They weren’t really dreams, nah. That’s what I had t’tell the press so’s they’d shut up and let me be.
Yeah, I’d go to bed like one does ‘fore one falls out of the waking world, but instead of that cozy shift from the bed to dreamland, I’d toss and I’d turn. It’d be too chilly, or too itchy. I knew one of them visions was comin’—visions is what my granddaughter, Mexxie, would probably call ‘em—when it suddenly got too cold and there was an anxiety in my chest like I’d had two and a half cups o’ coffee too many, y’see?
I’m a seventy-something year old feller, so when the chestbox starts actin’ up you’re always ready for the big final kick, that lurch or stab or however it goes when the ticker’s gone done tockin’—sure as all hell scared me when I first felt it, alongside that cold feeling.
The first night it happened, I got outta bed, wanting to be near some Aspirin or my trusty land line telephone, in case I had ring in my own ambulance. The feeling got better as I moved, which I took to be a good sign, but the temperature seemed to get frostier… not colder, but more prickly. Hard t’ explain fully, but that hardly matters when you stand it up next to the fact that my front yard was all lit up blue, like Christmas had traded in its traditional colours.
Should mention, this was all in July in the Oklahoma panhandle, so notions of yuletide and frosty chills shoulda been two season’s turns away.
I step outside, and there along the grass, bright blue like a laser beam, well: blueprints. I recognized ‘em as bastard versions of the type I’d follow and occasionally draw back when I was working in construction, later a foreman, even later what they call a construction materials consultant. So I knew my way around these things, and there plain and pretty on my front lawn was the layout to my own little bungalow.
Plus one room, that is.
Normal room in all respects other than the arrangement of the electrical pieces. Four walls, door leading into my living room. No windows, but hell, the crissing and crossing of wires and arrangement of sockets, bulbs, switches—crazy!
So, me bein’ alone and bored most of the time, I decide to go ahead and make it. Why not? A hobby, that’s what my daughter always tells me to get. Once or twice a week I’d have the cold restlessness, so it was easy enough to sketch down the exact metrics and angles, easy enough to double check through the visionary nights as I slowly gathered the material needed.
The neighbour’s boys helped with some of the tough bits, drywall and such. But the electrical, I felt I needed to do that on my own. That was the special part, y’see?
‘Course, word gets around in a small place like this and soon enough someone from the local paper is interested in why ‘Old Man Builds Tiny Side Room,’ can you imagine? Slow news year, or what? So I tells them it’s coming to me in a dream, just something to pass the time, right? Christmas comes and goes and Mexxie and her mom visit, polite about the project but needing to understand why exactly, “what are you going to put in there”—how do you tell ‘em that I’m hoping the lawn will tell me when it’s done? You don’t, you play the ‘old man’s got a few eccentricities, let him be’ card.
Now that the room’s done, as of two nights ago, I’m jotting all this down in case something does happen and people are wondering, in case it’s another slow news year and they need something to fill the pages—Old Man’s Crazy Room Explodes, who knows.
What I know, is that when I saw my lawn last night it was all blue except for a winking green and red sequence: Christmas at last, perhaps. Green lights and red lights came off and on inside the special room’s blueprint. You know what those colors mean when it comes to ‘lectricity? Green is an open circuit: off. Red is on. It was showing me a sequence of switches. A code.
It had me install two banks of four light switches in there. I’m going to go flip ‘em in the order now, I stayed out there two hours from 2am to 4am making sure I had it exact.
Part of me knows what one will see in five minutes is an old man, half mad now, standing alone in a small empty room playin’ with switches until he frowns and gives up.
But part of me hasn’t felt as excited as I do since I was a boy.
by Jordan Castle