MY ROOMMATE, THE EMPEROR
by Martha Hipley | "I woke up to the cold-sweat dread of being half-short on the rent"
if you haven’t noticed, we’ve been having our fun with notes lately.
below, read Martha Hipley’s original story MY ROOMMATE, THE EMPEROR.
It started when I went to bother Inga for next month’s rent. I was already pissed off because I could hear myself thinking, I don’t want to bother her, but it shouldn’t be a bother to want someone to pay the rent on time. She still didn’t seem to be working, but she had also stopped complaining about not having work, which was even more disturbing. I could barely sleep all week, wondering what Inga was doing besides making money, wondering why it bothered me to worry about bothering her about paying the rent, until I got into a real existential crisis and decided I just needed to talk to her. So I came home from my job—my real job—and found her in the kitchen, picking at the polish on her nails, scattering little bits of red enamel all over the lumpy fiberboard table.
She said, “Why are you asking about the rent today?”
And I said, “Because you were late last month.”
And she said, “Don’t worry about it,” and went back to her nails. “Anyway, I figured out that I want to be an emperor,” she said.
“Don’t you mean empress?” I asked. We were speaking in English, so this error caught me in a particular way that it wouldn’t have if she’d said “dictator” or “president.” Anyway, she was always saying she wanted to practice her Spanish and then didn’t.
“No, I want to be a female emperor,” she said.
“What’s the difference between a female emperor and an empress?” I asked.
“It’s political,” she said.
“I guess a female emperor is like a male nurse,” I said.
“What are you talking about,” she said. It wasn’t a question, it was an invitation to leave. So I went around the corner to pick up a torta and then came home and ate it on my bed.
The next day, I saw Santi for a coffee, and he told me he always writes about everyone who pisses him off in his diary so that if he ever needs to sue them he knows exactly when and where everything went down.
“Put it in the cloud,” he said, “and use real names so you can search it when you need to.”
Santi was kind of an asshole, but he never got fucked around. I decided to take him up on this advice and start writing out everything that happened with Inga to get ahead of the situation.
Well then. When she’d answered my post in the “FOREIGNERS IN MEXICO CITY” Facebook group, she said she was a designer for a jewelry brand and liked to cook. I asked her if that meant she needed a space to work because I followed a girl on Instagram who makes rings, and it seemed like a whole production that would be too much for the small two-bedroom apartment.
“Oh, it’s not like that,” she’d said. “It’s more conceptual.” So she moved in with nothing more than one suitcase full of sundresses and never cooked. She never seemed to work either, jewelry design or otherwise, but it didn’t matter until last month when she started complaining about losing the job she didn’t seem to have and was late on the rent for five horrible days while I ran circles around the landlady and tried to figure out if I could take the shame of borrowing the money from someone and just kick her out.
“You know, Napoleon wasn’t French,” she said when I got back from the coffee with Santi.
“Oh, like Tintin,” I said.
“You don’t understand what we are doing here, this is a movement.” She gestured like she was on the mañanera, but it was just her and some kid with a tattoo of Hello Kitty on his neck sitting on the couch like he owned the place. “This is Ale. He is like the John the Baptist of this operation.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” I asked. “Is he moving in? This apartment is too small for three. It’s just one bathroom.”
“You’re not listening,” she said. “He is the avant-garde. He’s showing me how to use Pixflip to get out my message.”
“What message?” I asked. “What’s Pixflip?”
“The medium is the message,” said Ale. “And Pixflip is the medium.” He pulled out his phone, one of those stupid ones that flips open to almost the size of a tablet and costs more than the whole rent on this apartment, and he clicked on the acid green icon of an app. “When you upload a photo, it zooms in on just four pixels,” he said. “It’s about concentration of vision.”
“Which four pixels?” I asked.
“The algorithm decides,” he said.
“But how is that a message?” I asked.
“You just don’t get it,” said Inga. “We already have over ten thousand followers, and we’re just getting started.”
“Okay, but do you get paid? Is it like being an influencer?”
“Listen, we have bigger plans than that.” She posed and Ale snapped a photo with his stupid phone. He then held it out for me to see as little hearts and smiley faces danced across a grid of four gigantic pixels.
“Okay, but rent is due on Friday,” I said.
“You’re so small-minded,” said Ale.
The next day was the change of administration, which struck me as a bad time for Inga to launch her campaign for emperor. Anyway, I was happy to have the day off. I was enjoying a lazy breakfast when the doorbell rang, and there was that kid Ale. This time he had brought a girl with a professional-looking case of makeup—the kind of metal case that looks like it might as well hold a MacGuffin in a cheap thriller as an eyeshadow palette. Before I could say anything, they pushed past me into the apartment.
“Are you coming too?” said the girl as she opened her case and started to set up shop in the living room.
“Coming where?” I asked.
“We’re having a press conference downtown,” said Inga as she appeared from the bathroom. Instead of her usual sundress and Birkenstocks, she was wearing a tailored suit with sensible heels. Her usually flowing, blonde hair was pulled back into a painfully tight bun. “This is our moment.”
