October 22nd, 2025

Design for a Chandelier. 1800-1899. From the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Pessimist
Fiction by Rhian Sasseen

The door clicked shut behind her.

In the hallway everything sounded like rain, even the radio. Even the television. As she walked, there were no people in the hallway, no other bodies passing her by, but voices still were everywhere, inescapable, they streamed out from behind every apartment door. Commercial jingles, laugh tracks, podcast episodes—for the best sleep of your life, try—praxis! Now and again, there was even a melody, notes that sounded like a moan.

The pessimist stepped forward. Nighttime, with its attendant sense of void, was the only time in which she really loved these halls. It was early in the morning; it was also late at night. It was the exact moment in which yesterday and tomorrow converge, the only true moment of neutrality available to us, and the pessimist should have been sleeping, she should have been bleating fitfully beside her boyfriend, sleepy little half-snores, yips, groans. But this was the time that she was always awake. Eyes open, eyes staring, eyes boring into the wall.

She had once read that there were two different types of insomnia, the traditional kind in which the patient has trouble falling asleep and another kind in which the patient could fall asleep but staying asleep was another matter. She had the latter. She woke up and she couldn’t fall back asleep, but she also wasn’t entirely awake. She was in that half-moment, that non-moment, that in-between. There was no longer any sense of time. This was what was so terrible about it, this is why she couldn’t fall back asleep, she had no purpose, she had no reason. She simply existed. She simply was.

The apartment had been her boyfriend’s idea, but these night walks were her own. In the year leading up to the move, he had wheedled her incessantly, talked constantly about how wonderful it would be to live together, to abandon their old lives, to merge, to start anew. Naturally, this would have to be in a new building, only recently constructed; a building where no one had died, no one had lived, it would have nothing but fresh starts and new beginnings. New, new, new. Her boyfriend found the apartment online, he contacted the broker, arranged the movers, he did all of the legwork for her, and so who was she, she who would do anything to avoid having an opinion, to say no?

She hadn’t told him that she recognized the building. It wasn’t exactly new to her. She had watched it go up, little by little, every morning, every evening, every walk to and from the C train. At first, she had mistaken it for a hotel, or a co-working space. It had that same incipient blandness, that strong whiff of anonymity, that always accompanies office buildings, whose inhabitants are always wearing their own kind of mask. There was a chandelier in the lobby. She stared at it through the lobby windows, from the sidewalk, when the building first opened, she spotted this chandelier and at first she liked it. But looking at it again, there was a cheapness to it, wasn’t there, the abstract pieces of metal welded together in an approximation, a facsimile, of something smooth, sleek, Scandinavian, designer. A mass-produced quality. The whole building had it, it could have been built in any city in any part of the world, any neighborhood desperate for young people, “revitalization,” for an influx of cash in hand. London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Madrid. The smaller cities, too, the ones enthused of lately by nomadic young people with computers: Medellin, Chiang Mai, Belgrade, anything that could be called the “new Berlin”... Standing there, looking through the windows, she got the distinct feeling that she, too, could have been standing anywhere. Doing anything. Being anyone.

The pessimist continued walking down the hall. It was pleasurable to eavesdrop. It was pleasurable to listen in on these other lives, to silently join their conversations. “Do we need any more milk?” she heard a man ask someone, and the pessimist mouthed a response privately to herself. Yes, dear. That was the problem with all these new buildings, there was no such thing as privacy. Nothing was built to last. Cheap materials and higher rents; she didn’t understand why she had said yes, why she had let her boyfriend talk her into this, but the idea of something new had been so alluring to him, and it pained her to disappoint. In every aspect of her life—school, work, love—she had always exhibited submissive tendencies, she didn’t know why, she had no idea where it stemmed from, this complacent willingness to please. Was it generational? There seemed to be an awful lot of them now, these young women drifting through their lives with diluted memories, as though they were viewing a character onscreen. Disassociation: the buzz word of our era. She was good at taking direction.

