The Doorman's Repose

by The Doorman's Repose (retail) (epub)

  “Almost?” said Victoria, with a worried look on her small heart-shaped face.

  “Well, I’m a little worried about a possible blockage of her pipes. Up on the fifteenth floor. If that’s the case there could be a big blow, or what’s maybe worse, the blockage could dislodge itself and travel all the way down here to Liesl herself and then she could get constipated and even crack.”

  Victoria stepped back two paces and looked up at the enormous machine looming over her. A big tank, like a giant headache pain-relief capsule, stood on four legs, rumbling and hissing. The whole thing was painted deep carmine red. At one end several large pipes rose into the ceiling. At the other the spaghetti bowl of smaller pipes emerged, connecting the tank with a many-cornered metal box. This is our boiler. It gives us steam heat in the winter and hot water for our sinks and tubs all year long.

  “Let’s go take a look at the fifteenth floor.”

  Ever since she could remember, Victoria had been interested in plumbing. Why this was so, she wasn’t sure. Possibly, it was when she lost her favorite plastic pink ring, the one with the butterfly stone, down the bathroom sink, and Oskar, by the simple procedure of unscrewing the cleanout plug on the bottom of the sub-sink trap, had found it and returned the ring to her that her fascination had begun.

  You can’t go from the utter depths of black despair, convinced in your heart of hearts that you will never see your plastic pink ring, the one with the butterfly stone, ever again, and then arrive at the Olympic heights of bliss when Oskar calmly hands you the very same plastic pink ring with the butterfly stone, saying, “There you are, Miss Victoria, good as new,” without it having a pretty profound effect on your overall worldview, when you’re three.

  This had led Victoria to see Oskar as some sort of superman and she immediately took a strong interest in his doings. Not long after this, she was well rewarded when a mysterious leak was discovered emanating from some spot between her floor, floor ten, and the floor above.

  Oskar had arrived, walked purposefully to the hall closet of their apartment, and, to Victoria’s immense surprise, removed a board in the back, thereby revealing an array of beautiful shining, convoluted and involuted pipes and valve hand wheels. Quite literally an unseen world had opened before her. She had immediately asked what was what, what went where, and so on. Happily, Oskar is not a super who doesn’t like to answer questions. So he spoke of risers and descenders, showed Victoria which pipes were cold and which were hot, and then gave her his best estimate as to where exactly the leak was.

  Later that day Victoria watched the hole get knocked into the wall in the inside stairs. Oskar then showed her with his flashlight how the hole in the wall in the stairs could actually lead up to the inside of her own closet.

  “It’s Main Street for mice. Not that this building has any mice, of course,” said Oskar, quickly.

  “Thank goodness for that,” said Victoria. “I’m afraid of mice.”

  Since that time Victoria had been fascinated by the insides of the building that we don’t see: the pipes, the beams, the cables. She started to accompany Oskar on his rounds whenever she could.

  •

  But back to our story of Liesl, our boiler. The winter of Victoria’s tenth year was an extremely cold one. Arctic winds picked up from their accustomed playgrounds in northern Canada and hustled south, around and over the Adirondack Mountains, and then down the Hudson River valley, which funneled them like some geographic tollbooth plaza until the winds arrived furious and biting in the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

  But especially Manhattan because everything is at its utmost in Manhattan.

  Then 777 Garden Avenue shivered. And the residents inside shivered too. Something was wrong with Liesl. All the outside rooms of the building were cold.

  “Liesl is depressed,” said Oskar, as he and Victoria walked the hallway on the eighth floor. They had found no blockages on the fifteenth floor. “Her extremities are cold. She’s got bad circulation. She’s not digesting properly.”

  They stopped at 8D, Mr. Sherman’s apartment, and rang the bell.

  Mr. Sherman opened the door. He stood in a bathrobe, woolen gray slippers, and a ski hat with earflaps.

  “Er,” said Oskar, “sorry to disturb, but we’re checking all the radiators.”

  “Hi, Mr. Sherman,” said Victoria.

  “It’s like the North Pole in here,” said Mr. Sherman. “I should drill a hole in my living-room floor and go ice fishing. I have to put my head in the toaster oven just to think.”

