20

The school’s corridors went on and on. Only the numbered classroom doors, with their translucent windows, broke the monotony of the gray metal lockers lining the halls. I didn’t understand how corridor after corridor could be empty. Where were the students and teachers? I had to find a men’s room, but there was no one to ask for directions.

At last I heard a man singing the national anthem in a tremulous voice that broke on the word “proudly.” I came to an open doorway and saw a thin, pale-faced custodian of fifty or so. Dressed in a blue uniform, a bucket beside him and the handle of a mop in his hands, he sang as he cleaned. I couldn’t believe my good fortune, because he was mopping the bathroom floor. I could see a row of sinks behind him, a long mirror above the sinks, and dispensers offering brown paper towels.

“Is this the men’s room?” I felt I might burst.

He broke off his song and gave me a sharp look.

“What’s the sign say?” he asked.

“What sign?”

He tossed his head in the direction of two interior doors. Black painted letters clearly labeled them the men’s room and women’s. I crossed to the men’s side and pulled open the door. The shock almost made me lose control of my bladder. Two long, open rows of porcelain toilets, perhaps three dozen altogether, ran along the walls, and sitting on them in varying degrees of nudity were women, many obese, their flesh rippling in thick folds.

I backed away, closing the door behind me.

“There are women in there.”

“It says it’s the men’s room,” he responded.

“But it’s filled with women.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, leaning on the mop and studying me with his cool gray eyes.

“Tell them it’s the men’s room.”

“You think they can’t read? The sign on the door couldn’t be plainer.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said in a panic. “I need a toilet, a urinal.”

“You can try over there,” he said with a disinterested shrug of his shoulders.

He pointed me toward the women’s room.

“But that’s the women’s room,” I protested.

“Yes?”

“I can’t go in there.”

“I thought you couldn’t wait.”

“I can’t, but not in there.”

“It’s up to you.”

I opened the door to the women’s room with a prayer that it would be empty. But it looked exactly as the men’s room had, filled with large women who had removed blouses, skirts, and sometimes bras. They showed no alarm at my presence and, in fact, took no notice of me. I slammed shut the door.

“Is there a private bathroom here?” I asked. “Maybe for the staff?”

He squinted as if to get me in proper focus. “You can’t use it.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not a staff member. I know everyone on the staff. Even if you’d just come on board, you’d have a badge with your photo ID. In that case, you’d be welcome to use any of the facilities—the cafeteria, library, computer lab, and, of course, the bathrooms.

“But … ”

It seemed to me that this should be his problem and not mine. Surely the school was required to have bathrooms available, and he, as an employee of the school, should see to it that there were.

“Can you make an exception? After all, this is a matter of human need.”

“The school board has taken human need into account.” He looked me straight in the eye. “It decided some people can use the staff bathrooms—that is, the staff—and some people can’t. You clearly fall into the category of those who cannot.”

“What if the staff bathroom is empty? Couldn’t you make an exception in that case?”

“No.”

“Then you should clear the women out of the men’s room!” I shouted.

“That’s not my job.”

“Well, it should be.”

“You blame anyone but yourself.”

“How could I be to blame?”

“You might have planned better. You could have used a bathroom before you came here.”

“What school doesn’t have bathrooms?”

“We have bathrooms.”

“Right,” I said sarcastically, “but you don’t make the women obey the rules. In effect, you have no facilities for me.”

I crossed my legs, uncertain how long I could continue this back-and-forth.

“I could tell you something,” he said with annoyance, “but what good would it do?”

He dipped his mop in the bucket and began weaving it back and forth on the gray cement floor.

“What is it?” I asked, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

He looked at me.

“Why do you always give everything away?”

I shook my head.

“You’re not even aware of it,” he went on.

“But you are,” I challenged defiantly.

“Why does the flow have to go out?” he asked.

“Because I have to pee.”

“That’s what you think. It’s what you’ve always thought. Everybody has good reasons why nothing can ever change.”

I wanted to tell him to get back to mopping the floor, but he didn’t look like a lunatic.

“So … what?”

“What if the flow went in?”

“It doesn’t work like that—”

“In your experience,” he interpolated, to end my sentence. “What if it did? All that energy that wants to pour into the world, and that wants the world to respond and take care of you. What if it reversed itself and flowed into you?”

“Where would it go? There’s only one way out of my bladder.”

“Ah, the physical facts!” He raised a hand to ward off my irrelevant words. “Must everything live within the narrow confines of the physical world? Is that all we are—stomachs, guts, bladders, and the rest?”

“It’s part of who we are,” I insisted.

“But how does it really work? Do you know all the body’s secrets, all our possibilities?”

