“Occupied.”

He sat on the toilet with the pistol in his left hand.  Everyone knew he was right handed.  Sure James, he thought, no one will figure it out that you shot yourself with the other hand.  Who would consider the source and fall on the conclusion that someone actually wanted you dead?

Every few minutes there was a knock at the door.  A woman would need to change her brat’s diapers soon.  Or the kid with the light-up shoes needs to piss all over the seat and smile about it to his mother who is in too much of a hurry to do nothing about it.

Knock!  Knock!  Knock!

Muffled voices and scattering footsteps began gathering outside the door.  It reminded him of the hangover he had.  It was a bad one.  Too many vodka tonics last night, he thought, too much cheap vodka.  The quinine was burning a hole in his stomach.  Not much help for the ulcer.  The Musak crackling through the little speaker hanging in the corner overhead was playing R.E.M’s “Shiny Happy People.”

James had been locked inside the family restroom of Swifty’s Supermarket for close to two hours, and it was trying the world’s patience.  It won’t be long before that kid with the light-up shoes will complain to his mother enough times that she’ll complain to a clerk who will fetch Katie, the store manager.  By the time they get through the door they’ll find James with his brains behind him sliding down the cheap wallboard that always swelled and decayed a week after being installed.

After being an employee at Swifty’s James found the last two years of his life blowing by without meaning or wanting.  He wasn’t even thirty and already he lost his will to do pretty much anything other than tap the snooze twice and drink his coffee and drive his piece of shit Toyota the same route and park in the same parking spot and punch the same time clock and hear the same jokes and stock the same shelves and eat the same lunches and take the same amount of shit from customers, co-workers, and Katie everyday.  “Just until my career takes off,” he used to say to friends.  A college degree only helps if your parents know someone.  You tell yourself, have a plan, and stick to the plan.  Then it becomes:  adjust the plan to suit the situation, adjust the situation enough to bare it.  “I’m just waiting for my window.”  The window was painted shut.  His days had started out a rollercoaster you’re eager to ride again and again because the lines are short, but over time you just want to vomit.

Outside the door James could hear the registers beeping in a non-conclusive polyrhythm that made his teeth grind.  He could hear a baby squealing in the cab of one of those shopping carts they fashion to look like a tiny car.  He could hear Ralph over in the Deli telling that stupid joke about the blonde again and laughing all over the bins of condiments and add-ons that they charge a dollar extra for.

Knock!  Knock!  Knock!

This time it was more urgent.  Someone was using the butt of their hand to call attention.  James felt his heart near the back of his throat beating harder and harder.  This can’t be my life, he thought.  Sweat ran down his forehead into his brow.  He used his sleeve to wipe his face.  The Musak changed to an old Madonna song he couldn’t remember the name of.

More muffled voices were coming from outside.  A large angry mob had grown over the last half hour in the hallway.  Outside he could hear their chattering, their urgencies, their complete lack of consideration that this wasn’t the only restroom in the place.  James cleared his throat and said, “Occupied.”  His voice trembled a little bit.  The pistol felt heavy in his hand.  It felt good in his hand.  Got it for a good deal over at Chop Shop Eddie’s.  The best fifty bucks he ever spent.

The knocking grew more impatient.  Indiscernible chatter accompanied it.  James could taste their ugliness.  Suddenly, a voice broke from the crowd.

“Hello?” the voice called out.

“Yes,” James said, “Occupied . . . Occupied.  Someone’s in here.”

“Hurry up in there!” another voice shouted.

“My kid’s about to wet himself!” cried another.

James looked anxiously around the room, tried not to imagine what they looked like.  “Occupied.”

“The guy’s in there jerking off!” a man’s voice yelled.

“I bet he’s got magazines with him!” a fat woman’s voice said.

“No way,” someone else said.  “He’s sexting on his phone!”

“Ohhhhh!  I’ve read about that!  That’s all the kids do these days, the filthy perverts!”

“Open up!”

“Come on!”

A foot started booting at the door, kicking to the rhythm of “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks.  “This is ridiculous!  How long do we have to wait to use the goddamn bathroom here?”  The mob had taken to pushing against the door and yanking at the handle.  James felt like the last survivor of a Zombie outbreak and now they had him.  What do I do, he thought . . . Paranoia.  Terror.  He tried to calm himself by taking deep breaths.  Then he heard someone out there say, “This is inexcusable!  I’m getting the manager!”

