Fearless by Rafael Yglesias

didn’t blame her for keeping him out, but he had no patience, and so he unzipped and splattered the granite. She saw him do it from the window and rushed away, probably to phone the police. A man across the street stopped to watch him. In the summer heat it would smell when her young husband came home. Max had been full. Minutes seem to pass and yet it poured out of him. Max thought there was plenty of time for the cops to arrive. He imagined her report:
    “There’s a man peeing on our renovated brownstone.”
    The whitish gray of the granite darkened from his pee. “I’m aging you. I’m giving you a more European look,” Max said as his stream became arched, then sporadic and finally a trickle.
    “That’s disgusting!” the man who had been watching from across the street yelled at him.
    The young mother looked out the window again. Max stared at her as he zipped up. She jerked back at his intensity. Her brown hair fell across her face like a curtain.
    “Sorry,” he said to her, mouthing the words and gesturing helplessly. He moved toward his car.
    Seeing Max come in his direction, the man across the street trotted away fearfully.
    A world of suspicion and cowardice, Max thought. A world without enough public bathrooms. Unvandalized bathrooms, he corrected himself. He had designed a pair for a city renovation of a small park in Brooklyn. “No nooks and crannies for muggers,” the Parks Department official advised. “And keep ledges to a minimum. Avoid anything that would encourage people to sleep or camp out.”
    Max had worked to make the structure bright and airy—an outhouse with plumbing. He drew a skylight, aware that its protective cage would cast a medieval shadow; and he planned a row of windows just below the roofline that would also be marred by bars; but the extra light would keep the space open anyway. The stalls were generous, thanks to the new regulations for the benefit of the handicapped. Max also insisted that the urinals have barriers between them for privacy. Max hated public bathrooms that forced unnecessary intimacy. He remembered the shame of modest and insecure adolescence when obliged to go in public.
    The city liked his design and built them. Unfortunately, both were kept locked to bar drug dealers and the homeless. If you wanted to use them you had to hunt down a ranger. Max had visited the park twice and not seen one. He wondered if anyone besides the work crews had ever used the facilities. By his second visit, the exteriors of his bathrooms were covered by a spider’s web of graffiti written in black paint. One window had been smashed somehow, despite its inaccessible height and bars.
    “Frank Lloyd Wright it ain’t,” Jeff had said about the finished product. He was bitter because the city didn’t contract for more. “They think your bathrooms are too elaborate. I said: ‘What? You don’t care for the bidets?’ ”
    Max didn’t laugh at the memory of Jeff’s joke. He saw Jeff’s severed head instead and felt pity for him. Jeff whined and itched and complained about everything in his life, but he had loved the world, and believed that every day held the promise of his redemption. Even if he did see redemption in the form of a long-term contract from Nutty Nick stores.
    Could I say that at his funeral? Max wondered. He was lost in Pittsburgh, driving through an unfamiliar suburb past the campus. There was a youthful air to the neighborhood. He stopped at an intersection next to a pair of college-age kids. They came up to his car right away, before he had begun to lower his window, as if they knew he needed directions.
    “Hey, what’s up?” asked the one who was blond and thick. His muscles had the shape of a bodybuilder’s. His friend was small and skinny and dark. The blond’s tone was hostile and challenging.
    “It’s rented,” the skinny one said, nodding at Max’s car.
    Max asked how to get back to the city proper. He wanted to find the International House