Administrator

The first of Horvath’s neighbors moved away in late winter. This neighbor, an older man with an unclean white beard, gave no warning. Horvath discovered his leaving by chance, when he noticed that the old man’s door was hanging open. Entering the apartment after knocking, he found no one. The place was orderly except for the bedroom, where the closet was open and clothes lay strewn on the floor, and the small bathroom, where a cup of coffee, still warm to the touch, was sitting on the rim of the tub. Horvath told the doorman about this. The doorman already knew. The old man had left a note and included the apartment keys in the envelope. The doorman asked if Horvath wanted to keep the keys, since he lived next door. Horvath hesitated for a long time. He did not like to involve himself in the affairs of his neighbors, not least because the building was large, which meant that any problem he might encounter could expand, pullulate, assume truly nightmarish contours, infinite eyes, infinite mouths, infinite arms, like a classical Titan. The doorman frowned at his hesitation. He told Horvath that he himself had a lot to do, and at times like this, everybody had to pitch in and help out. Horvath lacked the strength to argue with the doorman and agreed to take the keys. Because a fight with a doorman also verges on the infinite with respect to time. That afternoon, Horvath checked the apartment to make sure the gas and water were off, and he turned off all the lights and cracked a window to keep the air inside fresh, then locked up. Horvath’s neighbors at the end of the hall asked about the old man, and Horvath told them the truth. He didn’t know anything. Everyone agreed that the old man was an asshole, so no one was too upset he had gone away. Horvath had not liked him much either. He had criticized Horvath (unjustly) for making noise. Then the old man had tried to get Horvath to join his crusade against the people who lived above him, whom he also accused of making too much noise. He tried to get everybody interested by leaving leaflets on doorsteps, and Horvath had heard that enough residents joined up to get the attention of the management board, but it had all come to nothing. The upstairs neighbors were not noisy, just like Horvath. All the same, Horvath felt an obligation. Not to the old man but to the building. What if a gas line started leaking? What if the toilet flooded in the night and ruined someone else’s apartment? To allay these fears, he started checking in on the old man’s apartment once or twice a week, just to make sure. A couple of weeks after he started, he found that the pipe feeding water to the sink was leaking and a biggish puddle had formed in the kitchen. The floor was a little waterlogged, and Horvath, who had worked as a plumber’s assistant in his youth, wanted to check with the old man’s downstairs neighbors to make sure that their kitchen ceiling was not dripping. When he got downstairs, he found that the residents, a husband and wife, were getting ready to leave. The husband was carrying their baby on his shoulder and lugging suitcases out into the hallway with his free hand, while the wife was adjusting the limp straps of a blue car seat, pulling and pulling at them, though they did not give. Before he could say anything, the wife looked up from her pulling and said they were sorry but they had to head out. They did not know when they would be back. She’d heard that Horvath had the old man’s keys — would he mind taking theirs too, just in case? She did not always trust those doormen. Horvath did not want these keys either. He took them anyway. You can’t say no to people in a moment like that unless you are some kind of Greek hero, striding beyond all boundaries. Horvath now had two apartments to watch over. The first one was annoying because the plumber kept rescheduling his visit and Horvath had to deal with the leak by using a bucket that needed changing every few days. The second caused no such problems, but Horvath disliked it because he disliked the inane expressions that the husband and wife wore in the numerous photographs on the walls, and the inane expression that he could see already developing in the eyes of their child. A week after they left, someone came knocking on Horvath’s door at six in the morning. It was another young husband, his wife standing behind him. She had tears in her eyes. The husband muttered something about the doormen and about looking after things, just for a while, and then in a voice lower still, he offered Horvath money. Horvath asked him to speak up. The young husband repeated his offer, and Horvath accepted it. The crying wife stopped crying, and her face hardened. The young husband handed over a grimy stack of bills. Horvath threw the money away as soon as he was inside, then hung the new set of keys up next to the other two sets he was responsible for. (He jury-rigged a pegboard by hammering a few nails into a clear space on his vestibule wall.) Their apartment, H3, was a real shithole. The young husband and wife had seemed well dressed and clean, but they lived in filth. Grayish gruel filled up the metal drain guards in their kitchen sink. Towels, still wet, lay in heaps on the floor. Shut in a closet, crying away, was a tiny, filthy gray kitten. She had no food or drink, and her litter box made Horvath’s eyes water. First, Horvath took the kitten up to his own apartment and cleaned her off. Then he went back down and threw out everything he could pick up in the third apartment — pillows, forks, everything. It looked better when he had finished. He found a few unused bags of litter and food and made the kitten comfortable in his own place, with a makeshift bed near the hissing radiator. He told the doorman about the keys and the kitten, and the doorman said you could never trust these fancy new owners. The doorman must have mentioned Horvath’s name to others in passing, because the stream of visitors increased: people from other floors, people he had never met, people who had nothing to do with the three apartments he was currently “watching over.” At first they arrived with stories and apologies, explained why they were leaving, told Horvath it would only be for a short while. They all wore masklike expressions while telling these stories. Soon, visitors started knocking on Horvath’s door, their faces already rigid, and handing him the keys without a word, just a piece of paper giving the apartment number. None of this bothered Horvath. He earned his living as a translator of technical documents, so his work had not been much affected. He was, now and always, free to accomplish it on his own time. Being woken up at night or early in the morning by residents abandoning the building was not a real inconvenience. No, the only true offense was that fecal, frozen expression on his neighbors’ faces. Horvath had never seen anything like it. Luckily, by the end of the first month, the visits had stopped. Horvath would wake to find, slipped under his door, envelopes containing keys, apartment numbers, and sometimes money. The money he always kept. He