He lathered his entire body with soapy layers of Irish Spring, rinsed off, repeated, and repeated again. Sawdust could be a bitch to get off. If he didn’t overshower, he’d be tossing and turning in bed all night, too hot and sweaty and gross feeling to get any kind of decent sleep.
He washed both his skin and his hair with the bar of soap. There’d been shampoo once upon a time, but he hadn’t bothered to replace the last empty. Shampoo had been Eileen’s thing. As far as he was concerned, Irish Spring did the job just fine.
Finished, clean, he shut off the water and stepped out of the shower amid a billowing cloud of steam. His reflection, obscure in the steam, shadowy, floated across the mirror over the sink when he moved. He grabbed a used towel from the hook beside the shower and used it to dry himself.
The antibiotic ointment he found in the medicine cabinet had expired, but he slathered a little bit on his cut anyway and slapped on a sports band-aid.
With the damp towel wrapped around his waist, he went in search of his cat again.
“Selly?”
He went into the bedroom and looked beneath the comforter, stepped into the little-used office and checked the desk’s kneehole. When he didn’t find Selina in either of her favorite spots, he called to her again.
No response.
In the utility room, he found her empty water bowl. He also smelled out the yellow puddle in the laundry basket and sighed. Selina wasn’t the finickiest of cats, but if she got upset about something, she’d pee on the first inappropriate thing she could find.
He dumped the soiled clothes back into the washer, threw in some detergent, and set the machine going. He took the laundry basket to the back patio for a later washing. It had gone full dark outside. He noticed lights on in some of the neighboring houses and held his towel shut in case one of them happened to glance out the window during an untimely gust of wind.
Inside, he refilled the cat’s water and checked her litter box. Dry. And empty.
Where is she?
He didn’t think he’d left a door or window open but guessed it was possible. He checked the house and found nothing but closed, locked exits. Could she have gotten out when he came home? He thought he would have seen her, but he’d been more than a little brain dead when he arrived, and she could be sneaky when she wanted. He stuck his head out the front door, still clutching the towel’s loose knot.
“Sel? Here, kitty kitty.”
He quieted for a minute and listened for her familiar meow.
Silence.
Bruce closed the front door and made another loop through the house, checking the hidey holes and out-of-the-way places he’d skipped the first time around, half expecting to find the animal dead somewhere, curled up with her bloated tongue protruding from the side of her mouth and her eyes glazed, unseeing.
He found a furry slipper (Eileen's) in the back of the closet and was sure for a moment that he’d discovered the cat’s body. So sure that he surprised himself by welling up a little. When he moved aside the other piled shoes and found only more footwear instead of a corpse, he wiped away a single tear that had slipped through his day's worth of stubble.
Manly man indeed.
He couldn’t find her anywhere. Either she’d gotten out of the house, or she was playing one hell of a game of hide and seek.
Resigned, he went to the fridge for a beer and grabbed two instead. He took the brews to the sofa, started to turn on the television, and decided there wasn’t anything he wanted to watch. He twisted the top off the first bottle, took a long drink, and slouched.
Five minutes later, he was dead to the world.
FOUR
The next day was a total disaster.
Problem one: a bad night’s sleep. He woke on the couch with a stiff back, a sore neck, and a wet spot on the cushion beneath his butt that was half the result of the damp towel he’d forgotten to remove and half from spilled beer.
Problem the second: he still hadn’t been able to find Selina in the morning. Not in the house, not outside, not anywhere.
And then: he’d had to rebuild three different walls at work when his measurements came out slightly (or in one case, astronomically) wrong. He tried to tell himself she was just a cat, that he shouldn’t let her disappearance affect him so much, that she’d probably be waiting for him when he got home that night.
But she was more than just a cat. She’d been his companion for over ten years and the only friend he’d had since Eileen walked out.
And what if she wasn’t there? What if she was gone for good? Run away, or dead and decaying in a ditch somewhere? Maybe he was letting it get to him more than he should have, but to feel nothing would have been...dysfunctional. Soulless even.
