Chapter 6

六

The drilling sounds in the morning were becoming louder and louder, waking me up every day, often around 4 a.m., if I could sleep at all.

The insomnia got worse. It’d grown malignant. I’d have to take Xanax, every night, otherwise I couldn’t sleep a wink.

It wasn’t only me. Marco, the others, they’d been looking rough as well, their complexions sallow...

I was starting to believe the school itself to be a ghost or maybe a vampire that was sucking away our collective life force, cruelly drinking away our vitality and sleep...

Marco told me after breakfast that the lecture stage in his classroom collapsed as he and two of his students stood on it. Luckily, besides a couple bumps and bruises, no one was seriously injured.

“I asked the school, three times, to fix it,” Marco seethed, glancing up angrily at the creamy gray sky as we were walking down a tree-lined promenade, on the way to give our classes. Even under the penumbra of sagging clouds, I could see that the lines on Marco’s face were growing deeper, especially the crinkles on his forehead. The dude had seemed to age five years in only the short time we’d been there.

Another of our colleagues was with us, Rick, a late middle-aged Clevelander with leathery skin, platinum blond hair and piercing blue eyes.

We called Rick “Rooster” because of the spiky shock of hair he had running along his scalp, which, along with his pointy, chinless face, sort of made him look like a chicken.

As Rooster was walking with us, he lamented that “furniture, equipment was starting to disappear from his classrooms. And chairs, new chairs would snap. A student, a skinny one, cracked one the other day and landed on his ass.”

Rooster went on, scowling as he spoke, “There’s been buttloads of roaches in my apartment, too. Not to mention the mosquitoes, and the stray dog that ran in once. There’s been rats in my kitchen, rats ... Ugh, the first-floor sucks ... There’s a gaping hole in my balcony, too. I keep bugging the school to fix it, but they haven’t yet. There was a frigging hornet in there yesterday, a massive one...”

“Hey, Matty, was it you who said that hornets and wasps would fly into his classroom all the time last term?” I asked, then swirled and wiped my tongue at my teeth, checking to see if they were still there.

Man-bun nodded, made a facial expression like he had a stomachache and told us that the roof caved in that classroom, too, and that it was a newly-built room, to boot, but fortunately he didn’t have class the day the roof collapsed and thankfully the room was empty at the time.