When my landlord first showed me this place I thought it was amazing. Sure, it was kind of rundown, rat infested throughout the basements and a little noisy since Amtrak was just 10 blocks away, but it was my place. It was the first time in all of my 23 years I had ever lived alone. At home, I shared a bedroom with my sister. In college, the rent was always divided among three other people. Those were both incredible times filled with comfort, laughter and fights, but I needed a place of my own as everyone does once they have grown. This place – this place was mine, my paradise, my seclusion, my home that belonged only to me. I loved it.

Well, I loved it for the first 2 months. Before the tenant who could never find another volume level other than ten moved in. I didn’t know the neighbor. I didn’t know if it was a he or she or if there were more than one. I just knew the music that played at a ridiculously loud volume. By how high the music was I imagined five people sharing the apartment; after all one person could not keep up that much noise. No, there would have to be at least five people, maybe six or seven. All of them would wear black leather jackets and the most colorful tattoos to match the piercing they had, which would be everywhere. Metal Heads, my friends and I would call them in high school. The ones that skipped classes, sat on their motorcycles and gave you the most evil looks when you passed. The ones that would play music so loud they would cause their neighbor’s cups to slide across the table.

The noise caused vibrations to come through the walls of my living room, interrupting the Stock Market Report in the morning, the Simpsons in the evening, and even the sounds of my own chewing. It wasn’t even good music; it was demonic European rock music, where the singer screamed instead of singing the words. The screams would knock my skirt of its hanger and override the ringing of my telephone. The noise was never consistent; sometimes there was a 3-day period of silence. Other times, the music would play at the loudest volume possible all day.

I have never been one to stand up for myself. When I was eight I never even told anyone that the class bully took my lunch money everyday; I just waited until she moved away in the middle of fourth grade. All through high school, I never said no when someone told me (not asked me) to let them copy my homework. Not surprisingly, when it came to this noise problem, I left it alone. I didn’t call the cops or knock on the door in fear that I would just make everything worst. I would just put on earplugs or put on my Walkman and hope the noise would go away. The only other peace and comfort I found was the fact that in the morning, whether they were playing music or not, it would be completely silent as I sat in my cubical, five miles away.

Work, my salvation from the noise, was the 80th floor of a downtown business building, and I was doing well. It took me a while to find my place in Mortell, a company that helped start other businesses. After a year of being there (10 months after my noisy neighbor moved in), I finally got the chance to start my own project. My idea was to support a bunch of non-profit organizations that focused on leadership skills in teens. The project would set up a few grants and, being tax deducible, the project would save the company millions in the progress. It was my big chance and everything was going well until one Black Tuesday, when one of my partners made a mistake.

“Astra,” he called to me as I was walking from the elevator to the main desk.

“Hi, how’s everything going?”

“Fine, Great,” he said, before he paused for a while as I sorted through my messages. I looked up and saw a puzzled expression on his face.

“Is something wrong?” I asked

“Yeah, we have a problem”

“Oh, what is it,” I asked without much worry.

“Remember when you assigned me the job of writing out the checks to all the organizations?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry if you haven’t finished them. We still have a lot of time before the deadline.”

“Oh, its not that. I finished them early, you know, to get them out of the way. And…”

“Well, that’s good,” I said looking down at messages. “So what’s the problem?”

“You know,” he continued. “I never was great in math in high school. I got Ds
and Cs most of the time. So when it came to the decimals on the check. Well, you know how everyone was suppose to get $6,000?”

“Yeah,” I said, this time very worried.

“Well, I guess I made a mistake and they all are getting $60,000.”

“What! How did you do that?” I said loudly, panicking. So loudly, the whole lobby turned around for a moment.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he started speaking fast. “It just happened.”

“Well, call the checks back.”

“I can’t!”

“What do you mean you can’t? Cancel the checks!”

“They already started withdrawing. We’ve already lost about half a million dollars already in the three days they’ve been out. I only realized this morning when I reviewed the bank reports.” He spoke incredibly fast and nervously. I did the same.

“What! What! When does the boss look at those reports?”

“Ms. Astra!” The boss screamed walking off the elevator. At that moment he seemed like the Green Giant on all the corn cans. He inched closer to us, shaking the ground with each step and I was frozen in time. I saw my salvation slipping away. Somehow, in the far off distance, I heard the same demonic music that shook my apartment walls. The noise crept through the windows, through the cracks and the Air Condition vents. Incoherent to everyone else, the music circled around my head; my problems had followed me and found their ultimate destination.

“Ms. Astra!” my boss said once more with his deep voice flowing over an even thicker mustache. “Over breakfast today, my assistant had to do CPR as I choked on my bagel looking at all the account withdrawals. When I mustered up the courage to look again, 700, 000 came from your project.”

“Well you see,” I started, but was cut off at that instance by my partner.

“Astra, accidentally misplaced the decimals on about 20 checks, sir,” he said as naturally as rain. “I was about to double-check them, but it was too late. She already sent them off. The money was already withdrawn when I noticed…She said she wanted to get the work out of the way.”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open. All sound was mute for about ten minutes. All I could see was the movement of mouths spilling out lies and deciding my faith. The office watched me drown. All of a sudden the sound became too loud and a bullhorn blew the words, “You’re fired,” directly in my ear.

Those last words are the only sound I could remember as I rode the elevator to the first floor and caught the train home at 9:10am, a tradition always reserved for 6:00 pm. The rest of the day was a blur; everything was traffic moving a thousand miles per hour. I remained a zombie as I reached home. No activity follow except the game of staring at my turned-off television and eating lunch in my bedroom.

It wasn’t until around 8pm, when I woke up, as vibrations came through my living room walls. I put on my headphones out of mere routine, but did not turn it on. I had crashed back to earth with the noise and I was angry. I had survived, rubbed the sand out of my eyes and I was fed up with the noise. The urge made me bang on the walls and start screaming “Turn it off!” I ran to my phone and called the police. When they took too long to come, I walked out and bang on the door, forgetting about the worry of making things worst and forgetting about my Walkman still on my head.

“What!” The neighbor said opening the door. I remember this part in slow motion. The door in my mind takes five minutes to open and my neighbor appears; it is my lying partner. When he saw me clearly his mouth felled open and his tongue went dry. “Did you follow me here?”

“No, I live next door. You’re the one with bad taste. Turn down your music.”

“You followed me here!”

“Turn down the noise.”

Three minutes in the conversation I remembered my Walkman still in my pocket and reached for the Record button. The conversation turned into a yelling match about today’s events. Everyone stepped outside their door, recreating the stares at the office and I felt sorry that they had to put up with so much noise.

He never once said sorry, just that he was scared and that it was my project anyway. He was angry, so was I.

“Stop harassing me,” he screamed.

“It wasn’t my fault! It was your stupid mistake. Why should I take the blame because you can’t count?”

He yelled louder and I matched his volume in our argument; the Walkman recorded everything clearly over my No Doubt tape.

20 minutes flew by and the police finally came, sending me back to my apartment, while giving him a 300-dollar fine for disturbance. I wrote a letter to the boss, explaining everything that happened and supplying him with evidence of the truth. It took only a day before my partner was fired. I was given a raise, as an apology.

My project continued, under the watchful eyes of financial consultants of course. My noisy neighbor didn’t play loud music anymore because he couldn’t afford to live there; he moved back in with his mom. I moved away anyway, as I got more raises for my project’s success. My new bank account provided more than enough money to move into a nicer apartment, near a park, 10 miles away from Amtrak, and a cleaner basement, but still slightly rat infested. The birds are the only noisy ones, flying outside my window and chirping constantly, but they don’t scream instead of singing.