The Surreal Cafe: When You Gotta Go

I’ve always hated using the library bathrooms. They’re not exactly well kempt, and standing outside the bathroom door I try to figure out if I need to go bad enough to risk it (whatever "it" I might be risking), or if I can casually make my way to another building. If I stand here too long, I’ll look retarded or perverted, not that I generally care what people think, but still. The door is a normal oak color with a picture of a little generic man in a square. There’s the ventilation screen and that odd metal plate along the bottom. What’s that for? Is that to protect the door from all those people who kick their way in? Okay, I’ll take my chances. There’s nobody in here. That’s good, or at least better. By now I think I’m over my discomfort of being in a bathroom with other people. I think everybody goes through that for a while. A friend of mine had the unpleasant experience of having the bathroom door yanked open by a bully on several occasions in the middle of class. Sure, a bathroom connected to a classroom would be convenient, but little did they know they’d be creating the perfect environment for future mental scarring, eh? Well, there’s only one stall. Here we go. I drop my bag on the relatively clean floor and pull the door closed. Oh, this isn’t right. The lock is missing. It’s actually not here, in the door. If it had been a maintenance person, they would have replaced it immediately, right? I pull the door closed, let it go, and it slowly swings open again. Marvelous. Who would steal the lock on a door?

This isn’t the first door I’ve found like this, either. There were always damaged and missing locks in high school. Nobody seemed to notice. I wonder now if I was crazy, if I was just imagining missing door locks out of some repressed paranoia, as if most teenagers are not paranoid about something. And now the lock gremlin has followed me here whose goal is to annoy and humiliate at all costs. I used to have urges to write this problem down, to create a story about a kid who tracks down the bathroom door lock gnome or gremlin or whatever it is. Ferret, I don’t know. He’d find a network of tunnels just behind the bathroom walls where these creatures ran their bathroom lock black market and expose the whole operation to the world at large. Maybe they also stole that one missing sock. Maybe somebody would call Orkin, and then the locks could be replaced. But this isn’t a story. I’m standing here, now five minutes later, staring at the broken lock inside this stall. Forget it. I gotta go. I just hand my bag on the hook and . . . there’s a hook? There’s a fancy clothing hook inside the door, but not a lock. Whatever.

As I open the stall door, somebody walks in the bathroom. We avoid making eye contact and I turn to the sink as he goes into the stall. I begin washing my hands and casually look forward. There’s no mirror. I’m taken aback. There’s no mirror? I stare at the wall that’s not looking back at me and wonder. Missing locks I’ve experienced. They’re just annoying, but a missing bathroom mirror. This is just weird. It’s funny how you expect certain things in life, certain menial meaningless things like bathroom door locks and bathroom mirrors, but then they go missing and suddenly you’re out of step with the world.

I can’t help staring at the non-image of myself. It’s almost like I’m invisible, or a vampire. I've become so used to seeing myself that when I don’t, I feel like a part of me is missing. Then I realize how self-centered (unconsciously even) I am. I used to also consider writing a story where a kid’s reflection turns evil and torments the kid every time he sees him. Then the reflection would either pull him through to some anti-verse where things look the same but are wholly different, or the reflection gets out and runs amok with the kid’s life. Never did I picture the reflection simply not being there. I dry my hands and look back again at wall tile. The guy in the stall apparently doesn’t care about bathroom gremlins. The door is open about an inch or two. Wait ‘till he finds out he’s invisible. Maybe he won’t care about that either. Maybe most people don’t care that they’re invisible. I shoulder my leather bag and try to kick the door open by the metal panel along its bottom. Ow. Ah, this door only opens in one direction. I look back to my reflection for reassurance and to get a sympathetic laugh. Oh yeah, I’m not there. I close the bathroom door and look back at the generic, faceless, white man in the square. Maybe that’s a proper reflection.

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