Apparently my next-door neighbor was the most beautiful woman in the world. I wouldn’t know; I never saw her. Her hair was a lustrous wave of black. Her skin was pale and glowed like moonlight. Her eyes were sparkling jewels filled with warmth and kindness. Her lips were the red of sunset. These details came from my other neighbor, Mr. Rahman, a middle-aged man with a balding head and a bushy, graying mustache. He lived three doors down at the end of the hall.
Mr. Rahman would describe every aspect of my neighbor from head to toe in the most passionate manner, finding new ways to paint the portrait of my mysterious next-door neighbor.
“Have you seen her?” he’d ask whenever we met.
My answer was always no, and he’d unleash his colorful descriptions. With each subsequent meeting, my neighbor’s beauty grew stranger and more extravagant. Some of his descriptions were hacky, almost comical, but he stated them with such sincerity and conviction I couldn’t help but become entrapped.
“She’s like Mona Lisa and Madame X combined,” Mr. Rahman claimed. “A sad song after a heartbreak. The soft sounds of the piano that wrench and soothe your soul.”
“She’s like the clear night sky after a monsoon,” Mr. Rahman said on another occasion. “Like a gentle and cool breeze, a loving caress, but there’s power there too—to snap trees and shred your body. That is her beauty.”
Of course, the question of whether she was truly beautiful lingered in my mind. But why would someone so beautiful live here? The apartment was an old, sad thing. Most of the people living here were also old, sad things, cramped in tiny, crumbling rooms. And it was as dirty as it was cheap. There was a huge stain in the right corner of my bedroom. A big dark blob about the size of a coffee-table that seeped into the wooden floor. When I first moved into my apartment, I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed away. It was utterly useless. I used almost all the cleaning chemicals known to man. Still, it remained. The stain was indifferent to my struggle.
“Have you ever seen Mount Kilimanjaro?” Mr. Rahman asked me once.
“No, can’t say I have. Where is it?”
“It’s in Tanzania, Africa. Never even heard of it? Hemingway? The Snows of Kilimanjaro?”
I shook my head.
“When I first saw it, I was overwhelmed. My mind, my soul—everything. I understood why people believe that gods, angels, and spirits live above us. It’s a titan rising above the plains, a bridge between heaven and earth with snow that—” he paused, flushed. “Poets and writers have described it better than I ever could, but that’s the kind of beauty she is. One that inspires even more beauty.”
I asked him to tell me more about his trip to Kilimanjaro. He said he’d never been. He’d seen the mountain on TV. There’d been a shot with giraffes roaming in the foreground that made it look especially majestic.
A mountain, a monsoon, a painting, a song. My image of her shifted with his words. Like ink in water, she would dissipate, and the pieces of her would coalesce together again into something new. Always different, always beautiful.
“Do you understand?” Mr. Rahman would say at the end of each soliloquy.
I would nod and say “I see” each time. Mr. Rahman always looked disappointed, as if he was sure whatever vision floated in my mind was nowhere close to the truth. He was sure that his words could not do her justice.
My beautiful neighbor was named Mrs. Lee. Mr. Rahman had little chats with her sometimes when they met in the hallway. From the way he described her, I was surprised he didn’t fall to his knees before her. He learned that she was a widow, young, in her mid-thirties. Her husband died in a car crash, leaving her all alone. This of course only made her more beautiful. Tragedy enhances beauty.
“She’s Venus de Milo brought to life. A part of her has been ripped away, yet she stands so strong, so dignified, a testament in marble,” Mr. Rahman mused.
I told him I’d read a news story once about FEMEN activists protesting topless in front of the statue. They hung a sign saying “Rape me I am immoral” on it in protest of a Tunisian woman who faced indecency charges after she was raped by policemen. To them, the armless statue symbolized the helplessness and vulnerability of women, even stone goddesses. Mr. Rahman frowned at the story.
I finally gave up and covered the stain with a cheap but tasteful rug. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. I could feel the presence of it. It wasn’t alive, but it throbbed and pulsated in isolation. Even in the dark of night, I would glance to the corner and perceive a strange shape, darker than black.
I often pondered the origin of the stain. A water leak? Pet urine? Rust marks from old furniture? There were many possible answers, but I thought of it as an imprint of someone. I was not one to believe in the supernatural. I’d shed my superstitions with puberty, yet an ordinary answer was something I refused to entertain.
Sometimes, in the strange place between sleep and consciousness, I would imagine the shape of a woman rising from the stain, enveloped in my cheap yet tasteful rug. She couldn’t breathe underneath it, forcing deep, painful inhalations. I drifted to sleep listening to her muffled gasps for air.
