Over and above the apartment structure is the apartment construct, a zone of influence or domed logic which, encompassing your body, follows you wherever you go. Looked at in this way, it is less that the apartment is haunted than that you are haunted by the apartment. For from the point of view of a ghost, that is precisely what haunting means: while a mortal tenant is free to leave at any time, a ghost is bound to the premises eternally. Even if the house is demolished, the ghost will go on haunting its grounds. And if a skyscraper is built in its place, the ghost will haunt the skyscraper, wandering down its hallways and its stairwells as if they are its house. Transpose the ghost’s bones to a new burial ground, on the opposite side of the world, and it will persist in haunting its new graveyard, behaving in all things—in all places—as if it is still inside its house. The house is its haunt, which means that it is haunted by the house. Everywhere it goes is the house. Even when crossing a misty field, or a hotel lobby, the ghost is still walking down the hardwood hallway that it died in: all it sees are the fringed rugs beneath its feet, the crystal chandeliers above it. While the physical structure of the mansion may have burned to the ground centuries ago, the mental structure lives on as a spectral projection. Wherever the ghost finds itself, this bygone mansion’s hallways and chambers will radiate out from its regenerating body, like a system of hardwood starfish arms. That is how things stand with you and the apartment. Recalling now the lightness you felt this morning, as you stepped out into the sunshine and locked the front door behind you, you are filled with disgust. You were a fool. It was no use fleeing the physical apartment when you were still immured in the mental apartment. Exiting the physical front door brought you no nearer the mental front door. Every block you walked toward the café—every step you took away from the physical hallways—only led you deeper into the maze of the mental hallways. And at the end of the day, whenever you leave the café, the five blocks you will have to walk back to your physical apartment—the half-mile of oak-shaded concrete leading straight to the physical apartment—will all still be inside the mental apartment. You can never breach those mental walls. That is the true philosophical paradox: not how you can travel from point A to point B without first traversing a spatial infinity, bridging all the subdivisible points between them; but rather, how you can travel from mind A to mind B without first traversing a psychological infinity. Leaving the apartment in one frame of mind, how could you ever arrive at a new one? Between what you are thinking now and what you would like to think, there are a billion thoughts—a billion iterations of Idiot and Failure—that you first have to pass through.