The Tenants' Board (Part 1)
The heating in the Larkin Building died on the second Tuesday of January, which in Chicago is the worst possible week for anything to die.
Renata found out at six in the morning, when her bare feet hit the bathroom floor. The radiator under the window was cold all the way along. She put her hand on it twice, as if it might change its mind.
She called the landlord at eight. Voicemail. She called again at noon, and at four, and left a message each time in her politest voice. On Wednesday she wrote a letter, printed it at work, and pushed it under the door of the office on the ground floor. On Thursday the letter was still lying there in exactly the same position, with a pizza flyer on top of it.
By the weekend the building had turned into sixteen small private plans. Aiko in 3B worked in her coat and boiled water on the stove for the steam. Nina in 2A bought an electric heater, which killed the power on the whole floor twice in one evening. Dov in 1C, who had lived in the building for nineteen winters, rolled a towel along the bottom of his door and said nothing to anybody.
Renata knew all of this because she met them on the stairs, and every conversation was the same conversation. Everybody had called. Nobody had reached him. Everybody was waiting for somebody else's phone call to work.
That was the part she couldn't stop thinking about. Sixteen people had made the same complaint sixteen separate times, and to the landlord it looked like sixteen small problems he could ignore one at a time.
On Sunday night she typed one page and printed sixteen copies. She taped one to every door in the building and one to the glass by the mailboxes.
MEETING. THURSDAY, 7 P.M., LOBBY. THE HEATING. BRING A CHAIR.
By Thursday afternoon there were eleven new numbers in her phone, and she still had no idea what she was going to say.