Deborah Makes Peace

Deborah took a red-eye to Chicago and headed straight to her appointment with the rental agency Superb Apartments! Her new gig, production managing a concert to help refugees, would boost her resume but didn’t include housing. Two hours later, none of the units she’d seen justified the business’s exclamation point. More like a period. As in Stop. Renter Beware. The smell of the latest option was enough to give her pause. Carla, the pink-suited agent, appeared to hold her breath as she explained that heat was included and there were plans to remediate the mold. Deborah offered a polite smile while in her mind smoke blew from the ears of a fistwaving homunculus.

“Have any others?”

On the drive to the next property, Carla talked up the neighborhood. “Lots of young folks. Great bars. Do you Karaoke?”

“I doubt I’ll have time,” Deborah said. She sniffed a strand of hair, worried she’d carried the apartment’s stench as a souvenir. Her first production meeting was that afternoon and she wanted to make a decent—as in non-odorous—impression. She’d gotten the job over Zoom two days earlier after the original PM, some guy named Dougie, was fired for harassment. Although inexperienced, she’d sold her skills using her own implied exclamation points. Team leader! Multi-tasker extraordinaire! The least she could do was be Prompt! That meant choosing an apartment from today’s options: a studio with fire damage; one practically on top of the El tracks; the olfactory offender; and, as the agent opened the door to the final contender, a unit with a ghost.

Deborah spotted him right away. A translucent elderly man in an undershirt and saggy pants hovering in the corner of the living room. At first Deborah thought she was imagining him—some  hallucinatory effect brought on by the mold. She blinked. Nope, still there. He must have noticed her too because he raised his arm into what appeared to be a Nazi salute.

The agent herded Deborah into the kitchen. “You’ll love the dishwasher!” she declared as if the unit also came with elves who would unload it on command. As they returned to the living room, Carla rattled off other adornments: the eight foot ceilings, free basement laundry, and, most notably, the management’s willingness to enter into a month-to-month lease.

“What about the previous tenant?” Deborah asked, as she watched the ghost pace the corner in a floaty sort of way.

“They’ve been temporary rentals. For working professionals like yourself.”

“And the last long-term tenant?”

As the agent flipped through her papers, Deborah could tell she was stalling from the way her cheek color matched her suit. Deborah offered a conciliatory wave in the ghost’s direction. He glared and raised his arm. Her skin prickled, until she remembered she had the advantage of body mass. What was the worst he could do? Flicker the lights? Chill the room? Creepy, yes, but certainly not as threatening as homelessness or draining her bank account on a hotel or Airbnb.

Truth was, other than its ethereal occupant, the apartment was perfect for her needs.

The agent cleared her throat. “It was an older resident. He passed away.”

“In the unit?”

“Well yes, but there was no foul play. He died peacefully.”

“I see.”

Deborah fixed the ghost with a stare, a cowgirl entering a duel. Although he may have experienced a peaceful death, she was being presented with an opportunity to make sure the next three months of his afterlife would be anything but.

“I’ll take it.”

During her first few weeks, Deborah found ways to taunt her roommate. She looked up Yiddish curses, played Neil Diamond, and ate bagels and lox with relish (literally and figuratively). She’d rented basic furnishings but the apartment still seemed cavernous, so one day after work she stopped by a resale shop with the goal of making herself feel less like a squatter. What, she wondered, might offend a Nazi ghost?

An end-table shellacked with dayglow prints? Check.

Rainbow quilt and peace-sign throw pillow? Check, check.

A plastic framed poster of Bob Dylan? (That one could serve as a Talisman.)

But Deborah’s roommate wasn’t without his own tactics. She experienced typical ghostly annoyances; moaning pipes, rattling windows, flickering lights. When she passed through the hall on her way to the bathroom, she felt a chill, as if the freezer door had been left ajar. The ghost also proved to be quite the propagandist, although in this case, it might have been her mind playing tricks. She saw swastikas everywhere: in the steam on the bathroom mirror, in spider webs, and even in the berries topping her yogurt cup before she vigorously stirred them in. At least the ghost seemed to stick to his corner of the living room. She imagined him spending his final years in that spot, slouched in a musty recliner, subsisting on pork rinds and hyperbolic news.