I’ll be all right as long as my teeth don’t chatter, he thought. I can’t bear to hear my teeth chatter.
At eleven o’clock, Grunwald went to bed. He lay there in his pajamas under the
revolving fan, looking up into the dark and smiling. He felt better than he had felt for months. He was gratified but not surprised. “Goodnight, neighbor,” he said, and
closed his eyes. He slept through the night without waking for the first time in six
months.
At midnight, not far away from Curtis’s makeshift cell, some animal—probably just a
wild dog, but to Curtis it sounded like a hyena—let out a long, screaming howl. His
teeth began to chatter. The sound was every bit as awful as he had feared.
Some unimaginable time later, he slept.
When he woke up, he was shivering all over. Even his feet were jerking, tapdancing
like the feet of a junkie in withdrawal. I’m getting sick, I’ll have to go to the damn doctor, I ache all over, he thought. Then he opened his eyes, saw where he was, remembered where he was, and gave a loud, desolate cry: “Ohhhh… no! NO! ”
But it was oh yes. At least the Port-O-San wasn’t entirely dark anymore. Light was
coming through the circular holes: the pale rose glow of morning. It would soon
strengthen as the day brightened and heated up. Before long he would be steam-
cooking again.
Grunwald will come back. He’s had a night to think it over, he’ll realize how insane this is, and he’ll come back. He’ll let me out.
Curtis did not believe this. He wanted to, but didn’t.
He needed to take a leak in the worst way, but he was damned if he was going to piss
in the corner, even though there was crap and used toilet paper everywhere from
yesterday’s overturning. He felt somehow that if he did that—a nasty thing like that—
it would be the same as announcing to himself that he had given up hope.
I have given up hope.
But he hadn’t. Not completely. As tired and achey as he was, as frightened and
dispirited, part of him still hadn’t given up hope. And there was a bright side: he felt no urge to gag himself, and he hadn’t spent even a single minute of the night just gone by, nearly eternal though it had been, scourging his scalp with his comb.
There was no need to piss in the corner, anyway. He would just raise the toilet seat lid with one hand, aim with the other, and let fly. Of course, given the Port-O-San’s new
configuration, that would mean pissing horizontally instead of at a downward-
pointing angle. The current throb in his bladder suggested that would be absolutely no problem. Of course the final squirt or two would probably go on the floor, but—
“But thems are the fortunes of war,” he said, and surprised himself with a croaky
laugh. “And as far as the toilet seat goes…fuck holding it up. I can do better than
that.”
He was no Mr. Hercules, but both the half-ajar toilet seat and the flanges holding it to the bench were plastic—the seat and ring black, the flanges white. This whole
goddam box was really just a cheap plastic prefab job, you didn’t have to be a big-
time construction contractor to see that, and unlike the walls and the door, there was no cladding on the seat and its fastenings. He thought he could tear it off pretty easily, and if he could he would—if only to vent some of his anger and terror.
Curtis seized the seat and lifted it, meaning to grip the ring just beneath and pull
sideways. Instead he paused, looking through the circular hole and into the tank
beneath, trying to make sense of what he saw.
It looked like a thin seam of daylight.
He looked at this with perplexity into which hope came stealing slowly—not dawning,
exactly, but seeming to rise through his sweaty, ordure-streaked skin. At first he
thought it was either a swatch of fluorescent paint or an out-and-out optical illusion.
This latter idea was reinforced when the line of light began to fade away.