closed-in sound of his own voice frightened him all over again.
When he felt he had some control, he opened his eyes. They had adjusted to the
deeper gloom of the tank. He could see his shit-caked arms, and a matted ribbon of
paper hanging from his right hand. He plucked it off and dropped it. He supposed he
was getting used to such things. He supposed people could get used to anything, if
they had to. This wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.
He looked at the split. He looked at it for some time, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was like a split along the seam of a badly sewn garment. Because there
was a seam here. The tank was plastic after all—a plastic shell—but it wasn’t a single piece; it was two. It was held together by a line of screws that glimmered in the dark.
They glimmered because they were white. Curtis tried to remember if he had ever
seen white screws before. He couldn’t. Several of them at the lowest point of the tank had broken off, creating that split. Waste and wastewater must have been dribbling
out and onto the ground beneath for some time.
If the EPA knew about this. Motherfucker, you’d have them on your back, too, Curtis thought. He touched one of the screws still holding, the one just to the left of where the split ended. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was hard plastic rather than
metal. The same kind of plastic the toilet-ring flanges were made of, probably.
So. Two-piece construction. The tanks put together on some portable-toilet assembly
line in Defiance, Missouri, Magic City, Idaho, or—who knew?—What Cheer, Iowa.
Screwed together with hard plastic screws, the seam running across the bottom and up
the sides like a big old smile. The screws tightened with some special long-barreled
screwdriver, probably air-driven, like the gadget they used in garages to loosen the
lug-nuts holding on your tires. And why put these screwheads on the inside? That was
easy. So some merry prankster couldn’t come along with his own screwdriver and
open a full tank from the outside, of course.
The screws were placed about two inches apart along the seam, and the split was
about six inches long, causing Curtis to deduce that three of the plastic screws had
snapped. Bad materials, or bad design? Who gave a shit?
“To coin a phrase,” he said, and laughed again.
The screws still holding to the left and right of the split were sticking up a little way, but he could neither unscrew them nor snap them off as he had the toilet seat. He
couldn’t get enough purchase. The one on the right was a little loose, and he supposed that if he worked at it, he might be able to get it started and then unscrew it the rest of the way. It would take hours, and his fingers would probably be bleeding by the time
he managed the job, but it could probably be done. And what would he gain? Another
two inches of breathing space through the seam. No more than that.
The screws beyond the ones bordering the split in the seam were firm and tight.
Curtis could stay up on his knees no longer; the muscles in his thighs were burning.
He sat down against the curved side of the tank, forearms on his knees, filthy hands
dangling. He looked at the brightening oval of the toilet hole. That was the overworld, he supposed, only his share of it had grown very small. It smelled better, though, and when his legs felt a little stronger, he supposed he would clamber back through the
hole. He wasn’t going to stay in here, sitting in shit, if there was nothing to be gained by it. And it seemed there was not.
A jumbo cockroach, made bold by Curtis’s new stillness, scuttled up his filthy pant
leg. He flapped a hand at it and it was gone. “That’s right,” he said, “run. Why don’t you squeeze out through the hole? You’d probably fit.” He brushed his hair out of his
eyes, knowing he was smearing his forehead, not caring. “Nah, you like it in here.