When he wasn't home, I used his bathroom. I didn't get any particular thrill out of it, not really, it was mostly because his was so much cleaner than my own. My tiled floor, identical in size and color to his, was tainted a faint shade of pink from the dead strands of my colored hair that I never cleaned out of the grout. My clothes overflowed out of the hamper onto the floor and the door couldn't open all the way. My sink, the same vague shade of magenta as everything else in the room, was also stained with various pigments from paintbrushes and sponges that I really should have washed in the kitchen.
But in his bathroom, the floor was mopped each morning, the grout cleaned with a toothbrush every Saturday. The entire apartment was cleaned each Saturday. His brown floor mats, one in front of the sink and one in front of the shower, were laundered twice a week at the very least, and more if the white stripes on them began to look dingy. His black wire shelving that flanked the walls contained 12 copies of his video game magazine, in chronological order. Sometimes alphabetical by cover headline, it depended on the sort of week he washaving.
His shower curtain was ironed, though this ritual was one of the few done at his leisure and discretion, not on an inflexible schedule. His color-coordinated sink accessories- toothbrush holder, tissue box cover, water cup that remained unused- were exactly two inches apart and two inches from the backsplash. He washed his mirror each night after he washed his face, but before he brushed his teeth. There were exactly twenty-five disposable bathroom cups in the dispenser at any given time, as he replaced the top one each night. I explained to him once that this meant that the bottom twenty-four cups were never, and will never be used. He laughed.
The first few months of our living together I played pranks, as one naturally would in such an environment. While he was gone I flipped his towels around in the bathroom, so that the tags faced outward. I moved the accessories on his sink. I would put a few books on his bookshelf out of place, take them out of alphabetical order, or remove them from the category shelf where they belonged. I would take the candles in the living room and put the shortest one in the middle. I once hid the first Harry Potter book, throwing off the entire measurement of the fourth shelf in the left bookcase of our living room.
This delighted me when he came home, and of course immediately noticed each thing that had altered. I would stand, fascinated and giddy, as he scoured each room with his eyes to find what had moved, what had been misplaced. There were a few times when he touched or moved things that I had not affected. I never told him when that happened, I figured he needed to fix it anyway. He would laugh most of the time, treating it like some sort of scavenger hunt, like my way of saying welcome home, I missed you. It was all very playful, childish, ridiculous.
As the months wore on things became more particular. The pans and baking dishes had to be placed in a certain order, and he could tell by their sound if it was right. I was no longer allowed to do the dishes, as he could no longer be assured that they would be clean. Sometimes loads of laundry or plates would have to be done twice, to be absolute on their sterility. The sink was washed after each use, as was the stove and the counters. The napkin holder always held fifteen napkins, and I was wise to replace the ones that I used.
That was when the counting became forceful. The walking in and out of doorways, the flicking on and off of lights. The dimmer switches in the living and dining rooms made this particularly taxing. Doors would be locked and unlocked, faucets turned on and off. Listening to the sound of the shower being turned on, his feet climbing into the tub, climbing out, and the water shutting off again, over and over again, made me regret sharing a wall.
The floors became immaculately clean, as did the television set, the constantly dusted tables, and the polished wooden chairs in the dining room which we never sat in. Our apartment smelled like the laundry detergent section at the Food Saver, combined with furniture polish and cigarette smoke. The odor of his cigarettes began to bother him more and more as he tore across the apartment with cloths and sprays, but his increased stress only drove the butts to accumulate faster and in larger numbers in the crystal ashtrays on the porch. He dumped them every evening, and cleaned them out. He kept the butts in a bag in our closet on the balcony, filling it up quickly, but never dumping it out in the dumpster. I still don't know why. The place still smells like smoke.
As the year wore on I saw him less and less, while evidence of him grew exponentially. The apartment became a spotless warzone, as every gleaming surface only became harder proof of his degrading condition. I moved the coasters one evening to the opposite end of the coffee table within easier reach. The next day they were gone, replaced by a new set. I supposed it wasn't enough anymore just to move them back. I started just holding my glasses in my hands. I started using paper plates. I started eating out more.
