Automatic Shift

There are few sights more laughably pathetic than the broken automatic urinal. Two types of this beast populate restrooms where the reach of initial outlays has exceeded the grasp of maintenance.

Some broken automatic urinals flush all the time, without regard for their surroundings, so the result sounds like a tinny, aspirated fountain has been transported into the bathroom to accompany your dalliance. The other type, as you may have guessed, is the type that never flushes at all, and where man after man has availed himself of the facility. The resulting odor is certainly describable, but perhaps it should not be described. In any case, the urine sits, immobile, beyond the ken of normal man.

Such a urinal did Kevin Styson encounter as he entered the bathroom at the back of a small hole-in-the-wall serving modestly priced Chinese food. He has the obligatory ain't-that-a-shame thought before, optionless, stepping up to the urinal. At which time water started flowing in eager torrents down the urinal's sides and into the pipes beyond.

Kevin was a man of the world, fazed by little, and so he continued his preparation unperturbed. The water continued gushing, actually quite a ridiculous amount for such a small urinal, thought Kevin, until he had actually reached and passed the endpoint of his preparation.

Before the golden shaft hit porcelain, the water stopped.

Now Kevin was somewhat perplexed, but his perplexity did not impede the task at hand, so to speak. He stepped up and moved away from the urinal, expecting the gushing to start again. It did not.

In the manner of man dealing with automatic urinals since time immemorial, Kevin placed his hand briefly in front of where he thought the electronic sensor should be, then withdrew it. Water continued not flowing. More out of scientific curiosity than anything else, he waved his hand up and down in front of the whole electronic-looking apparatus, slowly, and withdrew it.

Still nothing.

Employing a typical masculine reasoning process (the same that had allowed the urinal to remain unflushed for countless hours before Kevin had his encounter), Kevin decided if he couldn't do anything about it, it wasn't his problem and, therefore, he didn't need to tell anyone about it. He washed his hands and returned to his table in time to snatch the last fortune cookie from the grasping fingernails of his girlfriend.

The paper inside read: "Eschew complexity in favor of the simplest possible thinking."

Kevin tried to suppress a chuckle.

"What's so funny?" his girlfriend asked.

"You don't want to know," Kevin replied.

Although Kevin normally would have been quite content to go back to his apartment and watch "Die Hard With A Vengeance" after his Oriental repast, tonight was a special night, in that his girlfriend was making him take her to the opera under pain of extreme moodiness. So they both entered Kevin's beloved old Saab, which although fraying had not lost all its dignity, and Kevin conducted them both to the performing arts complex. On the way Kevin's girlfriend noticed him looking strangely at the traffic lights, which Kevin explained by saying, "I don't know where I'm going that well, okay? I don't want to get lost." Which was true enough, and the trip passed without further incident.

The performing arts complex had an underground parking garage, and its entrance was common to the type: two lanes on a long downward slope from the street, each with a black-and-white striped bar that raised itself to permit entry or egress. The lane for leaving was controlled by a man in a booth taking usurious amounts of money from satiated operagoers. The lane for entry merely required that one press a button on a yellow-painted metal box raised about a yard above the concrete, and take a ticket from it. After the ticket had been taken, the bar would be raised, and one could see about the business of actually finding a space.

Kevin, his girlfriend, and the Saab containing them descended the long slope of the driveway and pulled up to the box. As they reached the box, Kevin noticed in the back of his mind that the bar was still raised, and they could probably enter without taking a ticket at all. However, Kevin, no fool he, was aware of the incredible amount of money charged to parking ticket-less opera patrons for the privilege of exiting the parking lot, and so he pushed the green button to get a ticket.

As Kevin took the ticket, the gate bar swung down like the blade of the guillotine having its way with Marie Antoinette's neck.

Kevin paused briefly, then pushed the button again. No response.

This time Kevin whacked the button with the flat of his fist, in the manner his father had used when dealing with recalcitrant household appliances. The feeling of satisfaction this approach gave Kevin was instantly dissipated by the gate bar's continued motionlessness.

"Dammit," Kevin said.

"Maybe if you back up and go forward again it'll let us through," his girlfriend suggested.

Kevin, knowing a good idea when he heard one, backed up a few feet. The gate swung violently upwards.

"Okay, then," Kevin said, and eased the car forward, at which point the gate bar swung just as violently downward. At this point the driver of the car behind Kevin had started a loud, audible discussion with his passenger about what the hell Kevin could possibly be doing up there.

Not a man to try to think of a new idea until all the old ideas had been tried repeatedly, Kevin backed up the car much faster than he had the first time, and, seeing the gate shoot up, slammed on the gas, intending he didn't quite know what. What happened was that Kevin had to stomp the brakes to avoid knocking the gate bar out of the way, which was more an instinctive reaction than a considered decision. At this point, the considered decision might well have gone the other way. In any case, Kevin now left the car and walked up to the booth for assistance. As soon as he left the car, of course, catcalling horns echoed up and down the driveway from bewildered, impatient prospective operagoers. Kevin resisted the urge to yell something back at them, mainly because his girlfriend was in the car.

He tapped on the glass for what seemed an eternity. At some point, the man in the booth found his way to turn around and talk to Kevin.

"The bar won't go up," said Kevin.

"Push the button," replied the man in the booth.

