‘I suppose we are the lucky ones, not to have died young with little chance to experience all.’

Jon sat on his toilet, quietly reflecting. The bathroom was like a ceramic tomb, encased in beige tile, old, cold, and sterile. Still, Snorri would have found such a consideration to be quite a luxury. He did have his Snorralaug though, with water that bubbled hot from inside the earth, where he could soak at his leisure and take in the heat to sooth stiff muscles and sore bones.

Jon wished there were a bathtub in his bathroom, something to soak in that would surround him in a veil of warm comfort. But there was only the shower, with the chair in the middle. Not even allowed to stand and welcome the hot rain, you had to sit naked on the plastic seat because you might fall. Probably would fall, sooner or later. It was undignified but he was resigned because he knew there was no way he would be able to lift himself out of a bathtub, he would need to be helped by a stubby nurse or Bruce, the giant black orderly. That would be even more humiliating, being a skinny naked carcass not even able to bath properly. Being flopped around like a limp scrawny doll in Bruce’s giant fingers.

He missed the luxury of it though. Laying in the soapy water, dozing, dreaming, imagining Snorri in his hot pool just outside his door at Reykholt. Imagining himself in the hot natural waters, under the cloudless summer sky when the day never ends and the snow has gone from the distant mountains. His eight hundred year old hot tub is still there in the ground at Reykholt. Jon could rest until Harriet came pounding on the door to warn him that she was entering his domain of solitude. A disruption, a disturbance, shattering his reverie.

His head drooped to his chest, his eyes closed, his trousers down at his ankles, his boney backside embedded in the hole of his toilet seat, as he dreamt about Snorri. It could take twenty or thirty minutes for his business to pass. It had become common for his toilet visit to sometimes become nap time.

It was the pounding on the bathroom door that jolted him awake and scared the shit right out of him. His arms flailed in his half woken state, as if he was defending himself from a swarm of raucous sound, a cacophony of troubled disconnected noise from a nether place.

“Jon,” the voice yelled. “Jon. Crazy Greta is dead.” It was Karl Homesman. “Jon, they found her in the stairwell by two. Slumped over like a sack of potatoes. Crazy Greta. Jon, you in there? You okay?”

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