I tried to talk to him, the times when he wasn't locked in his room and mumbling, and he smiled and laughed like always. We joked about how clean things were, while my room remained the great and terrible mess it always had been. He joked back, sarcastically commenting on my doors always remaining closed. My room and bathroom remained in the state they had always been. You could barely see the floor in my room, for papers, art supplies, clothing, record albums and books. My bed was unmade, my desk was unkept, and there was a thin odor of paint thinner, charcoal pencil, and the accumulation of human filth in unwashed clothes. We laughed at how we remained roommates. We laughed.
When I arrived that Tuesday to the blue and red lights flashing outside my apartment, it was only just beginning to rain. I was thanking God that it wasn't pouring, as I had to carry two large portraits, done in charcoal that remained yet to be sealed, up to my third floor apartment. I was hoping to go up and ask my roommate what was going on, if he had seen anything. He could never resist watching some sort of drama unfold in our parking lot. He once watched a drunk girl fight with a group of her friends for nearly an hour. He couldn't be torn away.
But when I got to the third floor, and my door was open with the thick scent of smoke and ash seeping out of the doorway, I thought maybe he wasn't home. When the police and fire department asked me if he and I got along okay, if he was nice, if he ever hurt me, I answered truthfully to every question: fine, of course, he never would. They asked if I had insurance, I assured them that everything valuable I owned I had with me. My computer, my cell phone, my diary, my car keys. Everything in my room and my bathroom? Nothing but clothing and those sorts of irreplaceable things-- photos, notebooks, paintings. A police officer came out of his room with a perfectly square box, taped up on all sides. Inside it were my two shelves worth of notebooks, photos of my sister he had painstakingly removed from the walls so as not to harm them, and the box that he knew, and only he knew, contained the broken fragments of a ballerina statue I had been given by my grandfather. There was no note.
His things were out of the apartment by the next day. I saw them moving out as I came by to gather the furniture from the living room, the pots and pans from the kitchen. His parents said I could keep the washer and dryer. I wasn't allowed to see him. They took the cigarette butts out of the closet outside and asked me why they were there. I still had no idea, as I had no idea until that very moment that there were over twenty-two bags of them out there.
They also found the coasters, I saw a police officer carrying them out on top of an already sealed box. I told them they were mine. He left them. I started to tell them more of his things were mine, or belonged to other people and I would return them. They believed me each and every time, even when I thought it was getting ridiculous. I think they were tired of going through everything and having to label it, number it, and catalogue it only to return it to his stricken parents. I kept a few dress shirts of his, perfectly pressed and creased like they were still in a box. I kept eight books, none of them in anything distinguishably less than brand new condition. I kept the mouse that attached to his laptop, his sink accessories, an unopened package of mechanical pencils, and an open box of latex gloves that I never saw him use once.
They didn't find a journal, some hidden files on his computer, or a note about why or how he did it. There was no evidence of his thought pattern, and pressing me got them nowhere. They insisted that I had been his best friend for years, I must know him better than anyone. I tried to tell them that I did, but not really. Knowing him was only talking to him, smiling at him, humoring him. The extent of our friendship was that we laughed late at night about nothing, we knew the sound of each others' key in the door, and I did not move his things. I knew what upset him and I kept back from his boundaries. I knew all there was to be known. We had an understanding, but I did not understand him. We were best friends, we talked every day, but in the last weeks of our interaction, I lost him. In the last day that I ever heard from the police, I realized I knew nothing about him.
They asked me that last day if I had any idea how he could have managed to only destroy the items in two rooms and nothing in the rest of the apartment. I told them he was very particular. They had not completed their investigation of the arson at that point, they had focused on clearing the space. I found out later that the wall that I shared with his room, the doorway into the hallway, the carpet that peeked beneath it, as well as the door, wall, and floor of my bathroom that flanked the hall, had all been coated with a special flame-retardant chemical he had bought from a chemistry graduate student. He had applied it carefully, with a very small brush. They managed to detect it with some sort of dye that turned the chemical bright orange. There was a neon-orange line down the side of every ruler they found in his possession. The box that he had filled with my things glowed like hot coals in a fire.
