Marj broke into a lurching run.
When she got to the 76, the man in the glass booth (just like the one at Wells) — he wore a turban and looked Indian — told her the bathroom was broken. She said it was an emergency and he saw how crestfallen she was. He said she could use the mensroom, and slid a key attached to a wirehanger into the metal tray. She stood there until he waved his arm showing which way to go.
She went around back. A door was open. She ran into the darkness. She couldn’t find the switch but as her eyes adjusted she saw a wood board over the bowl, and a sanitary napkin dispenser. She was in the ladiesroom. She hobbled to the men’s, jiggling the key in the lock but it was broken and she tried again, about to run to the Indian, when the door gave way. It wouldn’t shut but she was in trouble, again no light, this room darker, she managed to find the toilet by the indirect hard fluorescence the banks above the gas pumps cast through unclosable metal door and high tiny window over the bowl, nature calling, no time left to even check if there was paper, hiked up her dress, sitting on the cracked, sticky bowl, and everything splattered out. The room so filthy and malodorous but she was grateful, she thought of Mother Teresa then almost with shame at how much wealth and ease she, Marj Herlihy, had experienced in this life, what was this but a minor discomfort, and how soon she would be home, at the Taj Mahal, the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers, the simple comfort of a clean cot was all she would ask for, all that she needed, there she could reach out to the poorest of the poor, their world so much worse than this ruined powderroom, gut now settling, relieved, panting from the effort, she would reach out from the Taj as Jesus did from Orissa, yes, not many people knew it but Jesus had been mentored in India and spread the gospel there, he had even been to Benares where bodies are burned and thrown in the river except for children who are wrapped. So this dank little lavatory would not trouble her, she would not let the debacle of outhouse smells intrude, she would spin them into perfume, they were afterall nothing and would soon be a memory. She hadn’t even thought about where she would go — when she finished her business. She would ask the Indian man. They were a friendly culture, like an enormous family, why, it might turn out the man behind the glass knew Riki (whom she’d be sure to mention), and if he didn’t, perhaps he’d have heard of him because of his martyred, somewhat notorious death. They might establish a bond that way.
She heard someone at the door and thought it was the turban’d gentleman. “I’m in here!” she shouted. “Someone is in here!”—because she wasn’t yet done, cramping again and splattering, at the same time groping with her eyes because they had failed to adjust enough to find tissue paper — on that front she had not had much luck. There was a big box stuck to the wall that was supposed to have seat covers but it was empty.
He burst in, not the Indian but someone else, she knew it wasn’t the Indian because he stank, and scuttled like a bony spider before she might even gasp, there was no turban and he tore her off the seat, she was on the cold floor, numb, face slammed hard and cold where the jaw had been injured, pain seared through, she tried to speak but he slapped and the corrosive pain jabbed at the still-healing fracture, he ripped off the blouse and stuffed it in her mouth and she was thinking how can he why would he I haven’t even cleaned myself I am so old—she felt pain down there and splattered and peed and that made him angry but she couldn’t hear the words he was saying, he was trying to mute himself, mindful, she thought, that the door could not close and perhaps someone, the Indian, or passersby, might come, and while he kept on she distracted herself by thinking again of the work she would do once she got home to the palace in Bombay, the work she would do with men like him, spidery men who’d known nothing but sorrow and horror and disease, bereft men who descended like locusts on children and missionaries like herself and burned them or mauled them like sick wounded tigers, empty dank men who knew not what they did, and she was not there, she was no longer there for the longest time, she smelled his breath and his vomit, an alcoholic man, a drunken drug-addicted man, then somehow she was on her feet with the green Jil Sander wrapped around her, spiderman gone, of a sudden she was outside, a person pumping gas into their car stared, the turban glimpsed her through the glass, gesticulating, she realized he wanted the key back but she kept going and was not really there, kept walking until she came to a group of homeless smoking and laughing and she wondered if they were the ones who threw the empty cans but she wasn’t there and 2 of them were women and they made jokes at 1st like the girls that night at Rite Aid then grew warm and concerned and saw she’d been hurt, called her Mother, Moms, Poor Mama, one of them was hurt as well and they took Marj along, pied piperwalking it seemed forever but telling her all the insufferable way they would soon be there she knew that her journey had begun and when they reached the tiny building with wire fence and neatened closecropped lawn — more like a cottage, same size as the Beverly Hills bungalow — they were met by a kind lady in a white coat, nurse’s coat, caregiver’s coat, a clean, middleaged gal in whites, ethnicity undetermined, and the kennel-like barking of dogs, they barked and barked, a stern, confident, friendly chorus, the clean white-coated lady seemed to know all of the people Marj traveled with, the ones who had come to her aid like missionaries themselves, and the white-coated lady didn’t really see Marj at 1st, she looked at the other sick one and said, That arm is infected, it is abscessed, she would give something for the infection, the dogs kept barking and then the white-coated lady suddenly saw Marj and was taken aback (as if only used to seeing this street tribe without her, solving their troubles best she could, kindly middleaged gal a true Christian, what Marj aspired toward), when she saw the old woman with hammered swollen face and bloody shitsmeared legs trying to cover her modesty she gasped and said, My God, what happened to her, Mercy, and the others said they didn’t know but found Old Moms near the 76 and she was in a bad way, looked like a rich lady, and White Coat spoke in such sweet delicate overtures, did someone abduct you, but Marj was beyond words, she couldn’t understand, did someone assault you, she was so tired, still silently distracted with thoughts of the Taj Mahal Palace, she wasn’t really there, she was in Bombay, not there with the tribe, and the dogs kept barking and the lady said she would call 911, Marj needed real attention, “hospital attention,” and the police, they would have to be — it was a police matter, at the very mention of the word some of the gaggle peeled off and vanished, but the one with infected arm helped put a blanket on Moms, who the middleaged woman said was in shock and she went to call while the others gathered round and the dogs barked and barked and barked and barked