Multiocular.blog

There is a time in each of our lives when we are called to a certain action, to what some would call a divine purpose. Those who heed their call do what others cannot imagine, they achieve what others thought impossible, and push the limits of our understanding. As impressive as it seems from the outside, from the perspective of one enraptured thus, what they do seems easy, natural, that they’re simply fulfilling their deepest desires using what God given strengths they already had. Venkatesh Rao would say that someone so possessed had come to understand their grit, that thing that you can do that other people find inexplicably hard. Well, Reader, I’ve been hearing the angels singing the hosannas and the cosmic music is figuring a single, all-consuming theme: I Must Go To The Bathroom Multiple Times A Day.

The material, wordly–some crude individuals might say “medical”–reasons for this are apparent to me but I will only be expressing them in the form of these reviews. You, Reader, are curious and capable, and must come to your own conclusions based on the fingerprints I leave upon my work. If you seek for answers, I invite you to trace my steps through the bathrooms of Lighthaven and I’m sure you will find them there with time. Begin with the first entry in this series, if you have not already: Read this review of all the bathrooms at Lighthaven Building A RIGHT NOW!

I begin my investigations in the lowest part of Bayes House, the Bayesment you might say. Here down a winding corridor I find a restroom village situated in their own branch off the corridor. They live clustered together, sharing the same pleasant pink hexagon stone tile floor, the same alabaster plaster walls. Each member of this tribe bears a charming headdress, a rounded arch entry molded before the door. Stacks of toilet paper rolls huddle on the shelves inside these rooms like kodama, the clattering forest spirits of Japanese lore.

The chief among the restrooms of the Bayes underground presides at the very end of the hall. A section of the wall left unplastered, exposing the rough foundation bricks, lends–let’s call him The Chief–an air of dignified age, his status apparent from the fullness of his facilities. Whereas the other bathrooms have either a shower or a toilet (those with a toilet have a sink built into the flushing tank of the seat, such that I think to myself, “very efficient, very Japanese”), the chieftain has both. There’s even a little window that opens up at ground level behind a flowering bush in the garden next to Rat Park. This author occasioned to open it and shout at bewildered people walking along the path.

Often in small settlements, a surprising marker of affluence serves to underline the surrounding poverty. Here that marker is the bidet. It is not a Toto Washlet, but a brand I do not recognize called Brondell. It lights up the bowl with blue LEDs.

Returning back down the hall, I noticed another bathroom, isolated from the rest. This is Zeniba, and her great black stone cauldron of a sink greets you immediately upon entering. It is so large and mounted so high it is almost uncomfortable to use. A bidet she has also–no ordinary spinstroom is she–and in her grey tiling you can open a hatch to peer into the dismal sump below Bayes house that keeps that place from flooding. A visit to Zeniba is convenient, since she’s the closest bathroom from the main courtyard, but during my stay at Lighthaven I’ve never felt entirely at ease when I popped in to visit.

Reader, it is time for an admission: over the course of my researches, I’ve come to quite dislike Bayes House. There is a winding, spiraling quality to how one must traverse it; its books and nooks push me outward to its walls and corners. When I am in Bayes, I feel that I am standing not in a house but in a centrifuge, pulling my essences apart and arranging them by their relative densities.

Also, the other bathrooms in Bayes are either boring or wicked. I will muster all my efforts, Reader, to describe them in ways entertaining to the intellect but the two that are boring are so dull I do not deign to give them names. As for the wicked one, we will get to her in proper course.

The first floor bathrooms in Bayes are clearly emigrants from the basement village. They clutch the trappings of their traditional homeland–the toilet roll spirits, the space-efficient sink–but without the reinforcing mechanisms of a living community, the opulence and alienation of their new home above the surface has cocooned them completely.

There is one positive redeeming feature to note: this bathroom has a hand dryer. Why do none of the other bathrooms at Lighthaven have hand dryers?! Why are we subject to the indignity of wasteful fucking paper towels whenever we need to wash our hands anywhere else? It’s absurd.

The second floor bathroom is situated in the corner of the office space, such that one must awkwardly hustle past multiple “hardworking” writers to use it, as this author did numerous times during the research for this piece.

Yet, the reprieve is hardly worth the indignity. A handsome red stone floor reminds one of the storied masonry of India’s great palace restrooms, but there is nothing to remark upon except the single stained glass window. One can open this window, as this author did, and gaze out over Lighthaven and the surrounding rooftops as the cold rain falls hard and then soft and then hard again.

Finally, we come to the attic bathroom; the worst of the bunch. I have not deemed the last two bathrooms worthy of names, but for its decrepit, petty wickedness I christen it Yubaba.

Yubaba has no windows and is lit only by the harsh light of a single corn cob bulb inelegantly screwed into a downlight flushing. The cozy beanbag chairs and divans of the Bayes attic serve only to misdirect from the miserliness of this hovel. There are no toiletries; there is hardly any toilet paper! Despite the fact that there’s a bathtub and a shower up here, you won’t find a hamper or a rack of towels anywhere nearby. In fact, upon endeavoring to take a bath in this crooked space, the author was dismayed to discover that none of the bathtubs at Lighthaven have plugs and therefore cannot fulfill their telos. I had to plug the drain with the heel of my foot. Fortunately, I was blessed with hot water flow so plentiful it counteracted the entropy inherent to the imperfect interfacing of man and tub.

As I sat in that water, simultaneously cooling and draining away, my mind turned inward. I thought of the harmony of the Bayesment village. What a delight it would be to bring all my friends there, jostling and crowding down the hall. The doors of every restroom closing shut in synchrony and, after a short time, opening again to the sound of boisterous laughter. All the toilet roll kodama springing to life behind us, more and more of them pouring in from the ground level window from someplace unseen, stacks of them rolling at our feet some three or four rolls tall. All together we’d burst back down the hallway and into the night, like the joyous Morlocks of some eight hundred thousand years in the future, ready to feast on the Eloi.

Do not visit Yubaba unless you must. You will wish to be anywhere else.

For me that anywhere else will be the remaining bathrooms of Lighthaven. In my final entry I will tour the outer buildings of the complex and the interstitial spaces between them. I will see what there is to see with eyes unclouded. I hope, Reader, that you will await my next dispatch.