Behind the Book: 2

The time my neighbor exploded. Literally.

Kaanapali Beach, just down the hill. Photo by me.

This true story wound up in The Nightmarchers.

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I ONLY SAW HIM ONCE. Never knew his name. He lived on the first floor of our three-story complex, one apartment down and to the right of us. Plywood-covered window facing the parking lot, and an old, rusting white Cadillac with flat tires and a fine covering of red dirt.

Our complex was two blocks away from Kaanapali Beach, with small one and two-bedroom apartments that didn’t have air conditioning. Instead, we had geckos on the windows and rolling invasions of mice from the brown field of wild grass that bordered the property. But if you cracked the windows open at night, you could hear the waves break.

Mostly working people lived there. Bus riders, couples working two or more jobs, families with gaggles of kids who’d ride their scooters on the sidewalks and swing from the palm fronds.

One winter we had a big rain. The kind where water backed up in the sewer system, so the roads by the ocean flooded, people paddle boarded down the streets for fun, and water pooled by the storm drains in our parking lot. The kids came out to play in it, jumping and splashing, and we came out because our car was parked near the drain, and it looked like it might rise above the tires and up to the engine.

A flooded engine was not a problem we could afford to fix.

That’s the only time I saw him, my rusted-Cadillac-plywood-over-the-window neighbor. Kind of pasty with mussed grayish blond hair like he didn’t own a comb, wearing an old, white t-shirt, some kind of beige pants. He was actually outside. Stranger still, he looked like he was enjoying watching the kids play. His eyes seemed kind. When he saw us, he gave us a slight wave and went back in.

Our car wasn’t flooded, but it died from an exploding timing belt not long after, and I became a bus rider.

Then one day, after trudging up the hill after work, I noticed that the old Cadillac was gone. Piles of leaves that had accumulated under it were swept into a mound. No plywood over the windows. I figured he’d moved.

Then a white van came. And the men in hazmat suits.

To be honest, I wasn’t that concerned. In the tropics, stuff grows. A former landlord gave up trying to keep the exterior paint white because within a month gray spots of mildew would take over. I once found a strange tuft of brown, spongy hair-looking stuff on the door, which turned out to be chocolate tube slime. Weeds sprouted out of my car cover. It always felt like if you stopped moving for just a little too long, soon you’d be covered in wild grass or ivy.

I forgot to tell you about the maintenance guy. He always drove around the complex in a jaunty golf cart adorned with bits and bobs of plastic tourist souvenirs. Cheerful waves whenever you drove by. Hold that image.

Now, the hazmat crew wasn’t there too long—couple days maybe?—and after that, the complex started what seemed like a big renovation in that apartment. Old cabinets went out, new ones went in. Then the painters came. Then the carpet was torn out and replaced. I figured it was some kind of water damage.

So.

Eventually, new neighbors moved into the apartment. They must have been thrilled to get a completely renovated apartment for the same price as all the other, older apartments.

My husband had to go to the property manager about something or another, and the manager wasn’t there; instead, there was a new assistant property manager. He asked her what the story was about the renovation because, hey, we wouldn’t mind new carpeting either.

And she told him the story.

Insects are another big issue in the tropics. Wake up to a line of ants in your bathroom and you better hop on that before you have new roommates forever. So the complex regularly fumigated apartments using a pest control company. They always notified you with a flier posted to the door when they were coming, and most people found another place to be, and pest control would enter.

When pest control entered my rusted-Cadillac-plywood-over-the-window neighbor’s apartment, he was lying on the floor. Naked. They asked him if he’d like to be somewhere else while they did their job, and he declined. So they probably thought, it’s a weird haole thing, did their job and left.

At some point a few weeks later, another neighbor complained to the office about a smell. And maybe the rent was late, or they had some other legal reason that allowed them to go over to the apartment and let themselves in, because the property manager and the maintenance person went over to see what was up and they opened the door.

Saw my neighbor’s body on the floor. No air conditioning. Tropical humidity. Buildup of bodily gases over time. The manager told the maintenance man to go inside and check for…I don’t know. But the maintenance man did.

A mistake.

Because the body exploded.

The maintenance man ran out of the apartment, down the street, and never came back again.

In the first scene with Julia, the main character of The Nightmarchers, she’s in LA when this very same thing happened to her neighbor, the truth of which she only discovers from gossip.

It took a while for the cleanup. Everything had to be replaced. And things that had been tossed in the dumpster, some of it made its way back into the complex. She’d watched one woman pull a floor lamp out of the detritus, a few splotches of God-knows-what on the lampshade. John/Dan’s car—a clunky, rusting Oldsmobile with a year’s worth of dried leaves stuck under the windshield wipers—eventually lost its tires. Then the hood, and most of the engine. Someone bashed the windshield, even cut out the leather from the seats before it was eventually towed away. A family moved into 216 not long after the fresh paint had dried. Probably thought they were getting a steal with all new appliances, countertops, and closet doors.

My neighbor never made the news because the first rule of living on a tropical island paradise dependent on tourism is that bad things don’t happen there. Or I should say it made the news but only on the coconut wireless, which is actually a thing.

Maybe he was mentally ill. Maybe he was broke. Maybe he just gave up and decided to…stop. I can see him lying in the dark on the brown carpeting, staring up at the popcorn ceiling, muffled sounds of the children playing outside, chemical stink of pesticides lingering in his nostrils. Now his body is gone and there’s just the shadow of him trapped in the paper of a book, the flicker of a screen, that will one day be gone too.

As will you. As will I.

So let me go back to the important part. The air is pregnant with heat, raindrops falling from the sky so big that they bounce off the asphalt, making ripples of their own. Palm fronds are sagging and swaying. Small field mice buried somewhere deep under the soft earth. Geckos stuck to the undersides of leaves. Children who could be swimming in the pool splashing in a puddle that comes up to their knees by the backed-up storm drain.

And a man with pale skin and tousled hair watches them, hint of a smile on his face.