The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky Page B

making sure you pick up all the nerve and tissue damage so some idiot doesn’t turn around in three months and sue you silly. Sue you, because you patched him up after a knife fight, and now he’s only got half a smile.
    And the trombone player in the apartment next door to me is driving me mad. He’s been there a month now, in addition to the people downstairs who work night shifts and put their laundry in at the strangest of times. I’ve complained to the landlord, but they can’t seem to pin the guy down – it’s like cops, they’re never there when you need them, and this guy, he never seems to be playing when the landlord comes around.
    At first, I thought he was right next door – I’d wake up and hear him as if he was in the room with me. But go out in the hall, and it’s hard to find where exactly the sound is coming from. When I talk to the landlord on the phone, I can practically hear the shrug coming right back at me over the phone lines. I don’t even think he believes me that the guy is there.
    As for the trombone player himself, I don’t know if he just doesn’t realize how thin the walls are, or if he’s trying to push me over the edge. Or whether he just doesn’t care. He plays scales, fractured scales – one, two, three, four, five, one two, three, four, five – over and over again. Sometimes the same song –
Blue Moon
 – so that, for a day or two, it peals in my head like ringing bells. You must know that old Sinatra classic – “Blue moon, you saw me standing alone …” I’m pretty sure he’s playing it with a mute – and that he knows just how loud the trombone is, and that he’s making at least some effort to muf fle the sound. But not enough effort, because I can be in the apartment trying to sleep and he can drive me right back into my clothes and out onto the street.
    The noise is so pervasive that I’ve made up my own image of the guy – I assume it’s a guy, although I’ve never seen him.
    I picture him as late middle aged, paunchy and standing there playing the trombone naked, with a roaring great erection. He can play naked at home – in my imagination, that gives him some kind of charge. I don’t want to think what that says about my head – I’m no expert, I only spent one rotation in psychiatry as an intern, just enough to know that it was all my mother’s fault. Hey, I’m kidding, all right?
    For sure, though, I’m not known for my pysch skills. They brought me the guy they call the Major once, wanted me to commit him permanently. Two police of ficers, and a slew of angry firemen to boot. The Major was a favourite trick they used to play on the new guys, the probationary firefighters. The fire alarm would get pulled at the Major’s nursing home, always around ten at night, and the trucks would pull up and the fire fighters would put the new guys in breathing gear and send them inside. They’d crawl up the stairs to the alarm station, and there’d be the Major. Uniform hat and jacket, one hand at his forehead, saluting.
    He’d be staring at the spinning red lights flashing though the windows, and whacking off with his other hand.
    Funny stuff, hey? At ten o’clock at night, maybe.
    But not at three in the morning.
    I told the fire fighters they were being paid to answer fire calls, not me, and why were they wakingme up for that kind of crap anyway? What did they want me to do, prescribe some ky jelly to the old geezer so the Major wouldn’t light some kind of friction fire? I didn’t take even a moment to consider the underlying pathologies, to ask the “what if ” question, like, what if there’s a day when pulling the fire alarm isn’t enough, and a bunch of old people die in their beds because the Major lights up the toilet paper in the bathroom? I thought about