Sometime Between Midnight and Dawn

I was awakened by a loud thumping at the door, followed by the pathetic excuse of a door bell attached. Not that you need much noise when the whole apartment is only about the size of a bedroom. I was confused, disoriented and cut on my lamp, trying to figure out what the guy behind the door was yelling. With it came the blindness I remember from school. Those mornings when you would have to get up before the sun. My mother would come into my room at 6:30 sharp, singing "Oh what a beautiful morning" and cutting on every light in my room. I never even knew it was an actual song until I saw "Oklahoma" a couple of years ago.

But this wasn't my mother. When I finally began to interpret the yelling, it was my super, yelling just that. "Super! Super!" I thought maybe I had just fallen asleep and he maybe thought he saw a light on. Wearing nothiing but a t-shirt and underwear, I cracked the door, without even thinking to look through the peephole. What if he had been a psychopath? There he was, wearing normal clothes and jangling a keychain at me.

"Are these yours?" He said, dead serious.

"What?" I was geniunely confused. Surely someone waking me up would have an emergency or at least be an obnoxious neighbor who was drunk.

"These keys. I found these keys downstairs. Are they yours?" I had to wonder if he were high or drunk.

"No. No." I said slowly, beginning to wake up and thinking about how I had to be up at seven. I was about to shut the door when suddenly I remembered Saturday night's incident. "But, now that I think about it, the guy above me lost his keys this weekend. You should check with him."

Revenge would be mine. The super apologized, left, and I shut and relocked the door, went to the bathroom. It wasn't until I was in there, bleary eyed and looking as exhausted as I felt that I happened to look at the clock. It was after 3 in the morning. So of course I couldn't go right back to sleep. First of all, the man had almost given me a heart attack. Second of all, the lights were on, which in my body means Wake Time. Which meant I got back into bed, laid on my back for a little while staring at the ceiling, then turned the light back on and read for a while.

This morning when I got up I vaguely remembered what had happened the night before but also had a few questions about my super. A lot of times I see him when I head out to the NYSC, which is usually near 7:30 a.m. Does the man never sleep? And what is he doing going around knocking on people's doors for lost keys in the middle of the night. Because, to tell you the truth, if I lost my keys he would definitely be hearing about it sooner than later. I've still been thinking about it on and off today and it still confuses me to no end. But maybe that's what a New York superintendent is all about. A mysterious figure you never see when your lighting is out or your plumbing is broken, but shows up like a ghost sometime between midnight and dawn.