The table reminds me of a long corridor. A child weaves on a Big Wheel trike—side to side, not lacing a rug. Red rum, red rum. A typewriter clacks. The alternating thump of wheels on carpet and the clatter on hardwood floors. Slashed in my brain, the sinister textures and whops of Penderecki’s feverish soundtrack.

Overlooking, watching from the cliff’s edge, I sit at the head of the table, my back to a simplistic depiction of the Last Supper. I don’t do this out of contempt. The table does not reflect light. A brass metal lamp, Brobdingnagian in proportion, hunkers: a hoary colossus with bent appendages. It once presided over a chamber of some importance. Twelve bulbs, like disciples, had lost their shine. It isn’t one glorious table, but ten modernistic ones stitched together. Sixteen grim chairs, like bugs, squat and grumble alongside. When I squint, the veneer could be a burgundy lake with a rectangular central island. Caliban’s home. Stepping stones in the water mark a dotted line. Cut here. Or a million Roman millipedes in sandals crossing as a shortcut to Pluto. I am in the building where I work (worked).

Jefus inftiftar natwarden och bliwer förrådder af Judas.* The wording reads in Swedish, of a sort. A script font where f is s and v is w and f sometimes is v. The reproduction of the Last Supper is childlike, as it should be. Jesus has no beard. Judas scowls. Above Jesus, a flying saucer with a blue skirt hovers. A black-eyed Susan watches from its dome, but she’s been crying. Her eye is red. The saucer would purr like a fluorescent cat. Not meow. An earthy, electric burr. An antique lamp suspends from the underside of the saucer. A tractor beam wants to raise Jesus into the craft. Not a bar of gold from a chugging workhorse. A beam of magic light.

I glance up at the ceiling. Einar Forseth painted biblical motifs here. He made Swedish glass pictures in Coventry New Cathedral. And a Swedish mosaic floor.

Send him to Coventry. Did he do something wrong?

Pareidolia causes me to interpret random items and patterns of shadow and light as faces. Sometimes, I draw the faces. I sketched an angry rah, her upper lip curled, hair stuck up with pins, combs and ribbons. Hurrah! A tripod flip chart presented a Roman nose between two circular windows. Outside is evening blue. So my memsahib has pale blue eyes. She glares down at me. Two cast-iron radiators bake beneath her round eyes. Memsahib wears a mask now. A lucha-libre robot with iron gills or grills.

To my left is a wall of books from nineteen forty-six. A couple of the titles are twenty-nine, and a handful are forty-seven, and I hid a copy of 1984 from nineteen fifty. The nuns who cloistered here called this room the children’s reading room. As a caretaker, my hands touched no books for children. None that a child might sneak away with. A grand piano rolls in, its wheels squeak. It’s four in the afternoon. My memsahib’s eyes are darker. A gang of violinists surround a horn player. A recital, black coffee and sweet cake to tempt. Vultures with greedy eyes form the audience. A slurp of coffee, tossing kanelbullar to each other, to me. An early twentieth-century piece, violent, avant-garde. The violinists roar. The brass beast bellows two bars of semiquavers. The violinists scratch. The pack surrounds the downed animal. The hornist, in her death throes, wheezes and puffs a final exasperated jazz note. All we can do is watch the spectacle. Nature takes its course. The vultures beat their wings and squawk.

On the eve, its bricks sheltered parish papers of some importance. Now it safeguards them, the children, the raw clay. The reading room is my ward.

At five, the walls shift inwards, the stitched table buckles. The chairs scrape closer on their haunches. The lamp’s shadow creeps, steaming across the burgundy lake. I reach for the switch, but the light hesitates, one last buzz of electricity. My memsahib’s eyes are mine. The whiteboard, slapped with my frantic hieroglyphs, grins in the half-dark. The school radiators wheeze; their metallic rasps make sense to me. Somewhere, a tricycle wheel turns, its yo-yo rattle forces a glance over my shoulder. The building remembers every paper, every recital, every child’s laughter and shudder. Now it remembers me. It absorbed me. The children’s reading room has closed its doors to me.

From somewhere inside, I hear my rubber soles, or my human soul, clapping through its halls. Flap, flap, flap, flap…

*Jesus institutes the Last Supper but Judas betrays Him.