Conditioning

Posted by Ace on June 18th, 2009 filed in Tales of the Interregnum

Reed Richards, round 3.

The air conditioner is lying canted on the kitchen table at a crazy angle, one side up in the air, causing it to piss dirt-water into a brown towel like some incapacitated animal.  I have stripped the fins off and tossed them in a clattering heap on the couch, and am now removing the screws of the exterior casing.  They are the hexagonal bolt-head type, without slots;  I don’t have a socket wrench small enough to grip them, but I do have an adjustable wrench, and my own grim determination.

Reed, of course, probably wouldn’t have left his air conditioner in the window for three years straight.

As it turns out, the screws are only a quarter-inch long.  They come out reluctantly nonetheless:  rusted and nasty-looking at the head, clean and fairly pristine along the threads.  The last one is directly atop the case, and recessed in a slight depression;  it sinks into some kind of interior structure.  It proves to be longer than the others.  When I pull it free, the thin steel of the case rattles loosely.  I drop the wrench on the towel, place my hands on either side of the bulk and lift gently.

The hollow cube of the case pulls free from the metal base, but catches where it runs under the plastic front panel, preventing me from removing it.  I twist the case back and forth with my hands, trying to work its edge out from under the edge of the plastic, to no avail.  I lower it back onto the base instead, where it lands with a muffled ting.

Hnnnh. The plastic front panel had two normal Philips-head screws in it:  wide head, very short, with sharp points.  They were the first thing I removed two weeks ago, when the air-conditioner first started to make The Horrible Noise, but their removal created no noticeable liberation of the front panel, nor any noticeable effect at all.  I hook my index finger through the air vents and pull on the panel tentatively, confirming that indeed, it still seems firmly seated.

Now how are you gonna cool your computer with mineral oil if you can’t even fix an air conditioner? says the Voice.

Cooling my computer with mineral oil is my new benchmark for technical savvy and Millennium Falcon cool, ever since Neuro sent me a YouTube link showing it.  If I ever manage to get Heart Reborn up and running again, I have vague plans about maybe trying it out;  as it is, the problem with the air-conditioner is of more immediate concern, because I live in a glorified attic.  I change approach:  pick up a flat-head screwdriver and slot the head in the join between the panel and the case.  Then I twist.

There is a crunching sound-  not something breaking, but a seal overcoming friction-  and the front panel slides forward a quarter-inch.  I repeat this process two or three times around its circumference, easing it forward each time, until the entire panel falls off with a clatter.  Its absence reveals a hidden screw holding the case to the frame.  Jack Burton from “Big Trouble in Little China” straightens up from watching me, looks over his shoulder at the Voice, makes a smug grimace. “Well ya never know ’til you try,” he says.

I remove the hidden screw from its housing and lift off the case.

The guts of the machine inside are a weird amalgam of high and low tech:  solid-state control panel, welded metal cooling tubes, cheap plastic fans and a styrofoam block taped together with clear plastic packing tape.  Several red warning tags with large exclamation points that were previously hidden are now brightly in evidence.  I size it all up from several angles, making sense of it.   The drive shaft attached to the motor emerges both front and back:  one side attaches to a conventional fan blade used to drive the exhaust;  the other to a hamster-wheel-like turbine inside the styrofoam block that delivers the cool air to the front vents. Surprise!

My son should be here, I think, staring at it. He would love this, this whole process.  The sheer, forbidden absurdity of it.

Someone should be here, I think, looking around at the silent walls, through the now empty living room window.

I flip open my cel phone and dial Longstreet.

Like me, Longstreet is currently unemployed.  Unlike me (who has a freelance career, and thus tends to be unemployed frequently, with a great deal of advance notice), he got blindsided by the classic corp treatment:  they met him at the front door with a box, followed him to his office, told him to put whatever was in the office that belonged to him in the box, then walked him back out to the front door and told him he needn’t come back.   He has a house, and a pool, and the Empress, and many other things to occupy his time and attention, so it’s not like he’s sitting around the house twiddling his thumbs when he isn’t conducting his job search.  He also has pretty good prospects for finding another job, or so I’m led to believe.   Nonetheless, I feel a certain unjustifiable urge to check on him once in a while and be cheerful, as way of saying “see, it’s not the end of the world”-  make sure he’s not despondent and drinking paint thinner.  This seems like as good a reason as any.

Conveniently, he picks up.  “Hello?” he says.

“Longstreet,” I hail him.

