J. Howard Siegal
I stop into the gas station the other day to pick up a pack of smokes, and I see him there, that kid who once saved all of humanity from a looming catastrophe, or just found himself really bored at a party, or possibly both of those things at once.
He sits behind the counter, his dark hair and narrow features folded into the crease of a newspaper, his limbs rumpled in his work overalls, framed by plexiglass and impulse-buy offerings, slouching through time.
“Hey,” I say, “box of Darts.”
His hand reaches up to grab the pack and, bringing it down, flips it into his other palm, where it momentarily disappears. He produces the pack from under the counter, then looks up, and his face softens in recognition. He gives me a weak smile.
“How do you like it here?” I ask.
He laughs.
“It’s better, right? Than people dying in the streets or something?”
“I’m dating Marie now,” he says.
I meet him for the first time at Marie’s house party, waiting in line for the bathroom. Lydia spills out of it, shouting into her phone at her boyfriend, and then as soon as she closes the door behind her, that kid opens it from the inside and peeks out, eyes darting above his slender nose and chin.
He just stands there for the longest time, saying nothing. Then he turns and walks straight into the kitchen. We all bust up—what the hell was that about!
I go into the bathroom, and the window is still nailed shut, from that time that creepy dude was arrested in the park.
Marie says, “Okay, I’m going to talk to that kid.”
We find him in the kitchen, looking through the cupboards.
Marie says, “Can I help you?”
He starts going on about orange soda.
She says, “Why were you in the bathroom with my friend, huh? What were you doing in there?”
The kid shrinks into his clothes and starts apologizing.
Marie grabs Lydia and drags her over. “Were you watching my friend?” She backs him up against the screen door of the kitchen.
Lydia swears the dude was not in the bathroom with her.
Marie pokes the dude in the chest and says, “I’m watching you, skinny.”
Lydia puts her arm around him. “This lamb is clearly lost as fuck. Let’s get him a beer.”
Marie tails along to surveil as Lydia sells the whole beer line on the idea that this kid has taken way too many drugs and needs a drink, like immediately. She liberates the tap, pours three beers, and whisks us out of the kitchen.
In the living room, Lydia and Marie sit the kid down in an arm chair and flank him.
Lydia: “Where are you from, honey?”
Marie: “What were you doing in that bathroom?”
Lydia: “Are you a student?”
Marie: “Hold on, I’m going to take your picture. Sit still.”
Lydia: “Are you, like, on the spectrum?”
Marie: “Do you even know anyone at this party?”
Lydia: “Did someone give you something to eat? Was it, maybe, mushrooms? A little piece of paper?”
Marie: “What the fuck were you doing in that bathroom?”
At long last, the guy mumbles something about air, then gets up and walks away. We lose sight of him through the crowd in the hallway.
David Hu says he talked to the kid. He also relates the curious phenomenon of walking into a seemingly empty bathroom and having this guy breeze out of it.
All David can think to say is, “Keep the door closed.”
A while later, we come into the kitchen for a refill and find the kid standing by himself, looking around. “Hey man, are you okay?”
The guy shakes his head, looks worried.
“Follow me,” David says, and we all walk out to the back porch. “Hey, this is, uh, some guy I just met. We’re gonna smoke this joint.”
“Nice,” someone says.
David puts flame to the joint and passes it. “Ever smoke this before?”
The kid shakes his head.
“No pressure,” David says. The joint goes around several times, and David and the rest of us lapse into giggling reminiscence.
Stories begin flowing, the evening air is cool, and everyone huddles closer. At some point, the kid reaches to intercept the joint, puts it to his lips, and inhales. He coughs out a billow of smoke. He hangs around the circle, smoking and smiling, chuckling at the borrowed stories. At one point, he lets out a deep sigh that halts the conversation. The kid looks around. Everyone starts laughing again. He phases out of the circle some time before we notice he’s gone.
He pops out of the bathroom, turns hard for the kitchen, and bashes straight into the back of some huge guy, spilling beer everywhere. The guy turns slowly, with a scowl. The kid shrinks.
Then we hear a voice, “Hey, it’s the Bathroom Dude!”
Lydia emerges from the crowd, puts her arm over the kid’s shoulders, and scolds her man. “This dude has now arrived at this party three different times, and you barely even got your ass here once!”
