The Ceiling Man

The sky fell and my cat told a joke.

My cat, terrible and wiry, hatched the day I found her shaking in a dumpster puddle. She used to balance on Tom’s shoulders and push her head into the back of his.

“Like Chicken Little,” she brayed before retreating under the couch. Her head had poked out like a Jack-in-the-box to deliver an unfunny line from a movie she watched with Tom. We used to call her John Mulaney because she wore a suit and told jokes all day.

But the world is standing still in my kitchen, where a man just fell through my ceiling. The Colonel lived in the apartment above mine and laid dead in my galley. He was a veteran, I knew. He was alone and skinny, too. He was tired and angry but I was quiet and he sent me a lasagna after Tom’s funeral.

I bought this in a box and heated it up, he’d scribbled on a post-it. My wife cooked.

I dialed 911 and told the calm woman my address. And I repeated it.

“There’s a dead man in my kitchen. He fell through my ceiling. He’s in a bathtub and I think it overflowed. Or something. I’m fine. Should I leave the apartment?”

The calm woman told me to stand outside the apartment, near the door, stay on the line. I heard sirens and watched firemen march through my apartment, toward the dead Colonel, the second dead guy to ruin my life.

Is the mustache part of the uniform? my cat brayed. I thanked God for timing. Bad things come in threes and all that. This just had to be the last.

My home turned sterile. I moved into another apartment unit. I packed a suitcase of my things and a backpack of my cat’s things. She and I bickered while I folded. I told her I couldn’t bring everything and we’d be back after the firemen cleaned it up. She asked why tinfoil mattered more than treats.

Because you pee on the floor, I reminded her. Because you can’t use a litter box. And Tom never cared. Because tinfoil keeps you from pissing under the couch.

Isn’t that your fault?

Probably.

So your house smells like cat pee, Tom used to put on a Tony Soprano voice for this bit. And what can you do?

Colonel actually died hours before he fell through my ceiling. The coroner ruled it an accidental death. Not a suicide, a suited bright-eyed woman promised me. Not a suicide. An accident.

Which means this wasn’t personal or selfish. He didn’t mean to harm me and my plates and the table I refurnished while my cat (and Tom) cried at the fumes. He wasn’t trying to be a dick about dying.

So it wasn’t a suicide. It was an accident.

He fell asleep, right? But nobody would give me a yes or no. People with shiny nametags and minimalistic business cards just nodded their heads and told me it was an accident, yes, an accident, they reminded me. He broke the plaster on accident. He shattered my plates and tortured my dishwasher and crushed my tiles on accident.

How can I be mad at a man that fell asleep in the bathtub and through my ceiling and into my kitchen on accident? How can I be mad at anyone for that? It was an accident, Adrianna. My mother reminded me that everyone’s death affects someone else, a lot of times on accident. A piano crushes some guy and a bunch of people see it then they go home. But somebody stays and somebody else has to scrape his guts from the concrete and tell his family and there’s a closed casket somewhere along the line. And think, my mother never helped. You’re not even the somebody else; you were just the other guy on the sidewalk.

So remember to be embarrassed when you croak, my cat brayed.

Tom and I worked at a movie theater before we were married. I’d hung our aprons next to the stove. Colonel’s bathtub tore through the wall, leaving strings of fabric next to our stove.

Another memory for us? I wanted to ask him. Everything was a memory. The chipped plates with dainty pink flowers that we had earned from his mother. We giggled that we finally had a complete set of dinnerware. With pink flowers!

Like real adults, he grinned, pulling each one from a box stuffed with newspaper.

How cruel I am. For seeing this man (a veteran of some god damned war!) as an inconvenience. Right? What is more inconvenient than dying in the bathtub? Think about everything you do before the bath — laying out your clothes, filling your water bottle, brushing your teeth, and taking a shit — and all the things you planned to do afterward in that middle moment between bath and bed. But you die before that middle moment and now some girl is mad at you.

From the some girl: hey! That dead guy stole my memories. My aprons and my matching flower plates. When I moved back in, the stove was new. But I remember cleaning the old stove at 3 a.m., knowing he’d thank me in the morning.

You cleaned the stove! Tom’s teeth shone before he made me eggs and french toast. The sun rose behind our patio, burning a pinky yellow hue into the floors and walls.

And how cruel I am. For blaming this man for ruining my own bathtub. Right? But I can no longer fill my tub without remembering that someday I will die. And maybe alone. And maybe some girl will get mad at me for it.

The old fridge wasn’t even old, the landlords installed the old fridge because ice cream melted in the one before that.

We have a whole new shelf on the very bottom, he told me one day after we’d had the new old fridge for a week. A whole new shelf for anything we want.

After the Colonel revamped Tom’s kitchen, I had no food so I ate out of drive-thrus for weeks. If Tom was here, he’d know what to buy: rice, tortillas, chicken, beans, vegetables. But Tom died and I was alone and learning to cook from boxes and grieve from books.

Who’s there?

My neck bent into the kitchen.

Me, my cat brayed.