Gordy's Got a Problem

Chapter 1: The Problem

Leo Faraday, who was not a Leo by birth sign, and who considered himself to be as far from lion-like as one could get, was doing his best to keep an eye on the little yellow Miata to the right of him while, at the same time, trying to pull off a winning game of I-don’t-see-you. Three times Leo had granted that son-of-a-beach eye contact and the man had used every opportunity to pounce into Leo’s lane like he’d received permission to do so—only to immediately swing back into the middle lane, hopping back and forth as if any second aliens were going to open a VIP lane in the sky, and he had to make sure he was in the right lane to use it. The Miata had managed to gain zero metres of ground over any of the other cars inching along the 401 but had done an amazing job at risking everyone’s bumpers throughout the process, all the while increasing the potential of making the traffic they were already stuck in ten times worse. Leo had no idea what he would do to the man or his little yellow car if that happened.

Leo was having a terrible day. It wasn’t the worst day of his life, hadn’t even hit the top ten, but it was fair to say that if it kept getting worse in the exponential proportions that it had been, it could possibly peak at eleventh. Duration was making things harder, and only the gods knew just how long the day was going to continue. In the past twenty-five minutes, he’d travelled less than twenty kilometres. He could have walked faster. For that matter, he could have crawled faster. He would have said that traffic was being an absolute b***h, but then he would be being far nicer to traffic than it deserved. What should have been a forty-some-minute drive from the shop in Brampton to his apartment in the city was now clocking in at an hour-twenty.

Most Fridays he could deal with the fact that it took a little longer to get home. After all, he had chosen to live in the city when a lot of the people he worked with had opted for basement apartments in the suburbs. He’d chosen that option because he’d found a not-too-small apartment, on the sixth floor of a mostly okay building, that was only an Uber ride away from everything a young, single guy wanted from the weekend: pubs, clubs, live music, and the waterfront. Except he wasn’t feeling so young these days, even though he was pretty sure thirty-two wasn’t supposed to feel old, and he hadn’t seen a full weekend in months. The ones he had seen, he’d been too tired to do anything but slug-slide between the bedroom and the couch. Six-day workweeks were hard. The seven-day ones were killing him. Not being able to enjoy the city but paying extra for all the perks of living in the city was not only pointless, it was downright foolish.

He knew without a doubt that things would seem a lot less dramatic if he could just get some rest. Time off would be great, but he’d settled for a long, deep, dreamless sleep—the kind of sleep where a body was so far gone it took three or four tries to actually wake up. The very thought of it made his eyelids feel like they were ten times heavier than normal—a dangerous sensation for bumper-to-bumper traffic—but sleep hadn’t been the relief it should have been for a while now.

For nine years, Leo had lived in his apartment, and for eight years and eleven-plus months, neither sleep nor peace had been an issue. The domestic disagreements were few and far between and they had a tendency to fizzle out as quickly as they began. The kids in the building usually ran out of hooting and hollering juice by dusk, and most of the time the homeless people walking past the building preferred to mumble as oppose to scream.

His upstairs neighbour, however, was going to be the death of him.

In a move that defied both common sense and consideration, the Miata took Leo’s one-second pause to zip back into the outside lane, and it was only by the grace of all things good that Leo got to his brakes in time. He swallowed every curse his mind was throwing at him and gripped the wheel tighter than he needed to. He didn’t pound on it, or punch his dash, or make any of the gestures he so desperately wanted to. It wasn’t worth the energy he’d expend, and calm was one of those things that once one lost their grip on it, the process of gathering the reins back up became daunting. He could literally see his cut-off and the only thing he wanted to focus on was getting off the highway. From there he’d decide on the next step. As his father always said, “One step at a time will eventually be a whole journey.” That phrase had been running through his mind like a ninety’s pop song all day, but that was the case with most of the new-age, spiritually-freeing, flower-power mantras his parents shared with anyone that would listen. Once they got in your head, it was almost impossible to get them out.

There were many places he could go from where he was. The park, for a run; summer nights in Toronto were too quickly gone not to take advantage of them when they came along. Or the diner, for a well-deserved, so-big-you-need-both-hands-sized burger complete with fries. He could grab a couple of beers or a bottle of wine, sneak up to the roof, and watch the neighbourhood go dark. There was also a text from his best friend Jeff, as yet unanswered, asking him to come out and watch their other best buddy Fig play an open-mike session at Lola’s. Which would be cool, if he wasn’t ready to fall down from exhaustion, and if he didn’t know for a fact that Fig wouldn’t see the stage until at least nine but probably closer to ten or eleven. So, he could go. He probably should go. There was only about a four percent probability that he would, though. After all, he was expected back at work tomorrow morning for eight. Probably Sunday, too. Then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…

“Kill me now,” Leo grumbled. Except even as the words left his mouth, he could hear both his parents talking about life choices, taking steps toward happiness, and retaining responsibility for the paths on which we walked. It was all said very positively—they weren’t the type for negative reinforcement—but it was still hard to hear. Even when he was the one thinking it.