And she liked to watch them. In daylight, in the halls. Her neighbors. She liked to watch them rush by her, to whiz, the men in hoodies and the women pushing strollers, they always walked so fast. They had someplace to go. To live in this building, you almost certainly had to have a white-collar job, possibly in law, tech, or even finance; it was too expensive otherwise. Most of the inhabitants of this building had not grown up in this city and they would not grow old in this city, either. This city, massive as it was, was only a temporary rest stop, for careers to be nurtured and bank accounts to grow before the inevitable move north into the suburbs, the pull back towards the homeland or state of origin. It existed, to the building’s inhabitants, as a place to be observed. Most of its apartments had very large windows, and sometimes the pessimist stood before her own, watching the city instead of walking through it. This fortress of a building. She could feel her neighbors doing the same. Play-acting.

It was embarrassing to have a name. The pessimist rarely thought of hers, seldom referred to herself by it. In these moments of nightwalking, it was easy to disentangle from it, easy to believe it was not important; she did not want to be well-known. Identity was a weight she wished to shrug off; at night in the halls, she could. Walking alone, wearing her bathrobe over her nightgown and padding barefoot, she was only an ear, only an eye, observant. Never looking over her shoulder. Weary, when passing by the windows, of spotting a neighbor’s reflection. Never looking at her own.

*

She would be home late tonight, she told her boyfriend before she left for the office in the morning.

“A party,” she said. “For some new makeup brand. A beauty writer invited me. Said the gift bags would be good.”

Her boyfriend waved goodbye from where he sat in front of his computer, typing. He was a software engineer, and frequently worked from home.

The magazine where the pessimist worked as a copy editor had managed to stay relatively afloat in this era of Internet ad dollars due to a sustained public interest in celebrity gossip. Most frequently, the pessimist spent her time searching for any misspellings or stray commas in the captions of slideshows devoted to a particular celebrity’s various fashion looks. Each page of the slideshow garnered a click from a reader; clicks were good for business. The pessimist read a lot of slide shows.

Occasionally, the celebrity was swapped out for a member of a foreign royal family, most often British, but most of the time it was an actress or singer. Working at the magazine, the pessimist had grown wise to the ways of fame, despite having absolutely none of her own. She knew that most celebrities at one point or another in their careers called the paparazzi themselves, as a safe and foolproof method of easy PR, just as she knew what the various terminologies of the print magazines meant—the book, the gutter, the widows, the bleeds—and that all this insider information was growing rapidly irrelevant and without meaning as still yet more titles closed. But it gave her a certain pleasure to say the words aloud, to be privy to certain details. Like casting spells. The pessimist wasn’t wealthy enough to work as a writer or editor for the magazine, or any magazine; these jobs, coveted as they were and growing rarer every day as the industry lost its ad revenue to various social media platforms, mostly belonged to people who were less concerned about making rent. The tier below them—the copy editors, the social media managers, the graphic designers—was where the middle classes resided, if they could talk their way into a job. “It used to be different,” an old-timer had once confided to the pessimist during his retirement send-off, clutching a glass of warm prosecco at four in the afternoon. “I didn’t even go to college.”

After work, she met the beauty writer in their office building’s lobby. The beauty writer was a complicated woman, with a complicated love life, which she spoke to the pessimist about in great detail during the entirety of their cab ride. The party was being held in this particular makeup conglomerate’s office in Chelsea, near the art galleries and also the new mall that had recently gone up; a honeycomb-shaped statue near the mall’s entrance was sectioned off, because too many people had already killed themselves by jumping off of it. The room the pessimist and her coworker were directed towards by an enterprising young woman wearing all-black and a microphone headset was also decorated almost entirely in pink: pink walls, pink streamers, pink lights. A DJ spun records in the corner. It was barely six p.m.

Bored-looking women in heels drifted between tables scattered across the room, each devoted to a particular product in the makeup conglomerate’s various brands. At the table dedicated to a French shampoo, the pessimist filled out a note card for two free bottles of the stuff as an earnest, short man spent five minutes attempting to describe its winning qualities to her.

“It’s sulfate-free,” he kept saying, with urgency. “It’s sulfate-free.”

They would be delivered to her apartment.

“You just moved, didn’t you?” the beauty writer asked the pessimist when she was done filling out her address. They secured another glass of white wine each, moving to the outskirts of the room to sip it. “How’s that going?”

