The man across the hall

There's another apartment directly across the hall from mine--literally five feet away from my threshold. Behind it lived a highly reclusive elderly man. I use the past tense there because he died last week, in his apartment. There was some fuss as the police and paramedics came, then left with a body, leaving a legal notice on the door forbidding entrance while the coroner investigated the circumstances.

A few minutes ago, there was a knock on my door. It was his daughter. She is there to pick up his remaining possessions. She wanted to know if any of his neighbors knew him and could tell her about his life.

This seemed to me kind of an odd request, until she filled in more of the story. He disappeared in 1988, and had not been in contact with his family since then. They had periodically tried to find him, without success. So this poor woman had not seen or heard from her father in almost 25 years, with her first contact being the police calling to tell her of his death. She had had no explanation for why he vanished, no idea where he was. No wonder she was thirsty for any scraps of information about how he had been living.

I told her that when it was warm (most of the year) he kept his door propped open a few inches to let in air, but not enough that anybody could look in, and based on how much of the time the door was cracked that way, he almost never left his apartment.

I only saw him a couple of times in the six years I've been here, when we were both coincidentally leaving or returning at the same time and exchanged a nod and a hello. I assume he was probably just living on Social Security, or maybe he had some sort of pension.

About a year ago I noticed water puddling around his door and seeping out from there down the hall. I immediately contacted building maintenance so they could get the flooding stopped. To my surprise, he was in there! The flooding was coming from the apartment above into his, but rather than call for emergency help to get the leaking stopped, he was just mopping up his floor. Peculiar behavior. It seems that he really did not want to be bother anybody, or to be bothered.

Today was the first time I've seen inside his apartment. It's a studio. It has only one window, and the only thing visible through it is a cinder block wall six inches away. I had never noticed that the next building was so close to the back of ours that the apartments on that side had no view whatsoever. It's the kind of view that makes for a visual punchline in TV sitcoms when somebody first goes into a hotel room or apartment, opens the curtains, and sees a brick wall. I didn't know that there are people who actually live in places where that is the reality. Apparently that has been his entire view of the outside world for many, many years.

I hope that in his effects his daughter finds some sort of explanation for his disappearance and reclusiveness, as I couldn't help her learn anything substantive about him. She seemed like a warm, kind woman, and her pain at having been inexplicably shut out of her father's life for so long was palpable.

I find the whole thing terribly sad. I hope I don't end up like that.

His name was Bob.