The Bathroom Visitors

She cannot count the number of beds she slept on.

No, promiscuity is out of the reasons. This is simply the reality behind the life of a boarder. She doesn’t have an address that she can truly call her own, no place she can claim as hers because everything around her belongs to someone else. (This bed used to be someone’s bed, someone used to gaze vacantly at this window, someone used to pound the buttons on this old electric fan).

There is no such thing as permanent in her situation. The length of her stay depends on how strict the landlord and how high the rent is (these are the only items under her category things-to-look-for-in-an-apartment.) She is not the kind to meddle in other people’s affairs. She doesn’t care if the students next door are too rowdy, if the husband beats her wife then fucks her too loudly after an hour of quarrelling, if the baby cries right up to the morning. She doesn’t mind for as long as there is a thin wall separating her from the others, she can live with everything else. She doesn’t only pay for this small room, she pays for what is within her boundaries, the square miles of her room. The lives of others and what they do in their privacy are not included in her monthly rent.

She has her own world. She leaves at 6:00am everyday for work and goes home almost always at 9:00pm. In the remaining hours of being awake, she has everything she needs to keep her company. No television, only books. She lives by the idea that real life is too gruesome to be shown in a box. Everything is one-dimensional and repetitive. You hear the same crimes but different names, the same calamities but different places, the same lies for different reasons. Shutting herself out from the world at large, she began to turn to the other boarders for entertainment and, in turn, became perceptive to their habits. Their bathroom patterns, to be precise.

And what a variety they were.

At half past nine, she would hear steps towards the bathroom. It was only recently that she became sure that the 9:30PM bathroom visitor was a man. Firstly, by the weight of the steps and secondly, she saw a leather thong sandal by the door when she peeked outside of her room one time. She’d hear him cough rather badly during the first few minutes (a chain smoker, she thought) and the flush of the toilet after the coughing subsides. He was rather thrifty with water use. She would only hear up to 15 loud splashes hit the tiled floor during the entire time he was inside the bathroom. In her mind, he is an old man who thinks of bathing as a nuisance but is bound by its necessity.

Though she is a light sleeper, she always manages to fall back to sleep after sometime. She would always find herself awake every Tuesday and Friday at 11:30 in the evening, just as she was beginning to drift into her deeper sleep. The slow trickling water being poured (probably into the arms first) always snaps her out of slumber. After a succession of slapping water getting louder and sure, she would then hear the scrubbing of skin, hear bubbles lathering, the day’s grime and dirt being drained down the water pipes. She bets that the perpetrator is a girl for what other creature is as insistent as being clean and pure before going to sleep? She always took men as lazy beings who would jump right into bed, dirty and smelly, if they can get away with it. Once, becoming too intrigued with the 11:30 bathroom visitor, she went inside and faked a call of nature after the visitor was done bathing. When she opened the door, she was instantly greeted with the heady smell that only girls can stand. Shampoo, conditioner, face cream, feminine wash, moisturizer: a modern witches brew, she thought. The entire bathroom floor was still wet, the toilet seat still warm and the mirror all fogged up. She spent some time trying to recall from memory the scent of the shampoo, the soap and the conditioner. It was as if the girl who just left was still inside the bathroom, a bather in a different world just across her room.

But among all of these characters in her little bathroom fiction, the one that intrigues her most is the one who gets to use the bathroom right before she does. As her alarm clock springs to life at exactly five in the morning, she knew that a few minutes from that point, the bathroom will be as wide awake as her. As she lies still in her bed, teetering between the state of being awake and asleep, someone would start their morning ritual. She’d hear the scraping sound of towel and clothes being hung on the hooks placed above the door and then the faucet will come alive. The thing that amuses her most about this one is that he (the gender her own conclusion) would hum the same tune day after day. The first time she heard it, she knew she heard it before but just couldn’t place her finger on where or what occasion that was. This bathroom singer would hum this ghost of a tune in the same volume and cadence everyday. As she stands up to brew her first cup of coffee for the day, she would try to copy him and hum along. She will then wonder how he ended up like this:  where he would wake up at the same hour and hum the same tune every time.

