Extraordinary Rendition

30

SIMEON HAD LONG AGO learned to ignore the twice-daily rumble of sound in the stairwell. Harry and Jack, two sweet gay men who had recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary together, went up and down the narrow squeaking stairwell at least four times each day, usually to walk their two Shih-Tzus, Wobbie and Oliver. The men-both big blonds from the Midwest-were always together. When they navigated the stairs to their apartment just above Simeon’s, they jostled against the walls. Harry, once a stage dancer in Broadway musicals, who wore a cravat around his neck every day of the year, had developed diabetes. Because of the disease, he recently had two toes removed, and he often stumbled. Jack held him up, talking to him at times in an encouraging tone as if he were a parent urging on a child just learning to walk: “Good for you, you can do it.”

Simeon looked up from his writing. He had been editing his article with a pencil he had just sharpened. He held the pencil aloft as he waited for the rumble to pass from the landing in front of his apartment. But this time the sound was suspended. Simeon thought that something might have happened to them.

Then the door, always unlocked, burst inward. Two black men in winter street clothes-sagging corduroy pants, puffy winter jackets that made them look like the figure in the Michelin tire commercials, basketball-player sneakers, and those big baseball-style caps too large for their heads-rushed into the apartment and raced toward Simeon from different directions. Simeon instinctively pushed backward in his wooden chair. As the chair toppled over, he shouted, “Please don’t hurt me. Please.”