“Everybody else gets to blame everybody else for their shitty lives,” he mumbled. He looked at the Miata, now a car’s length ahead of him in the far left-hand lane, directing his comments at it. “Why not me, hmm? How about I blame you, you yellow-car-driving, unbelievably annoying jerk?”

While he hated the idea of just going to the apartment and sleeping—relinquishing his dissolving youth to sleep, living out his life for the sole purpose of getting up and going to work—there was no doubt that his credit card statement would be more than appreciative of the continuing overtime. If his damn truck hadn’t needed that damn alternator last month, and if his hydro bill hadn’t climbed sixty percent in the last three years for no good reason, and if gas prices weren’t so high, then maybe he could have told work exactly where they could put their weekend shifts. But it had, and they did, and they were, and that was life. So, instead of the diner, he pulled into a Subway when he was free of the highway and picked up what the sarcastic side of his mind pointed out would be the only item of notable inches for him that night.

He had barely pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building when his littlest neighbour, Samir, made a run for him. Up the overgrown hill that was the “garden area” of the entrance, down onto the cracking asphalt of the laneway, and up to the side of his truck without a concern in the world. Leo had experienced his share of near heart attacks when the boy had first started pulling that move, and more than once he’d told the kid how dangerous it was. Neither Samir, nor Samir’s mother, seemed to care about that particular danger, however, so Leo had stopped trying. Now he knew to watch for the dark-haired disaster-waiting-to-happen. He dreaded the constant turnover in their building, knowing one day, sure as sugar, some new hotshot was going to pull into the parking lot without being quite so cautious and Samir would be no more. Or any one of the twenty-odd kids that gathered down there to play, because the other kids weren’t much better than Samir. They’d had a playground once. And an actual garden with actual flowers. Garbage pails that got emptied. Walkways that were maintained and cleared of snow. But space was valuable, litigation too damn likely, and labour too expensive and/or difficult to keep. Such was the world these days.

“And if you keep thinking s**t like that, you’re not just going to feel old, you’re going to make yourself old,” Leo mumbled as he lowered the window and shifted the truck into park.

“Leo, Leo, Leo!” Samir sang, extending the vowels each time so that his name sounded like it was thirteen letters long instead of three. “Leo, guess what?”

Leo leaned out to peer at him. “You won the lottery and you, me, your mom, your auntie, and every one of your buddies are moving to the Bahamas?”

“Ha,” Samir snorted the sound as much as he spoke it. His lips were that weird colour of pink turning blue that kids got when it was getting too cold to be out in short sleeves and not quite late enough to go inside, but too close to being late enough that no kid wanted to go inside for a jacket and risk getting told to stay in.

Leo reached for the seat beside him. “You want my jacket, Sam? You can bring it up to me tomorrow sometime.”

Samir shook his head. “Someone’s in your spot.”

He’d said “spot” with enough of a spit that Leo could tell he was hoping for drama. A good shout off between neighbours was pretty entertaining to a bunch of kids too young to venture far enough away to find actual fun.

“What do you mean?” Leo asked, even though he knew exactly what Samir meant. It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last someone had ignored the numbers on the parking spaces and grabbed his empty one. That’s what happened when your parking spot was too close to the entrance.

Samir wiped his nose and pointed with the same slicked-up hand. “You know what. Number eight. Your parking spot. That white car with the throwing star on it.” He looked at Leo, eyes sparkling. “You gonna tear them up?”

Leo frowned. “Uh, no, Leo. I’m not going to tear up anyone or anything. Where do you even learn stuff like that?” He waved Samir away. “Back on the grass where it’s safe, please. You sure you don’t want my jacket? You look like you’re freezing. Shouldn’t you be going in for supper?”

Samir shrugged but backed up a couple of steps. “Nah. Momma and Auntie are visiting with my grandma. Grandma’s boyfriend says they sound like a bunch of old hens.” He jumped over the curb to the lawn, tucking both hands into his armpits and waving his elbows. “Cluck, cluck, mother fu—”

“Uh-uh-uh!” Leo shook his head, glaring, and closed the window. Most of the time Samir was a good kid, but he definitely had a rotten streak. Maybe all kids did.

