MY GRANDFATHER'S TOILETS

My grandfather bought three Toto toilets sometime in the late 1980s: one for the master bathroom, one for the guest bathroom and one for the hall bathroom, the one whose every conceivable surface is covered in mirrors. Once in a while, for fun, I'd poop in the hall bathroom. It was nothing short of a psychedelic experience. While defecating I could look in any direction and see thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of reflections of myself having a bowel movement, the images spiraling backwards towards the horrible, eternal infinite. I waved and my infinity of selves waved back.
     One day my grandfather called to tell me the news about the new toilets.
     "Shawn," he said, "I just bought three silent-flushing toilets."
     "Wow, Grandpa," I said, "That's great."
     "They cost me two thousand dollars. . . ," he said, clearly exhilarated, "each!"
     I don't know why he thought I should know how much his toi- lets cost.
     "Wow," I said.
     Apparently, Toto toilets are some of the best toilets. They are the Rolls Royce of toilets.
     "When you flush them," he said, nearly deranged, "you can't hear anything."
     Neither of us added anything for a minute. Then he said, "They're completely silent."
     My grandfather had trouble sleeping at night. He'd stay up until two or three in the morning, thinking about the past, something someone once told him twenty years prior that pissed him off or something someone did that he thought was somehow a betrayal of his trust and he'd get angry all over again, purposely reliving the most divisive moments from his past; or else he'd watch some History Channel documentary about the Holocaust which would recount, once again, the Jewish death toll, Nazi methodology, and Allied liberation of the concentration camps. The Toto toilets allowed my grandfather to sleep in as long as he needed. You see, if either my grandmother or I flushed the toilet in the morning, the sound of the water being flushed through the condo's piping would almost certainly wake him up. And when he woke up before he'd had enough sleep he was entirely unpleasant to be around.
     The next time I visited him he immediately walked me into the guest room, where I stayed, and into the bathroom.
     "Have I got something to show you," he boomed. "Look at this toilet," he said. "It's beautiful isn't it?"
     "Uhm, yeah," I said. I didn't know what else to say. I didn't realize at the time that it was possible to become so excited about a toilet. But I have to admit; it was the most modern, most elegant toilet I'd ever seen.
     "Shh," he said holding his long index finger over his lips, "listen." My grandfather bent down and pressed the wide, flat silver handle. All I heard was the sound of a distant, soft rush of water. It could have been a small creek trickling through an ancient, remote forest. It could have been the sound of a memory being vacuumed into the forever of nothingness.
     "Perfect," he said, "just perfect."