SPEAKER_00: The history of HIV and AIDS is the history of people who refuse to stay out of sight. Join us for the series Blind Spot, The Plague in the Shadows from the History Channel and WNYC Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_04: Hey, Lulu here.
There is this thing that radio producers love to say.
Radio is the most visual of all the storytelling forms.
SPEAKER_04:
More than the movies, more than photography, more than TV, which maybe sounds counterintuitive,
but the idea is that because your imagination is a bottomless resource, the visual experience you get here is way more immersive and vivid and lush and has better special effects than any film studio could ever just financially, logistically produce. Who knows if that's always true, but I will say the story that has stuck with me visually
the most over decades of listening is the one I'm about to play for you.
It's called The Living Room, and it actually comes to us from another podcast that's been around for just about 20 years called Love and Radio. If you haven't heard of them, they make beautiful sound rich stories, sometimes a little dark, always special.
In this episode, it is about bearing witness to something that maybe you weren't supposed to bear witness to.
The images from it, I literally have never been able to get them out of my head.
Before I play it, two quick notes. One, whereas we usually try to talk to everyone involved in a story, this episode is based
on one person's vantage point.
We did fact check it to make sure the key elements did in fact take place, but take it as one very powerful sliver of a complex situation.
And secondly, warning, adult themes ahead, probably not the best one to listen to with
kids. All right.
Let us slip into The Living Room from Love and Radio.
SPEAKER_07: Wait, you're listening.
Okay.
SPEAKER_07:
All right. Okay. All right.
SPEAKER_07: You're listening to Radio Lab.
SPEAKER_10:
Radio Lab. From WNYC. WNYC.
SPEAKER_04: Rewind.
SPEAKER_06:
So I'd been living in my apartment about 15 years.
And one evening I walked in the living room, which has three bay windows, which face the gardens in the back. And over half a block of gardens and across a small street, there was this bright window that I'd never noticed before.
But it's at the exact eye level of my third floor apartment.
And after a while I realized that I'd never seen it because there had always been curtains.
And so it was always, I think, dimly lit. The curtains were often closed. And all of a sudden there's this bright light and no curtains. And it was like a movie screen.
15 years and that window has meant nothing. I haven't even noticed it.
And now it's all I think about.
There were new tenants and it had always been a living room. And now it was suddenly a bedroom.
And there were these two people in there and they were naked.
This young couple in their 20s.
They were really lovey-dovey and they were always naked.
SPEAKER_08: That's Diana Weypert, who tells the story. And she told it to radio reporter Breonna Breen, who produced this piece with Nick and
Rennan.
SPEAKER_06: The thing is they pushed their bed so that the head was up against the windows.
So their heads, you could see both of their heads lying there.
So you'd see things that you just like, they were just shocking. And I just had been there all of this time and suddenly you could see people having sex
really clearly, like amazingly clearly. I had no idea that you could see so well across such a distance. And it was really uncomfortable.
My husband and I were still adjusting to parenthood and it wasn't the most romantic time in our lives. My son was probably three. When you're new parents to a toddler, especially because he sleeps in bed with us too. So he's like literally right between us. The last thing you need is a couple of hotties getting it on across the window, reminding
your husband of everything he's not getting.
So to have this really beautiful young woman that was really thin and naked all the time,
really it was very frustrating. And she had this beautiful tall, lanky, well-built boyfriend.
And so I first, I just, because I felt like my husband was going to be staring at this naked woman all the time, I started closing the living room curtains, which is really
kind of silly. And it made our room really dark and we never closed those curtains. And so that didn't work.
So I thought about like making a really big sign that said like, close your curtains or
buy curtains. They didn't even have curtains. Buy curtains, we can see you. And I thought about going by their building. I had no idea what their unit was and leaving a note.
And then I started thinking that was really silly and prudish and started realizing that
they were just young and I had to just get over it and live with it and move on.
And so that's what I did.
We got really used to them and they became sort of this symbol of what we used to be,
you know, in our twenties. And they were living this really carefree time.
And that's another thing that it was kind of hard not to sometimes, when you're in early parenthood you get a little bitter, I think, about some of those freedoms.
And we'd watch them sleeping till 11 while we'd been up since five with our toddler. And we saw them eating breakfast on the roof together.
So we got used to it and we would notice like, oh look, they got a new plant in there. And they became sort of part of our lives, you know, because they were just always there and never ever bought curtains.
SPEAKER_05: Do you think all the neighbors in your building and the surrounding buildings also saw this?
SPEAKER_06: It's funny, I think that the way that we're positioned, because all of the buildings around
us are different sizes and our building is the tallest one on our block. But it's exactly at the right level to see their windows.
I have a friend next door and then a friend across the way and all of them have windows
facing the gardens, but not all of them are blocked.
And I look at the other windows of the buildings around us and I don't think anyone has this
perfect level view.
The irony is that I'm such a private person.
