There was a lot of banging and clanking from the room next door when I was taking my breakfast this morning. For a moment, I thought they were fixing the pipes. Then I heard the sound of the vacuum cleaner. It was a rather odd sound. No one vacuums here, except for the janitor who is paid to vacuum the hallways daily, Monday through Friday. I thought that my neighbor must have been packing, getting ready to move out, and was probably cleaning up as well. It's been a while since I've heard anything from next door. I know the guy next door is alive and somewhere around because I still run into him every so often.
When I went out of my room to wash my cereal bowl in the kitchen, I walked past the room next door. The door was open. Instead of seeing a mess of moving boxes and my neighbor's skinny hairy legs protruding from shorts, I saw a man and a woman, both in the red top, black bottom uniform that janitors wear. I saw a professional but old looking black vacuum, and an empty room. My neighbor's left. Some time between the last time I saw him in the hallway with a basketful of laundry and this morning, my neighbor's moved out without anyone noticing. He didn't say goodbye, which wasn't surprising given how things were on our floor. Still, he managed to move out without me seeing any activity suggestive of a person moving out. It was somewhat amazing. You always see the boxes, but never the person moving. In this case, I saw nothing.
The guy next door was slightly odd. I am probably not the best person to judge how odd a man is, but he was slightly odd. He was in the government school, enrolled in a public policy program. When we first moved in, I chatted with him briefly and found out a few things about him. I don't remember anything about him now, except that he was from New Zealand, and was enrolled in one of the public policy programs at the government school. He wasn't very tall, thin, and had a rather extended and angular face. I didn't talk to him much, but from overhearing his long conversations at night, I know that his voice was slightly thin, and a little nasal. He used to talk a lot on the phone the first semester. The walls are a little thin, so I can always hear his voice. The exact words were a little muffled but I'm sure that I could have figured out everything if I had wanted to. His conversations didn't seem that interesting. For one thing, his voice, especially heard from the other side of the wall, sounded kind of whiny.
You would think that a man who talked so much over the phone would be a rather friendly person. The only stories I hear about him give quite the opposite impression. The only story that I ever hear actually, is about how he would go to the RA's room to tell him to tell whoever it was down the hallway to stop blasting opera. He must have been pretty good about keeping tabs on the guy who blasted opera, because I don't actually remember hearing opera the first semester. The variation of this story is about how he would storm out of his room in the middle of the night when the girl next door was coming back drunk and a little loud, and shout at her to stop being so noisy. I am a rather heavy sleeper, so I never hear their heated exchanges.
I should have kept in mind my neighbor's aversion to loud noise to avoid any variation of the above stories. But one night I forgot. I had a bunch of my classmates over to make Halloween costumes for the rhinos, and we were cutting and somewhat sewing pieces of cloth, and melding aluminum foil and wood together. Naturally, there was some organizational chatter, and the usual exchange of jokes. It felt natural. Then my RA stops by, which was again natural since my door was open. He thought that our little costume-making party looked rather fun, and I invited him to join us. He said that he would, but he had other things to do. "By the way, it might be a good idea to shut the door to keep the noise down." That was a good idea. I had really quite forgotten about the door in our rush to make the costumes by midnight. Then it struck me -- the guy next door probably got the RA to come over. The RA lives all the way down the hallway, and it was unlikely that he heard very much of us. Therefore, it must have been the guy next door. I was a little annoyed then. Why couldn't he have come over to tell me to keep the noise level down? I am generally a considerate person, and I would have shut my door and felt bad about it. Instead, he had to go to the RA to get him to inform me. I was feeling slightly guilty and annoyed.
He was really quite suited as a student of the government school on hindsight. His preference to do things officially, instead of informally, betrayed how his character was perfect for that of a potential bureaucrat. Interestingly, a friend also in a public policy program at the government school tells me that people in his program are actually rather impatient. There are some who would complain about how stupid people shouldn't be allowed to ask questions in class. Some of the people in the government school must have worked with the Peace Corps after college. I don't know how the two populations overlap, but given the fact that most of these people intended to work for some major NGO or another after graduating, I would have thought that they would be rather...nice. Definitely not impatient. I mean, these are the people who would take the time to iron through every single excruciating detail in their effort to improve the world. Right?
The second semester, the guy next door somehow totally faded away from sight. Opera music blasts every so often without restraint. I don't hear his conversations when I'm working at night. Occassionally, I see him coming back, leaving, or taking his laundry down. Perhaps he's given up on living here very much.
As you can see, it was no surprise that he would move out without saying goodbye. I'm just slightly bothered by how he managed to do so without me noticing. After the janitors were done cleaning his room, they left a yellow Post-It note on the door saying "Done". A clean-up job well done. You can't tell who, if anyone , lived there. If I had a better imagination and was more bored, I could have imagined that he was silenced (you know) somehow, and they moved everything of his out and got the janitors to clean up. That's how important government figures go. But he's not important yet.
The fortunate thing about being in public policy I guess, is the amount of red tape that separates one from the masses. Perhaps if he didn't have to live with a bunch of fortunate students in a developed country, he might have been a nicer figure on our floor. I wonder if anyone else missed him.
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