Dylan went to a different sink from the one that the retiree had used – and then had an idea that led him to the towel dispenser.
‘Pee, pee, pee,’ Shep said happily, with great relief.
‘Pee, pee, pee,’ Dylan echoed, returning with a towel to the retiree’s sink.
Shielding his right hand with the paper towel, he touched the faucet that the retiree had so recently shut off. Nothing. No fizz. No crackle.
He touched the fixture barehanded. Lots of fizz and crackle.
Again with the paper towel. Nothing.
Skin contact was required. Maybe not just hands. Maybe an elbow would work. Maybe feet. All sorts of ludicrous comic possibilities occurred to him.
‘Pee.’
‘Pee.’
Dylan rubbed the faucet vigorously with the towel, scrubbing away the soap and water that the retiree had left on the handle.
Then he touched it with his bare hand once more. The senior citizen’s psychic spoor remained as strong as it had been previously.
‘Pee.’
‘Pee.’
Evidently, this latent energy couldn’t simply be wiped away as fingerprints could be, but it dissipated gradually on its own, like an evaporating solvent.
At another sink, Dylan washed his hands. He was drying them near the towel dispenser when Shepherd came out of the fourth stall and went to the sink that his brother had just used.
‘Pee,’ Shepherd said.
‘You can see me now.’
‘Pee,’ Shep insisted as he turned on the water.
‘I’m right here.’
‘Pee.’
Refusing to be drawn into the sonar game when they were within sight of each other, Dylan tossed his crumpled towels in the waste can, and waited.
A riot of bizarre thoughts tumbled through his head, like an immense load of colorful laundry in a laundromat-size clothes dryer. One of those thoughts was that Shep had gone into the first stall but had come out of the fourth.
‘Pee.’
Dylan went to the fourth stall. The door stood ajar, and he shouldered it open.
Partitions separated the stalls, with twelve or fourteen inches of air space at the bottom. Shepherd could have dropped flat on the floor and wriggled from stall one to number four, under intervening partitions. Possible but highly unlikely.
‘Pee,’ Shep repeated, but with less enthusiasm, reluctantly coming to the conclusion that his brother would not participate any longer.
As fastidious about personal cleanliness as he was about the geometrical presentation of his meals, Shep had a post-toilet routine from which he never deviated: vigorously scrub the hands once, rinse them thoroughly, then scrub and rinse again. Indeed, as Dylan watched, Shep began the second scrub.
The kid had a special concern about the sanitary conditions in public lavatories. He regarded even the most well-maintained restroom with paranoid suspicion, certain that all known diseases and some not yet discovered were busily festering on every surface. Having read the American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine, Shep could recite a list of virtually all known diseases and infections if you were foolish enough to ask him to do so, and if he happened to be relating to the outer world well enough to hear your request – and if you had a sufficient number of hours to listen, since he would be all but impossible to stop once he got started.
Now, with the second rinse completed, Shep’s hands were red from excessive scrubbing and from water turned up so hot that he’d hissed in discomfort as he had endured it. Mindful of the deadly and cunning microorganisms hiding in plain sight on the chrome faucet handle, he turned the water off with his elbow.
Dylan could not imagine any circumstances under which Shepherd would lie facedown on a lavatory floor and slither under a series of partitions between toilet stalls. In fact, if it ever were to happen, you could be certain that simultaneously, in a sporting-goods store somewhere, Satan would be buying ice skates.
Besides, his white T-shirt remained immaculate. He hadn’t been mopping the floor with it.
Holding his hands high, like a surgeon expecting an assisting nurse to sheath them in latex gloves, Shep crossed the room to the towel dispenser. He waited for his brother to turn the crank, which he would not touch with clean hands.