The neighbors who I have the most interaction with are the ones directly below me. I encounter them most days and the greetings are friendly as I've been put in charge of fixing their universal remote when it becomes deprogrammed. They speak barely any English and from what I gather they don't even share the same first language. And their universal remote deprograms itself a shocking amount (9 or 10 times in the past two years). I do not know their names, but one of them is from Greece and of of them is from Not-Greece and Not-America. They're aging and drink a lot of tea and he sneaks the occasional cigarette on his porch when she is not looking.
After the 3rd or 4th time I fixed the remote they began to reward me with food or dessert. It started with a bag of oranges and two Heinekens and it's grown to home-cooked meals featuring some sort of noodles on a paper plate wrapped in tin foil. I've always taken the food upstairs to my house, but have never consumed it. At first it was because the food looked wholly unappetizing. Immediately after the first bag they gave me a plate full of foreign pastries that looked disgusting and stale. I did not eat those pastries because they did not intrigue me. I did not eat the subsequent plates because it was around this time that I began to fear that the neighbors below me intended to kill me.
And this is when I began to fear them. The thing is, a universal remote is a pretty standard piece of technology. You find the code, program it in and then it works. If you don't have the code you simply tell the remote to find it and when it guesses right you hit "enter." Now, I don't expect an elderly couple to know how to fix the remote, but it certainly is suspicious that the remote manages to become deprogrammed so often. The only palpable explanation is that it is not merely nature deprogramming that remote. So naturally they are deprogramming the remote on purpose. Why would they do that? Well, an outside observer would see two elderly people and think that maybe they're lonely and like the idea of their young neighbor coming down to visit. I would counter that maybe the express reason for the deprogramming is so that they may provide me with a plate of food for reprogramming. And if the goal of my visit is to give me food then clearly something must be going on with the food. And if something is indeed going on with the food that it is almost certainly poisoned.
What their original reasons for wanting to poison me are, I'll almost certainly never know. Maybe they're trained killers who have retired to Los Feliz and merely miss the power that came with craftily and untraceably taking a man's life or more likely maybe I stomp around too much up here. In a building whose demographic is so geriatric I'm sure I'm something of a nuisance to the building. I listen to music, I stay up late, I stumble home drunk. I'm not saying it's true, but I wouldn't be shocked if the building has some sort of secret basement where everyone goes to meet and at one of these meetings someone raised a bony hand and suggested a "solution" to the "problem in apartment 7." Any of these things could be the reason for the origin of the attempts on my life. But these were just in passing I'm sure. For I am now convinced that they know that I have never eaten any of the foods they gave me and that their desire to see me done away with is now more focused due to my rejection of their gifts.
In short, I think that the reason they want to kill me is that I have not eaten their poison. Which seems like putting the cart before the horse, but hear me out.
I became convinced of this because I slowly got the distinct sense that they KNEW I wasn't eating what they gave me. I'd get sidelong glances from them and another plate of food offered when I hadn't even programmed the remote. Suddenly they were knocking on my door at night and offering me another fresh plate. They were acting strangely. Clearly they knew. "How would they know?" I questioned myself. And there are only two possible answers to that question.
1. They dig through my trash.
2. I'm not dead.
If they were trying to poison me and they noticed that I had not died they would then know for certain that I was not eating their food. I can only imagine the rage it would send them into at the rejection of their generosity (feigned, but generous all the same). I also have come to believe that if they were digging through my trash it betrays a desire to kill me, because in order to kill someone you have to know them first. So, through that deductive reasoning I have proved that my downstairs neighbors want me dead.
And thus, I fear what my neighbors are capable of. What started as an exercise of assassination can only now have multiplied into a holy war of which my death can be the only outcome. At first they wanted me dead to pass the time, but now that I have offended them by rejecting their food and drink they want me dead because it is the only way to defend their honor and avenge the insult I have caused them. I think they'll stick to poisoning plates of home cooking for now, but if I hold out for too long they'll almost certainly move on to blowdarts or sniper rifles. I may soon be confined to my apartment for fear that if I exit they will be able to strike.
So if I die anytime soon. You know what happened.
