A la Node

Everywhere that large numbers of people gather, there will be at least one. Sometimes it will be deliberately and expertly hidden away, unseeable and unfindable. Sometimes they are accidents, a lost sign, a too-subtle door, a potted plant placed -just so-. There will be one, though, somewhere, you can bet on it.

It will be quiet, strangely cool, or perhaps just cooler than the crowded masses pressing by outside, unaware. It is a place of peace, of discretion and excretion. The quietness will strike you, after the noise of the outside world.

Mandy found the secret bathroom by accident, but then there are not many other ways to find one. She was desperate at the time, of course, and ready after wandering for forty-five minutes searching for a restroom to find anything to hide behind and go on the ground. The crowd wasn’t helping, it pulsed forward and then stopped, pressure waves propagating through sweaty overweight bodies, oversize purses, strollers and eternally underfoot children. Though actual contact was rare, the pressure waves seemed to squeeze and knead her bladder. She slipped sideways, bisected a small family and leaned against a warm and gritty stucco wall.

Surely there must be a restroom somewhere in all these acres of people slurping down sodas and lining up in the sun for rides. She regretted passing up the big ones near the front gate, the ones with the lines longer than even the roller coaster, the ones whose scent wafted over the waiting multitudes to assault her as she passed. She had assumed there would be another, deeper into the park, but it had so far eluded her.

The stucco wall was featureless, but curved around, its horizon slipping behind a clump of carefully manicured and entirely artificial looking shrubbery. She decided that if she was going to be forced to pee in public she should at least make an effort, and maybe there would be just enough cover if the wall allowed her to get behind the hedge. She inched around to where it seemed to meet the green leaves only to find that it didn’t meet them at all. The illusion was subtle, but standing here she could see the path following the curved wall, screened off from the milling crowds by the hedge. Perfect.

With one hand on the wall, she slipped behind the hedge and followed the path. She knew places like this had whole networks of behind-the-scenes paths and doors, where the business of the park could flow out of sight and out of mind. The path kept on, was she behind the building now? She turned to look behind her, saw the tops of heads bob along over the hedge. Ahead of her she could hear another crowd, this was probably as far as she could into hiding without coming out of hiding on the other side. She took one final look around and leaned against the wall, mentally preparing herself for the humiliation of squatting down on the gravel and praying not to be seen. As she leaned, she felt it move.

There was a brief moment of panic, but she was already composing a very compelling excuse for trespassing as she turned to see what had happened. There was a very thin straight crack in the wall, it slowly closed itself as she watched. She pushed on the wall with one hand, a section of it moved inward, opening up the crack again. She pushed harder until the crack expanded to define a doorway, so precisely cut into the wall that it was invisible when closed. From inside a tiny breath of cool air spilled out, carrying the scent of clean moisture and faint potpourri. Just inside should could see small white ceramic tiles.

She was inside and in a stall without ever consciously thinking about it. She sat and thought about what she had seen on her dash. Were those urinals? Was this a mens room? Not that it matters, it appeared to be entirely empty. In any case, if they didn’t put a sign on the outside, they certainly couldn’t complain. When she was done, she sat there for a minute, enjoying the cool air and complete silence. The sounds of the park didn’t seem to penetrate the walls.

She stepped out of the stall feeling more relieved than she could remember feeling in a long time, not that it was a high bar to reach. It had been a mistake to come to the park alone, she could admit that, but at least she could walk out with some dignity. The little knot of hopelessness in her chest retreated just a little.

The sinks were strange. For one thing, there were six of them, all different shapes. Taps seemed to be attached in random combinations, she found one that had clearly marked hot and cold knobs and washed her hands. Quirky, that was the word. It was an amusement park, she supposed, there had to be a certain amount of creative license, even in a restroom. There were indeed urinals, too, again in several odd configurations. What looked like a large mop sink dominated one corner of the room, and a large stainless steel block another. She looked into the mirror at her red face, flushed from the heat and maybe a bit of sunburn. Sweat matted her hair. She considered camping out in the bathroom for a few days until she felt human again.

In the mirror, she saw a door open in behind her and a woman slip in. The woman’s eyes darted around and she made a beeline for a stall. Well, so much for solitude, but there was something pleasing about knowing that the secret bathroom was there for someone else in need.

Composed, she turned and re-oriented herself. The woman had come in a different door, but like the one Mandy had come through, it seemed to be camouflaged, blending in the the lines on the tiled wall. Mandy’s door was on the adjacent wall, a heavy metal thing with a stainless steel handle. She reach out for the handle when she heard the crying.

She could walk out. She had her own pain to deal with, she wasn’t sure she could deal with someone else’s. She didn’t take the handle.

“Hey, you ok in there?”

