North Tower

Feeling lopsided.

Barney noted just two things in his small notebook. His daily assignment was to track lingering symptoms from his recent surgery. He was sitting in his unassuming room at Calbington Rehabilitation Facility looking out over the lawn. He watched as a strong wind blew the nearby forest back and forth.

Unlike most clinics in the tri-state area, Calbington accepted a wide variety of patients. Recovering drug addicts, psychiatric patients, and recent amputees, like Barney, all lived together and followed the same basic program. Calbington said it was innovative, the health department said it was confusing and very unlikely to be reconsidered for funding the following year.

Barney was glad to be there. He was planning on retiring anyway when a freak workplace accident flattened the front half of his right foot. His insurance payout covered three weeks in a rehabilitation facility and Calbington was the most isolated in the state.

The old Calbington building, a Victorian style mansion converted into a wonky private clinic with 20 residents, creaked and swayed the residents within its walls. The house had two towers, North and South, the top of which held the library and the piles of abandoned patient art therapy projects, respectively.

At group, Norman shared a dream he had about the walls of his room arguing, the South wall using seemingly rational points to seduce the East wall, while the North wall whispered poetry to the West. He said he awoke to the beginnings of a crack along his ceiling.

Barney sat next to Calvin, who mumbled most of the meetings and bumped into Barney as they got up. The wind was quickly becoming a storm by the time Barney got back to his room for the evening. Barney reached into his sweatpants pocket and felt the rough edges of his notebook, he pulled it out and flipped through the pages to find the first blank one. Instead, he found unfamiliar handwriting and the name CALVIN scrawled on the first page. Calvin’s recent entry read, “The towers are in disagreement.” His second recent entry read, “The basement hasn’t chosen a side, but the kitchen has pledged allegiance to North. The columns in reception are growing apart.”

Barney felt an eerie sense of familiarity reading the words as he listened to the rain pounding against his window.

The storm was truly a storm by the following day. At group, Barney sat next to Calvin and put out his hand, palm up. Calvin looked at his feet, and then pulled Barney’s worn black notebook from his robe pocket and slapped it into Barney’s hand. Barney handed Calvin back his own notebook. Calvin looked up at Barney and said cheerfully, “Oops!”

Norman raised his hand and began to tell the group that the crack in his ceiling had grown. Norman had begun to spread his hands apart to demonstrate the growth when Annalise cut him off. “Let’s hear from someone else today, Norman.” She pointed across the room to Rachel. Rachel slouched into her folding chair and told the group, “The library seems further away every day and walking is barely easier than when I arrived last week.” The group nodded and mumbled their agreement. The loudspeaker announced that their afternoon sessions were canceled because of the storm.

Barney returned to his room. He threw his notebook on the bed and huffed while he untied his sneakers and replaced them with slippers. He found that he disliked wearing his prosthetic when he was alone. In was more difficult to balance, but he didn’t feel any pressure to move symmetrically or at a particular pace with no one to judge him but the arguing walls. He decided he agreed with Norman that they were fighting and therefore had enough to worry about to mind how he looked relearning to walk.

Barney poked his head out his door to check the hallway for any stragglers before stepping out into the long hallway that ran the length of the building. The wind shook the windows at either side of the hall. The moonlight seemed somehow to be streaming in from both directions, running the length of the floorboards. Barney shuffled, left foot then right partial foot, left foot then right partial foot. The boards creaked under his left steps and mocked him by remaining silent under this right. After several slow waddles from window to window, his left big toe caught mid-step. Barney kneeled in the dim light to run his hands along what appeared to be the edges of several boards. He looked back and forth down the hall and estimated it was equidistant from North and South.

Barney returned to his room to make note of his evening walk. He flipped the notebook open to last full page, where he read the cursive notation, “I can’t sleep through the creaking, the screeching. Do bats live in the ceiling? Last night, the wall shook and knocked over my glasses.” Barney did not have glasses and his name was not Lorelai, as the neatly signed first page accused him. “Calvin,” he muttered angrily under his breath.

The next day, the storm raged against the house, and the house raged against the occupants. Barney went down to reception to ask about the forecast. Rosemary wasn’t at her desk, which was instead filled with sticky notes. Barney plucked a green one and read the tiny letters, “Storm. House? North Tower called, a message: no.” Barney plucked a yellow one and blinked a few times quickly before whispering aloud, “House! Is it? Art supplies have mutinied. Storm?” A loud crack of thunder interrupted any further snooping and Barney jumped as the phone on the desk rang. When he picked up and hesitantly said, “Hello?” the only response was static.

