Paradise

In 1996 Money magazine identified Madison, WI as the best place to live in the United States. This agreed with our sense of the place.  At that time Ed and I  were renting an apartment in a neat high-rise building with a hotel-style lobby, underground parking, and a heated outdoor pool. The building bordered on a large park where wild rabbits hopped merrily, as in a Disney movie, elder folks gathered for Saturday concerts and younger people played tennis on nearby courts.  The "Sovereign Apartments" were meant to be perfect - to such an extent that the proud administrator instructed the tenants, in his newsletter, not to dry pool towels on their balconies as it “cheapened the building". Thankfully, we were allowed to have pets. I made friends with a young couple who owned two cats. She was a nurse and often worked the swing shift; we would chat while we watched our cats playing on the lawn. Somewhere out there, in the ugly world, a serial killer was prowling and attacking young women, but it did not concern us - we lived in a paradise. Or so it seemed to us.

          One day, in the ugly world, the serial killer struck again, and was finally caught. This time his victim was an exchange student from South America, to whom he delivered a package sent by her family. It turned out that the killer was working for UPS and living … in our idyllic apartment building, no less. Suddenly the "Sovereign Apartments" became a center of the ugly world, TV crews and reporters were swarming around the building and asking the surprised tenants about the murderer. Most of us never saw him. Only the nurse who worked night shifts confided to the reporter that she met the man once in the underground parking. When he looked at her, there was something in his gaze that gave her goose bumps, she said. As is usually the case, the media soon forgot about our apartment building, but the idyllic atmosphere was gone for good. The administrator gave up printing his newsletter, and the tenants started provocatively drying their pool towels on their balconies not caring in the least that it “cheapened the building".