8:00PM
Costume party later, but for now, the bathroom’s clean. Still some residue of afternoon colour, coming in via the skylight, shimmering pale waves in the cistern-water becoming fainter and fainter. Across town, people in their own bathrooms, locked in the mirror, staring down the evil twin, dreaming of the night to come, swallowing things, and the toilet, the toilet, the porcelain ghost in every home, shrieking and gurgling, white eyelid propped up, sewer-pupil surveying and swirling.
Somebody is duct-taping a sheet of paper to the bathroom door, scrawling over it in black marker. It reads: ‘LOCK DOESN’T WORK, PLEASE KNOCK’.
9:34PM, DOLLY PARTON AND JESUS CHRIST
i’ve got a fuckin UTI
it hurts so bad
Dolly says this, gritting her teeth, like she has a bladder full of battery acid, like she’s gonna burn a hole in the ceramic. Her boyfriend’s dressed as Jesus Christ, he’s washing his hands, two red holes in his palms drawn on with marker and bleeding out, fading into pink from the sweat and the soap.
well, you didn’t get it from me
huh?
you didn’t get it from me
Strobelights leak in underneath the bathroom door, neon fingers in search of a darkness to perforate and inhabit, to make swollen with colour. They leave momentary stains of wet red
and blue and green across the tiled floor. Jesus looks at Dolly through the mirror. She’s grimacing, clenching the toilet paper in her hands, hot pain trickling out of her, drip, drip, drip.
this hurts so bad
i’m all done,
see you outside
10:15PM, BATMAN
Batman’s got very little feet but he wears big boots, stuffs the empty space beyond his toes with tissue, when he gets home he has to empty his shoes out into the bin because all the tissue is shredded and damp with toe-sweat. Now he’s in the toilet restuffing them. Some guy opens the door for a moment, sees Batman shoving wads of toilet paper into his boots. The guy laughs to himself, shuts the door.
Batman panics. There’s a little pink shaver on the bathroom counter. He bends it so that the razors pop out, drop to the tiles with a gentle clang, the sound of something which cuts. He bends over, places a blade against the tip of his big toe, bites his bottom lip, slices himself open from toenail to sole. It’s a bleeder; stings a little, then stings a lot, vibrates with a venomous pain like a spiderbite. It drips on the tiles and forms this witchy glyph of syrupy blood. The guy knocks again, Batman doesn’t respond; the guy comes in anyways.
the fuck?
i cut my toe
on some broken glass
that’s why i was putting toilet paper in my shoe
yeah, whatever
so when you tell people about this,
you tell them:
‘oh, the guy dressed up as Batman, he cut his toe on broken glass
that’s why he’s got toilet paper in his shoes’
yeah, man, whatever,
i gotta pee
11:03AM, SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
One of them already had hair like Art Garfunkel so it wasn’t too much of a stretch, but Paul Simon, she had to get a black-pageboy wig and a turtleneck. Forty bucks she’ll never get back, and she’ll never wear them again. They’re in the bathroom now opening a little baggie, putting housekeys up their nostrils, trying to unlock their brains, or re-lock them. Garfunkel says:
do you think old people have sex?
yeah they just do it slowly
i hate to imagine
their bodies smashing together,
like this
Garfunkel thumps her hands together, makes a noise less like applause and more like a meatmallet flattening a steak. She does it harder, louder, lets it hit a sluggish zenith, then lets it trail off, lets it die. Starlike blue glints all over Simon’s face; she has so many piercings,
metal dangling from every ridgeline, every orifice. The chain threaded through her septum swings back and forth, goldplated pendulum counting down to something, anything.
you should see about getting your frontal lobe pierced
do they do that?
i’m never gonna get old,
i’m never gonna have old sex,
i’m gonna upload myself to a computer ASAP
oh yeah?
then they can just program me to be happy
who’s ‘they’?
in the near future,
there’ll be no drug dealers,
no pharmacists, no psychiatrists,
no psychotherapists, no priests.
there’ll only be
software engineers
12:44AM, CHE GUEVARA AND THE ALIEN FROM ‘ALIEN’
Now we’re getting to the witching hour, people are throwing up, the toilet is clogged, unconscious bodies sprawled on the couch like decorative corpses, and no, this is not living, this is a thick fog coming round every Saturday, laden with amnesia and new bruises, smokemachine sickness, mistmonsters hidden in the haze with glittered hair and sallow cheeks and nice white teeth.
The Alien (are they called xenomorphs?), she’s cleaning her teeth with a limegreen toothbrush that she found in the cupboard under the sink. Che asks her:
you brought a toothbrush?
no,
i found it in the cabinet
gross
whatever
The Xenomorph says this with a mouthful of foam, then spits toothpaste splatter into the sink, some gets on the mirror, ropey paintstrokes of peppermint white across the silver world, amongst other stains which have accumulated over the night; somebody’s written their phone number in mudcoloured lipstick, somebody sneezed into their reflection and didn’t wipe it up. The Xenomorph drops the toothbrush on the tiles, kicks it under the bathroom cabinet.
this is one of the only places
you’re allowed to be ‘gross’.
i’ll never tell
Che opens up a bottle of listerine, gathers saliva in his mouth, lets it drip slow and glutinous into the neon-green fluid. It sits on top as whiteish bubbles; Che shakes the bottle, mixes it up, puts it back in the bathroom cabinet. The Xenomorph is incredulous, she’s clapping her gloved hands, rubber claws trembling with the impact.
