704
Clara Doukas moved into Apartment 704 on the first of September, 2026, carrying a cat carrier in one hand and a lamp in the other, because the movers had refused to carry anything up seven flights of stairs when the lift was out of order, and she had refused to let anyone else carry the lamp.
The lift was always out of order, as it turned out. There was a laminated sign on its door, yellowed by the sun, that said Προσωρινά εκτός λειτουργίας, temporarily out of service, and Clara would later learn from the caretaker that “temporarily” had been in effect since 2017.
She stopped on the fifth-floor landing to breathe. Through the stairwell window, Athens went on being Athens: a sea of flat concrete roofs, water tanks, satellite dishes, a laundry line with a single red towel moving in the heat, and beyond all of it, small and pale and impossibly sure of itself, the Acropolis. She had lived in this city her whole life and it still did that to her. It still looked like a thing that had been left out by accident by someone very large.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told the cat.
The cat, whose name was Aristotle because he had the look of someone who disagreed with everything, looked at her exactly like that through the grille of the carrier.
She had taken the apartment because it was cheap, which was suspicious, and because it was in Pangrati, which she loved, and because it was far enough from the flat she had shared for four years with Stavros that she would not run into him buying bread. That last reason she had not said out loud to anyone. She had told her mother it was about the rent. She had told her friend Eleni it was about the light. Neither of them believed her, and both had been kind enough not to say so.
Stavros had not done anything wrong. That was the problem. She had rehearsed the story so many times, trying to find the villain in it, and there was none. There had been no other woman, no shouting, no slammed door. There had been a long, quiet spring in which they had both noticed that dinner had become a thing they got through, and a summer evening on the balcony when he said, “Do you ever feel like we’re two people who used to know each other really well?” and she had said, “Yes,” and that was it. That was the whole ending. Four years, and it came apart with one honest sentence.
She was twenty-five and she was studying why people change. She had chosen psychology because she was curious about people, which was true, and because she wanted to understand what had happened to her parents, her grandparents, every couple she had ever watched go from holding hands to holding opinions, which was truer. Her thesis supervisor had called her topic “ambitious.” Clara had understood that to mean sad.
On the seventh floor the stairwell light was on a timer, and it clicked off just as she reached the landing. She stood in the dark with a lamp and a cat and listened to the building: the tick of cooling pipes, a television somewhere playing a quiz show, someone frying onions, the long hollow sigh of an old structure settling into evening.
Then she slapped the wall until the light came back, and there it was. Two doors, facing each other across a narrow hallway of cracked terrazzo tile. On the left, a brass numeral 703, tarnished green, hanging slightly crooked. On the right, a brand-new key sticking out of the lock of 704, which the landlord had left for her in an envelope that smelled faintly of cigarettes.
The door to 703 had no mat, no nameplate, and a thick fur of dust along the bottom edge. Someone had once hung a little ceramic evil-eye charm from the handle, and it had faded from blue to the color of old teeth.
She let Aristotle out in the new apartment. He walked once around the perimeter of the living room, inspecting each wall as if it had made a claim about him, and then sat down in the exact center of the floor and began to wash his face, which was his way of saying the place was acceptable.
704 was small and a little crooked. A single main room with a kitchenette along one wall, a bedroom just big enough for a bed and a desk, and a balcony the width of a bathtub. The walls were painted a yellow that had once been cheerful. The floors were wooden and creaked in a pattern she suspected she would learn to read like handwriting. There was a stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy, boot and all.
She unpacked until the light turned amber, then ate feta and tomatoes standing at the counter, then unpacked some more. Around ten she gave up and lay down on a mattress that still had plastic on one corner and looked at Italy on the ceiling.
She thought about nothing. She was getting good at it. It was a skill, like holding your breath.
At some point she must have slept, because she woke, and the room was black, and her phone said 11:16.
She was just about to put it face-down and go back under when she heard the music.
