The Shower

The shower was small, but not cozy.  ‘Cramped’ would have been a better word.  There were only two stalls and each of them was only about three feet squared; just enough room for a human being to step inside, get clean, and get out again.  Which, of course, was all that really mattered.  The stalls were built for necessity, not for comfort.

They were separated from one another by a thin plaster sheet that started about one foot up from the ground and continued up to about one foot down from the ceiling.  If one really wanted to, he could have stood up in his tippy-toes to look over at the next person’s head, or bent over, to see his feet.  This divisor was connected to the wall by virtue of two metal poles that were only about half rusted over.

The walls themselves, and the floor, and the ceiling, were all the same.  Dingy yellow tiles that had once been white and clean lined all three surfaces, festering with mold and mildew.  Some were cracked, some were chipped, none were new.

The two stalls shared one common area: a short, elongated “Dry Zone” that one could stand in and see the two curtains, side by side, two different gateways to identical stalls.  They too were suffering the effects of age.  The one on the left was missing several of the o-rings that held it to the curtain rod, and its partner had suffered a long, jagged tear, clumsily repaired with duct tape.  Both were slightly green, slightly grimy, and more than a little disgusting.

He stood in the Dry Zone, facing the stalls, halfway in between each one, looking slowly around himself with a sense of awe as he took in his new surroundings.  He was naked, his bare skin taut with goose bumps from the shower’s unpleasant coldness.  He was without a towel, or soap, or shampoo, but none of that even crossed his mind as he allowed his bright, eager eyes to crawl all over the grungy walls.

He himself was tall, lean and trim, the very model of masculine beauty.  Adorning his thin, nimble fingers were ten uniformly shaped nails, long and clean like a girl’s.  His mouth was full of pearly teeth, naturally straight, and his right shoulder was decorated with a little tattoo of an eagle in flight.  When he moved, he seemed to glide, his step full of confidence and self-assurance.

Slowly he stepped forward and reached out to brush aside the left-hand curtain to his left-hand side.  For another moment he lingered there, looking from the dripping walls to the old-fashioned temperature knob, to the tarnished brass showerhead that hung from the wall just above eye level.  As if stepping into a new world, he entered the shower.  He reached out, grabbed the dial, and pulled.

Like bullets the sharp droplets of water shot out the nozzle.  He winced at first, but quickly got used to it, and soon began washing himself meticulously.  By any standards, it was a long shower, upwards of an hour, but it an interesting new sensation and he savored it as best he could, for as long as he could.  When finally he decided he’d had enough he turned the knob back around to “Off,” and spent a moment drip-drying, watching the water collect off his body in the little trough at the shower’s far end.

Eventually he found himself dry enough, then pulled the curtain back again and stepped out again into the Dry Zone.  For a moment he was puzzled, as he looked back and forth, left and right, scanning the titled walls.  On all sides the walls were flat and unbroken, save for the occasional cracked or fractured tile.  Nowhere to be found on any side was a door, or window, or anything that might have indicated how he’d gotten in here, or how he was going to get out.

He sat down on the stoop that separated the stall from the Dry Zone and thought a moment.  The walls stared back at him eyelessly, tearing down his concentration, building back up his confusion. Finally he stood again, and began to pace, back and forth in the six-foot-wide Dry Zone.  His anxiety grew, rather than lessening.  His lean body grew tight as muscles flexed nervously.  He kept his head down but when he looked up again no doors or exits had appeared.  There were just walls, walls on all sides, gleaming white tile walls that offered neither explanation nor escape.

The next few hours passed and nothing changed.  He paced awhile more with tension mounting, then sat again to rest, cross-legged inside the left stall.  For what seemed like just as many hours he sat there unmoving, staring at a spot of water damage on the ceiling, lost in confusion.  Eventually he felt chill, and reached up to turn the shower back on, running warm.  With a squeak of the pipes the water burst forth and soaked the sitting man anew.

Still, he sat, feeling it wash over him and through him.  He looked up to watch as the droplets of unnatural rain came towards him from the ugly metal “cloud,” and then down, once more, as the water dripped off his firm body, running from him to the tiled shower floor, and from the floor to the trough right in front of him, from where we was sitting.  The trough was a small basin just six inches wide that ran all the way across his stall, and underneath the divider into the next.

Vaguely he began to wonder about a drain.  The trough didn’t seem to have one; not in his stall, anyway.  Curiously he leaned over to look under the divider, first to the right, to the next stall; and then to the left, in case he’d missed anything.  He hadn’t.  No drain existed.  The water seemed to just…  disappear, into nothing.       More time passed, and nothing changed.  His skin grew soggy and waterlogged but still he sat under there the nozzle, waiting without even knowing what he was waiting for.  The seconds ticked by but he grew neither hungry nor thirsty nor tired, simply bored.  The water kept falling, and he made no motion to turn it off.

