Bathroom
Justin Lo (7300)
“Sir?” he asked hesitantly.
The
older man gave no reply, but instead continued to stare at the blurry ATM
machine’s monitor.
“Er
– excuse me, sir,” he said.
Once
again, only silence met his ears.
“Sir! Would you happen to know where the men’s
restrooms are?” he cried, a natural sense of urgency adding defiance and anger
to the words that on paper would be so gentle and respectful.
“Hold
a moment,” came the late reply. “I’m
waiting for my money to pop out.”
He
stole a look at the ATM screen and realized that there was in fact nothing on
it but a blurry photograph of a dog.
“Well,
sir, I don’t think any money is coming out of that machine anytime soon. This has got to be some sort of joke! It ought to say “thank you for your
business” or “please take cash now” if it’s about to give you the bills for
your withdrawal.”
The
old man’s brows furrowed, and he growled, “Oh, unprincipled! Unprincipled! By my shoe, you’re just trying to convince me to walk over there
to the restrooms and then you’ll come and take my cash while I explain the
route we took!”
“No,
sir, no!” cried the younger man in denial.
“I simply have to go to the restroom!
You know where they are, don’t you?”
“Of
course – who do you take me for?”
“And
so you could direct me – verbally that is – you don’t have to budge a single
inch, sir – direct me to the restrooms?”
The
old man replied without hesitation, “Indeed.”
“And
… so may I have the directions?”
“What
directions?” asked the old man.
“To
the restrooms!”
“Oh. Well indeed, I am waiting for my cash right
now.”
“You
don’t really know where the restrooms are, do you …,” sighed the younger
man. He trembled slightly, and
remembered that he urgently had to use the toilet.
“I
do, I do! But you see, I haven’t used
the ones in this facility for some time, and so I should hardly recall exactly
where they are, unless I were to leave my guard of this ATM machine.”
The
younger man bid the older man farewell and tried the second floor of the
building. He scoured one hallway after
another, and at the end of one of the shorter corridors, he found a boy dressed
in a basketball jersey and cargo shorts.
“Ah,
excuse me,” began the man.
“Can’t. Talk.
To. Strangers,” replied the boy
with a stern glare, like one of those robots with the glowing red eyes and cold
metallic bodies.
“I
was just wondering where the -,” continued the man.
“Go. Away.
Or. I’ll. Blow.
Your. Head. Off.”
“Okay,
okay!” conceded the man, who left for the third floor.
On
the third floor, he found a teenage girl who was comfortably slouched on a
sofa, reading a popular novel and sipping iced tea.
He
stood next to her, somewhat hovering, not knowing whether he ought to bother
her or not. After a page or two, she
looked up at him with an apathetic glance.
“Yeah?”
she asked.
“Do
you know where the bathrooms are?”
“Well,
not the guys’ bathroom, but the girls’, sure.”
She laughed a little, a mixture of an innocent giggle and a coarse
chuckle.
“Oh
oh, I really don’t care what bathroom, any will do!”
“Wow,
pretty desperate, huh,” commented the girl.
“Well okay. The closest girls’
bathroom is on the twentieth fl-”
The
man’s eyes widened: “T-t-tw-twentieth floor?
Good God, who designed this building?!
No, no, I mean to ask, how in the world do you ever go?”
“Me?”
asked the girl. “That’s none of your
beeswax. Just run along, use the girls’
bathroom if you’re that freaking desperate.”
“But,
the elevator doesn’t go any higher than the fifth floor.”
“That’s
what stairs are for, Einstein.”
The
man fumed silently but thanked the girl anyway,