youve just moved into a new place and the bathroom sink has one of those built-in hand soaps you mostly see in public restrooms where the dispenser is attached directly to the tile wall. it still has some soap left in it, so you use it, figuring youll replace it whenever this current batch runs out.
the outside of the dispenser is completely opaque, just a shell of bland, off-white plastic. you cant see inside to determine how much is left. every day, several times a day, you press down on the pump and it spits out a perfect dollop of pale pink soap, slightly runny, smelling of baby powder and something indistinctly floral.
for a long time you dont really think about it at all except to feel distantly grateful towards the former tenants or the landlord or whoever for filling it up for you before you moved in. after a while though it starts to nag at you. the dispenser isnt that big, and still theres been no indication its anywhere near running out. once, feeling experimental, you keep pumping until soap is running down the side of the sink. you listen expectantly for the faint wheeze of a bottle about to run dry. eventually you are forced to give up and resign yourself to cleaning up the pointless mess youve made.
after that day, the sight and smell of your usual hand soap becomes inexplicably nauseating to you. you buy a new bottle scented "ocean breeze" and open up your dispenser to replace it. that is, you try to, only you cant seem to figure out how it opens. after a few minutes of feeling around for some seam or groove in the uniform plastic, you get impatient and start just pulling on the thing, trying to wrench it out of the wall. on the fourth or so good yank, you hear a crack as the shell separates from its mount. when you finally pry it away from the wall, rather than a floppy plastic bag of soap you find the nozzle is connected to a long gray tube, crimped up in a sort of accordion-like design, disappearing into a concealed hole in the wall.
the area around the hole has been stripped of the usual tile and the bare wall beneath is cracked in places, giving the impression that this... device was installed in a hurry by a shoddy contractor, or else jammed straight through the concrete with a degree of brute force you can scarcely imagine. against your better judgment you press down on the dispenser pump and watch the tube shudder and spasm out another perfect dollop of pink into the sinks basin. the pale color suddenly reminds you less of the placid pink of baby showers and powder blush and easter dresses than it does the color of toothpaste spittle after youve flossed a little too hard.
you stand back and, with one hand tightly gripping the hose, give one final, hard pull. hard because you are feeling too unnerved to worry about your security deposit at the moment. final because when you do pull it, you hear a loud thunk on the other side of the wall, an unseen impact that rattles the contents of your medicine cabinet, followed by a low, pained moan.
you never do find out whats on the other side of that wall. you just fix the soap dispenser, and break your lease. its not that you dont wonder-- of course you do. call it a case of sunk cost. youd been living there for at least a couple months, washing your hands, what, three or four times a day? you dont know. youd never had to think about it before. now, whenever it gets a little too quiet and youve run out of distractions to drown it out, its all you can do to keep yourself from running the calculations in your head to completion. how many cups, quarts, gallons overall?
at a certain point, it had to be better not to know. it just had to be.
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