"Can I use your bathroom for a minute, to put some cold water on my face, or something," Ed asked Mike, as he swayed uneasily.
"Sure thing, it's off of my office," Mike replied, and pointed his baton towards the back room.
Ed stumbled into the small bathroom, expecting filth, but as he closed the door behind him, the first thing he noticed was a light vanilla scent, along with flowery beads that nestled inside the toilet paper holder. Nothing scummy, neat and organized, unlike all he had expected, and causing him such alarm inside everything he ever thought or perceived.
Why, he thought, was he feeling like he was in a hand-drawn cartoon inside this porn shop? The snake, it didn't act like a snake, it acted like it had a mind, so animated and unreal. And Mike, so spotlight stage-show, was he somehow just a figment of imagination? Some twisted dream, perhaps his father had grabbed the chair from him and knocked him unconscious? Maybe this was a coma of some sort. Maybe, Ed thought, he wasn't really here, and all these connections he felt weren't even tangible, except in his mind?
But he felt the soft double-sheeted toilet paper in his hands, as he wiped himself ater taking a small poo. Standing at the sink, the light blue ceramic of it almost kissing his eyes, he wiped his face with his hands, and then water, and then a soft clean paper towel. He stared at himself, trying to find the problem. Something was different within his face, his eyes, but he couldn't see it right away. He looked at his cheeks, his palor, and then he saw it, in his lips.
He was smiling. Just softly, a smile, there it was, upon his face. The calm smile of a woman in the produce section of a grocery store as she sees the sale price on celery and lettuce. The soft smile of a little boy swinging on a tire swing on a summer's day. The smile shared by an old couple feeding ducks at lake-side.
A smile; Ed felt for sure this couldn't be happening, it had to be that he was in the hospital, dying of a chair-induced coma, but as he touched the smile on his lips with his fingertips, he knew it was indeed real, as were the events happening.
Of all places to feel life so real, so alive, so real it almost seemed not real, because of the happiness, because of the odd serenity of the penis and vagina, of the simplicity in the shape of a dildo or long leather whip, Ed wondered, why, why would it have to be a pornography shop that gave him a sense of belonging and connection to the world? He had no sexual longings, and any he'd had in the past he got angry at, and with himself, and would push them quickly inside a black metal box located above his stomach.
"Oh god," Ed said silently to the face in the mirror, "you can't work here. The box will open."
Life can sometimes be so real, it melts metal.