When we moved into the house—if you can call it a house, because it’s just sort of jammed together with other buildings, no space between them—there was a sign in the window that said, NO BOXS! We hadn’t seen the house before we bought it, doing everything online from the other side of the U.S., from a city named Hext, population seventy-five—no, seventy-three now that we were gone—in the dead center of Texas. Dead center.

The price was incredibly cheap for Berkeley, a town full of Democrats, with some of the highest rents in the country, which didn’t match up for me until I realized that “rent control” is sort of mythological, not much of a real thing, at least not in my experience. As we were moving in, our arms were, of course, filled with boxes. My partner works as a proofreader, and I work as a proofreader. We work from home, but the company wanted us close to corporate headquarters. We’d only have to go in once a week, but we preferred the old days, when we’d have to go in zero times a week.

NO BOXS!

We simply weren’t going to be told what to do. Not on our first day in our first house on this first of the month.

We went inside and ripped the sign down.

The apartment overlooked a small park where, on my birthday in 1969, three thousand people gathered for a rally that ended up turning into a protest once the Berkeley police arrived on-scene. One side threw bricks, the other threw tear gas. A patrol car was set on fire. The crowd doubled in size to six thousand. Supposedly, police put on Halloween masks, like pig faces, which must have been scary as hell, seeing those emerge from the tear-gas fog. Reagan sent in a couple thousand National Guard troops. Medical students volunteered to help treat the wounded. Police fired shotguns, and one student was killed when he was hit in the aorta.

I told all this to my partner.

“I’m making croque monsieur,” he said.

There’s absolutely nothing French about him, yet at times he’s the most French man on the planet.

We ate. We slept.

When we woke, there was a box in the front yard. I looked down from our one large window in front. The only other window was a small one in our bedroom that had a perfect view of a next-door neighbor’s wall that was about two inches from it, if that.

My partner’s hand touched my shoulder, and we both looked down from our picture window.

“Did we drop one?”

We both shook our heads no.

There were tents in the park. Spray paint on its potholed basketball court that said HomeLess = HarmLess.

We went out and tapped the box with a toe.

I opened it. Inside was books. Nothing we’d read. There was a play.

“I’ve been meaning to read a play,” he said.

“You have not.”

“What do you know?”

“That you don’t read plays.”

He started reading the play on the spot. He exceptionally read the play, eyes bulged out, a hyper-exaggeration of reading. Then he stopped. “It’s good,” he said “The first page.” He started to read the second page and turned back to the house.

I picked up the box and followed him inside.

Two days later, another box. This one with a candle holder, a dome clock, some spoons, a wooden mini-coffee table, and a cookbook.

“I’ve been meaning to read a cookbook,” he said.

“I’m not responding to that.”

He exaggeratedly read it.

That night, he made us something called shakshouka, which I immediately told him was the best thing I’d eaten in my life.

“Your entire life?”

“OK, best thing this decade.”

“You’re about to change it to best thing in the last year. I can tell. Then month, then week.”

“Nope. I’m holding at decade.”

“Well then, I’ll make it again.”

And he did. The next day.

And there was another box. We ate, staring down at it.

“Is it God?”

“God doesn’t leave boxes.”

“Why did the sign say ‘no boxes’? The boxes are like Christmas every morning.”

“Our luck might run out.”

“What do you mean?”

“You hate dome clocks.”

“I don’t hate dome clocks. I just thought that one was bawdy.”

“I don’t think you’re using the term ‘bawdy’ correctly.”

“I have my own meaning for the word.”

“I guess you do.”

We went down our steps to the box. We were a bit more suspicious this time.

A neighbor came out.

“The boxes,” he said.

“Yes!” my partner yelled, to stop him from leaving us. It worked. He stopped.

“They annoying you?”

“Not at all.”

“They annoyed the hell out of the last tenants.”

“You’re not about to tell us it’s haunted?”

“No. Ghosts aren’t bringing you these. It’s real people.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to ruin it for you.”

“Oh, please do.”

