On Thursday evening during a heavy rainfall the castle’s ceiling began leaking above our bed. I first noticed the sound from my desk, like a damp rhythmic patting. When I walked in I saw yellowish water dripping from the light fixture into an egg sized depression in the bed sheets; the smell metallic. After putting our largest pot where the pool was forming I called the building manager, then called again, and again. I was about to call R—— when my phone buzzed: “send email to info@aqprmf.com.” 

Immediately I typed into the body of a new email: Water is pouring from our ceiling. Help needed urgently, please call me.

As I waited for a response I sent a video of the water to R——, then searched the internet to find out how bad the situation was. Pictures came up of ceiling collapses and mold dominated attics, a crew in hazmat suits removing wheelbarrows of asbestos and building debris. Why was the water yellow? We knew already there was a mold issue from the dark, gestalt-like shadowings that periodically surfaced on the wall of the bedroom window and along the adjacent one, which we tried keeping our pillows from touching after we found mold growing on them too. 

One image I found was from another renter—their ceiling bloated, the latex paint holding barrels of water back, ballooning out like a massive cyst ready to pop. How do landlords get away with this, leaving their tenants in nightmarish conditions and still charging rent? Where was the persecution for these indignities? Look up rights, I wrote on a slip of paper, remembering reluctantly a page of narrative theory: “The mind is the nexus of the brain, the body, and the environment.” The slip of paper an extension of my mind, the way we leave our keys by the front door or our packed lunch at the front of the refrigerator. But what good was this information if it couldn’t secure me a safe place to sleep? The practicality of my knowledge was that it opened windows to more thinking, which opened still more windows, until what you saw was what really all was there—“The Dream of the Unified Field.” This was the idea.

The house itself was crumbling and all I could do was look out its windows. 

On the Internet, a man feeds a pack of hot-dogs to a grey swelling wave of racoons. He’s on his back porch in a ski-jacket, wood planks powdered with frost. Over 30 million times this video has been played. 

I’m cocooned in bed in the living room, where we are temporarily storing everything from the bedroom until the leak gets fixed. Days have passed this way, drenched in blue artificial light from the neighbour’s terrarium, watching the video of the racoons over and over again on my phone, keeping my books and laptop far away—a feeling that all the reading and writing I’ve been doing is vaguely responsible for this reoccurring sinus infection. A conspiracy that literature has a hand in my squaller, in my debts, in weak immunity to reality. Scrolling through the video’s comments I notice the viewers have a remarkable ability to instruct and delight in what they write—filling in what the racoons are thinking, the dialogue and names they give them, then slipping in mini manifestos about the right way to live, adopting a voice of textbook philosophy; the doom we bring upon ourselves when we ignore simple acts of kindness; the immanent societal collapse wherever  people are no longer able to trust each other. There are over 100 thousand comments like these, comparing the hot-dog handler to Jesus and Gautama, calling him an antidote to the times, his kinship with nature, the rustic earthiness of the video’s setting. One user writes: “if i could be anything id be this man.” When I open the profile it shows a thirty-something year old who makes videos about computer language. The user seems to know a lot about the way computers talk. His videos have thousands of views, but nothing like the hot-dog handler Jesus. There’s a certain reverence in the way people respond to the racoon video. Ailing, my body weak and feeble from a virus that’s been haunting me for months, I’m among the masses of people watching him and his racoons—the way some scale down his shoulders, their bony little hands, their plump bodies poised on hind legs, sniffing up at the air—expecting convalescence. I will not overburden myself with work; I will live humbly, I will be grateful. I will not stray from the light.