Portrait by Robert Adam Mayer It started with a bully. “The noise bully,” Nancy Rosenblum calls him, a man who lived in her Cambridge loft building years ago and tormented the family next door with a rooftop air conditioner whose roar and vibrations shook their apartment day and night. They couldn’t sleep. They tried earplugs and insulation; they tried moving their bed to the back of the room. Finally they tried selling their place. They received no offers. Meanwhile, the noise bully refused to move the air conditioner, even after Rosenblum and other neighbors confronted him on behalf of the sleepless family, even after they got together and offered to help pay for the cost of relocating the AC unit to a quieter spot on the roof. Instead he hired engineers to certify that the sound and vibration were within legal limits and posted the paperwork in the hallway. “This was malice,” Rosenblum says. “It was an act of deliberate cruelty.” In part, he liked the attention. “Some people will accept even negative attention.” But, she believes, he was also enjoying the power of proximity: “There’s a saying that goes, ‘No man can live longer in peace than his Neighbour pleases.’”