felt foolish for having thrown away the money from the cat owners. The new money was not much, but it was enough to pay for cat food and litter. The kitten was growing nicely; she was lean and strong now, with glossy fur and green eyes. One night, during a blizzard, Horvath counted the apartments he had been “given”: thirty-seven, out of one hundred total. His whole floor, except the unit at the opposite end, was now under his supervision, as was an entire other floor: the sixth. The stream of departing residents thinned for a while. Whenever Horvath passed the doorman on the way to the laundry room, the doorman always asked how his new “job” was going, and Horvath always answered that it was going well. Because it was. Horvath had checked each apartment. Nothing major was wrong. The fact that nothing major was wrong allowed him to spend a bit more time exploring. The gray kitten came with him. She liked to jump around as Horvath looked through the kitchen cabinets and closets and examined the furniture and books on the shelves. Sometimes the other residents on whatever floor he happened to be “inspecting” came out and glared at him. In such cases he jingled the keys he’d received until whoever it was went back inside. The other residents got used to him within three weeks, and these glares stopped. A few more residents, including some former glarers, interrupted Horvath on his rounds and gave him their keys; they all said he seemed responsible. Soon he had forty; soon, fifty. The floors below and above him: all empty. He was not worried about the holdouts. If they wanted to stay, let them stay. Since he knew nothing about them, they, in a real sense, failed to exist. Besides, he had material concerns to think about. The floors two below and two above were starting to go his way. He focused his rounds there and came up with the idea of knocking on the doors behind which people still lived, after dinner but well before anyone would be asleep. The residents seemed to know what he had come for. They either said, “No, not yet, we’ll let you know,” or they said, “As it happens, we are leaving,” and gave him the keys. He had so many now that he kept them all on a real pegboard he’d ordered so he wouldn’t have to hammer more nails into his vestibule wall. Each had a label indicating which apartment it belonged to. He kept this pegboard on the wall across from his bed, and every night as he fell asleep, he stared at it. The keys all had expressions, just like their owners. In some cases the same, in some cases different. If you don’t believe that objects wear human expressions, then you know nothing about objects or about human expressions. The key set in the upper rightmost corner — 2C — wore the expression of a syphilitic prince examining his princely chancre. 4H looked like a history professor, with the vacant, thunderous forehead that characterizes the academic class. Others resembled grocers who collaborated with secret policemen, harpists taking long pisses, tax collectors felled by the blow of a peasant’s blue, greasy hatchet. Yes, yes, it all sounds “crazy.” You have never been in the situation Horvath found himself in, however. He liked to watch these faces from his bed, and contemplating their strange variety never failed to help calm him and ease him into sleep. He extended his rounds to the remaining floors with greater confidence. He knocked more boldly and smiled into the faces of the residents when they opened their doors. Some still told him: “Not yet.” Sometimes they smiled back, and sometimes they looked frightened. One couple, oldsters, even whined at Horvath. They begged him to come back and said, “Please, please don’t kick us out — we have nowhere else to go.” Horvath was so shocked that he laughed in their faces, then apologized. He explained that he was not an agent of eviction. But the oldsters went on whining, and the husband actually began to cry, and they said once more that they had nowhere else. Why was he kicking them out, of all people? All along the floor, they said, were younger and healthier people. At this point, Horvath tried to leave, but the old woman detained him. Into his hand she put an envelope, open so that the money inside was visible, and told him that 9B was up to no good, that they had always been unreliable, and that they were planning to leave without paying any rent. Horvath tore his arm away from her cold, shaking grip and headed back to his apartment. He felt dizzy, semi-ill, and the cold stars looked down through the window, and the cold keys looked from the pegboard, for they looked at him just as he looked at them. The envelope stayed on his counter for days before he made up his mind to spend the money, and when the residents of 9B gave him their keys, he found that they were two chubby, almost identical men, smiling and largely silent, incapable of anything close to what the old woman had suggested. But the old woman was gone, her husband too, and nothing could be done to reproach them. The keys came faster and faster after this, it seemed to Horvath. He had almost seventy-five in his possession. More than six floors had fallen under his “administration.” All of this had happened by a simple, subtle, and external process. He dreamed about the apartments under his “administration.” Making his rounds now consumed much of the evening, and he only finished shortly before his customary bedtime. He dreamed about each apartment individually. He was present, walking around, looking at the books, the towels, the dishes, the toys. Sometimes the previous residents were there, sometimes not. Sometimes they spoke to him. Sometimes they ignored him. Sometimes he carried a large key ring with him. Other times it was an old-fashioned hide briefcase. In still other dreams, he wore the keys on silver-plated chains around his neck, and their weight was what dragged him back to wakefulness. These dreams left him well rested, no matter how long they went on and how intricate they were. He was able to attend to his technical translations with more clarity and vigor. More jobs had come in while the residents were leaving: demands to translate medical documents and operating instructions for sanitary technology. Horvath had never paid attention to the content of his translations, and he paid even less attention now. He only wanted to finish as soon as possible so that he could make his rounds with a clear conscience. He regularly met members of the building staff who had come looking for him: the superintendent and his mechanical team, the mail clerk, the security guy for the storage rooms, and the three junior doormen. They wanted to give him their spare keys — to make sure no one else got their hands on them if they, too, had to leave suddenly. The only building staff member who refused to acknowledge Horvath was the head doorman. Before, they had been on friendly terms. Maybe he thought Horvath was using the “outside circumstances” to steal his authority. Maybe he imagined Horvath was collecting tips that, by rights, should have been his. Whatever it was, he refused to speak to Horvath whenever