The church next door has a sign out front. A little box cantilevered from the avocado façade above the door, with red and blue and black letters. It is lit up at night.
Whoever made the sign spelled Sunday wrong, but they must not mind all that much.
Sunday is when there is the most noise from next door. All morning we can hear them through the brick walls singing and playing guitar and electronic organ. It makes you feel peaceful lying in bed, just another sign that it’s really Sunday, and in the shower you can sing along, the sounds are especially clear in there, echoing.
On Saturdays is the market, which is sort of annoying, because it’s much louder, earlier. The people have to set up their wares on their blankets in the street, and then there’s a few old ladies who like to sit on our steps and chat while there’s no customers.
Our house was empty for a while, but now I think they realize we’re living here. My roommate talked to them one time and they said a nice old man used to live in the other house next to ours, on the other side than the church. But then for a few days no one had seen him, and they finally had to unlock the door and found out he’d died. That house is still empty. I hang my sheets on the clotheslines on his roof, felling uncertain the first time if it was ok, but now I’ve gotten used to it.
The roof of the church is about a half storey lower, and it is made marginally less accessible by a low wall with a rusty railing across part of it where there’s a gap. They have a little patio with a lot of plants overlooking the street. In the back is where they hang their clothes, and sometimes there’s a little black dog—at least it looks small from up on the roof. It barks when other dogs are barking in other back patios or balconies, or whenever our flimsy metal door at the top of the stairs bangs open or closed.
One morning when I was brushing my teeth, hearing the music from the church next door—so it must have been Sunday (or maybe Thursday—the sign out front is ambiguous)—I realized something strange, and it was that I had never seen anyone go in or out of there, or hanging up the clothes, or feeding the dog, or watering the plants. No one sitting on the stairs or in a lawn chair in the sun, now that it was turning springlike. I listened more carefully—when I spit out the toothpaste and nighttime gunk from my mouth and sinuses my roommate shouted from the kitchen ‘That’s repulsive!’ but then she was quiet and my mouth was fresh—and I couldn’t tell, but I thought maybe it was just one voice singing after all.
I couldn’t make out the words, or even what language it was. But then there were more harmonic things happening, and the voices weren’t practiced so I could hear them coming in late or holding a note too long, exuberantly. That little bird’s eye.
So there had to be people, more people. Someone was playing the organ, and someone else was strumming the guitar. It could be the dog wagging his tail, brushing the strings, but I didn’t think so. Just to check I went upstairs and opened the roof door, let it bang against the wall, and while the dog came out and started barking I hurried back down into the living room and heard the same voices, the same instruments, unperturbed.
The chords were the ones I was familiar with from when I went to church back home, what passes among white protestants for joy. But they really did sound like they were getting into it, those few Christians who gathered in the house next door.
And if there really wasn’t anyone there, it could have been the ghosts of the first of them from the catacombs in Rome, and the nice old man next door, or a few angelic old friends, a dog that could be in two places at once. When I believe in God, I think he must be something like that.
