The Clockwork Reprise The 1200 building on Park Avenue is chronically inconspicuous. It rests between a florist shop, run by an old woman the age of dirt with a shepherd’s staff for a spine, and a small playground, buried by newspapers from 1993 and a fog that never seems to lift. There was a city planner around the turn of the nineteenth century. He was charged with creating a more affluent atmosphere for the street that has been run down since before it was called Park Avenue. To draw potential businesses and inhabitants in, all records of its previous name were expunged and it was dubbed a hand me down name. Whether to confuse property buyers and investors, or to manifest opulence, no one knows. It is, however, speculated that something changed on Park Avenue the day it was renamed, sending a ripple of insidious stillness across the entire street. This morning, the fog in the playground is not particularly thick or remarkable. It is the same as yesterday’s fog, maybe even a tad lighter. A man with a scruffy beard stumbles up to the bronze-handled door, a lukewarm coffee run out of steam in one hand, a saxophone case in the other, yesterday’s New York Times tucked up under his arm. He fumbles with his chainless keys, choosing the wrong one twice despite having lived on Park Avenue for over a decade. Finally, the keyhole twists and with a click the man backs up against the door, pushing it open. The New York Times slides to his elbow. The mail is not locked up at the 1200 building. The man slides his wad of coupons and bills and a folded manila envelope out of the wooden slot box on the bottom floor. He puts them with the Times which hasn’t stopped slipping. Park Avenue counts the apartment numbers backwards, starting with the number 4 on the ground floor, and working its way up to number 1. Some say this is the work of an eccentric urban planner or a construction worker with a vendetta or an adolescent prank that no one bothered to fix. Regardless of its origins, that’s the way it’s always been, and the way it probably always will be. Mrs. Achron has lived in Apartment 4 since the beginning of time. She was already the building’s unofficial monarch when the saxophone player first arrived over a decade ago and not much has changed since. She wakes up at 8:22 without fail. As the man slips quietly inside the building each morning around the same time—yesterday’s Times, lukewarm coffee, and saxophone case in hand— he finds her standing in the stairway for a smoke in her yellowing bathrobe and matted mint slippers. She watches. As the years go by, the inundated man thinks he can see her nose become more beaklike, morphing to match her hawklike presence. Once, she said good morning in a croaky, hacking voice. The man didn’t say anything, and neither did she for the next five years. But still, she stands, watching and smoking, puffs of sticky smoke swirling around and trapping themselves in the eggshell chipped paint of the hallway. This morning, the man’s shoes are wet with dew and fog. There is no welcome mat to shuffle across to dry them at Park Avenue. As far as the man is aware, he’s the only one that comes and goes. The wooden stairs spiraling up to the fourth floor are not bowed with use like other historic buildings. Apartment 3 belongs to a writer. Apartment 3 is arguably the worst of the apartments on Park Avenue, besides Apartment 2, but bad apartments make for cheap rent. The saxophone player knows this. The writer doesn’t come out. The only way the man knows his neighbor is a novelist is because one time, during his usual morning routine, he inadvertently grabbed his mail (the cubbies for Apartments 2 and 3 being directly next to each other) and saw “Return to Sender” stamped in red on a manuscript. Finding a writing job is difficult in this city, just as it is in every city. The saxophone player knows about job difficulty. He would know. He has a tin candy box tucked behind his top cabinet
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