Apartment Optical Illusions

1. The infinite walkup.

2. Is that a mouse or a gigantic cockroach emerging from your stove? Is it possible you see both?

3. Put together your new IKEA desk without any help. For the next decade, take this desk with you every time you move, despite it being completely nonfunctional.

4. You and your roommate are both on the lease, and pay the same amount in rent and utilities. So why does her room seem so much bigger than yours?

5. Stare at the brown dot on your ceiling for thirty seconds. Then look at a blank wall. Did the brown dot multiply? Are the dots moving?

6. Is the water stain on your bathroom ceiling yellow and white, or blue and black?

7. Did your secondhand bed come with three slats or four? Do you realize yet that it needs five slats in order to keep from sagging in the middle?

8. Which is at a shorter distance?

1. Your radiator, which sounds as if a grenade exploded inside a steel drum.
2. Your only window, which has the insulation capacity of a damp tissue.

9. You finally found a new roommate. Which do you see?

1. Kayla, a twenty-four-year-old sociology-grad-student acquaintance who’s willing to split her studio apartment with you, as long as you have a full year’s rent in cash, up front.
2. Your great-aunt Sandy, in the Bronx, who has a second bedroom, enough cat dander to coat both your lungs, and every issue of Time from 1968 onward.

10. Which shade of smokers’-lung gray will your landlord paint the apartment, four years after you’ve moved out? Will it match the burn marks on your wall from the time your toaster caught fire, when you tried to push an open-faced tuna melt into the slot? Will it blend in with the grime covering your window screens, so that the next tenant no longer knows where the wall ends and the outside world begins?