Dating : The Talking Dead: A Room for Two

In October of 2010, I moved from Kolkata to New York City. I was a freshly-minted graduate from business school, and had landed a lucrative consulting job right in the heart of the world’s financial capital. I was full of hope, and was covered in the unblemished shine of the newborn and naive.

I landed in Newark airport on the first of October. It was raining heavily, almost as if Newark wanted to show me a face that would feel familiar on my first day. I had no umbrella or raincoat and was completely exposed to the elements. October in Newark felt many multiples colder than December in Kolkata. The chilly rain had wasted little time in slithering under my clothes and proceeded to freeze me to my very bones.

My transportation from Newark airport to New York City was a shared taxi service. Six of us of had piled into the car with all our stuff. I had tried to find space inside the cab, without bringing my wet clothes in contact with the other people. A woman inside the cab, sitting on the opposite seat, periodically gave me a long looks of great pity. I don’t know if it was logic or intuition that guided her, but she seemed to already know that I was ill-prepared for my introduction to life in the ‘Big Apple’.

The taxi spent two hours circling the Bronx and upper Manhattan, dropping off the other passengers, before arriving at my destination. The taxi stopped next to the kerb in front of my destination, which was about twenty blocks to the north of Central Park. Rain continued to pour heavily even as I made my way out of the cab. The woman who had earlier given me looks of pity, now helped take my forty-six kilos of luggage out of the car in the pouring rain. I had arrived, drenched to the bone, on the stoop of the building that was to be my temporary home for the next three weeks.

In line with my sworn duty to adhere to the thrifty Indian stereotype, I had booked a stay through AirBnB at a reasonably-priced room (read $75 a night for New York). The pictures of that room had looked fairly satisfactory online. But I had not been mentally prepared for the old-time charm of the building that was now before me. It had a stunning brownstone façade. The stone-crafted stoop led up to a sturdy oak front door. There were three floors and a lower level that I could see from the outside. This building had likely been built sometime in the 19th century. It looked like it had been restored at some point, though not very well. I thanked my luck that I would get to stay in what looked like a historical building for such little rent.

I rang the doorbell. My brand new landlady Regina opened the door. Regina was a large, black woman whose entire being seemed to radiate enthusiasm. All two hundred and fifty kilograms of her were wrapped in a voluminous green and yellow dress that seemed to hold no particular shape. She was tall, round, and colorful.

“You’re late,” were the first words Regina greeted me with.

“Yes this is true,” were the first words I greeted Regina with.

“I stayed here an extra thirty minutes, child. All because you was late.”

“I’m sorry, Regina.” I offered, putting on my best ‘lost kitten’ expression. I had read somewhere that most Americans treated their pets better than their parents. So pretending to be a cat was the strategy I was going to adopt in order to be loved and accepted quickly in the New World.

I went back outside and dragged my dripping wet luggage all over Regina’s shiny hardwood floors. She sighed very loudly. I looked up at her and repeated my ‘sad cat’ face. It had the desired effect. Her features visibly softened at the sight of poor brown kid all alone in a new city, stubbing her toe repeatedly and clumsily on her American Tourister carry-on.

She pointed towards the kitchen. “You must be very hungry by now. Whatever you need should be available in the pantry. You can use the stove to cook your own meals. If you need any groceries call me, okay child?”

I nodded. Access to food signaled victory. My ‘lost kitty’ face was already turning out to be a masterstroke.

After I finished piling my luggage in the middle of the living room, Regina began laying out a very long list of house rules. She had assigned me room number 3. I would have the whole room to myself, but would have to share the bathroom with the resident of room number 4. She told me to lock the door whenever I left my room as there had been a few cases of theft by boarders in the past. I could do my laundry in the basement, which came equipped with a washer and dryer. I could come and go as I pleased, but Regina begged me not to bring home any pot, crack, or cigarettes. “You don’t know how much money I’ve had to spend to get that damned smell out of mah curtains.”

I assured her than I would keep her kitchen, room and bathroom clean.

This pleased her. “I don’t live in this house. I just own it and run it. But I’m telling you baby girl, you take care of this house and it will take care of you. Uh-huh” Regina wiggled her neck for emphasis.

“I will indeed.” I had no idea how the house was supposed to take care of me, but there was no reason to not humor my landlady a little.

After another ten minutes laying out more house rules, she looked at me, looked in the other room, and said, “I gotta a favor to ask you, baby girl.”