I considered showing Mr. Rahman the stain but ultimately decided against it. Perhaps it was fear, though it would be comically fitting if the stain only existed in my mind, a hackneyed metaphor. Of course, as time passed, I learned to live with it and the strange thoughts it brought me.
In any case, a sad tiny apartment with a mysterious dark stain was suitable for someone like me, but not for my supposedly wondrously beautiful neighbor, Mrs. Lee. Beautiful people did not always deserve to live in beautiful places, yet you often found them there.
But then, she wasn’t the only misfit. Mr. Rahman clearly did not belong either. It was obvious from the way he dressed, clean and impeccable. His precise mannerisms and natural eloquence marked his difference. He never flaunted his wealth. It was just a by-product of his being.
I remember the first time I met him clearly. It was the afternoon of the third day I just moved in. I was busy scrubbing the stain when he knocked on the door. He stood there with a big smile and a big bowl filled with rambutans, mangoes, bananas. Even a pineapple.
“Hello neighbor! I’m Rahman bin Abu Talib. I have the apartment at the end of the hall. Just thought I’d stop by and give you a little housewarming present!” he said with odd enthusiasm.
His smile was confident, flashy and infectious. The visit was a surprise; the apartment building didn’t seem like a neighborly place. I thanked him and invited him in for some tea. He eagerly accepted.
Mr. Rahman’s eyes expressed his own surprise when I brought out my little Chinese tea set. The gaiwan and teacups were a soothing white porcelain adorned with exquisite hand-painted lotuses. Its opulent grace languished in a stark contrast to my sparse surroundings.
He watched intently as I heated the electric kettle and mixed the tea leaves in the gaiwan. We sat in peaceful silence as the tea steeped.
When it was ready, I poured him a cup. Mr. Rahman brought the steaming teacup to his lips delicately and sipped in a slow measured pace. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t set the cup down. Sip by sip he emptied the cup without looking up. It took a while, but when he was done, he let out a heavy sigh.
“It’s very good. What is it?” he asked quietly.
“It’s a type of oolong tea, Tie Guan Yin, Iron Goddess of Mercy,” I explained.
“I see. It was fantastic. Is tea-brewing a hobby of yours? Are you an expert in tea?”
“No, not really. Couldn’t even tell you what water temperature goes best with what tea. I just know what tea I like and how to brew it. I learned from videos on YouTube,” I said with a shrug. “Someone gave me this tea set and I just thought I’d better start drinking tea.”
“That’s a fantastic mindset! Life always presents with us with so many opportunities to learn new things, but we just don’t see it.”
I nodded and poured him another cup.
“Say have you met your other neighbors, yet?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, most people here keep to themselves. Nobody visited me when I first moved in. What about your next-door neighbor, the one on the right? You haven’t met her yet?”
I shook my head again.
“Ah, you’re in for quite a sight, young man.”
“How so?” I asked.
Mr. Rahman gave a big flashy grin and said, “You won’t believe me until you see for yourself, but she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. Let me try to describe her to you.”
That was the first of many tea sessions between me and Mr. Rahman.
I lived in that apartment for two years and never saw her. I worked the evening shift at a hospice taking care of the elderly, every weekday from five in the evening to one in the morning. I came home to dimmed lights and silent halls.
I wasn’t sure what she did. Some nine-to-five job. As she worked, I slept. When I worked, she slept.
On weekends, she went back to the mainland to visit her parents. Every Friday, she left the island immediately after work. I imagined her, my beautiful neighbor squeezed among lines of car after car, slowly crossing the sea inch by inch on the bridge. She told Mr. Rahman she found the jam highly exhausting; sometimes she wished a titanic wave would rise from the sea and sweep her car perfectly to shore. She assured him no one would die in this fantasy scenario.
“What car does she drive?” I asked.
“What car would the most beautiful woman in the world drive?”
“I don’t know. A Mercedes Benz?”
Mr. Rahman laughed. “A Mercedes Benz? Oh, you know nothing about cars or women do you, young man?”
I never did find out what car the most beautiful woman in the world drives.
There were holidays, days when I was off, days when she was off, weekends where she would stay in, but I suppose it was just a strange coincidence that we never met. Our lives were parallel lines, never intersecting. We were star-crossed neighbors, separated by both a wall and the fickle strings of fate.
For the first few months, I doubted her existence. Nary a sound ever drifted from her apartment to mine. No voices, no laughs, no music, no whir of machines or chatter from television. It seemed unoccupied. Silent, dead, empty. It wasn’t just a lack of presence; it was absence.
