The Sound of Water

My wife and I were woken up at three in the morning by the sound of rushing water coming from the bathroom of our apartment.  We opened the door and found that the floor was flooded a few inches deep.  The water was flowing from a hole in the ceiling in the far corner of the room.  It appeared to be coming from the apartment above ours.  As we stood there in the doorway of the bathroom, several neighbors from the other apartments came in to see what was going on.  Apparently the sound of the flowing water had woken them up as well.  A few of them squeezed into the doorway beside us and surveyed the disaster with curiousity.  One of them noticed that there were streams of red in the water pouring from the ceiling and clouds of red spreading here and there in the water on the floor.  Someone else said that it looked like it might be blood.

That kind of caught everyone off guard.  We all looked at each other, not quite sure what to make of that statement.  Then one of the neighbors pushed through the crowd and we stood aside and let him through the doorway of the bathroom.  He crept in carefully.  His feet were bare and the water was cold.  He curled his toes and stepped lightly across the tile.  When he got over to the other side of the room, he braced himself against the wall and turned to look up at the hole in the ceiling where the water was coming through.  His eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open.  His head started shaking back and forth.  He looked down, biting his lip and thinking, and then he rushed out of the room, gesturing with his hands for us to part and clear a path for him.

We all followed him as he ran down the hall to the stairwell and pounded up the stairs to the floor above.  He slammed his shoulder against the door of the apartment directly above ours, cracking the wood until the lock gave way.  The door burst open and slammed violently against the wall as he stumbled into the dark apartment.  Inside, I could hear the running water, louder that it had been below.  We all made our way through the rooms, and we stopped cold at the doorway of the bathroom.

The faucets on the sink and the tub were all turned on full blast, and the sink and the tub were filled to overflowing.  The water ran over the sides of the porcelain and streamed across the floor to the far corner of the room where an old woman stood doubled over with her face pressed to the floor in a pool of blood diluted by the water flowing around her head.  One of her hands lay limp in the water, and there was a silver gun lying next to it.  The man who had rushed up there hooked the gun with his big toe and drew it away from the woman's body.  Someone turned off the faucets and opened the drains on the tub and the sink, and we all stood there, trying to make some sense of what we were seeing.

It seemed that this woman had lived above us, harboring some grudge against my wife and I.  We had no idea who she was, but apparently she had taken some offense to us or something we had done to the point that it had consumed her entirely.  She had concocted this bizarre revenge.  She had made a hole in the floor and then turned on all of her faucets in order to flood our apartment from above.  Then she had placed her eye to the hole that she had made while putting the muzzle of the gun to her head.  She wanted to leave her body there to watch, beyond death, with the water and the blood flowing around her cold eye and a cackling rictus of rotting teeth hardening on her face once the rigor mortis had set in.

Morning Classes

I was taking a class that was held in the very early hours of the morning. I arrived at the school when it was still dark out, and even then, I was hustling, walking fast, afraid of being late. The school building was just a large brick house. There were three storeys to the house, and as I approached, I saw that it was lit from top to bottom. Inside, the rooms of the house had all been converted into normal classrooms. The number of the classroom that I was looking for was printed on the red stub of a carnival ticket that I pulled from my pocket. I went from room to room, floor to floor, trying to find the right room, trying to match the number of the ticket in my hand. I rode up in a newly installed elevator with heavy silver doors and blue illuminated buttons. I made my way back downstairs by a grand staircase which had a thick white banister capped with posts on each floor that were mounted with the busts of different Greek philosophers, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle.

But there seemed to be no system to how the classrooms were numbered. They weren't numbered consecutively, or in any other sort of discernible order. They weren't numbered by floor or subject. I held up my carnival ticket and worked my way up and down the halls, thinking I had picked up the trail that would lead me to my class, thinking that I had deciphered a pattern in the numbers. But then I would find myself confronted by a seemingly random number posted on the copper plaque beside the door of the next classroom I came across, and it would completely blow the pattern that I had thought I had established. I would hold up the ticket next to the copper plaque and stare at them both in a stupor, as though holding them side by side would somehow bring one number into miraculous alignment with the other.

