Devon Field lives in Vancouver, BC, where he writes and podcasts. He hosts the medieval history podcast 'Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World.'
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There was always a whir before the door opened. Not necessary, but then they’d all been raised on unnecessary noises, comforts for a past generation whose connection to real use had long since been forgotten. Like the click that was going to come next.
The door clicked.
It opened and she stepped inside, stood quiet, listening. Sighed. There was that hum again. “Very much in the background,” the landlord had confidently assured her when she’d come to view the place, but it was there, there enough to give her headaches. It also told her that someone was home. Someone was sharing the space.
She dropped her ID card on the table by the door and emptied the mail slot. None of it was for her, which was for the best really. Nothing but specials on bathroom tile flooring, summons for a jury appearance, and a flyer for that terrible pizza place down the road. Unwanted missives for unknown persons, ones who had, in one way or another, moved on. Messages that seemed to serve no other purpose than to be carried, water in the pipes that kept the whole system flowing.
She took off her shoes and shuffled into the bedroom, finding a pair of inside pants that looked exactly like someone had just stepped out of them hours before, as indeed she had.
More comfortably dressed, she settled down on the sofa with a drink-box of pilsner and a dairy-crisper from the fridge. At a wave of her drinking hand, her ent-system answered with a chirp and a query, scanners lighting up her face. She flashed a quick grimace of a smile and it sprang into action, serving up a muted French action film set to solo baritone sax. Apparently that was what she felt like.
She watched until the projection stopped and then flushed her mouth before bed.
***
She woke early, rarely able to sleep in long enough to enjoy the place without company, without that hum. The warehouse where she worked was a little cottage light-industrial fulfillment hub, and she had to be there at 6 to dispense boxes. Boxes of grooved plastics to be creased or cut, perforations or adjustments made before being brought back to some other warehouse. Boxes of stable organics to be treated according to the client’s specific instructions, nothing she had anything to do with.
With hours like that, her mornings never amounted to anything too enjoyable. Just cold solids hitting an ambivalent stomach and then an inefficient series of darting preparations for the door. Key card in hand, but then a light-switch forgotten. Shoes on, but then a snack needed for lunch. A jacket, but then maybe a sweater instead.
Finally ready, she strode to the door and jabbed at the button. It groaned in response.
She sighed. This wasn’t a large un-share. Only six other people lived with her, but still there always seemed to be someone either coming or going just as she was trying to.
With increasing impatience, she waited until the door had finished its cycle and cleared her unknown co-habitant. Then, with a whir and a click, she left.
***
Her day was full of such negotiations. Each attempted arrangement for space accompanied by machine-noises and uncertainty as to whether it would be granted. Hoping for a little quiet at lunch, she tried a nearby alcove but found it already taken, the entrance a cascade of buttons numbered 1 to 20, all in red.
She waited outside on the sidewalk, bombarded by sound. Advertising and electoral campaigns aggressively hunting those who had no shelter out there in the street, not to mention the dreadful noise of parallel construction. Eventually someone left, and a single button lit up in green: 14. She pressed it, swiped her card, and went inside.
It was a simple space, a small square of smooth concrete. There was a single adirondack at which one could sit, as she did now, and look up at the facing wall’s tastefully creeping vines. It was also, she found, quite strongly scented by the previous occupant’s perfume. Or maybe one of the 19 other current occupants. That did sometimes happen. Ignoring it as best she could, she settled further down into the seat, consciously willing her face to relax, letting shoulders and bones sink as they would. She imagined 19 others slumped corpse-like, just as she was, in that same space, that same chair.
After a moment, she got up, throwing her body into motion, not so much dancing really as hurling herself about the room. Screamed, full-throated and uneven. Laughed. Sat back down.
She sat there as long as she felt able to afford. Maybe it had been a little longer than that, she thought, eyes narrowing at the numbers popping up in response to her exit swipe. Better get back to work.