Bathroom Dude says he’s been too early.
The next time he shows up, we’ve adopted him.
“Bathroom Duuuuude! BD!”
He’s walking down the hallway. The crowd parts.
“Are you, like, an internet magician? Is this gonna be on YouTube?”
BD brushes past rims of plastic cups. Fingers pat his shoulders.
We follow him into the kitchen again, where he leans against the counter. Everyone looks at him, waiting for a trick. Several people hand him beers.
Suddenly he looks up. Someone else is parting the crowd in the hallway, holding aloft a trophy of stacked white boxes.
“Pizza’s here!”
Marie slides in next to BD at the kitchen counter. His eyes are locked on the pizza.
“Gonna grab a slice, BD?”
BD shakes his head.
Marie looks up at the side of BD’s face. “I don’t like you, Bathroom Dude. I don’t like you. I’m on to you. I think you’re full of shit, that’s what I think.”
She drinks half a beer in three gulps. “I think you’re just a tricky kid. I gotta be honest with you, man. I’m sorry if you, like—you know, have difficulties or whatever, but I gotta tell you, Beeeee Deeee, I think you’re here for a reason. And you know what else? I think you’re just a fucking scrawny lonely kid with poor social skills.”
BD tells her this is all true.
Marie rolls up her T-shirt sleeve. “You see this tattoo, man? You see that eyeball? I’m watching you, dude. It’s watching you. All the time.”
BD takes his eyes off the pizza, just for a moment, to look at all of Marie’s eyes.
BD is thronged in humanity. Someone has turned on music, loud, and all of us in the kitchen are moving. The floor bows in and out of rhythm. He keeps his eyes on the pizza boxes, trying to catch, in his periphery, what is going on with these moving limbs. People press and jostle him, but he smiles. The music is pulsing and articulate. The room smells of cologne, sweat, and beer. Marie is over there, dancing with Lydia and her boyfriend.
Someone bumps him. A laugh spills out.
A beer is pressed into his hands.
“Yeahhh, Bathroom Duuuude!” someone yells.
A chant starts. A hand guides the cup to his lips. A cup is pressed into his other hand.
We are patting his back, rubbing his shoulders. He drinks down the cups.
An energy seems to well in him. He throws down the plastic cups, pushes the crowd away, staggers forward, and knocks down the pile of empty pizza boxes on the table. He then attacks them, pulling them apart in strips, intoning to no one in particular, “I came here from a long time forward. There is a fungus that gets made here. It is catastrophic for humanity. The orange soda gets left out with the pizza boxes and some cigarette ash and the rotting wood of the balcony. It makes the mold.”
BD looks up at the partygoers, strips of pizza boxes in his hands. “Everyone gets sick. Few survive. Please, my friends, dispose of your food, your drink, your trash, responsibly.”
Everyone dies laughing. This kid is too much. We love this guy. He must be high as fuck. We beg him to stay. He admits he does like it here, but he has to make sure he finishes with these pizza boxes. And where is the orange soda?
Someone runs out to grab some.
After a time, the party flags out. The crowd thins, and stragglers condense into addled little clusters of conversation. BD sits on the couch, his eyelids closing and opening, Lydia breathing into his ear about her boyfriend.
The diehards sink into snoring poses all over the apartment.
The next morning, I get up to piss, and the bathroom door is locked. I lean against the wall of the hallway, rubbing my face. The lock of the door clicks, and the latch turns, and out stumbles BD.
“Hey, man,” I say. “No trick this time, huh.”
He looks pale and sick, totally lost.
I pull out my phone. “Can I get you a ride home?”
He scowls and shakes his head, then slowly turns and shambles away from me, down the hallway and out of the apartment.
I head for the kitchen to scrounge for a forgotten cigarette among the abandoned cups and party debris. As I push open the screen door, I have a momentary fright, that I’ll look down at the rotting wood of the back porch and see an open pizza box, slices going soggy under the drips of an overturned bottle of orange soda, and a greenish grey spatter coming to life on the crust.
But I find no super-mold, no evident aftermath of heroism, just the same old planks of the porch, the same old haze of the morning. I pick up an empty pack of cigarettes from the window ledge and rip it open. Inside, with a pen from my pocket, I write, “Here the world was saved.”
I let the paper monument float down into the future.