With no clock, no watch, and no daylight to tell him the time he had no idea how long he had been there.  Hours, he knew, and soon it seemed those hours began to stretch into days, with no end in sight, no escape in mind.  Every so often he’d get up and turn the shower off, then spend a few more hours pacing back and forth in the Dry Zone, wondering how’d he’d gotten there, not caring how he’d gotten there but wanting to escape, wondering how to escape.  Eventually that too would get tiring and he’d sit in the shower for a few more hours and try to clear his mind.  He switched stalls every so often, delighting in what little bit of variety he could get.

At least three days had passed before he began to bite at his nails.  It was a nervous habit that he’d dropped years before as a kid but now it came back to him, little by little as tedium and claustrophobia began to take greater and greater hold over him.  It started with his thumbs, which had the largest nails, of course, and when he had worked them down to a stub he moved on to the index fingers, and from there to the rest of them, in order, methodically.  When he’d ripped the last one from the little pinky finger on his left hand he stared at the pale, wrinkly dome-like tips he’d been left with for a moment and then held them up into the spray, as if like plants they might drink, and grow.

The next few days after destroying his fingers he spent out of the showers altogether, in the Dry Zone.  Sometimes he paced back and forth for longer and longer hours, sometimes he did pushups off the slick ceramic floor, and sometimes he’d just lie on his back and stare and the ceiling, at the rows and rows of tiles enclosed in that flat, upside-down plane held in place by those four solid walls.

He started looking at the walls, too, examining the tiles in all their intricacies.  When the shower was new, many, many years ago, the tiles might all have been the same, but now it seemed each one was unique in its flaws.  Cracks, chips, and abrasions were the rule rather than the exception, and the more he stared at them the more he got to know them, to understand them, to memorize them.  It was like a giant vertical road map of some sort, one that reflected not the byways and landforms of same state or town but the history of the shower’s life.

He’d been in the Dry Zone about a week, give or take, when he finally went back into the stalls.  His fingers were still sore and red around the edges.  A few of them still bled, oddly.  None had even begun to grow back.  He winced as he grabbed onto the dial too tightly, aggravating the injuries, but then relaxed again in the flow of water.  Before long he was back in the same pattern of alternating between washing endlessly in the different stalls, and walking up and down in the Dry Zone.  And before long, the same tedium crept into this process, too.  His periods in between change grew longer and longer, until he was spending whole days doing nothing but sitting in the shower, staring up at the faucet with an empty mind.

In the Dry Zone, he’d given up his exercises but stuck to his studies of the cracks in the wall.  Sometimes he closed his eyes and traced over the patterns with his stumpy fingers, knowing with certainty every intimate detail the ceramics had to offer.  He’d learned all the intricacies, all the flaws in the mortar in between the tiles, all the weakest spots the wall had to offer.  If only he had a pick, or chisel, he thought occasionally, he could begin to chip away.  Any hard object would do, really…  a fork or spoon, a tin can, a pen, a paperweight.  A razorblade.  An earring.  A toothpick.

When next he stepped back under the water he turned his attention to the faucet.  He examined it, as it spit on him.  He tried twisting and turning it all around, to somehow unscrew it from the wall and wield it against the crumbling plaster of the Dry Zone.  No luck there; it was fixed as firmly to the wall as it could possibly have been.  The greater part of several days he then spent tugging and pulling and hitting, all in vane.  The faucet did naught but soak him further, water the only reward for his efforts.

After trying and failing the same way in the other stall he rested for a while, lying down backwards with the rain pointed at his chest.  His skin had grown soft and pale, and wrinkled like an old woman’s.  His hair had lost its color and his bird-tattoo seemed…  faded, somehow, as if the water had gotten in under his skin and wiped away the very ink.  He fixed his eyes on the rusty knob that was the master control for the showerhead.  What if it could be detached? It was a dial; it swiveled around a fixed point to set the temperature of the water.  What if, through excessive turning, it could be snapped off like a twig? It was old already.  Maybe it could be done.

He set about this new exploit in earnest.  The dial had a short, thick metal handle that stuck out several inches and he grabbed it firmly, then began to twist.  Left, then right, then left again, and right, left, then back to the right, and all over again.  As he turned, the water from the faucet changed from temperate to boiling hot to sub-arctic cold, then back again, then back again, then back again, but he hardly seemed to notice.  He was intent on his quest and of a single mind, able to tune out and completely ignore the many different kinds on pain inflicted on his back by the extreme temperatures.

