The apartment is loud.

Clinks of coffee, rapid-fire Serbian, drills breaking concrete into fat slabs, ambulances racing in between streets. An older man drags a battered suitcase repeating “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” in a high pitched voice. A phone vibrating on the metal table of the cafe below buzzes all the way up through the windows of the apartment and wobbles in my ears while I pour my coffee and I instinctively pat my pockets, scan my kitchen, look under the couch pillows. Ghost phone. Ghost messages. I swat at it like a phantom insect.

The apartment flattens noise. All noise is created equal! All noise is heard! Folks, there’s no barrier to entry, no price at the door, welcome to the membrane, not-so-selectively-permeable, open to all with working eardrums and a sensitive nervous system.

“It’s like we’re camping,” J. says, pillow on top of her head. It’s four in the morning and the garbage trucks have arrived. Or perhaps a helicopter has landed on the roof.

I laugh. What a comparison! How funny to think of this apartment as a tent, my bed as a sleeping bag. That each night we fall asleep in nature, to the peaceful humming of the wilderness. Except nature is a neighborhood in Queens that’s cut across by two highways, with no parks for relief, an unforgiving triangle of land. The wilderness is the screaming machinations of the city, made bare and explicit, a mess of movements and relationships.

I hear the grunts of the sanitation workers as they wrench the trash bags out of their containers. J. still has the pillow over her head, eyes squeezed shut, body curled in a fetal position back to the window. One hand in hers, I reach for the gaps in the noise, little swaths of silence I can wrap over us as a shroud. It doesn’t work.

The noise is all-enveloping. There is a terrible beast looming at the edge of our mattress, a hydraulic medusa, crunching and swallowing sacs of black plastic, like squares of liquorice. Finishing them with a terrible burp.

I take it all back. All noise is not created equal.

The cars, trucks, and buses slot firmly at the top of the hierarchy. They burn rubber, screech engines, cut through the air like a butcher knife, obliterate anything and everything else in their wake. Layers and layers of cars idling, honking, hollering, vomiting, shitting, crying out, and worst of all revving, revving, revving. In the past five years in the apartment, I have become a vehicular pandemoniac expert, sifting my way through the layers of noise, holding them to my nose, the precious notes of engine oil, cigarettes, and garbage.

With just one sip, I can identify between the different types of revving, the difference between a show-off—someone who’s removed the engine for the purpose of show, to show me that they are a gigantic asshole—and a car that is so broken down, so genuinely struggling, that its last gasps are on display for all of us before it goes to the beyond.

Frankie’s car is neither. It’s a battle cry. It’s defiant, relentless, an enormous fuck-you to the neighborhood; I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, at any hour, I am king of this fucking block. At least, that’s what I imagine he’s thinking when he revs at five in the morning, just after the garbage trucks, in his beat-up leather jacket, red paint on the back spelling out the words Assholes Never Die.

Nonna says he is on drugs. She thinks everybody is on drugs. But she has known Frankie for decades. She has watched his hair grow grey and gnarly, his car battered and bruised, his body as familiar to her as the apartment itself. Five years? Nothing! Pales in comparison. Just a sliver of time, a sliver of noise, a sliver of life.

Most mornings, I reach for the white noise machine on my dresser and repeat: the city is beautiful. I live in the best goddamn city in the world, in the best borough, in the best neighborhood. I am so lucky to live in my grandmother’s apartment, have a sense of family and history, to feel my blood in these walls. Queens is my home. Oh you haven’t been to Queens? You’re missing out. It’s the World’s Borough, you know. Most diverse neighborhoods in the world. Noise on my block? No, oh no, I learned to envision the noise as a river, I’m floating along a beautiful river of sound. Yes siree, I am part of a living ecosystem!

My friend Chad, who lives in Kentucky, remarked on the simple beauty of Astoria—couples carrying their bags of laundry to the laundromats, the older neighbors resting their wrinkled elbows on their windows, friendly chatter on the street corner. They said, “how wonderful, the inside is the outside is the inside is the outside. In Louisville, every part of life is private, indoors, hidden with in-unit washing machines and walk-in closets, but here you see the world!” I said “ok, yeah!” The world is here, the world is here in my apartment, I am alive! I am alive! I am alive.