He drove past his own parking spot, the spot with the white Mercedes sitting in it, and pulled into one of the visitor’s spots along the right side of the lot, even though parking there as a tenant was a no-no. He stopped to grab a picture of the Mercedes in case the property manager tried to raise hell over his choice of parking and realised at the last minute he’d forgotten his sub in the truck. He walked back, cursing, even though it took only a couple of minutes, because apparently the day had no intention of getting any better regardless of where he was.

As both elevators were in use, Leo didn’t bother to wait. He took the stairs two at a time and told himself that would make up for shirking the gym. He kicked off his work boots at the door but carried them to the balcony. It was a tiny, uncomfortably crumbly thing, just under a metre deep and about twice that lengthwise. It was all he needed, though—somewhere to air out his work boots and look at the street while he ate. In the ever-growing metropolis of the city, six stories weren’t high enough to see that far, but it was high enough to get him up and away. To get his face into the wind and breathe fresh air, to get his ears out of the bustle and listen to doves or pigeons or whatever-the-hell-birds were trilling out their evening devotions from the roof, and for several long minutes there was only him, his sandwich, and heaven. It was peaceful. Too peaceful. With less than half his sub eaten, his eyelids had already started to close.

Sleep—sweet, deep sleep—was a promise away.

He flipped the paper back around his sub and tucked it into the fridge for tomorrow. If he didn’t have it for breakfast, he’d bring it for lunch. He left the sliding door open to let in the cool May air, dropped his jeans while he walked to the bedroom, and crashed onto the bed; socks, undies, and all. If he was lucky, a couple of hours would do him and he’d get up, go see Jeff and Fig, and not regret it too much in the morning. If he was really lucky, he’d crash out hard and fast and not move a muscle until the alarm went off at five-thirty.

* * * *

The moment between falling asleep and having actually fallen all the way in was one of Leo’s favourite places to be; a few warm seconds where the pillow in a person’s arms had started to feel like a real body, but the imagery in one’s head hadn’t devolved into some weird dream yet. Those few seconds when a person could feel their corporal self melt away and sense that warmer, brighter, better version of themselves—the part that exists in the soul alone—start to blossom out of the goo the body had left behind.

He’d been aware of the rattle from above him, but it had been easy enough to ignore, almost windchime-like in its regularity and softness. Though it most likely would have been a serious sound where it was originating, buried above the concrete block and plaster that separated the apartments from one another, it wasn’t a bother to Leo at all. However, in the same way that the hardest rock song can have the softest intro, so, too, did that gentle rattle slip into a steady shake. Neither awake nor sleeping, the peaceful expression on Leo’s face tightened into a frown.

The shake became a strong, persistent thump that Leo’s surfacing consciousness insisted it could ignore. It was followed by a crash, several sharp bumps, and what sounded to Leo like forty footfalls, all wearing clunky, heavy heels. His eyelids snapped open. He was gritting his teeth so hard, his cheeks bulged. Something screamed—a long, wiggly sound that was either child or demon—and with the window open beside him, it was loud enough that whoever was making it could have been in bed with him. He heard his upstairs neighbour slam the window shut and the sound did quiet…in the way that a transport truck rumbling past sounded quieter than a train.

Nine or twenty children went running from one end of the apartment to the other.

Something crashed into the ceiling.

Something else shattered.

A door slammed.

Leo didn’t know he was getting out of bed until he found himself standing. Heat raged through his body, looping from one clenched fist to the other. Four days…six days…eight days…how long had it been while he’d laid there with a pillow over his head, trying to ignore the sounds from above? Telling himself that it would pass, that this was the way apartment living was, and it was certainly nothing he hadn’t dealt with before. Now this? On a day when he was so tired that he couldn’t even see straight? This ever-increasing, day-after-day, unbearable bullshit! Nobody could live like this!

For the most part, Leo was not confrontational. He hadn’t made a complaint about the noise with the property managers lest he end up getting some poor family kicked out and forcing them into someplace even worse than this one. He hadn’t bashed on the ceiling or screamed up into the void. At that moment, however, Leo was no longer acting like himself. Lack of peace, respect, and appreciation had caught up with him, and rational thought had been left weeping under the blanket of his bed, begging for sleep. Had his robe not been lying on the chair at the door of his bedroom, he might have forgotten to put something on at all. As it was, his hands could barely stop shaking enough to tie the belt. But if the neighbours didn’t like seeing his hairy thighs or his tighty-whiteys, maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe they’d stay quiet in the hopes of keeping him away.

