About the book
He never blocked her number. She blocked his. That is the first fact in the record, and the record is all he has.
In a converted cotton mill in New Orleans — two hundred and eighty-seven doors, a courtyard, a pool with a deep end — a man's three-year relationship ends by text at four minutes past one on a Saturday afternoon. The woman who ended it lives one floor up. She keeps the books for the building's Board. He is not going anywhere either.
What follows is eighteen months in which the building starts to answer back. A shelf at the gas station stocks his own losses at a dollar apiece. A film crew arrives in the lobby. A stranger knocks on doors at three in the morning. A library seems to speak to him in titles. A Board fines him two hundred and fifty dollars over a mouse trap, on the word of two men and no video. And through all of it, the woman one floor up walks her dog on a route that no longer crosses his — except when it does.
The Deep End is autofiction built like a case file. Every text, email, meeting minute and hearing transcript is laid on the table, dated to the minute, and where the record and the narrator's memory disagree, the book says so rather than choosing. Between the chapters sit thirteen invented rooms — a location scout, a Board meeting, a Russian relationship program, a reality-television run of show — in which he imagines the other side of his own story, and then admits, each time, exactly what he made up.
Is he being watched? Is he losing his mind? Or is he simply doing what she told him to do on her birthday, standing in the pool — write it all down? The book never decides. It ends where it began: in the water, at the wall, turning to go again.
A breakup memoir with the rigor of an investigation and the nerve to leave the question open.
From Chapter One
The Pool
The summer she wore the red swimsuit, I had never once laid eyes on her. Not in the elevator, not in the mail room, not in roughly twelve years of living in the same building.
That number deserves a moment before anything else in this book happens. I have checked it against my own move-in and hers and I can't make it come out much smaller. Twelve years. I had been in the Cotton Mill since I was twenty-three; she arrived some years after I did, and for more than a decade after that we occupied the same four walls of a converted mill — the same elevators, the same mail room, the same courtyard, the same single pool — and never once landed in the same ten feet at the same moment. Marina lived on the third floor, on the corner nearest mine. Close enough that our paths should have crossed a thousand times over by pure geometry alone, and they did not cross at all.
And I know exactly how it happened, which is the least mysterious part of this entire book, so let me spend it now while it's cheap.
We parked on opposite sides of the building. That's most of it right there. For the bulk of those years my work was within walking distance — I went out the front door on foot, every weekday morning, and came back in through it every evening, and never had a reason to use the side of the building where her car lived. She came and went through her side. I came and went through mine. Two people can share four walls for a decade and never occupy the same doorway if the doorways they use are a hundred feet apart and their reasons for using them never overlap. Add to that a courtyard you cross at different hours and a mail room you visit on different days and you don't need a conspiracy to explain twelve years. You need a floor plan.
There's a second explanation and it's less comfortable, so I'll give you that one too.
She had not always been blonde. She'd gone blonde not long before that summer, and I have wondered ever since whether the honest version of "our paths never crossed" is actually "our paths crossed and I did not look." A brunette woman carrying groceries across a courtyard is, to a man walking past with his head somewhere else, scenery. I cannot swear to you that I never saw Marina Kessler before that afternoon. I can only swear that I never noticed her — which is a different claim, and a worse one, and I'd rather write down the worse one.
I've come to think of the whole thing as its own small, ordinary miracle rather than anything stranger than that. We were both, in our own separate ways, quiet people living quiet, mostly isolated lives inside a building full of neighbors we'd trained ourselves not to really see. Twelve years is not evidence of design. Twelve years is evidence of two people who took the stairs at different hours, and of one of them not paying attention.
How it's built
Eight movements, fifty-six chapters, and thirteen invented rooms. The chapters are drawn from the author's own record — texts, emails, meeting minutes, a Board hearing transcribed from the Association's own recording — dated to the minute, with the typos left in. The rooms are the scenes he was never present for, written as imagination rather than testimony, each one followed by an admission of exactly what was made up.
The author
Troy Taliancich has lived in the same converted cotton mill in New Orleans for twenty-five years. The Deep End is his first novel. He is at work on a second, The Dog House.