***
The afternoon was a blur of inconsequential encounters. Plastics flowed out, plastic boxes full of plastics, the shells themselves marked and scored to be disassembled in basement suites and apartments. People flowed in, cars that they loaded quickly and drove on to other, similar pickups, or on foot, trickling along from the nearest station. She just facilitated the one finding the other: people meet box. She did that for another four hours, and then she left.
The transit back was long and loud with other people’s emotions, and by the time she was nearing home, she was exhausted by it all. Hit the door at a near stumble and followed the click into her apartment. At last.
But the relief did not linger. The hum was there.
Someone, one of the six other residents, was home, maybe more than one someone, their presence in its parallel space producing that steady tone on the edges of her awareness. Even worse, their music was bleeding through in short, stabbing transmissions from right here, but not right here. She thought she recognized it. Listened to the bursts of voice that broke through.
It was an old song, she was pretty sure. Something about belonging to the light and the thunder. Madonna? Or someone?
She shook her head, annoyance at the noise in her space merging smoothly with despair at ever having leased it at all. You got only the privacy you paid for, and she’d have to find hers somewhere else. Grabbing a beer-box from the fridge, she went looking for it on the roof.
The corridor was quiet, as ever. There was a common un-share next to the elevator, only two parallel slots and invariably occupied, but she looked anyway: two red lights. She continued on down a featureless hallway and into the elevator, both empty, neither really her own.
Even her apartment wasn’t her own, not really. Sure, she was free to walk in the door, at least after waiting for it to whir, but what of it was really hers? Not the land, obviously, because who owned land anymore? But not really the space either.
The unshared spaces were meant to be entirely separate, completely private, a refuge from all those other people’s clamouring voices and feelings. Yes, other people did go in that same door, they told you, but they didn’t go to the same place, not the same space. Those parallel apartments were entirely removed from your own. But it didn’t really work that way, did it?
There was the Madonna or whatever that was, and then there were the smells and other sounds too, the shards of a living environment not her own that somehow crept into her space, into what was supposed to be her own refuge from the world.
So what did she have? She had a fraction of an apartment, a neat 1/7th that through the miracles of technology had been stretched to the point of snapping until it encompassed every inch of the rental. Though not even entirely that.
For all that the parallel spaces technology had been heralded as a cure for urban congestion, it had spectacularly failed. She remembered the promises that had boomed out from the optimistically bearded face of that tech CEO. What was his name? Pennington?
She remembered how his legs had pumped him about the stage. How ten absolutely giddy audience members had been ushered up front to disappear, one at a time, through that single, mysterious door. How the screen had lit up behind him then, showing each of them shrieking in excitement in their own uniquely beautiful new apartment, ten of them existing in parallel behind that one door.
“Like magic!” people had gushed, aggressively sharing the clips.
“A fucking clown car,” her grandmother had opined, watching it on the evening news.
The CEO had been on all the talk shows after that, enthusiastically holding forth on the reinvention of Space! Room! Occupancy! Each word accompanied by big, all-encompassing sweeps of his arms. People loved him, loved his book, and loved sharing photos of his humble childhood home in Wisconsin. They loved his idea. Parallel dimensions! Space for all!
Or something like that.
Except it hadn't quite worked out that way. Sure, it had started out promisingly enough, but it hadn't so much solved cities’ congestion as given them a whole new direction to become congested in. Like kicking a hole in the back of your kitchen cupboard and stuffing the unused shit in there too.
Such were the dully dissatisfied thoughts that rattled through her head as she stepped out of the elevator and approached the entrance to the roof space. Like the common room downstairs, this was free to use, but was also, as a result, rarely free.
She didn’t look up right away as she approached the door, didn’t even raise her eyes from the flooring, just didn’t want to see too soon that all was red and taken. She wanted to preserve the possibility of that green light welcoming her to the roof for as long as possible, the potential of some space of her own.
She held that potential for a little while longer, eyes everywhere but forward. Looking at everything but the light on the edge of her vision.
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