So he thought about the cat, worried about her, and he screwed up his work. He’d started the day three weeks behind and ended it three weeks and two days behind. Hard to believe that staying home and sulking could sometimes be the productive thing to do. No three-, two-, or even one-day weekend for him this week. He’d have to come in at sunrise and work until dark every day until the following Saturday at least.
Need to get yourself some help. Couple of kids who’ll work for seven bucks an hour and do all the grunt work.
No, that would be a bad idea. A cheap solution on paper, but in reality he’d end up worse off. He’d hired help before and found that the kind of people who will work for the money he had to offer, if they showed up at all, would do more damage than good. They’d bust their butts for a couple of hours, but then they’d sneak off into the woods for a smoke (or a meth) break and come back two hours later ready to call it a day. Or they’d accidentally knock down a brace and send a whole series of walls dominoing into one another and shattering into worthless kindling. Or they’d knock the Sawzall out a window and bend the blade. Or they’d sword fight with their loaner tape measures and knock
each other
out a window. Bruce had seen it all once or twice. All those things and stupider. He was better off working on his own. Behind or not. Preoccupied or not.
By the time he got home that night, it was long past dark. His muscles screamed, the sawdust in his nose half suffocated him, and all he wanted to do was get in bed. Instead, he searched the house again.
Bedroom: empty. Bathroom: nada. Office: catless. Utility room: no Selly.
He opened a can of tuna and left it on the porch, hoping the scent might draw her home if she was anywhere in the vicinity. More likely, some stray would end up with the snack, but it didn’t hurt to try.
He brought a beer into the bathroom and turned on the shower. By the time he’d gotten out of his filthy work clothes, he’d changed his mind and decided maybe tonight should be a bath night. His aching muscles could use a soak. He reached past the shower curtain, shut off the water to deactivate the showerhead, turned it back to hot, and plugged the drain.
While the tub filled, he checked the tuna on the porch and found an empty can but no Selina. He went into the kitchen for a second beer.
Maybe you can actually drink both this time.
He’d left his second beer on the coffee table when he fell asleep the night before. He'd awakened to find a nasty water ring he’d either have to ignore or sand out when he had the time. Which, if this week was any indication, would be never.
He found some of Eileen’s old bubble bath under the sink and thought,
what the hell.
He poured a few capfuls into the bathwater; the surface frothed and bubbled like the concoction in a witch’s cauldron. It smelled sweet, coconuty. He set his bottles on the tub’s edge and lowered himself into the suds.
This time, he fell asleep before he opened even one of the beers.
FIVE
When he opened his eyes, the water had cooled to room temperature and he had another erection.
Had he been dreaming of Eileen? Of something else?
He couldn’t remember. He blinked, a little disoriented but mostly just tired. He used his foot to turn on the hot water and decided to ignore his hard on.
He splashed soapy water into his face and through his hair before reaching for one of the beers and twisting off the cap. His penis bobbed in the water, buoy like. The water warmed, and the alcohol worked its way into his system; he started to doze again. He was half asleep when the tub moved beneath him.
He opened his eyes and blinked, more disoriented now than ever.
What was that?
He still held the beer and had almost spilled it in the water. He set it on the ledge beside its twin and rubbed at his drooping eyelids.
It happened again. The floor shifted beneath him.
His first thought was that one of the joists beneath the bath had given out, rotted and split, and that the tub might crash through the floorboards and into the crawlspace beneath the house at any moment. He started to push himself up and out of the water, but then the floor rippled again and he lost his balance. His elbow smacked the side of the tub. He heard a crack and wondered if it had come from the basin or one of his bones. The beer bottles wobbled—two little drunkards—and fell to the floor. The open bottle didn’t break but spilled its innards across the tiles. The other shattered; a beer geyser sprayed everything from the toilet to the mirror to the door across the room.
