He turned the snib, locking the door of his tiny toilet. With the seamless poise of a ballet dancer, his belt was unfastened and his buttons popped, his jeans joining his ankles. Slowly he lowered his naked butt onto the icy white plastic of the pan, taking pleasure in a tickled grimace as a jolt pierced his tensing buttocks.
Now seated, his attention was drawn again to the strains of the radio, confined to the plugged warmth of his inner ears. Skittering winds drew fractured melodic lines with fluttered tongues; a heavy discordant brass dimmed slowly like the purple light of a murky October’s evening. It wasn’t long ago that he’d listen to this type of music and write it off as an unnecessary monstrosity. It would only take one out of place harmony and he’d react: “Fuck it! That’s going off!” What had changed, he wasn’t sure. Now he got a strange pleasure from its putridity, and the more horrible the sounds, the better. It was as if he needed to cut deeper into the sonic realms of his psyche to really listen. He imagined that if presented with the sound of five thousand highly trained musicians collectively shitting themselves in an erotic orgy of craptastic fury, he’d actually feel something for it.
Still though, he got used to the sounds pretty quickly, and zoned back out just as quick as his attention had been taken. His eye was now caught by a small stack of reading material down to his left, barely hiding underneath a half finished roll of toilet paper. Reaching down, coaxing a warm pain around his sphincter, he sifted through them. There was an old FHM (like really old!), a couple of film magazines, and a Guinness world record book from the previous decade. Holding up this ancient pile of useless stones was a rather attractive hardback, dressed in a green felt slightly stained by splashes of toothpaste and bleach, and with a very matter of fact gold imprinting on its front. It read: WORLD ATLAS.
He could feel the crescendo of his first brown ejection reaching a climax and dropping with a perfect cadence into the water below. Plop! What a sound! Bliss! Opening the atlas to its middle pages, he was greeted by the usual soft pinks, greens and yellows of archaic maps, this one of the entire globe hammered with the hand of the almighty, kneaded and rolled down onto the surface of these old pages. How silly it was, this skewed simulacrum!
Sitting on his sweating arse, flicking through the pages (and not licking his finger in between!), he toured the whole world. Russia, India, the Pacific, the rivers of France, the mountains of Chile. Everything seemed to be in this one heavy volume. How odd, he thought. It almost gave the impression that there wasn’t really a world ‘out there’. Everything before him was beautifully coloured, organised, and categorised. Everything in between these flaps of worn green felt was in its right place. He could surely take this book, and if he really believed in all it said to him (and had HIS omnipotent creative power), recreate the whole world from scratch…
What utter rot! This book was decades old, so most of the road layouts and city boundaries would be significantly more bloated than they appeared. The cancerous muck of light brown sliced and connected by lines of blue and yellow would have metastasised and crippled these thin pages, as coastlines slowly shrivelled back. Rivers would have cut new paths, ice caps would have shattered and new islands would have been spewed into existence by subterranean volcanoes not even shown in amongst the featureless blue filling almost half the book! What a preposterous impression it gave. No wonder it lived in the toilet.
He thought about it a little more as a pungent particle escaped in a fit of Brownian motion, this time landing with a less pleasing splashy abortion of a cadence. A cool speck of dirty water kissed his arse, causing an involuntary retractive spasm in his right cheek. This atlas; it gave the impression of a precise and manageable world, albeit one divided by big black lines, but ultimately the same from page to page. Sure, this county had a long river, this one a high mountain range; but all were just arbitrary divisions of the whole. Pondering why this offended him so much, a voice screamed at him from somewhere above and behind: ‘This book has as little to do with that world outside as it has to do with the world in here!”
That was it! It was guilty of trying to reduce that eminent Gaian flux that he occasionally experienced outside his pleasant sardine tin of an existence, to a snapsnot, a bastardisation - a something simple - a stupid, thoroughly inane version of the horror, never known to the learned men in libraries, nor to the worker on the frontline so willing to swallow any cartoonish ideology or stupefying narcotic to escape from the truth into the somniferous smothering grip of the eternal matron, unhappy with her boisterous and brash children, and so happy to punish, punish and punish.
With one last application of soft pressure in his abdomen, he became empty, and began to strip and fold the rough paper sitting on the magazines, placing the atlas back where he’d taken it from. Really, he might as well use it to clean the streaks of waste from his almighty crack, but he thought that would be in bad taste. After all, what if Atlas himself had decided to wipe his arse –
His thought was interrupted. A pleasing ooze of energy swept his bowel. Still one little bit to go, he thought as he strained a little harder to get it out. Now that was it, he was finished. He quickly wiped, checking each bit of paper to make sure there was nothing of mess left. Standing up, he tuned back into the music, as the strings were now almost lost in a beautiful pianissimo mesh of harmonics, the tempo seeming to dissolve into a timeless desert plateau. Fastening his belt, he turned and flushed, but not before closing the lid. All those thoughts, those revelations, atlas inspired epiphanies, just disappeared, and by the time he unlocked the door of his tiny toilet, he’d even forgotten about the atlas.
Still though, it was a good poop.