The Calling

It was past midnight and Lester was in his room, rolling over on his bed trying to get some sleep. That’s when he heard it, a constant squeak and scratch from the air conditioner which was unmistakable from the periodic shaking of the blower. He hadn’t heard it for three nights, so he hoped it would stop. With great discomfort, he stood up from his bed to give a check. He strolled towards the lights, gripped on a long stick from behind the door, and gave the AC a few taps on its sides. As always, the squeaks were briefly hushed.

A telephone bell was ringing in the living room.

Lester, in his pajamas, hurried out of the bedroom. He was tall, slightly balding, and a very lean figure, just like the stick in his hand, only with an exception of the potty belly.

Since it was past midnight, the call would be his wife. She phoned often at this time after work when she settled herself with a few drinks.

Their conversations more often than not followed a similar pattern where she predominantly did all the talking. It would start with the places she visited as part of her business trips, the authorities she met, and her ambitions to make it to the top of the organization. In between, she reminded him to water her Fire Lily in the garden and often finished the call by saying ‘You are the best, Lester. I feel so good after talking to you. Now you can go to sleep’.

Mostly after the call, he gets really hungry. He grabs from the kitchen, a bowl of his favorite onion-flavored fries mixed with barbecue sauce. Slouching on the couch in the living room with enough food close by, he watches something on the TV until his distracted eyes deceive him. He ends up sleeping on the couch until the heat of the day breaks out. After which he gets back to his room, which would have become frozen by now with the air conditioner running the whole night. 

Awakening at odd hours disturbed his sleep pattern so to account for it he slept as long as he wished during the day, though he barely managed to make up for it.   

Lester worked as an engineer at a private firm, a few years back. Suddenly, one day he got tired of it and decided to quit. His colleagues thought it was just a phase and he would come back after that. In any case, he never wished to go back or try a new one. He has stayed home since then.  

His wife’s choice to move out abroad for her work suggested it wasn’t required of him to secure for the family. The tangled knots of the marriage left him alone with this house, who were both the appalling witnesses to things they shouldn’t have seen.

***

The morning heat was fabulous and Lester was as yet in his bed, surprisingly sweating all over. Disturbed, he gets up only to find that the AC has stopped working. His stunts with the stick neglected to show its enchantment. Hesitant to call anyone to help, he tried to cope with it, but the late summer heat seemed unbearable. After much thought and trials, he took up the phone book and dialed the number against the name ‘Ashoke (repairman)’.

Just an hour after the call, Ashoke appeared at the doorstep with his tools. He advanced into the house with a familiarity of definitely knowing where the bedroom was, which caused Lester to be on his toes. He anxiously followed Ashoke and watched over his doings, wondering in dismay what was he going to find about him.

Ashoke climbed up onto his ladder and removed the front panel of the AC. A terrible, foul odor filled the room.

He closed his nose with a handkerchief and looked inside of the AC.

“ It’s a rat...” Ashoke exclaimed.

Lester looked in shock as Ashoke pulled scrapping of thermocol from the inside, which the rodent has eaten up. 

" A rat has been inside for a while and has damaged the wirings of the motherboard. It seems to have entered through a hole near the exhaust. “

“Sir, could you get me a brush? ”he asked.

Lester was stuck at the fact that a rodent has been living this close to him in the house.

“Sir ..?” Ashoke called out " A broom or a brush if you please? "

Holding his thoughts, Lester rushed to the kitchen for the brush and after a lot of looking around the house, he tracked down a horrible one in the work area.

The stinking got worse as he brushed out from the inside, a load of rat shit. Ashoke gave Lester a pathetic look while hauling it out, which felt like a stare that went through and uncovered him completely.

After a few hours of work, Ashoke got the AC up and running. “Sir, The hole is fixed and you needn’t stress about it any longer”

Lester found it hard to look at his face and speak, so he just looked down and nodded.

When he was about to leave, he asked whether he should come another day to clean the full house. 

“It’ll take two people to do it in a day, but if you need it don’t hesitate to call me up, Sir,” he said.

Lester nodded in agreement and shut the door.

***

Lester was resting in his bed after supper. The air was a lot cooler after the repair, the blower had become quieter. Lester, still caught up in the day’s events, didn’t even sense a change. Whenever he tried to close his eyes, he would see an ugly, loathsome, oversized rat climbing down the wall of his bedroom, happily dancing over from room to room and stopping at the leftover bread near the couch. After smelling the entire packet, it takes a piece of bread and climbs back up the wall.

“Was it the only one living inside?” he thought “How might one be certain?”

