A Juliette Balcony

CW: Suicide or self harm; Physical violence, gore or abuse

Janus Gilman moved into the apartment block in early May. It was an older unit, on the tenth floor of a reddish-brown brick building, a studio apartment that held room only for a small personal kitchen, a bathroom, and a twin bed. It was a real challenge to so much as squeeze in the wooden desk and laptop that Janus so required in order to work. The only source of light aside from those harsh old yellowish lights was a west facing window built into a door. When the handle of this door was pulled it opened into the air. The only thing blocking off the threshold was a rusting railing bolted down against the building. It stood there taking up nearly half the space similar to a baby gate.

At first Janus thought nothing of the balcony, but found himself confused to the function of it. It was only able to feed the imaginations of men and children. If not so high up, one could imagine giving a speech. He could pretend his long brown hair was far longer and more bronze in tint and properties, able to allow some woman with short hair and shining armor to crawl up and meet him in bed. The average little boy would wish to throw an egg, and any other given fragile object, off the edge. Not just children either. Really anyone who still wished to learn about the nature of gravity, Janus learned soon after moving in as he heard a large crash from outside his window and found a few disjointed parts of a television set stuck in the bars of his railing. The rest sat below, broken glass, bits of wire, and assorted plastic scraps littering the sidewalk.

One night, only a few weeks after he moved in, Janus was airing out the apartment as he cooked. “Airing out" may be a stretch of the term, as his next door neighbor starts smoking from her own Juliette Balcony, which managed to travel directly into his apartment rather than rising up to add to the pollution of the sky. Janus's dirty laundry sat at the base of the railing, keeping it out from underfoot as he used the kitchen. Someone rapped on the door connected to the hallway, when Janus opened the door a six foot two white man barreled through Janus's presence and started going through the drawers of his desk.

When Janus tried to stop him, the man punched him in the eye and kept going as Janus was sent dazed to the corner. All sorts of old sketches, childhood photos, receipts, and long since irrelevant work notes flew through the air, into the pot of stew, on the grate of the stove, out the window. As Janus got his balance back the fire alarm went off, screeching over the burning papers, piercing through the pain already flaming through his right eye socket.

Then Janus's body began to take over, the nervous system pulling him to his feet and causing him to bite at the fingers of this man. Together their bodies flailed across the room until they reached the balcony. The intruder's foot incidentally stepped up the pile of laundry like it would up the steps up to the building's entrance. Janus pushed the intruder and he fell over the railing out the window, the railing heaved with an impressive squeak. Janus stepped back and did not see, but he heard the crunching of the man's bones like sticks.

Janus put out the fire, called the police, and as he waited to give a report of the circumstances he stared at that Juliette balcony, still hanging open across the room. His imagination now filled with some of the most obvious imaginings a man could have about a door to nowhere ten stories high. He imagined himself walking out the door. He imagined his body rupturing like a plump large pimple. He pictured how loud the crunching sound would be in his ear, as he hit the concrete. He even imagined an unsuspecting passerby surprised as he fell upon their shoulder like pigeon shit. He did not take any perverse joy in these imaginings, and indeed was as disturbed by them as any average man would be. Through no force of will could he quiet these images within his head.

Janus kept clear all the space around the balcony, scared that if he were to sleepwalk or lose his sense, any such items would become a stepping stool just like the tall man, aiding him in achieving an untimely demise. It did not help, that as the only source of natural light, Janus spent hours of every day staring in the direction of the useless door. It sat there serving no function but to taunt him.

He sought to build some kind of better association between himself and the door and bought a hanging plant pot. He hoped bringing some sense of life into the space would calm his nerves, bought soil and seed. All of this ultimately meaningless as he tried to fit the pot upon the railing just to realize the door would not close. The railing and the door itself sat at too perfect a distance, leaving no excess space between them. Defeated, he took the pot, the soil, the seed, and left them in the apartment lobby with a note labeled "free".

His apartment unit itself was too devoid of life. The yellowish lighting served as such an omen that even the typical pests would not take up residence in the apartment unit. Not a single roach, flea, mouse, or even green-blue behind of a bottlefly. The only other life form willing to show itself was the occasional mold-growth showing itself from the edges of a poorly sealed bathtub.

Janus was left alone with just himself and this door. The door seemed to almost mock him. The door even took up residence in his dreams, every door he passed through seemed decorated exactly the same until opening one door too many he would fall from a height and wake up.

Even the sun itself seemed to be working in tandem with the door. He despised how the mornings were without natural light but the evenings, as the sun set, were marked by watching that little ball of fire disappear as if beckoning him to follow. It was as if the whole architecture of the building existed only to remind him of some inevitable plummet to his death.

He tried putting up curtains to block out the window, for a day or two it seemed to help. But he felt he could almost hear the presence of the door as it stood behind that curtain. The lights of the apartment brought on headaches that left him nauseous, somehow the color of this lighting reminded him of the smell of smoke. It was thick and suffocating. When the apartment building was hit by a blackout, for the first few moments he truly believed he had in fact died. He could feel his heart stop.

By now, if he had the means to move elsewhere he would without hesitation have done so. His salary however was barely enough to cover the rent in this catacomb. Instead, driven by the false death and frustrated with the childish power this one balcony held over him, he removed the curtains and set out again to make the sight of this doorway less threatening. He strung rose red ribbons through the bars, he took Hyssop flowers and weaved them through the bars until it looked like some frail basket.

When that wasn't enough, he took his junk mail and folded all those meaningless advertisements into paper airplanes. He flew them one by one out the window every time he thought of jumping. He would write his name on the wings, or other little messages, and send them out to fly. He watched them spiral, sometimes flying smoothly out of sight, others nosediving to the ground, occasionally one simply turned and flew back into the apartment building. This seemed effective. However there is only so much junk mail for Janus to waste.

Soon enough he was ripping pages from his mail-in ballot, those planes all sunk like rocks. He folded a dollar into a plane, it went far and a gentle looking older man slipped that cash into the pocket of his shirt. He took each and every page including the comics from the newspaper intended for one of his neighbors that sat in the lobby as he went searching for more mail. Oh what fun this game was, as soon as it was out the window it was out of his hands, no longer worthy of being considered. The same way he didn't need to consider the rain, snow, or thunder so long as he was indoors and unaffected.

The doors told Janus a secret; in here he was safe. Not a thing outside these walls mattered or was worth pursuing. So Janus took his bill for that month and folded it also into a plane! Oh how it flew! He saw it land on the roof of a distant gas station!

As a direct result of this, he was soon doing the same thing with an eviction notice! These days, Janus kept the door to the hallway locked. Today, he even set his desk against it. Totally calm, he heard knocking from the hallway. The knocking turned to shouting, and shouting turned to banging. Janus opened the door of his Juliette balcony and tossed his buzzing phone over it. He leaned against the railing until he heard it squeak and heave, until the bolts began to dance out of the wall.