Horvath crossed the lobby, staring instead at the white walls and the building’s doors, which now almost never opened or closed. Horvath tried to explain that everything had happened without his willing it. No luck. The senior doorman would ignore whatever Horvath said. Horvath was not ashamed of haranguing this man. Almost no one came to the lobby except to abandon their apartments. It was the two of them alone. Horvath yelled at the doorman, accused him of insane and conspiratorial thinking, and at last gave up in disgust. If people refused to accept the new circumstances, that was not Horvath’s fault. He had more important issues to deal with — namely, the remaining residents. There were eighteen, mostly confined to the uppermost floors, except for the lone holdout on Horvath’s own floor. The uppermost floors held the penthouses. Rich people lived in them. One was even famous, a banker. Horvath knew that these residents would not rush into his arms. Most of them maintained at least one other residence on a permanent basis, which meant that abandoning an apartment was not a major act but part of the year’s natural course. Also, some of them maintained at least one full-time staff member — a “built-in” caretaker. Though Horvath could not see an immediate way to bring these apartments under his administration, he knew that one would present itself. That’s how the “pure sequence” works, as opposed to the “logical sequence.” Horvath already wandered through these apartments in his dreams. He dreamed of the banker, tall and waxen-eyed, with a mustache and beard that were (more or less) the source of his fame. He dreamed about the maid he had seen walking along the corridor with her arms full of tangled-up yellow bedsheets. One afternoon, just as he was starting his rounds, he heard a story on the radio: domestic workers were no longer permitted to work until things improved. He raced up to the banker’s apartment and found the maid by the door. She saw Horvath coming. She knew about his administration. And she handed over the keys without saying anything. Once the banker and his maid had left, the rest of the rich people soon followed, and they all dispatched their servants to bring the keys to Horvath. These servants brought money as well. Not huge sums but much more than Horvath had collected so far. Except for the maintenance staff, the doormen, and his silent neighbor, Horvath was now alone in the building. At first the thought frightened him. He had never considered this as an outcome, because he had been consumed by the idea of “administration.” And before you leap in to insult him here, let me remind you that you would have behaved the same way. That’s how it goes — when you get what you want, a huge chasm opens, and obliterating mysteries pour through it, exhalations from Styx, Cocytus, whatever. His own apartment filled with a subaqueous weight, all the other apartments pressing down on it. It made his rounds harder, too, because he now felt a rising apprehension whenever he prepared to open a door. It usually managed to drive him back out and send him running down the hall, the way he had as a child after taking the garbage down to the garbage room. The apprehension began to interfere with his “administration.” He discovered that he was delaying his rounds as long as possible. One night, tired of his own cowardice, he forced himself to sit in an apartment while the wild anxiety filled him. He felt like he was choking, like he was drowning. He could not bear it any longer, but he refused to get up; he forced himself to sit on the cold sofa and stare out the window over the ashen roofs. He was sweating. He felt as though he might vomit. And then it ended. It ended in a single instant, like a human life. Horvath stayed where he was. He got more and more tired, inhaling the stale, unfamiliar air. He ended up falling asleep on the sofa. He woke up the next morning unsure of where he was, unafraid. He made himself coffee using the press in the kitchen and drank it while he looked through the window. He opened an odorous can of food for the kitten. After that, the fear no longer afflicted him. One morning, when the hot water to his apartment’s line had been cut off, he showered in a ninth-floor apartment using a different line and shat in the toilet afterward. He discovered a set of barbells in 5J and dragged them out, as well as laid down a yoga mat from 5R. Then, each morning, he exercised for an hour in the hall — grunting, yelling, jumping around. He ran laps back and forth down the corridor, whose length he had previously calculated. Then he showered in 6J. The owners had renovated the bathroom with marble, steel fixtures, a cavernous shower. They had also left behind piled-up towels. Horvath used one and hung it up to dry before making himself tea. He reused the same towel until it began to stink, then took a fresh one. When enough towels got dirty, he carried them over to 7R, where the owners had installed a washer and dryer. 7R was also Horvath’s source for office supplies. Whoever had lived there — and he did not know them, their key had arrived in the night — had also worked from home, and he found a bedroom closet filled with paper, pens, highlighters, and binder clips. 7K, across the hall from 7R, possessed a large library. On the shelves were a number of books in the languages Horvath knew, and he would read stretched out on a leather couch that creaked and whispered under him. After his reading period, he would go and work on whatever technical translation lay before him that day. Then he would eat his lunch in 8S, 4Q, or 5L. In 8S he had discovered a closet filled with canned goods, including smoked oysters, which he had always loved. Filthy, oily flavor, yes, that was what Horvath liked. After lunch, he did more work. The texts seemed to translate themselves. The second half of his workday was a long delight because it brought him closer and closer to the prospect of his evening rounds. He worked out for another hour, showered and changed, then either went up to 8D or down to 2H for dinner. In 8D he discovered a chest freezer full of expensive steaks; in 2D he found an identical model filled with frozen squid, mussels, salmon. Wine he took from either 5L or 2I. In the latter had lived an obese bald man who had given Horvath his keys. This man carried with him a sour, stuffy smell that clung to the money he handed over. His apartment was dim at all hours because he had piled old magazines and newspapers into towers with narrow alleys between them. Following the paths, Horvath had discovered a bedroom that held only bottles of wine stored in bookshelves, on the bed, under it, and in the tub and shower of the attached bathroom. These bottles were quite old and valuable, so Horvath took his time selecting the one he wanted whenever he visited 2I. He did not go often because of the danger that the piles might fall on him. He chose the wines by the labels. He knew nothing about wine. If the label had a horse on it, so much the better, and if it was written in French, then that was good as well. After his meal, he would