Gravitational Collapse

The lightning illuminated the bathroom for a moment, exposing the corner where I’d been holed up to nature’s eye.

The bathroom had always leaked a little; I couldn’t tell anymore whether that was the sound of drizzling rain or water dripping somewhere. As long as it wasn’t dripping on my head, I didn’t really care. I’d anticipated the lightning in advance, and I imagine the others in the office probably thought the one incandescent bulb they hadn’t swapped out yet had glitched, infected by the flashbang’s violence, or maybe figured the retinas they’d been destroying staring at screens all day had finally given out. The weather forecast had, predictably, failed to forecast the lightning. If weather forecasts were actually that useful, why haven’t farmers been able to live in peace?

Boom! The thunder punched through my noise-canceling headphones; the hand holding my phone trembled slightly.

After the thunder, I switched my headphones to transparency mode. After two minutes of scrolling news, I took them off and walked out of the bathroom. Stepping into the air-conditioned room caught me slightly off guard—there was an odd discomfort, like an extra shadow had settled over my body. The colleagues around me went on working as if nothing had happened; someone glanced up at me and then went back to staring at their screen.

I was also staring at a screen, in a sense—I’d been scrolling through today’s news the whole time I was in the bathroom. Every day the news is a miscellany of everything: from the state-owned assets commission to endangered animals, from airlines rescheduling flights to large-scale attacks. I’ve always wondered how people manage to never get tired of news, but it seems to exist purely to attract attention.

Because of the thunder, the sky outside had turned overcast—rum-colored, draped in deep purple storm clouds. It seemed to be standing in for the coming of night. Nobody was in a working mood.

I’d assumed that once I walked home through the rain and let the next day’s cycle of day and night erase any trace of what had happened, everything would be fine. I was probably wrong. The following Tuesday, after the HR meeting ended, I walked again into that familiar bathroom. It smelled of disinfectant, which threw me off a little. I was more used to a different smell—the ominous kind that usually started dispersing the moment I stepped inside. Today it wasn’t there. A little confused, I settled out of habit into the stall that was mine. There was some water on the floor, reflecting a dark and ghastly version of my face; I felt as though those water molecules were all my brain cells.

Symbolically, I checked around the partitions—obviously no one was there; this was my stall and mine alone. I didn’t pull my pants down, just grabbed some paper to pad the seat and sat down, scrolling my phone.

My mother asked how I’d been lately. I said fine, work as usual. My friends had been up late discussing a newly released film and some strange person one of them had witnessed, but they’d all gone quiet by now—probably at work. Nobody was messaging me. I opened the news app, but when I carefully scanned through the headlines, I suddenly noticed a sharpened smell of urine from somewhere, followed by the burning sensation of too much stomach acid. I closed my phone, shut my eyes, propped my head in my hands, and rested on the toilet. Maybe a minute or two passed. My legs were starting to lose circulation.

I’d just stood up when a gunshot sounded outside the window.

The flash made the window flare orange and gold. I flung open the stall door in a panic and saw two people standing in line at the sink. They looked back at me. I could see they were as tense as I was. But I had no interest in waiting for them to finish washing their hands one by one, so I shot them a look of contempt, skipped washing mine, and went straight back to my desk. I sat down and spent about fifteen minutes pretending to work before my boss arrived, sweating through his hair, to tell us there’d been a shooting outside the window. He told us we could stop for the day and take the subway from the building’s lower level home. I felt something almost like relief, so I packed up immediately and left.

Back home, lying alone on the sofa, the image of the bathroom kept surfacing and making me more and more agitated.

I went to my bathroom at home and washed my face with cold water. Staring at the blank white wall in the mirror, I kept seeing the faces of those two men washing their hands. Their faces, with jagged wrinkles, their eyes like stones from some infernal substrate, seemed arranged in front of my face in the manner of a Cubist sculpture. A wave of dizziness hit me, so I splashed cold water on my face. Water flew everywhere, distorting the reflection, getting into my hair. I went to bed without dealing with it.

I woke the next morning without the slightest sense of ease that leaving early should have brought. After throwing together a cup of instant coffee, I rushed off to work.

The sky today was clear in a way that seemed completely unrelated to everything. While I scrambled to catch up on what I’d missed the day before, a few colleagues started chatting as if yesterday had never happened. They started in on the news—car crashes, celebrities making comebacks, a drama series everyone was watching, three typhoons approaching Japan. I felt a little unsettled, as if my desk were the bathroom.

