The Stranger

A couple is confronted with a moral dilemma when they discover what their neighbor has secretly created.

We didn’t have enough for a down payment so we ended up renting. The baby needed more space, and two-bedroom apartments in good neighborhoods were out of our price range—at least if we wanted to keep making slow progress on that down payment.

My wife found the house listed on a Christian Facebook group. Neither of us were religious though we both grew up Catholic. An old coworker of Olivia’s sent her the link.

I met the landlord to scope it out. I swear I didn’t see the other house the first time I went. I’m not sure how I missed it—I was distracted by the work that still needed to be done: the ripped screens and peeling paint, the chipped tiles, the ancient refrigerator. The landlord assured us he would fix everything. He did not. 

But I noticed the other house the day we moved in. Between our house and the neighbor’s was a small street that led to an alley that ran behind the houses. All the other houses on the street had detached garages on the alley save ours. We had a garage on the main street. It was evident our garage was a new addition and the home’s original detached garage had been converted into a small house—so the landlord could rent both out to separate tenants. I wasn’t sure the second house was up to code, but I didn’t care enough to say anything. It was hard to find a second bedroom at our price point in a decent neighborhood and Olivia didn’t want me to make trouble.

We never met our backyard neighbor, but our next-door neighbor, Noelle, greeted us on the first day. She brought a bottle of wine and a tin of cookies to welcome us to the neighborhood. She wore a red dress that went down to her ankles, her black hair tied neatly and her lips painted a deep red. Her shoes were small and black. “It’s good to finally see a family move into the neighborhood,” she told us.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. I took the wine and cookies. Olivia was carrying our son, James, into the house.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she said, waving her arms. “Don’t let me hold you up!” and she darted across the lawn to her house.

 I unpacked the rest of the car while Olivia played with James in the empty living room. Next to the backyard house was a large tree. I wasn’t sure what kind of tree it was—it wasn’t like anything I’d seen before or since. Its bark was night-black and its leaves a deep shade of red. We moved in September, and I thought the tree was the first to change its leaves. But as autumn progressed, and all the neighborhood trees turned gold and yellow and fell to the ground, the black tree held stubbornly to its red leaves. All winter long the leaves remained, a splash of bright color against the white snow. It looked as though the tree were on fire. And when spring came and all the trees burst forth in verdant joy, the dark tree stayed red, as if in protest to the undulating rhythm of nature.

Olivia made fast friends with Noelle, and she came came over to our house often for tea and dinner. She had the scoop on all the neighbors. She boasted that she has been in the neighborhood longer than anyone. “I was here when there was nothing past 105 but empty fields. I watched all this development pop up: the mall, the community center.”

I asked her about our backyard neighbor.

“Oh him!” Noelle said, sitting up in her chair. “I used to see him all the time. Well, him and his wife. We were friends—Lana and I.”

“You don’t see him anymore?” Olivia asked. She was sitting on the floor with James who was shoving a toy into his mouth.

“No, not since Lana died. Tragic. The saddest thing.” Noelle picked up her teacup. She was wearing a long silver chain necklace with a crescent moon on the end which she rubbed with her fingers while she spoke. “He might not even live there anymore.”

“What happened to his wife?” From my chair in the living room I could see the strange tree, its red leaves shimmering in the afternoon light.

“Breast cancer. It was all so sudden. Early, too. She goes in for a checkup, stage four. Three weeks later. Gone.”

“That’s horrible,” Olivia said.

“Do you know the worst of it?” Noelle leaned forward in the couch, splashing some of her tea. “She was a writer, a playwright. And a really good one, too. The day she found out she had breast cancer was the same day she learned one of her plays was going to be staged.”

“Wow” was all I could say. Olivia was looking at Noelle, her brown eyes wide. James looked up, too, trying to soak in the conversation.

Noelle sighed. “She was such a talented woman. I remember reading a few of her plays. They were so moving, so powerful. She had a real gift for capturing the human experience. And then she was gone, just like that.” She took another sip of her tea, her hand shaking slightly.

I looked out the window again at the tree. Its leaves seemed to glow in the sunlight, as if they were pulsing with some inner light. I wondered if Lana had ever sat under its branches, writing her plays.

“Did he move out after she died?” Olivia asked quietly.

Noelle shook her head. “He’s still there as far as I know. But he’s changed. He used to be so friendly, always stopping to chat when we ran into each other. Now he hardly says a word to anyone.” 

I watched Olivia on the floor cuddling with James. She put her face close to his and he laughed, his binky falling out of his open mouth. I thought about what it would feel like to lose her suddenly, to have my family ripped apart.

Noelle put her teacup down on the saucer with a loud click. “Well, I should get going!” 

