Pajama Party

You forgot all about the snow.

It was there, falling from the sky, leisurely at first, cottony round flakes of it, bellies swollen, sticking to everything, the city surfaces, pavement, lampposts, street signs, mailboxes, rooftops, as well as the other surfaces, lawns, tree trunks and branches, patching over the holes, filling in the crevices, healing the scars, until most of the available surfaces were generously coated, the edges softened and a significant part of the noise absorbed, neutralized, your footsteps on the sidewalk even, the whole way to work.

Yes, it was there, when you walked from The Halfway House to the subway station, there when you emerged at the end of line, there when you boarded the cross-town bus, your connection, there when you got out at your stop, clumsily, after almost having missed it, having been lost in the pages of your book, the usual readings, Strategy for Revolution by Regis Debray, in this case, and it was there as well when you walked the remaining two blocks to The Community Center, nestled in the middle of the vast park, under the guardianship of the giant trees.

It was there, the snowfall, so unmistakable, straight out of a poem, or a Simon Joyner song, and then it wasn’t.

Just like that, upon crossing the threshold, upon entering the building from the employee entrance, the side door, so very discrete, hidden almost, a secret of sorts, upon punching your timecard at the foot of the freight elevator, upon starting your shift, the third shift, at that very moment, it went away, it disappeared, sinking beneath the waves right as the waters got choppy.

Thoughts racing in the usual dangerous directions, coming up against the usual walls, unscalable, forming the usual eddies, their familiar ruts, struggling to find the way forward, the way over, through, out, the anxiety creeping in, taking hold, manifesting itself in the form of pacing back and forth along the corridors of The Community Center, up and down the interminable staircases, gripped in this manner, you forgot all about it, the snow, forgot, most of all, of its softening of the edges, its calming effect, like a heavy blanket.

Of course there were the toilets. Of course there were the salt stains on the floors, so difficult to remove. Of course there were the wet floormats to hang up to dry and replace with dry ones. Of course there was the hair to remove from the floor drains, hanging on for dear life. Of course there handprints on the windows, down in the corners or high enough to defy explanation. Of course there were the trash bags dripping from the corners, a sticky solution, an unsavory concoction of half-finished sodas and coffees. Your shift, nonetheless, its meaty middle, its hard kernel, was composed of something entirely different.

It was composed of words, a dense mesh of them, separating you from cleaning, from your shift, from the work at hand, a smokescreen that isolates you, an endless stream of discourse, issuing forth from the hidden wellspring, perhaps a little poisoned, if not more, forming piles and piles of words that, shovelful after shovelful, you feed into the insatiable mouth of the furnace and the wild dance of its flames that, writhing, produces the steam that churns the pistons that fuel the usual obsessions, personal or professional, and the greatest fixation of them all, the interstice between the two, the profession and the person, the craft and the craftsperson, the book and the broom, the vanishing point where The Blueprints, so long in the making, crash into the quotidian, sending sparks flying, prefiguring conflagration.

The third shift was consumed in this way, between cleaning products and faulty interpretations, frenetic scouring and hermeneutic dead ends, oblivious to the snowstorm raging outside.

It caught you off guard, then, when you clocked out at the foot of the freight elevator, when you removed your winter coat from the hook on the wall, when you slipped your arms through the sleeves and zipped it up all the way up to your double chin, when you punched the code into the keypad to activate the alarm, when you tried to open the door and noticed the resistance, as if someone were holding it shut from the outside, as if there was something that you weren’t understanding, when you really had to put your shoulder into it and the door swung open at last.

It caught you off guard when you saw it, right there before you, the massive snowdrifts, covering the park benches, the footpaths now entirely buried beneath a rolling meadow of snow, great swaths of it, so much more than you could have ever imagined, causing you to pause and to try to calculate how it would be possible to produce such a quantity of snow in such a short span of time, just one shift of the usual cleaning and pacing and obsessing.

Yet there it was, the snow, just being itself, doing its thing, disorienting you with its bare existence, falling and floating and flying sideways and sticking to surfaces and softening and coating and calming.

Standing there on the other side of the doorway, the out side, staring into the fury, into the frozen tumbleweeds cartwheeling through the air of the park, between the giant trees, their branches weighed down with white powder, heaping helpings of it, standing there at the end of your shift, the far shore, you squinted and tried to make out the street corner, your bus stop in the distance, but you couldn’t. There was too much static on the screen.

