Thursday, 03 October 2002 | Fugitive

My new apartment is a railroad style apartment, which means it's long and relatively thin and that the rooms line up like boxcars. I moved in on Sunday afternoon, and it wasn't until today that I was able to walk in a straight line from the engine to the caboose without stepping over anything.

After a short period of uncertainty prior to my move, I've decided that I like the place quite a bit, that I don't think I could've found an apartment that suits me better, assuming I don't get sick of Spanish music anytime soon.

The last several days bleed together: Martin drove my car and my cat from Raleigh to Brooklyn; I scraped mysterious flecks of yellow from the knobs on my stove; Martin and I and lots of other people spent my lunch break watching a free White Stripes concert at Union Square; I bought a level and became a little obsessed with it, testing the angles of everything I attached to the wall; old Cuban men playing checkers watched my car as I unloaded it, assuring me that they wouldn't let anything happen to my stuff; my cat discovered the fire escape.

Three a.m.: Lisa, have you seen Jane? After a quick check in the usual corners, I took the fire escape, carefully gripping the thin red bars and quietly moving up past dark windows. Martin walked around the alley that surrounds the building like a moat, carrying a flashlight and whistling for her. He insisted that she must be inside, that there was nowhere for her to go.

Almost an hour later, we were standing on the roof, pointing the flashlight down, forming a weak V of light that barely reached the construction site behind my building, when we saw a plump gray figure walking along a high concrete wall. We ran down the stairs in a long spiral, trying to find a balance between quiet and quick. I helped hoist Martin onto the wall, one black Converse shoe standing on my thigh, the other in my cupped hands. Just as he was able to pull himself up and stand, Jane looked at him, jumped back over to the fire escape, darted up to the second floor, and hopped in my window.