I hadn’t realized when I had become ‘baby girl’ in this transaction. “Sure. What can I do for you?” I replied.

“Could you fix my computer for me? It keeps freezin’ up every half hour and then I gotta re-start that damn thing.”

As far as Regina knew, every Indian in the US was born with a computer engineering degree in their pockets. Since it was in my DNA after all, I ran an anti-virus program on her PC and thereby improved the quality of her life substantially. Regina’s gratitude knew no bounds. She gave me her Wi-Fi password, and helped me transfer my luggage to room number 3, all the while complaining about her bad back.

Room number 3 was pink, a color that was the outright opposite of my personal aesthetic. The walls had been painted a soothing blush, the curtains were blazing hot pink and the bedsheet had roses printed on it. A queen-sized bed occupied the center of the room, with low bedside tables flanking it on either side. A floor-lamp lit up the room for now. There were no tube-lights or fans, which felt quite jarring to my Indian eyes. A crusty old television sat with its back to one corner of the room. There was a chest of drawers pushed up next to it.

I unpacked the smallest of my many bags and changed out of my wet clothes. I badly needed a hot shower and followed by a warm dinner. I managed to rush through both tasks as quickly as I could before all of my energy ran out. Humans, like mobile phones, can also run out of charge.

I logged into Regina’s Wi-Fi from my phone and dropped my mother an email to let her know that I was safe and had managed to make my way to the AirBnB. I had neither the desire nor the capacity for a long-drawn phone conversation at the moment.

Sleep came comfortably that night, without a snore or turn. I had just crossed the seven seas. Surely the depth of my sleep needed to match the length of my day. This was the super-hard, double dose of sleep that comes visiting when one arrives to a comfortable bed after a very long and arduous journey.

************

I had exactly one day, a Sunday, to establish rudimentary familiarity with my neighborhood and the subway system that connected Manhattan. I adjusted my sleep cycle, did some laundry and took the train down to mid-town Manhattan in a bid to time my commute to work. The whole journey from the AirbnB to my office took me just twenty minutes. Satisfied that I was well-set to begin my first week at work, I spend whatever little was left of my Sunday getting in touch with family and friends.

Management consulting firms, like most other modern-day corporate organizations, put every fresh employee through an induction program. These may last from anywhere between two days to a month. My new employers had deigned that a week’s worth of introductions would be enough to start off the five of us who were joining them at the time. Even though it was a small firm, they had a well-oiled employee induction system in place. Attrition rates were high, and there was an induction week going on for some new hire at any given point in time.

Monday began with introductions to other people in the office and trailed off into trainings. The training programs spilled over into Tuesday and trained their way through all the way to Friday. Every day of that week ended in an unnecessarily long and exhausting dinner with some senior person in the firm. All five of us put up façades of great sincerity and good humor through those three hour dinners. And so, all of my energy reserves were completely drained by the time I commuted back to the AirBnB. I would unlock the door to room number 3 and almost immediately crash into my pillow with the force of a WWE wrestler doing a body-slam move.

On Friday night, for the very first time that week, my entire evening was free. The senior leadership at the firm had picked Friday as the one day in the week that they would have dinner with their own families, and not with a client or employee. Being the young and hot-blooded immigrant that I was, I seized my first night off with both hands, and decided that I absolutely must… stay home.

On my way back from office that evening, I had picked up a pepperoni pizza from Anthony’s Greek Pizza around the corner. I considered pepperoni pizza to be the absolute epitome of American food. I had arrived at that conclusion from years of watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in my school days.

Red pyjamas were finally out, and the gray pant-suit folded up. I hooked up my newly-provided company laptop to Regina’s Wi-Fi. But soon, I realized that downloading illegal torrents on the company laptop might not be the wisest course of action. I decided that I should instead watch some regular American TV. I found te TV switch and the remote and switched on the ancient television set in room number 3 for the first time in my six days there. The default channel was showing a crime series called CSI Miami — a genre I enjoyed. And thus, pizza on the bed, the TV blaring Horatio Caine one-liners from CSI Miami, I settled down to my first meal of my choice in New York City. I stared at my pizza slice. On TV, Horatio Caine squinted into the sun. He put on his sunglasses, and said a snappy dialogue with both a murder reference and a pun. This was America at its cheesy finest.

Twenty-five minutes into the mysterious murder of a particularly wealthy drug lord, the channel suddenly changed. The TV screen was now showing to ESPN’s telecast of an American college football match.

