The Gray House

Someone with the same case of bad nerves as me has destroyed the master bell, probably figuring that it is not needed for ringing the classes anymore, and people wouldn’t miss meals. In that he was mistaken. Many do. They come late, or early. Breakfasts are the hardest hit. In the morning it’s almost exclusively Pheasants in the canteen, chomping on their grass, that is, salads. A sorry sight. I’ve never much cared about that bell—I don’t like any indicators of time passing. But while it was working it at least made the atmosphere in the canteen a bit more lively.

I drive up to the table and put on the napkin.

Smoker, across from me, is sipping his tea like it’s a cup of hemlock. Lary, next to him, is busy mangling a roll with a dull knife. That’s it. Four at the Rats’ table, three for the Birds, a solitary Hound shoveling food into a backpack. Only Pheasants are all duly present and accounted for, and the crunch of their morning carrots can be clearly heard across the room.

I make myself a sandwich to demonstrate to Lary how it’s done, but he doesn’t even look in my direction. Huffing and puffing and torturing the bread.

After my second sandwich Alexander comes running, wheeling Tubby in before him. Tubby’s miserable look tells me he’s not exactly thrilled with being here. Alexander parks the wheelchair at the table and starts loading food into the poor guy. Tubby’s suffering, and Alexander, usually so very attentive, seems not to notice. If the bell were still operational it would have been ringing by now, but it isn’t, so what’s the rush? I take a camp pot out of the backpack and roll it over to Alexander.

“Dump it all in there, leave the kid alone.”

Alexander is just in time to catch the pot, but drops the spoon.

“See,” I say. “You’re asleep on your feet, you shouldn’t be feeding people. And, by the way, he’s already helped himself to a roll this morning. I wouldn’t put it past him to choke now, what with this treatment. People croak left and right from that, you know.”

Tubby slurps mayo off his chin and hiccups softly, as if in support of my speech. Alexander turns the pot this way and that, apparently amazed at its capaciousness. He clearly wants to drop everything and run back under the shower. He’s spent the last three days in there. Hoping to wash the Alexanderness off himself?

“Move it,” I say. “Time’s a-wasting.”

Lary grumbles something to the effect that there’s too much noise coming from me. That I generally produce too much noise, and in the mornings especially.

“Put that in your notebook,” I tell Smoker. “He was always boisterous, and in the mornings especially.”

I observe Alexander filling up the pot, fold my napkin, and drive off. These boring breakfasts you can keep.

I’m barely out into the hallway when I realize that I do indeed produce too much noise. And the reason for that is the removal of a fairly bulky item, namely the camp pot, from the backpack. Something has shifted inside and clanks insistently now, something that it was safely pressing against. And besides, old Mustang also started creaking, unpleasantly resembling the phantom cart that always passes by the House around dawn, closer to the night that’s just ended than to the morning that’s about to start.

I’m at my wits’ end with that cart. Could be a hobo returning with the nightly haul of empties. Could be a wheeler risen from the grave where his wheelchair had been buried alongside him and is now rusted to hell from being underground for so long. Or maybe it’s a runaway wheelchair all by its lonesome, passing by the House like the Flying Dutchman, rattling the decaying bones of its former master.

Establishing which of these theories best describes the reality is impossible. In this narrow slot between night and morning the dreams are too sweet for me to climb out of bed, and even if I were to climb out I still wouldn’t see anything, because it drives by when it’s still dark. I decided to make a recording of the mysterious squeaking object and then listen to it when I’m awake. But no matter how many times I’ve left the recorder in the open window, I’ve never caught that obnoxious noise. The cassettes with the failed attempts I’ve stashed in a box and secreted in the pile of no one’s things.

And now it’s me who’s squeaking like that elusive object, be it a cart, the ghost of a wheeler, or the wheelchair sans ghost. And this means that Mustang is due for an oil change and a check of the fasteners. A tedious, dreary, wearisome business.