  Oskar and Victoria slid past Mr. Sherman, who followed them into the living room.

  “Can I feel my fingertips? Forget about it! I can’t feel my elbows. There’s a sign in the back of my mouth that says ‘Danger: Bridge Frozen!’ The cockroaches have formed a hockey league in the kitchen sink.”

  Oskar kneeled down and placed his hand on the radiator and then turned the valve wheel back and forth a bit, holding his ear close to it. He held up a hand to stop Mr. Sherman from talking.

  Victoria stooped over Oskar and Mr. Sherman stooped over Victoria.

  Then they all three straightened and retraced their steps to the front door.

  Mr. Sherman said, “Don’t you want to take the temperature of my bed? It’s like the cold of deep space. It’s like the far side of the moon. You seen that documentary about the emperor penguins in Antarctica? That’s my bedroom on a good day! Look, it’s so cold my hair won’t grow. I’m going bald. I have to wear this hat.”

  “You’ve always been bald, Mr. Sherman,” said Victoria.

  “Yeah, maybe, but not this bald,” and Mr. Sherman pulled off his ski hat like a conjuror revealing the rabbit and inclined his bald pate toward Victoria.

  As a matter of fact, his head did look particularly bald.

  “Thanks, Mr. Sherman,” said Oskar. “We’re working on it. Good afternoon, Mr. Sherman.”

  “Next time you visit,” said Mr. Sherman, “bring a cocktail shaker. You can use bits and pieces of my frozen body to chill the gin.” Then he shook Victoria’s hand, saying, “Nice to see you, Victoria. Say hello to your mother.” And he shut the door.

  Walking to the elevator, Victoria said, “His hands really are cold.”

  “We’ve got to get through to Liesl somehow. She’s losing the will to live. And she’s too young to die. She’s only twenty-five years old.”

  •

  Victoria’s eyes began to lose focus, then rolled gently upward, and at last snapped open like two mousetraps and refocused when some inner alarm pulled her back into consciousness.

  She sat, leaning forward over a sheet of paper, the third handout her fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Emily Bland, had dealt the class that day.

  Victoria read:

  Read the following text fragment and then write a sentence about how the text fragment makes you feel, using the phrase, “The description of the mountains makes me feel _________ and _________.”

  I feel terrible, thought Victoria. I can’t see straight, my fingers and toes are freezing, something’s wrong in my stomach. Am I losing the will to live?

  Victoria pushed herself back from her desk and folded her arms, a deep and thoughtful frown spreading across her face. Normally an assignment like “The description of the mountains makes me feel _________ and _________,” while certainly annoying, wouldn’t cause her to lose the will to live. It was just a part of the routine of her day. There must be something more bothering her. She thought back.

  She had felt fine in the morning. Gym had been okay. Math was fun, even. Social studies had been engaging. So why had one simple black-and-white handout given her such a feeling of doom?

  Victoria squeezed her eyes shut. The first bad feelings had come to her just after lunch. What had happened at lunch? She had sat with the usual pals, eating the usual lunch: peanut butter and salami with iceberg lettuce on rye, an apple, a cookie, and a pint of milk.

  All correct. Or was it? Th
ere was something that was wrong. Victoria could nearly taste it. She took a deep breath, relaxed her brow, and then she remembered. The milk was wrong. It was skim! She usually drank whole milk. Today her usual red container was the palest blue. Of course! It had tasted awful. But was this the solution?

  One minute before the bell for dismissal rang, Victoria carefully wrote in, “The description of the mountains makes me feel weak and disoriented, unable to focus and get on with my life,” and passed it over to Ms. Bland, as she came around the desks to collect the papers.

  Five minutes later, out on the narrow and crowded sidewalk of Lexington Avenue, Victoria checked her change purse for funds.

  “A dollar thirty-five. Plenty,” she said, cupping her hand over the purse and pushing into the door of the U Like Deli. At the back of the store she grabbed an ice-cold pint of milk in the sweating red carton, paid, and then drank it down in one go on the sidewalk, in spite of the icy winds blowing around her, tickling the fake fur of her quilted hoodie.

  “Shazam! Low-fat begone, I feel good.”

