macblaze.ca

11:6

Ragnarök.

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök (UK) is a series of future events, including a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors.

—Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnarök)

He and his boon companions had taken turns reading aloud in the quad beneath the ancient campus basilica on those slow summer eves. There was something about those old Norse Eddas that had captured their imaginations and they had spent hours discussion their ‘impending doom’ as if it was quite real and inevitable.

And now it seems their prophetic impromptu salons were about to come home to roost.

The end was near. No matter that that if foresaw a new and better beginning; it was unlikely in the extreme that he was to be one of the chosen survivors, especially given his current circumstances.

The machine, its mysterious behaviour, the disaster at the mansion’s gates, the slow and seemingly unrelated series of events that had led to his current disreputable state: it all matched that saga and foretold the profitlessness of his current efforts to maintain the machine.

And yet he could not give up, could not pause in his enterprise, even for a moment. As if a hunger was upon him, a hunger to succeed, to survive to emerge again, as if he was destined to live on in another chapter. It was vain and arrogant, but that much of his true self had survived this ordeal. He had lived his life embracing his conceits and he would fight one wrapped in their accustomed embrace.

For if young Hal had been faced with ice giants rather than the scurrilously disdainful French he still would have uttered to himself that now famous line:

“Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more;”

11:5
Ever since he had returned to his room, the machine had been constantly demanding his attention. What had once been a mysterious and quite device had transformed into a veritable dragon: steaming and roaring at all hours and forever in need of attention and repair. It had stared with little leaks of steam from the major joins; little geysers hissing and spurting leaving his fine woven rugs forever damp and in danger of rotting.

In the blink of an eye the incessant demand of the oh so infernal device had begun to overwhelm him. If he was not attending to one tiny disaster or another,he had taken to trying to absorb the tattered manuals that he had discovered in the base of the main engine. He’d opened the access hatch trying to sop up the steady flow of alcohol that had erupted from glass sediment filter below the auxiliary pressure feed. Not that he had any idea at the time that was what he was doing. He just need to clean up the flammable fluid before it got into the carpet and became a danger. There were too many candles for him to leave such a dangerous leak for long.

And as such things happened, he had used the precious knowledge contained in the pages to put things to rights so he could once again attain a level of sanity, and, inevitably, instead of bringing about peace and security, his fumbling attempts to repair the issues had lead to a sever increase in leaks, sub sonic groans, and ear splitting shrieks as steam seemingly forced its way out of every joint, join and weld of this monstrosity.

Very quickly, the machine had become the central focus of his days and nights. So much so that he had not had a drink in weeks. Ah a drink… the lovely bouquets of malbecs and merlot, the sacred burn of the armangnac slowly flowing down the back of his throat… Instead he had the stink of machine oils and raw alcohol and the scalding of overheated fittings. But the machine still functioned; it demanded all of his attention and left him nothing but it had not yet failed and he still had hope.

He had hope that this series of breakdowns and failures would be noted by some other authority. He had hope that his improving skills would be sufficient unto the task. He had hope that it all meant something and that somewhere, someone appreciated his efforts, or at the vey least, was enjoying the fruits of his labor.

If not, then it would seem that entropy might win, and eventually, inevitably, the machine might fall silent for a final time.

11:4

The cravat was gold. Or at least it had once been. A subtle shimmering gold silk with fine threads of midnight blue woven in here and there forming an asymmetric pattern that would twist and dance in the light.

That pattern still caught his eye even though the once favoured cravat was currently wrapped around a corroded fitting on the brass pipe that ran along the base of the outer wall. It had gone from a place of honour in his closet to being wrapped around his neck to try and hold the sweat pouring off his head from flowing down and soaking his shirts to finally an ignoble end as nothing more than an ill-suited and ultimately failed attempt to patch up the secondary vent outflow.

The secondary vent outflow. A few scant months ago he had not even know that such a thing existed and now he was sacrificing his treasures so it might be granted a few more hours of functionality.

He turned his attention to the BOP valve and scratched his week old stubble. There had been two blow outs in the past week and and as far as his research could tell him, these protection valves were never meant to be used more than once. Still, it had worked flawlessly both times and he’d checked it over as thoroughly as he could before resetting it.

He picked up the copper oil can and triggered the little thumb pump several times, lubricating the main valve threads. There was little else he could do there and there was so much else that was demanding his attention.

10:31

Ali spun the lock on the carabiner and double checked the buckles on his harness. He followed the safety tether back to where it was attached to the door frame and made sure it hadn’t shifted and the safeties were engaged. “All good,” he said cheerfully to the woman on the ratty brown couch, “Wouldn’t want to go splat, eh!”

She looked like she was close to tears, but Ali suspected that it really wasn’t just the joy of his cheerful presence or his offer to scrape the mess from the outsides of her windows. She looked like she was having a hard day…a hard week perhaps. And since it was within his power to bring a little cheer into her life, well Ali was going to do just that.

Ali picked up his bucket and squeegee and walked back to the open window. These old apartments still had the traditional wood frames with the lousy slides. Charming, but they really hadn’t worn well over the decades and often made squeezing the windows out of the tracks a bit of balancing act. Often people just left them in like his charming host and tried to perform some sort of circus act when cleaning the outsides. It involved bending two opposite ways and having the arms of one of those big orange monkeys, but Ali supposed it could be done.

Really, though, it was all in the type of persuasion you chose to apply and Ali had just the tool.

As Ali approached the window he glanced at eh mess he was there to clean off. It certainly looked disgusting, but between the years of grime on the glass and the thick goop itself, Ali had a hard tim e identifying just what it was.

He put down his bucket and with one last unconscious twist on the carabiner lock, he slid out onto the window frame to get a closer look. No point dragging the mess into the apartment if he could get the bulk of it off before he removed the window.

As he leaned back to give his old eyes a chance to focus, a sudden thought spiked into his mind. It was Hallowe’en.

10:30

Ah, The end of October… failure is just in sight…
—The Author