the walls feel as though they are closing in. He needs space. Air. Height. Freedom. So he decides to go on an adventure. Climb a mountain. Well, he takes the endlessly winding, insurmountable staircase up to the rooftop of the building, which often feels like an Everest task itself. They really must get the elevator fixed.
He envisions his telescope waiting for him exactly where he left it. Sometimes he comes here to watch the stars. Sometimes, he wonders what it might be like to be one. Uncomplicated. Simplicity. Your only responsibility to shine incandescently. And to not get swallowed by black holes.
But tonight, he is not alone.
It is her. She stands near the ledge, far too near for comfort. Arms hanging loosely at her sides. Head tilted down toward the street far below. Gale’s breath stumbles.
He approaches slowly, with caution. “Hey… now, look,” he starts gently. She startles, but doesn’t teeter. “I don’t know what’s happened or even who you really are, but surely it isn’t worth…” He gestures weakly toward the drop. “Worth this. Whatever this is. If you’ll indulge me, perhaps we can find another solution? Together?”
She turns her head and blinks at him, then throws her head back in laughter. Full-bodied, bewildered laughter, and he once again fears she will lose her balance and fall to her untimely death. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Just come away from the edge,” he insists, hands raised to show he is no threat.
“I’m not gonna jump, you idiot.” She points toward the street below that is still teeming with life, even at this hour. “I’m watching.”
“…Watching what?”
“People.” Her eyes glint with a strange sort of fascination and glee.
He reluctantly steps beside her and peers down. The sparse crowds look so small from up here. Ant-like. Chaotic. Utterly oblivious.
“You can barely see anything from this height,” he says, perplexed.
“That’s the point,” she replies. “They’re all running around, thinking they know everything. But they don’t know a damn thing about the world.”
“And you do?” he asks, more sharply than intended.
She snorts. “Of course not. No one does. We’re all just fumbling in the dark.”
“That is… surprisingly philosophical for someone who tried to smoke me out of my own apartment.”
“Speaking of smoke,” she offers him a cigarette instead of an answer. “Ciggy?”
“No, thank you. I’ll think go inside now I know you’re not going to—”
“Maybe I will,” she shrugs, far too nonchalantly for his liking. “Think I’d land graceful as a cat or splat like a watermelon?”
“Morbid,” he mutters in a monotone manner. “And not remotely amusing.”
“Sure it is.”
“It really isn’t.”
She finally turns to him fully, still treating the ledge as if it were the ground floor, with the wind tugging strands of hair across her face. “And you’re the authority now? You’re not just a professor of pedantry but also a professor of humour?” A flicker of hurt tightens her mouth. He’s hit a nerve.
He softens. “I only mean…I know something about suicide.”
She holds his gaze for a beat. Something unspoken passes them by. They fall into a heavy, uncomfortable silence. And just when he steels himself to leave, a sudden gust of Atlantic wind slams the rooftop door shut with a violent clang.
Gale flinches. “Oh…oh no. No. No.” He laments as he realises the outside has no handle and the door must be opened from the other side. He normally brings something to keep the door propped open, but tonight he had been…too distracted.
His neighbour jumps at the sound, actually loses her balance this time, but the wind shoves her backwards instead of forwards, depositing her on her feet first onto the safety of the roof, albeit in a rather dignified manner. He hopes that that is enough to satisfy the Cat vs Watermelon Conundrum.
She checks her ankles for signs of damage. “Shit,” she mutters under a cloud of breath.
Gale is already pacing, back and forth, fingers cupping his chin. “We’re trapped. Brilliant. Truly brilliant. What do we do?”
She gives him that exasperating, childish shrug again and lights another cigarette. “Dunno. Smoke?”
“That is not a solution!”
“It’s a coping mechanism. And given it’s the middle of the night, the landlord will be soundly tucked up in bed, and there’s no phone signal up here, what exactly do you expect me to do about it? Conjure up a key from thin air?” She makes the vague gesture of conjuring something, he thinks.
“You could try not being a complete nightmare for five minutes.”
She raises a brow. “Ooh. Purple Cardigan bites back.” Something like approval glimmers there. Annoyingly, Gale feels it. He hates this woman. Why should he care what she thinks? But the fact that she’s looking at him right now as something other than total disappointment makes him feel a strange sense of pride.
“And stop calling me names,” he adds, quieter. Less bold.
She steps closer, folding her arms over her chest and tilting her head to the side. “Were you bullied a lot in school?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You’re just awfully sensitive about everything.”
“Well, maybe,” he snaps, “I’m sensitive because I’ve been trying to recover from burnout, but my neighbour’s relentless daily musical assault keeps setting me back. And now the cosmic joke is that I am locked on the roof with the very culprit, when it was supposed to be me up here thinking about jumping.”