His perception was altered, his view of time askew, but nevertheless it seemed to have been more than a week before he gave up.  The dial refused to budge; all he’d gained from his effort were tired fingers and unsightly, blistered palms.  He rested as best he could in the Dry Zone for a little bit longer before moving on to the next stall.  Again, he gasped the short, thick metal dial with his deformed hands and twisted, back and forth, and back, and forth.  This time he spent even longer on the task, his mounting desperation demanding he put hope into any source he could find.  This time was useless, too.

Then he relaxed again, and lay once more on the stall’s slick bottom, this time allowing the water to hit his face, washing over his blemished skin and into his mouth, over his teeth, his still-perfect teeth, the last part of his body the shower hadn’t ruined.  He thought of that grimy, tarnished slice of metal sticking out of the shower wall, and all of his failed efforts to break it off.  His brain reflected not irritation at the failure, but sadness, depression, and mounting tension.

He lay there in the shower for more time than ever before now.  His mind became a blur of stress and anxiety, as he thought about everything and nothing, all at once.  Time began to finally lose what little meaning it had still retained.  Hunger had never existed in the shower, nor had thirst, nor exhaustion; he’d never slept, not for one moment.  Hours passed, blurred into days, blurred into weeks.  Maybe even months; he couldn’t know, didn’t try to know.  When finally he arose, he stepped forward and slowly reached out, turning the shower off for the first time since he’d arrived.

His thoughts then drifted further, outside his body, outside the shower.  Fragments of places and events sifted through his mind like conscious dreams, waking images of un-reality.  He could see in his mind’s eye peak-top views from mountains he had climbed, when he could see for miles in all directions, over the treetops and riverbeds and dusty, rolling plains.  He remembered when his eyes had the freedom to take flight and soar over fabulous sights that were now mere memories.

His body bore no similarity to itself of old.  The tattoo was completely gone now; ashen-white skin had replaced the little flying bird, and covered the rest of his body, too.  His muscles had withered from disuse; his eyes were blank and staring.  Only his teeth were left, to remind him of who he once was.

That was when he smashed out his two front teeth, by stepping forward and slamming his head down on the shower dial as hard as he could.  The first time he missed, and only chipped his left tooth, but the second time he hit head-one and broke both of them right out of his mouth.  Pain flooded through his system as the teeth dropped peacefully into his open hand.  Blood dripped from his open mouth and mingled with the shower water, flowing into the drainage trough where it lingered a few moments more before vanishing, completely diluted.

Teeth in hand he turned, still wincing, and pushed the curtain aside weakly.  Then, taking a tooth in each hand between thumb and forefinger, he found the deepest, widest crack the shower wall had to offer, and began to scrape, slowly and deliberately.  The teeth were strong and healthy, as he’d always treated them with care growing up.  They were the perfect tool for digging through the ceramic tiling.

Before long, though, they too began to corrode.  Teeth are made for eating, and his, healthy though they were, couldn’t take this kind of abuse.  His progress was limited, but still visible, by the time his two front teeth had been reduced to nothing more than white dust on the Dry Zone floor.

So he entered the shower again, and again, each time pounding his head harder and harder against the wall, to create more of these little shovels.  None of the breaks were clean.  He could still feel the shards of bone sticking into his gums, cutting them even further, splashing more and more of his blood on the shower walls.  Each time he would return to the Dry Zone to wear away the tiles, to work on his hole, until his newest tooth was gone.  Then, he’d break out new ones and begin the cycle again.

Time seemed to pass more slowly, with the advent of this new macabre chore.  The pain of course was unbearable, and in the background the shower droned on and on, endlessly, tediously.  But he dared not shut it off for fear that silence or, worse, the dry scrape of his own teeth against plaster would drive him insane even sooner.  Time passed, slowly.  Weeks went by.

By the time his mouth was empty, his hole was no bigger than a dime.

He stepped back, for the first time truly seeing the full scope of his work.  For so long he’d been lost in his own private maze of conflicting hope and despair, blind to the sheer futility of his task.  One moment was spent in shock as he felt the tiny hole with his index finger, then pulled it away to press his face gently against the wall and look through, seeing only blackness, emptiness, nothing.

If not for the pain in his gums and jaw he’d have cried out in anguish, at seeing all his work having gone by for naught.  In his anger he struck the wall, as if he might punch right through it, but that was not the case.  He felt the bones in his fist shatter, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore, and he hit it again, with the other hand this time.  He fell to his knees and clasped his toothless face in his stubbly hands and began to weep, agonizing sobs that only increased the pain.

That was when he left the Dry Zone for the final time, and stepped back into the shower as a complete monster.  His body and mind were both as broken as his spirit and when he lay back down in that dull, lukewarm stream he gave in to the complete and utter despair that had been building since he first arrived.  He lay back down and crossed his arms over his chest and let the water flow into his pale, deathlike eyes, and did his best not to think ever again.