This Month's Story

John and I were returning from lunch. We were more than a little late and so as to not attract attention, we entered the building using the rear entrance. We found the door partially blocked by an immense pile of packaging, the protective remains of some piece of equipment that had been delivered while we were gone.

John and I started removing the material to the trash bin a short distance away, muttering various unprintable words about the laziness of the persons who had left them there. In a few minutes, we had gathered most of it up, when John saw me staring at some dry ice that had been hidden by the cardboard and plastic material. Using the cardboard to protect myself from the several pieces of intensely cold dry ice, I picked most of them up and motioned John to gather the remains of ice and follow me.

“Why.”

“I don’t know as yet, but we should be able to have some fun with this.”

The building was old, and had had many users. John and I shared an office a short distance from the Rest Room. It suddenly came to me what we should do. Skipping our office, I went to the Rest Room, directing John to follow me. I should say the room was unusual. It had thirteen urinals and six johns, relics of the building’s remote past. A large sink was positioned at the far end of the long line of urinals.

Once inside, I pointed to the thirteen urinals to John.

“Break the ice up and put a piece in each urinal.”

We proceeded to the task and soon each of the urinals was decorated with a piece of dry ice. They sat there amazingly normal. Placed were they were, they looked as if they were pieces of the white cakes of material that were usually placed in the urinals to hide unpleasant odors. We had just finished, when John turned toward the door and whispered: “Quick, someone’s coming.”

With this, we hurried to the far end of the urinals and addressed ourselves to the units next to the deep sink trying not to look at whoever came in.

When the door opened, and the person came in, we found that the person entering the room was Henry!

***

Now I should explain a little about Henry before we go any further.

To say he was odd would not do him justice, not the slightest. Henry was an anomaly. Everyone in the building, except for two secretaries, was a civilian marine scientist working on highly classified navy projects. As a group, we were the cream of the crop.

Henry was the oddity among the scientists. Neither I nor John knew exactly what it was he did. We both shared the thought that really no one in the laboratory knew any more than we, i.e. what exactly what it was he did. Henry had no friends, spoke to no one, shared an office by himself and rarely left it.

Years later for some reason, (again nobody knew why), the office security people raided his apartment and found it contained among numerous unexplainable oddities, several hundred Xerox copies of a single page of a classified Navy training manual. When we were shown a copy of the Xeroxed page, we all knew what it was but could not figure out why anyone would find a use for that single page, or even the out-of-date secret manual it came from. There were other eccentricities that seemed equally abnormal. But that one page, gave the navy no excuse but to promptly fire him. We never heard from him again. But this was several years later.

Today was today and it was this same Henry that stepped into the rest room.

***

Henry nodded to us as he entered and we nodded back and mimed doing the task one does when addressing a urinal, while all the time secretly watching him as he stepped to the first urinal near the door.

For the first few seconds he worked to open his fly and then he began to urinate.

Nothing visibly happened at first. But as soon as his urine hit the cake of ice, the cake foamed. In seconds it overflowed the urinal’s rim and flowed, an impressive fountain, down onto the restroom floor. Henry continued to urinate paying no visible attention to the increasingly massive flow exiting the urinal. The overflow spread magically on the floor, reaching a height of almost a foot thick, expanding in every direction; even entering beneath the closed doors of the johns immediately behind him.

We stared, horrified that the flow might reach us!

Through all this, Henry continued to do his business staring blankly at the wall in front of him. His face showed no emotion, absolutely not showing any knowledge of what was occurring. I looked at John and he in turn looked back at me, his facial feature that of wide open astonishment mirrored mine.

Although the time of what was taking place seemed to us to last many minutes, it was over in just over a minute. Evidently finished, Henry secured his trouser front and without acknowledging our presence, left the room. The flow abruptly stopped.

We both looked at the white cakes of dry ice in each of our urinals and, since neither one of us had opened our trousers, waited a few moments and then turned and left the room, no longer interested in our failed joke. We went back to our nearby office and returned to the work we had scheduled for the afternoon.

We never spoke to anyone about what had happened that day about our failed prank. To this day, I can only think of John’s remark as we left the restroom:

“Do you suppose it always does that when he pees?”