Climate Controlled

by John Chrysostom, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The call from Phoenix came at 4:52 in the morning, which was 2:52 in Phoenix. The young man who made it had the voice of someone who had spent the whole night in a room without windows.

"Lakeshore, this is Remote Monitoring. I have motion on B-rear, camera eleven. Single subject, stationary. Same as Tuesday."

Dena Kowalczyk stood in her kitchen on West Twenty-Sixth Street in her socks and watched the coffee maker think about it.

"I know about him," she said.

"Is the subject known to you, ma'am?"

"His name is Wendell."

There was a pause while the young man looked for a box to put that in.

"I have to log it as loitering at mechanical equipment. That's the category."

"Is he moving?"

"He moved his arm about a minute ago."

"Then log it," Dena said.

---

Keystone Lakeshore Self Storage sat on Upper Peach Street a quarter mile south of the interstate, between a tire shop and a church that had become a carpet warehouse. It had three buildings. A and C were drive-up, two long rows of roll-up doors painted the teal the company painted everything. B was the climate-controlled building. It was long and low, of tan block, with ninety-six interior units off two corridors. The lease promised that B would be kept between fifty-five and eighty degrees Fahrenheit all year round, and charged for it: a ten-by-ten in B cost a hundred and fourteen dollars a month, against seventy-nine for the same box in C, where the weather came in under the door.

The heat in B came from two gas unit heaters in a closet at the back. They were the condensing kind. Their exhaust went out through two white plastic pipes in the block wall, a foot apart, at about the height of a man's knee. In January the pipes breathed. Each of them put out a slow plume of wet air at something like a hundred degrees, and in the cold it turned at once to steam and went up the wall and froze there, so that the tan block behind the building wore a beard of ice from the pipes to the gutter.

Wendell slept between the pipes. He had flattened two boxes from the U-Haul display for a floor and laid a third over his legs. He kept his boots inside a black garbage bag inside his sleeping bag, so they would not freeze stiff overnight, and he slept with his back to the wall and his face to the field of snow that ran out to the drainage ditch and the backs of the houses on the next street. The steam came down on him as it cooled. By morning his top blanket had a crust of ice on it, like a pie, and underneath he was dry.

Dena had found him there in December, when she walked the fence line after a storm. She had said, You can't be here. He had said, I know. She had gone back to the office and sat at the counter for a while and then done nothing, and every morning since then she had done nothing again, and Phoenix had logged it.

On Monday the email came from Risk.

Lakeshore team: Per incident log, please install the attached vent guard (2 units, shipping UPS Ground, ETA Thurs) at B-rear mechanical, and post No Trespassing signage (attached, print on cardstock). Purpose is to prevent loitering at exhaust terminations and reduce CO exposure liability. Please confirm completion with photo by EOD Friday. Thanks for all you do!

The attachment showed a cage of galvanized steel mesh, eighteen inches on each side, that bolted over a pipe and stood out from the wall far enough to keep a body from lying against it. Dena printed the sign on cardstock, as she was told, and put it under the counter.

---

Now go into B with her, down the left corridor, past the fire door, to the end. B-30 is the largest unit in the building, ten feet by thirty, three hundred square feet of floor under a ceiling of corrugated steel, with a light that comes on when you open the door and goes off by itself after twenty minutes.

Dena knew what was in it because in October the company had made every manager in the region walk every unit with a flashlight for something it called a Pest and Moisture Audit. The tenants were notified by email and most of them did not come. Gordon Fesmire did not come. Dena cut nothing and opened nothing. The audit allowed her to look through the gap under a door with a flashlight and, where a unit had a mesh ceiling, to look in from a stepladder. B-30 had a mesh ceiling. She had stood on the stepladder for a long time.

Here is what was in it.

Four chrome rolling racks of the kind that stand in the back rooms of shops, each about six feet long, each hung tight from end to end with zippered garment bags. The bags were clear plastic over the front and white vinyl at the back, and across the shoulders of every one of them, in green letters, was printed FESMIRE'S · STATE STREET · SINCE 1961. Inside the bags were men's overcoats. She could see them through the plastic in the beam of the flashlight: camel, charcoal, navy, a brown herringbone, a black one with a velvet collar. Chesterfields and raglans and short car coats. Each had its tag still hanging from the left sleeve on a loop of white thread. She had counted the bags from the top of the ladder twice, because the first time she had not believed it, and both times it came to seventy-four.

