A Night World Floating in the Bath
When you sit at the front desk of a public bath, the whole town becomes the smell of hot water. Fabric softener on the towels, the damp hair of old men, the sweat of the young worn down to nothing. Here in the middle of the city, price and class alike blur and dissolve in the forty-two-degree water. Maybe the tub is all that remains of the equal society someone once dreamed of. Stripped bare and lined up side by side, the department head and the deliveryman carry the same number of wrinkles.
This place has been in the family since my grandfather’s day. Sixty years open, remodeled only once. The sole update: three years ago we swapped the little TV hanging over the changing room for a flat screen. A customer asked for it. He wanted to watch the business news, apparently.
Red and white numbers scroll beneath the screen. The S&P 500. Somewhere along the way, the bathhouse’s naked patrons began carrying world indices with them into the tub. To me at the desk, those numbers look like ripples on the surface of the water. Bubbles rise, burst, and vanish.
One night an old man who calls himself a regular—a securities analyst—rested his elbow on the rim of the tub and said, “Everyone in the world is soaking in the same bath. The water keeps pouring in, but nobody ever pulls the plug. Sooner or later it turns murky, grows heavy, and overflows all at once.” I checked the temperature in silence. Forty-two degrees. Same as always.
A man with a face you often see on TV comes too. A bit-part actor—a hundred people would know his face, and not one could tell you his name. He counts out his coins with care, sets them on the counter, and sinks quietly into the farthest corner of the bath. He once laughed at himself and said it was like a puddle wearing a crown. Men who never got to be the lead gather in places where no one is the lead.
On an evening just after the rainy season had ended, a small frog floated in the shallow bath. Green, looking thoroughly at home, it watched the TV over the shoulders of the soaking customers. No frog should ever turn up in a public bath in the middle of the city. I scooped it out and set it free in the alley through the back door.
The next day, the frog was back. This time at the bottom of the deep bath, sitting perfectly still with only its eyes above the surface. Not one customer batted an eye. Human beings worn to exhaustion lose even the will to call an abnormality abnormal.
As a child I read a comic about a little green sergeant. Aliens try to invade the Earth, but at the very last step they always lose to something sweet. I think now that it was a lie. A true invasion is neither occupation nor bombardment. It must be something like this: arriving as a small creature no one notices, getting used to the tubs one by one. On the day the surrender demand comes, human beings will already be soaking in the water, never having noticed a thing.
In early August, the boiler’s fuel consumption went strange. Fuel use was dropping, yet the water stayed warm. I suspected the thermometers and replaced three, but the readings never changed. It felt as if the water were welling up from underground. My grandfather used to say: the way of the hot spring is older than the way of the river.
The old man spoke again. “The market, you see, is a game where everyone thinks only of climbing out onto the rim of the tub. But what if something starts moving at the bottom of the water?” I didn’t answer. My job at the desk is only to keep the water boiling. If a night comes when I can’t boil it, I become a mere spectator.
That night came. On a late-autumn evening the numbers on the TV all turned red at once, and the scroll stopped. Not a blackout. Somewhere far away, a server had stopped spitting them out. From the next day, the bathhouse grew crowded. A young man whose delivery app had died. An old man whose trades had vanished. An actor with no work. All of them silent in the water. None of them raged. Bathwater, it turns out, dulls even anger.
Late at night, doing the books at the desk, I saw a light at the bottom of the deep bath. A faint, star-like light. The frog surfaced and croaked. Return. Return. Matching its rhythm, the city lights beyond the window went out one by one, far to near, like waves. As if someone were erasing a picture full of mistakes, wiping from the top down.
I never left the desk, keeping my eyes only on the temperature of the water. Forty-two degrees. Somehow, same as always. Amid the collapse of the world’s systems, only the water was right. Even the mountain behind us had begun to tremble, they said.
The starlight on the surface traced a slow circle. A whirlpool, or an awakening. I am a man with no ambition and no skill, fit for nothing but keeping the bath filled. Even so, if the world is to be reborn from here, I will be the first to smell the first fresh-boiled water.
The frog croaked again. The next light to go out must be this town’s. What would you do? Climb out of the water and get dressed—or stay, and watch whatever is being born at the bottom of the tub?