He slammed out of the apartment, through the fire door, and up the stairs, rolling full steam ahead. When his palm hit the second fire door to bring him into the hallway of the floor above him, Leo didn’t even feel the pressure of it. It was like his fury was clearing the way for him; he was slicing through space and time like a flaming arrow. The bullseye sat, invisible to the eye but pulsing in his mind, right below the paint-spattered, time-worn brass numbers of apartment 708, level seven, eighth apartment. Directly above 608, his level six, eighth apartment. The apartment that owned parking spot eight in the first damn row—the one currently occupied by a show-off white Mercedes—that Leo wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that Mr. or Mrs. Loud-as-f**k owned. Or, hell, maybe they had a little yellow Miata that liked to cut people off on the damn highway. Or a business that made their people work sixty damn hours a week!

Leo didn’t feel his knuckles hit the door, but the sound echoed through the hallway like a series of gunshots.

The door opened immediately, and in the time it took for a single heartbeat to flump in his chest, Leo went from furious to speechless. There, in front of him, was a man that Leo could only assume was an actual angel. He had one of those big-eyed, round faces that made him age undeterminable. He had a shadow growth on his face that suggested he wasn’t a teenager, but underneath that hair was the smooth, flawless skin of a young man. His hair was light, maybe honey brown or amber, but it was buzzed so short that it was hard to tell. He was slim, all collarbones and elbows underneath a thin T-shirt, and only about five and a half feet tall. That put him about twenty to thirty centimetres shorter than Leo, and he was looking up with crystal blue eyes as wide as silver dollars, his full, pink, recently moistened lips parted. Behind him, the apartment sat in complete silence.

Leo narrowed his eyes. Pretty man or not, situation managed or not, this wasn’t going to happen again. It couldn’t, for fear that Leo would lose the tenuous grip he had on his sanity.

“Look,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, but firm. “You don’t know me—”

“You’re my downstairs neighbour,” the young man blurted, breathlessly.

“And I hate to be a f*****g jerk complainer, but—”

“The noise is driving you mental.”

Leo frowned. “I know that it can be difficult to control every itty-bitty noise but—”

“You have to work in the morning, and you need your sleep.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. And—”

“And early,” the man said, nodding. “Like really early. Even though it’s a weekend.”

“Well, no, but yes. I guess. Kind of. Wait, how do you know this?”

The man put out his hand. “Gordy. Me, that is. I’m Gordy. You’re Leo.” He grinned; a look that lit up his whole face. “And I make a point of keeping an eye on all the good-looking guys in this building.”

Leo lifted his eyebrow. That was a weird way to introduce one’s self. Not “Gord” or “Gordon” or even one of the two with a “but you can call me Gordy” tacked on to it. Just Gordy, right out of the gate. To Leo that made it obvious that Gordy was trying to be cute, which probably wasn’t all that hard for him and was, no doubt, something he did all the time. With that face and the cute body, he probably had a lifetime of experience in getting situations to go his way with a smile and a tilt of his head.

“Well, isn’t that clever?” Leo asked. “Flirt with the gay guy and maybe he won’t be so pissed off.”

Gordy raised both hands as if in surrender. “No, no, I swear that’s not what I meant.”

“Un huh. Well, nice try. But I know where I rank in the building, Gord-o, and for me to be hitting any best-of lists you must be stalking six, seven, oh, maybe…nine guys then.”

“Nope. There’s really only two of you. You and 405. But that guy’s married with three kids.” Gordy stuck his hand back out and wiggled his fingers. “Don’t leave me hanging, Leo.”

Leo slowly took Gordy’s hand and gave him a half-hearted shake. 405 was actually pretty hot, he had to give Gordy that one. To be compared to that guy wasn’t doing his ego any harm. “Yeah, but he farts in the elevator,” Leo said. “I mean, we all fart, but he smirks about it. So, you know he knows what he’s doing. That positively reeks of narcissism.”

“Pun intended,” Gordy added.

“Pun intended,” Leo agreed. “But here’s the thing, Gordy. If you know all this about me, and you actually give a damn about how that might affect someone, then what—” he paused dramatically “—the actual—” he gave it one more pause for good measure, holding Gordy’s gaze “—fuck.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Gordy said quickly. “I just have a visitor. An unexpected visitor. Because of some family things that are going on.” He rubbed his chin with one hand and his guts with the other. If his expression could be trusted, he didn’t even realise he was doing it. “I’ve lived here for almost a year now. You know I’ve been quiet. Super quiet. Right?”

Leo hummed a non-committal sound. If Gordy had been in the apartment for a year, then what he was saying was true. It had most definitely been quiet up until now. How Leo had missed this guy for a year was anybody’s guess, though.

