Lunchtime came, though he wasn't very hungry. He'd eat, of course. He always ate, even when he didn't feel like eating. He opened his briefcase, gathered a few things from the Raleigh's account--the pretense was that he and his wife worked together over lunch, Darlene grading papers--and tucked them in neatly with the Pepto Bismol and antacids, perfect companions for the National Post he kept for bathroom excursions.
Vic Reagan peeked around the cubicle wall, startling Todd, who snatched up his briefcase and held it against his chest protectively.
"Ted," the boss always called him Ted, not Todd, "lemme see you in my office after lunch, 'kay, Big Guy?"
Big Guy. Was that a crack on his weight? Todd wondered. Sure he'd put on a few pounds since he'd started five years ago, but he was by no means heavy, and most of that weight gain was stress-related.
The rest, he supposed, was related to lunches at the food court in the mall.
Todd felt the eyes of the whole office on his back as he lowered his briefcase. He made sure to plaster on a smile before turning to face them, saw Kenneth Pratchett leering, savoring his humiliation. Guys like Pratchett would always be at the top of the food chain, unlike Todd, who swam in the wake of the apex predators.
Todd had read that the unattractive earned significantly less than conventionally good-looking people. They called it the plainness penalty. Todd had been seated on that bench for most of his life.
"Sure thing, sir," Todd said, as Vic Reagan--who prided himself on his namesake as if he'd been the one to tell Gorbachev to tear down the Wall--breezed past without awaiting his reply.
Todd's mind reeled with awful uncertainties. Office after lunch. On a Friday. Vic Reagan was notorious for firing off little Friday hand-slap emails to the entire office, not blaming anyone in particular, but referencing a specific incident so the intended target would still know they were being blamed, albeit unofficially. Then the coward would head out early for the weekend before anyone could offer their two cents. Seeing someone in his office on a Friday... that was an entirely different beast, and in Todd's imagination, the beast had horns and shark's teeth still pink with its previous meal.
They terminated people on Fridays. Todd had once read that if they fired someone earlier in the week there was a statistically higher chance of an "incident." What the incident might be was never specifically stated, but he'd seen enough movies to hazard a guess.
❚❚
TODD WAS ON his way to the mall parking lot after lunch when the basket of deep fried calamari hit his colon like a freight train heading for the end of a long, dark tunnel. Good God, not now! The stomach cramps had been getting worse over the past few months, with the mortgage, the bills, the guys at work eyeballing him, and Darl hoping to conceive.
The wolf wasn't exactly at the door, but he was getting his pipes ready to blow down Chez Petit Cochon.
Todd squeezed his cheeks and power-walked back to the washrooms, head swimming with the nausea pushing at the back of his throat. He knew exactly where they were and he should, considering he'd passed them five afternoons a week. The problem was that he hated--absolutely loathed--using public toilets. The few times he'd had to go to the john at work, after one coffee too many, or a particularly heavy dinner the night before, he'd try to use the washrooms on another floor, in another office. And still he'd startled with every squeak of a fart, pinched his legs closed around the space above the bowl where his meager genitals dangled over the filthy water, courtesy flushing to waft away the smell before wiping.
Insanely enough, he'd feared his colleagues, Big Dogs that they were, would sniff out his fear of them in his excrement.
If he thought he could have made it home, he would have. At home, the bathroom was a refuge from his daily stresses. It was his castle, as his father used to say--as in, "A man's crapper is his castle." It was where he came up with his best pitches, like the one that had landed him the job he held now, and the campaign that had gotten he and Darlene out of the sticks and into a nice new semi-detached in High Park.
But he had no choice in the matter. It felt like everything he'd eaten over the past two days was about to drop out of him like the flush of an airplane toilet, whether he was hovering uncomfortably over the well-used bowl or still hurrying on his way to it.
A toilet flushed behind the closed door, and a man stepped out of one of the stalls just as Todd stepped in. He pressed past Todd, eyes on the floor--surprisingly clean for a public restroom--and on through the door. Todd watched him go, then glanced at the unused sinks, shaking his head in slight disgust. Some people.
