My rented apartment is in the back, away from the noise of the cars on the avenue that comes into the sunny front apartments.  On the window side there is a narrow alley between this old building and the one next door.  Out the back windows there is a larger expanse, a back alley city-scape where a rumble for a low budget version of West Side Story could be filmed.  The apartment is usually quiet and good for sleeping.

Years ago there was a man with Tourrets living across the alley.  In moments of my own frustration I would pause to listen to his outbursts, unintelligible growlings of rage, and think “the man makes a lot of sense.”  Then one day I didn’t hear him anymore.  I read a piece in a newspaper about a guy screaming vehemently at another guy in a nearby bodega and being beaten to death with a baseball bat.  I think it may well have been him.   Now I am the man with Tourrets, though my outbursts tend to be one or two screamed obscenities when the internet goes out suddenly or my computer has some robotic fun with me.

Recently someone moved into the building, seemingly a theremin player.   The theremin was featured on the soundtracks of many black and white horror movies, its quavering, wailing tone sliding eerily from low to high and back.  Used properly, it makes the hair on the spine tingle.  I was lying in bed one day listening to someone methodically going up and down the fluid scale of a theremin.  

After a good while, when the theremin began singing in regular intervals and more typical scales, I recognized these were a soprano’s voice exercises.  “Oh, God,” I thought to myself wearily, “shut the fuck up….”  I turned my head on the pillow so that my mostly clogged ear was facing outward.   The high pitched vocal exercises continued, but were slightly muffled.

After another few minutes a man with windows on the alley could stand it no longer.  “Will you please shut the fuck up?” he called gruffly and politely out his window.   I smiled as the singing stopped.  My smile turned to a smirk as the startled soprano resumed her exercises.  I realized it was time to get out of bed, and distracted myself in the other room as the singer continued to chase her dreams directly above my bed.