His elbows banged the metal walls between our cubicles. Sputters of the last air in his throat and mouth burst out. Then I was falling.
My foot was wet. My wrist screamed in pain. I’d let one foot slide off the toilet seat and land in the bowl. My right arm was stretched out, my wrist painfully wrenched over the top of the stall as I held onto the loop of wire for dear life—and to end his.
I lifted my foot out, only to have my other foot splash in its place. Looking down I could see in the gap under the stalls that his feet had left the ground. My body weight falling had lifted him.
I rescued my other foot and had to step down onto the floor to reposition myself. My arms ached as I strained to keep hold of the garrote. Blood began pouring to the floor on his side of the wall. The wire had broken through.
The Swiss man’s struggles stopped almost immediately. The blood came down quickly, like he was pissing away a night’s worth of beer and missing the bowl.
I stood on the toilet seat again, easing up for a second on the wire. His body slipped and his feet touched ground. By the time I stood tall and tightened my grip again I realized I was holding dead weight.
I didn’t hear the door open, but the music got louder. “More Than a Feeling.”
“Hold on, I gotta take a wicked piss.”
So I knew he was a local. Good news was he sounded alone. I slid as far back to the tiled wall of the bathroom as I could to keep my arms draped over the divider out of sight from the man headed for a urinal. I didn’t want to let the Swiss man drop. The sound would be a giveaway, plus he might slip a leg out from under the stall door or something.
The muscles in my forearms burned. First from the strangulation, now the holding of a two-hundred-pound carcass of prime Swiss meat. Sweat dripped into my eyes but my hands were clawed onto the wooden handles of the wire loop and couldn’t help me.
Piss hit the porcelain basin of the urinal outside the stalls, and this was indeed a wicked one. He kept going and going like he hadn’t seen a bathroom in a week.
I grunted. Couldn’t help it. Still, not entirely out of place sound in a toilet stall.
The fountain of urine outside continued to fall.
My foot slipped again. I splashed into the bowl a third time. He had to have heard it, even over the sounds of his racehorse piss.
“Jesus, buddy,” he said. The beer might’ve been leaving his body, but it had already made its way to his brain. He sounded drunk and had to laugh at me.
“Don’t get the chowder,” I said, though I skipped trying to do the accent—chowdah. He laughed at that too, then started to wrap things up quickly, I assumed to head off the massive cloud of stink he thought would soon be emanating from my stall. Score one for my slippery foot.
He set off the flusher and left the room without washing his hands, and for that I was grateful. As soon as the music settled back into the pillow-over-the-ears muffle, I let the Swiss man fall. The sound of his body collapsing, banging against the toilet bowl, echoed off the tile and mirror walls.
I sat down on the toilet and panted for breath. My hands were frozen in a claw-fingered grip. I’d let one side of the wire loose and the other end dangled from my left hand, the wire slick with blood. On the tile floor between the stalls the pool of blood had found its way to the drain set in an indent in the floor, there to catch piss from those too drunk to aim well.
I bent down and gave his legs a shove, pushing his body into the stall so no part of him hung out. I evaluated my work. Not good enough. If someone bent down to look, they’d see him in a heap. Probably see the blood too.
I took off my jacket and hung it on the little hook there. First time in my life, I think, I’d ever used one of those things. I got down on the floor and slid under, hurrying since I knew there was more than one guy in the bar with a wicked piss in him.
My shirt got streaked with blood as I passed from one stall to the other. Fresh blood was probably not the worst thing my shirt picked up under there. Working fast I got him seated on the toilet and balanced so he’d stay. Up close, I saw the damage my wire had done. A ragged line was torn across his neck, blood and strings of flesh like the torn hem of a garment. His eyes were a maze of burst blood vessels, his tongue swollen and purple, wouldn’t fit in his mouth. Worst of it all were the little black panties he wore.
I slid back under, coating more of my shirt in blood and urine, who knows what else. The door opened again just as I got under into my own stall. I stood, wiped sweat off my forehead with a wad of toilet paper, and pulled my jacket on over my bloodstained shirt.
I unlocked the stall door and almost forgot to flush. Gotta keep up the illusion.
I, too, left without washing my hands.
Outside I found Bricks waiting in a cab, as planned. I slid in next to her and it took her a second to realize all had not gone smoothly.
“What the—”
“Don’t ask,” I said.
Here is a sample from Grant Jerkins’ Abnormal Man…
Note:
All epigrams and extracts—as well as this book’s title—are taken from the Bureau of Education Circular of Information No. 4, Abnormal Man, Being Essays on Education and Crime and Related Subjects, by Arthur MacDonald, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1893. In addition, the author is indebted to the Sub-Sub Programmer who kept dark hours alone with her loupe and logarithms to amass, correlate, scan, and furthermore write proprietary code to digitally capture le mots justes contained therein—the very phrases that would illume, limn, and inform the following narrative. She did this on the author’s behalf, requesting in return, only anonymity. Fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub.
For the convenience of those who are interested in questions concerning the abnormal classes—including their moral, intellectual, and physical education—the author presents in book form a number of his writings… In doing this the author has temporarily taken the point of view of the subject of each study, avoiding criticism, so that the reader may gain a clear insight…
The Moon.
You keep swallowing and you’re not sure why. You can feel your Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, up and down, over and over. Your eyes are closed, and there is a diffuse white glow bleeding through your eyelids. A pleasant, welcoming light. Not the sun. No, it is not the sun. It is the moon. Yes, the moon.
When you were still just a little kid, you believed—certain, you were absolutely certain—that the moon followed you. You can remember being in the backseat of your father’s restored Chevelle SS, driving home from a vacation in Gatlinburg, and watching the moon through the blue-green glass of the side window.
The moon stays with you. It follows you. No matter how fast the car speeds down the highway, that magnetic white disc keeps up with you, never lagging behind.
At first you think it might be some kind of optical illusion, some trick you aren’t yet old enough to understand, so you test the theory by looking away from it for a little while. Maybe it just seems like the moon is following you because you never take your eyes off it. A clock’s hands can only be seen to move if you take your eyes away from it for a little while. It’s only when you look back later that you can tell the hands have changed position. Maybe if you ignore the moon for a little while, maybe when you look back at it again, you will be able to tell it is really getting farther away. That it isn’t really following you after all.