The doorman of my apartment building can be difficult. He bars others' passage. Like Steve, who calls me from a snowbank outside the building, wintry gusts howling through his phone.

"Your doorman won't let me in."

I take the elevator down and ask Frank what's the matter.

"I don't like the way he looks," he says.

I go outside, hugging myself because I left my coat upstairs, and tell Steve he has to leave. I feel no guilt sending him back into the whirling, darkening storm. The thing is Frank's right. Steve's no good.

But then Frank tells the pizza delivery person they have the wrong address so many times they refuse to take my order.

"Frank," I say, "I like pizza."

"Bad for your heart," he says. "Too much cheese."

People say the doorman's controlling; I should complain to management. But I can't bring myself to do it. Anyway, I know he'd stand aside if I insisted. I can always override him.

I ask Frank why he's so particular, and he says, "It's my job." I ask if he has family, and he goes back to his crossword puzzle.

I think he must be lonely, and that's why he's always in everyone's business. Like the neighbor's mother he shoos away whenever she tries to visit.

"She's killing him," he says.

When we ask how, he says, "Incrementally."

He sounds tired, not because of having to state the obvious, but because he's getting on in years. "Too many to count," he says, when someone pries.

Lately, I've been catching him asleep. I tap on his desk, and he slowly opens his eyes, and says, "I wasn't sleeping," even though we both know he was.

Later, when I go to check the mail, he's asleep again. He sits up in his chair, his face hard and burnished, as if it were made of polished stone.

This time, I sneak out to the drug store and buy something I don't need. When I get back, he's awake, and he jumps at the sight of me.

"You're gonna give me a heart attack," he says. And even though I know it's hyperbole, I feel strangely guilty.

The next day, Frank moves to a standing position beside the door, but it doesn't keep him from falling asleep.

He stands there for hours, not moving.

I put my hand beneath his nose and feel warm air exiting, slow and even.

"I wasn't sleeping," he says again. But his eyes are closed, and the words come out stiff, like they're caught in his throat.

In the morning, we find him blocking the entrance to the front door, still standing.

When he feels cold and hard to the touch, we call management.

Maintenance workers try to move him but he's as heavy as those dead generals on horses made of iron. Then, while four of them are pushing, the unimaginable happens: Frank breaks at the ankles and topples over.

There's a collective groan as we all look away, and the man with the mother who's trying to kill him bursts into tears.

Frank's feet, as it turns out, are the heaviest. No amount of effort moves them; they're fused to the floor. Eventually, maintenance gives up and leaves them there.

For days, we stare at our doorman's feet as we enter and leave the building with our groceries and mail and long faces. All the tenants know to step over him, and after a while it becomes habit. We know where to put our feet without having to look.

But sometimes, visitors, particularly those with no situational awareness, trip over him. They knock into his feet and fall, and offence leaps to their faces—like Frank's feet have attacked them, like it's personal. Almost always they leave. They turn and go and vanish into their storms. And when they do, we know that if they ever got the chance, they would kill us, too—in small, incremental ways. And there's nothing left to do but watch them go.


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