The Raining Room

A Story by Anna

A miracle of modern engineering.

I’m driving barefoot to the university, partly because it’s far too hot for shoes, and partly because I like the feel of the rubber tread on the pedals. It’s satisfying to know exactly how fast I’m going. A rare uncertainty in life.

But god, it’s hot. The kind of heat that permeates your every cell, addles your mind and soul, delving where it’s not wanted and dissolving crisp thought into something deranged. A crazy kind of heat. And, of course, my aircon is broken �" the plastic grids around the steering wheel blow warm, useless air �" so sweat is dripping down my face like tears and saturating my new blue t-shirt. It was expensive too, a gift from myself to distract from the grim unpleasantness that waited at home, unpleasantness in the shape of a woman, a really rather lovely woman with soft round hips and lips pressed softly to my temples, which she did when I was upset, and I was often upset. Whatever. I bought the t-shirt from a fancy place in the city and walked out with guilt in the pit of my stomach and the depths of my wallet. It didn’t help.

I turn left after the shopping centre and pull up to a red traffic light, just in time for a group of kids to saunter past me, not older than maybe thirteen, cigarettes dangling from their mouths like lollipops and metal studs in weird places. I immediately try to disentangle myself from the judgement I feel: you pompous old fart. Twenty years ago you were eagerly tailing them, the geeky kid with the bowl cut and divorced parents. They laugh and tackle each other in the street (dangerous, the older me tuts) and then the light turns green and I cross the bridge and turn right.

It takes me ages to find parking at the university, and by the time I do I’m on the other side of the campus from where I need to be. I reluctantly slip on the shoes I threw in the boot and walk, cutting across the parklands, and by the time I get to the engineering building I am half melted, great pools of sweat running down my back and neck. I stand under the air conditioning unit for a few minutes, eyes closed, revelling in the relief of the thing, the little white plastic box that magics me back into sanity. Then I walk through the quiet whitewashed halls until I reach the lecture theatre, Room 13.4B, push open the dark wood door and there he is, a figure at a desk below hundreds of silent seats. The room is very empty, and my father seems very small.

“Hi dad,” I say, and start down the stairs towards him. He looks up, nods, and returns to his papers, waiting for me to approach him and ask him, as usual, for advice or commiseration.

As he becomes clearer I notice, as I always do, the tiny changes in him as he ages: his stomach growing fatter (he’s beginning to look disproportionate to the roundness of his belly), his beard longer, his hands trembling more as they turn pages. The only thing not to disintegrate, I think, is his eyesight, still sharp as cut glass in his bright blue eyes. He always had a disarming stare, tiny eyes blinking in a large, reddish face framed by white bushy eyebrows. I think idly that it’s just as well he doesn’t see my mother and that the home she’s in is on the other side of town. She looks so well it would kill him, her face barely lined and all her hair still blonde and curling at the ends. As a kid I remember him always loving her hair, touching it and curling it around his calloused fingers with a faraway look in his eyes, the last shred of intimacy between them left in my memory. I’m glad she still has her hair. No mind left but beautiful hair.

As I approach him he clears the papers quickly, hiding the receipts of his intellect like a child hiding forbidden candy wrappers. It used to bother me that he never shared his work with me, not even the notes for his lectures. I used to think he didn’t think me worthy, not smart or quick enough to understand him, but now I think he just likes to keep some parts of himself private. He used to share his thoughts with mum and now he shares them with lined paper and empty lecture halls, nice to finally get a silent appreciation that doesn’t answer back or ask about paychecks. He’s the quiet type, my old dad, but he seems very tired anywhere else but here, hunching over these papers and screwing up his sky-blue eyes at the words he’s shakily written.

“Come sit with me,” he says, and I obediently pull up a chair beside him, folding my hands on the table and waiting for him to place his own heavy hands on mine. He does and I feel a little lighter and more like a little boy than ever.

We sit in silence for a while as the cool air moves around us, and then he says in his slow, tired way, “Did she leave?”

“Yes. She left.”

“You miss her?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

“Will she come back?”

“Not this time.”

Saying it to dad brings up something in me and suddenly I want to cry. I swallow and wait for him to say something.

“You fought a lot.”

“We did.”

“You slept on the couch most nights.”

“I know.”

“I know it doesn’t make it better.”

I look at him and notice how the angles of his face have sunk with gravity. I see in his very blue eyes such a great and heavy sadness that it overwhelms his body, an illness of the soul of a strong and weary man.

“You’ll find someone else.”

