In the House of the Professor
In the house of the professor he can’t find the restroom. Moments before he’d excused himself from the table, the kindly professor pointing the way, but in the dark hallway there are many doors and none of them lead to what he is looking for. It is a big house, remarkably big for an academic, though the table’s muted din still reaches him in the hallway. He’d looked for a light switch but couldn’t find one. It is not dark enough to grope along the wall, but in the act of gently pushing open a half-closed door he feels like a subterranean explorer happening upon the wet mouth of a dank dripping cavern. Dank these rooms are not, for when he peeks inside he feels the metallic gust of central air conditioning meet his wine-warm face, and he can tell from their yawning expanse and the quiet that they exude that they are large and high-ceilinged. The hallway’s wooden floorboards do not creak beneath him and if his brother were here or if he’d simply been alone—and not attending the dinner party of this highly-esteemed queer theorist—he would take off his nice shoes and slide across the varnished surface on his socked feet: long socks, terminating mid-calf, patterned with cheeky reindeer heads. Nice socks, the professor had said when he arrived, and he’d immediately felt ashamed, standing there on the doorstep—he’d cuffed the bottom hems of his pants to make the socks visible and now regretted this decision. I like the holiday spirit. He’d been the first, too, at dinner, to ask where the restroom was, hesitant to interrupt the amiable flow of collegiate conversation, but he simply couldn’t wait any longer, as all the wine threatened to burst his bladder right there at the table. Even now, each lurch portends painful release. He will modulate his sigh, aim for inaudibility, even though the sound will certainly not carry to the dinner guests. Unbecoming—the sound of the pleasure of pissing—in this professor’s tasteful home. He had, however, seen this professor in the restroom on campus. At the urinal. Not two weeks ago. He’d seen the attentive downward cast of the professor’s head, no doubt dutifully watching the piss hit the porcelain bowl, and he had swiftly locked himself in a stall to avoid potentially awkward contact, waiting till the professor finished at the sink and left the restroom to emerge from his impromptu hiding. He had also, at the time, sifted through the various feelings that this encounter produced: this confused collision of the professional and the scatological—or was it the urological? In any case, the condoned and the condemned, though scatological is a word he enjoys very much and finds very precise and academic and frequently used in his graduate seminars. There are many facets of his life in which this word aptly applies. He continues down the hall, opening every door, fruitless. He is reminded of a recurring dream he had as a child, a dream in which he is lost in a discordantly bright house—discordant because the cheery brightness does not align with his dark panic—and he is looking for his mother, or maybe his teacher, who often reminds him of his mother, but usually he is looking for his mother. He is opening many doors and can’t find her and as he grows increasingly frantic he opens the final door and suddenly he is in a garden he doesn’t recognize and finds his mother sitting on a picnic blanket, smoking a cigarette. At the smoking he begins crying and finally wakes up, the vision of this betrayal still searing his relieved but foggy consciousness. As a child he did not like when people smoked, believing that it was bad and probably evil but also unhealthy, as his teacher taught him in school. Many assurances his mother made that she’d never smoked and never would, though some part of him did not believe her and this part of him manifested itself in his dreams. It’s funny, now: he is a contented social smoker, happy to light up on the balcony of some dizzy party if a cigarette or lighter is offered, and his present self can safely and fondly reflect on the imperious moral rectitude that guided much of his youth. Why this dream comes to him now is a question that does not occur to him, but perhaps it is the uncanny verisimilitude between his present disorientation and that dream’s visual geography—the immense pressure of its emotional world. We can only assume. For another dream he remembers as he shuffles down the hall bears some striking similarity to the discomfort that currently clinches his midsection. In this dream he is riding very slowly in an elevator up through an abandoned industrial building in New York City. Nothing about the building suggests that this is New York City (for he has never been outside the building to verify), and there are no windows which reveal any telling landmarks, but he knows in his gut that this is New York City and thinks he can hear the sirens and cars and general urban clamor beyond the elevator’s nondescript walls. The elevator stops at each floor and opens its doors to reveal a member or members of his family. On the first floors are his parents and brother, on the