The bathroom looked exactly the same as in the First. If anything, it was even more dilapidated. More cracks in the walls. The tiles fell away in a couple of places so that the piping showed through. And each remaining tile was covered in scribbles. The marker didn’t hold well, it smeared and faded, and the flowing script made the Fourth’s bathroom a bizarre sight, like a place that was draining away. That was urgently trying to convey a message but couldn’t because it was melting and evaporating. The writing was on the wall, but no one could read it. I tried. It was legible enough, but added up to complete nonsense. It destroyed your mood. I usually ended up reading the same one every time, the one arcing above the low sink: Without leaving his door he knows everything under heaven. Without looking out of his window . . . The rest of it was smeared, leaving only the very last word: Tzu. It drove me crazy that I found myself rereading it, and I’d even contemplated erasing it with a sponge, but something always stopped me from doing that. Besides, then I would have had to write something else in the glaringly empty space.
I wheeled over to that sink. Its edge was crusted with toothpaste, and the drain sported a clog of scum mixed with disgusting hair clippings. The hair was black. Having absorbed a large dose of this still life, I moved to the next sink. None of the wheelers in the Fourth had black hair, which meant that one of the able-bodied was carefully bending down to one of the low-hanging sinks while shaving, just to bestow the fruits of his piggishness on us. Or rather, I suspected, on me.
In came Alexander.
He brought another cup of coffee and an ashtray. Placed them on the edge of the sink. Put a cigarette and a lighter into the ashtray. The sleeves of his sweater flashed his fingers for a second; the nails were brutally gnawed off, bleeding. Then they went into hiding again. The sleeves were stretched and hung low, but he also grabbed them with the fingers from the inside to make sure no one saw his hands.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not at all,” he answered from the door. And vanished.
So here were two things that I learned about him in one go. That he could talk and that he was eating himself alive.
Alexander’s servility was more scary than pleasant. It brought to mind those nasty Pheasant tales of how other groups treated new arrivals. How they made them into slaves. I’d never believed them, but then I met Alexander, who seemed to have come straight out of those stories. A real person and at the same time a horror story made flesh. The way he carried himself was seriously shaking my resolve not to believe.
What did I know about the Fourth, when it came down to it? That, except for Lary, they behaved more or less normally toward me. They seemed nice, almost too nice for all those horrors attributed to them. But maybe I was exactly the reason? Who would need a slave in a wheelchair? Useless. He can barely serve himself. One who could move, now that’s different. One like Alexander. Having arrived at this thought, I realized that the Pheasant poison was inside me and that I was going to die from it. But not before carrying it through the rest of my life.
That was the last straw. I looked in the mirror. At the swollen nose and the swelling jaw. Touched the bruise. Pressed it harder, locked eyes with my reflection, and suddenly burst into tears.
They came so easily that I was astonished. As if I was always on the verge of them, ready to go. I was ogling myself in the mirror, cup in hand, and crying away. To mop up the fluids that sprung out of me, it took at least a couple of feet of paper towels. I blew my nose one final time and in the mirror saw Sphinx.
Not his face, he was too tall to fit in the mirror designed for the wheelchair-bound. But even without looking at his face, it was clear that he’d been there in time for the deluge.
I didn’t want to turn around, so I decided to behave like I hadn’t seen him. I put down the cup and busied myself with washing. A very long and thorough washing. Finally, I wiped my face and saw that he was still standing in exactly the same place as before. Apparently he wasn’t here to demonstrate discretion, so I had to pretend as if I’d just noticed he was there.
Sphinx had the same semi-assembled look, except he’d wrapped a shirt over his shoulders. The shirt clearly had been through a contentious encounter with liquid bleach at some point, and the jeans weren’t much better, but taken together, the appearance was stunning. Sphinx was one of those types on whom any old rags looked presentable and expensive. I had no idea how he pulled it off.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“A bit.”
To avoid looking him in the face, I stared at his sneakers. They were worn out, and he’d wrapped the laces around the ankles. Mine were much cooler.
“Bad enough to cry?” he continued.
Yeah. Discretion was not his strong suit.
“Of course not,” I managed.
It was silly of me to have expected that he would just turn around silently and leave me alone with my embarrassment. Now he was surely going to start an inquiry into why I seemed so unhappy.
“Your coffee’s getting cold,” he said.
I felt the cup. It was still warm.
Whether it was because I didn’t see Sphinx, who was now standing behind me so I could not see him in the mirror, or because he never did ask me anything, or because I wouldn’t have known what to answer if he had, or all of it together, the dam burst again. Except now it was words gushing out of me in a flood instead of tears.
“I’m a Pheasant,” I said to my puffy reflection. “A freaking Pheasant. I am for some reason not happy drinking my coffee right after a punch in the face. And you know what the funniest part is? That Lary doesn’t think I’m one. Oh, he calls me a Pheasant, but he doesn’t believe it himself. Or he wouldn’t be doing this. No Pheasant would ever take it, he’d snitch in an instant. So on the one hand he hates me for being a Pheasant, and on the other he counts on me not being a Pheasant. Isn’t that special? What if I were to wheel out of here right this moment and go to Shark’s office?”
I felt my face again. The swelling was visibly spreading. By dinnertime it was going to occupy half of my face. Much to the joy of the First.
“You can put some foundation cream on it,” Sphinx suggested. “It’s in the cabinet to your left.”
I bristled. He was so sure that I wanted to hide that shiner. Lary was too. What if I wanted to reveal it to the world? Tell everyone of the circumstances of me acquiring it and see what happened next? This was the Pheasant talking, of course, and it was scary.
“I am going to tell Shark,” I said out of sheer contrariness.
Sphinx came up to the adjacent sink and sat on it. He even crossed his legs, like it was a chair. I immediately thought of the caked toothpaste and wondered if he’d still look cool with toothpaste smeared on his butt.
“Right now?” he said.
“What?”
“Are you going to tell right now?”
I didn’t answer. Of course I wasn’t going anywhere, but he at least could have pretended to believe me. And try to talk me out of it.
“It was a joke,” I said crossly.
“Why?”
As I thought about it, he answered himself.
“Well, obviously you wanted to be talked out of it. To begin with. What else? Did you want to scare me? Possibly. But why me and not Lary? Or maybe you’d like me to stand up for you next time? Something like a covenant to protect you from him in the future? Sorry, I can’t promise you that. I’m not your nanny.”
I felt myself reddening from my ears all the way down to my heels. Sphinx’s interpretation of my behavior turned it pathetic. And it was very accurate. I just wasn’t thinking about it in those terms.