After dinner, the woman and her husband argue about the hole in their bathroom.
It’s not such a big hole. Two feet by two feet, the kind you might drop your garbage into every Thursday night and never think about where it goes. The kind just large enough for an adult to climb into and never be seen again.
“Are you going to touch it?” the husband asks as the woman leans in across the bathtub. They can hear the neighbors’ television on the other side of the wall, the canned studio laughter, but the hole sits flat on that same wall, a perfect circular black painting—except for the damp wind blowing out of it that smells of wet soil and river water.
“This is the kind of thing where if I touch it, I’ll be the first one to die, right?” the woman squints, hands sweating in her oversized rubber cleaning gloves.
“I can call a carpenter in the morning,” the man offers, taking a sip of the lukewarm beer he brought in from the kitchen.
“What do you expect them to do? Launch a wrench into the hole and see if it makes a good sound?” the woman asks, incredulous at her husband’s nonchalance.
The woman does not believe in monsters and portals, but she believes in the power of bad luck. Do you know how many times I’ve gotten screwed for absolutely no reason? she sometimes asks, parading out a laundry list of workplace grievances and childhood traumas. Her laptop crashing right before a pitch presentation, the time she took a four-hour bus ride to Vatnajökull just to be told the ice cave had flooded thirty minutes prior and was no longer safe to enter, the elementary school classmate who choked her on the playground after she told him to stop stepping on ants. To her, an inexplicable hole in the bathroom is another piece of evidence in her long history of misfortunes.
The man does not believe in bad luck or karma; he believes in a good night’s sleep. That anything can be fixed with enough rest.
“I’m just saying, maybe it would be better to just go to sleep,” the man says. “Maybe it’ll be gone in the morning.”
“That wouldn’t change that it had been here. That it might come back,” the woman frowns.
“What do you want me to do then?” he asks, his phone buzzing in his back pocket with new messages. One…two…three. He pictures his coworkers as tiny little men infesting his phone, crawling up his body and into his ear as he sleeps. “Should I just hop into the hole and check if everything’s all right, then come back with a thumbs up like ‘Alright honey, nothing in there looking to kill us. We’re good to sleep now!’ Would that make you feel better?” His phone vibrates again, and he fights the urge to take it out and fling it into the hole.
“I want—” The woman bites back her tongue. She can’t look him in the eye; she hasn’t been able to really in years. She can’t tell him what she sees when she looks at herself in the mirror or worse yet, the thing she sees reflected in the brown irises of his eyes when he looks at her.
The man and woman have been married for over ten years. They were matched on eHarmony, each filling out the hour-long compatibility survey, though neither would ever admit this to any of their friends who come over for wine and boardgame night.
“I TA-ed one of his classes during college,” the woman lies with practiced confidence, a hard lemonade in hand. She is a different person in front of their friends, charismatic and funny, the popular side-character in a sitcom. Only the man has seen her crying in the bathroom after work, the way she stares at her own reflection in the mirror, mapping out its imperfections. “He emailed me a bunch of statistics questions just to start a conversation.”
Their friends laugh, elbowing him with an oh my god and totally sounds like something he’d do!
The man doesn’t join in the story; he’s not good at lying, which is the source of many of his arguments with the woman. Instead, he goes to the kitchen to get another beer. “Anyone want another one?” he calls out, staring into the cold amber light of the refrigerator.
No one answers. The laughter from the other room sounds like the late-night barbecues their neighbor has in the summer. Unseen faces, clinking glasses, the vague smell of burning. The woman has already started talking about something else, but this doesn’t bother him. Made-up stories, like imaginary holes in the wall, are best left to settle themselves.
The man closes the refrigerator and goes to the bathroom.
He is struck first by the sound. A persistent whistling, like a winter draft through a crack in the window. In the cramped bathroom, the sound seems to come from inside him.
Then the man sees it for the first time. A black two-feet-by-two-feet circle on the bathroom wall. One might assume it’s just been painted on if not for the wind blowing out of it. If not for the gentle invitation coming from inside.
