Prague, CZ
Part 4: The Darkening
In the Beginning was the Word; John 1:1
An hour had passed
since Mathos had sat down on the bench on Platform 2 and the Diet cola he had consumed earlier was now rapidly filling his bladder. He had always like the expression that "you don't buy drinks, you rent them."
The signs to the WC led him
down the steps from platform 2 and through a cold, gray maze of granite toward a remote corner of the old train station. The communist era
station retained all the oppressive darkness that had marked the corresponding
part of the country’s history. Even though it was more or less alive with people, the station still felt dead. He walked among the massive columns,
not exactly brown, but brown nonetheless, that punctuated the cavernous
space in front of the, now shuttered, ticket windows.
Eventually, the path through the station led to a small dimly lit room with a
cardboard sign stuck on the wall next to the door that read ‘Muzi.’
The first
thing Mathos noticed as he entered the room was a slightly pungent odor he
often associated with humans that didn’t bathe as often as he might have
wished. The unbathed humans in Prague usually took the form of homeless people
who, more or less, lived on the city’s well-heated trams during the harsh winter
months. He could recall many times when his old knees had prompted him to
sit down behind or in front of, one of these destinationless riders and the
memory of the smell, if left unchecked, could still produce the mild pharyngeal
spasms that often herald the onset of emesis. However, in this situation,
the slightly pungent smell was not linked to any particular person; instead
it was a smell that covered the surfaces of the room the way sweat covers
your skin on a hot, humid night; even if you can’t see it, you can always
feel it.
To his right were two rust stained sinks with corroded gray faucet
handles. Handles that had been turned so many times that the dirt and grime of
the hands that had turned them had now become incorporated into
the metal of which they were made and no amount of cleaning could
restore their former luster. From the looks of things, he wasn’t the only one who
realized the futility of trying to clean the stains from the sinks, apparently whoever was
responsible for cleaning had also come to the same conclusion.
To his left, as he walked in, was a wooden door with a small window cut, almost, but not
quite, in the center. It was in his nature to be a tad retentive regarding
symmetry, or a lack thereof, and the slightly offset window was the psychological
equivalent of hang nail. Attached to the door, just
below the off-center window, was a small improvised shelf, supported by a
couple of metal brackets, which had probably been salvaged
from some discarded item. In his newly adopted country, one man’s trash was
very often another man’s treasure and so it was with the mismatched pieces
of metal that now supported the small shelf under the off-center window.
The sole purpose
of the little shelf was to hold a small plate, which was about the size of
a coffee cup saucer. Next to the plate and buried under several layers of
yellowed cellophane type was a piece of paper with “3 Kc?” scribbled in
faded blue ink. Mathos dug into
the right front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a handful of coins. From which he withdrew, three, one-krone coins, formed them into a neat little stack, and put
the three coins precisely in the center of the plate. He had only just turned
to walk when a hand, only slightly less grimy than the faucets, silently
emerged through the little cut-out window, raked the stack of coins off the
plate and disappeared back behind the door. It seemed likely that the
hand and wrist were attached to a person, although, the evidence for such an assumption was not overwhelming. The scene brought back distant
memories of a toy he had as a child. The toy was called the Magic Hand
Grabbing Toy Bank. That he remembered the toy at all he found amazing,
that he still remembered the name he found reassuring. It meant that while
age had robbed him of many things, his memory, for the most part, was
not one of them, something that routinely presented itself as both a blessing
and a curse.
Mathos walked past the sinks and into a second room; to the left were four toilet stalls,three of the
stalls had doors deeply inscribed with odd-looking graffiti, while the forth stall
was door-less. Across from the stalls was a wall with three rectangles of formerly white
porcelain. A low platform of slate provided a perch on which to stand
and a channel between the porcelain and the platform provided a drain
for the urine that flowed off the porcelain during micturition.
In essence you just pissed on a wall. Since you really couldn't miss, there was a certain logic to this style of urinal.
Looking down, he noticed several oddly colored shoe-shaped spots on the
slate platform at the base of the wall. The spots suggested that not all the urine meant for the drain,
actually ended up in the drain. The errant urine probably, at least in part,
contributed to the rather unpleasant odor that hung in the air.
The room was
dank, cold, and only partially lit; most of the light bulbs were burned out, and
probably had been for the last decade. The combination of the dirt brown
tiles on the walls and the slate gray floor imparted a feeling to the
room that could best be described, depending on the dose of your anti-depressant,
as either mildly or moderately dispiriting. The pipes exiting from the
top of each porcelain slab had, at one time, produced a steady stream of
water to wash away the urine, but corrosion, neglect, and rust had long ago
put an end to the flow of water. This meant that the job of removing the
urine had been outsourced to gravity and evaporation, which was at best not terribly effective. As Mathos stepped up onto the platform, the
stench of stale urine, rising from the conduit at his feet, filled his nostrils. He
looked down and saw that his boots fit perfectly into the oddly colored spots.
Mathos wasn’t too thrilled by the idea that some of his urine was about to be
reflected back onto his boots, however, in the scheme of things it was a
rather minor problem and certainly the least of his worries.
Of all the things
in our field of vision, it is often hard to explain why one thing catches our eye
while other things go unnoticed. In this case, his eyes focused on what appeared
to be a small chip in the off-white porcelain in front of him. Under the scrutiny of his
somewhat failing vision, the small black spot slowly revealed itself as a newborn fly.
Looking about, and as his eyes slowly adapted to the dimness,
more of the little blacks spots started to appear, just like stars in the
heavens after sunset – first one, then five, then ten, then too many to count.
Together they stood motionless, the flies, because it was too cold for them to
move and Mathos, because of the darkening. Like unwelcome guests,
he had gotten used to not having much control over their arrival,
although they usually came in the dark, usually, but not always.
In those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will desire death, but death will flee from them. Revelation 9:6
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