I looked for the remote under my thigh. We’ve all had those butt-dial, or in this case, butt-channel changing moments. I was sure this was one of those. But the remote was nowhere under me. I had placed it a safe half-a-foot in front of me.

Maybe the channel changed by itself, I thought with a shrug. I put down the pizza slice, wiped the grease off my hands, and changed the channel back to CSI Miami.

30 seconds. That was the period of time that elapsed before the screen went blank.

I was not completely sure what to feel this time. The remote was placed inches in from me, untouched. Multiple questions flitted through my mind very quickly.

And then, the TV began to make a sound. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing. The TV screen was back to ESPN and its telecast of that sport Americans call football. Whatever was on the TV screen was nothing like the football that the rest of the world knows. There were teams of huge rhino-sized men on the screen, trying to gouge each other to death over a weirdly-shaped ball.

I sat on the sagging queen-sized mattress for a few minutes, wondering what had just happened with the blank screen and changing channel. After eliminating multiple possibilities, one explanation seemed to make sense: the TV in room number 3 must have picked up a signal from the room next door.

I thought about it for a second, and got up from the bed. I had to know for sure what was happening. My curiosity was a great strength at the workplace, but it also did not let me rest until I found answers and explanations. I opened my door and gently tiptoed down the hall. I knocked on the door of room number 4.

There was no answer. I knocked again.

After about six knocks, I realized that it was just after 10pm, which was late by American domestic standards. I decided to give up and go back to my room.

Just then, the door opened a crack. A blonde woman in her mid-30s had opened the door. Her hair was tousled, and she was dressed in pajamas. She looked exhausted and sleepy. But most of all, she looked decidedly angry.

“Hi.” I offered in what I thought was a suitably apologetic ‘lost kitty’ tone, the same one that had worked with Regina. “I think my TV has been catching signals from your remote.”

“I don’t think so,” said the angry woman. “I was sleeping right now, until you woke me up. And I don’t tend to change TV channels while I’m asleep.”

I apologized and shuffled back into room number 3, still puzzled over the mystery of the changing channel.

Why did the TV change channels? I wondered. Did it not like my choice of TV programs?

There was one more possibility left. Perhaps the TV in room number 3 had caught signals from a neighbor’s remote, from the building behind this one. I opened up the hot pink curtains to check what lay beyond. It turned out that my neighbor on the other side of the window was just a scarcely populated parking lot.

I did not switch on the TV again that night. I had had enough excitement for one night and decided to go to bed instead. I slipped inside the covers and closed my eyes. Sleep did not come easily. Two questions began competing for my attention: Who had murdered the drug-lord on CSI Miami? What kind of people liked American football so much that they forced everyone around them to watch it as well?

********

The weekend passed as first weekends in New York City should: with a great amount of activity. There were sights to be seen, and touristy things to do before I could earn the privilege of considering myself a resident New Yorker, and shrugging my shoulders at the real tourists. I ate hotdogs from Bangladeshi vendors in Central Park, sang karaoke in Korea Town, ate Ethiopian food in the West village. Oddly enough, all of these things were considered very American things to do. This flurry of activity meant that I arrived home dog-tired on both Saturday and Sunday.

On Monday night, I managed to get home much earlier than any dutiful new employee should. I left my office in mid-town Manhattan by 8pm. I had decided that tonight was the night Regina’s kitchen would experience my deep culinary expertise for the very first time. It was another matter than I myself would also be experiencing my deep culinary expertise for the very first time.

After pottering around in that unfamiliar kitchen for some time, I did manage to surprise myself with an edible dish of pasta in red sauce. And so I settled in front of the TV, with my self-made dinner perched on my pyjama-clad lap. I tuned into HBO to a find series that was somewhat familiar to my Star world watching Indian palate — Dexter, that do-gooding serial killer who metes out vigilante justice and endlessly titillates the audience about getting caught. I finished my dinner and was about 45 minutes into the episode when the channel changed.

This was right at the part where Dexter was about to kill his victim in that week’s episode. This time the channel did not change to ESPN. This time the channel changed to Rihanna belting out, “Like I’m the only Girl in the World.”

This time I was mentally prepared. The remote was next to me. I wanted to finish my episode in peace. So I nonchalantly changed the channel back to Dexter.

30 seconds later, the TV responded by nonchalantly changing the channel back to Rihanna. She was going “The only one that you’ll ever love.”