The crying, which had been quiet, came to a shuddering halt with a loud sob. A voice, struggling for control said something, but Mandy couldn’t quite hear what she said.

“Do you need help?”

The voice came back, stronger this time, but it clearly wasn’t English. Fast and complex, maybe Russian?

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, but if you need anything…”

The woman in the stall spoke more slowly, but no more comprehensibly. Her voice kept catching, hurt poured past the language barrier. Whatever had driven her to seek refuge here, it hadn’t been her bladder. The latch on the stall door slowly turned and Mandy found herself face to face with a tall, willowy woman, long pale hair that was more a shade of white than of blond. Her eyes were red, she looked down apologetically and shook her head.

“Hey, whatever it is, you’re OK now, right? Come on, have a seat.” The woman spoke, shaking her head, embarrassed, teary. They sat down on the stainless steel thing, which was oddly warm and comfortable.

“I’ve had that kind of day too. I have some history with this place, I thought if I came here again I could… I don’t know. Recapture something.”

The other woman listened as she talked, as the whole story sort of unwound out of her. She didn’t seem to understand the words any more than Mandy understood her, but she listened, nodding. When it was out, at least the gist of it, the highlights, the real show-stopper mistakes, the woman sighed and nodded, gave her a weak smile. Her eyes seemed a bit too wide, her lips a bit blue, but sympathy was clear on her face.

Then the woman began talking. In one sense it was gibberish, random sounds without a single recognizable syllable, but on the other it was a story. There was frustration, hurt, a mistake made in anger, more pain, recrimination. A woman at an emotional breaking point, running. She looked around the bathroom and shrugged. This place, when I needed a place to stop and cry.

They both looked around. The bathroom was odd in a lot of ways, but Mandy was becoming more and more aware that she’d been in it for a long time. The tall woman seemed to be feeling the same, she stood up and went to one of the sinks to wash her face. After a certain amount of looking into the mirror and a long sigh, she walked over to Mandy and extended a hand. Mandy took it, it was warm, strong. Instead of the handshake Mandy expected, there was a squeeze, a tingling sensation of fingertips, and then contact was broken.

The woman took a a deep breath, squared her narrow shoulders and walked towards the wall. Before reaching out and opening a door that Mandy couldn’t even see until it opened, she turned and gave a reassuring smile. She stepped out into bright summer sunshine with a blue tint, the sounds of crowd filtered in until the door closed and disappeared among the grout lines. Mandy went to the door she had entered by and opened it to hot humid air and the sound of roller coaster screams.

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A Secret Room by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Mirrors don’t lie unless you program them to.

Of course, everyone knows better than to program their mirror to lie. Everyone knows that everyone knows better, and maybe, in some strange way, that’s why I was able to do it. After all, if you know it can’t possibly work, can’t possibly lead to anything good and everyone knows it, then it’s sort of safe to give it a try. It’s just a joke, a sort of ironic experiment, for fun. Just for fun, because you know everyone knows its a silly and dangerous thing to do, so no one would ever seriously do it.

They met in dark places, the basement storage rooms beneath a university research lab at first, then deeper, darker, less accessible places. They were scientists, intellectuals, thinkers. Dangerous people, with dangerous knowledge. A decision was made, though all knew what it would be when first they had secreted themselves from the world above.

It wasn’t so much that I minded having my soul imprisoned in the ancient Blood Crystal of Forgoth, what got to me most was that no one really seemed to care one way or the other. I mean, if you are going to have your immortal essence enslaved, you want it to mean something to your master. Instead, I began to feel like just be one more soul in an eldritch crystal, one more body puttering away on busy-work.

Yeln grew up under the third Chernobyl containment dome, in a wash of beautiful colors and sounds. It was an endless, beautiful summer day, if the Human descriptions of summer days were accurate. It was warm, bright, endless.

There were two hundred and seventeen robotic souls living under the dome, spending their long glorious days exploring the wonderland of machinery and crumbling concrete and warm isotopes of Uranium and its byproducts. There were no nights, and why would anyone need one? One stopped for maintenance, for cleaning, for diagnostics, that was all. If descriptions of the romance of summer resonated in Yeln’s heart, the night was an incomprehensible affectation, something humans did because they had to, and romanticized as a coping mechanism.

The sense of scale played havoc with his equilibrium. Floating weightless among the long aquamarine tendrils of an alien creature fully ten thousand miles long, a glance in the wrong direction could redefine what was up, what was behind you, what was reflected on the inside of your helmet and what was outside of it. He clamped down on nausea until the spectacle that filled his visor pulled his eyes again along the incredible length of variegated otherness. It was beautiful, but beauty hardly registered against the physical and emotional scale of it.