Life in a Thrashing Machine | Page 8

humble quality in the sounds that his
mind produced. He had always hoped and believed that in some way
God was instilling him with a special kind of skill and talent, but he
wondered if he were just suffering through delusions. He was confused
about his hopes of being divinely blessed with talent, and the strange
problems that he was having in progressing with his life. If, indeed,
God has given him the talent, then why didn't he give him a ready
outlet to share it with the world?
Vlad took his house key from his right pocket of his pants, unlocked
the door then entered. It wasn't that much warmer inside the house than
it was outside, in the winter air. He knew immediately that his mother
had turned down the thermostat again, in attempts to save some money
on the house heating bill, but Vlad could see that it made no difference.
The bills were just as high every month, regardless of how the furnace's
thermostat was kept. That was the way that business was run.
'Convince the people to pay more for using less', and his parents were
just the kind of people to let themselves be taken advantage.
Vlad could no longer care about their financial losses over useless bills.
He tried, several times, to explain to them that things didn't have to
work the way that they did, and that they should complain to some
higher place about it, instead of complaining to him.
However, after some two and a half decades of life in this country, his
parents were totally Canadianized and therefore became as apathetic as
the rest of the nation. If they didn't care about being sodomized by the
utility businesses, and by almost everything else, including the
government, he decided to be apathetic as well, and let them ruin
themselves.
Vlad closed the front door, took off his shoes and slowly counted to ten

until he heard a loud gritty voice echo down to him from the kitchen.
His mother was yelling at him with a heavy Hungarian accent, to close
the door and take off his shoes.
It was always the same thing when he came home; the same welcome
and the same turn of attention to something inane, which he had
already taken care of, himself. He bowed his head for a moment, trying
with his whole heart to keep from screaming in tortured mental agony.
He sat down on the bottom step and stretched out his legs. He leaned
back on the rest of the stairs and looked up at the dark ceiling.
"I hope I don't go crazy!" Vlad said to himself in a hopeless whisper.
From the kitchen upstairs, his mother barked at him to repeat what he
said.
Vlad took a deep breath and went up into the dining room.
"Was there anything in the mail today?" he asked her, as nicely as he
could but he got no response.
Playing that old deaf routine, again, he thought.
"Did anybody phone?" he continued, more harshly.
"Auntie Rita called and she told me 'dat she goes to Hungary this
Christmas with-"
Vlad cut her short. His voice was beginning to sound somewhat nasty,
since he didn't care about Auntie Rita, because she wasn't a relative,
much less any kind of blood relative.
"I mean, did anyone phone for me?"
His mother snapped back at him. "NO!" she hollered.
Vlad shook his head and quickly left the kitchen, making his way to the

basement. That place was his defenceless sanctuary. He was feeling
worse, now that he was at home. His frustration had increased and he
felt as if he couldn't breathe, at all.
He closed the basement door behind him and walked to the corner
pole-lamp and turned it on. He sat down on the piano bench and opened
the cover of the electronic keyboard.
Vlad began to pound away on the piano, his face contorting in a
manner that expressed anguish and stern concentration upon the notes
that he was playing.
The recreation room and the rest of the basement rang with the loud
pounding progression of Tchaikovsky's 1st Movement from Piano
Concerto No. 1. He made the piano writhe beneath his fingers and the
louder that Vlad heard what he was playing, the harder still, he tried to
release the ultimate volume from it, until shortly he stopped altogether
and slumped over the keyboard. He cried to himself without tears. Vlad
slowly sat up and shook his head slightly and grinned to himself. He
played some strange notes with one hand that lead him into a
goofy-sounding little tune that he remembered playing when he was a
kid.
The tune was Dvorak's 'Humoresque', and it was indeed one of the first
tunes that Vlad had learned