The ad in The Village Voice seemed promising. “Own room in very large three bedroom Tribeca apartment. Large living room. Eat in Kitchen. Jacuzzi Tub.”

After two weeks of apartment-hunting in New York, I was running low on hope and time. So, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in November, I arrived for my appointment at the loft on Leonard Street. The elevator door opened onto a brightly lit living room. A row of Grecian columns ran the span of the north wall, and dramatic metal sculptures were positioned like sentries by the windows. Through the bathroom door I spotted the edge of the promised Jacuzzi. Like the imagined inside of a genie’s lamp, the space glowed with an impossible hospitality.

Bobby greeted me at the door. On the phone, he had conveyed a hipster’s friendly, nervous energy. In person, his aloofness seemed more practiced, and I wasn’t surprised when he confessed to being an actor. He welcomed me in and showed me to the bedroom. A metal pterodactyl was suspended from the ceiling above an incongruous grand piano stationed in the far right corner. “Our last roommate left this here,” he said, fingering one of the keys. “He might come back for it. If not, do you mind it?” I decided I would happily share a room with a piano and a pterodactyl.

“The three of us are very close here,” Bobby confided. “We like to have game nights. Do you like to play games?”

“Definitely,” I said, fondly recalling my college days and racy games of Jenga.

Bobby would hold me to my word.

—

Three days later I returned to meet the other roommates. Jess was a pretty, emphatic girl with a warm smile and encouraging blue eyes. Her boyfriend, Jason, seemed both easygoing and enthusiastic as he greeted me with a spastic handshake. The four of us sat drinking beer and talking about work and breakup stories and college. Bobby explained that the loft belonged to his uncle, an eccentric artist who sometimes materialized to throw wild, bohemian parties before retreating to California. It was a lucky arrangement, allowing them to keep an apartment that should have been far beyond their means. I began to relax, sharing confidences and shedding defenses. If they would have me, I decided this could be my home.

And then the phone rang. “Hey guys, it’s Brian,” a voice announced as the answering machine clicked into its loop. “I want to swing by to get my money,” he growled. “And if I don’t get it, you’re in for a world of trouble. I want…my fucking…money. Bye.”

I felt like I’d been shaken awake out of a sweet dream. The roommates scrambled to explain away Brian’s madness. There was no money, they promised. Brian was crazy. Though I knew better, I was still searching for their approval, still desperate for a new home in a new city. And so I pocketed my suspicion, a New York apartment hunter’s greatest asset. I would permit them this trespass, but just this one.

When the phone rang again a half an hour later, Bobby and I were alone in the living room. Jess and Jason had disappeared in the heat of an argument about the pockets on Jason’s pants, which Jess hated. A woman’s voice filtered in from the answering machine: Operator 217 calling for Roberto. She sounded like a dispatcher from a prison switchboard. Bobby lunged for the phone. “Put him through,” he said as he ducked into the corner. “Yes sir, Colonel, sir. I’ve been bad,” he confessed in a loud whisper. “I deserve to be punished.” I spun around to find him rolling the leg of his pants to his knee. He mouthed an apology as he cocked one hand back and, with an anticipatory wince, slapped himself unmercifully on the calf.

“Bad. Very bad,” he groaned. With each slap, the Bobby I barely knew sounded more and more like an arthritic donkey.

I shifted forward on the couch and fixed my eyes on the TV screen, finding my reflection in its vacant face. I raised my eyebrows in amazement, consulting this distorted image of myself in a vague attempt to confirm or deny this absurdity. I was fumbling for an explanation that would allow me to stay, struggling against the waves of doubt pushing me toward the door. Bobby returned wearing a hangdog look and showering me with more apologies. The calls were rare. He only did it for the money.

Had I been in his struggling actor’s shoes, I might’ve chosen a more traditional service industry. But somehow I accepted the possibility that this was, in some distant sense, an acting job. My hope of finding a home in the loft had begun to fail me. In a quiet corner of my mind, I sketched the beginnings of an escape plan. When the phone rang several minutes later I prayed for a wrong number or a low-interest-rate credit card offer. As luck would have it, it was Operator 471. I steadied myself for another round of slaps and confessions, but this caller, unlike the Colonel, was a talker.

“No, I’m not alone,” Bobby admitted. “My, uh, my brother’s here. He’s visiting.” Bobby listened, his face slowly contorting into a desperate frown. “Ummm…here. He wants to talk to you.” He waved the phone in my face.

An awkward, hazy silence fell on the room and was shattered immediately by the sound of the apartment buzzer. Bobby’s girlfriend had arrived. The apartment had assumed its own manic reality, its own code and lunatic loyalties. In this house, under these rules, I had to take the phone.

“Do you know what to do?” The man buzzed with a nasal, Middle American plainness.

Shrugging, I positioned the phone between my ear and shoulder and clapped my hands together. “Ope. That hurt, that hurt pret-ty badly,” I said blandly, not wanting to play the part too convincingly. “Yeah, that one hurt, too.”
I hung up the phone just as Jason and Jess reappeared and Kim glided into the room. She was wearing a broad smile and carrying a 7-foot-long kayak paddle. “Happy anniversary!” she sang, thrusting the gift to Bobby.

“But we don’t have a kayak,” Bobby reminded her. “What can we do with this?”

I imagined that, at the very least, I could use the paddle to break the telephone. “We can rent the kayak. Happy anniversary.”

