orking women don’t get to scurry home and bury their faces in pillows when they’ve been yelled at. You settle your trembling hands by wrapping them around your tools and returning to work. Elisa had wanted to talk about what she’d seen and heard—the giant hand slapping the tank window, the animalistic roar. From Elisa’s first startled signs, though, it became clear that Zelda hadn’t seen the hand and had taken the roar for yet another distasteful animal experiment that would only sicken her to consider in detail. So Elisa keeps her thoughts to herself, wondering if it’s possible that Zelda is right and she mistook the whole thing.

The best thing for tonight is to scrub the images from her mind, and scrubbing is something Elisa is good at. She’s in and out of toilet stalls in the northeast men’s room, stabbing her swab under rims. Zelda, done mopping the floor, wets a pumice stone in the sink and frowns at the piss-crusted urinal partition she’s squared off against for years, searching for a fresh complaint to lift their spirits. Elisa believes in Zelda as she believes in few others: She will find that complaint, and it will be funny, and they will begin to crawl from under this sticky film of debasement left by all those judging men.

“Finest minds in the country, they tell us, gathered right here at Occam—and there are pee freckles on the ceiling. You know Brewster’s not the crispiest chip in the bag, but even he hits the target seventy-five percent of the time. I don’t know if I ought to be depressed about this or go get the Guinness Records folks on the line. Maybe they’ll give me a finder’s fee.”

Elisa nods and signs “Get on the telephone,” opting for an old-fashioned, two-piece model to evoke visions of a herd of New York City correspondents with PRESS badges tucked into their fedoras. Zelda gets the reference and grins—a bursting relief of a sight—and Elisa presses the joke, wiggling her fingers in the sign for “teletype,” then signing a suggestion to send a letter via pigeon. Zelda laughs and gestures at the ceiling.

“I can’t even figure out the angle of the—you know what I mean? I don’t want to be indecent here. But if you think about the physics and all that? The angle of the garden hose, the direction of the spray?”

Elisa giggles soundlessly, scandalized and so very grateful.

“Only thing I can figure is it’s a competition. Kind of like the Olympics? Points for height and distance. Points for style if you waggle it really good. And to think, all these years, we thought these science types didn’t have any physical skills.”

Elisa is in full silent guffaw, rocking back against the stall, the night’s events bleaching away under Zelda’s off-color scenario.

“Hey, there’s two urinals here,” Zelda chuckles. “I don’t think synchronized peeing is out of the question—”

A man walks in. Elisa turns from the toilet, Zelda from the urinal. He wasn’t there; now he is. It’s so incredible, the women forget to react. A plastic sign reading CLOSED FOR CLEANING is all that defends female janitors from the threat of male incursion, but it’s always been sufficient. Zelda starts to point at the sign, but her arm dies midway; it’s not a janitor’s place to assert the existence of physical objects to a man of higher station, and besides, her gibes about men’s bathroom practices are still ringing from every pipe, locknut, and escutcheon of the undersink. Elisa feels shame, then shame for feeling shame. Thousands of times she and Zelda have cleaned this room, and it takes one single man to make them feel like the obscene ones.

The man paces coolly to the middle of the room.

He holds in his right hand an orange cattle prod.