You drove your hands deep into the front pockets of your winter coat and tried to envision your odyssey through the city. You envisioned yourself waiting at the bus stop, all but buried, for a bus that wasn’t going to come. You envisioned yourself walking into the wind, cheeks red, snowflakes on your eyelashes, trudging through the snowbanks, all the way to the train station. You envisioned the city shutting down, the trains canceled, the sidewalks empty, broken boughs of trees in the middle of the streets. You envisioned yourself, a solitary figure, alone with the city, growing smaller and smaller, until you’re just a dot, the size of a snowflake, and then ultimately indistinguishable, entirely engulfed by the white night and its white noise, turned down low, just a murmur and so calming. You saw yourself emerging triumphant at the doorstep of The Halfway House, braving the storm, the only one.

Filled with these visions, you braced yourself for the first step, always the hardest.

Taking a deep breath, you held the night in your lungs, a little piece of it. As you did so, the words subsided and you went quiet, from flame to ember, for the first time since the start of your shift. You had the distinct feeling that you could stand there forever, night in your lungs, softening the edges.

Then you let out a sigh, releasing the withheld portion of the night, and turned around to face the building. Biting the fabric of the middle finger of the glove on your right hand, you removed it and fumbled through your pockets for the keycard, which you then held up to the sensor, mounted on the wall of the building to the side of the doorway. You watched as the light of the sensor went from red to green and listened for the click that unlocked the door to the employee entrance.

Once back inside the building, you turned off the alarm, waited ten seconds, and then turned it back on again. This time, however, you did not exit the building when prompted but took the freight elevator, instead, down to the basement.

You did not have a plan, not at first. You figured you would wait it out, the storm, give the sky a chance to clear, give the snowploughs a chance to work their magic.

Over the months, you had hidden dozens of books in strategic locations throughout The Community Center, in the nooks and crannies, on the most out-of-reach shelves, behind the heaviest equipment, or sometimes in plain sight even. You had chapters to read, notes to take, arguments to sketch. And The Community Center is always peaceful at that time of night. So why not pull up a chair and stay a while?

It quickly became clear, however, that a plan was forming, a more elaborate plan, more coherent, an image coming into focus, ever sharper, ever clearer. As you worked out the details, you realized that The Plan was so good, so solid, that you were amazed that you hadn’t implemented it before.

The Sleep-Over Plan consisted in taking a gymnastic floor mat from the supply closet of the main gymnasium to some quiet corner of The Community Center and using it as a bed for the night, perhaps the filtration room, with its steady stream of white noise from the pumps, or the supply closet on the top floor, more spacious than the rest, or the entrance to the tunnel that once connected The Community Center to the public library on the other side of the park.

For the past few months, your thoughts had been circling around the idea of rehabilitating the entrance to the tunnel, A Room of One’s Own of sorts, potentially your own, if you played your cards right. Long in disuse, the tunnel itself had been sealed off with a plywood and drywall partition that clashes rather painfully with the burgundy brick of the original construction. Upon opening the door from The Community Center to the tunnel, you encounter a small space, perfect for a small desk, chairs, shelves of books, and an electric kettle for maté. There was even room for one of the gymnastic floor mats from the supply closet of the main gymnasium.

Yes, it was decided: the entrance to the tunnel was the best place to spend the night, the most suited to your needs.

So, you gathered your provisions, the floormat, two folding chairs from the classroom on the main floor, one to sit on and other to use as a desktop, as well as your backpack and winter coat. And you brought them down to the bowels of the building, the long-forgotten entrance to the tunnel, where you set up camp.

It didn’t take long to convert the entrance to the tunnel into a study, into your Room of One’s Own.

As you worked, you realized that The Plan had an added benefit. You wouldn’t have to return to The Halfway House in the morning. You had everything you needed at hand, everything to keep you busy until your next shift, the following night. You had a towel and extra change of clothes in your locker in the breakroom, so you could take a shower in the locker room and change into fresh clothes before going to sleep. And you always kept a toothbrush and toothpaste in your backpack, so there would be no need to waste a trip to a convenient store for such necessities. In the morning, after exiting the building undetected, which wouldn’t be hard, knowing the building as well as you do, you could walk across the park and spend the day at the library before returning to The Community Center at night for your shift.

Laying down on the floormat with hands clasped behind your head, staring up at the ceiling of the tunnel, you were filled with a sense of well-being, a sense that everything was going to be alright after all, after everything that happened since graduation.

You imagined the snow getting deeper on the outside of the building, a weighted blanket. You felt your limbs getting heavier, your body sinking into the floormat, and you made a mental note to bring slippers next time, a sleeping bag perhaps. ‘Next time,’ the phrase lingered in your thoughts, as they lifted anchor and drifted out to deeper waters. Next time. Vaguely, you were aware that you were setting a dangerous precedent.

In the morning, things would not be the same. A door was opened that hadn’t been open before, one that would be difficult to shut. A place existed that hadn’t existed before, not just another non-place, but a place place, just as much of a place as The Halfway House, a new place, a new phase even, full of possibility.