As Kim excused herself and made for the bathroom, Jess jerked to attention, as if heeding the remote signal of a secret satellite.

“Kiiiiiiim,” she called. “Remember to write it down this time.”

Kim refused this mysterious request, violently. A war of words ignited, each woman hurling a volley of insults and obscenities across the loft. I blinked my eyes, half expecting the room to disappear when I re-opened them. When Kim finally took cover in the bathroom, Jess turned to me for support. “We keep a pad by the toilet paper roll so you can mark how many sheets you use. That’s fair, right?” She waved her hand violently around an imaginary roll. “I mean the girl must use a huge mitt of toilet paper.”

And there it was: the point of no return. If every trip to the bathroom required basic arithmetic, I could never live here. All traces of hope and comfort fell away, and I made a silent surrender. But I was still trapped by my promise to stay for dinner.

Some minutes later, after Bobby and Kim had stepped out to buy more beer, Jess, Jason and I were stationed in the kitchen. Jess assigned me tomato-slicing detail and we set to work. Somewhere into my second tomato I looked up to find Jess glowering at me. “No, no, no,” she chided. “You said you knew how to do this. Oh, I wanted everything to be perfect,” she sighed, grabbing her keys and making for the door. “I’ll just have to get more.”

“But there are eight left,” Jason called, indicating the unblemished tomatoes that had survived my amateur’s blade. Jess slammed the door.

Jason shook his head. “I’m sorry, dude. First the toilet paper. Now this!” he erupted, pounding his fist on the countertop and quashing an unsuspecting tomato.

“Here, count these,” he shouted, sending a roll of paper towels unfurling across the room with a red carpet’s splendor. “Uh oh! Look, I’m wasting! Don’t tell anyone! I’m wasting!” he screamed as he made his way to the bathroom.

I was glad for the moment alone as I groped for a graceful exit strategy. I had begun to feel like an actor stranded on stage, the only one without a script. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was an audience somewhere. In that moment, I considered just leaving. No goodbyes, no polite thanks and no looking back. But my solitude was not long for the lasting. The elevator door slid open to reveal—not Bobby, not Kim—but a short man with jet-back hair and a jet-black leather jacket. He marched into the loft, his shifty eyes scanning the room.

“Hi, I’m Brian,” he said. “I used to live here. I came to get something that belongs to me.”

Brian disappeared into Jess’s room and returned a minute later with a teddy bear, a piece of paper, a hammer and a marker. He set to work scrawling, “I WANT MY MONEY” in bold black letters on the paper, along with other assorted threats. When he was satisfied, Brian positioned an oversized nail above the chest of the unsuspecting bear. Steadying his manic hand, he hammered away furiously, sending the nail through the note, the bear and the kitchen table.

The night had spiraled into madness. All leanings toward shyness and politeness disappeared. I was through playing the role of the marionette. I would dance for them no more. When Jason finally reappeared, demanding that Brian drop the hammer and get out, I cleared my throat. “You know, I think I need to go, actually,” I said, falling back toward the elevator.

“I’m sorry. We’ll get him out of here,” Jason promised.

“Yeah, I’ll be finished in a minute,” Brian chimed in, hammer still firmly in hand.

“No, it’s not him. It’s…it’s everything. There’s something very theatrical about all of this.”

“In what way?”

“I mean this night feels very…staged. The comings and goings. It feels choreographed.”

“Oh.” Jason considered this carefully. “I think I know what you mean. Like you’re being watched?”

“Something like that.” Exactly like that.

“Like there might be people behind that wall? He pointed to a corner beneath the stairs, his face sliding into a knowing smile. “Like you’re in a hidden camera pilot for Comedy Central?”

“Something like that.”

On Jason’s cue, a team of producers, writers and crew filed out from behind the walls. The loft on Leonard Street had been a secret stage, all smoke and two-way mirrors. Bobby, Jess, Kim, Jason and Brian—actors one and all— welcomed me as if I had just been initiated into their illusionist’s fraternity.

A young producer led me back through a hidden hallway—stopping along the way to reveal a camera concealed in the microwave—and into a small room filled with a bank of monitors and video decks. The men and women behind the curtains broke into applause, and I was promptly ambushed by a man with a shoulder-mounted video camera. This backroom community had been tracking and recording my every move for almost three hours. In exchange for my trouble they conferred on me a fleeting, accidental celebrity. But in the glow of the camera light I was hit with a pang of shyness straight out of ninth grade.

I had stumbled upon a polished, rehearsed illusion and walked around in it for a while. There is a particular vulnerability in entering someone’s home with the hopes of living there. For three hours I had been fighting the growing sense of a hidden agenda, dismissing my suspicion as a vague conspiracy theory. No matter how absurd the turns of the night’s strange parade, it was hard to imagine such an intricate plot, an entire cast and crew working to manufacture one grand charade.

When I stepped out into the shuttered ghost town of the Tribeca night, the street looked different somehow. The cast-iron storefronts had inherited a new strangeness from the events of the artificial night. The feeling would linger for days.

—

There were others who would pin their hopes to the loft on Leonard Street. A few days later I spoke with the young producer, and he told me their stories. A few visitors had seen the story through to its climax, in which Bobby pilfered their possessions and presented them to Kim as makeshift anniversary presents. Several others had been completely seduced by the possibility of living in the loft and were devastated when the urban mirage vanished at the night’s end. Telling their stories, the producer sounded tired, his words tinged with guilt. I think in the end he wondered: How funny had it been?