“It’s true. He won’t mind. Any time I start to talk about a movie, he always asks me to give away the ending. He’s incessant: ‘Oh, please ruin the ending for me. Please.’”

“I’ll ruin the ending for you then,” the neighbor said.“It’s pretty simple though. You just moved in here, right?”

“Yes,” my partner said.“Vin. My God, pardon us.” My partner held out his hand and shook the neighbor’s. “Rob,” he said and pointed to me.

“Wang Lei,” the neighbor said.

“Such a beautiful name,” said my partner.

“It means ‘rock pile.’ Not so beautiful,” the neighbor said.

“I think rock piles could be very beautiful,” said my partner.

“Your house,” said the neighbor, “used to be a St. Vinny’s.”

We made no change to our expression.

“That’s a thrift store. They closed it. Turned it into an apartment complex and then turned it into a house, and now it’s where you live. But some people still think it’s a thrift store.”

“It looks nothing like a thrift store.”

“Yes, but you have people who’ve lived here twenty, thirty years, when it was a thrift store.”

“So why don’t they knock?”

“You used to just drop off the boxes here. If you don’t put that sign back up, you’re going to get a lot of these. The sign doesn’t really help, but it at least cuts down the number.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever have to buy anything again,” my partner said.

“Well, that’s you,” said the neighbor, “I just know I don’t want old electronics left on my front lawn.”

We had no lawn. Just cement. I looked over in the direction I thought the neighbor’s house was. No lawn there either.

He left without much of a goodbye, but we didn’t give him much of a goodbye either.

That night, we debated the sign.

“We’ve gotten three boxes in four days. We keep this up, we’ll have close to three hundred boxes by the end of the year. We better put the sign back up.”

“I like the books.”

“But that’s about ten percent. That’s ninety percent stuff we don’t want.”

“But it’s free.”

“Free things we don’t want.”

“But it’s free delivery, too.”

“Of things we don’t want.”

“It’s exciting.”

“How is it exciting?”

“I have no idea what we’ll be getting.”

I put up the sign. I told him we’d still be getting boxes. It’d just make it that much more exciting when we got them.

For three days, no boxes.

Then he took the sign down. Surprisingly, for three more days, no more boxes. Then, almost a full week of being box-free, we got a pile of stuff on the cement. No box. Just the stuff.

We didn’t have to open it. It was right there, the sun hitting it directly, for the world to see: an old child car seat and a mattress. We went outside and found that there was also a broken laptop, a dog bed, and some knives. We took a step back.

“Is that urine?”

“Dog urine?”

“I think it’s human urine?”

“I think it’s both.”

“Now, we have to haul a mattress. Do you know how heavy mattresses are?”

“If we leave it here, won’t garbage pick it up?”

“Which means we’ll have days with an old mattress in our front yard.”

“And a child car seat and a dog bed and—” He picked up the knives.

“Put those down.”

“I won’t get lead poisoning from a knife.”

“Put ‘em down.”

“Edward Scissorhands.”

“Down,” I said.

He put them down, made like he was going to lie in the dog bed.

“I’m making a bigger sign,” I said. “Signs. Plural.”

And I did.

It was impossible to miss the signs. We were the NO BOXES house now. With the signs properly proofread.

The next day, five boxes waited for us. A record. T-shirts, a tire, a recipe box full of receipts, a drill that appeared to have been drenched in ketchup like it’d been used in a student horror movie, matches, about a hundred magazines with no front covers, what we guessed was a lacrosse ball, fake spiderwebs for Halloween, a lamp (no light bulb, no base), a small metal lizard (we guessed), an inflatable shark, more cookbooks (sample titles: The Cuisine of San Bernardino, A Truly British Cookbook, Smoked Meat and Cigarettes).

Vin didn’t even pick up the books, bending over at the hip to read the titles. I asked him to stop.

“More signs won’t help,” I said.

“Not at all,” he said. “It’ll feed the fire.”

“What do we do?”

“Put up cameras?”

“Move?”

“I’m not moving.”

“Mousetraps?”

“Human-traps?”

“Box-traps?”

“Call the police?”

“Do you remember the story I told when we first moved in and we were looking out the window?”

