Bathroom Floor Metropolis / Senseless

By Andrew Zhou

Bathroom Floor Metropolis

My mother gave birth to a city on the bathroom floor.

First came the sound: a sweet wind, birds chirping with the sunrise. All the half-awake humming that comes with early morning, which lasted a second—maybe two—before the crash of full day. A thousand six-year olds in the back of eight-hundred SUVs, feet slamming against their fathers’ seats all the way down the interstate. The panting of a college soccer team, a lot like mine, scrimmaging in a park. A cop busting down a warehouse door. Hands up! Don’t fucking move! Bidets gurgling. Every song on every karaoke machine all at once and a fender bender in a parking lot, horns included. Gossip, gossip, gossip. Shotguns recoiling. Moaning. The night noise was much the same, but with crickets.

When it crowned, my mother screamed and dug her fingernails into my wrist like she used to as punishment when I wouldn’t eat my snap peas, but this time I dug my nails in right back. The neon of the streetlights came spilling out from between her legs, electric yellow dousing the bathroom tile, followed by the streetlights themselves, and then the holiday parades and stained glass windows with them. Scores of school buses, legions of big-box stores. Fresh produce on sale and shoe racks and water treatment facilities with graffiti sprayed at impossible angles. I got on my knees and took it all into my arms without letting it drop, not even when my mother cursed the name of every baby ever born—including mine—and the city threatened to drown me. Movie theaters, hot dog stands, barrels filled with biohazard, closets of jump ropes, skyscrapers, dog park blueprints, enough beautiful women to tend to every crib for miles. An ice sculpture in the shape of a heart, and fifty more with the face of Emma Stone. A man in a ski mask jumping at a pregnant woman from around a corner and screaming the fear into her, once and for all. The first death has your nose! The first death has your eyes! Veils in black and white, weighted blankets and half-melted roadkill kissing tar. I took all I could take, and still more came. Silk robes, dead babies, water cooler conveyor belts, unmarked graves, air traffic patterns, PlayStations, pennies charred by Bunsen burners, billboards, condoms, Christmas tree angels, golf courses, Toyota dealerships, businessmen missing their children’s recitals, sewer systems, temples, chiffon, owls. 

As my body failed under all that weight, I couldn’t fathom how my mother kept pushing through the signal smoke and air sirens and blood, how she could stand building the metropolis only to let it go. I won’t know the source of that steel until the day somebody invents time travel. Then I’ll go to the high school nurse’s office where I was born, and maybe if I hold the unbearable totality of myself, I’ll know my mother the way she knows me: endless candles, expired gift receipts, suburbs washing toward light.

Senseless

1.

I walked to a diner last week—the one you suggested after admitting that you couldn’t stand my cooking—but the pancakes came apart in my mouth like ash. The maple syrup ran like water. I told a server that the hash browns weren’t salty enough. He handed me a shaker filled with sugar.

2.

Think about that concert we attended on Wednesday, the one that accidentally played white noise in the lobby. The trumpets reminded me of police sirens. The timpani, a heart attack. And yet the worst part of the night was the ride home, when you refused to speak to me because I forgot your mom’s birthday. Remember? Only in the Wendy’s drive-through did you open your mouth to say that she’ll hold onto the slight, that even when her mind gives up, her body will keep the grudge and transform it, and all I could think of was the harp player pulling on each string like she was pulling the trigger of a shotgun.

3.

You’ve spent the last year taking control of our walls, appointing decor for every room in the house. I just wanted to choose something for the bathroom—the guest bathroom, for God’s sake. Ever since you called me and every other motherfucker who grew up in the Midwest tasteless, I’ve been dying for the chance to prove you wrong. At the gallery, I followed the most handsome employee to the back. If you saw me with him, you would have wanted to accuse me of sleeping with the man in all his six-foot-plus glory. You would never do it in the end, but your eyes would give the game away. I asked the employee to show me a watercolor. A seascape. Instead, he pulled back a curtain on an oil painting from hell: a sky of fire painted on yellowed canvas, the clouds roiling with brimstone, ash. I tried to examine the details, but the employee pulled me back. The paint was still wet.

4.

I know you’re sorry for starting that fight last week, for smashing my perfume bottles and making the toilet water smell like Chanel. It’s okay; love is a hard thing. And that means couples sometimes argue over silly things, like whether the world exists when we look away. Thank you for the flowers. They make up for everything, they do. I don’t even mind the lilies smelling like marigolds. Weeds instead of violets, poison sumac instead of roses.

5.

Darling, I can’t go back. When you came home late again last night and slipped into bed, I was half-awake imagining flour prints on my face. When you came from behind and slid your arms around my stomach, I thought a monster had broken in through the back window. Your fingers felt like teeth, your hands like mouths. Elbows against elbows—a fire alarm. Your bare feet against mine—a gas leak in the kitchen. You shrieked as I leapt on top of you; the lonely thing inside me went berserk. And I can’t even regret it, because it was only when my hands wrapped themselves around your neck that I finally recognized your skin. Something clicked in the senseless violence, like gunfire into music or sugar into salt. There in the dark, with my hands pressing the air out of you, an alignment: I could feel clearly again.

About the Author

Andrew Zhou is a queer Chinese writer and medical device engineer who grew up in the Minneapolis area but currently resides in Boston. He holds a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, Bourbon Penn, Chestnut Review, Foglifter, Faultline, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. Find him at zhouandrew.com.