check in according to the schedule he had developed: one floor every day, with visits paid to all the apartments. He never found anything amiss, but these visits served to better acquaint him with where he might replenish his stores when the supplies in his current “regulars” ran out. They were also good exercise for the gray kitten, whom he brought with him so that she could broaden her horizons and see the variety with which humanity managed to live. The kitten loved the rounds. She would stalk through the empty apartments, and many evenings she killed mice or large roaches that had begun to grow bolder in the stillness. At times, Horvath would encounter the doorman during his evening rounds. The doorman always said that he was not allowed to take the kitten out into the halls, and Horvath’s retort was always that dog owners had been allowed to take their dogs through the halls. The doorman never had an answer for this, but that never stopped him from mentioning the kitten next time. You see what I mean about the power of doormen, and how it is infinitely extensive in time? But the doorman could not call the police, who were dealing with other, more pressing matters. He could not appeal to the condo’s governing board. All its members had left the building. He could not appeal to “Leviathan” (i.e., the aggregate mass of all residents whom all doormen love and hate). Horvath began to enjoy these brief, cold exchanges. He looked forward to seeing the doorman’s wide, neatly shaved face change color with anger, and to seeing the doorman stop walking and raise his thick, hairy index finger as he delivered his bodiless, spiritless reprimand. The doorman started to lose his temper each time Horvath gave that identical response. (He never varied the wording, not once.) The gray kitten went on dancing along the carpet. One evening, the doorman brought one of the junior doormen along. To “catch” Horvath. But to Horvath’s delight, the junior doorman seemed to take his side. When the boss started waving that hairy, trembling finger, and when the deep, raucous voice announced the charges against Horvath, the junior doorman sighed. He chewed his lip. He said that Horvath had a point and that there was really no need for everyone to get so excited. The doorman now began raging at the junior doorman, calling him a backbiter and a traitor. Horvath’s kitten climbed onto the vase-topped table across from the elevator doors; there was an identical table in every hall, an identical vase, an identical mirror above it reflecting another identical hall, into which your doubles might stride at any moment. The junior doorman and his boss were now going at it. The senior doorman grabbed the junior doorman by his green lapels and began to shake him. The junior doorman, his face twisted, shoved the senior doorman away. The senior doorman fell to the ground. He sat there stunned. Then he got up and charged right at Horvath. Horvath tackled him — he was a lot bigger than the doorman, younger as well — and held him on the ground as he struggled. The junior doorman told him to be careful — the old man had been like this for a while. Eventually Horvath let the doorman up. An abyss of time yawned, my god. Like hell. Like the Stygian filths. The senior doorman walked away, and the junior doorman followed him. The next morning, when Horvath went to perform his exercise routine, he found that his equipment was gone. He searched the apartments it had come from: nothing. He ran laps and did calisthenics instead. In the shower in 6J, he thought about what other bullshit the senior doorman had dreamed up. There was more, as Horvath knew there would be. Padlocks had been installed on the chest freezers in 8D and 2D and on the enormous liquor cabinets and wine racks in 5L. But the doorman lacked the courage and equipment to seal the doors, and there were plenty of other apartments that Horvath could find his lunch in. He ate some canned hash from 7I, where a young woman had lived. In searching there, Horvath had found a series of diary volumes, as well as a box of syringes and needles, a length of yellow-brown rubber tubing, and a wooden case holding a few bags of white powder. This powder had the bitter flavor of heroin on the tongue. That evening, instead of doing his rounds, he waited. Then he took the elevator in the basement and headed to the maintenance rooms. The maintenance staff (including the senior doorman) all had complementary apartments on the first floor, and they had long since gone to bed. Horvath opened the maintenance supply room and took what he needed: the only pair of bolt cutters in the closet and two new padlocks. First he locked the supply closet. Then he found the senior doorman’s unlocked supply locker and locked it shut with the second padlock. He carried the bolt cutters back upstairs and cut the padlocks from the chest freezers and liquor cabinets. He was not worried about reprisals. Hardware stores had not been open for weeks, and the doorman had no way of obtaining another pair of bolt cutters. The next day, he went on his rounds as usual. He had no replacements for the dumbbells or yoga mat, so he again did calisthenics and ran laps until he was tired. He showered in 6J and then read in 7K. While he was reading, he heard a modest tap on the door. He looked through the peephole and saw the junior doorman. The junior doorman said that things had gotten a little bit heated and he understood, but would Horvath mind helping them out? Horvath said he would be happy to if the senior doorman apologized in person. The junior doorman went and got the senior doorman. The senior doorman’s voice was shaking as he said that he was sorry. Horvath told him that he couldn’t be understood, that he was speaking too quietly, mumbling like a coward. The senior doorman made as if to lunge at Horvath, but the junior doorman restrained him. Then he repeated the apology in a hard, clear voice. Horvath handed over the bolt cutters and closed the door. That afternoon, once he had finished his work, he drank an entire bottle of brandy in silence in 5L — in the silence and stillness that precede complete intoxication, the sickening clarity of a certain intoxication that reduces each moment to a moment and destroys the “literary quality” of events. In other words, this intoxication — only achievable under certain circumstances — reveals the pure sequence and destroys the logical, temporal sequence. This is the closest human beings can come to understanding god, for whom everything exists as a single, monstrous instant. To look out over the city not “shrouded” in snow, not “covered” in snow, the city not silent and not anything else, either, because attribution cannot exist under these stony conditions, this stony light flowing down into the world and creating each object as you look at it and annihilating it as you look away — yes, my friends, only in this manner can we truly commune with god. Who doesn’t say shit. Horvath didn’t “think” any of this; it brushed past him with its wings. He went on drinking until he emptied the bottle. The gray kitten danced and