you’re so fucked up!
i’m so fucked up!
here,
do it in the shampoo
1:15AM, JESUS CHRIST AND SOME GUY WHO DIDN’T DRESS UP and i was like:
‘yo, stop complaining,
you didn’t get it from me’
but, i mean,
UTI’s aren’t contagious
but, honestly,
she might’ve gotten it from me
i’m telling you,
that’s impossible
i mean,
it burns when i pee
for what, like, four years now
you should really go to a doctor
i do self-checks
you need to see a doctor
don’t tell her i said any of this
don’t worry, i won’t
1:26AM, DOLLY PARTON AND SOME GUY WHO DIDN’T DRESS UP
he said you were acting like a bitch
what a fucking asshole!
what a fucking asshole
i tell him i’m in pain,
just looking for, what, like,
a modicum of fucking sympathy,
and he says:
‘yeah, well, you didn’t get it from me’
what a fucking asshole
anyway. i’ll just stick to vodka cranberries
huh?
cranberry juice is good for a UTI
you’re going to pour a vodka cranberry in there?
huh?
2:02AM, SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
Garfunkel puts the last of it up her nose and then stares into the mirror blinking stiffly. Simon removes her wig, dusts it off, puts it back on, takes a piss. The half-flush doesn’t work so she uses the full-flush, wastes some six litres of water, but what can you do? Toilet paper’s gone too, just naked tubes of cardboard rolling across the tiles with the draft. Someone’s taken over the music, playing some cock-rock tunes from the early 2000s, songs everybody likes but nobody really likes, songs you know all the words to just by merit of being alive, the same way you learn your first words, flaccid force of life. Garfunkel says:
we should put on ‘Mrs Robinson’
that Outkast song
no
that’s ‘Miss Jackson’
Mrs Robinson,
Mrs Robinson,
hmmmm
are you kidding me?
should i know it?
have you seen The Graduate?
the one where the guy sleeps with that girl’s hot mum?
yeah
and then he’s all depressed?
yeah
and it’s like,
no matter what you do,
you’re just going to end up disappointed,
and bitter, and empty inside,
and wondering what’s wrong with you,
and wondering why you do all these things you do,
and why you bother even going on living?
yeah, exactly
no
i haven’t seen it
2:24AM, BATMAN
Batman stumbles into the bathroom, back to study his toe under the fluorescents, to lament his misshapen life. He kicks off his white sneaker; the blood has turned it pink and sticky. He cut too deep. There’s the sludgy-white glow of bone glistening from within ripples of weeping red flesh. Just then a group of people barge in without knocking. They see Batman cradling his tiny foot with the near-severed toe. He shrugs.
i don’t care about anything anymore
holy shit!
what happened to your foot?
i was just born this way i guess
you’re bleeding everywhere
oh, right
can somebody get this guy a band-aid?
dude, what happened?
i cut my toe open
because i’m ashamed of my body
which part?
3:00AM, DOLLY PARTON AND JESUS CHRIST
because if i’m in genuine pain
it would be nice of you to give a fuck
this is so stupid
you’re such a fucking asshole
this is a huge overreaction,
considering you have a UTI,
which, again, i couldn’t possibly have anything to do with.
they’re not even contagious, i googled it
oh my god,
oh my god
4:12AM, CHE GUEVARA AND THE ALIEN FROM ‘ALIEN’
Che opens up the bathroom cabinet, finds an assortment of little pill-bottles; he switches the tablets from this bottle into this bottle, and visa versa, till it’s all mixed up. Some poor fuck’s gonna reach for a melatonin and swallow an Adderall, some poor fuck’s gonna reach for an
Adderall and swallow Prozac, some poor fuck’s gonna reach for a Prozac and swallow antibiotics, and it goes around like that till nobody can figure out how to fix themselves, till everybody’s hopeless and dizzy from the constant reshuffle of the sickness and the cure. The Xenomorph laughs.
you’re getting carried away
i thought you were allowed to be disgusting in here
everything in moderation
The Xenomorph sits on the toilet. Che turns away, watches her through the mirror, as if a reflection is less deserving of privacy, as if it were a different entity entirely; a memory of a person, a cheap copy. Che speaks through the silver, conversation via apparition, a drop of rogue tapwater dripping slow down the mirror’s surface like a wet rift tenderly cleaving the world in two.
how much of a human life
is spent in the bathroom?
i guess it depends
depends on what?
on what you do in the bathroom,
which could be all kinds of stuff.
‘private’ things happen in here,
whatever the fuck that means
8:00AM
Place has cleared out for the most part; a couple stragglers here and there, a couple sleeping bodies splayed out on the sofa, clutching bottles precariously, dreaming of holding onto something, really holding on.
Just as dawn begins to trickle through the skylight, somebody comes into the bathroom. One of the tenants of the house. Most of their costume has been abandoned save for the wig and the makeup and some hefty plastic jewellery. They stare down the mirror, hungover as shit, can’t remember what their costume had been. Can’t remember what it was they were pretending to be, just the night before. Just a few hours ago.
They squint reading the sign on the bathroom door. Over the course of the night the condensation from dozens of sweating bodies filled the house with a warm vapour, made the writing almost illegible, made the ink drip away in greyish rivulets. They turn the sheet around, scrawl something else on the other side, tape it up again, then they shamble away back to bed. The sign says: ‘TOILET WON’T FLUSH, DO IT IN THE BACKYARD’.
