Now, it is not my regular habit to write about needing to relieve myself and use the water closet, but in this instant I feel it is quite necessary to describe in order to gain some perspective on the house itself. Having finished, with the recording studio, I was looking for the nearest bathroom, and it didn’t seem to present itself easily when I finally remembered how tricky Nido made the doors here sometimes. As I began to think about it, I remembered seeing a door that seemed unimportant near the entrance of the recording studio from the stairs, more like a broom closet than a door. When I went to check what looked more like a wall panel than a door, I again found no handle, but becoming savvier with the ways of Nido’s house, I found the easiest way to open the door was simply to push it, and in it went to a bathroom that seemed much larger than I would have expected. I was relieved to finally find it, though I hadn’t really been searching long. The bathroom was unusually laid out with nothing that looked like an traditional commode. There was what seemed to be a slanted and shallower bathtub, with what appeared to be handles on either side. Above this standing bathtub were different vessels of light blue and light brown liquids. The tub had holes all over it, with what I could only imagine were jets for the water. In place of the commonly shaped toilet commode I was expecting was a sort of throne.
I thought the idea of a throne for doing this function was brilliant in its own right, but it looked like a very comfortable sit. There was one difficulty that I didn’t find the catch to immediately and that was that you actually had to pull the seat down since it appeared to be on a spring like system to go back up. Otherwise, it acted more like a urinal. When one would bring the seat down, the room would darken with faint red, green, and blue lights shining in various places around the room. It was actually a very relaxing ambiance and would set one’s mind at ease. There was also a nice sound of streams running in the background with some light Mozart playing. There was also a device that seemed like a Japanese invention I’d heard about once. When one was finished with whatever they needed to do, a bidet like hose would spray a pleasant and cleansing liquid at the necessary parts. I realize this all must sound vulgar, and it is not actually this function of the bathroom that is interesting ultimately, but rather what else the bathroom could do. There were closets full of interesting and unusual items such as tiny towels that could expand to enormous lengths and because of their elasticity would wring themselves out once closed. The slanted bathroom, I later discovered was actually quite interesting to use. The idea behind it was to rest and let the tub itself wash you. The jets would spray out in every which way, and they would spray an environmentally friendly soap mixed with the water to clean one as much as possible.
Now, when I had first walked into the bathroom, I had only one thing on my mind, but after I had taken care of that, I needed to wash my hands with no obvious way of doing so, other than perhaps getting into the tub, which I wasn’t really interested in doing. I then found across the small room, a mirror with what looked to be hand prints in the wall on either side of it. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do exactly at first, but I then approached the mirror and covered the prints with my hands, and I suddenly felt a warm and rather pleasant feeling like a deep massage over my hands. I looked, and there seemed to be a clear liquid running over my hands at this point, like a higher viscosity water, running down and placing a protective layer of oil over my hands. In the mirror, I could see myself and as I looked on different lights would shine over my face as if highlighting different features. These high lights would draw attention to my nose, cheeks, eyes ears and every part you could think of. I hadn’t really paid so much attention to each feature in isolation before. As each section would be illuminated, I could tell that it was more accustomed to Nido’s features than anyone else’s, because some of the highlights would be a little low for me. I wondered what Nido would do while looking at this, and it then came to my attention that below, was a drawer that seemed to magically fabricated itself from the wall, filled with different tools and creams and things you might find in many typical medicine cabinet. In this drawer was a series of buttons that were again marked in Nido’s language but I soon found out what each meant by pressing it.
I pressed one button and suddenly the space beneath my eyes lit up, I pressed another and my chin where a beard might be lit up. This was actually all quite fascinating to me, until I pressed the final button and I suddenly saw the whole room flash in a very lightening pace. I was a little unsure of what happened until I gazed at the mirror again and when I moved my head noticed that the mirror’s image didn’t move with me, but remained completely stationary. It dawned on me that I was looking at a photograph of my face from moments earlier, and the flash must have been the flash of the room to accommodate this. I wondered what the purpose of this all was, but it remained illusive to me except to say that I suspected Nido used this photograph in the mirror to help him achieve certain looks. I couldn’t imagine Nido of all people taking any time for his own vanity, unless maybe he just found it fascinating to study this sort of thing. I called Kelly in to see this and demonstrate what I’d just found, but when I walked away from the mirror, the drawer receded into the wall and the lights all went on as they had when I was in other parts of the bathroom.
