By Heidi Simmons
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The Apartment
by Greg Baxter
Fiction
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Everyone wants a safe place to call home; a space that is secure and keeps out evil. But what happens if the evil is within? In Greg Baxter’s, The Apartment (Twelve, 208 pages) finding a comfortable place to live is not about walls and a roof.
The story is about a man looking for an apartment in an unnamed European city. He tells the story in a first person narrative without ever mentioning his own name. The story takes place in a single day.
The protagonist is an ex navy man who served during the Iraq war. He was on a submarine and never saw combat. However, after his service, he contracted his high tech skill set to the military for top dollar and returned to Iraq – this time right in the heart of the chaos.
Although his work was mainly in the Green Zone monitoring video surveillance, searching intelligence materials for clues to missing men and women taken by insurgents, he saw horrible, horrible things.
Having saved all his earnings, he is now retired and seeking a place to live in his new community. He cannot speak the language. He has a friend, Saskia, and she has promised to help him find the best place to live in the right neighborhood.
It is wintertime and around the holidays. Saskia helps him acclimate to the cold. He chose the city because it is cold. He, being from the American southwest desert, cold seemed like it might be just what he needs.
But he is unprepared and the girlfriend helps the foolish American find a coat, gloves and scarf – expensive, but he can afford them. As the two make their way to the apartment Saskia’s friends join them. Some are wary about this rich American and he is not sure they like him and not only because he’s American. He is a stranger.
As the narrator journeys through his newly adopted city, he runs into interesting people and past memories he can’t ignore. An American expat and retired military man named Easy takes him to Roman ruins, he attends a children’s recital and gets a lesson about Bach and Mozart. He remembers a childhood friend and the visit to her mother’s after her death. He recalls the birth of his nephew and seeing his mother and father together again getting along after so many years divorced.
When the protagonist gets his apartment, there are keys to unlock everything. So many, he cannot remember which goes to what. He has hardly any possessions and the apartment is cold.
On the surface, the character may be searching for an apartment, but he is actually searching for something far more important – his sanity. He has abandoned his country. He is disillusioned and angry. He has not seen his family in decades but loves and misses them. He has a thirst for knowledge, yet he cannot get the persistently random information out of his head.
Author Greg Baxter writes his story without chapters. In fact, he writes with a free flowing style that is hardly broken up with punctuation. Occasionally there are paragraphs. But this is not Proust. It is an intimate voice sharing the world around him that is both mundane and meaningful. It is his life, take it or leave it.
The Apartment can be read in one sitting, but it is difficult. Not because of the writing, but because there is a moodiness and intensity that creeps up. There is also wisdom and compelling anecdotes worthy of concentration, yet it is easy to be distracted from the page.
This is Baxter’s first novel. It is brave and bold and different. There is not a typical plot unfolding, but there is a story of a man who is trying to keep his life from unraveling any further. If he can find an apartment, a city and a community maybe everything will be okay. If he can remain distracted by everything that crosses his path, then perhaps he won’t have to look inside himself. If he can find a place to call home, then maybe he has a chance to be restored.
A provocative book, The Apartment is a poetic and meditative exposé of a guy with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder desperate to find peace and a place to call home. But the allegory may be much bigger. Especially for anyone who cannot leave his or her demons behind no matter how far you run or how anonymous you try to be.