With a quick scan of his surroundings, he saw no feet under any of the three stalls. No one stood at the urinals, either. At 12:30 on a Friday, this was about as close to a miracle as Todd had ever experienced.
Sweat beading on his brow, he slipped off his pants and cotton Jockeys just in time--Darlene had pressured him to wear boxers in order to increase his sperm production, but they just didn't keep the boys together the way he liked, and sperm production was the opposite of what he needed now--booting the stall door closed behind him.
Wouldn't that have been great, he thought, shitting my pants before a meeting with Reagan. He supposed he would have been all right, seeing as he was already at the mall. Just throw his crappy underwear in the trash and buy a few new pairs at the cheapest department store he could find. But the stink wouldn't wash off. He'd feel it sticking between his cheeks, itching, while sitting across the big desk from his tormentor. What's that aroma, Big Guy?
Someone was peering in at him, through the half-inch crack between the post and the door.
At first, Todd thought he'd imagined it. He hadn't even heard anyone come in. But someone was there: a single silver-gray eye scrutinized the place where Todd's legs came together. A blistered, pink tongue poked out to lick whitened, cracked lips. Wiry facial hair sprouted from nostrils like a tangled mass of tentacles, spreading out in a full mustache and beard. Under the door, Todd saw the dirty, paint-spattered coveralls and scuffed work boots that left a black rubber streak on the tiles.
Todd had a moment to think, It's my imagination. No one's looking in, he's just waiting to use the toilet. Bad calamari, that's all. I'm sick and I'm seeing things.
He tried to blink it away, to forget about the fact that there were three stalls, and all of them had been free when he'd come in. It wasn't even as though he'd gone into the wheelchair access stall by mistake. Whoever this person was, he was deliberately standing outside the door to the throne Todd occupied. This was no minor, excusable invasion of privacy, like taking the seat right next to someone on the train when there were dozens of empty seats. This wasn't just a minor violation of social convention. This was an infringement on a basic human right, to be able to shit without fear of harassment. If public toilets had been around in Moses's day, Thou shalt not loiter outside the toilet while thy neighbor is shitting would surely have been carved on one of those tablets.
Todd focused again on the crack in the door.
The pitch black pupil in the center of the silver-gray eye constricted. Todd had once read that pupils were sphincters. He pushed the useless thought away, noticing with rising horror a faint movement at the man's mid-section, but he couldn't see (nor did he want to imagine) what the man was doing to himself. It was all too much for his fragile mind to handle... that he was being spied on while defecating, and worse, that the voyeur might be pleasuring himself to the sight (smell?). Todd pulled his legs together tightly and cupped his hands over his genitals, unsure how he should respond to this violation... what he should say, if anything.
Please, God, make him go away!
Todd made to say, Excuse me, but immediately knew how it would sound. It was a problem he'd experienced often with colleagues: sounding meek. They'd swing their big dicks around the office--"Vaginas, with the women," he'd add for the benefit of Darlene--and Todd would still be scrabbling at his zipper like a nervous kid on Prom Night.
It was only then
that he noticed the graffiti on the walls. There were the usual tags, the crude jokes and drawings. What commanded Todd's attention had been etched in rigid letters with a key or, he supposed, a jackknife:
See "ReSULtS" BeLOW
But Todd didn't want to see anything below. In fact, he'd already seen a lot more "below" than he'd ever wanted.
The man's breath came quicker, in tandem with the rustling at his crotch, the metallic clack of his zipper, and Todd felt suddenly sicker than he had after eating the calamari. What kind of man would do such a thing, in plain sight of anyone?
What kind of man allowed it to happen?
But he was completely vulnerable. He'd realized it the moment this perverse dance had begun. His pants were loose around his ankles, his privates exposed, excrement smeared between his buttocks. If he did say something--if he was to shout at this pervert to Leave me alone, to Let me shit in piece for Christ's sake!--he could neither prevent an attack nor make an escape should the fecophiliac take offence and stop pleasuring himself just long enough to kick in the door.