Against the back wall stood a tall mirror in three hinged panels, the kind a man stands in front of while someone kneels at his feet with pins in his mouth. A dressmaker's form with no head. A glass-fronted case of ties, rolled. A cash register of the old heavy kind, with keys. A box marked SHOEHORNS. A box marked HANGERS — WOOD. A wooden sign, face to the wall.

Fesmire's had closed in the spring of 2015. Dena remembered it. Her father had bought his funeral suit there, and later he was buried in it. The lease on B-30 began on the second of March, 2015. It was paid by autopay on the first of every month from a checking account at Erie Federal, and it had never once been late. The rent had been two hundred and forty dollars when the lease began. It was three hundred and eighty-nine now. On the Thursday, while she waited for the UPS truck, Dena brought the tenant ledger up on the office computer and scrolled to the bottom of B-30, where the software kept a running total for its own reasons.

Total paid to date: $41,870.00.

She did not add up the prices on the tags. You may add them if you like. She had seen them through the plastic: two ninety-five, three forty-five, four fifty, six ninety-five for the one with the velvet collar.

---

The UPS truck came at two in the afternoon and left a carton on the counter. It was long and flat and very heavy for its size. Dena opened one end with the box cutter, looked at the galvanized mesh inside, and put the carton on the shelf behind the counter, next to the display of disc locks at fourteen ninety-nine.

That night it went down to nine degrees.

At 1:40 in the morning, by the alarm log she read afterwards, the north heater in B failed to light three times in a row and locked itself out. At 2:15 the south heater did the same. A man from Lake Erie Mechanical would tell her later, on the telephone, that it was almost certainly the condensate line. The water that comes off a condensing heater has to go somewhere. Here it went out through a little pipe in the wall, and at nine degrees the little pipe froze, and the water backed up into the heaters, and both of them did what they were built to do and refused to burn. He told her it was nobody's fault. He told her Monday.

Phoenix did not call at 4:52. There was no motion on camera eleven.

Dena got to Peach Street at ten past six. The office did not open until nine-thirty, but she had a key to the gate, and she drove around the back of B with her headlights on.

The pipes were not breathing. There was no steam. The ice on the wall had stopped growing and was only ice. Wendell was sitting up between the pipes with the sleeping bag pulled to his chin and the cardboard around his shoulders like a cape. There was frost in his eyebrows and in the gray hair at his temples, and when she got out of the car he looked at her and did not get up.

"She quit around two," he said.

"I know."

"I didn't touch it."

"I know you didn't. It's the drain. It froze."

He nodded as if that were reasonable. It was reasonable. Everything about it was reasonable.

Company policy did not allow non-tenants in the office at any hour. Company policy said nothing at all about Dena's car. She left the engine running and the heater on high, and she helped him up, because his knees did not want to do it, and got him into the passenger seat with his garbage bag of boots on his lap. Then she went into the office and made two cups of coffee in the Keurig and carried them out across the lot one in each hand, walking in the tire tracks so as not to spill.

He held the cup in both hands and did not drink it for a while.

"You got heat in there?" he said, and he tipped his head at Building B.

"Not since two."

"Huh," said Wendell.

---

The lease obliged her to tell the tenants of B when the climate control failed. There was a template for it. Dena sat at the counter in her coat and sent it to the eighty-one occupied units at 6:48. Dear Valued Tenant, we are experiencing a temporary interruption to climate control in Building B. Our service partner has been contacted and we anticipate restoration shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience. Then she called Lake Erie Mechanical and was told Monday. Then she called the regional manager and got his voicemail.

At 7:15 the office telephone rang. It was Gordon Fesmire.

He was the only one who called. He did not sound angry. He sounded the way a man sounds when he has been told that the room where his father's things are kept is getting cold. He asked what the temperature in B was now, and Dena walked down the corridor with the cordless phone and read it off the thermostat by the fire door: forty-six. He asked about humidity, and she said the thermostat didn't say. He said he would come out.

He came at twenty to nine, before the office opened, in a gray Audi that he parked across two spaces by the gate. He was perhaps sixty. He was wearing a camel overcoat that reached his knees, with a scarf inside the collar and leather gloves, and when he came into the office Dena saw a loop of white thread at the cuff of the left sleeve, where somebody had cut a tag off.

"Gordon Fesmire," he said, and held out his hand without taking off the glove. "B-30."

"I know," said Dena.

They went down the left corridor together. Their breath showed. The corridor was lit by fluorescent tubes behind wire cages, and the units on either side had the company's teal doors and the tenants' locks, every kind of lock, brass and steel and combination and one held shut with a bicycle chain. At the end Fesmire took a ring of keys out of his coat and opened the disc lock on B-30 and rolled the door up with one hand. The light came on.

