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gavin torvik
you can evict me from my apartment but you can't evict me from my imagination

11/27/25: toilet: refuge & risk

After yesterday's blogpost about CJ Cherryh's novel Rimrunners, I am once again thinking about one of my favourite subjects: CJ Cherryh on the toilet. Please bear with me. I don't mean "on the toilet" as in sitting on it, I mean like her perspective on the toilet. Please bear with me. I don't mean her perspective like what she sees when she's on the toilet I mean like

Please bear with me.

In Cherryh's fiction, the bathroom is two things at once: it is a sanctuary and a zone of acute danger. It is a sanctuary because it is a private space, where one may be vulnerable. But because it is a place where one is vulnerable it is also dangerous.

Examples:

IN RIMRUNNERS:

  • Early in the novel, protagonist Bet Yeager is unemployed and secretly living in a public toilet. Specifically, she sleeps in one of the stalls. As I described in my previous post, Bet has strategically chosen the women's restroom as her shelter for two reasons: 1) if a woman comes in during the night, Bet reasons that it is not uncommon for a woman to enter, use, and depart the bathroom while another woman occupies a stall the whole time; there is nothing unusual about a woman taking a lot of time in there so no woman will be suspicious of the fact that Bet is in the stall; 2) if Bet hears a man's footsteps/breathing/ambient noises enter the room, this likely means trouble, as men do not enter the women's room unless they are up to no good; at best his entering of the women's is a drunken mistake, which makes him no less dangerous than a prowler entering on purpose.
  • Later in Rimrunners, Bet does her first hyperspace jump as a crewmember of the scoutship Loki. In Cherryh-space, hyperspace is a dangerous endeavour that the human mind cannot handle. People must put themselves into medically induced comas before each jump. When they wake up, hours, days, or weeks have passed, depending on the jump. Everyone is severely calorie deficient, must jam down a packet of vitamin-dense gel, and leap back to duty. Everyone has to piss really bad. Imagine how bad you have to pee first thing in the morning and quadruple it. So there is a mad scramble for... the bathroom! Bet, being new to the Loki, an outsider, does not have the privileges of more senior crew, who have to piss quick so they can get back to active duty. So she keeps getting bumped back in the bathroom line and is horrified that she is going to piss her pants in front of everyone. The bathroom becomes a locus of the power structures at play onboard Loki, a concretization of Bet's outsider status, and a potential source of unbearable humiliation. She has endured horrible deprivations and humiliations in her time spent homeless, which she keeps secret from her crewmates; she is eager to put that all behind her and start again. Pissing herself in front of everyone would remind her of her low state and show weakness in front of a ruthless, cliquey crew that she must put up a tough front for. Female incontincence is a common thing, especially as women age, and a source of inconvenience and shame. The fact that Cherryh has harnessed this into a charged story moment is unique in science fiction and deeply impressive to me.

    IN PRIDE OF CHANUR:

  • Pride of Chanur takes place in the same universe as Rimrunners, but in a remote part of space where humans have not ventured and are unknown. The story is told from the perspective of Pyanfar Chanur, who is of a species of spacefaring feline aliens. In the novel, a lone human man, Tully, finds himself, by unknown and accidental circumstances, in this alien region, the first human ever to do so. He ends up aboard Pyanfar's ship. Pyanfar and her crew have never seen a human before - no one has. They don't even know if he's sentient. He's terrified. Oh, he's also naked. He's panicking, so Pyanfar tries to grab hold of him but she doesn't realize his hairless hide is so thin and her claws slash him very badly. This makes his panic worse. They don't know what to do with him. So they lock him in the bathroom.
  • At first, the toilet is Tully's prison. He rages in there. He's scared. But as he and the catpeople come to understand one another and he becomes a sort-of crewmember, he continues to live in the bathroom. The cat-aliens, having fur, keep their ship colder than a furless human finds comfortable, so the bathroom is his warm zone. More importantly, it is his refuge, the one closed-off area of the ship where he can go to be alone and not have to constantly deal with the near-unfathomable alienness of his surroundings. Being alone in such an extremely foreign environment takes an incredible psychological toll on Tully, so the bathroom becomes his place to shut out his weird surroundings and ground himself.

    These were two of the earliest Cherryh novels I read and since then I have not encountered any more bathroom motifs in her work. Reading Rimrunners and Pride back to back was an extremely interesting experience for this and other reasons. Maybe I'll reread both books, examine this theme more thoroughly, and write a zine or something.