  Fully recovered by dinnertime, she ate, watched a little TV, did her homework, and crawled into bed early. It was just too darn cold in the apartment to stay up any longer.

  •

  The rest of the week continued as before. The arctic winds blew and the outside rooms were, if anything, getting colder. Mr. Sherman had taken to pacing the lobby in his bathrobe, slippers, hat, and coat.

  “Eskimos,” he said, “have twenty-nine different names for cold. Number twenty-three is umlukniknob, which, translated into English, means ‘my living room.’ ”

  •

  Oskar handed Victoria a mug of hot cocoa and they sat down across from each other at his metal-topped desk in his office in the basement, just down the hall from where Liesl stood on her spindly but sturdy legs, softly hissing and murmuring.

  “The board meets tomorrow night. If I can’t figure out what’s bothering Liesl by then, she’s had it. The residents won’t put up with this anymore and I don’t blame them. She’s been a good old boiler, but I guess this is her time.”

  “This is not her time, Oskar, and you know it,” said Victoria, putting her hot cocoa down softly.

  “I know! You’re right. All right. Now let’s just think this through slowly one more time. What does Liesl’s day look like? The answer must be there. Well, she never goes out. It’s a very quiet life really. She just stands in the room and makes steam. From October to April she makes steam, and then in the summer she gets a bit of a rest. She doesn’t see anybody. Except me.”

  “But are you sure?” said Victoria. “What if someone has been sneaking into Liesl’s room and tampering with her? Who besides you has a key to her room?”

  “Well, Mr. Zeebruggen, the board president, and the building manager do, but why would they tamper with Liesl? What’s their motive?”

  “I’m getting to that. First, we establish opportunity. Then we look into motive. Maybe there’s something in it for Mr. Zeebruggen, or the building manager, if we get a new boiler. What if one of them is in tight with a boilermaker and will get some kind of kickback if we buy a new one? How much would a new boiler cost?”

  “A lot.”

  “That’s it then. We’ve established motive. And we’ve got opportunity. Once we connect one of them to the new boiler company . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she clapped her hands. “This won’t be the first time a little graft, bribery, and corruption have reared their ugly heads.”

  “Kickbacks? Graft, bribery, and corruption? Where do you learn this stuff?”

  “Social studies. Mr. Engbloom believes in telling it like it is.” Victoria chewed on the end of a pencil. “Now, we’re going to have to break into the building manager’s office, and Mr. Zeebruggen’s apartment, possibly even hack into their computers, but I’ll handle that end. Okay, what time does the building manager call it a night?”

  “Six thirty, but hold on now, Miss Victoria. We are not breaking into anyone’s office or apartment. That’s ridiculous. It’s against the law, the building procedures, and my moral principles. Doesn’t Mr. Engbloom teach you any moral principles?”

  “Mr. Engbloom says we need to return the power to the people.”

  “Well, Mr. Engbloom does not live at 777 Garden Avenue. Let’s leave Mr. Engbloom at school for a minute, because there’s another reason your theory is all wrong. I check Liesl every morning myself and all her controls are set properly. There has been no tampering with Liesl. No, let us return once more to Liesl’s day. She stands and steams.”

  Victoria sipped her cocoa. “Well,” she said, “if her outsides are right, since you’ve checked everything, then there must be something wrong with her insides. What goes into Liesl?”

  “Water and fuel,” said Oskar. “And electricity to regulate her.”

  “And you say the controls for regulating are correct. The lights down here are all on, so the electricity seems okay. What about the water?”

  “Water comes from the water tower, and it’s fine. Otherwise we’d all be sick. Liesl drinks the same water we drink.”

  Victoria put her mug down. “This hot cocoa tastes funny.”

  “It’s low-fat.”

  “Low-fat. Low-fat? Did you say low-fat? That’s it!” Victoria jumped up.

  “What’s it?”

  “Someone’s monkeying with her fuel. Listen, I went through this whole same thing at school, but I don’t have time to go into it now. When does Liesl get her next drink?”

  “Well, she’s always drinking. But if you mean when is the next fuel-oil delivery scheduled for, that’s tomorrow. It comes in a big truck.”

  “Perfect. Tomorrow is a teacher-development day. Mr. Eng bloom is very excited. Anyway, the important thing is I’ll be home and we can stake out Liesl’s libation.”