I changed the channel again. The TV changed it back.

I held the button down for 10 seconds. The TV screen did a flickery dance between Dexter killing some plastic-wrapped bad guy and Rihanna shaking her booty– like some internal, fight for the signal, the digital version of good and evil fighting for a person’s soul.

I gave up. The channel rested on Rihanna’s booty before I switched off the television. I was furious. If I wasn’t watching Dexter on TV, then nobody was going be watching anything.

Frustrated, I looked towards my phone. There were multiple unanswered messages, which quickly pulled my attention away from the strange event that had just taken place. Maybe I didn’t want to focus on the unsettling nature of what had just taken place. Maybe my mind wanted to seek comfort in ignoring the mystery of the changing channels. Whatever it was, I found myself engrossed in making a few calls to family members and friends. My mind simply let go of the question that it did not want to ask: why was the channel changing?

After an hour, I switched off all the lights in the room, put my phone on charge and lay down to sleep. Sleep came quickly that night. My mind really did want to shut down.

I woke up abruptly at 3am, to find the room freezing cold. A harsh drop in temperature had stirred me out of sleep. I was shivering under the heavy blanket. I sat up.

It took me a second to realize that the lights in the room were on. The sheer intensity of lighting wounded my bleary eyes. My pupils took a few moments to dilate fully. The floor lamp burned with the intensity of the afternoon sun, illuminating every corner of the room, scorching every shadow. Even the plug-in night lamp was on, feebly contributing to the flood of brightness in the tiny room.

My mind struggled to process the strange contrast of this flood-lit, cold-storage of a room. I could see my breath fog up. Every exhalation from my lungs had a smoky white clarity, like the exhaust of a well-maintained car.

I removed the blanket from my body. The cold assaulted my limbs afresh. I slid out of bed and switched off the floor-lamp. The night-lamp glowed red in response. I walked across the room and switched that off too.

I slid back into bed, praying that the cold would go away on its own. I buried myself under the bedsheet, with the blanket serving as a second cover. My last thoughts before drifting back to sleep was, Did I really forget to switch off the lights before going to bed? Wow, New York really does get cold huh.

*******

My first project allocation arrived on Tuesday morning. For the next three months, I would be building an unnecessarily complicated statistical model. This model would help a bunch of traders price their products more accurately. It was the perfect project for someone who wanted to hide away behind a desk and have little to no interaction with other human beings. Unfortunately, that was not me. I felt a little miffed that my new employers seemed to see me only as someone who had ability with numbers. I kept getting the feeling that they did not feel comfortable putting me in front of clients. However, I brushed this feeling aside. New employees should be willing to adjust. New immigrants should not expect to be accepted so quickly.

I began working in earnest. For the next few days, I would back stay late in the office working on my model. I could order-in dinner and wouldn’t have to bother with cooking. Staying back late also meant that I could expense that dinner on the client’s account. This wasn’t simply an action coming from my Indian thrift. Our entire team of 20-something single, overworked and overweight consultants would follow the same protocol. I would then go back to the AirBnB and crash as early as I could. These thirteen-hour work days would drain every ounce of energy in my system.

It was a few days before I could get an evening to myself. On Friday night, I came home around 8pm, dinner in hand. The weariness of the week called for me to take a breath before I could let my hair loose over the weekend. I quickly took a hot shower, changed into pajamas and settled down in front of the TV, much like the week before.

I had not forgotten about the changing channels. It had merely been pushed to back of my mind by a new and demanding work environment. A plan for dealing with the situation had slowing come to form while I was in the shower. I was going to watch whatever I wanted to and I was going to fix the issue once and for all.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes into an episode of Suits, the channel changed. I immediately called Regina from my mobile phone.

“Hello! Who is it?” demanded the cheerful voice on the other side. It seems that Regina had not bothered to save my number.

“It’s me Regina. Your tenant in room number 3.” I thought my complicated Indian name might not be the right identifier for her.

“Room number 3, right. That’s right. Which buildin’ you in, sweetie?” I did not know that Regina ran multiple establishments. She seemed to be quite the entrepreneur.

“The brownstone on 7th Avenue. In Harlem.”

“Yes yes, that’s right baby girl. You was the one who fixed my computer for me. Tell me, what can I do for you?”

“I think there’s a problem with the TV in my room.” I said in my most helpless ‘lost kitty’ tone. “The channel changes even when I haven’t pressed a button on the remote.”

