the loudest corner

My favorite place on campus is the fifth floor graduate computer center. It’s never too crowded and I have to flash my ID to get in. This makes me feel a little Secret Agent-y. Detective Whitney, reporting for computer use. ID? Yup. Cleared! Status fantasy aside, I love it because it’s warm. I sit there for hours cozily and productively reading and cranking out papers. But it closes around 9:45, which means home.

My house is not warm. It’s old and charming and really dirty (more later. HOLY CRAP, more later). My poorly insulated house wasn’t a problem until the temperatures dropped. Too cheap to turn on the heat, we tried to adapt by cooking (or in my case microwaving rice) in our hats, gloves, and sweatshirts. But at night, when we were still and body heat production was low, it was unbearable.

Because we live in an old house, we have gray radiators in each room. Mine is in the corner opposite my bed. We turned on the heat for the first time last week, and my radiator clicked and grunted once or twice but worked just fine. I took off my gloves, popped a big sleeping pill, and crawled into bed. I think I was dreaming that one of my students was a mass murderer.

At four in the morning, I woke to a thunderous clanking. Loud, metal to metal collision kind of banging. I sat up, pulled my covers close, and waited for an armed man with a crowbar to bust down the door and, you know, murder me. (Not because I’m anyone of importance, but because I have an easily followed routine and wouldn’t be missed in a city full of strangers.) I realized, though, that the clatter was coming from the corner near the radiator. Like right behind it, in the closet I refuse to use because it looks like spider mating ground.

So in an attempt to mimic bravery, I threw off my covers, opened the closet door and discovered a large piece of machinery that keeps my radiator producing the heat I so enjoy. Problem is, part of that production involves this steel-grinding cacophony. What follows is a kind of high-pitched hissing, like distant fireworks or a screaming teapot.

Downside: this happens every three-ish hours. Sometimes I’m still awake and it startles me. Other times, like on nights when I take a Xanax and watch Lord of the Rings, I wake up terrified that I’m caught in the fiery pits of Isengard surrounded by Orcs banging, shaping, working, and tempering metal swords, maces, and Medieval-style mattocks.

It’s cold, though, so the standoff between my radiator and I will persist.

But I finally bought a space heater that’s significantly less threatening.