What was wrong with Patrick Sanders?
He found he liked to ask himself this question using the third person, which in turn, made him count the number of strange behaviors he engaged in.
For instance, his routine visit to the first floor men’s restroom at Massey hall. There were no classrooms in Massey and it housed academic and administrative departments of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. That fact meant the building was quiet with less people around then, say, a building with classrooms in it.
Massey Hall, the beige brick building with architecture from the nineteen fifties on the outside and carpeted hallways and sheetrock walls on the inside. Massey used to house students over sixty years ago. Today, after knocking down walls and erecting new ones and general rearrangement of the interior, a new visitor wouldn’t have suspected that.
None of this interested Patrick. The only part of Massey Hall that interested him was the first floor men’s restroom. Because of the quiet.
When Patrick entered the men’s room it smelled like bleach, soap, and toilet disinfectant. The scent was so strong it tickled the inside of his nose and he sneezed into this elbow, the sound of him loud and explosive in the cool, damp room. The one inch tiles on the floor, brown and beige, were still damp from a mop.
He assumed the janitors had just cleaned it, but wondered, with the overkill of cleaning supplies, if they had washed away copious amounts of blood and disposed of a body.
The men’s room appeared to be empty—nobody standing at the two urinals separated by a panel wall and no feet on the floor in the two toilet stalls.
This was all well and good for Patrick because everything about the first floor men’s room in Massey Hall had become routine. It was the place he went this semester between his nine o’clock and eleven o’clock class on the ASU campus.
For Patrick, the men’s room at Massey was a literal rest stop between his class at business and his art class at Neeb North. His bowels didn’t have to do business often during this hour window of time, but he did enjoy the solitude of checking his messages (text and email) on his phone. In other words: Thumb-fucking his phone, his girlfriend, Kim, called it.
Inside the second stall, Patrick could have used the time to reflect on why he did things he did, but instead he sat on the toilet seat with his pants still on and pulled out his phone to do the deed Kim complained Patrick performed at restaurant tables and in bed.
So much for introspection. Patrick was aware of that thought as he pulled open his inbox to check his email. What will be will be.
However, he then noticed he wasn’t alone in the men’s room. Somebody was in the other stall. The man wore shiny black loafers and Patrick hadn’t heard him come in and he was certain the other bathroom stall had been empty a moment before.
He shook his head and chalked it up to not being aware of his surroundings. Which made sense with Kim’s complaining about him thumb-fucking his phone every moment of the day. How could he be aware of everything around him?
“Please absolve me of my sins,” the man next door said.
Great, Patrick thought, the dude is talking on his phone.
Then the man said again, “Please. Please forgive me. Are you there?”
The man’s voice sounded sad and loud in the men’s room which wasn’t designed as a confessional. A confessional would be more intimate. Contained. Like a coffin.
Patrick froze, phone in one hand, other hand under his chin. He gave a side eye at the wall next to him with the man behind it. He hoped the dude would shut up.
“Hello. I know you’re there,” the man said.
“You do know you’re in a men’s restroom, right? And I’m no frickin’ priest,” Patrick said.
“I don’t need a priest. I just need someone to absolve me of my sins,” the man said.
“I’m not that dude,” Patrick said.
His solitary moment in the Massey Hall restroom was ruined. He felt it slip away like the drop of a towel. If he had wanted conversation he would have used the rest room in Memorial Union.
“You are,” said the man on the other side.
“If anyone will do, go find someone else. Leave me in peace, so I can finish my business,” Patrick said.
“Listen to me,” the man said.
Light drumming came from the wall, it sounded like the man was drumming his fingertips against it. Patrick didn’t know if the wall was made of some heavy duty fiberglass or some composite involving metal. The walls had a gleam, like a metallic surface, and on Patrick’s side he could just make out his shadowy reflection in the wall and the graffiti written there. Not products of hight art, but low brow, fitting for late-stage teenagers and young adults who hadn’t grown out of their juvenile stage, with drawings of male and female genitalia.
Patrick had enough of this conversation. He reached back and lowered the flush handle (that was a habit of his in that he didn’t want anyone else in the restroom to think he was actually just sitting there, or worse, didn’t flush) and reached for the stall door.
The chrome slider wouldn’t move. He jiggled it, but it felt as if a magnet kept the door sealed shut.
“Listen to my story,” the man said next door.
Patrick slipped his phone in his pants pocket and with a deep, fortifying breath of air that still smelled like cleaning supplies, he got down on his hands and knees. The thought of his bare hands on the tiled floor of the rest room disgusted him, but a stuck door would not keep him there.
Once on his hands and knees he realized he also had to put his forearms on the floor to get under the door. His face twisted in disgust as he mentally added his forearms to the body parts that would need a soapy wash.
The moment he edged his hands out from underneath the stall door, a pair of shoes—Keds written on the sides--walked by, nearly stepping on his fingers. Reflectively, Patrick pulled back and realized the men’s room had two new visitors.
“Your pop know about it?” Someone asked. It was a young voice, younger than the older adult one Patrick had heard in the stall next door.
“Hell no. He’d tear my head off and shit down my neck if he did,” said another young voice.
“I’m the one with the filthy mouth,” the man next door said.
