If I weren't up before with the jetlag...

...I most certainly am now.

I really, honestly don't know why the guy next door to me decided to have at least two people over at three in the morning. The guests seemed to be English speakers (though I've never heard my neighbor speaking English on the phone through the paper-thin walls). Why the late-night festivities? An Olympics party? A polyamorous booty call? Lunch break for night shifters? Or just, like me, jetlag? He did this last night too. This time, though, it really was a party, with some kind of vaguely Spanish music at a volume where I could very nearly hear the words.

I mean, what were they thinking?

I was getting ready to bang on their door when the guy downstairs did. Pounding on the ceiling, yelling up the stairs (got quite a lot of resonance in his sinus cavities, this guy), banging on my door, then on the other one on this floor where the culprits were, yelling like he was going to kill them. They yelled back. From where I was (ahem, behind my door waiting to see who was going to kill whom) I couldn't understand what was being yelled. The French guy downstairs went out to the window on the other side of the apartment and yelled up in heavily-accented English, "Go back to your fucking country, man." Possibly not getting that adding man on the end of an utterance softens it (I've got a friend who's worked on the meaning of man at the end of utterances, by the way). Anyway, I feel that he didn't get that subtlety, because I gather he definitely didn't mean to soften his utterance. Did I mention his resonances? Resonant.

Silence after a while.

Then my next-door neighbor put on some rap music, louder: a big fuck you in any language.

At that point I did get dressed to go out and tell them, you know, I know you are having this feud with the guy downstairs but there are other people living here too. By the time I got dressed they had turned the music off. I went out anyway, to the floor below where a woman from one apartment was telling off the guys (a gay couple? anyway, not who I thought lived there) who had been yelling, that she didn't care whose fault it was, you don't make that much noise at this hour of the night. "C'est les Americans!" the one resonant guy kept saying.

As I left he was saying "Excusez-nous" over and over in that way that doesn't really mean sorry but does mean that one is kind of embarrassed, or at least defensive.

More silence.

Then more yelling, pounding on walls or doors, a crash, and I really did think someone was going to kill someone, though I couldn't tell where this was and hadn't heard the door open next door.

"No more of that," the yeller downstairs yelled several times in English. The guy upstairs yelled back in English and French - definitely not American, I'm happy to say.

The woman downstairs told everyone to dormir.

Eventually, at last, and only as I've been writing this, silence.

Odd way to meet one's neighbors.