It was almost quiet in the men’s room at the opera house. The music taking place on the stage was, of course, piped in through small round speakers on the ceiling, but that was it. The speakers were painted “Opera House Restroom Ceiling White”, which would have also looked acceptable on the walls of the opera house restroom. Jason was in the handicapped stall on all fours near the commode with his nose to the black and white octagonal tiles. He dared not let it make contact, but he’d been in the handicapped stall in the opera house restroom for the last half hour trying to track down the source of the scent of his mother’s perfume, and his standards for how intimate he got with the room had declined sharply in that time. Even members of high society had to step on awful things to reach the handicapped stall in the men’s restroom in the opera house. There was an empty space around a single tile, and behind it seemed to be the source of the smell. He had no keys or effects from his wallet, since he put those things in his wife Evelyn’s purse when he wore this particular tuxedo. He was, however, chewing a piece of gum, and he decided in that moment that if he stuck the gum to the tile and couldn't pull it up, he’d leave the men’s room and return to the performance. But the gum worked.
He lifted the tile and set it and the green blob of Wrigley’s Extra on top of it next to the hole in the bathroom floor. Without the tile, the smell coming from below rapidly grew more complex. In addition to his mother’s Chanel No. 5, he could now detect hints of the perfume his first real girlfriend wore. It was cheap purple stuff in a plastic spray bottle, and he was suddenly overwhelmed with visions of his youth spent making mistakes with reckless abandon. Throughout his adult life he’d seen the same purple bottle in stores and chuckled to himself, but here on the bathroom floor at the opera house he didn't feel like chuckling at all. In fact, he was overcome with a very strong urge to run out of the restroom screaming, but the light emitting from the hole in the floor drew him in. As he drew his eye to the hole in the floor, he could faintly hear a song playing on the other side over the concerto coming out of the ceiling speakers. It was Otis Redding singing ‘Love Man’, and it had been his favorite song when he was still at the mercy of his parent’s cassette tape collection. He suddenly saw himself cross legged on the living room floor with the big cushioned headphones over his ears trying to fast forward to the end of the song that came on before ‘Love Man’. Jason quickly put his eye to the hole and looked in, and in the room below a tall shadow of a man crossed the mustard yellow carpet towards Jason’s line of sight.
Just then, three men came into the bathroom laughing and talking about the show. Jason lept to his feet and straightened his tuxedo jacket as well as he could. He flushed the toilet in the handicapped stall in the men’s room in the opera house, nudged the gum-topped tile back into place, and made his way to the sink. He washed his hands and face thoroughly and walked briskly back to his seat.