Cabin Fever

The ceiling started talking to him in September.

He lived alone in a small house, looking out on Green Bay.

He woke up at about seven on a Monday morning and lay in bed thinking. The first fall chill had invaded the room. From under the warm covers, he wasn't in a hurry to carpe any deims. His Kindle sat on the bedside table streaming a Gabriel Iglesias stand up special. That's a habit he developed years ago. He generally woke around four thirty, fired up his tablet, and listened to comedians. It helped him relax; he often fell back asleep in less than a minute. Sometimes, he woke up laughing.

He was an involuntarily retired software salesperson. Three years ago, his employer canned him because he failed to sell their crappy app for eighteen months - go figure. As a sixty-sixty-year-old, he had walked away from paychecks, business casual, and working with people he didn't respect. He'd escaped his Willy Loman days.

Now, he thought about what he had to do before noon.

Fix the kitchen window, sweep the garage, run the gas out of the outboard, power washer and lawn mower, and pay the bills.

He remembered that the garbage needed to be at the end of the drive before eight, which kicked him into gear a bit.

Then the ceiling whispered, "Hey, that's one exciting life you got going there."

He sat up and looked around the room. The dog, an elderly yellow lab named Bo, issued a low growl, and the hair along his back bristled.

The ceiling had never talked before, and the dog didn't like it.

The ceiling's drywall was textured using skip troweling, a fast and cheap finishing treatment. Contractors liked the process because any minimum-wage schmoe with half a brain could skip trowel a room in a couple of hours.

Sometimes, as the sun rose, he'd stare at the rough texture of the area over his bed and imagine he saw things. One area kind of looked like a naked woman if he squinted his eyes just right. That was his favorite chunk of the ceiling. The rest just looked like a bas-relief map.

After the ceiling spoke to him, he remembered Ebenezer Scrooge and how the first time his dead partner spoke to Ebenezer from the door knocker, Scrooge thought it was a case of indigestion. Now, he tried to remember what he'd eaten before sleeping.

He rolled out of bed and gave Bo some extra scratches behind his ears to calm him down.

While he pulled on his jeans, he decided not to drag the garbage to the road. The disposal company provided a large container on wheels. A week's worth of his trash only filled about a quarter of the bin. When the weather cooled, he often waited a couple of weeks before taking the rubbish to the end of the driveway because it didn't stink.

His ceiling commented, "Way to go, you've decided on the half-assed approach again. You're a champ at that. Maybe that's why you lost your damn job."

He began to not like the ceiling very much.

Next, he let Bo out the back door and watched him from the picture window. Bo stood on the deck, sniffing the breeze off the bay. He watched Bo because the dog habitually wandered off into the woods. That beast could follow a scent for miles. Eventually, Bo went into the yard and made another deposit. With that, he opened the back door and called the hound into the house.

For some reason, he thought about folding fitted sheets and how life is full of stuff like that—stuff where you can only do the best you can and have to accept the result.

With that happy idea, he remembered the nasty old mattress he had slept on as a teenager. It was a twin bed supported by a steel frame. One sharp spring poked through the top and stabbed him in his lower back. When this first happened, he flipped the mattress over and found another spring sticking out on the other side. One of his older siblings had already experienced the rusty spring treatment. The only solution involved placing a couple of magazines under the fitted sheet to cover the mean piece of metal. Complaining to his parents wasn't an option; the old man was traveling most of the time, and Mom struggled every day to keep her children from burning the house down.

The ceiling chimed in with, "Great - another pity party. That all happened over fifty years ago. Get over it."

Now he was tired of the ceiling and said out loud, "I'm not wallowing in the past. It's my life, and I just remembered something about it. It happened, and it's part of me, like my green eyes, my bad breath, and the shape of my belly button. So, why not say something nice?"

Then he thought:

Careful, chief, you're talking to the ceiling. What's next, imagining a six-foot-tall rabbit?

He went to his laptop and clicked on the NPR website. The House Intelligence Committee hearings oozed out of the speaker.

That's when Bo said, "Must we?"

He turned on the dog and thought, "If it's this bad in September, what will February bring?"