What could he do to defend himself if the silver-eyed man attacked him? If the smell was no longer enough, and the freak wanted a taste? What if he wanted to play with it, like a rotten little boy plunging his fists into his dirty diaper, to smear it over the walls and on himself and on its maker? What could he do besides sit there and let the terrible man do whatever terrible things he wanted, to wait until the man had finished with him--with him and his shit--then pull up his pants and wash off his shame in the sink?
Todd considered in that long, excruciating moment--with his helpless brown eyes pinned in place by the single scrutinizing gray one--that he was a sitting duck, one which had been stripped of its feathers and splayed out naked, about to get its most private of orifices crammed with a fistful of bread and onions.
The man was grunting now, a vile, ululating groan of pain or pleasure--uh-ruh-ruggh! uh-ruh-ruggh! uh-ruh-ruggh!--as though he'd already rubbed himself raw in a prior affront and was gritting his teeth through the discomfort. The eye opened wider, the tongue sliding back and forth like a blind, desiccated worm feeling its way along dried concrete after a storm. One work boot shuddered and kicked out, the way a dog's leg might jerk when scratched in just the right place, thudding softly against the post.
Todd realized, as he watched the boot kick out, that it wasn't paint on the man's pants at all. Or, if it was, it was the thickest paint he'd ever seen, great globs of it like giant white slugs.
Oh, please, Todd thought pitifully, why don't you leave me alone?!
Todd heard the clack of someone pushing at a locked door, and his heart leapt. The relief that it wasn't the door before him was short-lived upon realizing it was the outside door, the door separating them from the food court. Somebody had tried to enter the bathroom and was foiled by the lock. Someone who could have potentially spared him further indignity at the hands of this maniac.
His thwarted savior.
Todd Pendleton was locked in and alone, trapped by the nasty silver-eyed man.
Why does this have to happen to me? Todd wanted to scream. But he knew why. It was the perfect metaphor for his impotence: both figurative and literal. He'd bitten off more than he could chew with the Raleigh's account, and everyone knew it. Meanwhile, Darlene wanted a baby--preferably a boy, but she'd be happy with either sex "just as long as it's healthy"--and Todd didn't have the guts, so to speak, to tell her he wasn't ready for such responsibility. His unrequited need to talk her out of it, at least temporarily, had just last week presented itself in erectile difficulty.
The man at the door had no trouble achieving an erection, unfortunately. All at once the silver eye widened, and the man began to sputter out breath after breath like a braying horse, sucking in through snot-sticky nostrils, the hairs in there writhing like tentacles--Goddamn you, vile food court calamari!--after each stinking discharge of cabbage and sulfur and a sickeningly sweet smell--Maple syrup?--from his lungs. It brought with it thoughts of death and rot and the fiery cauldrons of Hell and childhood trips to Pioneer Village where Todd had invariably gotten his face pushed into the snow by one of the Big Kids.
A gob of the man's cold, wet spunk landed on Todd's knee. Todd cried out. It was the first sound he'd made since he'd seen the man in the crack of the door, and its echo in his tiny metal death chamber startled him further. He wanted so desperately to wipe the sperm from his leg, but the libertine's cold, silver eye held him in place, daring him to move. Another spurt struck between the door and post, and oozed its way to the floor like a gleaming, pearly snail.
Then, as if Todd had nothing more to show him, the scatologist let out a pained grunt--uuurrruunnghh!--and shambled off, dragging his feet with each belabored step. Hunching down over his naked midsection, Todd watched the dirty boots scuffle away. The bathroom door unlatched and creaked open. The boots stepped out. The door hung silently in space for a moment, then slammed shut.
Todd heard himself whimper with relief. He wiped his ass and the jism from his knee--there was toilet paper at least, thank God for small mercies--and left the stall, grimacing in disgust as the man's semen plunked to the scuffed tile at his feet. He washed his hands, peering at himself in the mirror. His face was ghostly pale, sickeningly gaunt. His were the haunted eyes of a victim.