“Hey, I’m going to the bathroom for a sec—can you give these to the team lead?”

“Sure.”

I handed my colleague two reports, then strolled into the bathroom with an air of total nonchalance. When I closed the door, I let out a breath. I was about to light a cigarette when I saw two people crouching in the corner.

They were suffused with a lurking dark purple, eyes sunken and blackened, faces long, wearing dark gray workwear. One was lying face-down on the floor, apparently asleep; the other had both arms wrapped around their knees and was staring at me hard.

I stopped moving.

The air froze.

Both of their faces were smeared with what looked like mud; their clothes were covered in water stains. By the look of them, they’d just crawled out of a sewer drain. I thought about whether to say something. What I actually wanted was to get back quickly—my computer wasn’t locked, and I was a little worried my colleagues might snoop through my chat logs. Those colleagues all seemed like snoopers; I’d often questioned whether it was right to be working at this company.

I figured I’d go into the stall—at least there’d be no eyes in there. But when I pulled the handle of the stall that was supposed to be mine, it was locked.

A dizzy chill ran down my spine.

Slightly panicking, I didn’t dare check whether someone was actually in there. The gap under the stall door seemed darker than usual.

I stole a glance behind me with my peripheral vision but couldn’t make out where the two of them had gone. Not quite daring to meet them head-on, I shook out my hand and felt the door of the other stall. Though I’d braced myself, finding it locked again frightened me just the same. My heart was beating close to the speed at which I’d shaken my coffee cup that morning, but my hand didn’t move at all.

I took a deep breath and pulled my hand off the door handle. Then I felt a thin stream of cool water running over my shoe. I’m not sure how I sensed it, but I turned to look. The two people were gone—only a plastic angel doll lay on the floor. Actually, it didn’t look plastic. Its eyes reflected the artificial light; the fabric of its clothes looked as smooth as conditioner. I got the sense its head might be old copper repainted. Beside it, the urinal had come apart in scattered pieces, the ceramic white almost blinding. I hadn’t expected it to have broken so quietly—but looking closer, I saw its cracks were even and clean, as if not the result of violence. Clearly, it hadn’t collided with the floor tiles either, or there would have been some sound. I carried this question and the memory of what I’d just seen back to my computer, but my mind wasn’t on work.

I started thinking about a question: can weather forecasts actually let farmers live in peace? Maybe I’d been thinking too simply. Weather forecasts let people feel a dual sense of control over the future and over nature—as if the universe belonged to a wise shade of blue. But could that confidence spread from a farmer’s hands into the seeds? My colleague noticed me staring at the spreadsheet with a furrowed brow and asked if I wanted to get drinks tonight. I asked what kind of drinks. He stared at me in surprise; I froze, then smiled and said I was in. He smiled back, patted my shoulder, looked at my spreadsheet, and I looked at my spreadsheet. I wanted it to grow as lush as what a farmer imagines when they look at a weather forecast and believe their seeds will thrive—I wanted to see it swell with confidence, spiral upward, bloom. Blank spreadsheet. My colleague’s smile slowly faded. Mine did too. I suspected it was because today’s sky was too clear to have anything to do with either of us. Right—weather forecasts probably couldn’t let farmers live in peace. So how could they? Well, I’ll think about that once I’m living in peace myself.

The urge to smoke hits the same way a smoke alarm goes off. I stood in the bathroom smoking and thinking about that comic bit of self-reference. Green smoke ballooned from the toilet bowl, spiraling upward, blooming. Air danced in front of me. After I went back into the office, I wanted to make sure no one had been there. I waited in the bathroom for my colleague to escape from that wretched office into the bathroom—I knew he’d come, in the one minute before his computer popped up a window. I fiddled with the angel doll; it made babbling sounds, like the sound of air being squeezed out. Cigarette in my mouth, I carried the doll to the sink, looked at the dust and hair in the basin, looked at the filth and slime in the drain, then looked up at myself in the mirror. Actually I was looking at the window behind me—I couldn’t see myself at all anymore. All I could see was tomorrow’s weather. My eyes started to ache from looking, so I put the angel doll down. Walking out of the bathroom I saw my colleague coming down the corridor with the face of someone being chewed out by their boss for the first time. I patted his shoulder and told him the drinks were great. He grumbled to me about the boss for a few lines. I watched him duck into the bathroom, knowing he would belong to this place forever. I called out to him: you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met. I said it, turned around, and the bathroom behind me exploded—I only felt clear water droplets and blood flecks landing on my clothes.