Finally, I thought I had found the right room. I started to settle in at one of the desks in the back. I dumped my books on the desktop, and I started to hang my coat on the back of the chair. The class hadn't begun yet, and there was hardly anyone there. The teacher was at his desk up at the head of the classroom, and a couple of his students were there talking to him. I had slipped in unnoticed, but when I set my books down, the noise had caught their attention. I looked up from arranging my coat on the back of the chair and saw that they were all staring at me. The teacher held his white coffee cup poised under his scowling face. They said nothing, but they stared at me so insistently that I became certain that I had mistaken the room number. Everything about their demeanor conveyed the idea that I was in the wrong place. I looked at my red ticket again. I went back out to the hall and looked at the room number again. I blushed and laughed and gathered up my books and coat and slipped back out of the classroom.

I started to think that I would never find the right room; I would never make it to class on time. The class was probably already in session, somewhere, in one of these rooms, the lecture already proceeding in muffled tones behind the closed door, vital information for the course already dispensed, all of it already lost to me, frustrated, roaming the empty halls with my useless red ticket. The books weighed heavy on my arms. My coat was hot and uncomfortable slung over my shoulder. I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. I turned this way and that, stepping in one direction and then another with a purpose, only to find that purpose dissolving in uncertainty. I had no idea where to go.

Down at the end of one of the halls there was a set of French doors with long lace curtains hung over their windows. I went out through these doors and I found myself on the front porch of the old house. There was a young lady there, wearing a white nightgown and swinging ever so softly on the porch swing. She was turned away, gazing off at the morning glow on the horizon. She turned back briefly to look at me, scanning me from head to toe with a quick nod of her head, and then she turned to look back out at the sky. I thought of the red ticket still in my hand, still clutched in my fist. Maybe she would know where my classroom was at. She seemed like she was a fixture here, perhaps a daughter of someone on the faculty or on the board of administration, passing her time out here on the porch swing while all the daily business of the school carried on inside.

I turned my hand up and opened my fist, but instead of the red carnival ticket, I found a frail baby bird sitting in the palm of my hand. It looked like I might have injured it a bit from the pressure of my fist. Its feathers were disheveled and matted, and it struggled to its feet on broken bones and flexed its crooked wings. It looked up at me, hoping that I could help it, but all I could do was hold my hand out and let it take its time there on my palm and gather whatever strength that it had left. Then, suddenly, it sprang from my palm and took flight. It circled around the porch there, its wings flapping against the posts and the corners of the roof. The young lady and I both followed the bird with our eyes, smiling, our heads twisting as the bird bounced here and there above us in the dark.

But finally the bird found its way. It ducked down low and slipped out under the roof of the porch and flew free out into the morning air. It settled on the branch of a nearby tree and took up the song that it was born knowing by heart, hesitantly cracking out the first notes. I took a seat beside the young lady, settling down slowly and taking care not to interrupt the steady, gentle rocking of the porch swing, swinging just enough to compensate for my own added weight, letting the swing drift back and forth in the same rhythm as before. And so we sat, swinging quietly, adding no words to the situation, listening to the bird on the branch, and watching for the sun to rise.

Foot Work

Some friends of mine were sitting around over coffee, talking about what they would do in a dystopian scenario where everything was controlled and censored and no one had any privacy.  They proposed all of the usual measures, underground manifestos, clandestine groups of rebels, and so forth.  I let them talk it all out, getting all the details in order, and then I explained to them why it wouldn't work.  In these scenarios, the governments always kept a tight reign on information and ideas, and they actively discouraged the meeting of two or more minds, keeping people as isolated as possible.  Their manifestos would be found and burned.  Their subversive groups would be infiltrated and broken up the moment they formed.

I had a different idea.  The only way to hide the truth in these circumstances would be to leave it in plain sight.  I would affect a limp, possibly as the result of a manufactured accident.  I would walk with my right foot turning outwards from time to time in a way the would seem involuntary, like a spasm or a response to chronic pain.  But I would build a code into this limp.  The left foot would pace the spaces off evenly and the right foot would shift at different angles to indicate different letters.  And wherever there was an occasion to leave lasting footprints on the ground, I would write my message step by step.  I would teach no one this code.  I would just leave it there on the muddy ground to be deciphered by someone in the future.  There would be no meetings, no manifestos, no counter-revolutionary cells.  There would just one man, walking, leaving the truth behind me everywhere I went.