leapt beside him. Horvath was still drunk when he went back to his apartment, carrying the kitten in the crook of his arm. He had trouble walking. As he reached his floor, he saw the door of the sole remaining resident, his own neighbor, open swiftly and close. He raced over. He wanted to meet this remarkable person, to congratulate them. To offer them their share of his administration. They had earned it! But no one answered his knocks or his doorbell ringing, and he heard nothing moving beyond the door when he pressed his ear to the cold metal. The next day he suffered a terrible hangover. He skipped his exercise routine and took a long shower in 6J. After the shower, he had a look through the living room windows. They looked down onto the street entrance of the building. A white van had pulled up. It was the only moving car he had seen in weeks. Four people in livery came out of the building, followed by three men in gray coveralls. The doormen and the maintenance men. They climbed into the van. The last to go was the senior doorman, who was not wearing his hat. Horvath could see a nude spot on his head amid the still youthful hair the man had kept into late middle age. The van left. Horvath watched for a while to see if the police would come. You couldn’t just drive around without a special permit. But no police came. This meant that Horvath was really alone now except for his neighbor. He went back to the door and knocked again, because he wanted to share the good news and make the resident the same offer: half his administration. Again, no answer. He went downstairs to the maintenance rooms. Just like the other residents, the doormen and maintenance staff had left everything behind. The bolt cutters were back in the supply closet. The propane grills that residents were allowed to use on the roof stood in a row in one large storage space, and piled against the opposite wall were wooden frames holding fresh tanks of propane. Horvath also found spare coveralls (freshly laundered), winter gloves, socks, work boots, and canvas work jackets. The maintenance staff and the doormen had also kept two refrigerators filled with beer. Horvath drank a can right away, even though it was still early in the morning. He drank while he stood in the hot oblong room that held the monitors for the security cameras, and he moved his eyes from one to the other. Empty, empty, empty. There was a camera aimed at the room, he saw, when the view switched to show him standing there swaying with his back to the camera. Nothing new there: heavy, awkward shoulders, scalp reddish and bare, arms dangling like those of a puppet. He tried to peer into the minor infinity extending into the monitor as it appeared on the screen. The view flashed away before he could fish anything from that ghostly, fucked-up depth. Horvath took a cart — one of ten gray canvas carts — filled to the upper edge with tools, winter clothes, and cold beer back to his apartment. He put on the boots, socks, a canvas jacket, a pair of thick gloves. Then he rode the elevator up to the penthouse floor. He had not yet explored there. He chose the banker’s apartment first. In the front room, a vase filled with dried eucalyptus leaves stood on an ebony table under a mirror. In this mirror Horvath and the kitten appeared. She leapt off his shoulder onto the table and then onto the floor. She had trouble negotiating the bare floors and skidded when she tried to stop running. Horvath tucked her into his jacket pocket and then wandered the banker’s apartment for a while. The bedrooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen — they all gleamed with a dental light. This light stuck to the knives, the plates, the toilet handle. Maybe it looks different if you are a rich man; maybe everything stares at you with welcome. Well, what did it matter to Horvath? His administration expanded beyond the bounds of even the richest man. The apartment was freezing. It had a huge terrace along one wall. Cold air was seeping in between the seams of the doors. He stepped out onto the terrace, which was covered with snow. It was the first time he had been outside in weeks. He had a high view of the city. The stores he could see were shuttered. He saw no one in the empty streets except for a small group of police officers. In the building across the way, he saw dark windows. Floor after floor. The residents had left. There was a terrace for that building’s penthouses as well. Standing on the terrace was a figure wrapped up in a long coat, with a hat and scarf. The scarf covered the face. Horvath gestured, waved his arms. The figure on the terrace waved back. The long arms went up and down. The air was fresh and bitter. It smelled like snow. And as he stood there, snow began falling. The kitten leapt out of his pocket and started hopping around on the terrace. Every time she saw a snowflake, she leapt as if in delight or fear. The snow was white and clean. The leftover snow on the sidewalks was white and clean. The snow on the roofs was white and clean. That afternoon, Horvath searched through the apartments under his administration until he found more workout equipment: a set of resistance bands, another yoga mat, and a small treadmill. He brought them all down to the sixth floor and spent two hours exercising. After his shower, he made another extensive search — he was looking for cat supplies. He took all he found and lugged it home, though he dropped some toys off on six so that the kitten could occupy herself while he worked out. He had started taking a notebook with him and marking down anything of interest in any apartment he saw. He made more detailed notes each time he did his rounds. He added maps as well, charting each apartment’s layout and the placement of objects within each room. He added more and more details every day. At first he thought he would soon exhaust the details, but it proved impossible. In fact, it was much harder to fence out the details he did not want to include. These details — objects, colors, qualities, juxtapositions — had as much right to appear in the “administrative rolls” as any other. And he would include them, he would. Not in the first edition but in future volumes. For one volume would never suffice, he saw that now. No, you had to keep going, to keep adding. To classify everything, but to classify it all with a brand-new system, a taxonomy that existed as a circle with infinite circumference and a center located nowhere. Horvath had never considered the possibilities of such diagrams, though he had worked with diagrams all throughout his professional adult life. It had taken the unusual circumstances of his administration to awaken him to their possibilities. Because his administration extended upward, downward, and across the plane; it extended in time as well, back through the pasts of each apartment and into their futures. This annihilated some categories and gave birth to others. He stopped drawing maps and started drawing diagrams. These diagrams linked various apartments, objects, classes, qualities, times, sensations. For instance, one evening he drew:

