wheels

            Bathroom smells a mix of baking soda deodorant with hot air brown trails of excrement. Three toilet stalls restrict the poop, and poopers vary in timing of their company provided air freshener spray and shit combo, either before their routine, for those who strive for decency in scent, or afterwards, for those who strive for decency in manners.
            Young Werner is in the handicapped stall closest to the sinks. Hidden behind a door of corporate policy of privacy he can let the increments of the day pass by as he sighs in frustration. He prefers the handicapped stall. Its enormous size gives it a serious handicap advantage over the other two stalls. Three toilets for an office that employs more than sixty men. Forget about going to the bathroom at eleven in the morning.
            Young Werner's stall is his refuge from the immaturity he can't face on the outside of this bathroom: his inability to show up to a nine to five job, complete his duties, and continue the routine. His record is six months, and by the end of it there wasn't even a bridge left to burn.
This new office isn't quite like his previous experiences. For one thing, this beats the largest office he's ever worked at before, which had nineteen people turning out daily. This office spans from nineteenth all the way to twentieth street, employs about maybe more than around one hundred. The long office used to be a YMCA gym that at peak utility taught about a thousand different men how to kill and love each other in the ring and in the showers. There's a drain by his foot near the toilet, a reminder of where the YMCA passion emptied out.
            He checks his clock to confirm that only fifteen minutes have passed. Young Werner keeps it to himself that he has a daily bowel movement at around two hours after he wakes up. It is also his insider knowledge that this daily process only requires him to sit in a toilet for about five minutes, the last four and a half just to enjoy the spasm of his sphincter as it clutches back into its regular tightness. His legs start to Charliehorse after twenty minutes. YW can't decide whether the cramps are better than sitting at his desk pretending to work, and then laughs at himself, because duh The Cramps are better.
            He decides that it's time to go back to his desk. He looks down at his black shoes, pulls up his black pants by his black belt up to the second button from the bottom of his white shirt, bends over to pull his black socks back up to his shins, takes a deep breath and a histrionic sigh, and unlatches the stall's door. He scrubs his hands clean over the poorly designed sink and splashes some water on the bottom of his shirt and on his pants in the crotch area. As he scrubs he stares into his own eyes in the mirror and admires his own looks, with a faint shudder cringing within his empty feeling chest. He barely gets his hands dry from a brown paper towel wipe. He walks towards the exit door and as his fingers reach the latch handle a door swings open behind him. YW pulls the door and holds it open, gesturing to the man who just left the stall. The man does a double take towards YW, and after a moment's deliberation walks out past YW's open door gesture.             Then it hits him, YW, that old familiar feeling of embarrassment. The man who left the stall didn't wash his hands, and the double take was probably because it was his intention to, but YW holding the door open for him prompted an awkwardness between the two, and office people, unlike normal people, are too fucking convoluted to just say "have to wash my hands first" instead of walking out of a restroom after wiping your own ass without washing your hands with soap and water because some guy you don't know in the office is holding the door open. YW feels panicky weirdness and hotness all over his body as he considers the silent exchange between two strangers who work in the same room every day who don't know each other and have little impetus to be casual with one another. The man will walk over to the kitchen and wash his hands, but YW doesn't know that. That's yet another set of eyes that YW will now have to consciously avoid in his periphery.
            The first month he worked there, he tried to smile at the strangers he'd walk past or stand next to waiting in line to use the flavia coffee machine. He meant it as an invitation to introduction, get to know each other, but people usually reacted towards YW's smile with their own forced half-smile, the kind you can tell there is nothing genuine about. Sometimes he'd just introduce himself and mention that he's new there, but then he'd have nothing to talk about beyond where he sat in the office and which corporate product he was pushing. He stopped saying he was new after two months of working there. He's only actually learned five new names.
            On his way back to his desk he stops by an office water cooler, modern day proffering to the goddess of chit chat, and waits with see through plastic in his hand for a gray haired man who's filling up his sixteen ounce aluminum canister. The man is only slightly nudging the tap handle with the side of his index knuckle, his remaining digits holding the top of the bottle in a clawed shape. YW considers suggesting to the man that he place adequate pressure on the handle so that the water will flow out quicker and he doesn't have to wait as long to fill his bottle, but that sounds offensive to YW. The sound of drops splashing within the container is slowly increasing in pitch. YW considers a 'hey I used to do it the same way too until I learned,' but that's even more condescending. Two minutes have past, and the splashing of the water keeps getting higher. 'Hey, not sure if you noticed, but I've been standing behind you this whole time.' YW cringes to himself, and releases an internal shudder (pretty often) in response to his own awkward thoughts.
