ferus rex

Doctor Antoinette Marelli placed a hand on the curved wooden handle of her umbrella, but then looking up at the crepuscular sky through the water-speckled windshield of the Saab, she thought better of it, and stepped out of her car with only the pull-out radio in hand. The streets were just beginning to fill again; the children that had been driven under porches and into doorways by the sudden cloudburst were coming out into the eager space of evening.

The five-story brick building opened onto the street through a tall, arched passageway, which expanded into a dim central courtyard. To the left and right in the courtyard there were mirror-image sets of glass and iron doors, each covered to the point of opaqueness with masses of colorful graffiti, each leading up into a separate bank of apartments. Remembering Carmen’s directions, Dr. Marelli chose the right hand side. The glass door shut behind her with a silent, vacuum-creating suck that brought into sudden clarity all the sounds of life drifting out through the shut apartment doors and filling the corridors of the building.

There was no elevator, so she began padding up the dirty marble steps to 5-F. Each successive flight was a different world of sounds and cooking aromas that penetrated out through the closed doors. It seemed as if some concentrated extract of human life, in its most riotous and fecund form, were straining against the confines of each apartment. In the Doctor’s mind, the phenomenon turned itself into a laboratory problem: too much bio-mass, too little space. The door to 5-F was visually indistinct among all the other red-painted metal doors. Though from within, she could hear the restless pulse of Merengue playing loudly. Underneath the music, there were the singular sounds and murmurs of a dense crowd.