  “Libation?”

  “It means drink. Mr. Engbloom believes in expanding our vocabulary. What’s Liesl’s libation company, by the way?”

  “Lamprey Fuel Oil.”

  “Maybe I should have Mr. Engbloom check them out. Would it be wrong for me to send him an e-mail, I wonder? I’ve got to go upstairs. Tomorrow we get to the bottom of this. Don’t give up on Liesl!”

  •

  The following afternoon, if you had been driving down Seventy-seventh Street on the Upper East Side, you would have had to inch your car past an enormous deep-green tanker truck, double-parked alongside the north side of 777 Garden Avenue. The truck stood yards high and shimmered. It was very clean and the many chrome bits with which it was festooned reflected its yellow lights, its red spiral pinstriping, and its picture of a grinning white lamprey eel.

  A heavy hose, the diameter of a medium-size anaconda, ran from the truck’s tail end and across half of the sidewalk where it connected to a pipe mouth that ended flush with the sidewalk. This was Liesl’s own mouth in a way, where once a month or so she was filled up with fuel, Liesl’s libation.

  The Lamprey Fuel Oil man lounged against his rumbling green truck, making small talk with Oskar. Victoria, disguised as a ten-year-old too little to be interested in grown-up things, jumped rope in her padded winter parka.

  The fuel man strolled over to Victoria.

  “Ain’t it a little cold to be outside?” he said.

  Victoria just stared at him, dumbly.

  Oskar said, “I’ll head in then. Give me a call when you’re finished filling up.”

  The fuel man nodded to Oskar, turning back to the truck as Oskar glanced at Victoria and raised his left eyebrow before descending the metal ramp to the basement.

  Victoria skipped rope.

  As soon as Oskar was gone, the fuel man went to the back of the truck and turned a large valve wheel to the right.

  Victoria jumped a little closer.

  The fuel man unscrewed the metal ring attaching the hose to a spigot on the truck and then shifted it to another spigot next to it. He glanced once over his right shoulder toward the building and then secur
ed the hose to the new spigot. He turned another valve wheel to the left several times and then sauntered to the sidewalk and leaned against the truck again.

  Victoria slowly skipped around the corner of the building and then to the front door, where Mr. Bunchley let her in. Immediately, Victoria threw down her jump rope and ran around the elevators to the stairs and then down to the basement.

  “Just like I thought,” said Victoria, rushing up to Oskar, who was waiting outside the boiler room. “He switched the snake to another hole as soon as you left. I’m sure what he’s giving Liesl is low-fat.”

  “Well, we’ll just check that right now.”

  They entered Liesl’s room, climbed five steps of a metal ladder and up to Liesl, who hummed and murmured, smelled like molasses, plums, charcoal, and fire, but still didn’t look quite right.

  Oskar lifted a pail off of a hook on Liesl’s flank. “Mr. Engbloom sent me a message from his iPhone by the way. Lamprey Fuel Oil has been sued four times since last year.”

  “We’ll have our answer soon,” said Oskar, who held the pail beneath a spigot jutting from a large pipe that crossed over to Liesl just below the ceiling.

  Oskar pointed over his head. “The Lamprey guy is standing only a few yards that way.”

  Instinctively, Victoria hid behind Oskar a bit as he slowly opened the spigot with the valve wheel. A stream of what looked like thin Coca-Cola flowed into the pail. Oskar shut the spigot and poured some of the fuel into a glass, which he had taken from a small shelf on the side of the oil tank. He held the glass to the light and then showed it to Victoria. Seen this way, the fuel was very pale indeed. Oskar took a deep sniff at the top of the glass and then offered the glass to Victoria.

  Victoria said, “I don’t smell anything.”

  “That’s just it,” said Oskar. “The smell should just about knock you out.” Oskar put the glass on the shelf again and wiped his hands on the rag he took from his back pocket. “It’s low-fat, all right. This is diluted fuel. It’s weak. They’ve tampered with her food. They’re giving her skim.”

  •

  Later that evening, Victoria paced outside the building’s conference-room door. When it opened at last, Oskar emerged and Victoria walked briskly to him and cocked a questioning eyebrow.