“I thought it was Sheinbaum’s moment,” I said.
Inga scowled. “You’re either part of the future or you’re part of the past, and there’s nothing funny about that.” She sat down on the edge of the couch, and the girl began to do her makeup while Ale held up his phone with both hands and took a paparazzo’s amount of photos.
After that I didn’t see any of them for a day—when I woke up the apartment was empty. My manager said someone in the office had tested positive for COVID, and we all had to work from home until we tested clean. I forwarded him the same photo of a positive test I had used the last time I wanted to get out of work for a few days. Then I called Santi.
There was a screening at the Cineteca in the evening, and Santi picked me up to drive down there in his van, which was a real treat over riding the metro. The film was an action flick, not much plot, lots of punches and stunts, but the twist of the thing was that it was filmed under risk of death.
The director was in the audience, and he gave a little talk and answered some questions through a translator after the film. He said he had lived his whole life under a fascist regime, but in spite of all that, he always knew he wanted to be an artist. His father had been a real renegade and hid VHS transfers of kung fu movies and American TV under the floorboards in their small apartment in the capital city. He shot the whole film in secret with his friends, using an old Sony handycam that he saved for a year to buy, given the inflation and scarcity there. He only had one 2GB SD card, so he had to be pretty fucking precious about what files he saved, none of that David Fincher shit. When he finally had the opportunity to escape his country, he remembered an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head where they crossed the border from Mexico to the US after swallowing condoms full of drugs. Given the repressive sexual politics of the regime, he was unable to source a condom. He made do with swallowing his SD card in the tied-off thumb of a surgical glove. When he was picked up across the border and transferred to Geneva via a benevolent NGO, he bought some laxatives in a pharmacy and sat over a bucket until he safely shat out the footage.
Someone asked him what his favorite kung fu movie was, and he said that Police Story was technically superior but he had more of a soft spot for Rumble in the Bronx. Someone asked him what he was making now that he was free, and he said he was mostly resting, watching a lot of stuff on Netflix, and enjoying ice cream for the first time in his life. He said he’d like to work with Glen Powell someday, or maybe Paul Mescal because he thought Gladiator II was pretty good—he liked the monkey. Someone asked him what happened to his friends, and he said he didn’t know—most likely they were dead by association and the only record of their existence was the film itself. Someone asked him if he was enjoying his visit to Mexico to present the film, and he said he was but that the food was pretty spicy for his stomach.
After the Q&A, Santi wanted to go out for drinks, but I made him drive me home because I felt sour from the whole thing. I hadn’t worked on any art in months, and here I was with no excuses. I could have all the condoms and SD cards that I wanted. When I got home, the apartment was still empty, so I smoked a joint and tried to draw. In the end, I got too high and ended up walking to the Walmart for a pint of ice cream.
The next morning, I texted the photo of the positive test to my boss again and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Even at 8 AM, I could hear a real nightmare brewing. I stuck my head out the kitchen window and saw a group of around 50 people of all sorts holding signs that read things like “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” and “INGA PARA SIEMPRE” and just “[HEART EMOJI] INGA.” The crowd was sizable. Someone was leading a chant that sounded like “NI GUERRA, NI FRONTERA, SOLO INGA, MI LIDERA!” Some guy had one of those giant speakers they sell downtown in Calle Simón Bolívar and was blasting the new Bad Bunny.
I knocked on Inga’s door to let her know about everyone waiting for her outside, and she told me to go away because she wanted to sleep a while longer.
“Okay, but you know the neighbors on the ground floor are old? I don’t think it’s nice to have so much noise on the street in front of their windows?” I said.
“Since when is revolution nice?” she said. “Anyway, just tell them I’ll be down in a minute.”
So I put on my slippers and went down with my coffee to try and talk some sense into them. I didn’t even need them to leave. I just wanted them to quiet down a bit.
“She says she’ll be down in a minute,” I said to the guy with the speaker. “Can you turn it down a little bit and tell the rest? And also, you should know she’s not that great. She doesn’t even speak good Spanish.”
“Napoleon didn’t speak good French,” he said. “I heard it on a podcast. Anyway, I know she’s not great. I’m just mad about my phone bill.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Listen, about six months ago my phone company decided to upgrade me to a packet that includes Amazon Music for 30 pesos more per month, but I didn’t ask for that! I already have Spotify.”
“Don’t they have all the same music on Amazon? You could just switch and it would be cheaper, I bet.”
“Does Amazon have all my playlists? No! I’ve been making these mixes for years. I’m practically a DJ. This is my soul. I listen to my running mix every morning—I can’t give that up. They’re trying to upsell me on some new iPhone too. I’m not stupid. It’s not even about locking me into the monthly payments. You know that 5G gives you cancer, right? It’s no accident—the pharma companies are behind all of this in the end. The one product everyone wants is a cancer cure. Plus Ozempic after everyone gives up running.” He was getting really fired up and started kicking at the curb. “It’s all a conspiracy!”
“But what does that have to do with Inga?”
