I’m wandering around the mall, lost, as an Alzheimer’s patient might wander around a nursing home. I’m yelling less, of course, and I’m not insisting that every brunette strolling past is my long dead wife, but I’m no less confused. I actually check to see if I’m wearing a hospital gown. I’m not. When we parted ways, you told me you would text me when and where to meet back up. I check my phone. You haven’t texted.
It could be my mood, but everything looks ugly today. Gaudy signs advertise sales. Smudged glass protects storefront displays. In unlikely patterns, sections of stained floor tiles meet large areas of worn industrial carpet. People mill about the wide mall hallways like cattle working their way through the maze of a corral. Just ahead, a worn out mother drags two screaming kids into a lingerie store. Right behind me, a teenager’s ice cream falls onto the floor. I look back, and he’s staring down at it, cursing, his peach fuzz moustache glistening with vanilla. He has no idea what his next move should be. If I listen carefully, I can hear a Muzak version of Beethoven’s Zur Namensfeier playing over the mall’s PA system.
I find the washroom to wash my hands, but what I’m really wanting is a shower. Like mall washrooms all over the world, this one is populated by guys mostly looking to get away for five minutes; no-one really has to use the facilities. A young professional in a burgundy blazer leans over a dirty sink inspecting something on his face. A middle-aged man, his nose a mess of burst capillaries, leans against a brown-tiled wall squinting at cell phone screen. His wife, before she disappeared into a crowd shoppers, told him she’d text him when and where to meet up. This middle-aged man, his thick, greying eyebrows knitted together in confusion, he doesn’t remember how to check his texts.
A dishevelled college student bursts out of a stall, a book of poetry under one arm, complaining loudly about the unsanitary conditions. “There’s shit everywhere!” he shrieks. “Shit dried onto the walls of the toilet bowl and all over the rim. There’s shit on the seat. There’s even shit on the walls!” The rest of us, we look at the college student, our faces blank. I look up at the ceiling over the stall; there’s a constellation of drops splattered up there, as well. The college student, his face a scowl, flees the washroom with his thick tome under his arm. A long piece of toilet paper flaps behind him, stuck to one shoe.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a scatological fixation. I’m serious. Immortalized in nearly forty surviving letters are scatological references from the composer of Requiem Mass in D Minor. Letters to his mother. Letters to his father. Letters to a cousin, his friends, his wife, his sister. One letter to his choirmaster. Mozart loved scat so much he even wrote songs about it. Canons, rounds, where multiple voices would stagger in, layering, repeating the obscene verse one after another, building to the coarsest of crescendos. Occasionally, he would borrow music written by another composer, changing the words to suit his needs. More often than not, he would compose original music as the vehicle for his scatological lyrics. Mozart, he would have loved this washroom.
I dry my hands, and head back into the mall just in time to see the college student meeting up with his partner, toilet paper still stuck to his shoe. To her, he’s excitedly recounting the disgusting scene in the washroom, waving the book of poetry between them. His face is dark with disgust. Jonathan Swift, essayist, poet, cleric, he loved writing about human waste. Loved it. His best known work, Gulliver’s Travels, is littered with references to both urine and feces. He wrote numerous poems on the subject of bodily functions. In his final years, he wrote a treatise, Human Ordur, on excrement under the pseudonym Dr Shit. Jonathan Swift, he could have found the humour this college student missed.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I know it’s got to be you. You’re ready to meet up. Withdrawing my phone, I spot that kid who dropped the ice cream before, and he’s waiting for a new one in a long, twisting line. I glance over at the lingerie store half expecting to see the worn out mother dragging around two screaming kids. But she’s not there. I’m standing in the middle of the wide mall hallway with crowds of faceless patrons swirling around me, and playing over the PA system is a Muzak version of a selection from Handel’s Water Music. My mood, it’s brightening. Me, I allow the ugly to become beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment