Concierge

Concierge

The Loge

I watch her on the intercom screen, the stranger at the gate. What can she be doing here? She rings the buzzer again. She must be lost. I know, just from looking at her, that she has no business being here. Except she seems certain that this is the place she wants, so determined. Now she looks into the lens. I will not let her in. I cannot.

I am the gatekeeper of this building. Sitting here in my loge: a tiny cabin in the corner of the courtyard, which would fit maybe twenty times into the apartments above me. But it is mine, at least. My private space. My home. Most people wouldn’t consider it worthy of the name. If I sit on the pull-down bed, I can touch nearly all the corners of the room at once. There is damp spreading from the ground and down from the roof and the windows don’t keep out the cold. But there are four walls. There is a place for me to put my photographs with their echoes of a life once lived, the little relics I have collected and which I hold onto when I feel most alone; the flowers I pick from the courtyard garden every other morning so there is something fresh and alive in here. This place, for all its shortcomings, represents security. Without it I have nothing.

I look again at the face on the intercom screen. As the light catches her just so I see a familiarity: the sharp line of the nose and jaw. But more than her appearance it is something about the way she moves, looks around her. A hungry, vulpine quality that reminds me of another. All the more reason not to let her in. I don’t like strangers. I don’t like change. Change has always been dangerous for me. He proved that: coming here with his questions, his charm. The man who came to live in the third-floor apartment: Benjamin Daniels. After he came here, everything changed.