Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

The brute sounded enormous. With the wet, sucking sound of a bathtub drain he hawked up a massive wad of saliva. I could hear it rattling from his cheeks and throat into his mouth, followed by the spit-bullet splat of his robust mouthful hitting the floor. Flecks colored brown with masticated tobacco sprayed my way under the partition, and I stepped my Bass Weejuns back as far as the tiny space allowed. A great hulking ogre had taken up residence on the toilet next to mine. This thought infused my fear with a hunger, but not for food. As the tedious upstate sun had filled me with thirst, the looming sense of some hairy giant spurred a tenuous new physical need. A true scientist dedicated to studying nature, I reasoned, would remain motionless and silent. The cubicle made a suitable “blind” from which to spy; Mr. Darwin had endured worse. I heard the buzz of a heavy zipper parting. That ominous sound was followed by the clank of a metal belt buckle striking the concrete floor.

In the stealthy manner of Mr. Darwin I remained toilet-bound, but leaned forward from the waist, lower and lower, so as to peek beneath the bottom edge of the partition. What I saw baffled me: The beastly monster’s feet were shod in rather louche shoes of the type called “cowboy boots,” and his low-quality, prêt-à-porter gabardine slacks were collapsed to rest around his booted ankles. The two ends of a belt dangled from his open waistband, flanking the yawning zipper, and the buckle was a hammered oval of tarnished silver embedded with faux turquoise and engraved with the legend WORLD’S BEST DAD. What piqued my professional curiosity was how his toes ought to have been pointing forward. They were not. Both tips of his boots were pointed toward me, facing the metal wall that separated us.

The flimsy sheet metal bowed and groaned as if some leviathan pressed against it from the opposite side.

Alarmed, I slowly sat upright. There, the real horror awaited me.

What appeared to be a stubby boneless finger now protruded through the snarling mouth hole in the stall partition. This short, thick cylinder was mottled brown, fading from a red-brown at the blunt terminus to a soiled beige where it disappeared through the wall. Infinite tiny wrinkles carpeted the finger’s spongy surface, and several short, curling hairs clung to it. The finger gave off a sour, not-healthy odor.

Before I could make a closer inspection, mercifully, my eyeglasses chose that moment to slip from my sweat-slicked face. Their tortoiseshell frames clattered against the concrete floor, skidded through the field of expectorated tobacco juice, and spun out of my reach. I grabbed at the air, desperate, but caught nothing. Everything in the world smeared together. Minus my corrective lenses nothing had an edge. This place was already as dark as wearing ten pairs of Foster Grants and ten pairs of Ray-Bans at the same time, and now everything looked mixed-up as well.

Squinting, I leaned so near the finger that I could feel its animal heat. I peered from so close up that my breath stirred the short, curled hairs. I sniffed at it tentatively. As my brain whispered that the “finger” was not an actual finger, I was shocked by the true nature of this encounter. The scent was unmistakable. This apparent psychopath… this sexual deviant… he was attempting to menace me with a longish lump of dog poopie.

I was seated in close proximity to a deranged masher who’d armed himself with a longish, brown dog boo-boo.

Some unbalanced Mr. Lechy Vanderlech, most likely an escapee from a lunatic asylum, had traveled to this location for the specific purpose of collecting a discarded dog dooky. In all likelihood he’d lingered over his selection, scouting for a dried pet poo nugget with sufficient length and tensile strength to be so brandished, but with not so much girth that it wouldn’t fit through an existing hole in this partition. I was merely the unlucky target of his deranged attentions. Only a breath away from my look of dumbstruck horror, the poo log emerged from the battered metal and drooped at a steep angle.

It was the downward angle of my nana’s cigarette when she was subject to a serious emotional depression; however, as I watched, the mood of the drooping poo finger began to improve. Like some horrid, soft-focus miracle it began to inflate. The hideous mud boo-boo rose until it jutted straight out from its rough hole in the metal wall. Its ruddy color shifted from red-brown to pink as its angle slanted upward. Before I could blink my eyes it was pointed at the ceiling. By now it had swollen so large, and it thrust up at such a steep incline, that I doubted my assailant could easily retract his hostile doo-doo probe.

Even seen, vague and unfocused, through my crippled eyes, the transformation was astounding. The nascent naturalist within me began to formulate a strategy.

Wary, I lifted the heavy tome of Mr. Darwin. For as long as I could recollect I’d been the victim of schoolyard bullies, those giggling Miss Skanky Skankenheimers who’d misled and tormented me. No longer would I tolerate similar forms of demeaning abuse. Tensing the slight muscles of my youthful arms, I took aim. My plan was to swing the heavy book and swat the menacing poop with such force that it would fly the full extent of the room. After that, I’d bolt, running full speed, and return to the bright outside world before my lunatic harasser knew I’d so destroyed his sad, ridiculous toy.

Gentle Tweeter,

Those long years thence, seated astride a stained toilet bowl in an upstate public bathroom, I tightened my grip on the Beagle book. With both hands I held the heavy, leather-bound volume. Like a golfer preparing to hit a drive down the fourteenth fairway at St. Donats, or a tennis star rearing back to hit a scorching serve over the net at the French Open, I slowly aligned the book with the offensive dog dooky. The magically swollen pet doo-doo jutted eagerly toward me, oblivious to my imminent violent actions. The cinder-block room echoed with the plink-plunk musical notes of dripping water, but otherwise a silence had settled, so intense it proved my harasser and I were both holding our respective breaths. The muscles of my frail shoulders and shoestring arms flexed, rigid as iron, focusing the strength garnered from my mom’s spacey yoga gurus in Kathmandu and Bar Harbor. A wild karate yelp took shape at the back of my throat. Squinting my nearsighted eyes, I told myself: Exhale . I told myself: Lean into the swing .

Steeling myself, I was Theseus about to do battle with the Minotaur in the dank basements of Crete. I was Hercules girding my loins to fight Cerberus, the fierce two-headed watchdog of the underworld.

I told myself: Now .

Wielding the heavy volume from above my head, swinging it diagonally, down and sideways simultaneously, I rendered the threatening doggie poo a mighty thwack . Without hesitation, my backswing landed a second, resounding smack against the loathsome doodie-caca, but it refused to detach and go flying as I’d hoped. Trapped by its own magically increased size, the menacing poo finger appeared to be wedged within the jagged metal hole. The awful dooky bobbed and flopped wildly, flailing and twisting in every direction. From behind the sheet-metal partition a sharp gasp of breath preceded a howling scream. The pressure which had bowed the partition in my direction now reversed, and some great force seemed to tug against the metal wall. The scratched, mutilated barrier pulled away from me, dragged backward by the efforts of the trapped dog boo-boo attempting to escape.

Flogging with the hardcover book, I pummeled my foe’s vile puppy poop with one savage blow after another. In response, the unseen opponent bellowed and shrieked. These were animal sounds. The wailing which might occur on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. This senseless keening might be a suffering horse or cow as likely as it was a human male.