And I don't know, am I supposed to have maybe respected their privacy and just looked away? But it's impossible because that's the way the chairs face. They face the window. I couldn't not see them if I wanted to.
But I guess I could have not gotten the binoculars.
So, time went by and this is maybe a year and a half later, two years later.
And I remember seeing their room and the light was on, but it was empty.
And I thought that was strange because it was five o'clock in the morning and they never
went anywhere early.
And it was like that for like a whole week. It was just this empty room with a light on. And I thought that was strange.
They didn't seem to be there as often or maybe just she would be there and he was gone for long periods of time.
And we just kind of forgot about them. There wasn't as much action going on and they weren't as present. And so we just kind of lived our lives and forgot about them for maybe seven or eight months.
At the end of last year in December, there was this night when my husband and I separately
had both seen this woman naked sitting in the window.
Kind of chubby, slump shouldered woman who was just looking down at the street. And we both thought it was so strange. Just couldn't figure out who she was and what she was doing and why she was naked. And a few nights later, there was this young man standing right at the window by the bed. And he was skeletal. He was so thin and he was bald completely. And we realized it was the same couple.
They had completely changed.
He was sick.
There was something serious wrong with him.
After that, I just watched the window all the time.
SPEAKER_07: OK, we're going to we're going to pause right here. Let's just we'll be right back.
SPEAKER_10: With Iowa and New Hampshire already in the bag, opponents of Donald Trump are hoping his run for office will be stymied by the 91 indictments he's facing. But right now, none of this matters to him.
SPEAKER_03: It's just free airtime. It's just an opportunity to be on CNN one more night of the week.
He is very good at winning for losing on the next On the Media from WNYC.
SPEAKER_10: Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_08: Let's get back to our story from Breanna Breen and the folks at Love and Radio, Nick Vanderkolk and Brendan Baker. And so we're just going to go back to the room, see, see what's what we can see through
SPEAKER_08: the window.
SPEAKER_08: Here's Diane Weiper.
SPEAKER_06: I just watched the window all the time. And he would sit all day.
He was there because I work from home and I would see him all day in the bedroom, either
lying down or sitting at the computer.
Then after a couple of weeks, he was just lying down and he was just there and his bald head would be up against the the pane of glass all the time.
And she would be there and she'd come in and she would bring him things.
But mostly it was just him there by himself.
And sometimes he would have like his knees bent and you could just see how skeletal they
were. They were just bones. Sometimes he'd kick off the blankets and he was just lying there naked and emaciated.
And then after a while, he was just always burrowed under the blankets.
I found myself thinking like, well, maybe he's been through chemo and he's recovering and he's going through this sick phase before he gets well because he's so young.
He's just such a young guy. So we had to go to Colorado to see my family for Christmas. I worried all the time I was there. I thought about them and I worried that he wasn't going to be there when we got back. I worried all the time about it. When we got back about 10 days later, he was still there. But his head looked so much smaller and there were a lot of people there.
And then I got out my binoculars. I got my birding binoculars. I'm not proud of it, but at that point I felt so invested.
It looked like people coming to say goodbye. There was this sort of short, blonde, midwestern looking woman who I guessed was his mother. And then there was this young guy who just kept pacing the halls. You could just see there were two doorways leading out of this room and you could just see him go down one side and through the other and then back and forth and back and forth. And I figured he was the brother.
And it looked like the girlfriend's sister was also there. It was just a guess. Looked like her.
I remember there was just this little gathering going on in the living room right below. The neighbors were standing around and having drinks and they had no idea at all what was going on right upstairs.
I would watch people come and go. Then after a while everyone left except for the girlfriend and the mother.
And I spent all that evening sitting vigil on the back of the couch and watching. I remember the girlfriend lying beside him for a long time on her own and she was just stroking his face so tenderly. It was so much affection that really transcends the kind of young love that you expect. All I could see was the top of his head all that time.
And I remember later seeing her standing by the bed when the mother on the other side
and they were just all talking and she put a hand on his forehead. She put the back of her hand on his forehead and then she was wiping at her eyes. And you could tell that there was this sense that something that it was getting closer.
Then I could see this reckoning where she was wiping at her eyes and touching his forehead
and wiping at her eyes.
There were candles lit and this young woman was on one side and his mother was on the
other side.
They just were lying there for a really long time and they had their hands just resting on his chest.
So I watched it for a long time.
The mother and the girlfriend were lying on either side of him and you could tell this was the end. I thought now all that's left is the girlfriend and the mother and inexplicably me.
Me like I'm one of the three people at the deathbed and they lay there for a long time
and then they just got up and they went into the other room and I realized that must have
been the moment.
And all this time you know I always had this sense that you know they're they're gonna
break up. They're gonna move out. Nobody that age stays together very long. And I had no idea it was just like this beautiful love story.
So the next day, the next day I got up and I went to the window first thing and they were folding up blankets and stacking them on the bed and I figured that he had been
taken away. And so I was in the kitchen and my husband called because he had he knew how obsessed I'd gotten with this situation and he said there's activity over there.