If Mr. Rahman was not pulling an elaborate prank on me, I was half convinced he was meeting a ghost. Maybe that explained her supernatural beauty. Maybe she had died in the car crash with her husband.
My other next-door neighbors were a family of five. Not even the faintest sound drifted from Mrs. Lee’s apartment into mine, but they, on the other hand, made their presence known. From their side I was bombarded by the laughter and screaming of children, the fiery arguments of husband and wife. Regardless of intent or emotion, it seemed the family communicated only through the uncaged power of sound.
Their faces were no mystery to me. The children looked like children. I did not know how to judge their appearance. Sometimes I saw the mother ushering them down the hall. She was an average looking woman, but there was an intensity to her. She seemed to be a woman of goals.
The father I saw rather frequently late at night when I returned home. He had a body of forgotten muscles buried in fat and a surprisingly elegant face. Even at two in the morning, he would wave a hand at me as he took languid puffs in the hall.
Mr. Rahman didn’t think much of the man.
“Why is he smoking in the hallway? Nobody’s allowed to smoke in the hallway!” he would fret.
I wasn’t particularly bothered by the smoke, but the noise? It felt strange to listen to the cacophony of lives so close yet so distant from my own. I was the reluctant receiver of information both intimate and mundane. I knew that the big sister kept stealing and hiding the little sister’s plush elephant. That the little brother’s refusal to eat any food on the spectrum of yellow greatly perplexed and vexed his mother. I knew they argued about the apartment, and that the father’s mocking imitation of the mother’s boss always made her laugh.
“I saw you talking to that woman from 3B this morning,” the mother said once to the father. There was no hint of jealousy in her voice.
“Yes, I did. Just a greeting.”
After a long pause, the mother said, “I feel sorry for her.”
After an even longer pause, the father responded with a somber, “Me too.”
Though it did confirm that Mrs. Lee was not a ghost or some imaginary woman that existed only in Mr. Rahman’s head, this conversation made her infinitely more mysterious.
Why did they feel sorry for her? My mind spun elaborate theories. Perhaps it was a lie: my beautiful neighbor was not so beautiful after all. What if the tragic car accident that took her husband left her horribly disfigured or crippled? Or both? Or maybe it was something else? Maybe she was suffering from something that couldn’t be seen? A terminal illness? Financial woes? An irrational fear of the world? Could it just have been a comment on her widowhood?
My questions led to more questions. An endless maze of inquiries. I didn’t bring up the conversation I overheard or the thoughts pounding on my head to Mr. Rahman the next time I saw him. Instead I listened to him wax poetic about her beauty yet again. This time, he compared her beauty to the power of free market capitalism.
Besides my beautiful next-door neighbor, the other mystery of my apartment complex was the curious case of Mr. Rahman. As I’ve said, he did not belong. He was clearly wealthy, educated, and there was an aura about him that indicated a life of success despite his present surroundings.
Mr. Rahman would knock on my door and ask if I was available for a visit. As always, I would say yes. Weekday or weekend, it was usually two in the afternoon. I would look at the clock, and if it was 2:05 and there was no knock, I knew he would not be coming. I didn’t have work until the evening and Mr. Rahman appeared to be unemployed. This happened three or four times a week.
In any case, our tea sessions would always begin with his ballads of Mrs. Lee’s indescribable beauty. Then, he would speak about the doom and gloom of the current state of the world. The words “these days” were used very often. He would ask my opinions, of which I had little. I told him I would digest news but never really processed it. He thought this was good.
“There are too many opinions in the world,” he said. Still, this didn’t stop him from relaying his own. Of course, he wasn’t happy with the way things are or the way they could be.
Throughout, Mr. Rahman would sip on his steaming cup of tea like it was an ice-cold glass of whiskey. The Iron Goddess of Mercy turned to Johnnie Walker. With each sip, he would get sadder, seemingly drunker, and like a dutiful bartender I would pour him another while listening to his laments.
One cup after another, Mr. Rahman tried to drown his sorrows away. Instead, it intensified them. The hot tea would drip down his throat and melt into his heart, and then a wave of melancholy would gush forth.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m a monster,” he would sob quietly. “I’m sorry, Adnan. I’m sorry, Ashraf. I’m sorry, Nur. I’m sorry. I’m a monster.”
From what I managed to gather, Adnan and Ashraf were his two sons and Nur was his wife. According to Mr. Rahman, he had done something monstrous to them. Living alone in this dark little apartment was his penance. Whether the monstrous thing was truly monstrous, I never knew. He never shared and I never pressed him. I listened to his sobs in silence and without judgement.
