He didn't want the man at the basin to see him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a moment, but that would be enough to know what he was thinking. People who laughed behind closed toilet stall doors were quite possibly not to be trusted.
Click-clack of shoes on the old porcelain tiles. Whooze of the door being opened and the hisshh of it settling slowly back into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang!
God, it's so silent in here! Why didn't the guy move?
But there was just the silence, thick and smooth and total, the sort of silence the dead would hear in their coffins if they could still hear, and Tell again became convinced that Sneakers was dead, fuck logic, he was dead and had been dead for who knew how long, he was sitting in there and if you opened the door you would see some slumped mossy thing with its hands dangling in the fork of its crotch, you would see
For a moment he was on the verge of calling, Hey Sneaks! You all right?
But what if Sneakers answered, not in a questioning or irritated voice but in a froggy grinding croak? Wasn't there something about waking the dead? About…
Suddenly Tell was up, up fast, flushing the toilet and buttoning his pants, out of the stall, zipping his fly as he headed for the door, aware that in a few seconds he was going to feel silly but not caring. Yet he could not forbear one glance under the first stall as he passed. Dirty white sneakers. And dead flies.
Weren't any dead flies in my stall. And just how is it that nine weeks have gone by and he still hasn't noticed that he missed one of the eyelets? Or does he just wear them all the time, even to bed?
Pneumatic elbow or not, Tell hit the door Pretty hard coming out. The receptionist, a Camel smoldering between his fingers, was looking at him with the cool curiosity he saved for beings merely mortal (as opposed to such deities in human form as Roger Daltrey).
Tell hurried down the hall to Tabori Studios.
'Paul?'
'What?' Janning answered without looking up from the board. Georgie Ronkler was standing off to one side, watching Janning closely and nibbling a cuticle - cuticles were all he had left to nibble; his fingernails simply did not exist above the point where they parted company with live flesh and hot nerve-endings. He was close to the door. If Janning began to rant, Georgie would slip through it.
'I think there might be something wrong in-'
Janning groaned. 'Something else?'
'What do you mean?'
'This drum track is what I mean. It's badly botched, and I don't know what we can do about it.' He flicked a toggle and drums crashed into the studio. 'You hear it?'
'The snare, you mean?'
'Of course I mean the snare! It stands out a mile from the rest of the percussion, but it's married to it!'
'Yes, but-'
'Jesus bloody fuck, I hate shit like this! Forty tracks I got here, forty goddamn tracks to record a simple bop tune and some IDIOT technician-'
From the tail of his eye Tell saw Georgie disappear like a cool breeze.
''But look, Paul, if you lower the eq-'
'The eq's got nothing to do with-'
'Shut up and just listen for a minute,' Tell said soothingly - something he could have said to no one else on the face of the earth-and slid a switch. Janning stopped ranting and started listening. He asked a question. Tell answered it. Then he asked one Tell couldn't answer, but Janning was able to answer it himself, and all of a sudden they were looking at a whole new spectrum of possibilities for a song called 'Answer to You, Answer to Me.
After a while, sensing that the storm had passed, Georgie Ronkler crept back in.
And Tell forgot what he had meant to say about the sneakers.
He thought about them again the following evening. He was at home, sitting on the toilet in his own bathroom, reading Everything That Rises Must Converge while Vivaldi played mildly from the bedroom speakers (although Tell now mixed rock and roll for a living, he only owned four or five rock records, most of them by Creedence Clearwater Revival).
He looked up from his book, somewhat startled. A question of cosmic ludicrousness had suddenly occurred to him: How long has it been since you took a crap in the evening, John?
He didn't know, but he thought he might be taking them then quite a bit more frequently in the future. At least one of his habits had changed, it seemed.
Sitting in the living room fifteen minutes later, his book forgotten in his lap, something else occurred to him: he hadn't used the third floor rest room once that day. They had gone across the street for coffee at ten, and he had taken a whizz in the men's room of The Donut Shop while Paul and Georgie sat at the counter, drinking coffee and talking about overdubs. Then, on his lunch hour, he had made a pit-stop at the Brew 'n Burger ... and another on the first floor late that afternoon when he had gone down to drop off a bunch of mail that he could just as easily stuffed into the mailslot by the elevators.
Avoiding the third-floor men's? Was that what he'd been doing today, without even realizing it? You bet your sweatsocks. Avoiding it like a scared kid who goes a block out of his way coming home from school so he won't have to go past the local haunted house. He had been spooked by a pair of dirty sneakers.
Aloud, very clearly, Tell said: 'This has got to stop.'
But that was Thursday night and something happened on Friday night that changed everything. That was when the door closed between him and Paul Janning.