Gordy’s hand moved up his belly to his chest. He put the other in the air. “I swear to you, if you just give me another day or two—a few days is all I need—this will all be over, and everything will go back to normal.” He tapped his chest. “The noise is driving me crazy, too, so it’s not just you. If there was any way that I could…” He peeked over his shoulder, into the apartment. When he looked back at Leo, it was with an expression of resigned exhaustion. “I’ve tried. I continue to try and that won’t stop. Please bear with me for, like, three more days. Four, tops.”

“Wait, you just said a couple and now it’s four—”

Gordy’s eyes widened and he clapped his hands together. “I know! I’ll make this up to you. Let me cook you dinner. After my guest is gone, of course. We can shoot for next weekend, hopefully.”

Once again, Leo’s frown deepened “Hopefully? Dude, next weekend is a week away. I can’t sleep in my truck. Come on, you’ve got to—”

“And I will. It’s all going to be golden. What do you like? Are you a steak guy? Chicken? Vegetarian? You know what, just give me your phone number. I’ll text you when Bel—” Gordy seemed to catch himself. He put up one finger and dashed into his apartment. “Wait right there,” he shouted from the kitchen.

Leo peered in. Against the kitchen wall, on the cheap laminate flooring of the living room, sat a pile of smashed glass beside a propped broom. An overturned yucca tree lay sprawled over an area rug in the middle of the space, trailing soil like blood from a wound. He leaned to the right to see around the door better, but got blocked by Gordy’s return.

“Okay, phone,” Gordy said, holding it up. “Give me your number.”

Leo figured he probably could just give the cute guy his number, walk away, and hope for the best. But his parents would never forgive him if he “had been in the position to transform darkness into light” and he hadn’t—especially if he walked away and something really bad happened. Now that he’d had a chance to look around a bit, now that he understood that some kind of struggle or tantrum had gone on here, Leo was left with a weird feeling that was all kinds of uncomfortable. He lowered his voice to a whisper and moved closer to Gordy. “Is everything okay in here? Do you need some help or something?”

Gordy gasped a laugh, turning to look behind him at whatever it was Leo was seeing. “What, here? Me? No. No, no. This isn’t…this is just…”

“Because if somebody’s hurting you or making you do something you don’t want to do—like maybe whoever it is you keep looking back to check on—now would be the time to say something. I can help you.”

Gordy looked back at Leo, his eyes shimmering with tears. “That’s really nice of you, thank you. You can’t help with this. But I promise you that nobody is hurting anyone or anything.”

“Except your yucca tree.”

Gordy looked over his shoulder again. “Yeah. That was just an accident. I promise.”

“There’s no need to promise anything to me.” Leo shrugged, moved back into the hallway, and started talking normally again. “Except that dinner, if you actually want to do that.” He forced himself to smile and look at Gordy directly, even though Gordy’s messed-up apartment still desperately wanted his attention. “And that you’re going to try and be quiet, of course.”

Gordy swallowed hard enough that Leo heard his throat click. “Yes, and yes. Thanks, Leo. I appreciate your patience. Or, if we can’t call it ‘patience,’ your ability to clench and bear it, at least.”

Leo snorted. “I’m gay, Gordy. I’ve been clenching and bearing since I was eighteen.”

For a second, Gordy just stared, then burst out laughing. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you just said that!”

Someone with way more of a handle on “cool” than he was capable of would have left their conversation at that, spinning away with a smirk and making it the last thing the cute guy remembered about him. Instead, Leo stuck out his hand, offering the handshake this time. “It was nice to meet you, Gordy.”

He was still smiling when he stepped into his apartment, and although it probably wasn’t an actual sensation and more just a trick of his mind, he would swear that he could still feel the warmth of Gordy’s smaller hand tucked against his own. He picked up his phone, checked for a message in case Gordy had verified the number, and saw Jeff’s text.

For a year, he hadn’t noticed that an actual angel lived above him, an angel who apparently had been noticing quite a bit about him. He’d been so lost in the mundane repetition of working and eating and sleeping, that the rest of life was quite literally getting ignored. One day, sooner than he’d want to admit was possible, he was going to wake up, realise he was sixty instead of thirty-two, and life had decided to ignore him back.

“f**k that,” Leo told his phone. He quickly responded to Jeff, set down the phone, and went into the bedroom to change. He was stepping into a pair of clean jeans when something clump-clump-clumped across the ceiling. He looked up, frowning, and a second later, his phone buzzed. A number he’d never seen before had messaged him, but his face broke out into a smile when he read it.

It was only one word: SORRY!