We clock each other out. The guy showing me around the apartment is distracted by his own spiel about the advantage of utilities not being included, and so doesn’t notice. The tub is short and chunky. Just my type. Thick rounded porcelain sides curving down in a bulge from rim to floor. Like some pornographic mashup of muscly thigh and baboon buttock. Deep. You can get lost in him for hours. And hard.
Tub and me. Twelve years and counting. My most successful relationship to date.
America hates tubs. It doesn’t admit this. It just surreptitiously commits incremental acts of genocide against them, hoping they’ll seem to have disappeared of their own accord. Hotels dish out the propaganda and the great unwashed then does the master’s dirty work. First with tubs not deep enough to submerge in and sides too vertical to allow for proper lying down. The message here: bathing is for losers. Then by removing tubs altogether and replacing them with walk-in showers. The message here: showers are luxurious, obviously. All lies.
Showers are about doing. Jump in, get clean, jump out, get back to life. Jumpy, jumpy, jumpy. A bouncy pragmatism. Perfect for those who hit the ground only so as to spring right up off of it again. For those who wish to defy gravity. And so perfect for humans. Because we’re the apes who stood up, walked, and won. We do it standing up!
But I’m a man who’ll even sit to pee. As I’m perched on the throne letting my life trickle away below, Tub winks over at me: “Why stand up when you could sit down, eh?” I nod. “Indeed, why sit when you could lie down?” Tub is dirty minded. I smirk, stand, remove my clothes, take a moment for Tub to take me in, then slide right down. “For that matter, why lie down, when you could just lie down and die?” Tub’s a bit dark. But that’s how I like it.
And so that’s how we do it. In the dark. Tub and me. Being seen isn’t shaming enough. We need to be destroyed. I turn off all the lights. Candles, incense, and other wellness paraphernalia are forbidden. This isn’t therapy, it’s Thanatos. An inverse baptism. Not born again, but dead at last.
He fills up. I get in and go down. Wet, suffocating, too hot. I want to escape. Back to where I still exert my powers of choice. But that world no longer exists. I’m now inextricable from this other mysterious parallel existence. An Ophelia drowning in the night. Full of relief, I submit to the increased force of gravity. Indistinguishable from all the other objects in this rich adagio of greys, I feel I’m camouflaged. A murderer would never find me. I imagine one standing confused at the bathroom door and then leaving. Off to look for someone else who’s not, like me, so hot for death.
Tub is my tomb. He makes my life worth living.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