I would let Mr. Rahman cry until it was time for me to get to work. He would look deeply embarrassed as he left, but the next time I met him, he acted like it never happened. His sobs, his self-flagellation—they all never happened until they happened again.
Things repeated. I poured Mr. Rahman cups of tea. He spun poems of Mrs. Lee’s beauty. He sobbed. I worked nights at the hospice. The husband next door smoked in the hallway. He waved at me. I overheard his wife complaining about the apartment. They laughed together. I scrubbed the stain. I poured Mr. Rahman a cup of tea. All the while, I never saw or met my next-door neighbor, the most beautiful woman in the world.
Mr. Rahman stopped coming for tea. One night, I realized he had not visited for more than a week. The next day, I looked at the clock and waited for 2:00 to turn into 2:05 and then 2:15. My porcelain teacups were polished and gleaming; the water was hot and boiling. He didn’t come that day or the day after.
I tried to search for a reason for his absence, to recall what happened the last time I saw him, but all my tea sessions with him melded together. I poured through each one, trying to remember if I had given any offense. I scoured for anything significant. I could find nothing. They were all the same.
I could have knocked on Mr. Rahman’s door, asked him what was wrong, invited him for some afternoon tea myself. He was only three doors down. But I never did.
On a Saturday morning, maybe two months later, I came back to my apartment with two bags of groceries. When the elevator door opened, two men waited for me to get out before attempting to fit in a black leather sofa. Behind them another two men waited, carrying an ornate wooden armoire.
“That’s the last of furniture, Dad,” came a voice at the end of the hall. The man was tall, handsome, and bright faced. I could read his future just by looking at him: a life of happiness and success. I wondered if this was the elder or younger son. He looked absolutely nothing like me.
“Good, good,” said Mr. Rahman. He locked his door up and faced the hallway. He saw me but didn’t look at me. Together with his son, he passed me by without acknowledgement. His face was blank; he stared straight ahead. They stopped in front of the elevator and waited. I unlocked my door and went inside, and as Mr. Rahman descended, I remained in my room. As he walked out of the apartment forever, I turned on the kettle, poured tea into my porcelain teacups, and drank alone.
No. Not alone. I peeled back the rug, and though she did not rise from the stain as she did in the darkness, I knew she was there.
In another month or so the family next door also left. Strangely, their departure was not sudden. The loudness that drifted through the walls faded slowly. Each day, their conversations softened until all I could hear were muffled whispers. It was as if they were preparing me for their eventual exit out of my life. Then they were gone, and all that was left was silence.
Now, it was just me, my stain, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Just as before, I could not feel an iota of her presence. There were no sounds, no signs of life. Stillness besieged me from both sides. Maybe she had left too, and I didn’t even know it.
I thought about her sometimes as I lay beside my stain. I brushed my fingertips over the carpet, cycling through my mind for the various portraits of her that Mr. Rahman had left me, but with each retrieval the details would fade. Her face became blurred, like a smudged painting, and then she turned into a mere impression, a silhouette, less than a shape.
When I first heard the knock, I was staring at the darkness on the floor, waiting for her. I spent a lot of time doing that these days. I no longer hid her under the rug. She was always there with me, and in the night, she arose from the stain—walked in slow circles around my room, and sat, unmoving at the edge of my bed, as if waiting for me, too. And as each memory of my neighbors receded, as I slowly forgot the sounds of the family next door, forgot the ways Mr. Rahman described our beautiful neighbor, she solidified, her outline growing clearer. Will a time come when she gains a mouth? A voice? Would she lament her sorrows to me while I poured her a cup of tea? I would listen; she was all the company I needed.
The knock on my door came again. It was late, not the time for food deliveries or health inspectors. Reluctantly, I wrenched my eyes from the stain and stumbled to the door.
“Hello? Are you there?” said the voice behind the door. “It’s your neighbor. I’m sorry to bother you but I need your help with something.”
My hand froze at the handle. I remembered the soft sounds of a piano. I remembered a world of majestic African mountains, raging monsoons, and marble statues of goddesses, but I felt the woman rise from the stain, beckoning me back into the room. Again, the world outside my apartment began to slip away.
“Hello?” she asked again as she knocked. Time dilated to an eternal suspension. Behind the door was Mrs. Lee, the most beautiful woman in the world. All I had to do was open the door to see if Mr. Rahman was telling the truth, to meet her at long last.
I gripped the doorknob. Waited.
Feng Gooi was born and raised in the sunny tropical island of Penang, Malaysia, but is currently in snowy Buffalo, New York, studying for a master’s degree in mental health counseling. He used to work in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as a mental health rehab worker. You can find his work in Shoreline of Infinity, Alchemy, and Teleport Magazine.