On her way home from a rather ordinary day at work, she sat across at what first seemed to be an ordinary old lady on the train. She has this habit of always looking outside the window, watching the scenery with intensity as if seeing it all for the first time. From the corner of her eye, she noticed that there was something odd with the old lady. She would twitch and twitch in rapid successions and she was trying to limit her movements, as if it was something embarrassing to be done in public like picking your nose or sneezing loudly without covering your mouth. After a few minutes, she came into a conclusion (it was always her damned conclusions) that the old lady probably has Tourette Syndrome . She was trying hard not to look straight in front of her. She focused on the things whizzing past her: homes, trees, other commuters but it was all pointless. She knew it was rude to stare, to express her wonder and awe at this condition placed right before her very eye. She tries hard not to look at her but from the corner of her eye she sees her involuntary spasms. She acted as if the old lady was not there but she is there. She tries to shake it off, this need to look, to stare, to ogle but she could only think of the lamest metaphor to describe what is unraveling right in front of her: it’s like the wind, you don’t see it but you know it’s there, like her bathroom visitors. For months she tried to treat their presence as mere winds, just brushing past her but is enough to give her a chill, a feeling in her skin. Somehow, she is a wind vane in the midst of a field, going with where the wind blows. But what if she can trick the wind? What if she can make them go north instead of south? What if she can make turbulence out of a breeze? What if? What if?

What happened on that day has left her shaken. It’s as if something inside of her has come alive. For a long time she managed to live a life as dull as a faded wallpaper. Nothing in it was spectacular or worth noticing but she liked it that way. Surprises were something she never really liked. For her, it was all just bothersome, a ripple in a perfectly silent water. She didn’t mind living her life by the numbers. She wasn’t expecting something to happen in her life that would change the order of things and she sure wasn’t going to do anything about it. She was certain that Tourette was not something contagious, that you could get just by being physically close to one who has it. But somehow, she felt afflicted by the twitches and the spasms of the old lady. She felt something inside of her snap, as if she stepped on a twig and heard its crisp crack under the weight of her feet.

Maybe that is what they call a passerby effect. And she was trapped between the indifferent and the caring.  She didn’t know how she would react, that a non-infectious syndrome had infected her to put her place in the old lady’s. Maybe this is how indifference feels: her bathroom visitors, like the wind, come and go and she couldn’t care less. But what if she did care? But what if what her neighbors’ affairs mattered? How would things go if she did not enclose herself inside her own world of books, a decent paying job that pays her rent of unstable residence, and bathroom visitors?

She went home, carrying that little change in her, like a secret she suddenly came across the floor of the train. Sleep was a mere concept to her that night. She felt like she needed a good scratching to take that itch that suddenly got into her. She spent a good deal rolling around the bed, rubbing her body in her sheets, the blanket, anything that can provide friction.  She looked at clock. It was nearing 9:30 already. With all her strength, she willed herself out of the bed. She opened the door of her room and saw a portal: the bathroom. Like a crazed woman she went inside and locked herself in. She tried hard not to look at her reflection, afraid that she will see an entirely different woman staring back at her. She sat at the toilet seat, cupping her head in her hands. She didn’t know how much time has passed. Minutes turned into centuries. Then she heard it: the unlocking and the slow lift of the door. She got up instantly and barred herself against the door, putting all her frail self in keeping the door closed. Urgent knocks vibrated inside the bathroom and in her mind the knocks had a voice. Let me in, let me in. She held her ground, pressing with all her might to keep the door closed. She can feel the push and the full, growing weaker by the minute. All she heard was footsteps walking away, the sound getting weaker with every step until she can hear nothing. Then she felt nothing, not even a single itch.

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