numbers, rooms & naughty child

I was inside an institutional building with many levels, staircases, rooms to sleep in, rooms to work from, rooms with books, classrooms, and rooms for sitting in and looking out. I had been inside the building for a long time and felt that I knew the maze of floors and rooms very well. A young woman, a world famous athlete, visited the building and I took it upon myself to show her around. I checked where she was going to be staying and we set out to look for the room. We walked down a long hall and I asked her the room number again – the number consisted of a letter followed by three numbers. As we continued checking the doors for the corresponding room number, I became confused as the doors were simply numbered with one, two and three digits. We walked up another level and again, I could not recall the room number that we were looking for. I had to ask her again. She then pointed out that the doors all had two room numbers: the official one, two and three digits numbers in neat white plastic numerals attached to the middle of each door, and then a second number written in untidy black pen, scrawled across the doors further down. These numbers were written in the same format as the number for which we were looking.

After leaving her at her room, I went off to find my own sleeping room and office. I climbed up the green carpeted stairs at a far corner of the building, travelling up several levels. I reached the top level but realised that I had taken a wrong turn as I was in a room that was not mine. I retreated down one flight of stairs and found that I had gone through a door identical to and directly next to the door I was meant to go through. I went through the correct door, up the twin green carpeted stairs and found myself at the top in my room. From my room, I could see a classroom of children sitting at desks, facing the front of the room where a poet was speaking to the group. It was soon to be my turn to speak to the group; I was to tell three dream stories and then recite a fourth dream. The class was a little disruptive, led by one particular boy who talked incessantly. When it was my turn, I walked up the centre aisle behind the children and began speaking from the back of the room. The noisy boy, seated on my left, continued to talk, and I stopped speaking, waiting for him to be quiet before I began again. He kept talking so I quietly said his name, my anger growing under the surface of calm.

After the class, I told him to stay back. He began to thrash against me, his arms and legs wildly swinging, threatening to hurt me. Still very angry but aware of not damaging him, I grabbed his arms around his wrists and his legs around his ankles, and held them altogether in one fist, occasionally having to readjust my grip as he wriggled free. I held him there, trapped, until he began to quiet. I didn’t let him go until he was sorry that he was rude and aggressive; until he realised that his behaviour wasn’t acceptable. I let him go though I still felt anger toward him. His wrists and ankles were a little red and immediately, he began to race around, talking to the other children that came back into the classroom, stirring up trouble.