It was early afternoon, and I had just arrived back home from my winter vacation. Upon entering my apartment, I noticed that my roommate’s door was slightly ajar, and I could not see any light filtering through the crack. I dropped off my bag in my room, and took off my heavy winter coat. I was itching with curiosity. I needed to see the inside of his room. I knew he was not there and I was not sure when I would have gotten another opportunity. While I felt that I should respect his privacy, the temptation was too great.
When I moved back to Montreal in September, I had very little time to find an apartment. I was living in Ottawa at the time and had been waiting on a formal offer letter from a company in Montreal before looking for a place to live. When the letter finally came it was on a Thursday; I was going to start work the following Tuesday. I reached out to my old roommate Riley, who was still living in Montreal, to see if by chance he needed a new roommate. He did. One of his roommates had just moved out.
I had been inside his apartment before, but never from the perspective of someone looking to move in. When I saw it that weekend, it looked nice. The kitchen was renovated, there was a washer and a dryer, and it had all my old kitchen appliances that I had sold to Riley when I moved away from Montreal. The room that had just been vacated was quite small, with dark laminate wooden floors and a built-in closet. Being the minimalist I am, a small room did not bother me. Besides, where else was I going to find another apartment that same weekend?
The reason the last roommate had moved out was a mouse infestation. She would hear them in her room, and had taped up small gaps in the baseboard where she thought the mice were coming from. No problem, I thought. With the exterminators, the mice will soon be gone. Plus, I thought, I am not a princess.
Before deciding to move in, I wanted to meet the other roommate in this three-bedroom apartment. “Sure,” Riley said, “I think he is in his room.” Riley went to knock on his door, and the roommate came out to say hello.
He seemed friendly, though socially awkward. I learned a few things about him. He was a student, who enjoyed walking long distances. What his major was, I cannot remember. What year he was in, he said was complicated. I did not get much more out of him. I am not quite sure where he was from. I know he spent some time growing up in Nova Scotia, and his parents were now in Ethiopia. This guy seems odd, I thought, but nice enough.
I moved in the next day.
Over the next few months, I realized how little I liked the apartment. It took months and several visits from the exterminator to get rid of the mouse problem. I would hear scratching coming from inside my walls in the middle of the night. Even when I was mostly used to it, it was still disconcerting. As winter arrived, my laminate floor cooled foot-numbing temperatures. We had a mealworm problem, but luckily that did not last long. The whole living room and kitchen area had only one small window. This window gave onto a narrow inlet of a courtyard. At no time of the day did the sun ever reach my apartment. My room had a window and a door to the fire escape. The window had bars on it. The door to the fire escape was accessible to anyone, causing me anxiety.
I learned about my door’s accessibility one morning at 5AM. Flashlight beams were darting around the narrow courtyard and through my window. I could hear loud voices outside. Someone tried the door to my bedroom, to see if it was locked: it was. Half an hour later, someone rang my doorbell. I opened the door and it was the police. Apparently they had gotten report of a robbery and had traced the suspect to the back of my building. They had decided that the best course of action then was to try all the back doors to see if any were unlocked.
Regardless of its small size and the early-morning visitors, my room was not the worst. One of the other bedrooms in my apartment had no windows. That would have been hell for me. But not for the roommate. Every day I came back from work and I would see his door closed, with a green-tinted, harsh light spilling out underneath it. I saw him sometimes. I would be sitting in the living room, and I would hear his door open. Then, a few quick, audible steps turned into a bathrobe-clad blur that disappeared into the bathroom. When not in a bathrobe, he would take his backpack with him into the bathroom. Because the light always seemed to be on in his room, I sometimes had the suspicion that he had simply forgotten to turn off his light. Surely he couldn’t be in there all the time? But then I would hear him rapidly open his bedroom door, slam it shut, open the front door, slam it shut, and lock it. He was always back shortly after leaving. He never spent any time in the kitchen or the living room. Did he even eat? The number of conversations I had with him that lasted more than a minute can be counted on one hand.
A few weeks ago, I was coming home from work and I saw the roommate leaving the apartment. It was below -10C that day, but my roommate was wearing only a t-shirt, jeans, and mittens. I asked him about it later, in one of our minute-long conversations. He claimed to almost never wear coats, and that he has gotten used to always being in a t-shirt.
My enigmatic roommate: with each passing day and every interaction, I became more curious. He spends so much time in his windowless room, I thought. How? What does his room look like? Is he hiding a dark secret in there? The door was always closed.
Finally, that winter afternoon, the opportunity arose. I was going to see the inside of his room. I tried opening his door and felt initial resistance. Was it blocked from the inside? No, the door was simply scraping against the floor, not surprising in my shoddy apartment. I opened the door fully. The sharp smell of a lived-in, musty, unventilated room greeted me. I turned on the lights.
The room was empty: no furniture, no clothes, nothing.
Had he moved out? I messaged Riley to see if the roommate had said anything to him. He said no. My mysterious roommate had vanished.