Up close the racks were even fuller than they had looked from the ladder. The bags were packed so tight that the shoulders of the coats pressed into each other through the plastic. Fesmire went along the first rack with his gloves off now, pushing a hand into the gap between the bags, pulling one out a little way and letting it fall back. He unzipped one at the top and put his face down to the collar of the coat inside and breathed in.

"Wool's fine in the cold," he said. "It's the damp that kills it. If it gets cold and then warm again too fast, you get condensation. That's what I'm worried about. Monday, they said?"

"Monday."

He zipped the bag up again. He went along the second rack.

"My father bought these the fall before he got sick," he said. "Full order from the mill in Pennsylvania, same as every year. He thought he'd sell them. Then he didn't." He did not turn around. "I'm going to do something with them. Online. There's a market for this kind of thing. Made in America, you know, deadstock. People pay."

"There's a man sleeping behind this building," Dena said.

Fesmire stopped with his hand inside the rack.

"Okay," he said.

"He sleeps against the heater exhaust. On the back wall. That's where the heat comes out."

"Okay."

"The heaters are off."

He took his hand out of the rack and looked at her. He had a long, decent, worried face, a face for standing behind a counter and telling a man the truth about how a jacket fit him.

"Do you want me to call somebody? I know some people on City Council."

"I've called everybody I know," said Dena. "Everybody I call says Monday."

He looked back at the racks. The light ticked overhead.

"You've got seventy-four coats in here," Dena said.

"Seventy-five," said Fesmire. "I'm wearing one."

He said it without any smile at all, as a correction of fact, and then he seemed to hear what he had said, and his face went red under the fluorescent light, from the collar of his father's coat up.

He went to the fourth rack, the one nearest the back wall. At the very end of it, apart from the others, hung six bags with a strip of red tape across the shoulders. He unzipped the first of these, looked at the tag, and zipped it up. He unzipped the second and looked at the tag and turned the coat inside out at the hem to look at something, and then he lifted it off the rack, bag and all, and held it out to her across the narrow space between the racks.

"Seconds," he said. "There's a pull in the lining. Nobody would ever see it." He was still holding it out. "Tell him it's from Fesmire's."

Dena took it. It was heavier than she expected.

Fesmire put his gloves back on. He reached up and took hold of the strap on the door and pulled it down, and it came down with the long rattle those doors make, and he bent and put the disc lock through the hasp and pressed it shut. He tried it once with his hand.

"You'll call me Monday," he said. "When it's back on."

"I'll send the email," said Dena.

---

Wendell was asleep in the passenger seat with his mouth open and the empty cup still in both hands. The windows had fogged on the inside. Dena opened the driver's door and the cold went in ahead of her and woke him.

She unzipped the bag and took out the coat. It was a charcoal raglan, a long one, with horn buttons and a collar that would turn up past the ears. She held it up by the shoulders so that he could see it.

"Put this on."

He looked at it for some time before he put the cup down on the dashboard. Getting into it in the front seat of a Buick was not simple. She held one sleeve and he found it with his arm, and then he leaned forward against the dashboard and she fed the other side round behind him, and he found that sleeve too, and sat back. The coat was too big in the shoulders and exactly right in the length. He buttoned it from the bottom, slowly, all four horn buttons, and turned the collar up.

The tag was still hanging from the left sleeve on its loop of white thread. Wendell lifted his arm and read it. There were two tags. The first was cream card, printed in green: FESMIRE'S · STATE STREET · $345.00. The second was red, and somebody had written on it by hand in ballpoint: AS IS — LINING.

"What's wrong with the lining?" he said.

"There's a pull in it. Somewhere."

He opened the front of the coat and looked inside it, at the gray satin lining with the little label sewn into it, and ran his hand down the inside along the seam, and then closed it again.

"Lining's fine," he said.

"Okay."

"Where'd it come from?"

Dena looked out through the windshield, where she had cleared a patch of the fog with her sleeve, at Building B. The tan block of it. The teal doors at the end. The gutter along the roof with the beard of ice hanging off it, not growing any more.

Wendell looked where she was looking, and kept looking.

She took the box cutter from the cup holder and held out her hand for his arm. He gave it to her. She slid the blade under the loop of white thread and it parted, and both tags came away together and lay in her palm, the cream and the red, and she put them in her pocket.

The vent guard was still in its carton on the shelf behind the counter. It was Friday. She had until the end of the day.

In B-30 the light had gone off by itself. The racks stood in the dark at forty-one degrees, and the coats were fine. Wool is fine in the cold.

---

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōanne Chrȳsostomō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Chrysostom, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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