What he wondered was: had the man been lying in wait for just anyone to enter the toilets? Or had he picked out something in Todd, a vulnerability he could exploit? Todd sometimes used this toilet, so it was likely the man had seen him in this stall before. And the idea that the man had chosen him, of all people--For what? Because I look like a wimp? A sucker? Someone who would sit there and take it and wouldn't make a peep in his own defense, exactly like I just did?--made him more angry than the assault itself.
Strangely, the anger was not directed at his assailant but at the mortified face staring back at him in the mirror.
The door creaked open. Todd startled, watching its reflection as it swung open. A teenage boy in a black toque and a tight, ribbed undershirt stepped up beside him, began primping himself, swiping his hands through the scruffy hair above his ears and slicking back his eyebrows with the index and little finger of a single hand--the Devil's sign, Todd noted--all before spotting Todd standing beside him. The kid took one look, pulled a disturbed face, and walked out.
As Todd rubbed his hands together under the dryer, he glanced at the stall he'd been sitting in, indistinguishable from the others except for a pearly splotch still trickling down the door handle. He had an impulse to wipe it off, to spare the next person from the indignity of getting it smeared it on their palm, but an insidious, selfish little thought wormed its way into his head, surprising him into sudden, delirious laughter:
Fuck 'em.
He stood in front of the row of mirrors, laughing, cackling at his own reflection.
What would someone say, he thought, if they walked in and caught me guffawing like this--like a genuine nutjob?
The laughter died in his throat.
He went back to the stall, wound a good bunch of toilet paper around his hand, then tentatively wiped away the spunk from the door. He did the same with the spot on the floor, glistening under the fluorescents, then chucked the sticky wad into the bowl and flushed it away. Todd had been raised to clean up after himself, and though it hadn't been him who'd made this gloppy mess, he felt at least partly responsible.
It occurred to him that feeling personal responsibility for being victimized was unhealthy, but he pushed it out of his mind. He wasn't a victim. He'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to anyone.
Yes, but would anyone have let it go on happening?
Again, he pushed the thought away.
He washed his hands a second time before leaving the washroom for good.
As he scurried through the food court, he scanned the patrons surreptitiously, looking for the man in the white-stained coveralls. Not to confront him--Heavens, no--bu
t to avoid him. To identify him, so he could steer clear of him in the future.
A few customers caught his furtive looks. A teenager scowled over her taco salad and cell phone and an elderly gentleman smiled and ruffled his newspaper. There were no coveralls, there was no man with a beard and silver-gray eyes. If not for the mess he'd cleaned from the door, he might have been able to convince himself he'd imagined the entire ordeal.
Whether imagined or incredibly, horribly real, Todd never wanted to see those silver-gray eyes again in his life, if he could help it. And he'd certainly never go into that bathroom again, not even to wash his hands before eating. Maybe he'd drive to another mall on Monday, a little further if need be, to get his lunch.
If I've still got a job come Monday, he thought, launching into the parking lot elevator just as the doors began to close.
❚❚
TODD DUCKED UNDER the scaffolding and back into the lobby of 323 Bay Street. They'd been doing renovations on the building for months now, caulking around the exteriors of the windows, painting the halls, and the inconvenience was bordering on intrusive. The living wall they'd installed when the renos began trickled pleasantly as always, but today it reminded Todd of urination, and urination reminded him of the washroom at the mall.
He hurried by to the elevators.
Hurrying to my own execution, he thought, and pushed the thought away. As a skill, he thought he'd just about gotten the hang of it.
All eyes fell on him when he stepped into the office, like wolves on their prey. Kenneth Pratchett nodded up at him from his chair as Todd passed by toward Reagan's corner office, the kind of nod you gave people at a funeral, with slightly downcast eyes.
Todd gave a hesitant knock on the door, opened just a crack so Vic Reagan could say "My door's always open" and mean it literally as well as figuratively. "Come," Reagan shouted, which had always reminded Todd of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise (he and Darlene were closet Trekkers), but today made him think of the eye between the crack in the door, the silver-gray iris jerking up and down as he--
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