Free The Strangers' Gallery by Paul Bowdring

night? You’d expect the muscles to be relaxed at that hour, but they’re tensed as if for another fire alarm. It’s worse than standing at a urinal in a public washroom at some big event, with curious urinators on either side of you and a pawing impatient pack at your back.
    Tired of standing, I sat down on the toilet seat, tucked Its Eminence between my legs and pointed it back into the bowl. The muscles usually relax when I do this, but the womanliness of the act makes me self-conscious, even alone and half-asleep late at night. I didn’t have my glasses on, but I tried to focus my eyes on the set of burgundy towels on the rack behind the bathroom door. Mrs. Somerton had arranged them as a floral display, a still life: the bath towel, a sort of background wash; the face towel in the shape of a hanging basket; and the face cloth, an open fan or scallop shell set in the basket. She’d worked at a hotel for many years, where she’d been taught clever arranging tricks like this, along with exasperating habits that she’s been unable to break, though I’ve mentioned them to her a thousand times. She tucks the top sheet, for instance, in under the mattress, so snug that it’s impossible to kick out. I have to get out of bed and lift up the mattress all the way round. I’m six-foot-two, and my feet hang out over the edge.
    Sitting and staring at this towel display, like some esoteric object of meditation, seemed to do the trick. My bladder began to drain more quickly, but my muscles tensed again as an alarm did sound—a loud shout from Anton’s room at the end of the hall. I tightened the drawstring of my bathrobe and ran down to find Anton crawling around on the bedroom floor in his undershorts, hissing and moaning, with blood all over his hands and arms.
    â€œI lost my crown,” he said, lisping through white, sucked-in lips.
    For a moment, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I thought he was drunk or cut or had taken leave of his senses; but it was not the blood of a deposed monarch that was flowing, just the tomato juice and vodka of the reigning insomniac. Drinking from a heavy whisky glass, he had broken off the gold cap of his tooth. His tongue was capping the tooth now, and he was talking thickly and nasally and moaning majestically as both of us, on hands and knees, tried to find the crown.
    â€œI hope I didn’t swallow it again,” he said, wincing and pulling his lips tight over his teeth, or half his teeth, the other half resting in the baking soda solution in another whisky glass in the bathroom.
    â€œWhat do you mean,
again
?” I asked.
    â€œWell…I swallowed it before…but I passed it on. I watched for it among my stools.”
    â€œYou what?”
    â€œAmong my stools…I watched for it among my stools. It was my ex-wife Darka’s wedding ring. It has—how do you say?—a sentimental value for me. She left it when we parted and I melted it down. I told her she would stay a part of me, and I thought of how to do it. Marieke, my girlfriend, has big teeth and likes to bite. She broke my tooth when we were making love, then she broke my gold crown when I had it done—on purpose, I thought, when she found out where the gold came from. She was on top, where she likes to be, and I swallowed it. Took three days for it to pass.”
    We searched everywhere for Anton’s crown—in the bedclothes, under the bed, in the closet. He shook out his clothes, which were on the floor, and removed the sheets and blankets and pillowcase from the bed. Finally, he looked forlornly down into the dregs of his drink, threw his head back and drained the contents of the glass as if filtering it through baleen plates.
    It was three in the morning, but he asked me to phone my dentist, Dr. Winston Giovannetti, or Dr. Wins, as I had taken to calling him—never to his face, of course, but always affectionately, for he was a