Help!
We have tried everything and everything has failed. Facilities Management does not respond. And the creatures taking over our once peaceful belfry bathroom do not respond to threats. I know this because just yesterday Dana - a good soul, a brave hallmate, I think she worked at The Herald - went in to restore order and never came out.
The fourth floor of Hegeman D has been overrun.
The urinal leaks, the shower leaks, the toilet leaks and the ventilator doesn't work. The single window won't open. With no air entering or escaping (except the gasps released by its victims), the bathroom has developed its own weather system.
The forecast: heavy fog.
The only variable: whether the effluvium will taste tart or tangy or smoky or spicy.
If you have sampled the smog, of course, you will soon be dead. But don't crouch. There is no safety below. Fetid pools of water have formed where there are no pipes. From what prehistoric depths do they bubble?
For those of you who look out for these sorts of things, who keep score, note: the machines have won. They have won, paradoxically, by breaking down and handing nature carte blanche in the bathroom. And we all know what nature does when it is allowed to run amuck. It kills.
Ari has fallen sick, and grows sicker by the day. He says he's fine but his wild blood-shot eyes tell a different story. I often find him lying on the floor of our suite sobbing but I pretend not to notice. As for my other roommate, Sam - well, I haven't seen Sam for weeks. Has he escaped to get help or has he also succumbed? I fear the worst.
All I have are my books. In one there is a poem by Baudelaire. He writes:
Nature is a temple where living pillarsSometimes emit confused words;Man passes through forests of symbolsWhich observe him with familiar looks.I had never taken that last line literally before. But now I know that Baudelaire was also being slowly overrun by all manner of bloodthirsty flora intent on sucking out his life.
But this brings me to a very serious point. Can someone - if indeed anyone is still alive down there - please break into Facilities Management and, with the buckets of my money they have, buy a safe-suit, gas mask, pliers, shot gun and other useful plumbing equipment, and come and save us?
I will pay you with the $40,000 my parents mistakenly paid to Brown so that I could be toyed with by a sentient pestilence, Les Fleurs du Mal, if you will, up here in the crumbling attic of Hegeman D.
Alexander Zevin '06 lives in a dorm.
