To Pee or Not to Pee

by Virginia Konchan

An unnamed, middle-aged female Amazon Fulfillment worker getting paid $12/hour without benefits, working 40 hours a week, with a one-hour bus commute each way from a cramped, airless studio apartment in a rundown building infested by rodents with no hot water and only a microwave to cook meals purchased with her few remaining dollars debates with herself whether it’s worth it to risk using the restroom at the warehouse to urinate, five hours into her shift, to relieve herself of the vending machine coffee and several gulps of water she drank earlier in her shift, which began at 4am.  The debate is prompted by how the management team has purposefully constructed the warehouse as a neo-panopticon with spy cameras, wherein the restrooms are located a solid half-mile from the factory assembly line.

While first posing this question to herself as a logistical conundrum, despite having no education in math, logic, philosophy, or physics, she then decides to frame her vocational dilemma as existential, recalling the soliloquy from Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In a moment of theatrical inspiration, she says out loud in a stage whisper (yet soft enough that no other factory workers hear): “To pee or not to pee:  that is the question.”  Emotionally overcome with her newfound capacity to aestheticize her trauma, when heretofore she only screamed, sobbed, and raved, like Ophelia (who met with bitter ends), she reaches into her faux-leather purse for her last stick of Trident gum, which she unwraps, places in her dry mouth, chews for a moment, then deposits in a used Kleenex, before taking a long, deep breath.

Knowing she only has mere seconds left on the clock before her brief gasp of freedom is espied by the shift supervisor, Frank, a surly, portly, 50-something middling middle-manager with a mean ax to grind with every woman on the floor, despite himself having a nice, hard-working, stay-at-home wife and two young girls, she digs deep into her fuzzy memory of her high school English class, when she memorized Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy in two weeks by rote, remembering and reinventing, as a high performance art/low labor mixtape, these lines:

“To pee or not to pee, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler to take it in the behind
without whining, than to suffer the slings
of outrageous fuckery from the front door.
I would take arms against a sea of troubles
and end them, but I have no arms, because
they’ve been anesthetized by exhausting,
repetitive, wage labor exploitation, in an
impure capitalist world where women sell
their bodies, and men, their parts, as pimps.
To die, to sleep no more:  but I’m not alive!
How could death end this paradox, when
even my very heart is on the auction block,
a thousand unnatural shocks of hollering men
naming their prices, before the gavel lands?
To what is flesh heir?  Not consummation,
which is wedding sex, but consumption,
what you become when reduced to meat:
a hell devoutly to be feared, yet it’s here.
Ay, there’s the rub a dub dub in the tubby tub:
for in that sleep of death they live and call life,
what dreams may come when they hear me sing,
having already devoured my mortal umbilical coil
I’ve shunted off before realizing my desire to pee?
My rebellion may give them pause, but no respect
for my soul, my service, my sacrifice or my debt:
my daily calamity finances their caviar on ice,
protracting this vile nightmare for they and I,
that could have been a utopian paradise.”

Overcome, she closes her eyes briefly, grabs her purse, scans the factory quickly to ensure that no one heard her nor detected her momentary absence from the processing line, and, deciding that she’d rather live free, and pee, than die on her knees, with a bursting bladder made more urgent by the birth of three children (the third, a boy, she birthed vaginally, alone, at 3am in a Shell Oil parking lot, not being able to afford either an ambulance or hospital birth, yet still feels guilty about the blood and placenta she ejected in the weeds, a home-away-from-home outdoor delivery also filmed with security cameras), she strides quietly and determinedly toward the distant restroom, head down but not bowed, counting her steps to calm herself, as if sheep.

Pausing at the threshold before the door, she checks her watch, and, seeing that she still has 2 minutes and 14 seconds left on the clock from the time of her likely witnessed departure from the location of her impromptu soliloquy to return, she barrels through the gender neutral door (Amazon is very respectful of the bathroom rights of all persons, as long as they have the bravery, stealth, fortitude, and efficiency to execute a covet-op, Mission Impossible pee break), blinks rapidly under the florescent lights, crouches to the floor to check for shoes, and, seeing none, chooses the larger stall, as she’s clumsy and carries a large mom purse, which makes skillful maneuvering in a tight, enclosed space difficult, flings open the door, says a breathless Hail Mary with her pants down while urinating, then zips up, flushes, flings back open the door, washes her red, bleached, age-spotted hands with a modest squirt of Clorox-smelling soap, dries her hands on the sides of her cotton Walmart slacks, gathers what’s left—nothing—of her wits, and sprints not toward but through the door, propelling the door’s opening not with her elbow or hand like most leisurely, normal folks, but her forehead, like a bull storming a matador who has had enough of a lifetime of taunting, stupidity, and death, and, thrusting it open with her skull like a crowning baby, but without the mother’s dilations and contractions easing the passage, plunges through into glory, which turns out to be just the other side of the bathroom door.

The author of four poetry collections, including Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022), and Hallelujah Time (Véhicule Press, 2021), and a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift, well as coeditor of the craft anthology Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), my work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Believer.