“What you say baby girl?” She sounded like she had understood me perfectly, but just wanted me to repeat the statement anyway.

“There’s a problem with the TV in room number three.” I repeated slowly. “The channel has been changing by itself.”

“Uh huh.”

This was getting very frustrating. I tried a different approach. “Does the TV share a connection or shared cable with any of the other rooms?”

“There’s no such thing baby girl. You have your own set-top box for cable right there in your room. Look below the TV.”

Yes, it was there. Right under the TV, like she said.

“Would you do something to fix the issue?” I finally asked her directly.

Regina paused cleared her throat before speaking. “Of course. I’ll send my daughter over tomorrow around noon to take a look.”

I was supposed to be out seeing potential rooms for me to live in more permanently the next day. “I’m not going to be in the room at noon. Can she come by in the evening?”

Regina sounded oddly delighted by the scheduling problem. “Oh no. She can’t come in the evening.”

“Okay, How about Sunday?”

“Oh no. She can’t come Sunday. We gotta go to church baby girl.”

“When can she come, if not tomorrow afternoon?”

“Monday afternoon. She’ll come by to clean the house as usual.”

“But I won’t be there on Monday afternoon. I need to go to work.”

“Don’t we all darling, don’t we all.”

This was turning out to be an odd and difficult conversation. Regina seemed to derive some sort of peculiar joy in giving me the most obscure responses. “Can someone come by to take a look after 6pm on any day next week?”

“Oh lord. Let me see. I’ll give you a call if one of us is able to drop by. Is that all right?”

I reluctantly accepted the offer. I shouldn’t have expected better service for the bottom-of-the-barrel day rate that I was paying her anyway.

But I still had no explanation for why the TV had decided that I should watch the New York Knicks instead of Suits. I tried watching my show of choice again. But the TV had made up its mind. I begged and pleaded with the recall button on the remote quite a bit before giving up.

I switched off the TV and the floor lamp and went to sleep, having just lost the battle of the channels.

3am. I woke up to find all the lights in the room switched on to full intensity- for some reason, it felt even brighter than the incident last week. The floor lamp was on highest brightness and the night lamp looked like it was about to burst. My door was shut. I had been locking from the inside every night. Once again, my room felt like the inside of a freezer. I could see my breath fog up. Room number 3 seemed to have drawn up an unspoken agreement without consulting me in the least, and the agreement states that if I messed with the TV, it would mess with my sleep.

This realization made me angry. No, not frightened. I was very angry. The rude jolt of being woken up like that had dispelled all fear from my system. My mind was too fogged up and tired to seek out explanations anymore. I wanted to fight. I yelled out into the dead, cold night, “Shut up!”

No reply came. If it had, I would’ve probably been shaken into the sanity of a fear response. Instead the silence only fomented my anger even more.

I crawled out of bed and in my childish anger, yanked out the plug of the floor lamp, then yanked out the plug of the night light, got back under the warm covers and dozed off.

*******

I woke up with a start at 8.30am. The events of last night felt like a distant dream. I wasn’t fully convinced if they had even happened.

That weekend, I had made plans for a fun Saturday in the cesspool called Jersey City. I was planning to live across the river, mostly to save on those pesky New York City taxes and that steep New York City rent. I wanted to inspect the localities across the Hudson river and their connectivity to my office before I took a final call to look for a room there. I had asked my cousin, who lived in Jersey City with her husband, to take me around the place. I certainly couldn’t be trusted to go to New Jersey without adult supervision.

My cousin was a high-organized, calm and almost saintly woman in her early 30s. She had offered her house as temporary accommodation the very day that she heard I would be moving to New York. But I knew my cousin’s habits. She was neat, orderly and existed according to a schedule. I was young and wanted to avoid the pressure of having to follow that schedule outside of all office house. I loved the idea of gallivanting around the city in my precious free time and had wanted to spend some time at least in Manhattan. And so, I had refused her offer of providing accommodation to me while Ii looked for a house, but I did take her up on the offer to show me around Jersey City and help me look for my own place. We had agreed to meet at 9.30 am at the Grove Street subway station on Saturday morning. This meant that I had to wake up by 8am to be there on time. I was already running half an hour late.

I kicked into panic mode. I was going to be late for my adult-supervised tour of Jersey City, with the most punctual human being I know in real life. I dropped my cousin a quick text message to meet at 10am instead and gathered up my toiletries. Then, I locked my door from the outside and dived into the shared bathroom on the first floor.