third and fourth are his grandparents, and up and up his cousins and aunts and uncles, floor number or rather altitude increasing commensurately with his level of anxiety upon seeing each respective member of the family, some of whom give him more anxiety than others, especially the cousins who always asked him to play sports in the street at Christmas or Thanksgiving, sports which were never his strong suit, a weakness that he believed they always judged him for, his inability to catch a falling football or dribble a basketball, to pass or receive a soccer ball, none of it he could do and all of it he feared doing because he couldn’t do it, and he feared what they would say about him and he feared their laughs and taunts and he felt always trapped by those who were supposed to love him most—Why do they make you feel anxious? his mother would ask him, they are your family and they love you unconditionally. This another kind of assurance that some part of him doubted—how do you know they love me unconditionally? What if I killed someone? What if I flushed a hamster down the toilet? What if I can’t kick a soccer ball? He had never experienced any sign of love or affection from them—he saw them only on holidays, when they kicked or tossed around a ball in the street, and then he didn’t see them again for another six months until it was someone’s birthday (and he always liked birthdays more because they took place at restaurants so he didn’t have to play sports in the street). Anyway, the elevator goes up and up and at each stop some member of his family waves to him and asks him to come join them and he says no. This, he always thought, was pretty easy to interpret. Then—and this is the weird part, the unexpected but undisputed part—one of his cousins, one of these male cousins with whom he dreaded playing sports, but we will not say who, gets in the elevator with him. Up they go to a top floor at which they finally disembark and enter a dimly lit apartment room with a dingy mattress on the floor and a pile of unwashed clothes in the corner. There is no window, or if there is a window it offers only a view of a brick wall. Into the attached bathroom his cousin leads him. The bathroom is just as squalid as the living room, the tub and sink and toilet all coated in grime and rust and a dripping sound is everywhere, and then his cousin starts taking off his own clothes, even his underwear, though he can’t see his cousin’s private parts, or at least these seem blurred and out of focus. The cousin gets in the bathtub and turns on the water. The cousin sits and begins talking to him, though he can’t remember or discern what they are talking about, but it is something friendly and sportive. He has to pee. Mind if I piss? he says to his cousin, though he never in real life says the word piss. The cousin doesn’t mind. So he starts pissing. He knows his cousin can see him as he pisses. The feeling is incredibly pleasurable, though slightly painful, even though no piss comes out. With great exertion he squeezes out a dribble. He arcs his head back. Yes. Now he’s at a urinal, the toilet has become a urinal—there’s an important difference here—but his cousin is still blurry and naked in the bathtub. At this point he always wakes up. He is usually panicked, terrified, heart pounding, thinking that he has wet the bed, and he is already devising explanations to his mother. He pats the sheets all around his groin, he pats the front of his boxers, but everything is dry, if not a little damp with night sweat. No urine. But he is always hard. Very hard. The precise details of this dream he can remember so well because he recorded it in the dream journal of his high school creative writing class. The teacher of this class assured him that by recording your dreams immediately after waking and by completing this task every morning you will not only be better at recalling your dreams but allow them to flavor your fiction with some necessary modicum of the absurd. Of course, he did not write this full story in his dream journal. He did not write about anything after his cousin gets in the elevator; or rather, he changed the ending: he and his cousin ride up to the rooftop, where they do indeed witness the daytime skyline of New York City, then his cousin decides to jump and he jumps with him. This ending perhaps just troubling enough to get his teacher’s worried attention, but not enough to arouse suspicion. In any case, he feels now in the hallway of the professor’s house a similar kind of ecstatic pressure, the immense pressure of needing to piss, that he felt in the filthy restroom of his dream, and as he reaches the end of the hallway he turns a corner to find a much shorter hallway with two doors. He opens one door and discovers what appears to be the garage, the faintest residue of light extending from the foyer down the dark hallway and around the narrow corner to alight in razored glint on the spotless windshield of two sleek sleeping cars. He closes the door and opens the other: the restroom, at last. He goes inside and shuts the door, pressing down the silvered lock button.
