Meanwhile, Elsewhere

A shimmering verisimilar sheen of metallic blue-gray envelops the city in which I find myself. To the untrained eye it would just seem foggy, but the truth is that the plasticity doesn’t end where the concrete or steel or carbon fiber hits the suspended water, it just appears to get worse. It’s true that I can see the brightly colored buildings smearing into the air, but what I’m talking about is the overall subduing effect of being here that results from incessantly being in line, wordlessly tapping my phone to pay, never hearing so much as one human voice in even the most crowded of intersections, pedestrians crossing the street at the crosswalks and nowhere else, waiting for the traffic light to tell me it’s safe for my car to move, etc., that culminates in never wanting to disobey, not because there are physical barriers or threats of discipline preventing me from doing so, but because the invisible striated pathways that guide me run through my head just as they run through everyone else’s, and to deviate from them is literally unthinkable because a world outside of them does not exist. And so, like a child who sits at the table until dinner is finished simply because they are told to do so even though there is nothing physically stopping them from standing up, I obey. But I don’t have any more energy to spend on the origins of how awful this all is because I have to to go to the bathroom so badly that my skin is starting to prickle with adrenaline and I can feel the pores on my forearms opening as they prepare to sweat.

At the moment I’m driving, but I’m considering just parking and proceeding on foot. I’m so desperate that I’m looking at Google Maps more than the road. Searching ‘public toilet’ and repeatedly getting no results is only keeping my eyes glued to the screen and wondering if this city truly does not have one single toilet or if Google is playing a joke on just me. In the moments when I can break the trance of staring at the screen I gaze outwards while internally pleading that I’ll see a universally decipherable bathroom sign on one of the same buildings I see when I look down at my phone. They pass my eyes just as they pass the car rendered on the screen and I wonder why it’s a different color from the one I’m driving and why I can’t see myself in the driver’s seat since I can see the car reflecting in the ground-level glass windows at the exact same moment I can see my own reflection in them. I end up driving for several blocks without incident despite never actually looking up from my phone. Or perhaps I never looked down in the first place. I wouldn’t know.

I do manage to park. I unbuckle my seatbelt and literally feel my abdomen expand outwards from the internal pressure. Whether or not I’ve correctly worked out the algebra above my parking space will be revealed to me later. At the moment, I don’t care. I figure that if I’m on foot I can jump at the opportunity to relieve myself the moment I find a somewhat isolated tree or tucked-away alley, although I know there are no trees nor crevices out of sight of The Public or CCTV even though you would think that for a city and civilization and species that so severely penalizes conducting a necessary bodily function in the Wrong places we would at least make it easy to find the Right places. I do manage to find a city map on a trifold plastic display on the corner of a street and although I would have preferred to spend my luck on an actual bathroom luck seems to be the one thing they haven’t managed to make transactional yet. I almost stop to wonder why, but instead I scan the map key. There is nothing of use to me there and so I notice my reflection on the translucent casing laid overtop of the map itself. My reflection is transparent enough that I can see the map through me while simultaneously noticing a piece of food stuck in my teeth. I can also see the angled reflections from the two adjacent maps overlapping the face directly in front of mine. I try to pick the piece of food out and quickly am unable to discern which hand belongs to which reflection and end up poking myself in the eye, which I only notice because of the blunting pain because what I see is my eye in the palm of my hand, hair growing from my teeth, and an ear sprouting from my forehead, and just as I’m starting to want to scream and howl and gnash my teeth at what I’ve mutated into I realize I have forgotten why I looked at this map in the first place. I pivot and walk away, frustrated with my newfound food in my teeth and my aforementioned urine in my bladder but already peacefully accepting that what I’ve become no longer feels alien and in fact already seems normal to the point that I can barely even remember being any other way. I do, however, wonder why everyone else suddenly looks so strange.

I give up on the notion of a traditional solution, pull out my phone, and punch “how to find a bathroom in a busy city” into YouTube. The first result seems promising as the title exactly matches my search request. In the video there is a young-looking male at a desk in front of a microphone commentating on an inset recording of what appears to be an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience which features two men also sitting at desks in front of microphones looking at another screen in their physical space that, it seems, is also a YouTube video of yet another young-looking male commentating on a final inset recording of archived footage of what appears to be an episode of whatever talk show Conan O’Brien hosted before Late Night, and that guest does, admittedly, seem to be delivering an anecdote that sounds eerily similar to the experience I am living now, although it’s difficult to hear since there are no fewer than five people talking across all layers of the video. I wonder if the guest, on that couch in that moment, could have ever began to comprehend that, due to unforeseen technological advancements that put most sci-fi novels to shame, he was simultaneously existing on the sidewalk next to me decades in the future. I close the video and pocket my phone as I can’t hear whatever solution he arrived at. I look up and around for something that does not yet exist and that I wouldn’t recognize anyway.

I try not to think. I keep walking. I trip off the curb and fall between two parked cars. And just let it all out. And laugh. What else is there to do? I tried. I don’t care if, in all likelihood, the authorities are closing in. The relief is transcendental. Dissociative, even. I attain a perspective of the scene so removed that I can see the irony tensing up until it snaps at the end of this narrative arc so well that it could potentially be a story, and as I lie prostrate on the pavement I see myself, dear reader, in this story yet also, simultaneously, sitting and typing these words in the midst of creating a bridge that eternally connects the two moments even though I do not yet exist and I am not yet typing this story yet somehow I also do and so does it but where, when, exactly, am I, is that version of me at the computer, is that/this moment? Sometime, somewhere, yes. When, where, I am not sure. I am only sure that I am now amongst these words and their corridors, and in fact I always have been; I can no longer even remember putting them on this page for the first time and can only remember reworking and manipulating them, just as a dream does not start by slowly fading in from the void but by immediately placing the dreamer in it exactly as this story began for you, me, and the version of us both that exists here, together. But the only dreams we remember are the ones right before we wake up, and so what, perhaps, are you and I about to wake up from, or find ourselves being broadcasted across someday? As lost as I still am, I prefer to be lost in these organic lattices of my own creation instead of the plastic simulacrum of this city that was designed by some schmucks in a twentieth-story boardroom to fuck me, specifically, over. The buildings and the fog and my natural instincts are, for the first time in my life, indistinguishable from the words on this page and I’ve found that, for reasons I can’t explain, this eases the aches and pains of being unable to find a bathroom in a busy city.

I stand up. One of the cars is mine. There’s a neon-orange parking ticket on the windshield.