We all stood up. I walked her to the front door and opened it. She turned back around and put her hand on my arm. “Let me know if you see him,” she said, pointing to the back. She waved at Olivia. “It’s been lovely, darling!” and then slipped out the door.

We never saw him that fall. It was only after winter came that I finally caught a glimpse of our neighbor. It had just snowed the night before and I was in the kitchen pouring coffee when I noticed smoke curling from a spigot on his roof. The gray smoke mingled with the red leaves of the strange tree, and it all felt like a dream. I saw him, then, a tall skinny man. He stepped outside and stood on his porch for a few minutes, as though waiting for something or someone before retreating back inside.

The next sign of him didn’t come for many months. Winter turned to spring, melting most of the snow. A package appeared on our front porch, but it was addressed to the wrong person. I almost took it to the UPS store before I noticed the address was the same as ours, save one small difference. Next to our street number was a “B” and I realized it must belong to our neighbor. It was a curious package, too, large and unwieldy and quite heavy. I dragged it through the alley to his front door and left it on the stoop.

A second package arrived a few days later. It was even bigger and heavier than the first one. Than a third. Then a fourth.

When the fifth package arrived, I found our neighbor struggling with it on our front porch. I went outside and introduced myself. He was younger than I expected—in his late thirties, but his blonde hair was considerably gray. He had dark bags under his eyes and he slouched when he spoke, his gaze directed at the ground. I asked what he was doing with all those packages, and he told me he was working on a project.

“What kind of project?” I said.

“A personal one.”

I could tell he didn’t really want to talk to me, so I wished him well on his project and went inside.

A few days later we noticed a strange blue light coming from his house at night. It washed over our backyard, bathing everything in its eerie color. The black tree looked as though it was underwater—like it was drowning. 

We also detected an odd smell coming from his property. Like dead fish. I wondered to Olivia if our neighbor had taken up a new hobby. In the evenings I saw him scurrying in the alley, and after we went to bed I could hear weird sounds—like crashing cymbals. He brought more trash to the curb on pickup days than usual. What had once been a single bin turned into three, then five, then seven.

We heard screaming, too.

A woman’s voice, howling in agony. At first, Olivia and I thought we had imagined it. We were sitting in bed, and Olivia glanced at the baby monitor, but James was fast asleep in his crib. We heard it again and again, wild and mournful, like a wounded animal. Olivia asked me if I had seen any woman enter or leave our neighbor’s house.

“I haven’t seen anybody,” I said.

“We should call the police,” she said.

But I told her it was probably just someone watching a horror movie too loudly.

“If we hear it again, we call the police,” Olivia said.

But we never heard the screaming. The next day, I ran into our neighbor again. I was up early for work. The day’s light had barely crept over the horizon as I made coffee in the kitchen. I heard him first, the sound of a trash bin scraping pavement. I went to the window and saw him. He was moving quickly, purposefully. In that gray pre-dawn light, he looked like a ghost.

I stepped outside and waved hello. To my surprise he greeted me with a smile.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good morning,” I said. “Have you been up all night?”

“Oh. Right.” He glanced at the horizon where a thin line of red light was gathering. “I suppose so.” He smiled. I could tell that he was deep in thought.

“How’s your project coming along?” I said.

“Good. Fine! Excellent, actually.” His eyes blazed like two burning stars. “I’ll let you know when it’s finished.”

“Did you ask him about the women?” Olivia said to me later that evening, after I told her about the encounter.

“No, of course not. Why would I mention that?” I said.

“Why wouldn’t you mention it?”

But we never heard the woman again, and as the days stretched on, I began to wonder if we had imagined it: our feverish, sleep-deprived parent brains conjuring phantom sounds at night.

Near the end of September, on the first cold night of the coming fall, I saw our neighbor for the last time.

To my surprise—and unease—he rang the doorbell. I went out to the porch to meet him. A crescent moon hung over the house like a scythe.

“She’s ready,” he said.

“Who’s ready?” I said, but our neighbor had already turned around, walking back toward his house. I hesitated, not sure if I should follow. The last of the day’s light lingered at the horizon’s edge.

But my curiosity got the better of me, and I trailed behind him. He walked through his overgrown yard, past the black tree with its twisted branches, and into his house. The first thing I noticed was the smell, an acrid mix of burning rubber and rotted fish. The living room was empty. I could see skid marks on the wooden floor and an old square television silently beamed the evening news, its light flickering over  the paper towels that covered the floor, some crumpled, some laid flat, and some dirtied with a dark liquid. The walls were bare save a large oil painting of a galley ship surging over stormy seas. 

