The Bottle

By 2020, I was no longer new. I knew the corridors, the rooms, the habits, and some of the people well enough to speak without measuring every sentence.

There was a man responsible for cleaning the offices. We had become friendly over time. He knew the building in a way none of us did. We knew our own rooms. He knew what remained after we left them.

One day, while we were talking, he mentioned my roommate very casually, as if he were telling me that a chair was broken or that the radiator was leaking.

“He urinates into a bottle in the room,” he said.

I thought I had misunderstood. “What?” He repeated it. Apparently, the toilet was three floors away.

Three floors. This was the explanation.

I stood there trying to understand the distance between the sentence and the world I thought I lived in. Three floors had defeated civilization.

There were elevators. There were stairs. There were toilets. There was plumbing, electricity, internet access, computers, books, degrees, titles, meetings, reports, committees. And somewhere in the middle of all this infrastructure, a plastic bottle had become a personal sewage system.

What disturbed me was not only the act itself. It was the logic behind it. A person had looked at three floors and decided that dignity was more tiring.

I did not know whether to laugh. The cleaning man did not laugh. That made it worse. For him, this was not a story. It was information.

Perhaps buildings are understood best by the people who clean them. The rest of us see doors with names on them. We see titles, positions, offices, bookshelves. They see what people leave behind.

After that conversation, I looked at the room differently. Nothing had changed. The same desks were there. The same computers. The same papers. But once you know something, the room is never innocent again.

For years, I had thought institutions revealed themselves through decisions, meetings, promotions, and official language. Sometimes they do.

Sometimes all you need is a bottle.

It was a small detail. But small details are often where the truth becomes impossible to decorate.