Alone again. With almost everyone else on the floor gone, I’m stranded until Thursday morning when my train leaves.
We closed the Harrison Gr1lle Monday night. That involves throwing all the food away and cleaning every station out, scrubbing them with hospital grade vigor, and eating all the leftover cake. I stationed myself at the dish sink with the overhead 180° water hose and sprayed all the food off the pans. The worst part is the sauces. It was sorta bad when my watch smelled like chocolate syrup from shakes. Now with l’eau de garlic mayonnaise et buffalo sauce on it, it smells like a super concentrated platter of wings from Applebee’s.
Then Tuesday afternoon, as I had been looking forward to for a long time, I finally got to see the old gang again (the Action Heights one, not the thugs from Chino). Neal skyped me into Borg’s room on his laptop webcam for the annual Returning Seniors match, wherein this year’s young upstarts on the Schol bowl team challenge the Old Legends. They set me (the laptop) on a desk and had an unnamed puppet holding the buzzer. (I couldn’t see them. I was facing the other team.) Apparently, I was just supposed to yell “buzz” or pound on the microphone or light a small fire in front of the webcam, and they would push the plunger for me. The audio quality was a little shifty because of the volume normalizing, because I think the microphone tried to cancel background noise, which in this case would be Ancy calling the questions. So I would hear a question like, “Name the lining….. ….. ….. fluid……. missionary….. center of the epithelial layer.” And that’s all I would hear, because the middle part of the question would be noise-leveled out. That’s why I wasn’t so sure about my answers to the ocular anatomy question. When I turned out to be right, Friz threatened to shut the laptop lid. Oh, well, we won. And I got to be god for a couple minutes as my visage was projected on the screen and my voice boomed forth from the ceiling speakers.
As Tuesday marked the end of classes for this week, dinnertime saw the departure of almost everybody on the floor, in the building, on the campus. As I scootered myself towards the library in the bright afternoon sun, the leaves rustled, the red brick blurred past, and not a soul moved. The zombies waited in the dark…
