Snapshots from the Life of a Man who must Work for a Living – 1

He particularly cherished the toilet breaks he allowed himself. The lavatory was his private sanctuary in the midst of the frigid, tubelit, bleakly pastel expanses of his office floor. His first break was scheduled at 11, after his breakfast which usually consisted of three slices of bread, some butter, and a cup of coffee. While he ate alone, the constant hubbub in the canteen (with its peals of tired laughter, its stale air of oft-repeated jokes and the squawking sports channels on its lone television set) rendered the canteen a place ill equipped to provide the warm, comfortable, enclosing privacy of the lavatory. He always took great care in wiping off the seat and placing three equally long strips of paper to form a U on the seat before dropping his pants. The warmth inside was cosy. The fresh breath of just-sprayed deodorants (sprayed every 15 minutes by a blue-liveried attendant who was diligently liberal in his zeal to keep things smelling of lemons) was a welcome change from the soulless odorlessness of the office floor. He would gently slip his shoes off and run his tuberous toe over the cool uncarpeted marble. Some days, he would spend upto a half hour tracing snaking lanes of journeying veins from one interlocked slab to another. He never felt at ease urinating along a line of men into, what he considered with a shudder of disgust, an openly inviting ceramic maw. He found no great pleasure in inspecting the arc, the texture, the flow of his urine nor was he so curious about his fellow men as to evaluate them by the way they set their feet, the bent of their upper body, the one/two-handedness of their grip or the hissing fall of their urine. Indeed, he was quite diffident by nature, with a marked tendency to speak at the collar of those who were taller than him and at the ear (whichever seemed closer) of those shorter or of a height with him. There were moments when he could even be termed shy but these were few and usually involved a social gathering of sorts. So it was that he always carried with him a few choice pebbles that he collected each morning from the assorted refuse on the road on his way to work from the bus stop. These, he would wrap in paper and carry with him into the lavatory for times when his intestines were not inclined to void themselves for his benefit. He would perch himself the usual way and softly plop pebbles in  the water at two- or three-minute intervals. He always ensured his phone would stay at his desk for the duration of his breaks. For these were the few choice moments he had that were his own, when the world was a different planet in a different sky, and he, a lone nomad, content in his box floating through a deep dark space of nothing.