gas leak

The smell really wasn’t too bad, in fact, I was starting to get used to it, and it really didn’t bother me anymore. It didn’t smell good, but I didn’t really notice it anymore. But that was because I lived there.

The smell was turning him off like a faucet in the middle of draught. Rent wasn’t all that bad, but that wasn’t the reason why I wanted a second roommate. This may sound odd but I think some part of me was convinced the bad smell would go away if Paul stayed with us.

“I can’t stay here, Bailey. Not with that smell, it reeks.” He asked me if I had called the landlord yet, and I swore to him I had, and I didn’t even need to swear. Habitually, I don’t lie. My landlord agreed that it, indeed, smelled very bad, but he couldn’t pinpoint what it was. “Just let me know if it starts to smell rotten—”

“Rotten what?”

“…rotten eggs,” he said. “That’s a gas leak. But – Bailey,” he placed a hand on my shoulder and leaned in close, “tell me first, OK?”

I knew that my house was less expensive than all the other houses on my street, that it had been “unfortunately and illegally” constructed, though he’d never gone into the details of what that actually meant.

“Couldn’t my house explode?” I asked.

“I will buy you a hotel if there’s a gas leak, but you need to tell me first.”

I was anxious about all that gas-leak nonsense for weeks. I think I was mostly nervous because my landlord had basically told me if it happened, there would be nothing I could do, I would have to wait for him, and I didn’t want to do that. If our house were to explode, I would be here all alone with my current roommate, Beatrice, who teased my anxiety more than she ever tried remedy it. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever actually started to smell that, I feel like I would lose all sense of myself.

Hopelessness, however, can bring false prophets, and I soon found comfort in the bad smell that constantly lingered in my home because as long as it remained, that meant that there was no rotten eggs smell. I told Beatrice, this one day and without looking up she had said, “Or, you just can’t smell it. Because this other smell is so strong.”

This statement bothered me more than anything had before. She was right, absolutely. What if our home already did smell of rotten eggs but this other smell – this other god-forsaken, gut-wrenching, unbearable scent – masked it? We’d never know. We could die in our sleep. Our house could be on the verge of demolition any second, and we wouldn’t be the wiser.

After this incident, and the spike in my anxiety that it induced, Beatrice and I started talking less and less. Remarkably, she somehow stopped speaking to me for a week. She’s a remarkable person in that she could manage that. I talk constantly while she could go weeks without breathing a word.

Naturally, hopelessly, helplessly, I contacted my landlord again and explained my predicament.

“It doesn’t smell like rotten eggs right now,” I explained, “but what if it did? And this other smell is still here and I can’t smell it?”

“But it doesn’t?” he assessed, over the phone. “It doesn’t currently stink?”

“It does,” I said, “but not of rotten eggs. At least, not that I can tell…”

“Well then, what’s the issue?”

I had swallowed several deep, stench-stained breaths while he continued to pester, “Hello? Hello?” on the line before I said, “Can you come over?”

“Can I what?”

“Can you come over? And smell the house?”

“I have owned this property for a year, I know what it smells like.”

I took a deep shaky breath and on it’s release, he shattered. “I’ll come over.”

I let him in and the first thing he asked was, “Where’s Beatrice?” because I suppose he didn’t want to talk to me and all my anxiety.

“Does it smell like rotten eggs?” I insisted.

“No, where’s Beatrice?”

“She’s in the basement.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What on earth is she doing down there, that’s where it smells the worst.”

“Is it?”

“It is,” he nodded.

We walked through the house and passed through the kitchen and he asked me what I was making. “Beatrice soup.”

“Pardon?”

“Her favorite soup.”

“I see.” He stopped at the door to the basement. Without looking at me, he asked, “Have you been down there with her?”

“It’s the only way I can talk to her. She stays down there all the time.”

I feel like we shared a peculiar moment of familiarity immediately following this statement. He looked at me with a face of surprise and simultaneous endearment. “Do you see a therapist for your anxiety?”

