Watching television isn’t mandatory. Bunny is free to go to her room, which requires she walk past Underpants Man as he stands guard over the phone mounted on the wall. Although the phone is a pay phone, it doesn’t accept coins because money is Not Allowed. To make calls, the lunatics use prepaid phone cards. However, they can receive calls free of charge. Underpants Man, the self-designated phone monitor, is there to enforce the ten-minute rule, although keeping phone calls to ten minutes might not even be a rule other than one imposed by Underpants Man. Ever vigilant, with one eye on the clock and the other eye on a woman who is talking on the phone, presumably to someone on the other end, Underpants Man squawks, “Two minutes. You’ve got two minutes.” Bunny waits to see what will happen next. “One minute, forty seconds,” he says. “One minute, twenty seconds. Sixty seconds. Fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight seconds.”
When he gets down to thirty-four seconds, Bunny loses interest.
The way it’s said that an atheist who prays every day will come to believe in God, perhaps if she goes through the motions of normalcy, she’ll be normal. To take a shower is normal. In the bathroom, Bunny pulls her T-shirt up over her head, recoiling from the stench of herself. Back when she took showers as a matter of course, she liked the water to be hot enough to fog the mirror and turn her skin pink, but Shawna was right. Warm is as hot as it gets here. Bunny unwraps the bar of motel soap, which is a sickly shade of white, white that has yellowed from age.
The shower isn’t draining properly, if at all. Standing in a puddle that is two inches deep, Bunny wonders if this is how people get tapeworms or parasites or trichinosis. She remembers the word “trichinosis,” and she has a vague notion of an association between it and some disgusting disease like leprosy, which might or might not be an accurate association. Try as she does, she is unable to recall what trichinosis is. Soap scum settles around her feet, but figuring she’s come this far, she stays in the shower long enough to wash her hair, too.
After patting herself dry, she puts on the fresh pair of paper pajamas.
She does not feel better.
In bed, with her legal pad propped up on her knees, her pen is poised to write down what it is she’d wanted to ask Albie. Something about the water in the shower, but what? What about the water in the shower? She tries to remember but she cannot, and fury goes off like a bottle rocket. She flings the notepad to the floor.
And all the while, Mrs. Cortez sits on her bed, facing the window, as if she’s been there forever frozen, a regal monument of the will not to live.