“No, of course not.”

“And your sperm,” he said.

“What?”

“Your sperm. Why not take that into you as well? Why not keep its energy to feed your deepest desires and needs? The Taoist tradition encourages men to conserve their sperm.”

“How is that possible?”

“By making the ejaculation flow inward.”

“But to where?” I asked.

“‘Where’ in this case isn’t a physical place,” he answered. “It’s a metaphor.”

“But it has to go somewhere. If it doesn’t go out, where does it go inside the body?”

“Literally,” he paused, “it goes backward, into the bladder. But the Taoists believe that unspent semen travels up the spine and nourishes the brain. It builds the good energy that brings health, perhaps even immortality.”

“What kind of custodian are you?” I demanded.

“Are the hallways clean?”

“Yes.” I had to admit that.

“Are the bathrooms well maintained? Are there paper towels in the dispensers?” He gestured about the room. “And soap and toilet paper?”

“Yes.”

“There’s your answer.”

“But … ”

He began mopping again.

“What are you talking about?” I finally got out. “It makes no sense. No one is immortal. And no one will become immortal or even healthy by holding back their sperm.”

“You have proof?”

He looked concerned, and I realized that I might have brought into question one of his deeply held beliefs. Regret overcame me. What right did I have to shake his certainties?

“No, I have no proof, none at all.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said with an injured look. He returned to mopping patterns on the floor.

I heard screams from the men’s room. The custodian continued to mop as if he heard nothing, but I rushed to the door. A teenage boy had appeared from I don’t know where and was kneeling over a slender, red-haired girl who trembled on the floor in some kind of fit. Ignoring the half-naked women, I rushed forward.

“Shall we call for help?” I asked the young man.

He held her shuddering shoulders and studied her face. I saw that he was handsome and well built, his skin smooth and his cheeks pink with the flush of youthful health.

“No,” he said, gently releasing her as the tremors lessened, “she’ll be all right.”

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“Yes.”

He didn’t seem concerned, and I decided that he must know best. The girl, her skin ever so white on the red pillow of her hair, slipped into a peaceful sleep. The woman nearest me was holding up a small mirror and carefully using tweezers to pluck at hairs I couldn’t see. I turned away and exited the room. I didn’t stop when I came to the custodian but hurried forward into the main corridor.

“Where are you going?”

The young man followed me.

“I’m looking for a bathroom,” I said urgently.

“Didn’t you come here to speak?” he asked.

Could he be right? Had I? If so, what topic had I selected? I kept silent and walked at a furious pace back along the corridor. The youth skipped every dozen or so paces to keep up with me.

“I want to hear what you’re going to say,” he continued. “How do you know what to do? How does anyone make a choice?”

“You have nothing but possibilities,” I said, envying him the freedom of youth when nothing is yet shaped or definite.

“That’s not enough.”

He touched me because possibility has such beauty, and yet what he said was true. He couldn’t remain forever in the possible. He had to choose one way or another. He would make choices, and each choice would move him more definitely along a path that would be difficult to erase.

“How did you choose your career?” he asked.

“By accident,” I replied.

“What?” He looked dubious.

I started to walk again but more slowly. The boy kept pace with me as we passed the gray lockers and turned into another corridor, identical to the last.

“I did something for a long time,” I said, not recollecting exactly what but feeling that I spoke the truth, “and that became my career.”

“Didn’t you need training?” he demanded. “Maybe a degree? Or were you an apprentice? Doing something for a long time sounds like … like you didn’t think about it before you started. But you have to know where you want to go. If you don’t think before you start, how can you ever get there?”

What he said, and the innocence and intensity with which he said it, made me believe him. If I had intended to say anything different, I would have been a very poor speaker. It would be just as well if I didn’t speak.

“If you do something long enough,” I answered despite my thoughts, “you essentially give up all the other possibilities.”

“That doesn’t sound like career guidance.”

“Maybe it’s not,” I admitted.

He stopped at a door indistinguishable from all the rest.

“Don’t let them hear you talk like that.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The committee. It has to finish its review before you can give your talk.”

With that, he opened the door to a classroom where a dozen men and women sat at a long table. Abruptly I recalled having been there only a few minutes before, ready to speak, when the need to use the bathroom had overcome me. One of the women, the chairperson, nodded to welcome me back and gestured with her hand that I should take a place at the head of the table.

“Please continue,” she said.

I leapt somewhere into the middle of the talk I imagined I’d begun.

