The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 5

There's now a suit from the FBI who stands in the bathroom all day long till the library closes. He never sits, not even to shit, not even to eat. I couldn't figure it out until I realized that there were actually two of them and some unseen changing of the guards.

I recognized them both, of course, from their earlier assignment, checking various patron records. This was even before the RNC was officially set here. On rainy days or spring thaws, scraggly hooded boys from the Urban Explorer's Action Squad used to come in and pore over the old sewer maps down in the subbasement where I worked ("when it's rainin', don't go drainin'"). The two suits would drop into the shadows and emerge the next day to examine the same maps.

Kevin, before he was laid off, had fun turning the tables, pulling the records of the two Feds to see what they were reading. He tried to chat them up, offer some reading recommendations, and he claimed that one of them was really into Daniel Clowes, that he'd actually caught the guy walking out of a bathroom stall with our copy of Like a Velvet Fist Cast in Iron. But of course you couldn't believe half of what Kevin said, even when it was true.

Anyhow, the two suits were older and must've resented this crap assignment, guns holstered and standing in the john all day being mistaken for queers. You could just imagine their younger bosses with their promising carreers and their blonde wives. These two were, in short, dangerous. I took to shitting at home.

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Previously on Laws of Silence:
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 4

Part 4: When You Piss in a Toilet

Two things are certain: I hate that toilet, and I miss Kevin. Fucking lay-offs.

A typical day now: I tell 20 people, “The bathrooms are that way.” Then I alphabetize some books.

A typical day then? Me laughing as Kevin expounds, “When you piss in a toilet, dude, it sounds like a creek. You know that babbling sound, right? Think about those monkeys typing Shakespeare. If you piss and I piss and everybody else fuckin’ pisses long enough, well tinkle, tankle, bubble, babble, and *whamo!* the vocal ambulations waver just so and a real word emerges from babbling toilet water like the burning bush. And then they lock you up for saying so. Trust me, man. Lock ups.”

When the Hinckley library burnt down we had a field day. I know that’s bad, but we both hated their RFID catalog, which worked so great they fired two librarian assistants (new-found efficiencies, etc.). But something went awry when Harry Potter # 4 started to register as Harry Potter # 3. Then Harry Potter # 2 did the same. Manual systems kept up with the errors for a bit, but the problem spread to neighboring works in the stacks, the Rowleys and the Rowlinsons, and on down the line. Soon the library was threatened with the prospect of holding nothing but Harry Potter # 3. Kevin claimed that the actual books themselves began to change, a word or two at a time, that the physical collection itself slowly morphing into Harry Potter # 3. On top of that, he said that people were getting confused and returning personal copies of Harry Potter # 3 instead of whatever actual book they checked out. It was, in short, getting to be slim pickin’s at the Hinckley library.

Well anyhow, Kevin’s theories, man, that bullshit made my day roll. An RFID virus written by the FBI? The FBI convinced a “Harry-Potter-is-a-witch” wacko to burn down the Hinckley library?

“But … why?” I puzzled.

“A couple months before 911” Kevin looking shifty-eyed, “and someone in the Hinckley library is Googling all this crazy shit about the melting points of steel, the speed and fuel size of various planes, the physics of collision. The Feds found out, somehow got access to Google queries and traced it back. They were all over that place.”

“Seriously, dude,” he drolled, “Our library director’s ass-kiss thing with the Feds? Seriously, dude? Come on. What the fuck? What’s she so scared of, man?”

Silly stuff. But what the hell? Listening to Kevin’s theories sure killed time better than smuggling guitar tuners into whistling potties. And now he’s gone and the toilet coughed up that hairy hand and the Feds are all over us, and every time that toilet whistles—Phewwy eeeee!—I feel alone.

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Previously on The Laws of Silence:
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo #3
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo #2
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 3

Thus continues The Ballad of the Singing Loo:

Chapter 3

As luck would have it, I have one of the world's largest beards (I've check Guinness' World Records). At 9 it was fuller than most men's. I shaved it once: age 7, the day my dad died. By 10, they assumed I was a dwarf and I had my run of the bars.

Paradoxically, I have some of the neatest eyebrows you'll ever see on a man. Plucked daily, searching out the grays, the unruliness. It stings, and I rub my left index and middle finger on my thumb rapidly, which somehow relieves the pain.

I've been injured twice. Once while rollerskating. Didn't know how to stop but loved going fast, 10 year-old beard flapping in the breeze. Slammed into a wall and my wrists killed. Three hours later my neck tensed up. I forced it left and a taught string grew tighter and tighter and focused into a globule on the back of my head. It gave way suddenly like a deep pimple, gloppy, feeling oozy and warm inside.

Second time was on a bike, hauling through a parking lot. A cable strung waist-high split the lot in two, but gray day, gray lot, gray cable ... and too late. The right-hand shifter caught me on the hollow spot by the balls. For several years, whenever I lifted something heavy I felt all warm and woozy there and thought about my grandfather's hernia, like a grapefruit that he'd stuff back inside wincing. Eventually I just stoped lifting heavy things.

The third time was when I saw that severed hand in the toilet. You'd think it'd look like a joke, floating in the toilet.

Nope.

I fuckin' flipped out, nailed my head on the stall door and nearly broke my thumb slamming out the bathroom door. But that wasn't what hurt. The flashbacks started that night.

Next day, nearly everyone laid off with the merger, I was left alone with a couple of Feds in town for the RNC, deep in the sub-stacks, shelving books, retrieving the books. "My God," I thought, "will no one help the widow's son?" and every 15 minutes like Old Faithful that toilet screamed.

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Previously on The Laws of Silence:

* The Ballad of the Singing Loo #2
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

The Ballad of the Singing Loo, Part 2

Thus continues The Ballad of the Singing Loo:

Chapter 2

I was reading Boloña’s 2666 last night, ending section 2, when I hit two datum I wanted to store: 1) the name of a book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, that sounded interesting, and 2) a curious word, Adkintuwe, which sounded like a friend, "akin to me," and which meant “sending messages by the movement of branches” (221), reminding me of the internet, collaboration, projects. And I thought about “projects,” which were, it seemed, a projection of one’s thoughts and efforts, a projection of oneself, encapsulated, a snapshot in time. I thought of a lone oak on a hill, widespread branches swaying in the breeze and wondered what it meant to communicate by collaborative projections.

“Store the data,” I thought, and I reached behind a pile of books on my nightstand and found a scrap of paper and a pen, which were exactly the kind of paper scrap and pen I keep on my nightstand for these situations. On the scrap I found a note, obviously my handwriting, though I couldn’t remember writing it:

I saw something behind the mirror today. It was like looking out a window at night, mostly reflection, but something dark and unseen was clearly out there.

I picked up the pen and wrote these words. My wife was snoring. I turned off the light. I closed my eyes and I went to sleep. I dreamed. A hand in the toilet, floating a slow circle. Left hand, male, swollen, purple. A gold band in the bursting ring finger. The toilet flushed but without a sound and the hand spun and the fingers splayed and seemed to grip the edges of the drain. It wouldn’t go down. The water slowly filled and the hand rose, bobbed. Gray hairs, black hairs curled on knuckles. Was he Greek? The toilet started its whistle and I couldn’t look at the sound so I woke, half awoke.

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Previously on Laws of Silence:

* The Ballad of the Singing Loo