TOILET
THE NOVEL
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Terrible.
It was a factory, a great industrial one that lied at the outskirts of a dying and decadent city. It stank. It trembled like a black lung in the smoggy morning sun. It had become a mirror of emptiness. A sad, metallic emptiness.
No one could smile anymore.
The factory spiraled upward out of the earth like a neurotic eruption of fragmented steel chunks. Its shadow spilled over onto everything pure and beautiful, corrupting. There was nothing else to it. Except. If one looked away.
One could see an expressway next to the factory.
A businessman, quintessential, was driving his Lexus to work.
His eyes reflected the future. It was a future dead already, full of fog, waves, and skeptical searchlights. Gloomy. His brown eyes twirled about. Scanning. Searching. Hoping. It was more than just an uncomfortable restlessness caused by traffic congestion. It was something that was developing into a disaster.
It started in his stomach.
It begins with a grumble; the dissatisfied groans of a stomach fed a breakfast burrito. It grows. It develops into a belch. Loud. The burp echoes throughout the car, accompanying Schubert’s eighth symphony that plays softly in the background. He feels relief, but only momentarily. The gas begins to expand again, this time in his bowels. He begins to play with the radio. The man wants something else, something new…a Distraction…that will get him through. The businessman finds a new song but not even the sound of Borodin can stop what is to come. He squiggles in his seat before it whispers out of his buttocks: a soft, feint fart. It is silent, but deadly. The car is full of its rank smell. He smiles as he thinks of how amusing and pleasant it feels to fart.
He doesn’t see it coming though; the gas was but a Sign, a signal so simple of an impending scream. It starts slowly. It develops into an ever-pressing urge, making him squirm in his seat; it feels like gas but with an element of wholly something more. He is cautious. He knows that if he releases it he may also release something else. He is afraid. It continues to grow.
A line of sweat begins to form on his brow. He imagines all the possibilities as his eyes scan the expressway for an exit that is not there. He envisions in his mind all his co-workers turning their heads as he walks in that day. He can already hear their noses sniffing as he strolls past them. All it will take to destroy an image of an entire life is one little unforgettable blotch on the back of his pants. The image will spread like a disease, jumping from person to person not with coughs, but with words as his co-workers assemble for lunch at some restaurant and whisper to each other, “Did you hear…”
He cannot let that happen. Pygmalion. The image he has spent an entire life creating is now his only reality. If he loses that then he loses everything. He no longer knows happiness.
It continues to grow. His face is covered in a thick and pale sweat. He continues to squirm. Agitated. He grunts.
“Ugh!”
His restless eyes then settle on a sign, “INDUSTRIAL TOILETS INC…”. He knows that he has two options. The first is to let it all out in the car and to go to work with a burden stained on the back of his pants. The second is to leave his car on the expressway and to find some secluded spot where he could let loose a fury of partially digested beans, rice, and tomatoes. And let’s not forget about the eggs too. Scrambled. Artificial.
The sweat begins to drip down his neck. He knows he has to get out. Now. But, he is afraid…Always…of what people might think. He has to make a choice. It boils inside. Again, he grunts.
“Ugh!”
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
“If you love Kafka, then you’ll love Toilet.”
TOILET
This novel tells the surreal tale of two generations of toilet-people and a man in a wine cellar, slowly going insane, after a nuclear war. The novel breathlessly explores the fate of a toilet that is transformed into a man who is pregnant, but who will always smell like a toilet. It is a book that one author describes as, “a perfect portrayal of post-modern man, who filled with longing, loneliness and confusion, searches desperately in an everyday abyss for the joys we were promised. It is a representation of the dissolution of the nuclear family. It is, in short, a book like no other, one so disturbing it edifies…”
About the Author
Michael Szymczyk is currently at work on two other novels. He is also writing a philosophical work entitled “On the Law of Insignificance”. He lives in