“It’s not to seek the goal that we can imagine,” I said passionately, “but to seek what is unimaginable. We can describe innumerable paths to careers, but can we find the secret paths to happiness? If you were to take the most successful among us, wouldn’t they remember a time when anything was still possible? The scientist might have been a teacher. The teacher might have been a doctor. So many opportunities are foreclosed by the very choices that let us climb the ladder of success. Is there a secret antidote for this loss?”

I looked at their faces. They gave no sign of response. Was I speaking only to myself? Yet with or without their encouragement, the stream of words poured out of me.

“Remember the dreams of your youth,” I said, my earnestness causing me to skip much that I might have said. “Remember youthful pleasures. Never give up your imagination. Why should moving forward be giving up? It doesn’t have to be! Whatever your career, hold tightly to the joys of your youth.”

I continued until my flow of words trickled to silence. I glanced from face to face, but they all looked down at their writing pads or fiddled with their pens.

“I like to choose my words carefully,” the chairwoman said after a pause, “and, in this case, brevity has a great deal to commend it. So, in place of my usual detailed critique, I’ll offer one or two carefully chosen words.”

I noticed that her cheeks had flushed. I could feel my voice still vibrating in the room.

“Preposterous,” she said sharply, “and ridiculous!”

Sadness for her came over me. Her professional status squeezed her ever so tightly into herself. It would be futile to remind her of the possibilities that had once been hers or to plead with her to recollect her early dreams and pleasures. The others nodded in approval.

“He shows no grasp of what our students need to hear,” said a portly, balding man who looked over his eyeglasses to his colleagues.

“In fact,” added a tall, intense woman with jabs of her index finger, “his message is the diametric opposite of what we believe. Career success is the result of application and hard work, not fantasy and escapism.”

“All things considered,” observed a heavyset man with salt-and-pepper hair, “he would be best served by listening to exactly the type of lecture he was supposed to give here.”

They went on speaking about me to each other, but no one addressed me in person. They acted as if I had left the room or become the subject of a study. Their conversation absorbed them, and no one objected when I crept out of the room.

“Did you hear any of that?” I asked the youth in the hallway.

“No.”

“I won’t be invited to speak—that’s for sure.”

We began to walk down the corridor, but I lost all sense of direction. The meeting lingered with me, and I wasn’t sure whether we were returning the way I came or going a different way.

“Here’s a bathroom.”

“Staff” was painted in dark letters, at eye level, on the wooden door.

“I can’t use that.”

“Why not?”

I waved at the letters.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll stand guard.”

“What if we get caught?” I asked.

“Maybe they’ll expel me again,” he answered cheerfully.

“Again?”

“Yes, I was missing for quite a while.”

“Missing?”

“I ran away. First they expelled me for poor attendance. Then when months went by and I didn’t show up, people got really upset … ”

“Especially your parents.”

“Sure. My picture ended up everywhere—on posters, milk cartons, TV shows, you name it.”

“Did they find you?”

“Nope.”

I hesitated.

“Okay,” I said.

He smiled and ushered me forward with a wave of his hand. I entered the bathroom, locked the door behind me, positioned myself in front of the toilet, and began to urinate. Well past the moment when the flow would normally have stopped, it simply continued like a flood. I filled the toilet to its brim and had to reach forward and flush it to prevent a spillover, and still the urine poured out of me until I flushed again, and continued until I flushed once more and was finally empty. I kept thinking about the youth waiting outside. I wanted to ask him questions, but I wasn’t sure where to start. Feeling much better, I zipped my trousers and stepped into the hallway.

“All set?” he asked

“Yes, thanks.”

“Come on.”

He pointed down the corridor, and we started walking again.

“Where did you travel?” I asked.

“Mexico to start. Then I went south—Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica.”

“Was there a reason?”

“To run away?”

“Yes.”

“For fun.”

“But people worried. Your parents must have worried.”

He shrugged.

“Was it?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. I mean, of course it wasn’t all fun.”

“No?”

“When I got bored, I came home. So here I am.”

“Why Mexico?” I asked.

“I could get there. No way could I get to Europe or someplace like that.”

We reached a main entrance with three revolving doors.

“Here you are,” he said.

“Do you play ball?” I asked, not wanting to let him go.

“Sure,” he smiled.

“Baseball?”

He nodded.

“Let me guess. You’re the third baseman.”

“Close, shortstop.”

He seemed perfectly willing to stay and chat with me, but I worried that he might be missing a class.

“So long,” I said after a few more questions and answers.

“Adios,” he answered, and turned to walk down the corridor.

I wanted to call him back. Was there something more to say or do with him? He never looked back. Rounding a corner, he left my sight. I lingered in the hallway, although I had no reason to believe he would return. I didn’t know how long I would wait. Why hadn’t I called to him? I felt so … incomplete.