Matt Langer

My upstairs neighbor is a soft-spoken, tiny little Asian man. He shares his apartment with a similarly soft-spoken, tiny little Asian woman. I ran into them in the hallway one time and my only takeaway was that they were both soft-spoken. And tiny.

And every night at 11pm sharp, and again every morning at 7am (also sharp), they do it.

Now don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I’m so intimate with their intimacy because their doin’ it in any way resembles the kind of doin’ it parodied by Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally”—I hear no voices, no exclamations that might suggest two lovers are in the throes of erotic abandon. Nor do I imagine their doin’ it to be the kind that Jimmy Pop and The Yin and DJ Q-Ball and the other distinguished members of the Bloodhound Gang might have witnessed during a formative moment of their collective youth while watching the Discovery Channel, because whatever happens on that box spring above my bedroom doesn’t seem even remotely animalistic. The reverberations that rattle through their floorboards (my ceiling) are indicative of something far too mechanical and formulaic to be considered carnal (much less romantic), like a laboratory demonstration of Hooke’s Law gone horribly awry. There’s this profound Teutonic precision to the freqency of their (his) gyrations, a frequency that might find an analog in the natural world only in the hummingbird, though no hummingbird I know of could ever pull off so much coital shock & awe.

So imagine my boyish delight upon browsing the selections on our front door’s buzzer this morning and discovering such a symbolic parity between their lifestyle and surname.