“Oh, yes,” the pessimist told her. She felt uncomfortable talking about her personal life to this woman, who was just a colleague, not a family member, not a friend. Though that’s what all workplaces are supposed to be like these days, aren’t they, even the fancy ones—we’re all family here. “It’s nice. We’re still in Brooklyn. My boyfriend and me. It’s a new building.”

“I love that,” the beauty writer told her. She scanned the room, disappointed by the caliber of the attendees—mostly junior editors, no one important. “It’s so nice to be the first ones to live in a space, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” the pessimist said. “I kind of miss having a history, though. I don’t like this whole idea of wiping the slate clean. It seems dishonest.”

Not knowing how to respond to this, the beauty writer ignored her. She had dinner plans with her fiancé after this, she announced, and made a show of glancing at the time on her cell phone. “Shall we go? Collect our goodies?”

“Yes, let’s.”

The gift bag was even larger than the beauty writer had promised. It sagged from its own weight, brimming over with full-size lipsticks, eyeshadows, blushes, serums, face washes, even the brush component of an electric face brush that promised to deep cleanse the pores. (“But where’s the actual brush?” the beauty writer complained.) The pessimist clutched it tightly to herself, slightly awed by the sheer amount of product she was being given, awed and disgusted, the sheer excess of it all.

“Bye!” the beauty writer told her when they parted, hugging her loosely and drawing out the sound of the farewell. Each took her own taxi to their next destination. The magazine would pay.

She was unused to luxury. As the car pulled up to the pessimist’s building, she noticed a food deliveryman exiting from the front door. They were always going in and out, a continuous stream, it seemed that no one inside the building liked to cook even though they lived above a grocery store. A waste of money, the pessimist privately thought, though they ordered out too, her boyfriend and her, more frequently than she would have liked. She felt a weariness whenever they did so, not quite guilt but a pause, a pain, a memory of a different version of herself, a different life. When passing the food deliveryman, the pessimist wished for some kind of signal, a sign to flash, something to let him know she wasn’t like this, that she observed the apartments and their inhabitants, too—but what would be the point? She had changed. The transformative and smoothing effect of university, of graduate school. Now, she was just like them.

From behind his desk, the doorman nodded at her in bored recognition. The bag of free makeup sagged heavy in her hand. Foolish, she felt so foolish. Foolish, standing there in this air-conditioned lobby, this entirely new building, heels and a trench coat, her hair all twisted up into a yearning approximation of elegance, the makeup on her face turned into treacle from the swampy air outdoors. New York on the verge of a rainstorm. How stupid she was, thinking she had anything in common with any of them—doorman, delivery man, all these men. She thought of the beauty writer rooting around through the bag greedily, disappointed that the electric face brush hadn’t been included. If she didn’t get back to her apartment soon, the bag might break. Its white rope handles left marks on her palms.

As she waited for the elevator, the pessimist noticed an open door to the left of it, a door she had never passed through before. It led to the pool downstairs, that she knew, because of course there was a pool in this building—another selling point, according to her boyfriend—just think of the amenities!—they had never used it. Now, though, looking at the door, the pessimist walked through it. She did not hesitate. Before the elevator came. She had told her boyfriend she might be late, anyway.

Downstairs, the smell of chlorine. It was a relief, she breathed in that chemical scent with satisfaction, let it burn through her lungs and curl through her nose. It was a completely unnatural smell, void of anything organic, and it overwhelmed her. There was no one down here but the pessimist, no one even in the building’s gym further down the hall, no lights save for a few low lights in the pool, which emphasized the clarity of the water. A few plastic deck chairs sat around the perimeter—why? They were underground, there was no sun here. The pessimist dropped her gift bag beside one and sat down at the chair’s front, and its strips of sunny, yellow-covered fabric sagged beneath her weight.

The blue of the water. The white of the pool lights. Primary colors, everything in this building was a primary color. The pessimist stood up, removed her shoes, and walked to the edge of the pool. Once there, without hesitating—with only a small crash once she hit the water—she swooned into the pool.

*

For a few weeks after the pool, the pessimist felt calm. But eventually it returned. The tension. The agitation. That wordless discord. She ground her teeth day and night.