The water splash pitch reaches its peak before spilling over. The old man's knuckle loosens on the tap and snarls the cap to spin it back onto the hole, taking a few slow steps away from the cooler's direction in the process.
            "Some people take their sweet time." YW is trying to tell if the old man heard what was just said aloud while trying to look at who just said it, but it's hard for him to clear his thoughts. It's mind petrification, as in a dream. The old man slumps away, and for a second YW thinks he can discern an indicative gloom in his retreat.
                        "Know what I'm saying?"
            YW finally looks back around him and meets someone he's never seen in the office before. YW instinctively moves sideways towards the water cooler, slouching on one side to reach his hand onto the tap.
"If you press down harder on that tap the water comes out faster. I'm Togna by the way. New here."
YW shakes a feminine, silky hand on what looks to be an adult boy.
"Yeah I started working here about two weeks ago...Hhmmm...Maybe more like six weeks ago, hah, I guess I'm not that new here."
            YW looks at black slacks, black belt and purple (bright) snug sweater, and is incredulously smirking in his head at the shaggy mess of brown bed hair of someone who looks crazy in a 9 to 6, and smirks wider when he notices the buckled, perforated wingtip shoes that shine a squeaky glare off the fluorescent lighting.
"I'm basically just doing grunt work."
            After confirming that the 'grunt work' is more or less the same job as his own, YW's interest peaks. He walks away from Togna with a mumble and a sideways face, the traditional office expression for going-back-to-desk. He thinks of the old man and is flustered for a moment. As soon as his ass is stumped on his chair, his back presses against the support to bend his seat to a one hundred and forty-three degree angle. YW's scoping the lengthy loft for Togna's head, but doesn't find him. Togna sits behind his line of sight. YW looks down at his desk, focuses on his chicken scratch scribblings, notes taken down after someone is called or emailed, reached out to for information, notes that lose all meaning as soon as they're written down, the corresponding memories in the brain disintegrating into the darkness of forgetting, things that will never again actually be considered real or to have taken place, since no one on earth and through its history will ever think of it again, or even know, lonely YW's years passing by in front of a matted screen displaying a blue wallpaper and a few icons to the left, an email account tracking financial information to be archived in a corporate database for multi-billion clients to ogle at for brief seconds, funding an organization that in return keeps a greased wheel turning on, again, YW's life. The wheel is really more of a gear, and it rotates slowly in place, since half of it is submerged in forgetting.
            YW doesn't catch sight of Togna for a week. He's not sure at first, but suspects that he didn't quite register Togna's looks because of his embarrassment for the old man. He considers various ideas of who exactly Togna might be and where he is, because mostly that's how Togna's thought process works. A copious amount of implausible scenarios are imagined by his subconscious and brought up to his id for inspection. There's OK communication between the two. It's the ego that doesn't listen. So his id tries to keep the zaniest ideas from the subconscious in check. Meanwhile, the super-ego is nowhere to be found. Maybe Togna was fired by the old man. He never actually worked here, he was visiting someone. He's temping. He's avoiding me.
            On a Monday in the early afternoon, just a slight bit past one, YW walks up the block from his desk to kitchen, and when he turns the corner to the left to grab for a dixie cup he catches a glimpse of Togna in his peripheral and in an immediate reaction gives off a surprised and smiling look, for only half a second, until his face distorts into an awkward pain as he hesitates for another half second and his id moves him on forward towards the bathroom, skipping the coffee machine (his original intention) entirely. Togna is standing in front of a girl who's identity YW didn't catch, their faces in close proximity. YW is in the bathroom trying to process the really crazy part of what just happened: He thinks, he's not quite sure, but he overhead Togna tell this girl in close proximity that he likes looking at her but doesn't like saying hi. YW couldn't imagine a worse tact to approaching the more confusing sex. But did Togna really say that? And where has this guy been for a week? YW doesn't notice it until he goes backout, but Togna is wearing tight black Levis over olive loafers and a plain white tee.
            Looking at the mirror, not utilizing any of the bathroom's utilities, YW waits about ten minutes before he goes back out, and when he does, Togna is leaned back on the counter with the coffee machine staring directly at him. YW's subconscious suggests Togna is related to someone.