I open my window and yell “Shut the fuck up! Please shut the fuck up.” Frankie can’t hear me over the sound of his revving. I notice he has a huge white bandage over his nose.

Nothing prepares you for the perversity of the noise, the apartment is a flimsy, a space where noise violates and runs around wild.

I run into a neighbor who I often see at the farmer’s market in Jackson Heights. She has bright blue eyes, long white hair that she wears loose, and a knowing wisdom about the neighborhood that she’s lived in all her life. We exchange pleasantries and then I say:

“So, this revving is crazy huh?”

She gives me a blank look.

“You know, the car engines every morning?”

She slowly nods, a flash of recognition.

Encouraged, I lower my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I think his name is Frankie.”

“Oh yes.” Her expression is strange, her eyes are glazed.

I try again. “It’s driving me nuts. Who can stand-”

“Well the car belonged to his father.”

I nod, not understanding. “So—

“So, you know. There’s a particular feeling attached to it.” She waves goodbye.

I stood there stunned. His father? His father? Who cares about this damn father! What kind of logic exists on the block that someone can rev all hours of the day and all hours of the night because they are missing their father? Does grieving preclude a muffler?

Later I think, well, the outside is in the inside is the outside. Frankie’s pain is my pain, his sorrow, my sorrow. His car engine’s revving are his screams into the night, blasting out I miss my dad, and I suppose I can understand that.

A couple days later, my doorbell rings five times. It’s old, a harsh jarring sound, and on the fifth buzz, I run downstairs. Packages have been stolen from my apartment, as well as an old bike and a new mattress. Through the window of the front door, I see a man with wiry grey and brown hair, normally tied back in a bun. Frankie. My stomach drops. Does he know I hate him? I have never hated someone the way I have hated him. Is he going to accuse me of conspiring against him? Toppling his throne, as king of the neighborhood?

He pushes his head inside my entranceway and asks, “Have you seen my airpods?”

I pause for a minute. Have I seen his airpods? Did I accidentally take his airpods?

“Um, no. I haven’t seen your airpods.” I fight the instinct to pat down my pockets.

“My airpods. My airpods!” He motions to his ears. “I tracked them here.” He pulls out his phone and shows me a Whatsapp message.

I peer down at the messages, they’re incoherent. In the text messages, I see a lot of baby’s, please’s, smiley emojis, angel emojis, and most jarringly, my exact address.

“I know they’re here. I followed the location here.” He reaches past me and tapes a message on spiral note paper, facing the inside of the building.

Lost pair of earbuds. Tracked To This Building. Please return, already reported Lost. Please Return Frankie. Black with White Stripe.

“Ok. Um. You should ask the cafe.” I say.

He waits expectantly.

“You might have left them there.” I give a weak smile.

He nods and I close the door. I leave the note for a week, afraid if I take it down, he’ll come back looking for them again with a new note.

When I walk outside the following morning, I notice there is a new note, a different note, typed and clean, taped on top of his car.

Hello, Please do not rev your car before 9am, I have children who wake up tired from the noise and can’t go back to sleep. Thank you.

What do we have left but bargaining?

As Frankie revs, lights switch on, children cry, parents groan, faces jam into pillows with a silent scream. We can’t ask Frankie to stop revving completely, but we can implore him, please sir, for the sake of my young children with their small eardrums and little faces scrunched up, please sir, would you mind not revving before nine in the morning?

Did Nonna shush my father and uncle when they were small children as they woke up to cars and conversations? Did she stroke their face, as she does mine now, gently with the back of her hand, to say, please go back to sleep, it's early, it's nothing?

Do our gestures mimic each other as the years pass and layer on top of each other, duplicated and photocopied, infinite light wooden cabinets and tall windows, all gestures and rhythms of the neighborhood over time?

Does growing up with a river of sound make you part of its ecosystem rather than a witness or bystander? Why am I watching the current rush away?