“Gotta,” he said, once more wiping his cheeks. “Gotta.”

As long as he didn’t get stuck halfway in and halfway out of the hole. That would be a terrible way to die.

“Not going to get stuck,” he said. “Look how big it is. That thing was built for the asses of doughnut-eating long-haul truckers.”

This made him giggle. The sound contained more hysteria than humor. The toilet hole did not look big to him; it looked small. Almost tiny. He knew that was only his nervous perception of it-hell, his scared perception, his frightened to death perception-but knowing that didn’t help much.

“Gotta do it, though,” he said. “There’s really nothing else.”

And in the end it would probably be for nothing…but he doubted anyone had bothered to add a steel outer layer to the holding tank, and that decided him.

“God help me,” he said. It was his first prayer in almost forty years. “God, please help me not get stuck.”

He poked his right arm through the hole, then his head (first taking one more deep breath of the better air in the cubicle). He pressed his left arm to his side and slithered into the hole. His left shoulder caught, but before he could panic and draw back-this was, part of him understood, the critical moment, the point of no return-he shimmied it like a man doing the Watusi. His shoulder popped through. He jackknifed into the stinking tank up to his waist. With his hips-slim, but not nonexistent-plugging the hole, it was now as black as pitch. That seam of light seemed to float mockingly just before his eyes. Like a mirage.

Oh God, please don’t let it be a mirage.

The tank was maybe four feet deep, maybe a trifle more. Bigger than the trunk of a car, but not-unfortunately-the size of a pickup truck’s bed. There was no way to tell for sure, but he thought his hanging hair was touching the disinfected water, and that the top of his head must be within inches of the muck filling the bottom. His left arm was still pinned against his body. Pinned at the wrist now. He couldn’t get it free. He shimmied from one side to the other. His arm stayed where it was. His worst nightmare: caught. Caught after all. Caught head down in stinking blackness.

Panic flared. He reached out with his free hand, not thinking about it, just doing it. For a moment he could see his fingers outlined by the scant light coming in through the bottom of the tank, which was now facing the sunrise instead of the ground. The light was right there, right in front of him. He grabbed for it. The first three fingers of his flailing hand were too big to fit through the narrow gap, but he was able to hook his pinky into the split. He pulled, feeling the ragged edge-metal or plastic, he didn’t know which-first dig into the skin of his finger and then tear it open. Curtis didn’t care. He pulled harder.

His hips popped through the hole like a cork coming out of a bottle. His wrist came free, but too late for him to lift his left arm and help break his fall. He crashed headfirst into the shit.

Curtis came up choking and flailing, his nose plugged with wet stink. He coughed and spat, aware that he was in a very tight place now, oh for sure. Had he thought the toilet was tight? Ridiculous. The toilet was the wide-open spaces. The toilet was the American west, the Australian Outback, the Great Horsehead Nebula. And he had given it up to crawl into a dark womb half-filled with rotting shit.

He wiped his face, then flung his hands to either side. Ribbons of dark stuff flew from his fingertips. His eyes were stinging, blurring. He wiped them with first one arm, then the other. His nose was plugged. He stuck his pinky fingers up them-he could feel blood running down the right one-and cleared his nostrils as best he could. He got enough out so he could breathe again, but when he did, the stench of the tank seemed to leap down his throat and sink claws into his stomach. He retched, a deep growling sound.

Get hold of yourself. Just get hold, or it’s for nothing.

He leaned back against the caked side of the tank, dragging in deep gasps of air through his mouth, but that was almost as bad. Just above him was a large pearl of oval light. The toilet hole he had, in his madness, wriggled through. He retched again. To his own ears he sounded like a bad-tempered dog on a hot day, trying to bark while half-strangled by a too-tight collar.

What if I can’t stop? What if I can’t stop doing that? I’ll have a seizure.

He was too frightened and overwhelmed to think, so his body thought for him. He turned on his knees, which was hard-the side wall of the holding tank, which was now the floor, was slippery-but just possible. He applied his mouth to the split in the floor of the tank and breathed through it. As he did, a memory of some story he’d heard or read in grammar school came back to him: Indians hiding from their enemies by lying on the bottom of a shallow pond. Lying there and breathing through hollow reeds. You could do that. You could do that if you remained calm.

He closed his eyes. He breathed, and the air coming in through the split was blessedly sweet. Little by little, his runaway heartbeat began to slow.

You can go back up. If you can go one way, you can go the other. And going back up will be easier, because now you’re…

“Now I’m greasy,” he said, and managed a shaky laugh…even though the dull, closed-in sound of his own voice frightened him all over again.

When he felt he had some control, he opened his eyes. They had adjusted to the deeper gloom of the tank. He could see his shit-caked arms, and a matted ribbon of paper hanging from his right hand. He plucked it off and dropped it. He supposed he was getting used to such things. He supposed people could get used to anything, if they had to. This wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.

He looked at the split. He looked at it for some time, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was like a split along the seam of a badly sewn garment. Because there was a seam here. The tank was plastic after all-a plastic shell-but it wasn’t a single piece; it was two. It was held together by a line of screws that glimmered in the dark. They glimmered because they were white. Curtis tried to remember if he had ever seen white screws before. He couldn’t. Several of them at the lowest point of the tank had broken off, creating that split. Waste and wastewater must have been dribbling out and onto the ground beneath for some time.

If the EPA knew about this. Motherfucker, you’d have them on your back, too, Curtis thought. He touched one of the screws still holding, the one just to the left of where the split ended. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was hard plastic rather than metal. The same kind of plastic the toilet-ring flanges were made of, probably.

So. Two-piece construction. The tanks put together on some portable-toilet assembly line in Defiance, Missouri, Magic City, Idaho, or-who knew?-What Cheer, Iowa. Screwed together with hard plastic screws, the seam running across the bottom and up the sides like a big old smile. The screws tightened with some special long-barreled screwdriver, probably air-driven, like the gadget they used in garages to loosen the lug-nuts holding on your tires. And why put these screwheads on the inside? That was easy. So some merry prankster couldn’t come along with his own screwdriver and open a full tank from the outside, of course.

The screws were placed about two inches apart along the seam, and the split was about six inches long, causing Curtis to deduce that three of the plastic screws had snapped. Bad materials, or bad design? Who gave a shit?

“To coin a phrase,” he said, and laughed again.

The screws still holding to the left and right of the split were sticking up a little way, but he could neither unscrew them nor snap them off as he had the toilet seat. He couldn’t get enough purchase. The one on the right was a little loose, and he supposed that if he worked at it, he might be able to get it started and then unscrew it the rest of the way. It would take hours, and his fingers would probably be bleeding by the time he managed the job, but it could probably be done. And what would he gain? Another two inches of breathing space through the seam. No more than that.