He would piss freely, then kneel by the toilet to smell his piss. He’d sniff for the smell of alcohol, because he loved to drink, and he loved to smell the stench of his drink.
“Ahh!” he would say. “It is beautiful!”
As he’d sit smelling and smiling, minutes would become hours, and the piss that had splattered onto the seat or the walls would dry. A yellow crust would form, and he’d feel it with his finger, scratch it, lick it, and giggle like a young boy. This immutable formation of the body’s excretion, this perpetual form; an incomprehensible manifestation of beauty from his inexorable fountain of plenty. It would be his only representation to the world beyond. The door would be rattled and knocked at, but that soon would subside. The smell would linger, and he would take it in with every breath, let it sit in his nose like a hot- air balloon, then pull it down inside himself.
And the flavor! It was almost too much! But there, in its molecules, was alcohol and there was urine. How splendid! He would never tire of it. As he took in the fragrance he would consider the endpoint of his life, and silently moan. What a pitiful existence. What mattered? All of nothing? Everything? Perhaps few things. He would worry without reason, and fret without countenance. As though he were staring out the windows of a bus as he rode inside it, he’d witness the fervor with which those of a higher class lived, and he would envy their existence, hunger for their place in the world, plea to gods unknown for his path to be paved in a comparable direction.
“Because I have tried so hard!” he would yell, while he lay on the floor, beside the toilet, with his own urine turning to crust beside him. “My accomplishments are few. All that I want should take me forward!”
His face would be lit by a multitude of colors as the lights passed by—lights from the streets, while he looked on from the conjectural bus window—and his eyes would betray him. But his concealment of self would be his savior. Standing up from the floor, and swallowing the final flakes of urinal flavor and alcoholic essence, he would open the door. None who had rattled or knocked at it would be present. An empty hallway would greet him, and he’d stumble down it with his own strong will, his own instinct for survival, his own inattention to everyone.
“Is my life a waste?” he would ask himself. “Will I ever amount to the heroical figures of my dreams?”
If gods existed, he would eat the cheese from between their legs just to achieve riposte. But he would then think of “riposte”, and its connotations. He would relive the horrid nightmare in waking life, the incorrectable slum of self in which he listened, with full ear-engulfing completeness, the tale from his co-worker, whose father was a fencer, who would with frequent, fervent delight, use the word “riposte” to explain a daily event, a regular task, a less than formidable endeavor. He would, with the whole of his being, renounce himself. A chance of expression he would find, upon his return to a social caste; the caste by which all would be commanded. And it is in this social order he would look upon his own self as a deficiency, a whole and complete paradigm of failure.
“But still,” he would say, “I must move forward. I must unsheathe my steel, and strike with clear intention at the future.” His lips would, by this point, be wet with the gleam of urine, stained yellow and red, partially imbued with the flavorous cakes of blood. “What now?” he would ask. And no answer would come. But it would not matter, for no answer could please him. Forward he would journey, an acclimatized youth with a zest the source of which he would never understand.
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