“Sir Ace,” he replies.  “How goes it?”

“Fine,” I say.  I tap the end of the screwdriver on the front panel.  “So I’m taking apart my air-conditioner…” I continue, then pause, baiting the narrative hook.

There is a long silence on the other end of the line.  “No good can come of this,” he says, sadly.

He’s joking. I smile.  Maybe. “Don’t be silly,” I tell him.   “It’s already broken, what can I do, break it more?”

“True.”

“Now,” I continue, “I have removed the outer case.   And in doing so, I have, predictably, uncovered a number of warning signs saying, in essence:   ‘Do not operate this device without the outer case, as it has moving parts.’”

“Yes,” he says.

“However,” I add, “would you agree, logically, that it would be difficult or impossible for me to ascertain the cause of a noise that the device only makes while it is in operation without turning it on and running it?  In this state?”

There is another long pause, and I hope it’s because he’s laughing.  “Yes,” he says. “ I would agree with that statement.”

I walk halfway around the kitchen table.  “Because I am not, after all, fucking with the electrical system.”   I stop and peer at the motor.  “Nor am I planning on sticking my hand into it.”

“No,” says Longstreet.  “I would just plug ‘er in and let ‘er rip then.”

“Excellent,” I say, sweeping the white power cord up into my hand and thrusting it brusquely into the kitchen outlet.  “That’s precisely what I was hoping you’d say.”  I step over the cord, stand at arm’s length from the control panel and place my finger against the On/Off switch.  “Switching on,” I tell him. I press the button.

The motor whirs to life, and the fan blades spin.  Immediately a god-awful whining noise fills the room, echoing off the walls and through my head.  I creep cautiously to the edge of the machine and look into the guts.  The noise has no discernible cause, nor any discernible effect. Nothing is smoking or rattling or appears to be catching on fire.

“Yeesh,” says Longstreet, over the phone. “I can hear that from here.”

“Yeah,” I respond.  The compressor is off, and the fan is running on low, so I thumb the button to turn it to High.  The whine rises to a feverish pitch then holds, like imminent doom.  I look for belts, or similar moving parts.  There are none;  the fan blades and the drive shaft are the only parts outside of the motor.  I examine the housing that surrounds the exhaust fan looking for breakage or friction, and come to a sudden realization.  “The fan blades are plastic,” I say out loud.

“That’s no good either,” says Longstreet.

“No,” I confirm, although I’m not sure he’s thinking the same thing I’m thinking.  If the fan blades are plastic, and the housing surrounding the fan blades is plastic, that means that nothing involved in the system can bend.  Or if it has bent, there’s no way to bend it back. I have been working all this time with the idea in the back of my head that maybe the noise is just something out of alignment, a bent fin or unseated housing.  Now that idea evaporates, chases away to wherever old machines go.   I cut the power.

The noise cuts off too, instantly.  I watch the fan blade spin, slow down, then blink as I realize I now have another piece of information.  “Crap,” I spit into the phone. “It’s the motor.”

“How do you know?” asks Longstreet.

“Because the noise stops as soon as I stop the power,” I reply.  I poke at the fan blade with the tip of the screwdriver, rolling it back and forth to either side.  “If there was something bent or obstructing the action of the other parts, and that was doing it, the noise would keep going as everything slowed down, then stop.”   I turn the fan back to Low and hit the power again to confirm the diagnosis, but am surprised this time as nothing moves.  The motor hums;  the fan blades tilt slowly and stop, tilt farther and stop again.  I reach the tip of the screwdriver towards the blades to give them a push, think better of it, withdraw and toggle the fan to High.  The blades chug some more, then roll over.  The whine picks up again.  “The brushes must be shot,” I tell him.  “That or the drive shaft is sticking,” I add.  “Maybe.”

“Hit it with WD-40,” he says.

“Are you sure?” I ask him.   “Won’t that mess up an electrical motor, if it gets inside?”

Third long pause.   “I do not believe WD-40 is inimical to the operation of any machine.”

I am not altogether sure he is correct.  I have vivid memories of applying WD-40 to parts of an old, treasured board game called Dark Tower which were never meant to be lubricated, and nearly destroying it as a result;  only my friend Doom’s timely intercession helped save me from disaster.   But the air-conditioner is an 815 watt 120 volt appliance, not a 1.5 watt 3 volt toy, and Longstreet is an engineer.  Eh, what the hell, I think. Already broken! I take the phone into the closet, paw through the tops of a few boxes looking.  “I’m gonna have to call you back on this one,” I tell him.  “Not sure where the can is.”

