5 Seconds marvels and a water pump

Fig.1, The Truth (Interpretation)
(credit)

What can fit into 9m2 room? A small wardrobe, a mattress, an out-of-place table with no chair to sit at…
They don't fill that much space, though.
They can't.
Something else stands in the middle. Something pushing everything against the walls: The whirr of the building's water pump.

Wrrrrr…Clack…Wrrrr…Clack.

The buried metronome never stops, a continuous confirmation of renewed moisture for everyone in the boarding house.


When I first moved in, it turned into a constant pain, oscillating between my eardrums and my brain. A pink electric elephant smugly sitting on my nerves every time I tried not to think of it.

Wrrrrr…Clack…Wrrrr…Clack.
G sharp.

I don't even remember when I noticed it. Or when I started improvising melodies over it. I've whistled the Pumps Variations, The Art of Pumping, and Canon in Pump Major, inverting and tangling melodies until my lips gave up.

When my inspiration dried out, I realized that exercise had significantly increased my tolerance to the noise. I took on finding new ways to have fun out of it. I gave it a name. Wet Walter, the Water Wisdom Whisperer.

"Blessed are the hydrated" on Sundays, "Water is great" on Fridays, "Be water" on any day.
But who was Walter, really? Cringing every 5 seconds, dispensing its goodness to us, unwashed creatures? How could he be so repetitive yet so meaningful, putting himself to a task only fit for an hydrophilic Sisyphus?
Maybe the answer was in the rhythm: 5 seconds between each pulse. I thought it silly, not seeing how anything meaningful could happen in a such a short lapse of time. I got curious. I looked it up.

Wrrrrr…Clack… 20 babies see their first light.
Wrrrrr…Clack… 9 people see their last one.
Wrrrrr…Clack… 200 lightning strikes have found their way to the ground
Wrrrrr…Clack… 20.000 new stars are now shining
Wrrrrr…Clack… 150 new supernovas are bursting gamma rays all over the place.

Fact after fact, numbers kept adding up, in neat piles from my floor to my ceiling, occupying the space once monopolized by the whirr. The pink elephant was gone, replaced by a steady reminder of five seconds marvels.

I think too much, I was told.
I don't really mind. I have all the time to.
On tempo, to the beat of a nearby water pump, the shout out of Walter, town crier before the gods, who helped me find the heartbeat of the universe in a dumb electrical engine and its monotonous song in G sharp.

5 Seconds marvels and a water pump by Danny Hefer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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