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SILVER DISH ‑‑‑>‑‑‑‑>‑‑‑‑‑‑‑> ORCHID

I won’t bother explaining this diagram beyond noting that it draws the obvious connections between these four objects: that Heidegger stands in a “yielded” relationship with certain sunsets, and the reverse is true for orchids and silver dishes, whereas there is a “degree one” proximity relation between Heidegger and silver dishes and a “degree two” proximity relation between green sunsets and orchids. Horvath did not care if anyone else understood these diagrams. They did not serve an outer purpose; they existed only for him. The trouble was that as long as one apartment remained closed to him, the diagrams, which were by their nature holographic, would always be incomplete and worthless. The knowledge of what the last resident’s apartment contained could throw the knowledge he had already accumulated into disorder. He knew how insane this sounded, and he was glad he did not have to justify himself to anyone. He wrote a short, polite letter explaining to this resident that the two of them were now alone in the building, and while they had never met before — Horvath apologized for this but also said he had wanted to be respectful of a stranger’s privacy — they should meet now because they existed, whether they liked it or not, in a relationship of mathematical precision and importance. He hesitated before finishing the letter. Whoever lived in that apartment had made it clear they were not interested in the outside world. It was likely that they possessed a large enough stockpile to simply wait everything out. Horvath was not a rude person. He hated unnecessary rudeness, and the emptiness of the building would magnify any rudeness into an unthinkable size, a host, mirror facing mirror. (Or something like that. Who knows?) Yet he put it in an envelope all the same, with an inscription from the end of a famous French novel written across the front. I am sure I do not need to tell you what it was. The kitten came with him to deliver the letter. She rode on his shoulder as he squatted down to slide it under the holdout’s door, and he felt her warm breath in his scanty hair. After that he kept to his routine. Morning workouts, afternoon meals, evening explorations. The kitten came with him. He had gotten used to having her as a companion, and he talked to her as he would to another human being — mostly about his findings, his eventual plans for the diagrams, and his thoughts about the last resident. Yet he heard nothing, saw nothing. He found himself reduced to listening at his own door for sounds suggesting that the last resident was walking around. He stared at the lip of light between his door and the sill in the hope that a letter might glide across it. He put tripled efforts into his diagrams. He knew completion was not possible, but he still made every effort, and he found that in making these efforts, he was rewarded with greater subtleties. Consider the following:

