He lay there interminably, manually monitoring his boner, trying to keep it halfway up. From outside came neighings, distant clangings, the crowing of a rooster, the rural sounds of anywhere. As Jenna continued to sleep, or pretend to, a roiling announced itself in his bowels. Despite his best resistance, the roiling increased until it was an urgency that trounced all others. He padded into the bathroom and locked the door. In his shaving kit was a kitchen fork that he’d brought for the extremely disagreeable task ahead of him. He sat clutching it in a sweaty hand as his shit slid out of him. There was a lot of it, two or three days’ worth. Through the door, he heard the telephone ring, their six-thirty wake-up call.
He knelt on the cool floor and peered into the bowl at the four large turds afloat in it, hoping to see the glint of gold immediately. The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with the fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of a fork had been a wishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but to lift out each turd and run it through his fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged. Holding his breath, his eyes watering furiously, he grasped the most promising turd and let go of his latest fantasy, which was that one hand would suffice. He had to use both hands, one to hold the shit and the other to pick through it. He retched once, drily, and got to work, pushing his fingers into the soft and body-warm and surprisingly lightweight log of excrement.
Jenna knocked on the door. “What’s going on in there?”
“Just a minute!”
“What are you doing in there? Jerking off?”
“I said just a minute! I have diarrhea.”
“Oh, Christ. Can you at least hand me a tampon?”
“In a minute!”
Mercifully, the ring turned up in the second of the turds he broke apart. A hardness amid softness, a clean circle within chaos. He rinsed his hands as well as he could in the filthy water, flushed the toilet with his elbow, and bore the ring to the sink. The stench was appalling. He washed his hands and the ring and the faucets three times with lots of soap, while Jenna, outside the door, complained that breakfast was in twenty minutes. And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing at the stench, he was a different person. He could see this person so clearly, it was like standing outside himself. He was the person who’d handled his own shit to get his wedding ring back. This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