He wondered whether rats too had a family and it may have been taking the bread for its wife and children. Suddenly he pictured an infant rodent inside his air conditioner sharing the bread among a clan of rats. A clan that was increasing by dozens—rats standing and discussing something in groups of twos and threes and fours and pointing fingers at Lester, they seemed to walk slowly down the wall but once they were grounded they hustled towards him.

He jerked awake in horror, rushed to the kitchen, and drank two glasses of water. He found himself sweating all over despite the proper functioning of the air conditioner.

Lester looked at the clock, it was past two, there was no call yet. If she was gonna call today she would have already done, so he thought of going back to bed again. When he was about to roll back his sheets, he heard the squeaks, repeatedly. First, he blamed Ashoke in his mind for the work he had done, however after some thought, he wasn’t even sure if what he heard was for real or if it was his creative mind. He turned over in bed covering his ears with pillows making a decent attempt not to hear it or consider anything. But the noise wouldn’t stop.

He jumped up from his bed in distress, switched off the AC, and pushed open all the windows of the room. He wanted to end this misery by either getting rid of the rodent if at all there was one or prove to himself that it was just his imagination. 

As he followed the sound he found that this time it was not from the air conditioner but from the cabinet close to it. A cupboard where he used to keep the old clothes and other unused items. He climbed on a chair below the cabinet, reached out to the handles, and opened it.

A cloud of dust filled the air which made him sneeze. He stuck his head inside, it was completely dark, all he could see were a few cardboard boxes in the front. When tried to move one of them, he heard a squeak, then saw a long tail swiftly moving across. Lester leaned over in his chair and stretched out his hands to his maximum to get hold of the rodent. It wasn’t only that he couldn’t get a grip of the rodent but the chair that held him went off balance and he fell on the floor.

Lester felt a sharp pain in his knees. Unable to get up, he laid on the floor for some time. While nursing his knees, he caught sight of the cardboard box on the floor. During the fall, while trying to catch on to something, he grabbed onto an edge of this box which fell along with him. It had fallen sideways and a book popped out from it. He grabbed that book and crawled towards the window for the light and sat there supporting his back against the walls.

The first few pages of the book were scribblings about friendship, love, rivers, and mountains. In some pages, a girl is mentioned who possesses the most beautiful eyes in school. Some of the writing that followed resembled the shape of a poem about the girl, while some sounded like modified versions of Hemingway’s writings. They were all written in pencil and at certain points were corrected with a red pen. Further down, one of its pages had a newspaper cut out stuck on to it.

“The Enchanted Garden by Lester Philip VI P

St. John’s School”

His eyes brimmed as he read through it. He remembered it as a poem he wrote for a competition, which won a prize and got featured on a weekend supplement. 

Along with that fell out a picture of his mom. It was an old black and white photo, though damaged for the most part you could make out her sitting at a table holding a pen. She looks young and strikingly beautiful.

That single image split opened the hard seeds of his past, his mind messily rebounded among a cluster of memories, images, fragments of scenes, and people which gave rise to new roots and vines until the enchanted garden appeared in its full glory, inside of him. On each living page of the book, he saw himself. The stories in it reflected his life, his affections, his dreams, and all that he ever wanted to be.

His face glimmered like a teenager in the moonlight as he closely read through the book. The occasional breeze made its way through the windows and made Lester feel safe and wiped away the tears from his face. They made him feel at ease and helped him take a nap. He laid on the floor, holding the books close to his chest, and dozed off like when he was a boy.

The next morning Lester sensed something swirling across his body that forced him back to his senses. He opened his eyes, the sun was shining bright on his face. He looked up through the window to the beautiful Fire Lilies waving in the breeze. He has woken up fresh from a sleep that had no sense of time. He wondered how many hours he had slept, was it even days? he didn’t know. There seems to be no more pain in his legs.

He stood up and stacked the fallen books on his study table. When he was about to take the remaining books from the box, he heard that squeak again, except for this time the rodent appeared right in front, staring at him. He leaned down and opened his palm to catch it but strangely enough the rodent strolled towards him and occupied itself comfortably in his palms. Holding the amusement he brought it closer. He simply couldn’t believe his eyes. It wasn’t how he imagined it to be, it was a hamster: tiny, very clean, with a fur of reddy-brown color and kindly hazel eyes, which wrapped its little tail around his fingers.

Lester carried the hamster and placed it on the pine shaving bedding inside a little pet house he made.  

  ***

The telephone was ringing in the living room. 

Lester is at the study table in his room, lost in a world of his own, trying to put down his shaped thoughts on paper, the journals stacked alongside. The hamster, enjoying its piece of carrot, comes out of its new home, climbs onto the table and moves along Lester’s arm, and rests on his shoulder.

The phone rang again. Then it rang for the third time, unnoticed.