A Lesson in New Décor, a Bath, Dying, Waterfalls, and Horror.

When I lived at Whispering Oaks Condominiums many years ago, I had a cute place on the first floor.  It had two balconies, a galley kitchen, two bedrooms, two baths, and a combination dining room-living room.  It was small, decorating was easy, and I made it cozy.  All was serene until one Saturday night when the water came down in glistening sheets along the living room wall.  It came not from the condominium above, but from the condominium above that on the top floor.  The water continued flowing down to the garden condominium, below mine.

The owner was at work that evening, since he worked nearby at Marshall Field & Company department store, and he worked a late shift that evening.

Why the water was coming from that unit on the top floor, was anyone’s guess at that point.  That is, until the firemen reached the top-floor unit and found the door locked tight.  It was an ominous quiet, broken only by the sound of relentless water streaming from beneath the doorframe. With a sharp crack, they forced their way in, only to be greeted by the surreal sight of the overflowing bathtub, its porcelain edges barely visible under the torrent.  The man, naked, pale, and motionless, lay slumped against the tub’s curved back, his arm draped on the side of the tub, and a twisted grimace frozen on his lifeless face.  The scene was both tragic and bizarre, a moment frozen in time, where the quiet intimacy of a bath had turned into a macabre tableau.

The body in the bathtub was an older man, the roommate of the owner.  He evidently was drawing his bath while he sat inside the tub, died at some point, and the water kept pouring and pouring from the faucet and over the sides of the tub, throughout that unit and down to the three units below.

When all was said and done, the amount of drywall and painting repairs was enormous for all four condominium units, but insurance helped.  Repair crews swarmed the building in the weeks that followed, wielding industrial dehumidifiers and cutting through warped drywall.  The affected residents exchanged tired smiles in the lobby and hallways, commiserating over the shared ordeal.  The owner of the unit, still reeling from the news of his roommate’s passing, tried to reconcile his grief with the practical nightmare of insurance claims and restoration costs.  Each floor of the building bore its own unique scars from the incident of a soggy imprint of a life, and death, left behind.

Several months after Joe’s live-in boyfriend, Guiseppe, died in the bathtub, another waterfall occurred.  Joe scheduled carpetlayers to remove his old carpeting and install fresh wall-to-wall shag carpeting.  The residents in the general area heard the soft tapping of hammers and thought little of the work being done.  But soon after they saw it.

Water was once again running down their living room walls.  The wall was glistening with the water dripping and flowing down.

Once more, the residents living below Joe ran upstairs to see if it was his crew that caused a small waterfall.  And sure enough, it was.  The carpet layers hit a water pipe in the floor when they were reinstalling new carpet tack along some of the walls.  A hole in the pipe was punctured, and voilà!  The waterfall.

Once again, his insurance had to pay for drywall and painting repairs in the three condominiums units below him that were affected.