"I did that," said Kevin, and produced three tickets as proof.

"Well, back up and try again," said the man in the booth.

"I did that," Kevin replied, a little less calm than he was at the beginning of this exchange, which was already a little less calm than he would have liked to have been. Right now he was thinking of backing up and having the man stand under the bar before it came down.

The man came out of the booth––Kevin's girlfriend remarked later that she had never seen that door actually used before––and made his way, with incredible deliberateness, over to the gate bar's raising and lowering mechanism, where he produced one of those tools that defies description, that interact with one solitary piece of obscure machinery and do that well. Very slowly, he started turning the tool. The bar moved an infinitesimal amount upward.

"This thing really doesn't want to go up!" the man said.

Kevin snorted and got back in the car, to wait.

"What did he say?" asked his girlfriend.

"He said the thing doesn't want to go up."

"Don't we know it. Jesus. Look how slow he's going." One thing about Kevin's girlfriend, she was a good sport most of the time.

"But you know, when we were backing up, it seemed to work. I just…"

"What?"

"Nothing. It doesn't really make any sense."

Kevin, to his distinct and pleasant surprise, enjoyed the opera, because it was one of those operas where a great many people meet their respective untimely deaths, and the way the soloists were singing, Kevin could tell they were really feeling it. His girlfriend was as pleasantly surprised as Kevin was that he had enjoyed it, and that made Kevin happy, and life was good, regardless of minor disturbances that may have cast dark clouds over it earlier. They were holding hands in the foyer of the opera house, and his girlfriend suggested that they take a walk out on the terrace, which afforded a nice view of the lighted nighttime city in all its splendor.

Kevin's girlfriend, a bit flighty, let go of Kevin's hand in haste and skipped through the automatic doors ahead of him. Kevin followed closely, until he realized that he had just run smack into the now-closed doors.

Kevin stepped back and uttered a few mild oaths as his girlfriend went (a bit too carefreely, Kevin thought) off to the edge of the terrace to take in all the view that she possibly could. Back at the door, and seeing no way to get much beyond the door, Kevin considered the situation. His nose was not bleeding, which was first priority, as he would have been out of the running for amorous favors of any kind if his proboscis was going to drip blood in the clinch. Nonetheless, Kevin was standing two feet from a door which, by design and by Kevin's right as an object composed of matter and standing a certain distance from the ground, should have been open, and yet was not, and furthermore did not seem particularly inclined to entertaining thoughts of doing so.

"What in the hell…" Kevin said. He stepped back further, watching the door for some sign of his girlfriend, who would soon undoubtedly be wondering where he was, and more than a bit annoyed. And, he had to admit, rightly so. As he stepped back, the door gradually opened, until he was about seven feet from the door and it was completely ready for passage of any kind.

Higher concepts were not formed remarkably quickly by Kevin's brain, but they did eventually make their way into his consciousness when circumstances demanded it. In this case, Kevin was beginning to make a connection between the two previous events described here and the present, seemingly intractable situation.

He stepped very cautiously towards the door.

It closed slightly.

He backed up to his previous position, watching the door like a hawk in case it tried anything funny or untoward. It opened fully again.

Another operagoer passed through the open door without incident, and looked at Kevin with a strange expression halfway between curiosity and superciliousness, and perhaps encompassing briefly the idea that Kevin was some kind of country bumpkin who had never seen an automatic door before, Kevin, this man who was a tower of knowledge (as all modern men are, and must be) about how automatic things operate.

Kevin, standing unconsciously in a professional wrestler's stance now, arms out and legs bent slightly to deal with any unexpected move by the door, thought he might be expected to explain himself to his girlfriend, who had not been in the bathroom earlier. As with so many ominous thoughts, the portent held in this one was almost instantly fulfilled.

"Kevin?" came the query from the terrace. "Kevin? Where are you? Why aren't you out here?"

Kevin took a deep breath. "I'm in here. The door is messed up or something…"

A tornado entered the lobby. "Why aren't you out here? What's wrong with the door? What does that mean? Come on, go through the door!" And with that, thinking that Kevin was being playfully recalcitrant, grabbed his arm and flung him at the automatic doors.

It was one of Kevin's major points of pride that his current girlfriend worked out, was fairly pumped up and toned , and was strong enough to take care of herself in any encounters with the stray mugger or aggressive religious proselytizer around a subway station or on a dark street. This was still, in some objective way, a point of pride with Kevin, although in the time he was flying at the doors he absolutely knew were going to shut forever and with immovable firmness he found himself wondering how he had attained such a great velocity.

This time, his nose was bleeding.

"Oh my God, what happened?"

"I tole you da door was broken…"

"Oh my God, oh Kevin, I'm so sorry…" Again, his girlfriend was basically a good sport, and helped him stop the bleeding along with a discomfited opera house janitor, and Kevin couldn't really blame her for just asking to be dropped off. He did, after all, have a veritable Everest of gauze in the middle of his face. He made a mental note as she got out of the car and told him again how glad she was that he enjoyed the opera to take her to the opera again sometime when everything was working normally. Whenever that was, or would be.

Kevin drove down the driveway of his apartment building's garage to the automatic door governing access, thought for five seconds, backed up out of the driveway, parked on the street, took the stairs up to his apartment, and went to bed.

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