Room Draw

I guess I finally got smart the day I came home and found my typewriter sitting on my computer keyboard. I mean, I'm absentminded, but I'm not that lost. I placed my hands on my hips and surveyed the room. Desk piled about two feet high, check; clothes and books strewn about the floor, right; more clothes thrown on the bed, uh huh. So what was wrong? I threw my sweater in the general direction of the closet and pulled out my chair, absently kicking away the three mismatched socks and random textbook blocking its path. Plopping myself down into its welcoming embrace, I stared at the offending object.

It was a Royal typewriter, probably about ten years old. Staring at it, I finally realized what was bugging me. I don't own a typewriter. Peeking underneath it, I found that my Macintosh keyboard wasn't damaged, other than a patina of dust. I blew it off, picked up the typewriter, and placed it on the counter next to the Mac. I got up and inspected the room again.

I couldn't find anything. Not that this was a surprise; with the sheer volume of stuff on every available surface, I doubt I would've been able to tell if something was missing if I'd had an indexed list of my possessions. The window was still closed from the inside, so I doubted anyone had come in that way. The door had been locked when I came in, so there was no way to tell if anyone had been in the room.

Besides, why the heck would they have left a typewriter on my Macintosh? I couldn't figure. Deciding to forget about it, I threw my bookbag onto the typewriter and went to bed.

The next morning, after getting up and performing the ritual search through the piles for a clean pair of socks, or even just clean socks, I came across something odd; a total lack of typewriter. It wasn't there. Zip. Zero. Gone. I stopped, feeling ridiculous, and gingerly picked up the edge of my bookbag, now lying on the counter. Feeling even more stupid, I lifted the edge and looked under the bag. Nope. Just plywood.

I dressed, shouldered my bag, and went out, muttering disbelieving disjointed phrases at myself. Thank god for the mundane boredom of classes. Sitting in Sociology, I doodled a swinging mechanism that might be attached to my loft's counter in order to flip the typewriter above and below the counter level. Realizing I'd looked below the counter, I tore it up and chewed on the note paper distractedly.

Politics offered no better ideas. I toyed with the idea of 'borrowing' a metal detector from Geology and going around the room, and ignored the overwhelming feeling that I was a) being silly and b) slowly cracking under the strain.

History helped; after fifty minutes of solid, refreshing sleep, I felt ready to tackle the problem again. I marched back downcampus to lunch, a swing in my step. I had it beat. I went through lunch, bantering with friends, and retreated to the privacy of my room. Entering, I dropped my bag near the door and went right for the counter. The typewriter steadfastly refused to appear. I examined the counter carefully, and found the four small indents the typewriter had made in the soft plywood.

Looking under the counter revealed nothing but a large quantity of dust and a quarter wedged in between a textbook and a ripped sneaker.

I stood back, and looked slowly about. Nothing for it, I was backed into a corner. Sighing, I pushed up my sleeves and began to clean the room.

An hour and a half later, I stood once more and swept my gaze over newly cleaned and dusted furniture, balanced checkbook, a stack of paid bills waiting to be mailed, and a polished, gleamingly drab Macintosh. So I got a little carried away. Smiling in satisfaction, I grabbed my books and headed for the library, reflecting on how many months it had been since I had cleaned my room.

After an hour or so of studying and another hour of sleep on C floor of the library, I returned to my room with a brown-bagged sandwich in my teeth, my bag in one hand and fished in my pocket for keys with the other. The keys came reluctantly free of the thread they had become so lovingly attached to in my pocket, and the door swung wide. I breezed in, dropped my bag, put the sandwich in the fridge, kicked the door closed, and swung my chair out from under the counter. It hit something. I frowned and pulled harder, dislodging the obstruction, and froze. Reaching under the chair, I pulled out a sneaker. A sneaker that had been neatly placed by the dresser when I left. Quickly looking around, I found nothing else out of place-DX7 on the counter, Mac next to it, tapes on the wall, typewriter on the desk, phone on the-

Hold it. I deliberately forced my gaze back to the desk. The typewriter sat impudently in the middle of my desk calendar. I approached the desk, and sat down, staring at the machine. It appeared to be the same one. There was an envelope in the platen. Reaching out slowly, I removed it from the typewriter and turned it over.

Occupant, it read.

I whooped. howling with laughter, I literally fell out of my chair and giggled uncontrollably for at least ten minutes, reassuring my neighbors when they knocked that I hadn't been taking drugs. After the ten minutes had passed, I sat back in the chair, still snickering occasionally, and turning the envelope over in my hands. It was sealed, but somehow, I'd expected that. There was no other marking. I tore it open carefully. Inside was a single sheet of paper.

Dear Occupant;

I can't come up with anything better than that to call you by, knowing nothing about you, so I figured that I'd just use that and hope you didn't throw out this letter as soon as you got it.

Good reasoning.

Anyway, here we are. I really don't know how to explain this, but I figured you were out there when I came back from class and found my stuff moved around. I'm kinda paranoid about that. Oh, I didn't figure it out at first, but after watching for a week or two, and noticing that my typewriter was gone one morning and back that afternoon, I sort of figured it out. I have no idea how this works, but apparently every now and then, stuff will move around here. (I haven't managed to catch it at it, though) This typewriter apparently can make trips back and forth, although I am not sure how or when or why it does so. If you are there, please write back. I promise not to tell anyone unless you really want me to. I've never heard of this happening before. Have you? I look forward to hearing from you. Oh, by the way, my name's Ranzi. Just put your reply in the typewriter. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

Does it ever. I sat back and stared at the ceiling for a while, and then, grinning widely, reached for a sheet of typing paper.

Well, Ranzi and I got to be pretty good friends before the end of the school year. We figured out that our rooms are connected somehow by some weird kind of simularity, if that's a word. Every now and then, when one of us moves something, an object in the other's room will move roughly equivalently. We finally caught a pair of sneakers at it, and thus managed to synchronize watches, roughly. They're on the same time as we are, twenty- four hours a day. He's never heard of Princeton, but then, I've never heard of Freyzan U. either. Why our two rooms? Well, we sent across pictures of our rooms, and the first thing we noticed about them was that you couldn't see the floor in either of them. We never sent across pictures of each other, but maybe we will one of these days. We've avoided the subject; maybe we're both afraid we'll end up looking hideous. Or perhaps we're afraid that we'll look like normal folk to each other, and some of the mystery will be gone.

That was all last year. I didn't hear anything from Ranzi over the summer, and the freshman in my old room looked at me strangely when I tried to ask him about it in a circumspect manner. But that's okay. I've just noticed that my Mac isn't here, and I just saw a sock run and hide under the bureau.

ah, freshman year...

-the custodian