After the Deluge
Trip Start
Dec 2007
1
17
41
Trip End
Aug 2008
Beijing,
China
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Worked all weekend...nothing exciting there, but I did have one big thrill over the Saturday/Sunday/Monday/Tuesday timeframe prior to the official beginning of the Chinese New Year Spring Festival... You see, my apartment decided to flood. I'll peel back for a bit to bring ya'll up to speed with a little background. I have the world's smallest washer and dryer combination in a tiny hall closet. Also located in this closet is a huge tank. A tank that resembles a large helium cylinder you might see at a children's birthday party, or full of nitrous at an underground rave. At the top of the cylinder is a very high tech, but extremely poorly constructed timer-looking thing that whirls all day and all night for apparently no reason.
This, I'm told, is a water purifier, but to me it appears more like a prop from a 1950's Space Monster film. Something that a crew member would monitor holding a clipboard, while the main character says something like, "I just don't get it..." Then a very chesty brunette might allow her hand fall to his shoulder, pulling closer, saying, "Jim...what is it?" "I don't know, Annette, but I do know this," turning to her face her with longing in his eyes, "What man has wrought in his idiocy, even God himself can't undo..." Together they turn to look out the tiny circular porthole, cheeks pressed together, to see the emptiness of space....When suddenly, another set of eyes come the opposite of the glass... And all the while, my hallway cylinder whirls as a frustrated Julliard trained underpaid actor crew member extra in brightly colored jumpsuit and perhaps a white hard hat scribbles on a chart in the background, as he considers moving back to Illinois to join his father's vinyl siding business.
So anyway, this thing does absolutely nothing, except that every few days it expels the multitude of gallons of water it houses for no purpose. This has been going ever since I have been in the apartment, but somehow always when I'm away...like it knows when I'm there...creepy. It has a very sketchy garden hose that emerges from the side of the cheap plastic timer-thingy. With a blast that sounds like a freight train derailing, the torrents of water come racing out the tube into a drain in the floor...or so is the design. You see, although there is a drain cover there on the floor in the tiny closet...the drain itself, well, it is concreted over. The first time I noticed a few damp spots on the floor when returning home from work, I was concerned something was a miss, but I just figured it was the cleaning woman's spills, or whatever.
So now that you're up to date... Sunday night, on the phone to my parents, and I hear the derailment, and immediately scan my brain for reference points for the incredible sound... Heavy construction or remodeling upstairs? The television in the bedroom exploding? And then I see it....the flood. The water is pouring out across the floor into the bathroom, into the living room. I grab a towel and start pushing the giant puddles towards the bathroom, which in fact has an operating drain in the floor. The water just keeps coming...and I keep moving it toward the bathroom, without much luck... More water...how much can this thing hold? Then it suddenly begins another sound, equally unappealing...a sort of sucking wheeze you might associate with the elderly Lucille Ball on her third pack of Old Gold's at the Friar's Club luncheon buffet. You know, that gravel voiced Lucy, even later that the Lucy Show...we're talking guest spots on any third rate early 80's variety show...something than might star Ruth Buzzy and Harvey Korman.
I think I'm out of the woods...but then....more water comes pouring out....I then race to shut off my water...and this only pauses the impending deluge to come....
To make this rather long story mercifully less lengthy...Time to call the real estate agent...except it is Chinese New Year, and literally everyone is on vacation. I sheepishly turn the water back on...and after a gurgle...nothing. I unplug the whirling monster, and hope for the best... I wipe up the water all the while thinking about a Costa Rican beach and a large beer at Clarita's.... Let see...Can I do it? If I sell the place in LA and Pittsburgh? How much could it be really be to live in a tiny beach condo in the CR?