James steadied his shaking.  His knees were weak as he rose to his feet.  He looked at his reflection in the crappy old mirror.  His hair was jaggedly parted, and it hung a little too low.  He was damn near white as a ghost and sweating profusely.  He was wearing the same Docker khakis as always and forever, and he donned a JC Penny sweater with Abercrombie polo underneath.  He gently laughed at himself:  what a beautiful disaster.  He took another deep breath.  He switched the pistol to his right hand so that his grip was more confident.  He closed his eyes.  He breathed and breathed.  The sound of the manic crowd banging and yelling and crying and condescending slowly began to fade to sweet, sweet music.  An orchestral piece of sorts began flowing in his mind.  Schoenberg.  Vivaldi.  Beethoven.  Mozart.  They were all there and their arrangements picked him up and soared him out of the store and beyond the parking lot, past the intersections and far, far away, until he could not see anything that made any kind of modern sense to him.      Then, James heard the sound of something jingling:  Keys.  It was a monster set of keys, emerging from the enraged group. It was Katie, the awful, awful demon, an anti-Christ that was coming to destroy him.  This was the person solely responsible for James losing his will to live.  A woman so evil and cruel–she would assign double shifts to single parents Christmas night; she would pull people from their lunch breaks to cover their co-workers shifts; she found simple reasons to give workers the pink slip just to hire fresh fish with little experience and pay them even less.  Remorseless.  And here she was, here to confront James and embarrass him in front of the treacherous, vile citizens who buy microwave dinners, stand in line at the Starbucks hub inside the lobby of the store yapping on their phones when the poor bastards behind the counter want to walk out the front door, who believe everything they read, who need to get the kids home so they can watch another group of delinquents degrade themselves on “reality television” for prizes, abasement and stunted stigma, who steal all meaning from the world and contribute to the reason he was in here in the first place.

James’ eyes opened as the door unlocked.  He raised his arm and met the opening door with pistol aimed and ready.  The first shot went straight through the evil manager’s head and ricocheted off the wall, landing in someone else’s thigh.  The splatter from Katie’s head stopped a lot of the crowd from surging and shut them right up.  James marched through the gauntlet of consumers throwing elbows and head-butting anything or anyone that got in his path, including the brat with the light-up shoes.  At the end of the hallway he saw laughing slobby Ralph and plugged him twice in the gut, dropping Ralph like an epileptic hippo at a strobe light exhibit.

Running through the front doors James heard the universal alarm that can be triggered from any cash register and behind most swinging doors leading to the stock rooms.  If there’s a robbery or a lost child or threat of chemical warfare the alarm is tripped and the police respond within three minutes.  James ran to his piece of shit Toyota and had the thing started before closing the door.  In the rearview he saw the crowd pouring from both entrances of Swifty’s Supermarket.  Most of them were screaming.  They ran in all directions, swarming the parking lot.  Some were covered in blood, some with children under each arm, some carrying bags of unpaid groceries.

James rounded the corner out of the parking lot and made it halfway toward the freeway when the flashing lights clouded his vision and the next thing he knew James was being rear ended by the cops and then his car was being pushed off the road and then he had an officer’s knee in his back and cuffs around his wrists and fingerprint ink smeared across his palm and cameras flashing in his face and an unsympathetic attorney and a judge with a family that delivered a life sentence leading to death row upon him and a cellmate with oneirophrenia and toilet alcohol and pen pals that don’t write back and cholera and insanity and sleepless nights and no life no friends no future and then it’s lights out.

James sat up the night before his execution.  The judge had been damn hard on seeing to it that capital punishment was enforced, given the nature of his psychotic outburst at the supermarket, and it was to be the good old electric chair he would receive.  The prosecutor had actually shaken James hand and laughed in his face after the sentencing.  But that was all years and years ago.  The only thing James had concerns about was he couldn’t make his mind up about what to choose for his last meal.  It was a choice of either a steak with mashed potatoes and carrots with chocolate cake for dessert, or fast food take-out.  The guards even offered to spike his soda with a little bourbon.  “Hell, it may ease you into the situation more willingly,” one guard had said.  Then they both laughed as James looked away.

The thought of a nice steak washed down with all the standard accompaniment was nice to think about, but James figured, if they serve it to me right before they take me away, it won’t have enough time to digest and maybe a nice double cheeseburger from Burger King washed down with bourbon might taste better if I vomit when they throw the switch, or, hopefully not, if I shit myself would it even matter? Mainly seeing how the food hasn’t started to even digest–

Knock!  Knock!  Knock!

James gasped as he threw his head up from his lap. He wiped his face and looked around.  The vodka hadn’t cleared from his system yet and he had fallen asleep while taking a shit again.  His eyes were puffy and when he looked at his watch it was only half past eleven.  He chose to go in the family restroom because there was always a fresh air sanitizer installed, not like the employee restroom where the stacks of magazines collected bacteria and the fan was always broken.

“Occupied,” he said.  He put his head back into his lap.  Then all was quiet except for the goddamned Musak.

• Short Stack