Another night, another morning. She could no longer stand it. Another night, they had a habit of returning! The pessimist tip-toed softly out of her apartment, shrugging a coat over her pajamas; it was now growing colder, and the hallway thermometers were set a few degrees cooler than the temperature her boyfriend preferred to keep their rooms. Outside of their apartment, everything was as it always had been: her bare feet against the carpet, the occasional noises that emanated from the neighbors and their televisions, the volumes turned too high. Night’s darkness washed over her face, smudging out her features. The will of the individual, in this tasteless age, rules all; individual taste, individual consumption habits, the customer is always right. But to experience an emotion, or to experience a work of art, means collapsing those individual borders of the self, letting them fall against one another like the soft, pulpy skins of a rotting fruit. Fertilizer. The preferences of the individual are subsumed into the collective history of what it means to be human. She did not like her face, but not for the reasons the women’s magazines in the building where she worked assumed.

No one else was in the hallway. The pessimist gripped her coat closer to herself and began walking faster, breathing deeper. There, at the end of the hall, was her goal—the elevator. Once she reached it, she tapped the button to go down, all the way down, down into the basement. She needed to revisit the pool.

Downstairs, though, the door leading to the pool was locked. The pessimist shook the handle up and down, frustrated, trying to force her way in but with no luck. Some kind of maintenance, maybe, or just an added measure to prevent death by drowning. There were a lot of kids in this building, after all. After her fall, the pessimist had managed to convince her boyfriend that the reason she arrived soaked to the bone, dripping faintly chlorine-scented drops onto their entry way’s rug, was due to the rain. “Okay,” he had told her slowly, questioningly, from where he sat on their cream-colored couch before turning back to his show. The man behind the front desk, though, had looked at her strangely when she came back up—he squinted at her, as though the water had in fact erased her, somehow, washed her away, the woman standing before him now unrecognizable as a tenant of this building. He narrowed his eyes, trying to focus, as she retreated upstairs.

Back in the elevator, slumping with a sense of defeat, the pessimist returned to her own floor. The hallway was still empty; the carpet still felt rough against her bare feet. The syllables of her thoughts metered themselves out against each step she took; alone, alone, alone; she was alone, it was nighttime, she could not sleep. A feeling of panic. She could not return to bed, not yet. It stretched before her in her mind’s eye, more a trap than sanctuary. The emptiness of her own head, her own thoughts. The pessimist walked down the hallway, turning down a corner; enraged, she started pushing her hand against every apartment’s door knob, as though to force her way in—they were all locked—4A, 4B, 4D, 4C—she was running now, she didn’t care what the neighbors thought, it was two a.m., all this rattling, on and on, to every door—though what she would do once she broke in, she did not know—could not know—4I, 4J, 4K, 4L—would they call the police, her neighbors, would they report a crime—she didn’t trust herself—couldn’t bear to say—

4M. The door swung open. In shock, she stood there at the doorway.

Of course. She had watched workers go in and out of it just yesterday, as she returned from checking the mail. Workers carrying plaster and paint and wooden beams, a new toilet—some units in the building were still being created, renovated, even though these units were now officially on the market and realtors with their clients visited them near daily. Doors in these sorts of apartment buildings locked of their own accord once closed, the pessimist thought dumbly. But not this one. It must have been broken, or someone had untwisted that switch in it, the one on the side that ensured it would lock automatically. Tentatively, the pessimist stepped in, and shut the door behind her. She flicked the switch—yes. There were the lights. The windows. The open kitchen, the living room, a bathroom, two bedrooms. It was larger than her and her boyfriend’s place. She thought to herself, a joke that wasn’t funny, so this is how the other half lives.

It was in a state of flux, the apartment, a half-renovation. Some buckets stood in the living room, along with a ladder that had blue tarp draped over it. All the appliances, though, had already been installed; she ran a finger over the brand-new refrigerator, turned the stovetop’s gas on quickly and admired the flame’s blue sheen. White walls, pale wood floors. The still-sour smell of freshly applied paint. She whistled, taking it all in. A person could easily disappear in a place like this, just blend into the walls. A cookie-cutter apartment, something prefab in its execution. This building could be any building. It could be any apartment in any part of the world.

