LAKEVIEW—As the effects of novel coronavirus sweep the nation, an unintended casualty of the global pandemic can be found just a few blocks away from the Belmont L stop: the guy living in a local house’s crawl space.
“I’d started to notice Katie and Alan staying home more regularly about three weeks ago,” said Stanley Krevins, 36, a longtime resident of the unfinished crawl space beneath the ground-floor apartment. “Usually I’d sneak up and grab a bowl of chips and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge around two, when both of them were at work, but that’s all changed.” Krevins, comfortably swaddled in a nest of old t-shirts and socks lost in the laundry room, has tracked the habits and schedules of all four residents of the duplex apartment for years with the rigor of a parole officer. “I loved the routine of it all,” he said, wistfully. “It grounds me. But everything’s different now.”
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Krevins, who relies mostly on his sense of smell and industrious spirit, has eaten through most of his supplies. “I always keep about a week’s worth of rations down here, in case Alan gets another weeklong case of the Mondays,” he noted, winking and gesturing to a now-empty filing cabinet that once was filled with loose Nilla Wafers and Veganaise. “Once I started scenting all four of the renters’ musks in the building at the same time, I figured something was going belly-up.”
“Our ghost died of coronavirus,” said Katie Root, a 25-year-old marketing associate and resident of the building. “Before the virus hit the States, our ghost was stealing our food and making neighborhood dogs bark. But now? Nothing. I wonder what’s changed.” When asked about the building’s relationship with their ghost, Root acknowledged a begrudging respect. “We have to be neighborly about it all, really,” said Root, throwing up her hands in a good natured sort of way. “It’s not every house that has a ghost with a taste for world cuisine.”
“Did they really think I was a ghost?” asked Krevins, hiding his smile in his calloused, mole-like hands. “Wow. That’s a big honor.” When asked about his plans to find food and medical supplies for his budding canker sore, Krevins said he had options. “They have to go grocery shopping at some point,” he noted, sweating. “They have to, right? Then who’ll get to eat up all the leftover Dijon mustard and white peppercorns? Little old Stanley.”