I emerged, squeaky clean and all shiny. I unlocked the door to room number 3 and stepped in. It was 9am. New York City was bathed in broad daylight, outside my cramped and dark room that is. But wait. Something was different.

The room was in the same mess I had left it. My suitcase was open. The bed cover was pulled back and the blanket a crumpled mess. My phone plugged into the charger. Everything was undisturbed. The door was exactly as I had left it. No one had been in here.

But this was not the dark room that I had left. All the lights were on. The plugs had been put back in their sockets. The room was freezing once again.

The toiletries fell from my arms. I stood transfixed while my mind processed what my eyes were seeing.

And it was at that moment, recollecting fully well how I had angrily yanked out the plugs from their sockets at 3am the previous night, it finally hit me. I had not been dreaming about the 3am wake-up calls. I had been ignoring reality. There was something very strange going on in here and it had been going on for some time now. Someone, or something had been with me in that room all this while. It loved sports, and Rihanna, liked things very cold, and insisted that I wake up at 3am every night. It had been waiting, watching and toying with me.

I threw the towel on the bed, grabbed my shoes, keys, my phone, my wallet and an overcoat with the speed of a superhero and rushed out of the room. I finished getting dressed in the living room. My hands shook as I struggled to put on my shoes. I fumbled with the buttons on the overcoat. I couldn’t even turn my head around to steal one last glance at room number 3.

After I finished getting dressed, I gathered the last dregs of my courage and walked up to the door of room number 3. I locked it from the outside and exhaled. And then I heard something. There was faint laughter coming from inside the room. The hair on my arms stood up.

I dropped the keys. I then grabbed them from the floor and ran through the living room, down the stone stoop and out of the old brownstone house on 7th avenue.

I stood there on the sidewalk, panting for breath, trying to pacify my panic. One thought raced through my mind, like a train without any stops. I couldn’t tell anyone about this. I wouldn’t tell anyone about this. They would think I was crazy.

*******

I reached Grove Street station at 9.30, earlier than I had thought I would. I found a Dunkin Donuts nearby, grabbed a cup of coffee and waited for my cousin to arrive. I had skipped breakfast but my stomach was in no place to accept anything, given how much it was churning at that time.

My cousin arrived sharp at 10 and we continued with our day as planned. I wore a mask of normalcy very well. We chatted about my work. She scolded me for not meeting her sooner. We walked through three different neighborhoods, and she told me about the pros and cons of living in each one. We stopped by at her house for a long lunch. And in the evening, we strolled along the promenade that bordered the Hudson river, offering us an iconic view of the sun setting over Manhattan.

As the sun began to set, the dread of return to room number 3 began to surface. I couldn’t go back there. The events of that morning has unleashed such panic in me that I was unable to think about this rationally. The residue of cold crawling terror was still in my system.

So I asked my cousin if I could stay with her that weekend instead.

She smiled. “Will you be able to survive that long without your laptop?”

I agreed that I would have to try. My cousin was rather pleased. I ended up staying at her house till Monday morning.

I crawled back to the Airbnb on Monday morning, sharp at 8. I need to change into formal clothes and pick up my laptop before going in to work. A chilly October wind whistled down the street as I walked from the subway station, up to the brownstone house. I opened the front door.

The house was silent. All my fellow occupants seemed to be asleep. With a lot of trepidation, I opened the door to room number 3. The room was exactly as I had left it, mess on the bed and lights switched on.

I left the lights alone and picked up the stuff that I needed to get through the day. I had planned to come back later that evening and pick up one of the suitcases. I would go live with my cousin for the rest of the week. She thought my change of heart had happened because I missed home. I allowed her to believe this because the truth was far harder to explain. I, for one, did not yet have a satisfactory explanation myself.

Nothing disturbed me as I went about my short business inside room number 3. I was very careful to not switch on the TV. It seemed like whenever the TV was involved, the lighting issues followed. If I didn’t mess with the remote, everyone was happy, calm, and even allowed the lights to stay as they were. I left for the office shortly afterwards. I had had no further interactions with whatever lived in that room. It also meant that I had experienced no further events to help me understand what had happened before.