“Right,” he replies.  “Good luck.”   I fold the phone closed.

The boxes are filled with nails, screws, single drill bits (I don’t own a drill), electrical extensions designed to connect things I’ve forgotten about to things I’ve never had.   I hurl power strips into piles, toss sandpaper and paintbrushes aside, curse Faye roundly as the cause of all things once possessed and now missing, and ultimately find the can right where I left it:  on an upper shelf nowhere near the boxes, behind a pack of mogul bulbs which obscured it from view.  The red plastic cap sits atop it;  the thin red plastic straw used to direct the spray is taped to the side of the can, as it always was in my father Hawkeye’s basement.  Men have sung paeans to this fluid, this miraculous mix that fixes all mechanical ills, and not incidentally, makes them seem as if they know more about what went wrong than they actually do.

There is no way to bring it to bear against the drive shaft.

There are only so many openings in the air-conditioning machinery.  The ones that are close enough and wide enough for the can and straw to fit through do not target the points where the drive shaft emerges from the motor;  the ones that target those points are either too narrow or too far away for the can and straw to reach.  At length I devise a torturous way of bending the straw and hook-shooting the WD-40 onto the shaft.  It splatters everywhere and makes a mess, but includes the target.  I get a nose-full of the smell as I do so and pull up short, surprised:  it’s the exact same smell as the oil in the Gran Sangre de Toro bottle on my kitchen counter, the one Church and I emptied of wine playing Oblivion, and that I later turned into a wick-lamp.  An unexpected connection.

The air-conditioner, indifferent to all of this, resumes the same whining noise when power is resumed.  I let it run for a full minute, enough time for any lubricative properties of the WD-40 to manifest themselves, then cut the power again and call Longstreet back.

“So?” he asks.

“Nah,” I tell him. “Accomplished nothing.”  I cap the spray can.  “Except possibly melting the styrofoam insulation block, because of the benzene.”

“Bummer,” he laughs.

“So I’m beat, right?” I say, setting down the can, and picking up a long-cold cup of tea.   “It’s the motor.  It’ll cost more to fix it than it will to get a new one.”

“It’ll cost more to fix it than it will to get a new one,” he agrees.  “Just take it out to the curb.”

“What a drag.”  A black cloud coalesces from nowhere, settles on me heavily.  Hawkeye is looking down at his work bench, shaking his head slowly and sadly at my incompetence, unwilling to look at me. “What would Dad say?”

“Welp,” says Longstreet evenly, “I have a basement here with a couple of your father’s broken air-conditioners.  Which, come to think of it, I have to take out to the curb.”  He chuckles.  “So I don’t think you need to worry about what your father would say.”

I laugh, too.  You’re wrong, I think.  But I don’t say it.  “Thanks for your help,” I tell him.

—

The air-conditioner is heavy, and imbalanced in the distribution of its weight;  the use of plastic and styrofoam does not extend to the compressor, and the compressor is off-center, because the motor and drive shaft cannot be.  It was a struggle to get it out of the window to the kitchen table.  Now I hitch the power cord up in loops atop the case, so that I don’t trip on it, and struggle again, hauling it through the living room, down the staircase, across the landing, down and out the screen door.  I lower it gingerly onto a cheap white outdoor table, next to the towels I used to blot up the lamp oil when I knocked the Gran Sangre de Toro bottle over, and the bowed clipboard the oil ruined.  I try not to crush my fingers.  When I am done, I step back and draw my forearm across my forehead to wipe the sweat away, then check the table to make sure it will hold.

The sky overhead is roiled, cloudy.  It has been raining for several days straight, and will probably rain again tonight.  When it does, the water will pour all over the electrical parts of the unit, the digital controls, and probably ruin them, too.  Then, for sure, it will be beyond repair.

What would he say? I think, looking down at it.

…and he stands at the table, looks down at it with me. “No sense in getting bent out of shape about it,” he says. “Cost you less to get a new one than it will to fix it.”  His mouth twists a little; the set of pragmatism tempered with a slight sadness for a world that is no longer the one he remembers, a world where that is true.  He doesn’t blame me.  He might as well blame the moon and the stars.

He doesn’t blame me.

I leave the air-conditioner there, turn my back on it and go back inside.

Water take it, I think.

The Water takes us all.