On the other side of the hole, the man feels like someone else. His other-side-of-the-hole house lies on an elevated boardwalk next to a dark river. He sits on a cedar bench and watches the flow of the water, the current too fast to see if there are any fish underneath the foamy rapids. There are no birds and no moon. Time passes and passes.
But time is not the same on the other side of the hole. It is a feeling inside the man’s body, a ticking in his chest, a hollow between his bones where the wet wind passes through. Outside the house, several yards from the river, there is a path of towering sequoias cloaked in the sharp smell of wet soil and rotting bark. Branches and roots lie in ruin, but the trees never die.
Beyond the trees, there is a stone gate.
The man has never ventured that far. He is afraid of what he will find there.
Before the man and the woman got married, the two of them took a fourteen-hour plane ride with the man’s parents to visit the woman’s parents in Japan. A show of mutual respect, the woman had called it, but as the six of them sat in a private tatami room in a kaiseki restaurant near Hachioji Station, staring at steaming bowls of pufferfish soup in silence, it felt more like torture training to the man.
“Everything’s so small,” the man’s father finally said, half-joking, spearing the lone shiitake mushroom floating on top with a chopstick, and held it up like a science teacher showing off a specimen to the class.
“But it all tastes great,” his mother followed-up, flashing a sympathetic smile like everyone always did when they heard the woman’s family lived overseas. It must be hard being so far from family, they’d say like it was a terminal illness, but what the woman heard was: It must be so hard never really belonging here.
The woman’s father worked as a photographer for a small local import/export company, photographing products for their seasonal catalogs. For a period of four years when the woman was still in elementary school, he’d been completely out of work and spent hours just sitting on a park bench in his business suit a few train stations away. The woman had eaten most of her meals at her grandmother’s house then. Sprawled on the old tatami floor, she peeled mandarin oranges and watched dramas about women finding love with hairdressers and gang members with hidden hearts of gold. She wondered if the secret to a good relationship was in finding the perfect balance between honesty and dishonesty.
A man who inconveniences his own family with his misery is a failure in more ways than one, she’d overheard her grandmother tell her mother in the hall. She didn’t tell them she’d followed her father once during her summer break, boarding the crowded Chuo Line with all the other commuters at the station near her house and getting off thirty minutes later at Kichijoji Station with a flurry of salarymen. How instead of heading into one of the office buildings, he continued on to the green oasis of Inokashira Park, sweat staining the back of his white dress shirt, past the swan-headed pleasure boats and trendy cabin-shaped cafes, and settled down on a bench under the half-shade of a sugar maple tree with a canned coffee. How he watched the kids try to catch cicadas in their mesh nets the way she watched her dramas, like someone longing for something already lost. It was the first and only time she felt like she’d really seen him.
Now, under the harsh amber spotlights of the private dining room, her parents looked like strangers.
“Chotto shashin toritai,” the woman’s father told her in Japanese, making a button-clicking motion with his index finger as if he thought she’d forgotten her mother tongue in all the years she’d spent overseas. He wanted to take a photo of the couple and the man’s family. Her mother handed a package of silk scarves to the man’s parents, a specialty from her hometown, that she presented in layers of ornate wrapping. Neither of her parents spoke English, and the woman had grown tired of translating, so she pretended not to see.
The man’s father clasped his hands together, mimicking the fake monks that sometimes asked for donations in the park outside his office. “Thank you, thank you!” he said, dropping the furoshiki-wrapped package into the same plastic shopping bag filled with acrylic bullet train keychains and novelty cat hats they’d bought at a Harajuku souvenir shop. When the woman’s father took out his DSLR camera, the man’s parents laughed a little. “No big deal, this should be fine right?” his father said, waving his cellphone dismissively.
After dinner, the woman’s parents insisted the couple stay overnight in their house. The woman had not been home in years and immediately accepted the offer.
