Leav­ing work, I opened the door to the men’s room to a loud hiss­ing sound and dense humid­ity. The light had also come on, the light that shuts off after 15 or so min­utes of nobody open­ing the door. All this occur­ring to me in under a sec­ond, I real­ized that some­body was using the shower — yes there’s a shower in the men’s room at work.

Rather than use the only uri­nal, which is imme­di­ately next to the shower and might make the show­erer uncom­fort­able, I went for the fur­thest of two stalls. In the toi­let was what looked like the unflush­able rem­nants of vomit. So, my mind is work­ing on this — some­body threw up, and that per­son is now, maybe, wash­ing a shirt? their face? in the shower. That’s fine.

As I’m pee­ing I real­ize that the shush­ing of the shower is very even, not the slight­est aber­ra­tion you’d expect from some­body rins­ing sham­poo from their hair or what­ever. Nobody clear­ing their throat. And no com­ment about my hav­ing acti­vated the lights, which any­body in there would have at least made a joke about to break the ice.

I’m peek­ing slightly over the top of the stall to see if I can catch a glimpse of some­thing, but there’s no sign of any­thing. Now I’m think­ing, which makes more sense: that some­body left the shower on full blast and full heat, then walked away? Or that some­body is uncon­scious on the tile floor?

I leave the stall and go to wash my hands, intend­ing to find out as dis­creetly as pos­si­ble whether there’s some­one in there. As I walk towards the sink I notice a cou­ple things. First is the Breath Savers wrap­per in one of the sinks, sit­ting in a pool of pink hand soap. Sec­ond is the streamer of paper towel strewn on the floor, and another length of it bunched up clum­sily in the small trash can (not vis­i­ble). One of the sinks has also been left run­ning. “This is really weird.”

After wash­ing my hands I glance quickly through the open­ing in the shower cur­tain, and, as far as I can tell, there’s no one there. My eyes linger, and sure enough, not a soul. I part the cur­tain, step into the dry half of the shower. I notice that there’s an unopened roll of toi­let paper, sit­ting upright on top of the drain, drenched in steam­ing hot water.

So, some­body was here, some­body in a bad way. I go into the hall, which is very small, and look around — nobody. I go back inside and turn the shower off, clean up. So, where did they go, and what exactly hap­pened here?

I checked the whole stair­well and the sec­ond story bath­room too. But what did I really expect, that some­body after throw­ing up in the bath­room and turn­ing on the shower for what­ever rea­son would be so deliri­ous that they would climb, foam­ing, up to the roof of the build­ing, only to col­lapse in the corner?

And those breath mints, that really stole the show. I can’t imag­ine a per­son who’s in bad enough shape to leave the shower on and paper tow­els every­where could be helped very much by munch­ing on a fist­ful of breath mints.

Any­way that’s pretty weird huh?