“How could I forget it? You totally ruined the moment.”

“I didn’t ruin the moment.”

“We’re looking out of our first house together, and you tell me about a boy shot in the abdomen.”

“Aorta.”

“Whatever. It wasn’t romantic.”

“It’s the reality of this city.”

“This city’s haunted.”

“Oh, it’s not ghosts, like the neighbor said. It’s neighbors.”

“Like the ghosts said.”

“What?”

“I’m going inside. I’m cold.”

“It’s gonna be in the seventies today.”

But he was already inside. I was left with cleanup. I moved everything to our garbage cans.

When I went inside, he was standing at the door.

“Do you know what climate change is?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t throw all that away.”

“As opposed to?”

“Donate it.”

“A tire?”

“Not the tire.”

“The lacrosse balls?”

“Pick what’s salvageable. Don’t throw it all away.”

“Nothing was salvageable.”

“T-shirts. People need T-shirts.”

“Not ones with ketchup stains.”

“There were no ketchup stains.”

“From the drill.”

“What drill?”

“I’m going to lie down.”

“I’m not going through that trash.”

“Good.”

I lay down. He was in the doorway.

“I’m talking to you.”

“Boxes,” I said. “Goddamn boxes.”

The next day, another box. We opened it. It was full of boxes. A box of boxes.

“They’re messing with us.”

“Why?”

“Is Berkeley homophobic?”

“Isn’t Berkeley supposed to be the opposite of homophobic?”

“No, that’s San Francisco. We should have moved there.”

“Let’s move.”

“No.”

“It’ll stop.”

“When?”

“Once we don’t let it bother us. That’s how everything works.”

We found that if we just left the boxes alone, they’d mostly get taken by the garbage men. Mostly. They’d leave some things behind. The mattress had been there since the beginning. It would be there forever. It would be there during the apocalypse. It’ll be trumpets and war and seas of blood and rivers of blood and that mattress.

Our lawn stank.

Except there was no lawn.

But it stank.

Ugly.

The books had been rained on by now. Just once. But enough to turn them to non books. To trash. To eyesore. One book looking a bit like a punched grilled cheese sandwich at this point. I got close to see if I could make out the title. That book was a cookbook. I didn’t want to touch it, so didn’t. I went inside.

“You should put up a camera to see who’s doing this, like you said.”

“I don’t care who’s doing this.”

And I didn’t.

I looked around to ensure all of the NO BOXES signs were removed. We debated putting up a MORE BOXES sign, for reverse psychology. We thought perhaps it should say NO BOXS, that the missing E was part of some incantation we didn’t know about, didn’t understand.

Instead, we just let the boxes come.

My partner mentioned all this to a police officer.

“File a report.”

“What would we put?”

“Just put what’s going on.”

“We just told you.”

“You have to file a report.”

“Saying that garbage is being left on our front lawn?”

“What’s your address?”

We told him.

He thought, said, “There’s no front lawns on that street.”

We filed a report.

The boxes came.

The police didn’t.

“We need a lawyer.”

“Who would we sue? The boxes?”

“The city.”

“Do you know the long, slow, torturous, tortuous, tortoise-ish of a pain that would be? And we’d lose. You can’t sue a city. Not a rich city.”

“Can we make the back door our front door?”

“I don’t like that alley at night.”

“We won’t go out at night.”

“I only go out at night.”

“Come to bed.”

“I smell garbage.”

“Close the window.”

“It’s closed.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“You paused.”

“I wasn’t ready for it.”

“Ready to tell me you love me?”

“Not right after ‘I smell garbage, close the window.’ Not ‘I smell garbage close the window do you love me?’”

“You should always be ready.”

“I’ll try harder in the future.”

“I need to move.”

“We can’t.”

“I need to move.”

“We can’t.”

“Need. Do you understand ‘need’?”

“Yes, I understand ‘need.’” I kissed him. “I understand need.”

He grabbed me. It would be all right. We survived Texas. We’ll survive California.

He went to turn off the light. It was the lamp with no light bulb, no base.

“The other one,” I said.