Patrick sat down hard onto the toilet seat. At first he didn’t like how the bathroom suddenly grew crowded and he was being forced in a conversation he didn’t want to have. He held his breath with a sinking feeling something odd was going on.
For one, the floor seemed cleaner, with more shine. The cleaning smell wasn’t as pungent as a moment before. And the two college students outside the stall were talking as if they hadn’t heard the dude in the next stall.
“He’ll never know,” filthy mouth said. “Why do you care? I have the cash now and you said you’d do it. That’s the deal, right, asshole?
“Make sure he doesn’t find out,” the other voice said. “Nothing leads back to me.”
Their shadows lay on the one-inch-tile floor and they looked like stick legs of a child’s drawing. Patrick faked a cough. And coughed again when there was no reaction from the outside. He felt ridiculous doing it. The two outside exchanged something, Patrick saw it by the shadows of their hands as they stood in front of the sinks and mirror.
“When will they be gone?” filthy mouth asked.
“They’ll be gone by Sunday morning,” said the other.
When the voice of the man next door spoke again, Patrick turned his head to the wall. “That was Wednesday, April nineteenth, nineteen sixty one,” the man said. “On Saturday night just after nine o’clock on April twenty second, nineteen sixty one, Billy Martin and Elaine Crenshaw die in a car crash when the brakes fail. Look it up on your phone if you want to have proof.”
Patrick looked to the tiled floor again and the shadows were gone and the floor was dingy again, the tiles less vibrant, now faded.
“Are you looking?” asked the man in the next stall.
“Why do I care, man?” Patrick asked.
Someone with bare feet walked by Patrick’s stall. The toenails were long and the big toe had long black hairs on it. The person went to the stall next to Patrick’s, the one where the man sat, but the shoes were gone at the base of the toilet.
Bare Feet sat on the toilet and Patrick reached for the stall door handle to see if he could get out now. His mind couldn’t process what was happening. It all seemed like a dream or a hallucination.
But before he could try the slider, the first floor men’s room in Massey Hall exploded with a gun shot. Patrick flinched and dropped his phone. His ears rang, but not before he heard something splatter in the next stall.
Then the air smelled like smoke and iron.
He bent over to pick up his phone and noticed the bare feet in the stall next door. Blood droplets were on the floor and a revolver had landed on the tiles between those two bare feet. One foot, the right one, wasn’t flat on the floor, but on its right edge.
The red, scarlet blood screamed at him and he picked up his phone and threw himself into the stall door. The slider still wouldn’t work and he pounded, pounded on the door.
“I’m not finished,” said the man in the next stall. “Tuesday, May second, nineteen sixty one. The law caught up to Dexter. That was guy I paid to rig the brakes and cause the car crash. I wasn’t anywhere to be found. The police were working hard at finding a motive. Dexter couldn’t wait it out. He thought his life was over, thought he was going to the electric chair.” The man chuckled, then continued, “He wasn’t concerned about the loss of life. Just more concerned about his own ruined life.”
“None of this concerns me,” Patrick said. “I don’t need to know this.”
The man said, “You have your phone. But who are we kidding. You kids these days have a computer in your pocket. Use your pocket computer and you’ll find the information I gave you accurate.”
Patrick looked at his phone. The screen lit up with the wallpaper of him and Kim clinging to each other. The screen wasn’t cracked thanks to the Otter protective case.
He tried the stall door again. The slider wouldn’t move.
“If I look up your information, will you let me go?” Patrick asked.
“In due time.”
What did that mean?
Patrick brought up Google on his phone and did a search. And after two flustered attempts with the information he had gotten from the man in the stall next door, he found a link about an unsolved mystery on the ASU campus involving a Dexter Snider and the couple who died in the car crash in nineteen sixty one. After Dexter’s suicide, his alibi panned out, but there was evidence he was the one who tampered with the brakes. They also found evidence, Dexter had done other unscrupulous services on other vehicles. But the murder of Billy Martin and Elaine Crenshaw remains unsolved.
“Did you find it?” The man asked.
“You’re right,” Patrick said. “Everything as you said. The case is unsolved. Can I leave now?”
“Will you absolve me?” The man asked.
Patrick realized he didn’t know the man’s name. Even if he knew it, the police wouldn’t take his word for it. A cold case fifty years old they would want to know how Patrick knew.
“Will you absolve me?” The man asked again.
In an instant the answer came to Patrick’s lips. “No. I can’t. I won’t. It’s not my place.”
Patrick stopped himself from saying he thought the man in the stall next to him should go to hell.
Then the man said, “Thank you for listening.”
The slider on the stall door slipped back on its own and the door squeaked open an inch. Patrick pushed the door further open and saw himself in the mirror above the sink. His face was pale and he looked like he had seen a ghost.
The shoes in the stall next to him were gone.
He never told another soul about what had happened to him in the first floor men’s restroom in Massey Hall. He never set foot in the building again. Instead, between classes, he stayed in the noisy Memorial Union and avoided thumb-fucking his phone.
And he wondered about the people he saw, the people he watched. Wondered what lurked in their pasts. What horrors never forgiven. He couldn’t stop himself.
He was forever wondering.
No longer: What was wrong with Patrick Sanders?
Now he wondered what was wrong with everyone else.