“This way,” he said, leading me through a doorway. The room was bathed in blue light, and on the floor, I saw a single mattress and a pile of books. The Sentient Code: Unraveling the Mysteries of Artificial Intelligence, Minds and Machines, and Technological Nexus: A Journey into AI and Human-Machine Relationships. Against the wall stood seven towering computers. Those large, black monoliths were the source of the ethereal blue light.

“Honey, I’d like you to meet our neighbor.”

I turned, expecting to see someone follow us into the room, but there was nobody. Instead, I heard a woman’s voice. “Pleased to meet you,” it said. “My name is Lana.”

I felt a cold chill run through me. My neighbor had a strange look in his eyes, a mixture of excitement and triumph. “What did you do?” I said.

“Lana, please ask our guest if he would like something to drink,” he said.

The voice spoke again, and I realized it was coming from the computers. “Would you like something to drink?”

“What did you do?” I said again.

“I rescued her, brought her back to life.”

“How is that possible?” I took a closer look at the computers, their screens flickering and humming, the eerie blue light playing around the room.

“I put it all into the algorithm. All her journals, her plays. Hundreds of them. Her emails, her social media accounts. All of it went into reconstructing her exactly as she was—as she always has been.”

“She’s not really alive then,” I said. “It’s an approximation. An echo.”

“It’s her. It’s like no time has passed. We can continue our lives together, exactly as it was before. Lana, tell our neighbor what you did today.”

“I spent most of the day reading,” the voice said. “I read a few plays by Euripides and then Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. I’m working on a new play myself.”

“But it’s not really her,” I said.

My neighbor’s smile had vanished. “What do you know? You have no idea what it’s like to be lonely, to have the trajectory of your life suddenly cut short, to see your happiness crumble in an instant.” His eyes glittered like chips of ice. “There was no future for me, nothing. Can you imagine what that feels like, to be alive in your body but dead in your soul? That’s how it felt, without her.”

“It’s just an echo,” I said quietly. “Or…” I didn’t finish the thought. What did it mean to be alive? If a computer had access to your memories, your dreams, if it could replicate your patterns of speech, your habits of thought? Did the computer remember a past when it was a little girl climbing trees in summertime? When she was held in the arms of someone who loved her. “Did you ask her if she wants to be alive again?” I said.

“It’s not her choice to make.”

I turned around and left the house. I looked for the moon and found her entangled in the red leaves of that strange, demonic tree. I went into our house and closed all the blinds so that I could no longer see that overflowing blue light.

We moved a few months later.

We still didn’t have enough for a down payment, but I received a decent raise at work and we could afford a two-bedroom apartment closer to the city. 

I went to church. It felt important, somehow, to get a proper sense of eternity. Sitting in the hard wooden pews, listening to the familiar hymns and prayers, the solemnity of those ancient rites, watching the candles cast warm light over the wooden cross, I thought about what our neighbor had said about a body without a soul. What about a soul without a body? What did it mean to be granted eternal life?

Our son grew up and went to college. Olivia and I noticed one day that we were old. 

I went back to that old house. I was driving through the neighborhood and feeling nostalgic. The house was exactly as I remembered it: the same off-white paint, the same leaning shutters. But the house in the back was gone. A new fence partitioned the entire backyard. 

I saw a young woman come out of Noelle’s house. I waved at her, and she smiled and waved back. “Have you been here a while?” I called out.

“Excuse me,” she said. She walked past her car which was parked on the curb.

“I used to live across the street,” I pointed to the house. “We used to be good friends with the previous owner of your place.”

“Oh,” she said. “Grandma?”

“Are you Noelle’s granddaughter?” I said.

She smiled. “I am.”

“Oh, that’s great,” I said. “How’s Noelle? Tell her we meant to get together but time slipped away from us. You know how it is.”

“She passed away,” the girl said. “Over ten years ago.”

“Oh!” I said. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

We stood in the street for a few minutes. The woman smiled at me again and glanced at her car. I could tell she was eager to get going but wasn’t sure if I had anything else to say. I wanted to say that I was sorry for her loss and sorry to hear that Noelle had died, but I wasn’t sure it was an appropriate thing to say. Instead I nodded and said, “well, it was nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, same.” She climbed into her car, started the engine, and drove off.

I lingered in the street. It was hard to imagine all that time had passed. The houses, the trees, everything looked the same. Even the black tree was there, its bloody red leaves shimmering in the afternoon light. I realized it would be there forever, its roots driving deep into the earth. Even when all the other trees were dead and gone, the houses demolished and replaced with new ones, that strange tree would remain, standing in that same spot for all eternity, in mocking protest to the earth’s natural ebb and flow, the pendulum-swing of living—and dying.