In the restroom all is soft and pastel-hued. The hand towels folded conch-like are strictly decorative. Not knowing where to dry his hands he will wipe them on the front of his black pants. His piss is long and indeed glorious. He is renewed upon finishing. In the mirror he takes a flirty photo and sends it to the person he calls his lover. This is a relatively new lover, who would not condone the use of the word lover. The lover responds to the photo almost immediately: HOT, he says. MORE? He sends another photo, in another pose, this time showing more of his jawline, which looks rather defined in the restroom’s generous lighting. He knows that he is drunk, but he will hide this when he goes back out to the table. He is about to do this when he receives another text: SHOW ME MORE, the lover says, with a winky face. He knows what this means. He hesitates, then thinks: okay. He unzips the front of his pants and lazily untucks the bottom hem of his shirt, so that a section of his underwear is showing. He sends the photo to his lover. The lover sends back a drooling face emoji. TAKE IT OUT, the lover says. He knows, or can intuit, what the lover is doing right now. The lover is probably in his bedroom, or in the bathroom attached to the bedroom, arranging his hair or his clothes in front of the mirror, freshly showered. The bouncy curls of his lover’s hair are therefore damp and probably fragrant. They are both, after this dinner is over, going out tonight. Also with the lover might be the lover’s best friend, another man their own age, whose insistent presence he has found to be an increasing nuisance. The lover and the lover’s best friend touch each other frequently—in a platonic way, the lover assures. They do this in front of him and every time they do he must smother his rage, his desire to grab the lover’s wrist and pull him close. But this kind of possessive affection he knows would turn the lover off, would push him further away. He thinks now that the lover and the lover’s best friend are together, getting ready, for the best friend is also going out with them tonight (of course). He did not want this but he had no choice in the matter and no power to change it, and besides he wonders what he and the lover would actually do together once they got to the club alone—the lover not inclined towards public displays of affection with the one with whom he is actually intimate, despite the fact that any club they’d go to would readily encourage any such sort of gaudy proud attraction. So the unwanted third party—the best friend—is actually a convenient distraction from what he and the lover would not be doing, which would only irritate him further, and besides, the idea now of sending a more explicit photo to the lover with the best friend in the room actually sounds pretty hot, and he feels himself growing slightly hard. Perfect, he thinks, and he suddenly wants the best friend to see—a likely possibility, for he imagines his lover and the best friend getting ready together and absently touching each other in the light of the mirror. He pulls out the shaft of his penis and drapes it artfully among the folds of his open trousers. Trousers? He thinks trousers now because the word in all its foreignness is also suddenly hot to him, and actually the best friend is a somewhat attractive English transplant to their very modern Southern California university, and he has heard the best friend say this word many times in his particular accent, the soft syllables of which now ricochet around his sloshed brain. He takes the picture, and he is happy that his cock looks sufficiently thick enough to be arousing but not thick enough to show that he is in fact hard and growing harder. YUM, the lover replies, in all caps. NOW YOU, he types, briefly cognizant of the fact that this language is the same language they used in the anonymous online dating app where they met and where they arranged their first date. A “date” being a strange thing to arrange in such a place, a place with no rules and no prohibitions, except perhaps a prohibition against or rather a disinclination towards scheduling a meeting in a place so public as a coffee shop. In any case, he does not have time to reflect on what this might mean about the possible trajectory or rut of their relationship—this he will think about later, maybe tomorrow morning—because the lover instantly replies: CAN’T RIGHT NOW. Of course he wants to reply, WHY NOT, but instead says, OKAY FINE. WHEN’S YOUR DINNER OVER? the lover says, I’M ALMOST READY, and he replies, WE’RE STARTING DESSERT. WE MIGHT MEET YOU AT THE CLUB THEN, the lover says, and though he feels slightly vexed that his lover would go without him, the we in his response suggests that the lover and the lover’s best friend are in fact together, and that the lover has been receiving his pictures while the best friend is in the room, and that perhaps the best friend is privy to these pictures or has glimpsed them over the shoulder of the lover, a thought that fills him with redly animal satiation. And what’s more, the lover cannot share his own explicit photo with him because the best friend is there, and despite all their cubbish touching the lover does not want to reveal himself to the best friend in such a way. This is a victory. He is still too hard to return to the dinner just yet, so he watches the wine’s bloom swell and subside across his face.
Back at the table he feels jolly enough to tell the dinner guests the dream of his mother. By the end of his story all of the gathered professors and graduate students are laughing, kind laughs, fond laughs, shared laughs, they say, how cute, how funny, and he knows with sudden horror that he has revealed some part of himself that is unready. A deep scarlet shame overcomes him, though he doesn’t let this show, and he is quiet for the rest of the dinner. But this does not stop a spontaneous revelation of favorite dreams from going round the table, and he is caught off-guard, stilled, amazed, by one woman’s recounting: I am in an elevator in a skyscraper, going up and up, so high up that I begin to feel the popping in my ears and a kind of dizziness that must have come from the knowledge that the ground was very far away, and I remember feeling that I must be going to outer space, that there was no other explanation—but then, when I get to the top, I’m in an abandoned alleyway with a payphone and I get on and call my mother and discover that—well, I don’t remember exactly what she told me, but I remember that it just terrified me and woke me up immediately, my heart pounding, and I felt also a mysterious pain in my ears, especially the ear to which I’d held the phone, and a fuzziness, like they’d been stuffed with gauze or like I’d just emerged from a very loud, sightless place. For a long time after hearing this he will think of nothing else. Later, at the club, when the best friend has gone off to the restroom and the music thuds around them, he will shout this into the ears of his lover—this woman I don’t know had almost the same dream that I did—but the lover will not hear him.
Dillon Sefic is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, and studied Romantic poetry and Gothic fiction at the University of Oxford. He is at work on a novel.
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