Despite everything, the sunlight still hit the old man the same way. This old man was an odd, yet dependable fellow. Nobody knew him, and he didn’t know anybody. The only real human connection he had was the occasional “hello” and “good morning” that he would toss to someone passing by him in the hallway.

These greetings were one of the many unshakable constants of this man. Just like gravity and the setting of the sun, you could always expect him to be sporting the faint smell of oranges and a coat the same shade of brown as his hat. His most distinguishing feature, however, was the white bandage that hugged the right side of his face, shrouding over the place where an ear had once been. He reminded everyone of Vincent Van Gogh. In fact, some people called him Vincent Van Gogh, but never to his face, obviously. What else were they supposed to call him? To them, his name was unknown.

Another constant of the man was that you would always know what time it was when you saw him. Every morning, at precisely 9:00 o’clock, he would depart for the park and then reappear precisely 30 minutes later. This routine was solid as stone and unbreakable as steel.  The only exception was Sundays, when shopping would occur between 2:00 and 3:00. 

His unchanging presence was almost a bit comforting, a sense of stability in the ever chaotic world that the rest of the apartment's inmates lived in. He was even a bit of an inside joke for a few of them.

“Did you see Van Gogh going out, when you left?” one would say to the other.

“Oh no, I just missed him.” the other would say.

Despite his dependability, everything about the man was a mystery. The knowledge of where he came and what he had done for a living floated beyond the reach of the residents of the buildings residents. To them, he was a normal oddity. A strange phantom that they saw so regularly that he became a sort of a habitual presence. 

On the 7th of July, 2017 the man was coming back from one of his walks. This was one of the days where a package awaited the man, and so he took it.

A brief wave was exchanged with a woman in the hall before his well worn legs lugged him up the stairs, down the hall, and towards his room.

The key he took out of his pocket was made of a dulled metal. His hand shook ever so slightly as he fit the key into the keyhole and turned. The soft click sound of the door unlocking preceding his opening of the door. His tattered brown shoes bravely sprung forward over the threshold, delivering him from the cruel hallway to the bliss of the apartment.

The apartment he stepped into was dark. The switch made a soft clicking sound as he flicked it, turning on the light and revealing an unusual sight.

Hidden behind the door of the apartment was an interior straight out of the 1950s. Delicately dotting the blue wallpaper were yellow roses. The wallpaper's color was matched by a blue couch, but it contrasted with the red brick fireplace that wasn’t connected to a chimney. Perched on a brown desk was the regal figure of a phonograph player, blue curtains draped just behind its golden trunk.

The wallpaper changed as he carried the package into the bathroom. Covering the walls in the bathroom was a brilliant pink with white checkered lines. Pink was also the color of the toilet, the sink, the towels, and the bathtub. The one oasis in this pink desert was the blue floor. He sat the package down, and from it he took several soaps. Their brand was Lifebuoy. He had to get them specially delivered, because the store near him didn’t sell Lifebuoy soap.

As he placed some of the little squares on the shelf he made sure that they were perfectly neat and orderly.

The box of soaps was much lighter as he carried it to the closet, and placed it right next to the old fashioned vacuum.

Then, that was done. He was feeling a bit tired after his walk to the park, so he decided to relax. 

His desire to relax took him over to the slight imperfection that was the TV. The construction that was done on the TV was so good that you could not tell that it was made in the past 20 years. However, the imperfection came in the form of the VCR that he took out of a box, the cassette he put it in, and the remote he used. 

This brief anachronism was something that made him wince slightly as he fiddled through the menu and hit play. Dazzling upon the screen of the TV was an old game show, forgotten by time, but remembered by him.

It was lucky that he had managed to find the VCR for it.

The couch was lukewarmly comfortable as he sat down on it, only to then realize that he should move the curtains.

He went over to the window, and did just that. As he parted the blue drapes a view to a city is what could have been shown. However, what was instead displayed was a picturesque American postwar suburb. This was thanks to the posters he had taped to the windows.