;SARDINE CANS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HERMANN CONRING?

;@?

;@?

;@?

;@?

NIRODHA — “QUENCHING OF THE LIGHTS” — FEUDAL MEDIATIZATION

?X;

?X;

?X;

?X;

?X;

ASSFUCKING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3PM

Efforts like this can only arrive when the “human mind” functions at a supersubtle, supercosmic level. Horvath reaped some reward for his efforts, as noted, but it was clear that they were ultimately futile unless he could manage to make contact with the last resident and look within their apartment. As for the counterargument that he could simply deduce what the last apartment contained by completing the rest of the diagrams and looking for the most significant lacunae, Horvath had raised and rejected it himself. A compromise, stained with shit and blood. 7K was the one place where Horvath could get a little rest. There, in its library, he could forget the diagrams for a while. He began to extend his daily visits there. He had already exhausted its diagrammatic possibilities, so he could simply lie on the creaking, crying couch and read. True, when he left, the problem would confront him again. True, he was wasting valuable time. This did not matter. He was content to read, to regard it as a form of sleep. One afternoon, he felt disturbed as soon as he entered. The kitten was upset as well, yowling in her high, strangled voice. There was nothing wrong with the place: no major disorder, no break-in. After an initial exploration, he located the source of the disturbance. On the coffee table next to the couch where he usually read was a book. A paperback edition, cheap, of a famous French novel. He had catalogued the apartment’s library exhaustively, and it did not contain this novel. There had been no sign of forced entry, and the apartment was empty except for Horvath and the kitten. Horvath was flipping through the book when he saw the dedication and remembered that these were the words he had scrawled (in English) across the envelope delivered to the last resident: TO THE HAPPY FEW. He raced to the elevator and back to his own floor, holding the book as it flapped with the force of his running. He expected — he did not know. When he reached the closed door, he found that nothing at all had changed. No one answered his knock or the doorbell. He heard nothing when he pressed his ear to the cold metal, and he saw nothing when he lifted up the weather stripping at the door’s bottom and peered through the gap above the sill. Yet it couldn’t be denied. The resident had “spoken” to him. How, exactly, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps they, too, had a key to 7K; perhaps they, too, “did rounds.” He didn’t care about the method the reticent had used. He cared that they had at last responded. From this, Horvath took heart. It seemed to him that he should write another note, but he could not think of what to say. Later that morning, he discovered that the kitchen faucet in 4Q had begun to leak. He called the emergency maintenance number listed in the doormen’s staff room, used when tasks outstripped the ability of the on-site maintenance men. No one answered. Horvath was not surprised, but he let it ring for a while. He went back up to 4Q and shut off the kitchen’s water supply. He could fill pots and pans with water from the bathroom. He also found that one of the windows in 9B had broken — not due to any outside action, the window being too high up for that. No, it looked like a simple case of a fracture caused by excessive cold. The owners of the apartment had manually shut off all heating before they left, and Horvath had not had the presence of mind to turn it back on. He taped over the crack and then taped a blanket over the pane itself before turning the radiator valves back on. At night, when he got back to his desk, he found that he had produced a volume of diagrams exceeding his estimates. He needed a better way to store and organize them. At the moment, they stood in four ragged piles that he had to rebuild at least once a night because drafts or the kitten knocked them over. He remembered a filing cabinet in 7L and brought that up. He discarded the papers within it, which appeared to contain poems or similar trash, after giving a sheaf to the kitten. His diagrams filled the emptied cabinet almost entirely, but at least this got them off the floor and gave him a little space to store new ones. He had trouble sleeping. There were long nights when he half-slept or dozed until dawn, longer nights when his dreams would not leave him alone. When he dreamed about dreaming, for example, or dreamed that he was awake, or dreamed that the ashes of Polish springtime had drifted down and covered everything outside, mingling with the broken, reprehensible snows. And for those wondering why the leaky faucet didn’t “count” as an answer from the last resident, and why the fractured window didn’t express their response to Horvath’s letter, let me say again that you wonder this only because you are unlike Horvath. Horvath was new to administration, but he was no amateur. He knew what an answer looked like, and he was not going to be taken in by amor fati. He avoided 7K because he had no interest in committing the “sin of hope” either, the sin that contaminates and destroys everything. When he heard noises that might be footsteps outside his door, he did not even get out of bed, because he knew they were deceptions. When in the doormen’s staff room he thought he detected movement on the screen aimed down his hallway, he turned his back. Let those shadows flit by, let them dance along the stony walls. They had nothing to do with Horvath. Besides, shortly after this, the kitten got sick. Horvath didn’t know how it had happened. She was tired; she slept almost all the time. She stopped playing with him, and she hardly ate anything. Horvath tried to convince himself that it was nothing. A cold, a passing stomach flu. Young animals got sick all the time. Yet he knew what it was from the first moment he saw the dull gleam in the kitten’s eyes. He tried everything. Feeding her soft food. Keeping her wrapped up in blankets. When she got too weak to go to her water bowl, he gave her water with a spoon and then with an eyedropper. Every morning he brought her clean sheets, taken from 3I and 6N, which had