Edison is new to the city. He’s new to this town, new to his tiny second floor studio, new to his neighbors who slam their doors and cuss at one another about silly things like taking out the trash and putting a new roll of toilet paper on the dispenser. He came from the country. He came from far away, from a farm, from a place where the sounds outside his front door came from nature, from roosters and the wind and gnarled tree branches. This is all new for Edison. All new. It’s summer in the city, humid and sticky. The day seems to hang here, thick and fussy with noise, fuzzy like static cling. The night hangs the same only darker. Edison’s little apartment, all the way up one story above the busy avenue, didn’t come with much and it did not come with air conditioning. It came with a closet of a kitchen and a closet of a bathroom and a closet of a closet with hardly any space. In the heat, he opens the window and lets the garbled city air pour in. It pours in like water invading a submerged ship. It pours in. This city is not at all like the country; it’s not at all like where Edison once lived. Nothing is the same. Here, everything is concrete. Everything is metal, steel, glass. In the city, life crashes off these surfaces. It raises a true racket. The city is pretty darn loud. It’s so loud that Edison can’t hear nature, not the nature that he’s used to. He cannot hear roosters; he cannot hear the wind or gnarled tree branches scratching the itchy bricks of the old buildings. Edison tried to hear these things on his first night. He closed his eyes, scrunched them tight, but he couldn’t hear any of those things. He couldn’t hear anything familiar. What he could hear was traffic: The constant honking of angry cab drivers, the wailing adult sirens of red and white flashing ambulances, the throbbing growl of motorbikes. And then, surprisingly, he could hear something else. He could hear something else he couldn’t remember ever hearing before: He could hear life. Real life. In the city, people were living. In between the din, most often in the slow fade of sunset, when the city begins to gradually slip into its bedclothes, Edison can hear—so clearly—the conversations of diners at the restaurant on the ground floor of his building. One floor above the avenue, the voices rise. Buffeted on the stilling weeknight air, the voices rise. Through the dark striped awning that covers the dining patio, the stories rise. “I’m so tired of being veggie, Deb.” It’s a female voice. Sweet-sounding. Edison imagines her with teardrop earrings. Recently he passed a magazine stand and the glossy model on the cover, pouty and frail, had teardrop earrings on. Those are the earrings he imagines on this woman, just because. “I woke up last night dying for a cheeseburger.” “No! You cannot, Lydia!” “I know. I know it’s sick. I’m disgusting. But I’ve been thinking about it so much lately. I feel bad because I saw that video. You know, the one with the cows, and I mean I just—I do imagine the cow faces, so I can’t. I want to.” “Every meat patty has eyes and a face and a mother,” the other girl says, as if reading from a manual. “Carol said the exact same thing. But I’ve been dreaming about cheeseburgers, waking up thinking about cheeseburgers and—“ A male voice: “Hi there, have you ladies decided what you’d—“ “—Spinach salads,” the second girl, Deb, interrupts. Edison props a smallish, tattered blue armchair beside the window for these conversations, as if setting up for a night of television. The smell of fried food folds itself through the four-foot gap of the open window. Onions, garlic, and other scents Edison cannot place waft in. “Well, I just found out my parents smoke pot. As in, the present.” It’s a male voice. Edison pictures a college-aged man. A fork clinks on a plate. The boy is maybe a freshman at the university. Edison wonders and fills in the blanks. The boy is wearing a polo, and his dining companion laughs at the start of the story. It’s a girl. “You’re hysterical,” she says. “How do you know?” “My mom was all bent out of shape because she thought my brother came to Easter dinner stoned.” The girl is laughing some more. “Then she goes: ‘It’s not as if your father and I don’t. But this was Easter.’” “Wow. I love it.” Edison imagines her with blonde hair, long blonde hair. At this point, she’s tucking it back behind her ears, tidying what shook loose when she laughed. “…And she was all, ‘What do you think we do when we’re with Bob Perkins?’ She says, ‘Bob Perkins and your father are crazy when they are together! Always smoking.’” “Bob Perkins?” The girl is laughing again. The boy is laughing for the first time. A different night. Another boy, perhaps a man. He’s in his thirties Edison decides. He is wearing a button down shirt. He probably likes cats, flosses every night before bed. Edison imagines these things. He gives faces to the voices that crawl into his room. “Tell me a secret.” The man’s eyes are on his date like she’s the only girl in the room, the only thing that interests him. She purses her lips, “I date new people mainly to look in their medicine cabinets.” Her admission is met with silence. And then laughter. Both of them laughing. He is reaching for her hand; she is letting him take it. Edison lets out a held breath. He smiles. Edison spends a lot of time in his small apartment, but Edison is doing okay. He feels like the cramped apartment is holding him, cradling him. Once he had so much space, and now he has so much less. There is simplicity in that. Even though the world here is so much more complex and fast and loud, for Edison who has so little, it actually seems easier. For Edison the city is getting easier. —Matthew Allard, May 10, 2009				Restaurant Noise 2006 ink and watercolor on paper 7.5 x 5.125"