"Mr. Ferrell," I said. "That's the nicest thing anybody's done for me all week."
"Well," he said, gruffly, "your neighbor called me some names on that recording that I'm still thinking about, so let's call it even."
Lamont came by that afternoon with his laptop and an expression I would describe as grimly delighted. The co-op had emailed him the interval report within two hours. The young woman on the phone had asked if he'd ever looked at it before, and when he said no, she'd said, "Oh, you're going to want to."
We sat at my kitchen table and he turned the screen toward me.
I want to try to explain what I saw, because it was the moment this stopped being a fight about my mower and became something else.
An interval report is just a long list of numbers: every fifteen minutes, how many kilowatt-hours went through the meter. Put it on a graph, and you get a picture of a building's life. The amenity center's life, for most of the previous year, looked exactly how you'd expect. Every day, a hump in the afternoon when the clubhouse air conditioning worked hardest. A steady block from six in the morning to ten at night when the pool pump ran. Little spikes on weekend evenings when somebody rented the clubhouse for a birthday party. Low and quiet at night, maybe two or three kilowatts for the pool lights, the parking lot lights, the refrigerator in the clubhouse kitchen, the monument lights at the entrance. A bigger hump all summer, a smaller hump all winter. It breathed.
And then, on March sixth, at 4:15 in the afternoon, the floor came up.
It didn't drift. It didn't creep. In one fifteen-minute interval, the baseline jumped by about three and a half kilowatts, and then, forty-five minutes later, by another ten. Thirteen point six kilowatts, give or take, sitting underneath everything else like a slab of concrete. All the old shapes were still there, the pool pump and the afternoon air-conditioning hump and the birthday parties, but now they were all floating on top of this flat, solid, unchanging block. Day and night. Weekday and weekend. Rain and shine. It never went down. Not once, for six and a half months.
Except one time. On the night of the May storm, at 11:02 p.m., the whole thing dropped to zero, along with everything else, and stayed at zero for nineteen hours, until the co-op restored the feeder. And then, at 6:14 the following evening, the pool pump came back, and the clubhouse air came back, and the slab came back. All thirteen point six kilowatts of it, in one step, like somebody had flipped a switch.
"Lamont," I said. "Look at this."
"I've been looking at it since eleven o'clock this morning."