Chapter 9: The Bathroom

Thursday. The trip was in four days. I had not packed. I had not thought about it.

He had been waiting since Tuesday. He had made his claim and gone quiet. I had gone quiet with him. Two quiet days. I thought it was rest.

It was not rest. He was gathering it.

The static came up. The bathroom came with it, whole. Not the wall this time. The room. All of it, around me, and I was fourteen.

White tiles. Small. Close. The sink. The water running. The water ran and ran and the sound filled the room. It was October. It was the fourteenth.

I was in the corner. The door was far. Four of them. Older. Bigger. I did not look at them. I looked at the tiles.

I counted. It was something to do. It was somewhere else. One. Two. Three. The water ran. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. The rows were even. Each tile had a number. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. The water ran. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

The wall ended. There was nothing after twenty-four. I counted again. The water ran. The numbers held. The water ran. The numbers held. The room was loud and the tiles were small and the count was the only thing that was mine.

The fear was loud. The water was louder. I counted.

I did not see them go. I heard the door. I heard the quiet come back. The water was the only sound left. The water and the count. The count stopped at twenty-four. It stayed there. It never moved again.

I stayed in the corner a long time. Then I got up.

I did not leave the bathroom. I left myself.

I left the boy in the corner. The one who had been there. The one who had seen. I made a new one. A Zhang Hao who had not been in the corner. Who had not seen. Who had nothing to carry. He stood up. He walked to the sink. The water was still running. He washed his face. He did not turn the water off. He walked out.

The door. The corridor. The chalk dust. The light. The afternoon. I walked into it.

It was his life. It was the same life. The name was the same. The face was the same. The clothes were the same. The room would be the same. The table would be the same. My mother would be the same. Only the person inside had changed. No one noticed. No one has ever noticed.

I walked out of the bathroom and into a life. The afternoon. The next class. The same corridor. The same chalk dust. The years. The town. The city. The job. The flat. The name on the door. The name on the reports. The name I answered to. I answered to it. Every time, for thirteen years, I answered. He never answered to it again. He was in the water. No one asked. No one noticed.

The water ran behind me. It ran for thirteen years. It is running now.

The flat came back. I was on the floor. My back was against the wall. I did not remember sitting down. The water was still in my ears. The count was still in my mouth. Twenty-four. It had stopped there. It had stopped there for thirteen years.

I sat in the dark. The fridge hummed. The circled date was on the calendar behind me. October the fourteenth.

The underpass wall was this wall. I had known it since Tuesday. I had known it and still walked through it every day. The drip ran sideways. It was this water.

It was not his day. It was mine. It was the day I was made. It was the day I was born. My birthday is in February but I was born on October the fourteenth, in a bathroom, at fourteen, in the corner, counting.

The dream had been this. The wall. The water. The crying behind me. The count. Every night, all of it. It had never been a dream. It was the memory, whole, and I had walked through it every night without knowing I was inside it.

The static was in the room. The voice came out of it clean. Full. For the first time, in full voice.

“Zhang Hao,” he said.

He said it the way he had always said it. The way I had heard as wrong. The way the static said it on the first day. Hao. I had shaken with it. I had called it wrong.

It was not wrong. It was the provincial way. It was the only way he had ever known the name.

“Hao” had been his own name. Said the old way. The first Zhang Hao’s way.

“I’m Zhang Hao,” he said. “I was—”

He stopped. The static held.

“It was mine,” he said. “The name. All of it. Mine.”

He said it again. It was the claim. It was the whole claim, spoken at last, and half of it was still missing.

I sat on the floor with my back to the wall. There was nothing left to do. There was no coping left. I said nothing.

“Thirteen years,” he said. “You were born the day I stopped counting. I have been—”

The static swelled. It filled the room. It filled my ears. It filled my head. He could not finish. He had carried it thirteen years, and it still would not come out whole.

He made me to run. So he could go. He could not go. He gave me the run instead. He gave me the life. He kept the day. He kept the water. He kept the count. He waited thirteen years in the sound of his own tap.

He is the owner of the mind. He made it. He filled it with the memory I would not take. He has been inside it since he was fourteen. He is inside it now.

The name was his first. It was his before it was mine. He gave it to me with everything else. I have worn it all my life. I thought it was mine. It was his. All of it was his.

He wants it back. The body. The life. The name.

He wants out.

“Out,” he said.