The Seventh Chair

I don’t understand why people meet. Speaking has uses. A question needs an answer. Work needs instructions. Money needs agreement.

But meeting?

People leave homes they spent years earning money to buy. They sit in traffic. They wait for someone who is late. They eat food they could have ordered alone. Then they return home tired and complain that the day disappeared.

Every Thursday at 8:10 pm, six people gather in the courtyard below my penthouse.

The glass runs from the floor to the ceiling, so the city begins at my feet. From this height, people lose their faces. They become shirts, bags and habits.

Large Red Spectacles always arrive first. Silver Hair brings a cloth bag filled with books. Burgundy Hair carries steel containers. White Shoes checks his phone every few minutes. The Salt-Pepper-colored hair rubs his knees before sitting. The youngest woman is always late.

I know more about them than I should.

Large Red Spectacles and Burgundy Hair are married, though they rarely arrive together. White Shoes calls someone before every meeting and often walks away from the group while speaking. Silver Hair always divides whatever she brings into seven portions.

People reveal themselves through habits when their faces are too far away to interfere.

They arrange seven chairs.

Only six are occupied.

Seven chairs again.

And that empty one always bothers me.

Perhaps because this penthouse has empty chairs too.

My parents bought this home when I was nine. My mother wanted sunrise on one side and sunset on the other. My father wanted the highest floor available. They both got what they wanted.

And one gloomy night, a truck crossed the divider and crushed my parents’ car when I was sixteen. Eight years have passed, though the apartment still contains the life we had before the accident.

My father’s reading glasses remain inside the drawer beside his bed. My mother’s blue cup is still in the kitchen cabinet. Their places at the dining table have never been touched.

Every photograph of them is sealed inside a box deep in their wardrobe. I packed away every frame after the funeral. Their objects could stay. Objects never looked back at me.

When they died, the penthouse became mine.

So did the silence.

At first, silence frightened me. It made every small sound feel like the beginning of another bad night. Then the outside became worse.

A car was no longer transportation. It was something that might not return.

A late person was not delayed. They were injured, missing or dead.

Every unexpected call carried news. Every doorbell took me back to the night when my parents did not use their keys.

I tried returning to school.

Students complained about examinations. Someone cried because her boyfriend had stopped replying. Two boys pushed one another near the staircase and laughed. Others pretended they had spent the weekend having more fun than everyone else. Everyone’s life had continued at the exact speed while mine had stopped.

People spoke softly around me for a few weeks. Then they began speaking normally. Some avoided me because they didn’t know what to say. Others came too close because they wanted to prove they cared.

Both exhausted me.

At home, I could hear myself think.

Outside, I could hear everything.

So I stopped leaving home.

Not in one decision.

First, I missed one school day.

Then a week.

Tutors began coming here. Later, lessons moved online. My uncle signed whatever the law required. Lawyers and a family trust managed everything until I turned eighteen.

After that, I stopped allowing people inside.

Grief brought me home.

Anxiety closed the door.

Peace made me keep it closed.

Inside, nobody arrived unexpectedly. Nothing touched me. Nothing required an immediate reaction.

I could hear myself think.

Eventually, I began to like the sound.

My days now move in the same order.

I wake at 5:40 without an alarm.

At 6:00, I make black coffee and stand by the eastern window. I watch the sunrise touch the buildings before reaching the roads.

At 6:15, I write.

I stop at 8:30, even if the sentence is unfinished. I shower and eat two eggs, toast and one apple.

From 9:15 until noon, I edit what I wrote the previous day.

Lunch arrives at 12:30.

The delivery person leaves it on the mat. I wait until the lift doors close before opening mine.

From 1:00 to 3:00, I read.

At 3:15, I walk four thousand steps between the kitchen and my parents’ bedroom door. Seventy-six rounds.

There is a treadmill in the gym area.

I never use it.

Maybe because it faces a wall.

Maybe because my route allows me to check that every room is still where it was yesterday.

At 4:30, I check emails only to answer them.

At 5:30, I sit beside the glass and watch people return home.

Dinner arrives at 8:30.

I write again from 9:00 until 10:30.

At 11:20, I switch off every light except the one beside my bed.

Midnight means sleep.

My publisher is an email address. Groceries are notifications. Delivery people are footsteps outside a closed door. My screens carry words, never faces. That is all I need to know of them.

Some people would call it a prison.

Prisons probably don’t feel this peaceful.

Late at night, the penthouse becomes so quiet that I can hear my heartbeat without touching my chest. That sound is enough company. It asks nothing from me.

Writing began because the silence needed somewhere to go.

At 17, I published a short story under another name. A few hundred people read it. Then a few thousand.

By 19, a publisher had found my email address.

By 21, my novels were earning enough to pay for everything I used, although my parents had left more money than I could spend.

Writing money felt earned.

Three novels later, readers know my characters better than anyone knows me.

My face has never appeared on a book jacket. Interviews arrive as written questions. I send back written answers.

Perhaps that is why I keep watching the courtyard: it lets me enter other lives without allowing anyone into mine.

The Thursday group once had seven people.

Yellow Shoes.

I had almost forgotten him.

He used to arrive with Silver Hair and carry the chairs. He sat with one ankle resting over his opposite knee. Whenever he laughed, his whole body bent forward.

Then one Thursday, he stopped coming.

Seven chairs still came out.

For weeks, I expected Yellow Shoes to return. Eventually, I stopped.

The group did not.

Sometimes a cup of tea appeared on the empty chair. Sometimes a book. Once, Burgundy Hair placed a piece of cake there.

Why keep a chair for someone who never comes?

One Thursday, Silver Hair placed a framed photograph on the seventh chair.

From forty-two floors above, I could not see the face. I saw only the white garland around the frame.

So that was it. Yellow Shoes was dead.

Yet they continued meeting. They still made room for someone who was gone. Their loss had not pushed the living away. Mine had. They had kept him among them.

I had hidden my parents’ inside a box and turned every living person into an email, a notification or a pair of footsteps.

I looked towards my dining table.

My parents’ chairs were still there.

At 8:30, the doorbell rang.

I walked towards the entrance and stood behind the closed door.

The paper bag touched the mat. A zip closed. Shoes turned towards the lift.

Usually, I waited until the footsteps disappeared and the lift doors closed.

The footsteps began moving away. In another second, he would become nothing but footsteps again.

This time, I opened the door.

The delivery person turned.

He was younger than I had imagined. Tired eyes. Damp hair. A small scar above his left eyebrow. My heartbeat became loud enough to hear without touching my chest.

I kept the door open.

Up close, I remembered that people have faces.