Dinah Lebowitz had lived in the Bay Area of California her entire life, but as the digital clock on her dashboard steadily crept towards 11pm, she found herself driving down streets she never knew existed. Certainly not a re-assuring feeling seeing mile after mile of dilapidated buildings covered with graffiti as she made her way towards her appointed destination.
The navigation system said she was on track, but each time the car made a funny sound or she took a bump in the road wrong, an icy razor nicked at Dinah's spine. This wasn't an area she wanted to break down.
The goosebumps on her bare thighs rubbing together like sandpaper as she shifted anxiously in her seat, Dinah's head filled with the scent of the special perfume Carlton had told her to wear. Tresor wasn't a brand she'd ever worn, and being in the closed confines of her car, with her apprehensiveness working on overdrive, she cringed knowing that scent was going to be imprinted on her brain no matter how the rest of the evening turned out.
"Why does he want me to wear this particular perfume?" she asked herself several times, desperate for anything to take her mind off the millions of other things that would certainly distract her from the task at hand.
The answer to that question would come soon enough.
_______________________________
There were several truckstops dotting the landscape out there on that stretch of interstate near San Lorenzo where the 880 and the 580 met. Each one lit up the night sky like the neon beacon of a casino as Dinah steered through the maze of big rigs in her severely out of place hybrid.
Having weathered more earthquakes than she cared to, Dinah could feel the ground below rumble from the line of heavy trucks passing her in every direction, just adding to the surreal, out of body experience she was feeling.
Checking the truck stop name on the sign with the one she'd written down, Dinah pulled into an out of the way parking spot, cut the engine and surveyed her surroundings as truckers and lot-lizards alike, scurried like tiny ants across the darkened lot.
Less than an hour before, Dinah Lebowitz had been seated with her fellow board members, charting the course for the local school system for years to come. Two months earlier, she'd even been profiled in the Mercury News as one of Northern California's most influential women. Now she was casing the men's room behind a large interstate truck stop, a few towns from home, waiting for the right time (if there was such a thing) to duck inside, unseen.
No one had entered the bathroom in the 10 minutes she sat in the car, and even though she knew some men took their sweet time once they were situated inside, she had to believe if someone had been, they would have come out by then. A shawl wrapped around her head and her chunkiest sunglasses concealing her face, Dinah looked eerily like the Unabomber's infamous composite drawing as she lowered her head and made a beeline towards the door.
"With a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans, you could have pulled this cross gender thing off," Dinah told herself, but it wasn't happening considering the skirt Carlton had insisted on her wearing.
The men's room smelt as bad as Dinah had feared. As prominent as the Tresor was, it did little to mute the other distasteful notes stirring around her. The vibration of all those tractor trailers outside still noticeable under her feet as she stood between the rows of four sinks and four enclosed toilets, Dinah fought the urge to steal even one peek at herself in the cracked and pockmarked mirrors beside her.
"He said the second one," Dinah remembered back to the terse but explicitly detailed instructions Carlton had sent her.
Assuming he meant the second stall as you entered, Dinah crept closer and pushed open the swinging door, desperate to take some level of cover before anyone walked in.
It was exactly as he described. Not that there was all that much to see.
There were the scattershot and extremely lewd drawings and poems scrawled across the walls, not to mention a heaping helping of phone numbers. Seeing those, Dinah congratulated for keeping some level of privacy during her online chats. The toilet itself was, thankfully, in better shape than she thought. She'd seen much worse sights in several of the schools she'd worked in over the years.
Just as she was about to step inside, Dinah froze when she saw the one identifiable feature Carlton had mentioned in his email. There was a crudely cut hole carved between stalls 2 and 3, about the size of Dinah's fist, if she balled it up and tried placing it through. The oval shaped gap appeared to be cut with a pocketknife, then sanded down enough to give it a tolerable amount of smoothness around the edges.
The crude implication of the hole's purpose weighed on Dinah's mind, but she did her best not to try and picture the vast array of sins that had taken place in the very spot she stood over the past few weeks, months or years.
The gravity of her entire existence seemingly was being sucked into that waist high hole to her left, as if an alternate universe was on the other side trying to reel her in. Dinah was so lost trying to fight that hypnotic pull, she barely heard the restroom's outer door swing open, and the echo of cowboy boots headed her way. Crouching like a frightened cat into the corner of the stall, Dinah reached out and fumbled to lock the door. Putting her hands to her mouth as she waited for the man to pass, the sound of his breathing sent chills down the back of her neck as his presence filled the enclosed room.
She only had a brief sliver of a view through the crack in the door, but enough to tell this guy wasn't Carlton. Dinah even let out a meek sigh of relief when she heard his piss stream hit the urinal instead of ponying up in the stall beside her. She knew he had to smell her perfume, it was way too distinct to miss in such an environment. Assuming this guy was one of the truckers out there on the lot, she was sure he encountered oddities of this ilk often during his travels. Even behind the closed door, Dinah could sense the man's bemusement as he washed and dried his hands. She was sure he even tried stealing a peek inside the door on his way out.
Real fear suddenly struck Dinah. Realizing her chance to scurry from the bathroom like a bat out of hell, and return to her regularly scheduled life was dwindling, every single little noise, real or imagined, caused her to flinch as she cowered on the toilet.
Another minute or so passed before the outside door creaked open again.
The new man's footsteps and cadence of breathing once again left Dinah pressing the knuckles of her right hand to her mouth, wondering if this could be Carlton.
"You know it is," a distant, almost ethereal voice inside her head chimed, as if something deep in the core of her psyche recognized the young man's presence from all the times he sat in her office, or walked past her in the halls, a decade earlier.
Seeing his tan work boots beneath the bottom of the door, Dinah could tell he was black just from the passing glance she was able to make through the door's crack when he strode past. The lump in her throat growing as she waited for him to continue on to the urinals, Dinah opened both palms and cradled her sunglass covered face in her hands when she heard the door of the stall beside her swing open.
"DGL64" he mumbled, wasting no time unbuckling his pants as he inquired.
Her tongue dryer than a Death Valley gully, Dinah was finally able to choke back a reply, praying he wouldn't recognize her muffled voice after all those years.
"...Yes," her parched lips managed.
"Good," he casually replied just before tugging the zipper of his fly down.
"Now get down on your knees," Carlton curtly added.