“Did your parents like the dinner?” she asked, as she and her husband changed out of their sweaty day-clothes in her old bedroom. Her parents had left it exactly as she remembered, down to the flower-print sheets on the bed and the clear box of small Sanrio erasers and gel pens on her desk. In middle school, she’d written a love letter with those pens after her friends pressured her and watched the boy laugh as he showed it to his friends.
“Who knows. They were probably wowed by all the tiny dishes,” the man said, his feet sore from all the walking during the day. His shoulders ached from carrying his parents’ shopping bags and his mother’s 1.5L water bottle. (“It’s better for the environment,” she reasoned, slipping it into the man’s backpack as she Googled flights for a friend’s daughter’s wedding.)
The woman watched the man scroll through his phone.
“Did you enjoy the dinner?” she asked, staring at her own reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. Her old posters of idol bands still taped to the wall, their eyes watching her like her grandmother used to when she came home from school with new bruises.
But the man didn’t hear her question, his brain fogged with jetlag and thoughts of the awkward breakfast tomorrow morning with the woman’s parents. What was he supposed to say to them? Did they even like him or were they simply criticizing him in a language he didn’t know with a smile on their faces? Every action, every word was a potential landmine that no one would warn him about, not even his wife. He needed a good night’s sleep to mentally prepare himself.
By the time the woman asked her third question, the man was already snoring, dreaming of summer rooftop bars, of boats sailing across dark open oceans and movies projected into the night sky. Of a happier version of his wife, far away from the canned laughter and punchline questions of her acquaintances. Of a happier version of himself.
“Do you love me?” the woman asked, but the old walls had no answer.
The world on the other side of the hole is drained of color. There is neither day nor night, only a perpetual ocean spray of gray. Distance, like time, is a feeling that the man cannot trust.
One day/night, as he sits on his bench, he sees someone standing under the stone gate.
“Hello?” he tries in that same big voice he uses when traveling with his wife through crowded train stations. The one he uses when he is afraid of being left behind.
The person doesn’t answer.
“Do you know what this place is?” the man asks in the same booming voice.
The person turns away and dashes off. The man follows. Soil squelches under his feet, roots rising out of the ground like tiny hurdles. He leaps, stumbles, scrambles back up, his body moving before his brain, his breath quickening. He feels the burn in muscles he hasn’t exercised in years.
Yet no matter how fast the man runs, the person never gets any closer. The path of gray sequoias stretches infinitely. Distance, like love, is a feeling you cannot measure until the end.
A sharp gust of wind rustles through the trees, tearing leaves from branches.
“Hey, wait!” the man shouts, panting, but the person keeps running. He watches until they’re nothing but a dot on the gray horizon, and he is alone again. “I just wanted to talk,” he mutters.
In the hotel room on the night of their wedding, with her face still caked in make-up and her two-hundred-dollar hairstyle (insisted on and paid for by the man’s mother) hanging in limp curls, the woman told the man a secret: She desperately craved fries and Coke.
“Even after all that grilled salmon and foie gras?” the man asked, tracing a finger down the woman’s arm to the center of her palm. He was tired and a little drunk but was eager to hold his new wife without all the extra layers of clothes and wedding planning stress, all the baggage of her family and his. The first time they’d slept together, he’d been so afraid of screwing up that she’d had to guide him through the whole thing like a high school sex ed pamphlet, both of them laughing awkwardly. She hadn’t been his first, but he had been hers, and that made him more nervous, like he could ruin her if he wasn’t careful.
“Give me fries over caviar and foie gras any day,” the woman sighed, lying down on the bed, kicking off her heels. “My dad used to say that.”
The woman’s parents couldn’t attend the ceremony due to travel restrictions, but they’d participated via Zoom and sent her a gold-scarlet kimono that belonged to her grandmother to wear as a change of outfit. The fabric still hung on a velvet hanger in their bedroom like an embroidered ghost because the woman had no idea how to put it on.
“You all must have grown up eating a lot of garbage,” the man joked, but the woman suddenly froze.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“I was just kidding.”
