Apartment of Darkness

Corporate Housing is unfiltered evil. The company for which I am freelancing has set me up in an apartment complex about 5 miles up the 101 from the studio. The previous occupant of my pain cave, I am positive, owned a cat. I know this because there are areas in the apartment where the unmistakable odor of feline urine lurks still, like an invisible ghost, mocking me. I’ve tried attacking two different areas in the living room with Febreeze and a sponge, my T-shirt wrapped around my head like a shadour, to no avail: the pungent odor won’t go away. I scream at the cream stucco walls and shake my fists. My madness verges on that of Lady Macbeth. “Out, damned spot, OUT!” I shout as I scour, wide-eyed and trembling. My quote of Joyce’s final line from Araby for my headline proved telling – my eyes now truly burn with anguish and anger...and the ammonia stench of cat piss. And that is only the beginning of my irritation.

As I’m only in the bay area for two months, it makes sense to move into a furnished apartment. But why must these flats always be so insipid? Even their names, like Oakwood or The Highlands, ring of banality. I realize that no two people exist who have the same taste in furnishings, but why not just make the apartment plain and spartan? Why make it the wet dream of a bourgeois octogenarian? My milk-and-water abode is adorned with gaudy gold-framed mirrors and derivative Impressionist prints of women in straw hats and gingham dresses gathering flowers in an English Garden. I cringe at the large brass lamps, and the teal bathroom rugs and toilet lid covers make me squeal in disgust. The fake pothos in the glazed basket by the fireplace clouds my mind. I gnash my teeth at the mocha towels, salmon and ecru place mats, blond cabinets and dressers, and mauve napkin rings. A home, even a temporary one, should be one’s refuge from the vicissitudes of the world and the mundane drudgery of workaday life. When I come home from work, however, I find not relief but madness. Every morning and every night I enter the land of desperation and frenzy. As I try in vain to prepare a simple meal for breakfast or dinner, my mind reels at the jade overstuffed love seats with taupe flower-printed pillows. In the dark of the night I awake from cursed dreams of lilac pewter ware and cinnamon teapots, screaming and clutching my dusty rose and celery bedspread. The horror! The horror!