Unlocking the door to my New York City apartment is, as always, like cracking the seal on an ancient tomb. The door groans as I push it open. Inside, the air is stale and dry. A layer of dust covers everything. The living room radiators hiss at me in the dark. There are two people who routinely stay in the apartment whenever they are in New York. They are friends of mine who use the apartment for their own purposes, and do a bit of housesitting for me.
They clearly hadn’t been here in awhile.
I remember the first time I saw the apartment. It was a muggy day in August. A series of thunderstorms had blown through New York that afternoon, one of which was so severe that it sounded like entire train cars were falling from the sky. The man who owned the apartment wore a gray pinstriped suit, like something a budget-minded gangster would wear. Though I can longer remember what the man looked like, my mind has since replaced his face with the face of the actor who played Mikael Blomkvist in the 2009 Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. This happens more often as I get older, that my brain involuntarily fills in any gaps in memory with bits from movies and TV.
The man was a “sponsor,” which in New York City co-op terminology means that he and a group of investors had purchased a bunch of apartments in the building for a tiny amount of money many years ago. They had since been renting out the apartments–including this apartment–while waiting for the day when they could eventually sell the apartments and reap a return on their investment.
The previous tenants had moved out a few days earlier, leaving the place vacant. The living room, especially by New York City standards, felt cavernous to me, namely because it was a sunken living room. I’d heard about sunken living rooms before. They were living rooms that required a step or two into or out of them. I loved the words “sunken living room.” There was something beautifully nautical about them. The idea of sitting in a “sunken living room” made me think of a starfish luxuriating under the sea on a particularly peaceful bit of sun speckled coral.
As I took not one but two (two!) steps down into the sunken living room–which, as it turns out, would one day be my sunken living room–I noticed a small black object off in the corner. It was, I realized, a dead, legs-up waterbug. A waterbug, in case you’ve never seen one, looks like an oversized cockroach. And this waterbug was one of the largest ones I’d ever seen. It was, no kidding, about the size of a baby’s shoe.
I observed Mikael Blomkvist as he nonchalantly sidled over to the corner where the waterbug was located. He pretended to drop his pen–“Oops!” he said–then as he leaned down to presumably fetch his dropped pen, he skillfully produced a napkin from his pocket and seized the dead waterbug with it. Then, like a Las Vegas magician, he slipped the napkin into his pocket. Clearly this man had picked up dead waterbugs during apartment showings before.
Stage 5-7. Reminder: we are still in the DESERT stages, people, which presumably means that these stages are taking place inside pyramids or something. In today’s “pyramid,” I found two haunted cannons that fire at regular intervals, their deadly cannonballs cutting horizontal paths across the screen; and a pair of completely new creatures which appear to be the result of a consummated union between a mouse and a turtle.
This pyramid stage is divided in half by a slanting wall of large bricks, which may or may not be representative of the exterior of the pyramid. On the left side of the wall is a series of small widely spaced platforms, as well as the two mouse-turtle (turtlouse?) which are traveling in counterclockwise patterns around a couple of the platforms. On the right side of the slanted wall, you’ll find a very long ladder–quite possibly the longest ladder in the game so far–the two haunted cannons, and at the very bottom, a super hammer-time hammer and the exit door.
Feel free to ignore the widely spaced platform section on the left side of the stage altogether if you like. Me, I fooled around over there, but I certainly didn’t need to. Yes, there are riches to be squeezed from this section–Pauline’s umbrella, hat, and handbag are all there, as is a 1-up heart. But as with all of the DESERT stages so far, time is short, and it’s easy to get confused and distracted over here. Pro tip: It’s OK to leave a handbag behind once in awhile, if it’s done in the name of completing a stage.
The stage’s shortest-distance-between-two-points solution is this: climb up the slanted brick wall, which, because of its slant, can also be used as a gigantic stairway. At the very top of the stairway wall is the key. Ignore it for now. Instead, take the World’s Longest Ladder down, taking care along the way to avoid the cannon fire from the two haunted cannons. At the bottom of the ladder, grab the hammer, and do some demolition on all nearby breakable brick walls. This removes the barrier between you and the exit door.
Now, retrace your steps back to the top of the slanted brick stairway. Grab the key. Then go back down the slanted brick stairway. Put the key into the lock. Final step: go treat yourself yourself to a butterscotch. You’ve earned it.