“My family’s had caviar and foie gras before. It’s not that big a fucking deal.”
“I know. Look, I’m sorry.”
“They paid for that kaiseki dinner with your parents, didn’t they? It was so goddamn expensive and who knows what they were eating afterwards, but they wanted your parents to feel welcome.”
The man didn’t say anything. Nothing of the complaints his parents had afterwards about how long the food took, the disgustingly humid weather, the general slowness of everything and everyone in Japan. Marriage was about compromise, wasn’t it? Braiding your mutual dissatisfactions until they became something small enough to tolerate.
The hotel room’s large vanity mirror reflected the open back of her dress like a pale moon, her skin smooth, old bruises long healed.
“Have you ever felt like you’re just staring out of a stranger’s eyes?” the woman asked, covering her face with her hand as if the ceiling lights were suddenly too bright. “And this stranger is strangling the real you, but you have no idea how to get back into your own body. No idea how to save yourself?”
The woman’s voice was small, so small the man felt like she might disappear if he didn’t hold onto her with both hands. But the man was afraid too. Of the verbal landmines and his own clumsiness. Of the gravity of a confession.
The man zips up his parka and puts on the woman’s garden gloves. They’re too tight and a little wet inside from the woman’s sweat, but he doesn’t say a thing. The woman asks if he needs anything else. She pulls open the mirror above the sink, looking for something useful on the small shelf behind it. Perhaps he could use the dental floss like a garrote, like in the spy films they used to watch? She laughs so he knows she’s only kidding.
He looks at her in the mirror as if looking at himself. He thinks of how they’d spent hours talking on the phone every night before meeting in person for the first time. Just a voice with an endless history to explore. She’d mentioned her bad luck then, laughing nervously into the receiver.
“You must think I’m a weirdo,” she’d said then, staring at her own reflection in the window as she heated herself some late-night soup. “I hope you don’t end up hating me eventually.” The microwave beeped in the background. She immediately regretted the words. How many times had her friends told her she was too much of a downer? Hadn’t her grandmother always told her to be less cynical, to smile and be positive, to be less like her father. No one wants to be with someone who is sad all the time.
“I won’t ever hate you,” he’d said then. The man was not superstitious, but if there was such a thing as karma, he wanted to think he was lucky to have met her. Someone to share his own emptiness with.
In another timeline, the man steps out of the bathtub and holds the woman in his arms. He tells her the hole in the bathroom is real, that he’s been lost inside it countless times, but that he will always find a way back to her. We’ll laugh about it then. We’ll tell our kids, and they’ll call us both weirdos, and we’ll grow old together, just us two weirdos in our weird house. I love you.
I love you.
But here, the woman is just out of reach. A stream of small mistakes, misunderstandings, and unspoken words building up into a dark river between them, a path of endless trees, their roots gnarled, bleeding water. The hole in the bathroom wall pulses behind the man, close enough that he can smell its burning scent.
It calls to him.
On the other side of the hole, the man sits on the bench, watching the river. Time is a gash in his chest, leaking something he doesn’t quite understand. Something warm and precious. Like blood. Like summer light. He wonders if it’s always been this way, if his life on the other side with his wife has always been the one that he’s imagined. Water splashes up from the river, the rumbling current like an earthquake. Light filters through the new leaves on the trees. He can almost taste it against his skin. No matter how many times the trees shed their leaves, there are always new ones to take their place.
No one waits under the stone gate. It sits in silent ruin in the distance, long abandoned. Beyond it, a bone white sky. Once upon a time, someone had waited for him under its stones, waiting to be pulled back. Once upon a time, he promised someone important that he would always find a way home.
Who had that been?
The man is about to stand when someone presses a hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t need to go back,” the person says with a voice that is distantly familiar, like a childhood tape that has warped with time. It belonged to someone he loved once. “You can take all the rest you need. Just stay here with me.”
(Editors’ Note: “What We Mean When We Talk About the Hole in the Bathroom” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 69A.)
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