Chapter 1: Select Strength
The new tenant in 4B moved in on a Tuesday with three boxes, one duffel bag, and no furniture whatsoever.
You know this because the walls of the Delancey Arms are made of plaster, good intentions and nothing else, and because you edit audio for a living. Eight hours a day you sit in your spare room with closed-back headphones and scrub breaths and lip smacks out of a true crime podcast called Dead Air. Your ears are trained. You can tell a sneeze from a cough through two floors. You can tell when Mr. Petrakis on three has fallen asleep with the Mets game on, and you can tell, from the way the stairs creak, whether Mrs. Lebowitz is carrying groceries or her cat.
The man in 4B made no noise on the stairs at all.
That was the first thing. The second thing was that on Wednesday morning, the delivery guys left a refrigerator on the sidewalk because the elevator has been broken since the Obama administration, and when you came back from the bodega twenty minutes later the refrigerator was gone. No dolly. No help. Just a fridge, now upstairs, and a man in a dark green henley closing his door very quietly across the hall.
"Morning," he said, without quite looking at you.
"Did you carry that up by yourself?"
He considered the question as if it might be a trap. "It wasn't that heavy."
"It was a refrigerator."
"Small one," he said, and shut the door.
He had longish dark hair pushed back behind his ears, stubble that looked less like a style choice than a man who'd forgotten mirrors existed, and blue eyes that did a full sweep of the hallway before they landed anywhere. He wore gloves. Black leather, both hands, in September. You filed that under New York and went inside to remove forty-one instances of the word "allegedly" from episode 212.
The fuse box in your building is a museum piece. On Friday at 6:04 a.m., something across the hall went pop, followed by a low, very creative stream of swearing in what you were fairly sure was Russian.
At 6:11 there was a knock on your door. Two knocks, actually. Spaced and polite, like someone who had read about knocking in a manual.
You opened it in your sleep shirt, which says WORLD'S OKAYEST ARCHIVIST and belonged to your college roommate, holding a mug you had not yet filled. The man from 4B stood a respectful three feet back, hands in his jacket pockets.
"Sorry," he said. "My power's out. I think I blew something."
"The fuse box is in the basement. You need Gary. Gary doesn't wake up until nine and he doesn't care until noon."
"Right." He nodded slowly. His eyes went past your shoulder, very briefly, toward your kitchen, and then came back with tremendous discipline. "Okay. Thanks."
"You want coffee," you said.
"I didn't say that."
"You looked at my kitchen like it owed you money."
The corner of his mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would go if one were scheduled. "I could use coffee," he admitted.
Here is the problem. At 6:30 you had a call with your producer in London, who wanted to discuss "the tonal arc of the silence" in episode 213, and you had not yet brushed your teeth. So you did something your mother would have called reckless and your therapist would have called growth. You stepped aside and said, "Machine's on the counter. Mugs above it. I have to be on a call in nineteen minutes, so you're on your own. Don't steal my stuff."
He hesitated on the threshold like a vampire waiting for paperwork. Then he stepped in.
You shut yourself in the spare room, put on your headphones, and spent forty minutes nodding while a man named Rupert said "liminal" eleven times. When you came out, your neighbor was standing in the middle of your kitchen with his arms folded, staring down your coffee machine like it was a hostage situation.
The machine was a DeLonghi Prima-something with a touchscreen, eleven drink presets and an app. It had been your ex's. When Evan moved out, he'd taken the couch, the good knives and the cat, and you had taken the machine, partly because you loved it and mostly because he did. It made a flat white that tasted like a warm apology. It also had opinions.
At present the screen was flashing DESCALE REQUIRED in polite red letters. Beneath that was a hairline crack shaped like a lightning bolt.
"Okay," you said.
"I can explain," he said.
"Please."
He unfolded one arm and gestured at the machine with the precise weariness of a man presenting evidence. "It asked me what I wanted. I said coffee. I pressed coffee. It said 'Select strength.' I selected a strength. It said 'Select size.' I selected a size. It made a noise like a jet engine and then it said 'Insert milk carafe.' I didn't want milk. I pressed no. There is no no. There's just a picture of a cup with a little cloud on it."
"That's the cappuccino setting."
"I didn't ask for a cappuccino," he said, with real feeling. "Then it said descale, and I tried to go back, and I pressed a little hard."
You looked at the crack. You looked at him. "A little hard."
"I'll pay for it."
"It's a touchscreen. You touch it. It's in the name."
"In my defense," he said, "it was rude first."
You laughed. You did not mean to. It came out of you sideways, ugly and sudden, and his shoulders came down maybe a quarter of an inch, as if he had been braced for something worse.
