It was the easiest problem in the world. A plumber wasn’t needed, a child could’ve fixed it. An illiterate child could’ve fixed it. An illiterate child with parkinson’s and amnesia with agoraphobic tendencies in an open field could’ve fixed it. Left-handed.
Just… tighten a pipe. It was that simple, that straight-forward. John plucked the sorry old monkey wrench that lived in the secluded depths of the garage from its perch, wrenched a nut, wrenched a bolt, wrenched all the other bits of the pipe the tool could fit around (righty tighty, lefty loosey rigorously adhered to), and that was that and that was all she wrote.
The next day, the sink didn’t work.
“Well, that makes no sense,” said John.
“Better give it a look anyways,” said Jane.
So they went and had a look. One of the pipes under the sink had come loose slightly and was vibrating majestically in place, like the reed of an oboe.
“Huh,” said John. And he went away and came back again with the creaky, protesting monkey wrench, and he once more tightened everything that he could until it squeaked like a chimpanzee with its finger stuck in a termite mound.
That night, John and Jane were awoken by the squeals of metal and found that no less than six pipes had come loose – two in both bathroom sinks, one in the kitchen, two in the shower, and the toilets.
“Maybe we should call a plumber,” suggested Jane.
John rolled his eyes. It was just pipes, for goodness sakes. He wasn’t handy, but you barely needed hands at all to fix these sorts of problems. He rode the monkey wrench hard that night, sending shivers down the house’s metallic spine, and went to bed with the angry rest of a man who’s had it up to here with the day.
The next day, the shower exploded. It was most abrupt and occurred when Jane was trying to use it, which annoyed her to the point of shrieks.
“I could’ve sworn I tightened those,” said John. He took his mighty master monkey wrench once more and replaced the fitful pipes with their shadowy backups, retrieved from the darkest corners of the shed. They were cold and silvery and beautifully ugly, and that evening as John and Jane had dinner they all vanished and half the house was covered in mixed water of varying temperatures and sewage.
“Maybe we should call a plumber right now,” ordered Jane.
“All right,” said John.
The plumber was a tall, slimly-built man who absolutely could not have existed in any cartoon of his profession, with a high forehead and a nose that had previously belonged to a 19th-century British aristocrat and no moustache. He took three steps into the house, and seventeen downstairs to look at the pipes. He frowned, creased his brow, pinched his arm, spat on the floor with great venom, sniffed exactly twice and broke into an ear-splitting scream of terror before fleeing out the door while crossing himself, leaving behind both his toolbox and his truck.
The toolbox had a new wrench in it, one with sleek lines and a rubber grip and a lighter built into the handle. John took it up in his hand, raided the truck for pipes, and went about his duty with grim efficiency. When he was done the house’s guts gleamed as brilliantly as a silver fork in a streambed. He threw the old monkey wrench in the garbage and proclaimed himself satisfied. But he kept the new one. Just in case.
All was serene the next day. Peaceful. Quiet. The showers were taken and luxuriated within, the toilets flushed, double-flushed, triple-flushed. The sink provided gently-warmed cleanliness.
Breakfast was had, the civilized meal of the morning. And at its conclusion the dishwasher was loaded, filled, soaped, and gently purred into motion for all of ten seconds before breaking down in a heaving fit.
John opened the pipes and came nose to nose with a tiny agrarian civilization, peopled by thousands of creatures no bigger than dust mites. He frowned down upon them, uncertain of his place in this newly discovered world until someone shot a miniscule ballista at him, whereupon he exercised the justice of the Old Testament and threw the pipe into the garbage.
“Maybe we should just replace all the pipes,” said Jane.
“I’m working on it,” said John.
That evening he replaced all the pipes.
That midnight he woke up and heard a mysterious clanking from beneath his bed, in the cellar. He sighed, coughed, removed the plumber’s wrench from his bedside table, shuffled downstairs, and came face to face with an enormous metallic creature in the front hall, still rife with the dusty particles of the basement. It was made entirely of piping and shaped roughly like an enormous lizard of the Permian.
John wrenched it until it stopped moving, but lost a leg. Jane called the police, the ambulance, and the animal control unit. The first took away the wrench (“evidence”), the second John and his leg (“reattachment”), the third the remnants of the pipe-lizard (“disposal”).
“Do we still have a wrench in the house, dear?” he inquired of Jane.
“No,” she said.
“Oh well,” he muttered, as the doctors measured the diameter of his leg-stump. “I guess we’ll think of something.”
John had surgery on the third, and therapy on the fifth, and was discharged on the seventh, because he was out of money. He went home (limping) and found that his house was entirely filled with pipes, like a thornbush thicket.
“I tried to phone you,” explained Jane, from the makeshift hut she’d crafted out of their car, on their lawn. “But I’ve been busy, and you didn’t answer.”
“Have you bought a new wrench yet?” asked John.
“No,” she said. “They’re too expensive nowadays to be bothered. Go and ask the neighbours for a loan or something.”
John went to the neighbours (limping). One of them had a wrench. It was a socket wrench, not a monkey wrench, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
So he walked up to his front door (limping), and he wrenched his way into the hallway, then wrenched his way upstairs, and wrenched his way into the bathroom, where he got his toothbrush and his deodorant and had a quick piss and floss. As he gargled, a throat cleared next to his ear, and he turned around (limping) to find himself face to face with a small band of pipes. Each of them stood no taller than his waist, their leader barely passed his knee. A white flag was clutched in its maw.
“We would like,” said the pipe, “to discuss terms.”
John wrenched them, then wrenched his way into his bedroom to liberate a suit, which he put on. He couldn’t feel himself in that lousy little hospital gown, even if it did afford some ventilation to his reattached leg. In his suit he felt like a new man. A new, leg-cramped (limping) man who smelt like grease.
After wrenching his way to the bedside table for his keys, John wrenched his way back out the front door (the piping had regrown in his absence), turfed Jane out of the car, and went to work as she shouted abuse at him from the lawn.
Work was unpleasant. He couldn’t go to the bathroom without his wrench in his pocket, and he found himself eyeing the toilet bowl suspiciously. After his business was concluded, he stayed an extra half-hour overtime to personally tighten the thing’s u-bend. He didn’t like the look it had been giving him.
At last, home came John. Home again, home again, his home had walked off. His neighbours showed him cellphone footage of it rising to its feet – its enormous, piping-made feet – and negotiating with Jane, who secured transport with it to Belgium. It had strolled off at a pace just above a leisurely stroll, which was a problem for John because of his (limping) and the fact that his car only had about five minutes worth of gas left in it.
Well fine. If that’s the way life would be, that’s the way life would be. John still had his wrench, and that was all that mattered.
After spending the night in his car, John awoke to the polite windshield rap-rap of his neighbour’s knuckles. He politely requested that his wrench be returned.
John made a rude gesture and roared away to work on his last wisps of gas, where he found the entire lobby clogged with piping. The whole thing had started yesterday evening, said the receptionist, who was sharing a cigarette with the homeless man that worked their corner.
“Well, that makes no sense,” said John.
The receptionist shrugged.
John felt the comfortable weight of the wrench in his back pocket, and eyed the doors of his office building with fresh determination.
He strode in (limping) manfully.
All he’d have to do was tighten a few more pipes.