Squat, beige and Soviet, the Marie Antoinette Apartments stood against the stale gray Minneapolis sky. Irony of the worst kind, he thought, blandly ugly and unconscious. He would take exquisitely self-aware irony any day over this three-story architectural monstrosity, “classed up” with tacked on ionic Greek columns, harsh blue LED Christmas lights wrapped inexpertly around them, canned Christmas classics pumping through the air.
God, this place was only better than minimum security prison by a hair. But it was all he could afford now, so he’d just have to lower his eyes—and his standards—every time he approached. He tried to avoid the other people in the building, but a few of the near indigent souls, especially the family across the hall, insisted on pestering him with their lowbrow holiday cheer—the cheap gift of homemade cookies, the invitation of a seat at their dinner table on Christmas night on the flip side of a child’s crude drawing of a Christmas tree slipped under his door.
All this might have been more bearable if anyone he knew now understood why the Marie Antoinette Apartments pained his soul, filled him with righteous rage. He’d certainly never get that from his obtuse, court-appointed therapist, a small, garish woman whose office and clothing reeked of TJ Maxx. So, he amused himself by using up their fifty minutes complaining about how much he hated living there.
His fingers itched to blow the place up, her told her. To set it alight. She told him there were healthier ways to channel and examine his negative emotions so he could eventually let them go. He needed to think about what the Marie Antoinette represented to him, she told him, to look deeper, and to perhaps think about its positive attributes instead.
This made him laugh hysterically. How much deeper can I go than living inside the damned building? Should I dive into the meaning of my laminate, faux wood floors and Formica kitchen counters, the rancid smell of old cooking that oozes from the graying, cracked walls studded with nail holes and abandoned, archeological remnants of tape from all the miserable souls who inhabited the purgatory before me? How about the rust-stained, leaking toilet and body-oil-marked tub? Should I look for Rorshachs in its grimy patterns?
That’s not what I meant, she said quietly, and you know it.
Well, I cherish my negative emotions, he said, suddenly tired. They’re the only things keeping me going these days.
~
Near morning a couple of weeks before Christmas, after one too many sleeping pills, he had a vivid dream.
It started out of focus as he dragged himself toward the Marie Antoinette, bearing his usual cloak of heavy, gray resignation and pushed hard against the main door, as he always had to. Only this time, the door sprang open and instead of jarring, cold Christmas music, warm strains of exquisite chamber music vibrated through him. All came into focus. The entryway had grown to twice its size, the gray, non-descript industrial carpet replaced with a glowing, mahogany parquet floor. Instead of aluminum mailboxes and a frameless wall mirror on either side of the narrow space, giant gilt mirrors reflecting golden candlelight and gold and cream fleur-de-lis silk wallpaper covered the walls. The walls heaved outward until the room became what it wanted to be--a grand palace ballroom, complete with gently tinkling, candle-lit chandeliers. A ballroom for him alone.