Tenderness, treachery, hatred—all at once, repeatedly. Softness, pliability, vibrations. A tangled mechanism, layers deep, full of connections, partitions, pipes, channels… buried way down. And this "way down" is so tiny, it fits in your palm. Like a ladies’ handbag, just over a liter, where you could lose a lighter for half an hour. We figure everyone’s got the same quirk.

On stage, there’s Dormshiganger, the saxophonist. He’s cradling his instrument, gentle but firm. Eyes closed, he tenses, just a bit, then relaxes, pouring out a sound that just penetrates the space—powerful, mesmerizing. Every time he shifts to a new phrase, he pulls back, spine straight, or leans in, eyes squeezing shut tighter, or he bends one leg, leaves the other stiff, head tilted like a dog, eyebrows doing a little dance. Or he squats, like he’s tiptoeing in reverse, getting shorter, and then the saxophone just melts into him, visually inseparable. His lips are always pursed, full of that mouthpiece. After each piece, he licks the reed, eyes darting to check the metal’s shine.

Walk into a men’s restroom, and you’ll see something wild, something women never get to witness. Indifferent infernals standing before a row of gleaming urinals. For them, nothing exists but tenderness, treachery, and hatred, all focused, all lavishly channeled towards one aim. And almost guaranteed, there’ll be one whose movements would send any politician into a full-blown panic. Because, as we all know, authorities have very unconventional ideas about how people use public restrooms; I mean, judging by the operating hours, they must think no one needs a pee break after ten PM.

Let’s call it Male Restroom Saxophonism. Think about a saxophonist on stage: that’s pretty much how some guys perform their toilet ritual. And you, you step up to a urinal, fresh off the performance of one of these diabolical dudes, and you peer into the bowl. What’s there? Nothing. Everything’s drained away, just like melodies vanishing into the evening air, hanging from the lampposts. And then—you lower, you unleash… we figure everyone’s got the same quirk, right? Don’t we?

No, come on, you’ve gotta admit, you’ve seen things just as weird.

Once, I saw a guy sprinting down the street, barefoot, just in jeans, tearing along at incredible speed, clutching a toilet under his arm. At first, I figured his house had been robbed, and that toilet was all the poor bastard managed to save. But then, I dropped the jokes, the ape-like grin this world’s tolerated for thirty years slid off my face, and I looked like a sad orangutan. Not a second later, a rude Spaniard lady, flat and cold-bellied, exploded from the crowd like a planet, smacked my chest with her nose, and unleashed a cacophony so intense, even if I spoke Spanish, it’d take hours to decipher.

The guy who’d just blown past me at 200 mph with a toilet tucked under his arm was now, nonchalantly, sitting on that toilet in the park, almost right by the fence. His back was to me. All I could see was the wheel of his back, and it looked like he was tinkering with the axle of that wheel, which was somehow also his spine. And then he’d get up, lie on his stomach, and roll home. To a place where no loving wife, no money, no gold, no silver awaited him. Most definitely, no toilet.

I was just curious. So I snuck into the park. The paths in this place never lead to exits. I stepped carefully on the grass, heading for a crimson path, the grass scratching my soles. When I got closer, I saw there was no wheel on his chest. He was hunched over, criminally so, perched on his toilet, clearly ripped barbarically from a pipe, with some rag sticking out of the porcelain guts. In his left hand, he held a thin silver chain, and in his right, a grubby shoelace. His strange movements were like hail falling. A gust in one direction, then an abrupt stop, another, then an acceleration—down! And at the very bottom—Brownian motion. His bare back was fried in olive oil; his stomach and chest, in sunflower oil and vinegar. He was hiding them, pretending to be a wheel. It was Dormshiganger.

“What are you doing here, mister?” I cut myself off immediately, but it was too late. I always got awkward talking to people in situations like this.

“I’m writing music. But do I know you?” His hairy left hand resumed its task, but a second later, his attention shot back to me.

“Nah, you just passed me, and there was that Spanish lady… anyway, I’m really glad we met. You see, the way you write music reminds me of how I do my job.” I snorted, fizzing with the thought that he was about to ask me—

“What is your job?” This guy, he paid attention to everything, even the most insignificant stuff. A mere sapper’s shovel could pop into his life for a second, and he’d track its movements, remember its outline, and definitely mention it at dinner. I laughed, left him hanging for a bit. Dormshiganger gave a slight smirk into his week-old lacquered mustache. His small eyes in his disproportionately large sockets looked like they wanted to fall into my hand. And this is how they fell:

“I manage projects for a company. They install bio-toilets in our city.” The answer threw Dormshiganger a bit. His eyes awkwardly clanked from my palm right onto the rim of the toilet and gave a guilty smile, then went back to work. He was hanging the shoelace and chain in the wind, then taking them off, then hanging them again, but on a different gust. It hit me then: boy, what a bizarre dude.

As I started to walk away, to leave the park, I heard a crack, like a cold, gloomy steamroller paving over a jungle crawling with Madagascar cockroaches. A huge poplar tree fell right on Dormshiganger’s back. The musician vanished into the leaves, and only ceramic shards, scattered within a four-meter radius, were left to remind me of his recent presence.

When I walked out of the fast-food restroom across from the park, that thought was still swirling in my head. The threshold floated under me, and all my thoughts spilled out onto the table next to the bathroom door, where some office-worker couple was huddled. And then, an avalanche. Tables surged like a wave, and I stood on a fallen ceiling panel, surfing around the room, knocking over hamburgers, fries, drinks, cash registers, advertising posters, splitting open some skulls as I went. People flew past, sometimes whole, faces washing clean and getting dirty, papers burning and turning to dust, light letters blasted a brassy tush. I couldn’t understand what was happening, not because it was a complicated question. I just stopped being a thinking being altogether.

Only after busting through the storefront, steadying myself, and heading along the ridiculous keyboard-like cobblestones did I finally get it. In that hall, where there were exactly twice as many jaws as chairs, I heard music. It carried me in circles, it made my board move along the path of least resistance. It was music like what Dormshiganger was composing in the park. Wind taking shape, but never holding it forever, just squeezing through perfectly profiled openings. Five octaves of notes, having an orgy in broad daylight, right in front of hundreds of city dwellers.

“And how does that connect to my work?”

“You see, we both catch the wind in a shoelace and a chain. That’s what makes up our work, that’s what our lives consist of, that’s what we get paid for.” We walked fast, like we were both late for a meeting; he kept checking his imaginary mouthpiece, which was right where it should be.

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, my dear friend. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The thing is, in my work, the shoelace and chain are replaceable. But in yours, they’re only present figuratively, mentally. You can’t exclude them, update them, shorten them, or change their material. Music is far more tangible than you think.” 

He stretched that ridiculously long annulary, and rang it with a ring of words: “Music—you can poke it, stroke it, split it. You can even tickle it. But what can you do with a complex supply of luxury bio-toilet equipment?” His guttural ‘r’ gave Dormshiganger away. Even when he spoke, the mouthpiece was there, mentally, in his mouth. Tangibly…

“You can do something with the bio-toilet itself.”

“Wait, so do you make bio-toilets, or do you manage their installation?”

I knew the conversation was over. As I passed an open manhole, I didn’t even say goodbye to Dormshiganger, who vanished right then and there.

A toilet with auto-wash, a toilet with a view of the Gulf, a Venus de Milo-shaped toilet, a toilet with video surveillance.

That rhythm section, man, it just vibrates. Sublime music. Music without a treble clef, somehow. Pop, Pop, Bop-Dee Damn! So tell me, which one's real enough to grab onto? Which one do you actually want your hands on?