An unmarried Middle-Eastern man typically lives with his family; that is, unless he is a student (likely aged between 18 and 26).
Case closed.
It’s time to hit the streets.
I grabbed my black jacket and laced the boots. I’m not sure why, but every detective always has either a cigarette or a toothpick in their mouth.
I’ve already brushed the snags. Toothpick it is.
Most of my neighbors had their lights off. The only person I saw was a man a floor down sitting on his doorstep criss-crossed. It was an awkward position but one he was clearly comfortable in. His back was rounded over the glow of his screen and a cigarette dangled out of the center of his mouth. He didn’t look up when I passed.
1 AM: Not Gotham City
The first characters I saw were three women. They weren’t together and they were about my age.
One was wearing a sweet perfume, freshly applied. She was meeting someone. Judging by the hour, she trusts whoever she is going to meet. Judging by the amount of perfume, she hasn’t known him too long. Date number three then.
The other two were fixed on their phones and hardly noticed me pass.
Tell me, how many other cities with nearly two million inhabitants are safe enough for women to walk through at night?
This isn’t a political essay, so I shan’t expound on Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, and his policies. For those who don’t know, he has been accused of horrendous and inhumane policies, on top of the regular list of corrupt actions shared by most politicians.
Nevertheless, women feel safe here in the middle of the night.
San Francisco has less than half the population of Budapest and technically more humane policies. It’s also the closest thing I’ve seen to a Gotham City if Gotham City had no Batman.
Nothing else on the block to report on.
There was an overfed gray cat lounging in a window and a drunkard singing what sounded like a folk song.
4:30 AM: Do Androids Dream of Electric Birds?
The alarm was set for 3 AM but my sloth overpowered it. Luckily, a singing bird woke me at 4:30 AM.
The window was cracked at night because I wanted to hear what the block had to say. Largely it was the sound of engines, with an occasional bark or voice piercing through the white noise.
Later in the morning it was the beeps of a backing up construction truck, pigeons and doves cooing, my elderly neighbor’s TV, and my other neighbors cupboards shutting.
But the bird is what woke me. I’m not sure if it was the pitch or the song that made me take interest. Likely both, for the song I’d never heard and the pitch was louder than the pigeons and doves.
It was a strange tune, eerie really, though at the time I couldn’t explain why.
This was plenty to warrant an investigation. The sound was coming from somewhere inside the building’s atrium. I opened my front door and started the search.
All the neighbors were asleep except for the man I saw earlier. He was sitting in the exact same position doing the exact same thing: smoking and scrolling. This time I noticed he was ashing his cigarette into an old pickle jar.
The song was coming from the floor above. I crept up the stairs carefully so as not to spook it. I was close and the bird didn’t stop singing. My training is good, you know that, but not good enough to avoid detection from a wild animal. Perhaps this creature, like the young man one floor down, didn’t care about my presence at all.
That’s when I realized why the song was eerie. It hadn’t stopped since I first heard it!
A bird that never tilts its head as it awaits a response. A man with ears sewed shut and a mouth jammed open. A world that deprived itself of nature and makes desperate attempts to reconnect by setting their screensavers as pictures of waterfalls, buying plastic plants, and installing fake birds.
The sound streamed out of a tan box that hung crookedly above the window of apartment 77.
It took all my strength to not tear its wired jugular out and hurl it four floors down.