He then sat back down on his chair and continued to watch the game show. 

The man didn’t mean to, but he ended up falling asleep.

This was unfortunate because you can’t hide from your past in your dreams.

The dreams that descended upon the man like buzzards on roadkill were dark dreams, dreams of gunfire, and screams, and helicopter rides, and a young woman begging for her life.

When the man woke up, it was not with a start, as he had one done in his younger days. He had gone through many nightmares since then, and he wasn’t as agile at waking up from them as he used to be. Instead, he just opened his eyes. He then got up, shaking present in every bone of his body. The TV screen snapped to blackness as his trembling finger landed on the button.

Then he closed his eyes again, and tried to balance himself. He imagined opening his eyes and being perfectly calm. However, when he opened his eyes the storm in his stomach had not dissipated whatsoever. It hadn’t been his first nightmare. In fact, it was just another nightmare in a long string of nightmares, but they never lost potency as the years dragged on.

The man breathed in a couple of times, which did very little to calm him down. He tried to find another way to calm himself down, so he went over to the phonograph, got out a record, and placed it in. It didn’t work perfectly, but that was the way he liked it.

This wasn’t just a recreation of any house, but of a house where the curtains were blue, and where the phonograph record player didn’t work just right, and where Lifebuoy soap was placed neatly on a pink bathroom shelf.

It had been expensive; he probably wouldn’t have been able to if it weren’t for various rather fortunate events that happened to him during the early 2000s. It was during that time when he had the idea, and it only took him a few years to make it a reality. He could have turned an entire house into it, but houses were expensive, and their house had been so small, only a little bit bigger than the penthouse apartment that he had been living in.

It had crossed his mind how insane this was, but he didn’t care. He had spent almost half a century wanting to return there, to that long since bulldozed down utopia. So, he made his own Eden to stay in. The only times he left were for shopping and walks to clear his head.

Almost everything in his little bubble was a perfect replica of the house in wich he was raised. The only things missing were his mother, who would grumble in Croatian when something bad happened, or his father, always smoking a long pipe. He wondered what they would think of his arrangement. Perhaps they would think it foolish, or perhaps they would wish that they themselves could have rented an apartment and made it look like their own childhood homes, in countries across the sea. 

He had come from a long line of men and women with scars between their eyes. All of them had tried to stitch their broken brain back together with whatever thread they could find, but his method was unique.

This was the only way he could live. His whole body ached for the innocence- shaped hole in his heart, and he had to fill it up somehow.

Images flashed in his brain and he found that same old storm of pain shrieking its way into his brain.

Flecks of bitter dizziness began to pelt his aching head. 

He reached for the record player, trying to turn it off, but his hands touched only air.

He hadn’t realized that the music wasn’t on at all as he tilted over and fell onto the floor.

Everyone noticed it when he didn’t go for a walk the next day. There were all sorts of worried whispers, wondering if the old man was okay. The next day, everyone grew more concerned. The whispers grew louder. The woman who lived next to him decided to knock on his door, only to be greeted with silence. The janitor was eventually called and he used a skeleton key to unlock the door. He gasped when he saw what was inside.

An ambulance was called, but they were two days too late.

A few of the people cried when they heard the news, even though they did not know him. He seemed nice, they thought. Of course, they also talked about what was inside. People talked about what they heard was inside his room. Apparently, the apartment looked like something from the 50s. 

But, the people moved on with their lives. The items in the apartment were moved out, and the decorations were taken down. The landlord actually liked the pink bathrooms though, so they kept that. Eventually, new people moved into the apartment, unaware that someone had died in it.

Even as they marched onward from the events, the residents of the building still felt a bit like something was missing. They had never known the man but they had found it comforting, how dependable it was that you could always see the man at a certain time of time wearing the same clothes

Perhaps they just appreciated the stability. After all, everyone seems to prefer the ordinary.