For the next several days, the group continued to meet in the dusty and damp sitting room, centrally located in the wide space on the first floor between the sitting room and reception, even as the walls began to strain against each other. Calvin feigned apologies and handed Barney more black notebooks. Norman’s dreams got worse, Rachel insisted the library grew farther and farther away and said she was glad. Xavier started calling Barney “Twenty K” after he got Barney’s notebook in the swap and saw the amount of Barney’s insurance payout. A dissenting group of South side patients started meeting at secret alternate times.

The storm worsened and the house shuddered with the cold, shaking loose leaves and dust that had gathered on the support beams. The boards in the hallway had cones on either side, a warning marked by one of the staff. The receptionist, Sylvia, moved into a vacant room on the South side after Faisal moved into the leaky library because the walls in his room “were too imaginative.”

Patients from the South used easels to create a barrier around a large crack developing between the bathrooms in the center of the building. Trees swung back and forth, flinging water at the already soaked outer walls of the mansion. The kitchen staff stopped cooking and started putting raw vegetables in the sitting room every day at 11 am and 4 pm. Barney kept a small stash of carrots to snack on in the drawer of his bedside table. He liked to munch on them while he read whichever notebook Calvin brought by. He read about the dreams of other patients as pieces of plaster dislodged from his walls like the house had goosebumps.

Barney made notes in the margins of the notebooks, circling points he deemed logical and scratching out poetry and creative musings.

The boards in the hallway started to separate and dip, creating a gap wide enough for the warning cones to slip through into the darkness. It created a slope towards the center of the house so that when the structure shook, furniture started to slide towards the gap. Nightly, the patients gathered to listen to radio reports of the storm. Landslides nearby had blocked the access roads.

On Saturday morning, the power went out. Barney blamed the South side and threw a drenched sneaker at them across the ever-widening gap between the towers. It fell through to the first floor with a squelch.

Sunday morning, the residents were exhausted from trying to find new vessels to catch the rain dripping down the walls. All of their blankets were damp. The boards they pulled out of the hallway gap wouldn’t catch fire even with some of the oldest book pages as kindling. Barney chewed the tip of his last drawer carrot as he watched the sun rise through the crack in the sitting room walls.

After two more powerless days, the house had shifted itself back and forth and created enough space that the patients had to step over a crevice on the ground floor. The hallway on the second floor required a short leap to cross from North to South sides of the house. But each side had become so restless that they barely wanted to see each other or the walls and features of the other side. Barney grumbled as he stepped over the crack to see if there was more food. South side patients slinked back into the shadows to avoid him as he grabbed his handful of carrots and shuffled away.

By the time the power came back on Monday night, the patients were startled to see their harrowed appearance in the fluorescent lights. Their clothes were torn, having snagged on boards and furniture scattered throughout the building. Just after midnight, Sylvia called out that the phone had a ringtone. Bodies slammed into each other rushing down the hallway. Calvin caught his sock on a bedside table that had fallen partway between the floorboards.

Waiting in line to use the phone, Barney heard the frantic calls of Rachel, Judy, and Xavier. They looked around skittishly as they whispered into the handset about the walls and the floors and the windows. Barney was right behind Xavier as he told his aunt that the crack in the corner of his room was big enough to fit a pack of cigarettes. Xavier told her the walls told him it was a safe spot to hide them. Barney told his brother he had thrown all the colored pencils into the void in the center of the house.

By the break of dawn Tuesday morning, sirens and helicopters descended on the lawn of Calbington Manner after multiple concerned family members called. The storm broke, a few rays of sun broke through the cloud cover and paramedics herded the patients onto the lawn to examine them for carbon monoxide poisoning. Barney felt his thoughts clearing as the clouds started drifting apart. He looked towards the house as a last fit of wind blew heavily from the tree cover behind him.

The sides of the house were more distinct now then ever, from afar he could see the North and South towers pulling at the seams in the center of the structure. The North tower tipped away from him while the South tower tipped threateningly toward him. The towers swayed as though dancing around each other. The wind picked a few stray documents and circled them around the growing hole in the center of the building. With a frenzied last screaming creak, the towers fell toward each other and away. With a strike of lightning from the remaining dark cloud, the towers collapsed away from each other into two distinct piles separated by a scattered line of dinner trays that had partially fallen into the crack.

The residents of the home nodded knowingly while EMTs jumped in alarm. Barney whispered, “Good, they hated each other,” as an oxygen mask was fitted over his head.