She looked at the windows. Floor to ceiling. From them, she could see directly out into the street, stare out onto the traffic that still zipped along it even at this hour in the night, the delivery men and the Uber drivers and the scooters scooting home, and she moved closer in order to do so. There was a seafood restaurant across the road, nestled between a few older brownstones. A neon sign advertised crab legs. The foundations of another new building, too, one slowly being built. She watched the cars and the bicycles move along the road, racing one another, their lights receding the further they got away. Little lights, floating there. Swallowed up in the enormity of the night.

She noticed her own reflection in the window. She noticed, too, her breath, cloudy on the windowpane. She spent each day performing, whole days transformed into a drama before these windows, and the pessimist’s devotion to realism was as such that she had convinced herself that this wasn’t true, that she had no audience, no one applauding the daily motions, banal rhythms, of her days spent inside the apartment, that hers was an easy naturalism. But now, she was reminded of their presence, her audience; she could see a member of it staring at her now, in that shadowy mirror world of her own reflection. A sense of despondency took hold of her, until finally she tucked her coat sleeve around her right hand and moved to wipe the breath—that evidence—away.

There. Now she was completely gone.

No trace.

*

The weeks passed. When returning home from work one evening, a bag of groceries in hand, the pessimist found herself thinking again of that empty apartment, how good it had felt to step inside. Her workday had ended much earlier than expected, and she felt uncommonly cheerful, hopeful even, a rare good mood. Smiling to herself, she resolved to visit the empty apartment again that evening, as a special treat.

When she stepped off the elevator, though, something was different. An energy had changed. Things were noisy: there were men talking to one another, some of them milling about in the hallway but others wandering up and down with boxes, and the pessimist heard the sound of a woman’s voice, too, pinched and irritated, calling to them: “If you just—if you could just place it there, not there—” A clatter soon followed, like a box being dropped, as well as a small shriek from the woman and what sounded like curse words muttered in a language the pessimist couldn’t totally place.

Curious, the pessimist walked around the hallway’s corner. The door to 4M was open; the noises appeared to be coming from there. Her chest tightened. The pessimist walked to the edge of the door and, like she once did that earlier evening, silently peered in.

Inside, everything was chaos. Boxes and bookshelves and stacks of more boxes. Endless boxes, a forest of boxes, and barely a path to walk through. There was no more ladder. The paint job appeared finished. It didn’t even smell new anymore, it just smelled like sweat, animal, no, human, like the movers who were now walking past her and over to the elevator. A small woman hurried behind them, a look of agitation on her face. She stopped abruptly when she saw the pessimist. “Oh, hello,” she said, looking startled. “Hi.”

“Hi, hello,” the pessimist said hurriedly, stumbling over her words. Her throat felt hot, constricted, as though an allergic reaction had spread through her, threatening her capacity to breathe. She gestured behind her, waving vaguely around the corner, towards her own apartment, though she could barely remember where it even was right now, at this moment in time, she was too upset, too startled by what she saw. “I’m your neighbor,” she told the woman. “I live down the hall.”

The woman smiled. “It’s nice to meet you. As you can see,” and here she threw her hands back, tapping one finger against the stack of boxes nearest to her, “things are kind of a mess here, we’re just moving in. And those movers—I swear, they’re this close to breaking my dishes. It’s terrible, I don’t know why my husband insisted on going with this company. Moving is just the worst.”

The pessimist agreed with her. Welcomed her. Went back to her own apartment. There, surrounded by her own things, her own life, the stage props essential to her every day, she sat on the couch, groceries growing warm in their bag beside her, and sat without moving for a very long time.

But then she thought, and her mind raced back to the fresh appliances, the newly-applied paint—she imagined herself crouched within that living room again, she imagined herself sitting on that brand-new couch, more expensive than her own—she imagined herself tip-toeing into the bedroom, and standing there, quiet, as she listened to the neighbor woman and her husband sleeping, their slow, expansive breaths—as she sat there, slumped in her own living room, surrounded by her own cheap objects, the pessimist thought this: she had never told the woman about her broken door.

Rhian Sasseen lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, Granta, and more.