The locker room and the Big Buddies
The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious. Luther’s shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther’s 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany. […] Women’s slippers, centurions’ dusty sandals, dock-workers’ hobnailed boots, Popes’ slippers. All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping.
Context
Hal spots the tip of Schacht's enormous purple shower thong under a stall door, and one glimpsed posture opens a shaft straight down through recorded time — Luther, train-station salesmen, centurions, Popes, and finally firelit men in skins with wadded leaves in hand. Time's depth measured not by a clock but by a single position the species has always held: waiting as the oldest human tense, "timeless millennial," almost religious. (The trimmed middle is the salesmen "awaiting the acid gush.")