I retrieved Kelly and brought her over with me to see this unusual bathroom with the mirror and ‘the hand washing station’ or what I came to refer to in my head as ‘Nido’s sink’. She was impressed and actually very tickled and bemused by the sink especially. As Kelly looked on at each of these little delights, I found something a little more unusual, a chest on the side of the wall. There was nothing particularly interesting about the chest in and of itself, except when I opened it, I found a series of levers and buttons, like the controls to a spaceship in a science fiction novel from the 30’s. I poked and played with these novels and pulled one lever when I heard what sounded like a distant release of a great deal of water. I was a little confused and decided to pull another lever and this time the sound of the water was closer. Still curious as to what had just happened, I pulled another lever and heard what I could describe as the sound one hears from an automatic carwash while in his car. Each time this great sound of liquid and everything would come on, the lever would remain down for what seemed like several minutes and finally grow quieter with the lever righting itself to its original position.
I didn’t know what had just happened but knew it was a frightening sound and it didn’t seem to alleviate. Kelly asked what all of that was, and I explained I didn’t know, but I was curious and just wanted to figure it out so kept touching each of these levers until I had a better understanding of it. She gave me a scalding look of disapproval with a little bit of a groan, but went back to what she was doing with ‘Nido’s Sink’. While I was waiting for the dreadful sound to disappear, I began to take notice of the walls and things around me. I noticed that it had a thematic look of a Roman bath, with pillars painted on the sides, and highly detailed landscapes of what looked to be the Seven Hills of Rome itself. I realized just how avid a student Nido must have been of classics and how it seemed strangely appropriate for him to make his own Roman bath, though there was no attitude of socializing or relaxing here. As a sort of joke, I saw near the commode that Nido had a very simple wooden stick with a sponge on the end. I was told this was the way the Romans would wipe themselves after making use of their mass toilets. Nido had a strange sense of humor about him I was just now beginning to realize, even if it was for only himself. It was now that I remembered a conversation we had had much earlier about the Ancient Romans, and Carthaginians, a particular favorite subject of mine in school, how strange now to see this subject again in his house, in his most unusual bathroom of all things.
A little worried about the noise still, I tried to leave the bathroom but found myself a complete prisoner in this small room. I was actually a little worried by this point, but figured this thing would turn itself off eventually, as the others had. If I was still locked in, I might be a lot more aggressive by that point. Suddenly the sound stopped, and I tried again to push my way out. Again I was forbidden, but I heard another sound that was slightly reassuring to me in a strange way. It was like a low hum emanating from the hall. As I pushed at the door, I felt it became uncomfortably warm to the point of overly hot in a matter of perhaps ten seconds. After the ten seconds had ended, I heard the sound of a lock snapping out of place and suddenly could open the door out into the hallway. The hallway somehow looked different, and it finally dawned on me that it was now extremely clean, much in the same way that the dishes were in the kitchen after I’d shut the drawer. Apparently, though Nido was a janitor, he liked to avoid cleaning his own house himself. I came to understand that he had devised some kind of self cleaning system for the whole house, and I was beginning to appreciate a lot of the aspects of the house I’d seen earlier. This included the doors that would shut themselves so tightly and consistently, as well as just how clean and in its place everything seemed to be. Each item in retrospect must have had some sort of cover for the cascading cleansers that must have covered them.
I thought it was interesting and I now had a better idea of why things seemed so well kept when we first arrived here. Nido must have had the house on a cycle of some sort so as not to accumulate too much dirt or anything. I figured that each room would automatically clean itself in some sort of cycle, but that if Nido wanted, he could clean any particular room at any time. All in all, in retrospect the amount of time for the room to fully clean itself was probably around one or two minutes, but it seemed worse with the horrible feeling of being trapped. I told Kelly about what I thought I’d found, and she was enthusiastic about all of this too. Her only concern was how efficient and wasteful this must have been, I couldn’t answer that straight away, save to say I was fairly sure Nido would take extra precautions to be as diligent in this aspect as any other or he probably wouldn’t have made it the way he did. I wasn’t sure, of course, but I could only imagine that this much thought and planning into a house must have certainly thought of the most cost and resource effective way to do it. Following this extraordinary discovery, we left, and in the basement we decided to enter back into the recording studio and see if we could find anything else, simply because it felt like there should have been more to the basement than these two little rooms. Looking around we discovered we were right when we found another door, that was similarly designed as the first trick door we’d discovered.
