Please note that he doesn’t even start the conversation with a “Hello,” which is kind of more upsetting to me than the Antichrist stuff, because a greeting is a basic building block of polite society, and is one of the only things that separates us from bears.
So I drove back to my home, drinking my Frappuccino and making a mental note that I should let all of Victor’s calls go through to my voice mail, and then my intestines exploded. I mean, they didn’t literally explode, but it totally felt that way. And at first I was all, “Okay, pain is good, feel the burn,” but then I realized that this was not like yoga and that I had, in fact, made a horrible, horrible mistake. I’m not going to get graphic, but it basically felt like my legs melted and an elephant crawled inside my stomach and was clawing his way out. And the elephant had claws, apparently. And his nose was made of snakes.
Since Victor was in New York, and Hailey was in school, I had the house to myself, which was good, because honestly there would have been no way to maintain the sensual mystery of womanhood if anyone had heard the noises coming from that bathroom. At a certain point I started worrying that I might be OD’ing. I wasn’t sure what OD’ing on laxatives looked like, but I was fairly certain it would be messy and that you’d probably shit out your entire colon. I’m not sure if this is actually medically possible, and I thought about calling Lotta to ask her whether she felt like she was shitting out her colon when she was doing her cleanse, but I wasn’t sure I could talk without screaming, and also I didn’t have her phone number. And so I sat there, thinking that this would be a horrible way to die, because basically no matter what I’d accomplished in my life it would always be overshadowed by “And she died on the toilet from pooping out her own lower intestine.” Like, if it had happened to Thomas Edison that would totally be the very first thing it would say in his Wikipedia entry. It’d be all, “Thomas Edison, who pooped out his own colon, made a variety of inventions and changed the way we live today. Did we mention he pooped out his colon? Because he totally did. Thomas Edison pooped out his colon. Honestly, we can’t stress this enough.”
It was about this time that I decided I needed to take action, so I found some Pepto-Bismol and took a full dose. I considered taking more, but at this point I was concerned that I might have to call 911 for help and I didn’t want to have to explain why I’d taken three times the recommended amount of laxatives and three times the recommended amount of antidiarrhea medicine, because even to me that sounded like some sort of poorly planned suicide attempt. Taking just one dose of the antidiarrheal seemed somewhat rational, comparatively. “Surely,” I thought, “this will make me seem much more credible and less likely to be put on suicide watch.”
Of course, the Pepto-Bismol was no match for the raw power of the ex-lax, and was much like wearing shin guards in the middle of a tornado, except even less effective, because at least with shin guards, when they found your body later you could still wear a skirt in your coffin (unless your legs got ripped off entirely, which could totally happen). But the Pepto-Bismol didn’t do anything at all except turn my tongue black.
It crossed my mind that maybe eating a bunch of cheese might help, because I once went to school with a girl who ate too much cheese and got so constipated that she had to go to the hospital to get the poop removed by a doctor. And after I heard that I could never really look at her the same way, and I often wondered whether she got to keep the poop they removed, like when you get to keep your tonsils. And then I remembered that I didn’t have any cheese in the house, and that even if I did, it wouldn’t matter, because I couldn’t leave the toilet long enough to get it. And that’s when I heard the noise at the bathroom door.
It sounded like someone leaning against the door and tapping it lightly with his knuckles, and I was all, “Oh, my God, I didn’t lock the bathroom door,” and then I thought, “Wait, why would I even need to lock the door, since I’m the only one home?” My initial thought was that it was a murderer or a rapist, which was quickly followed up by the thought that if it was a rapist, he was going to be terribly disappointed. And then I thought how it was kind of weird that I’d even shut the bathroom door in the first place, since I was alone, but technically I think you should never leave the door open when you go to the bathroom, because that’s how society breaks down. Then I heard the possible rapist again, and so I coughed, because I thought it might be a burglar who didn’t realize I was home. I hoped that the coughing would give him a hint that he needed to leave, although technically the other noises coming from the bathroom were probably much more intimidating than coughing, but I was trying to be polite, because I’m a lady.