the best bedding, because she could no longer go to the litter box to piss or shit, and he painstakingly cleaned her off with damp, warm towels throughout the day. The kitten did not wail or cry. She was largely silent, looking at Horvath with her dull eyes like coals, like some underearthly hatred. He gave no thought to his own health, though he knew you could get sick from animals. He spent all the time with her that he could, keeping her on his lap while he worked. Soon she became so ill that she could not even eat the porridge he had reduced her dry food to with water. He began giving her beef and chicken broth through the eyedropper. He tried to find some explanation or hope in the diagrams. This illness had to fit in somewhere. Yet he could never make it fit. He could not find the correct directional terms or master the subtle relational effects that diagramming this terrible occurrence would have required. He started searching the apartments for some type of general “cat medicine.” (He knew even as he looked that the idea was moronic, that no such thing existed, yet he kept looking.) He started with 3H, where he had discovered the kitten. He looked everywhere, hurled down everything from the cabinets and cupboards. He looked under the sofa cushions and in a box hidden under the bed, where he found nothing but photographs of empty rooms, or of the same empty room, with a stain on the carpet that moved, or seemed to move, between each picture. The kitten got sicker. Horvath tried to prepare himself for her death. After all, why should it matter? He had tried to do his best, to give her a good life, to save her, and he could hardly pretend that she had been his lifelong best friend; they had known each other for less than four months, and there was no point in mourning someone you had known for only a few months, especially because she was an animal. Horvath, however, knew the truth about animal suffering. That it is unspeakably worse than human suffering. Animals cannot lie to themselves about freedom or redemption. They cannot rely on memory to save them. Suffering exists for animals as a total universe from which there is no escape. He went on trying and trying to save the kitten. He did not dare leave her alone, not even for one moment. He carried her with him in the pocket of the jacket he had taken from the doormen’s staff room. He also carried two bottles, one of water and one of broth, and an eyedropper. The kitten shit and pissed in the pocket, and it leaked down onto Horvath. He didn’t care. There was no one around to smell it. Let the smell fill up these empty hallways and the whole building. In fact, let the piss-and-shit smell reign at the highest peak of administration. The kitten began vomiting too, and this stained the jacket, his clothes, the carpets in the hallways, and the ottomans he sometimes let the kitten sleep on while he performed his rounds. Again, it did not matter to Horvath. Let the vomit rise up and flood the world. No matter what he did, he was unable to escape the dull fire of the kitten’s gaze — in mirrors, in windows, in those rarer and rarer moments when the kitten was awake. He dreamed about her eyes as well, as you would expect. The eyes floated in dimness, or they lit up a room where a stain moved across the carpet like some filthy Bolshevistic paramecium. The kitten weighed almost nothing at this point. Horvath let her sleep on his chest at night so that he would know right away if she stopped moving and died. This turned his sleep into vigil, because he was afraid, as noted, of leaving the animal alone. Every night he would lie down with the kitten on his chest and look into her eyes until they closed, and then his heart and body would contract, and he would start to shiver, and he would wait to see if the kitten was still breathing. At times he dared to put a finger on her prominent rib cage, to feel her thin bones pushing up against her skin through her warm fur. Other times he did not dare. One night, he awoke from a dream of the kitten’s eyes and of the paramecium, and the kitten was dead. Or so he thought at first. Then he realized that she was hardly breathing at all. A shaking panic took hold of his limbs. He flapped his hands back and forth like a child, and tears slid from his eyes into the cavities of his ears. He saw, next to his bed, his pen and pad, and because he did not know what else to do, he picked them up and — without disturbing the kitten — began to write. To describe what was happening, and to beg for her survival and for his own forgiveness. (He did not know what his crime was, but he begged all the same.) When he was done, he signed his missive. Or maybe his hand signed it on its own. The signature read M. Horvath, Administrator. He cradled the kitten, still breathing, in one arm and put the letter in an envelope with the other hand. It was hard, and harder still to seal it. Across the envelope he wrote down the dedication from the French novel (in English, again). He got up and took the kitten and the letter out into the hall. He knelt down and pushed the letter under the last resident’s door. Once it was inside, Horvath failed to resist the temptation to lift the weather stripping. As if the resident might give him a glimpse of themselves so easily. Well, nothing happened. The letter lay there looking huge in his foreshortened vision. He blew through the slit, and the letter moved a little farther into the apartment. This made him panic that he had overdone it. He got up and ran away from the door like a child. Then he ran back and lay down on the floor and put the kitten on his chest. He promised himself he would not fall asleep, but he did fall asleep, and he dreamed of the eyes and the carpet. When he woke up, he was cold, and his back and legs hurt. He had trouble moving his arms and shoulders. A new terror swept through him. The kitten was gone. Then he saw her. She was walking on her own, slowly and clumsily but alive. Walking down the hall toward him. A cry tore itself from his throat, and he offered her broth from the dropper. She ate greedily and with more ease than she had shown since the beginning of her illness. Horvath banged on the door, cried and pleaded for the resident to come out. He shouted his thanks through the cold metal and left warm tears on the cold metal.