“Sometimes, do you?” (I don’t know why I asked this.)

“Sometimes,” he said. He’d never told me he had anxiety before. “I like renting out my houses. It relaxes me. Do stuff that relaxes you, Bailey. It helps. It helped me.” I didn’t know then why he was telling me this, but I think now, looking back, it was because he had felt common ground shifting into place beneath our feet, over that smell-assaulted basement.

“I like to cook.”

He nodded. “Let’s go,” he said, and he smiled at me. For the first time, since we’d met, he smiled at me. I decided I liked him then, and my fear of rotten eggs subsided into a soft, comfortable form of temporary trust.

It was a really shitty house, to be honest with you. The lights don’t work too well in the basement, you have to take the stairs in the dark. There’s a single electric bulb dangling from the ceiling with the rest of them and that illuminates the whole room.

I watched him wander through them, like a kid looking at icicle lights during Christmas. They didn’t glow, they merely reflected the light from the bulb. Rotting flesh can be iridescent. Or at least the beetles and flies were. He looked at me over his shoulder. “When’d you guys first come down here?”

“I came down here the day we moved in. Beatrice has been hanging around down here just for the last two months.”

“That’s around when you first called me about the gas leaks?”

I sighed. “She thought I was being silly. I was so scared that…that…the gas would leak…”

He turned around and walked back to me, at the foot of the stairs, and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously. And that she didn’t either.”

“We’re still working it out,” I said.

He nodded, gravely, and bit his lip as if keeping a secret. “When I first flipped this, people didn’t take me seriously. The two that were down here before Beatrice, they called me constantly, always complaining about one thing or another. It made me feel like a loser to have given them such a shitty house, even though it wasn’t my fault they bought into it. One day they called me about a leak in the basement. I was so anxious driving over, for the sixth time that week – six times! Nearly every day, can you believe it? ...Anyways, I decided I needed new tenants.”

“I’m looking for a new roommate.”

He was quiet. “The rent’s not that high, I mean I gave you a discount when you starting renting because of the smell…”

“It’s not that.”

“Than what is it?”

I didn’t know how to answer this immediately, when exactly the idea of a new roommate started in my head. I thought for a moment before saying, “Beatrice is the one who smells. She’s rotten.” And I listened for her to retaliate, but she didn’t. I looked her up and down, dangling next to that private lightbulb, and said again, “She’s rotten…”

“You can see now why I wanted you to call me first?” he asked, bringing us back down to the decomposing floor.

“Oh, yeah, I knew why from the start, but I was scared. My anxiety gets the better of me.”

“Mine, too.”

I recalled my idea from earlier. “Will air freshener work?”

“What?”

“On the smell. Will air freshener get rid of the smell of the bodies.”

“Already tried that. Honestly, this place would have to be burned to get rid of it now.” So that’s what I did.

I was cooking for Beatrice but I was feeling angry at her simultaneously. I was frustrated with the smell – that awful, awful smell, her smell – so I turned on the stove, and the oven, I lit some candles. I went to the basement, and I doused Beatrice in air freshener and lit a scented candle near the tip of her dress to get rid of that awful, awful smell. I finished making my soup first, and I ate that while I sat across the street and watched it burn. He had been right. You couldn’t smell anything. I called him up.

“You did what?”

I wanted company, and after our moment of similarity, he had become one of the select few people who could sooth my aching mind. He got me. He got me, like no one – like Beatrice – never did or could. “You should come over.”

His car pulled up nice and slow in front of my house as itself was inhaling smoke and was debating whether to stop, drop, and roll. He got out, without taking his eyes off the flames and smoke snaking from the windows, and walked over toward me.

“I wasn’t implying you actually burn it to the ground.”

“Better safe than sorry. The only way nothing bad can ever happen is if you do it yourself first.”

He sat down next to me and I handed him a bowl. “You’re the gas leak.”

“No,” I said. “Merely the smell.”