Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

You slam the door and say, "Sorry."

And from somewhere deep inside, she says, "Don't be."

And she still doesn't lock the door. The little sign still saying:

Vacant.

How this happens is I used to fly round-trip from the East Coast to Los Angeles when I was still in the medical program at USC. During breaks in the school year. Six times I opened the door on the same yoga redhead naked from the waist down with her skinny legs pulled up cross-legged on the toilet seat, filing her nails with the scratch pad of a matchbook, as if she's trying to catch herself on fire, wearing just a silky blouse knotted over her breasts, and six times she looks down at her freckled pink self with the road crew orange rug around it, then her eyes the same gray as tin metal look up at me, slow, and every time says, "If you don't mind," she says, "I'm in here."

Six times, I slam the door in her face.

All I can think to say is, "Don't you speak English?"

Six times.

This all takes less than a minute. There isn't time to think.

But it happens more and more often.

Some other trip, maybe cruising altitude between Los Angeles and Seattle, you'll open the door on some surfer blond with both tanned hands wrapped around the big purple dog between his legs, and Mr. Kewl shakes the stringy hair off his eyes, points his dog, squeezed shiny wet inside a glossy rubber, he points this straight at you and says, "Hey, man, make the time...."

It gets to be, every time you go to the bathroom, the little sign says vacant, but it's always somebody.

Another woman, two knuckles deep and disappearing into herself.

A different man, his four inches dancing between his thumb and forefinger, primed and ready to cough up the little white soldiers.

You begin to wonder, just what do they mean by vacant.

Even in an empty bathroom, you find the smell of spermicidal foam. The paper towels are always used up. You'll see the print of a bare foot on the bathroom mirror, six feet up, near the top of the mirror, the little arched print of a woman's foot, the five round spots left by her toes, and you'd wonder, what happened here?

Like with coded public announcements, "The Blue Danube Waltz" or Nurse Flamingo, you wonder, what's going on?

You wonder, what aren't they telling us?

You'll see a smear of lipstick on the wall, down almost to the floor, and you can only imagine what was going on. There's the dried white stripes from the last pull-out moment when somebody's dog tossed his white soldiers against the plastic wall.

Some flights the walls will still be wet to the touch, the mirror fogged. The carpet sticky. The sink drain is sucked full, choked with every color of little curled hair. On the bathroom counter, next to the sink, is the perfect round outline in jelly, contraceptive jelly and mucus, of where somebody set her diaphragm. Some flights, there's two or three different sizes of perfect round outlines.

These are the domestic leg of longer flights, transpacific or flights over the pole. Ten-to-sixteen-hour flights. Direct flights, Los Angeles to Paris. Or from anywhere to Sydney.

My Los Angeles trip number seven, the yoga redhead whips her skirt off the floor and hurries out after me. Still zipping herself up in the back, she trails me all the way to my seat and sits next to me, saying, "If your goal is to hurt my feelings, you could give lessons."

She's got this shining soap opera kind of hairdo, only now her blouse is buttoned with a big floppy bow in the front and everything, pinned down with a big jewelry brooch.

You say it again, "Sorry."

This is westbound, somewhere north-northwest above Atlanta.

"Listen," she says, "I work just too hard to take this kind of shit. You hear me?"

You say, "I'm sorry."

"I'm on the road three weeks out of every month," she says. "I'm paying for a house I never see ... soccer camp for my kids ... just the cost of my dad's nursing home is incredible. Don't I deserve something? I'm not bad-looking. The least you can do is not shut the door in my face."

This is really what she says.

She ducks down to put her face between me and the magazine I'm pretending to read. "Don't make like you don't know," she says. "It's not like sex is anything secret."

And I say, "Sex?"

And she puts a hand over her mouth and sits back.

She says, "Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry. I just thought..." and reaches up to push the little red stewardess button.

A flight attendant comes past, and the redhead orders two double bourbons.

I say, "I hope you're planning to drink them both."

And she says, "Actually, they're both for you."

This would be my first time. That first time that no subsequent time is ever as good as.

"Don't let's fight," she says and gives me her cool white hand. "I'm Tracy."

A better place this could've happened is a Lockheed TriStar 500 with its strip mall of five large bathrooms isolated in the rear of the tourist-class cabin. Spacious. Soundproof. Behind everybody's back where they can't see who comes and goes.

Compared to that, you have to wonder what kind of animal designed the Boeing 747- 400, where it seems every bathroom opens onto a seat. For any real discretion, you have to trek back to the toilets in the back of the rear tourist cabin. Forget the single lower- level sidewall bathroom in business class unless you want everybody to know what you've got going.

It's simple.

If you're a guy, how it works is you sit in the bathroom with your Uncle Charlie whipped out, you know, the big red panda, and you work him up to parade attention, you know, the full upright position, and then you just wait in your little plastic room and hope for the best.

Think of it as fishing.

If you're Catholic, it's the same feeling as sitting in a confessional. The waiting, the release, the redemption.

Think of it as catch-and-release fishing. What people call "sport fishing."

The other way how it works is you just open doors until you find something you like. It's the same as the old game show where whatever door you choose, that's the prize you take home. It's the same as the lady and the tiger.

Behind some doors, it's somebody expensive back from first class for some slumming, a little cabin-class rough trade. Less chance she'll meet anybody she knows. Behind other doors, you'll get some aged beef with his brown tie thrown back over one shoulder, his hairy knees spread against the wall on each side, petting his leathery dead snake and then he says, "Sorry bud, nothing personal."

Those times, you'll be too grossed even to say, "As if."

Or, "In your dreams, buddy."

Still, the reward rate is just great enough to keep you pushing your luck.

The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting. The lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how fast the time flies.

Half the thrill is the challenge. The danger and risk.

So, it's not the Great American West or the race to the South Pole or being the first man to walk on the moon.

It's a different kind of space exploration.

You're mapping a different kind of wilderness. Your own vast interior landscape.

It's the last frontier to conquer, other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven't done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here's everything you've only imagined.

You're Chris Columbus sailing over the horizon.

You're the first caveman to risk eating an oyster. Maybe this particular oyster isn't new, but it's new to you.

Suspended in the nowhere, in the halfway fourteen hours between Heathrow and Jo- burg, you can have ten true-life adventures. Twelve if the movie's bad. More if the flight's full, less if there's turbulence. More if you don't mind a guy's mouth doing the job, less if you return to your seat during meal service.