Life in a Thrashing Machine | Page 8

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 to play on the piano. That was quite an achievement, he had thought, considering that he was six when he learned it, and by ear, too.
The lilting and bouncy nature of the music brought to his mind an image of the past. He saw himself as a little kid on the prairie in Loretta Manitoba, running through the wheat fields with a few of his friends and having a good time with them, torturing the gophers that lived there, and being just normal kids.
He remembered one of his first winters, too. Snow had fallen for a straight week then finally there was an entire day of nothing but sun and blue sky.
He was dressed in warm clothing, so much in fact that he could hardly walk, move his arms or anything. Vlad was just four or five, and