"You could've just knocked again," you said. "I'd have made it."
"You were working. I heard you. Somebody named Rupert." He paused. "He says liminal a lot."
"Oh my God. You could hear that?"
"Walls are thin."
"The walls are a rumor," you agreed. You went to the machine, held down two buttons that no reasonable person would ever think to hold down together, and the screen blinked and went back to its cheerful home menu, crack and all. You set it to a plain double shot, no milk, no cloud, and slid a mug under the spout. The machine growled and produced coffee.
He watched the whole process the way people watch someone defuse a bomb in movies, attentive and slightly offended that it looked so easy.
"There's an override," you said. "Hold the cup and the steam button. Three seconds."
"Who would ever do that."
"Engineers. Sadists. Me, now."
You handed him the mug. He took it with his left hand, and the leather glove pulled tight across his knuckles, and the sound it made against the ceramic was wrong. Too hard. A clink, not a tap.
He drank half of it in one go and closed his eyes, and for one second his whole face changed. Something in his jaw unlocked. He looked, briefly, like a person who had been very tired for a very long time and had just remembered what it was like not to be.
"That's good," he said quietly.
"It's a three-hundred-dollar machine. It better be."
His eyes snapped open. "Three hundred."
"I got it in a breakup. Emotionally it cost more."
"I'm definitely paying for it."
"You're definitely not. Sit down. What's your name? I've been calling you Fridge Guy in my head and it's starting to feel personal."
He did not sit down. He stood by the counter with the mug in both hands, and it occurred to you that in your small kitchen he had chosen the one spot where he could see the front door, the window and the hallway to your bedroom at the same time.
"James," he said.
"James. Okay. Hi."
"People call me Bucky."
"Bucky," you repeated, and something tugged at the back of your brain, the way a song you half know tugs when it plays in a grocery store. You were too undercaffeinated to chase it. "Is that a choice you made or one that was made for you?"
That got the almost-smile again, longer this time. "Little of both. It was a long time ago."
"You don't look that old."
"I moisturize," Bucky said, completely deadpan, and drank the rest of his coffee.
He offered three more times to pay for the screen. You refused three more times. He washed his mug, dried it with the towel that says BLESS THIS MESS that your aunt sent you as a passive-aggressive housewarming gift, and set it back in the cupboard exactly where it had come from, handle out, like it had never left.
At the door he paused.
"Thank you," he said. "Really. I've been up since three. I'm not great at mornings."
"Nobody's great at mornings. Mornings are a scam."
"I used to be," he said, and he said it lightly, but it sat in the air between you a beat too long, like a dropped glass that hadn't hit the floor yet.
He reached for the doorknob. The cuff of his jacket rode up an inch, and the glove ended, and above it, where his wrist should have been, there was a band of dark metal. Not a watch. Not a bracelet. Black and gold plates, fitted together so finely they looked woven, catching the hallway light and moving, actually moving, as his fingers closed around the knob.
You stared. You did not mean to stare. Your brain, finally caffeinated by proxy, slotted the song into place: the news footage from years ago, a highway in D.C., a man with a red star on his shoulder, a Smithsonian exhibit you had wandered through one rainy summer with your dad, a placard that said Howling Commando. Brooklyn's own. Lost in 1945.
He felt you looking. Of course he did. He went very still, the way the hallway goes still right before Mrs. Lebowitz's cat knocks something off the radiator.
"Yeah," Bucky said, without turning around. "That's why I pressed it a little hard."
You opened your mouth. Nothing intelligent was available.
"I'll get Gary at nine," he said, and let himself out, and shut the door so quietly you didn't hear the latch.
You stood in your kitchen for a long time. The machine blinked at you with its new lightning-bolt scar. You thought about the Smithsonian. You thought about the way he'd chosen where to stand. You thought about how he had said I used to be.
At 9:15 you heard Gary's voice in the stairwell, complaining. At 9:20 you heard the power hum back on in 4B. At 9:22 you heard nothing at all, because Bucky Barnes, apparently, moved through the world like he was afraid of waking it up.
The next morning there was something sitting on your doormat.
It was a stovetop moka pot. Not new. Dented aluminum, octagonal, the handle wrapped in fresh electrical tape. Tucked under it was an index card, the handwriting small and slanted and a little old-fashioned, the kind they used to teach with rulers.
Doesn't have a screen. Can't break it. I tried. Would you show me how to use yours properly? I'll bring the coffee. -B. (4B)
And underneath, smaller, as if added after a long argument with himself:
Ma used to make it in one of these. I don't remember how. I'd like to.