“I’ve called the phone company a hundred times, I tried to cancel my whole plan, I tried to transfer my number to a new company, nothing works! I’m stuck paying the damn 30 pesos every month, and I’m never going to use Amazon Music even if the cancer gets me. It’s despicable. At least Inga has some big ideas. I figure it’s either sign up with someone like her or start sending anthrax to the Amazon offices.”
None of this made sense to me, but I was worried if I talked to him any longer it might start to, so I went back inside. After a while, Inga finally went out to meet them, and they all disappeared in a cloud of chants and reggaeton. I forgot to ask her about the rent.
The next day was Friday, and I woke up to an empty apartment and the cold-sweat dread of being half-short on the rent. Again. I was debating what I would text the landlady to try and stall when a message came in from Santi: “u see this shit?” He linked to an Instagram reel of some fucking chaos. I could hardly tell what was going on in the video and had to scroll through half the comments to figure out that Inga and her gang had broken into Chapultepec Castle in the night and were refusing to leave until Sheinbaum ceded the country to her.
“no mms,” I replied. “wtf”
“cops say steer clear of reforma”
“shit”
“sip”
I texted Inga to ask what the fuck was going on and could she at least transfer me the money, but the message hung in WhatsApp with the single checkmark that told me she had run out of data again.
I decided to bike over to see the situation for myself. Most of the tourist neighborhoods along the way were still bustling with red-faced Americans drinking cortados and complaining loudly about the cost of living over there compared to the price of their coffee here, but once I crossed Avenida Chapultepec I was in no man’s land. The place was littered with cops just standing by, looking bored, doing nothing at all.
I noticed the Starbucks by the side entrance was open, and I hadn’t had a coffee or anything yet, so I figured, what would another five minutes hurt? Their cold brew is kind of shitty, but it’s not like I had other options, so I bit the bullet, got a coffee, locked my bike by the ticket booth, and trotted up the hill.
The whole operation was pretty shabby. Inga’s gang was mostly just yelling and kicking over at the flowers in the garden and making more videos. I told someone I had brought Inga a coffee, and they directed me up to her on one of the upper levels. She was leaning over that balcony that everyone uses in their Bumble profile photos with her phone stretched out at arm’s length. As I got closer I could see that stupid Pixflip app open on her screen.
I said, “You didn’t send me the rent again.”
And she said, “Are you serious?”
And I said, “I like that apartment. I can’t afford to move.”
And she said, “You think so small.”
And I said, “Oh, eat shit,” and I threw the coffee on the ground and thought about the 79 pesos I had paid for it.
And she said, “This is a historic site! This is a historic moment!”
And I said, “You’re a bitch,” and without a single thought, I pushed her.
She flipped so easily over the rail—Inga’s so tall and Scandinavian there was nothing she could do against the right push. I watched her scrape down the side of the castle, and down the hill, and disappear into the brush and cacti. She didn’t even make a sound as she fell, which was strange, but that made it easy for me to slip down through all the yelling in the garden and out past the tied-up staff, down to my bike, and back to the Starbucks to buy another coffee. The barista asked me if I’d like to add anything else this time. I bought a little cake pop that looked like a raccoon and texted a photo of it to Santi after I had bitten off half of its head.
“this is me rn”
“u ok?”
I told him I wasn’t okay, and that Inga had skipped out on the rent again.
He said, “I can just lend u the money,” and he suggested I put the apartment up on Airbnb and crash on his couch until I made back the money.
Santi’s an asshole, but he’s always right. I hung up some papel picado, took some photos, and in a few hours I had two weeks of reservations at gringo tourist prices that would cover the whole month’s rent. Lucky for me everyone wanted to come to Mexico City for Dia de los Muertos these days, and the apartment was an easy walk to all the best shopping according to Vogue, so of course people snapped it up.
Today, I decided to make a real go of it. I packed up a tote bag with a new sketch pad, I went across the street to a café (a nice one, not a Starbucks), and ordered a matcha. I sat out front only to realize I had paper and nothing to draw with. I thought about asking the kid working at the register to watch my spot while I ran back home for my markers, but that felt too much like something Inga would do.
Inga’s whole thing fell apart as quickly as she had fallen off the side of the castle to her death, and I wondered if that guy ever fixed his phone bill every time I passed a Telcel ad. Sometimes I felt bad. She wasn’t that great, but she wasn’t that bad either. She wasn’t wrong. Everything is kind of shitty, not just our phone bills, not just the rent. We all probably could be marching around, yelling about something. It was a nice day for it. But these things never work, and when they do, it’s not how you’d want. One day they’re getting rid of the fees on your phone bill and the next you can’t buy ice cream anymore, or maybe there’s just one kind of ice cream and it’s vanilla because that’s the only kind Inga likes. It can happen faster than you’d think. Inga’s plan was kind of a joke, like her jewelry, like her Spanish lessons, but what if it wasn’t? It’s better to nip it in the bud, stick with what you know, drink your matcha, chill out. I know my limits, and I’d rather pay my rent on time and have a Walmart down the street than change the world. I know I don’t have it in me to eat and shit a fucking condom to make my art, at least.
Copyright © 2025 Martha Hipley