His reassurance seems shallow and I feel very tired and wish I hadn’t come to this big depressing room. This hall is full of the shadows of bored students. Not the place for a profound father-son moment, least of all this infuriating obtrusive sadness that hangs around the podium stand. I feel annoyed at the inappropriateness of this situation, the wrongness.

“Dad, you should get away. Go on holiday or something. I’ll pay. Just take a sabbatical or something and get out of this place and stop thinking about mum and being so miserable.”

He looks up at me suddenly, puzzlement in his eyes.

“What makes you think I’m thinking about your mother?”

And I realise he’s serious. And he sees in my face that I’m stung.

He smiles slightly. “Joshua, you can’t imagine that your mother and you are the only things in my life.”

I recoil slightly, because that is exactly what I think.

“I study the present and the future, Joshua. Not the past. You’d be wise to do the same.”

“But I see it, Dad. I see how sad you are and how lonely…”

“I am lonely. And I’m sad for all sorts of reasons. I’m sad because I haven’t figured out the Great Uniting Theory of the Universe, and because I know I’ll die before I do. I’m sad because there are students in this room who waste their very great potential. I’m sad because the world is big and I am very small and my son is so young and so lonely. But it’s my sadness, and I’ll keep it.”

I look at him, bewildered. I don’t think I’ve heard him speak this much since he made a speech at my 21^st birthday.

We look at each other and hear each other breathing.

“I want to show you something,” he says, and he stands up and begins to walk up the many stairs of the lecture theatre with his slow and lumbering gait. To my own surprise, I find myself hurrying after him.

He takes me to the stairwell and starts climbing those.

“Dad, you can’t do that. Take the lift.”

He ignores me and asks, “Joshua, do you know how an air conditioner works?”

“An air conditioner?”

“Yes. A normal, everyday air conditioner.”

“No.”

“Well, take for example the air conditioner in this building. This mechanism works on a refrigeration cycle, based on pressure regulation to induce phase changes…”

“Dad…”

He’s climbing quickly and puffing intensely, and soon he stops stepping up with each foot and brings them both up to each step one at a time. I grab his arm and he collapses heavily and for a moment I think he’s fainted, but he sits on the landing between staircases (we’ve gone up four flights), and heaves deep breathes.

“Dad, let’s just stop, you can’t handle this.”

“No, Joshua, not now.” And he says it with such intensity that �" insanely �" I nod, wide-eyed.

He gathers his breath again and stands up, starts talking and climbing again, panting between each word.

“So we use an electric fan motor to power a compressor that will manipulate the pressure in two separate compartments, say, the area to be cooled and an external area. In the cooling area, we place an evaporator coil, which evaporates into vapour due to the low pressure we have induced. The heat is thus removed from the area.”

He’s speaking with more excitement than I’ve ever seen, even though he can barely catch his breath. Six floors up.

“Meanwhile, in the external area-”

He stumbles and I catch him, but he brushes me off and keeps climbing.

“-We compress the refrigerant vapour, put it through another heat exchange coil…”

Eight floors.

“And it condenses into liquid, releasing the previously-absorbed heat and ready to be reused!”

He stops, and grins at me. I realise we’ve reached the end of the stairs and are facing a single grey door marked “AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY”.

“Do you know where these external areas are located, Joshua?”

“No, of course I-”

“They are located at the very top of the building.”

We both stare at the grey door.

“What, in there?”

He leans close to me, and smiles confidentially. I feel my heart race (this is insane! Why are we here?) like a kid again, waiting for the secret my father is about to bestow at the top of these endless stairs (that I shouldn’t have let him climb). And somewhere dimly in my chest I know that Julie is gone and mum is almost gone and there is such great, enormous sadness in the world and nothing is going to be all right, not now or probably ever in my life. But standing at this door with my father, both of us grinning like lunatics, I feel my breathing quicken and adrenaline coursing through me and I really, totally do not give a f**k.

He speaks in a low, course whisper.

“A raining room, Joshua. A room that’s sole purpose is to cool us and sharpen the air we breathe. It rains in there, Joshua, when it hasn’t rained out there-” he nods to the windows behind us, “-in months. It’s like… it’s like…” I see his eyes scanning the air above my head, searching for a way to describe it.

“It’s like it rains all our sadness and keeps it at the top of our buildings,” I say.

He squeezes my hand and we look at each other.

“Can we go in there? Are you authorised?” I ask tentatively.

And then he says something I know I will not forget in my life, unblinking and more honest than I have ever known him to be.

“Every man is authorised to look upon his sadness in the room above his head.”

And we pause. And I love him very much in that moment.

Then we press on, to the room that cools our minds and the fire in our souls.