The elevator smelled like piss.

I looked over at the real estate agent and he shot me a nervous smile. “One of the women must’ve peed,” he said, moving his hand over his crotch while making a wavy motion with his fingers. I laughed. Maybe living in an old folks’ home would have a certain charm. I pictured a future version of myself, greeting an elderly neighbor as she passed by me in the hallway. She’d bow her head towards me, deeply. Then she’d wet herself. Liquid would pool into her rubber clogs, the urine dark and stormy.

As we rose to the 8th floor, the real estate agent explained how the building provided coin-operated washing machines but no dryers. The tenants preferred to air-dry their laundry from a clothesline. “You’ll find that most of the residents tend to stay confined to their rooms. They only come out when absolutely necessary.” He played with a crack in his plastic phone case, avoiding my eyeline. “No one here wants to be a burden.”

 

Room 807 was the only available unit for non-geriatrics. A torn piece of caution tape hung from the door knob. The transom window above was browned with soot. “Go ahead,” said the real estate agent. “It’s open.”

The apartment appeared sterile underneath its sole fluorescent bulb. It brought to mind a hospital food court. Aluminum bars covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, drilled firmly into the walls. “For safety reasons,” said the real estate agent, tapping his knuckles against the bars. “So that no one falls out.”

The windows in my university dorm had been similarly bolted shut. Plexiglass walls had covered the library’s atrium. A student once climbed over the barrier and jumped to his death, seven stories below. They raised the plexiglass ten feet higher for the following semester. There’s a city proposal to gate off New York’s subway stations, to prevent people from jumping. They’d put barriers at every platform edge, with electric doors that would open when the trains arrived and then close when they departed. The Tokyo metro had this system installed a few years back. People still jump on the tracks there. It just requires a bit of work.

My ex once told me about these two thirteen-year-old girls in Tokyo who held hands as they leapt in front of an oncoming train. I’ve since been unable to get them out of my head. I’ve replayed the imagined death scene over and over again, so much so that the teenage girls have become 3D renders in my mind. Well, not in their entirety. Not with an exact likeness. Parts of them are left unfinished, purposefully so, leaving space for personal projection. But more minute details are all filled-in, made glossy and pristine in my 4K daydreaming. Their tartan skirts billow in the subway airflow. Their tiny fingernails turn florid when squeezed. Their pale legs smear in the motion blur.

I see the pair’s final jump as a gentle act. Not abrupt. Not in any way violent. Like a child’s careful release from a playground swing, they fell soft and easy upon the tracks. But I always get stuck on the hands. I can’t help but zoom-in tight on this point. It’s as if their clasped hands held the secret message behind the whole thing. Because what it says to me is this: these girls did not go at it alone. They clung to each other. Their last act was not a jump, but rather, the holding of a position. The irreducible position of two girls, side-by-side, with their hands intertwined.

The real estate agent cleared his throat. “And can I ask about your credit score?” I lied and told him I had a guarantor. He nodded. “I’ll send you the rental application. It’s a competitive listing.”

 

On my way down, in the elevator, I tried to focus on the pee smell. But my thoughts kept going back to the two girls. What happened to them when they were younger? I needed to know the exact point in which the seed had been planted. When the ideation took root.

Is it possible that, on some late winter day, when the girls were about six or seven on their way home from school, carefully watched over by their parents, huddled at the edge of the platform, covering their ears as the train screamed into the station, watching the evening commuters shuffle in and then out, the screen doors opening and then closing behind them, as the crowded passenger cart lurched forward, as fathers gripped their daughters by the shoulders, do you think, in such a moment, the girls might have asked themselves: just what are they holding us back from?