My day the office was laden with anxiety. I found myself analyzing the situation again and again. Now that my mind had acknowledged that something was wrong with room number 3, it was overcome with the desire to understand what exactly was living there. It almost felt like the room had started turning on the lights and changing the channels because I was like a persistent guest who wasn’t taking a hint to leave. It had done whatever it could to make me feel unwelcome but not physically harm me. I wondered if that would be the next step if I didn’t take the hint. If room number 3 had wanted to threaten me into leaving, it had certainly done a good job.

On the other hand, I found myself struggling to vacate the room. I had paid upfront for three weeks of stay in that room. This was to give me enough leeway to find more permanent accommodations for myself. I couldn’t just up and leave, and sacrifice all of that money. I also craved a rational explanation for what had transpired in that room.

I decided that I would move to my cousin’s place that night, putting myself out of harm’s way until I figured out what was happening. And the only way to figure that out, without continuing to live in room number 3, was to demand an explanation from Regina.

*****

I reached Jersey City late on Monday night, around 10pm. My anxiety during the entire day had resulted in significantly lowered efficiency and spread out work. It was too late and I had very little fight left in me for that call with Regina. I managed to call her on Tuesday instead.

She picked up after a couple of rings. “Baby girl, that’s you from the brownstone in Harlem calling?”

“Yes. It’s me Regina…”

She cut in before I could finish. “I sent my daughter there yesterday but you was not there. She could not open your door without that key. How we be solving your problems if you not there?”

I steeled myself. “You told me that you would call and let me know before you sent someone over.”

“Oh yes. That I did.” Regina was a bit sheepish now.

“Listen I’m not calling to talk about fixing that problem with the TV. I need to talk to you about what’s going on in that room.”

There was silence on the line.

“There’s something wrong with that room.” I heard myself say it out loud for the first time.

“What’s wrong with that room!” she sounded belligerent now.

I took a breath. “There’s something in that room. It’s not a normal room. Stuff keep happening.”

“What stuff?” Regina’s tone was no longer belligerent, but it sounded like she would only acknowledge the problem if I acknowledged it fully first.

“That TV thing… the channel changing by itself. I told you about it. But there’s more. The lights keep turning on by themselves… and I heard…”

“Oh shush baby girl,” Regina cut me off again. She was talking in a hushed tone now. “Don’t talk about it. It gets worse if you talk about it.”

“Then why’d you make me talk about it…”

“Hush baby girl. It can hear you.”

“I’m not calling you from the room. I’ve moved to my cousin’s place in Jersey City for now.”

Regina sighed.

I understood. She had known all along. She had put me in that room hoping that whatever was in there wouldn’t cause me any problems. She kept trying to make it work and extend my stay. At the end of the day, even a haunted room was money.

“What’s in there Regina?”

“I ain’t talking about it.”

I would never get a clear explanation. So I tried getting whatever else I could instead. “You need to give me my money back. I’m not going to ask you for the money for the time I’ve already lived there. But I need a refund for the rest of the time that I won’t be staying.”

“I am not giving you your money back. You have to understand, I need that money”

“I understand but you need to understand that you’re ripping people off by putting that room up for rent. You know you shouldn’t be doing that.”

“Don’t you lecture me about morality. I need to make my business work!”

I had clearly hit a nerve. I paused and considered my options. “Refund my money or I’m going to write a really bad review for you on the website.” This was the irate consumer’s ultimate threat to a small business in the digital age.

Regina considered my threat. “And if I refund your money, then you won’t be talking shit about that room to anyone.”

I sighed. If I didn’t say anything then there would be other unsuspecting guests like me in the future. It was a hard choice.

“Deal,” I said.

I moved all my luggage out of the 7th avenue brownstone on Wednesday evening.

The next Saturday, I moved into an airy, sunlight-filled room in Jersey City that overlooked the Hudson River and gave me a stunning view. The rent felt steep to my thrifty belief systems, but I was fairly certain that no ghost could afford to move into this place. In any case, a self-respecting spirit of New York would consider it an insult to move all the way across the river, here with me.

Regina duly transferred my refund in a few days’ time. As part of our deal, I had agreed to not talk about the events or ask her any questions. I never figured out who or what had been my first roommate in New York City.

Over time, I have come to accept the gnawing burden of this answered question. Of course, there is a price that I’ve paid. Sometimes I find myself inching out of sleep for a brief moment in the middle of the night to check if the lights are off. Once in a while, I find the hair at the back of my neck rise if the temperature dips too quickly. And as for the TV channel, I can’t help but appreciate the streaming platforms available on multiple screens, that have freed us from the fight over which TV channel to watch tonight.