And I came running and I got my binoculars and I looked and and realized that he was
still there. He was still in the bed. His body was still there and it was the coroner. So the coroner and his assistant came and they had these white plastic gloves on and they pulled his body to the edge of the bed and onto this white sheet.
And I just remember the lifelessness of it looked so shrunken. It almost looked like a shrunken rubber proxy of a body. So incredibly dead. They wrapped him in the sheet and they zipped him into a vinyl bag and they put him on this
kind of gurney. They took the gurney out and I just had this very strange impulse and I ran and threw on my coat kind of over my pajamas and ran out to the street and ran to the corner and I got there just as they were hauling him out. They were carrying him out and the girlfriend was there.
She was talking to one of them in the doorway and they loaded him into this van and I realized
that they didn't know me at all.
I had no place to be there.
And they looked at me, I remember the coroner's assistant looking at me like I was sort of like a rubber necker in the street looking at this grizzly scene. And I realized that's what I was. I had no place to be there and suddenly it all felt so perverse.
So I went home and I felt very strange about the whole thing.
And I tried to tell myself that, well I never wanted to be part of their lives.
I was the one that wanted them to put up curtains. I wanted them to shut the intimate stuff out. I was uncomfortable with it. I was the one that wanted out. And I started remembering all of a sudden when I moved to that apartment so many years ago and I was in my mid-twenties that I had to share the apartment with a roommate because it was too expensive. My bedroom was in the living room. And I remember how when I first moved in I pushed the head of my bed up against the three bay windows so that in the morning I could see the sky. And I remember that I had no clue.
It never occurred to me that anyone could see me. But I remember that I felt like whenever I looked out the window I never saw anyone
and I never closed my curtains either.
Did you ever find out either of their names? I never have found out their names and I looked through the local obituaries obsessively for weeks and there was never anyone that fit his description. There was never anyone young enough or that looked like him.
So no idea. I walked by their place several times and there are only numbers on the mailboxes and the buzzers and there are no names. So I can't look up anything. I don't know. Yeah. I have no idea who she is. I have no idea who he was.
No idea what he was sick with.
Just a couple days after it happened she was up on the roof with a friend doing yoga and I've watched her lying around a lot. She went out of town I think for a bit and she's still there. I have been watching her recovery and instead of being this young woman she looks totally
different.
She looks so changed.
She just looks like this very experienced world weary person.
She has a job now that gets her up very early because I get up at six and she's already dressed and heads out at like 615. The other night I saw her and she was in her bedroom and she was wearing this baggy t-shirt and all the lights were on and she was dancing. Just dancing around her room.
So yeah, I want her to move on. This young woman that I was so cranky and bitter about.
Now I feel so protective and kind of maternal.
SPEAKER_05: If you ran into her at the corner market or something do you think you could ever say
anything to her?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, if I ran into her I wouldn't say a thing.
What would I say? I've been watching you through your window. How creepy would that be? Yeah, no way.
She doesn't know that there's this person that's this complete
stranger that's out there really rooting for her.
SPEAKER_08: Diane Weypert told her story to radio reporter Brianna Breen who produced this with the folks
at Love & Radio, Nick Vanderkolk and Brendan Baker.
SPEAKER_07: And Nick does have a little postscript here which I think you ought to hear.
SPEAKER_09: Just after this interview was recorded last spring Diane's neighbor closed her curtains and hasn't opened up since.
SPEAKER_08: Special thanks to Erin Belkin, Karen Duffin, Alison Sorel and Brian Posner. Thanks of course to Nick and Brendan and Brianna for letting us air that piece. Do yourself a favor, go to loveandradio.org and subscribe to that podcast. There are stories I have heard on Love & Radio that I just will never forget.
They have seriously burrowed themselves so deeply into my brain that I actually have nightmares.
You should listen to them all, loveandradio.org. I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Proitch.
Thanks for listening. All right, Lulu from The Present with one last thing.
SPEAKER_04: There is a very special Radiolab live event ping ponging its way across the country right now.
It's just been to LA and Boston and New York and Chicago and beyond and it is about to make its very last stop in Seattle.
So if you live in the Seattle area and want to see a Radiolab episode unfold with all the wonder and play and immersive musical sound design before your eyes, come check it out. It's Thursday, February 15th at Town Hall Seattle. Our senior producer Simon Adler will be dressed on the stage in a snappy white suit leading you through live music and interviews and stories and images from space and an even
stranger place called the 1970s. Again, coming to Seattle on Thursday, February 15th at Town Hall Seattle.
Find out more and get your tickets at KUOW.org slash events. Bye.
SPEAKER_02: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.
Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bressler, Akady Foster-Keese, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz-Gutierrez, Sundun Yanam Sambaran, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Alyssa Jung Perry, Sarah Sandbeck, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Erica Inyankers. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