She stiffens. The smirk falters. Something cracks in her expression. He sees something he’s not seen in her before. Is it remorse? Reflection? Guilt?
“Why didn’t you say it was that bad?” she murmurs rather sheepishly.
“You didn’t give me the chance.”
She presses her tongue against her cheek, thinking. “You just… rubbed me the wrong way with all those big words. Sounded like you were trying to make me feel stupid.”
“I wasn’t,” he says, sincerely. “I was trying to be polite. Though admittedly, my version of polite is rather… verbose.”
“No shit.” She gives a small yet genuine smile for the first time. She takes in a breath and pushes the air out of her lungs consciously. “I didn’t mean to make it worse for you.”
"I am overly sensitive to noise, but I can’t be the only one in that building you’ve tortured.”
She winces. “I didn’t know the walls were that thin.”
“I can hear the man on the other side of me brush his teeth.”
The corners of her lips rise again. “Apartment living must really suck for you.”
“You have no idea.”
They sit. Two ramshackle deck chairs, perpetually damp and rusted beyond repair. But up here, in the quiet, the chairs might as well be thrones. He is bewildered to think that less than an hour ago, he loathed this woman, but here he is, bantering with her and now sitting in a comfortable silence.
After a while, he approaches the question he’s been dying to know the answer to, “I have to ask. Why that song? And why so many times?”
She looks skyward as if the stars might have the answer. Then she smiles, like she is remembering something beautiful. “It’s naive,” she says. “Sunny pop-rock nonsense. But it doesn’t force it or pretend to be anything else. It’s like… every day sucks, but Friday always comes. I guess I was trying to make every day feel like Friday. Drown out the weekday noise.”
He nods, able to understand some element of that. “An aural charm against despair. Inelegant, but effective,” he says, trying to lighten the mood.
Her smile dims. “I lied earlier.” A pause.“I was up here to jump too.”
Gale’s breath catches in his throat. “…Why?”
“My dad called.”
He waits.
“That’s it,” she says. “He called. Said barely anything. Then hung up again.”
“Is he… not supportive?”
“Who would be?” She curls into herself into a ball, arms around her knees to create a cradle for her chin. “I’m like adderall in human form. Chaos. One fuck-up to the next. Who wastes love on that?”
Gale’s chest aches, not with pity, but recognition. “That’s a ridiculous question. Plenty would.”
She doesn’t seem to know what to do with that answer. “I get intrusive thoughts,” she admits. “Bad ones. Hurting people. Scaring myself. Does that make me evil?” She gazes into his eyes, searching for something. There is an unexpected vulnerability about her.
He ponders the question a moment. He has spent many a quiet evening asking himself the same question. He, too, has a propensity for darkness. All it would take is the right, or wrong, person to bring it out in him. Mystra, for example. He craves excellence, which could easily lend itself to negative actions if left unchecked. But does that make him evil? He’d never really come to a firm conclusion before tonight, but looking at her and her wide doe eyes in the here and now, he knows exactly what to say. “Do you act on them?” he questions.
“No,” she replies.
“Then they’re thoughts. Not verdicts.”
Her eyes open and close with fragility as his response sinks in. “You don’t think I’m evil?”
“I think you are… brusque. And arrogant. Ill-mannered. Horrendous taste in music….”
“HEY! Don’t diss The Cure!”
“But evil? No.”
Something warm flickers in her gaze, like a deer caught in the headlights.
Silence settles again, but a different kind of silence. After a moment, she clears her throat. Lightly, almost shyly: “Do you know anything about stars and constellations and shit?”
“A little.”
“Teach me?”
He hesitates only long enough to meet her eyes; tired and smudged with eyeliner, but finally earnest.
“Alright,” he says, and points upward. “See that one? Just left of the antenna?”
She squints. “Pretend I do.”
“That’s Altair,” he explains. “It’s part of a trio. They’re far apart, but always connected.”
“Sounds lonely,” she murmurs.
“Or loyal,” he counteroffers.
She looks at him. Really looks. And something softens in them both. A tiny shift, but enough.
“Hey, Gale?” she says quietly.
“Yes?”
“If I put music on again… maybe you could knock and come over instead of yelling at my door?”
He pretends to consider. “If you promise not to torture me with ‘Friday I’m In Love.’”
“No promises.” A small, warm grin forms on her face.
He groans. She nudges his foot with hers. And for the first time in weeks, the noise in his head eases. The city hums below, the stars burn steadily above, and the rooftop feels miraculously quiet.
“Teach me another one,” she says.
And Gale does.