Bruce ignored the beer, bent his legs, and tried to turn into a kneeling position, but the bottom of the tub felt like quicksand now. He couldn’t get purchase, couldn't seem to control his body at all. He would put a hand out to brace himself, and the seemingly solid surface of the tub would suck it in, grab it and hold on like some sort of sentient being.
He started to turn. No, the
tub
started to turn
him
. He struggled, twisted, strained his already-strained muscles until he ached from head to toe. The tub turned him facedown in the water and held him there. Bruce fought it, broke the water’s surface and sucked in a long, gasping breath. The tub jerked him back into its depths.
This is ridiculous, not real, just your imagination.
Ridiculous: yes. Real: yes. Imagination: no.
He wrenched his head back and managed to suck in another partial breath. In his struggle for air, Bruce almost didn’t feel the tub’s floor reconstituting around his still-hard cock.
If anything was impossible, surely that was it. That he could still have an erection, that he hadn’t wilted like a drowned flower.
Now he was pulling back both his head and his groin. The tub let him get his face above water but wouldn’t let go of his other head. It gripped him tight, jerked him furiously, an overeager lover. Bruce spit out soapy water and screamed. The tub continued jerking, rubbing him raw. Bruce saw some of the bubbles begin to pinken and realized he must be bleeding. His screaming intensified. Water splashed over the edge of the tub, mixed with the puddled beer and pooled near the sink where the floor dipped down a little.
He thrashed. He continued yelping, groaning. And yet, he felt himself approaching climax. Disgusting. Incomprehensible. But true.
The tub stroked for another few seconds, and Bruce spilled his seed despite himself. His hips bucked, and his mind went fuzzy, just as it had when he’d pleasured himself the night before, just as it always had when he’d come inside Eileen with her breathing in his ear and scratching his back.
The tub let go as unceremoniously as it had grabbed on. Bruce swung his legs over the tub’s edge and backed out of the water, reaching for his sore penis and breathing so irregularly he was almost hyperventilating. Through the bubbles, he watched the drain slide from the middle of the tub to its usual spot at the end. The bathmat was gone. Maybe sucked into the drain, maybe melded with the tub’s surface during its...what? Morphing? Yes, he supposed that was as good a word as any.
He took another step back, afraid the tub would reach out and grab him again, molest him again. Water, bubbles, and blood streamed down his body. A pink thread of semen dangled from the tip of his now-flaccid penis for a second before detaching and landing in the hair on his lower leg. In the tub, the band-aid he’d applied the night before floated to the surface. It had a single bloody streak down the middle.
Bruce grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist. Crazy as it was, he didn’t want the tub to see him naked any longer than it had already. Not that it seemed to be able to see anything at all.
Are you serious?
he thought.
Of course it can’t see you. It can’t do anything. It’s a goddam bathtub. You’re still sleeping, and none of this is real. Open your fucking eyes already.
Except there was no chance this was a dream. He’d never had dreams this lifelike. Or this freaky.
A huge air bubble escaped the tub’s drain and
blurped
when it reached the soapy surface. And then the water level started dropping. Bruce could hear the liquid surging through the pipes beneath the floor. He continued backing away from the tub, watching where he stepped to avoid shards of the broken beer bottle. His crotch throbbed, and his legs shook. He thought he might not be able to make it out of the bathroom, that his body would betray him, buckle beneath him, and he’d fall within striking distance of the tub.
Striking distance?
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes; then he slammed his palm into his forehead. As if he might be able to bludgeon the last five minutes out of his memory. Again:
smack.
Harder:
SMACK.
Pinpoint bursts of light flickered across his inner eyelids. The last of the bathwater swirled down the drain with a sound that almost reminded him of chuckling. He peeked out between his fingers like a scared little kid and finished backing out of the room.
In the hall, he closed the bathroom door and sat down with his bare back against it. For what seemed a very long time, he tried to regain control of his breathing. His chest hitched, his throat trembled, tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.