Over the Counter, Under the Toilet Seat by Itto Outini

The intercity taxis in Morocco are only supposed to take six passengers at a time, but there are no limits on the size of those passengers, and so, one mild summer evening, I found myself flattened against a taxi door on the road from Rabat to Meknes along with four skinny men and one behemoth of a woman, whose right buttock filled my lap while her left spilled over onto one of the men’s thighs. For a while, he’d struggled against her, but this had only resulted in her elbowing me repeatedly in the head while the ancient, rickety driver, peering in the rearview mirror, murmured, “Please, don’t be angry with each other. Remember that it’s Ramadan.”

Eventually, the man gave up and went to sleep. Following his lead, the other three had promptly started snoring. Only the driver, the woman, and I were awake. Her scent filled the taxi, a rich miasma of decaying herbs in dirty, boiling water—and that was before she started farting.

The drive from Rabat, where I’d spent the morning begging and knocking on the doors of NGOs that claimed to, but didn’t, help people like me, back to Meknes, where I was going to school, should’ve taken no more than two hours. Unfortunately, we’d fallen behind schedule. Every fifteen minutes or so, the driver brought the taxi to a shuddering halt—because of traffic, I’d guessed at first, but now we’d put the city behind us, and these stops had not ceased. “She’s so old,” I heard the driver muttering to himself at one point. “Got to cool her down.” Then the click of locks, the sound of a car door, sloshing liquid, and hissing steam. He was pouring water on the engine, I realized, to keep it from overheating.

His was one of the oldest vehicles I’d ever been in, and he was one of the oldest men I’d ever met, and I doubted that either he or his taxi should be trusted to carry us so much as block, much less between cities. Still, here we were. There was no going back now.  

“Hey,” the woman wheezed suddenly into my ear. “Where do you live?”

“What?” Leaving aside the impertinence of this question, anyone looking at my stick-thin body and my filthy clothes could’ve guessed that I was homeless.

“Where do you live?” the woman repeated. “Whose daughter are you? Do you have a phone number?”

I shook my head as best I could, wedged between the woman’s shoulder and the window of the taxi. I didn’t want to keep the conversation going.

She had other ideas.

“I’m desperate,” she told me. “Desperate. My husband’s addicted to smoking. It’s bad for his health. Really bad. I want him to stop. I heard that a blind person’s pee is the cure. I need your pee. Honey, let me collect some.”

I wasn’t a Muslim, but I still made sure to fast during Ramadan for my own safety. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in hours. This was a good thing since most of the woman’s weight seemed to be positioned directly on top of my bladder. If there’d been any blind pee in me, it would’ve been all over the seats already.

“I don’t have any pee for you,” I told her. “Good luck with your husband.”

But she was not to be deterred. “It’s okay if you don’t have it now,” she said. “That’s why I need to know where you live.”

In Morocco, parents often warn their children to hold in their farts because the smell will make you blind. Just keep doing what you’re doing, I wanted to tell her, and you’ll have five more options before we reach Meknes. Instead, I reached under the seat for the bag of hard-boiled eggs I’d been given that morning, the sole fruits of my begging, announcing, “Hey, guys, wake up! It’s time to break our fasts. I heard the call to prayer.”

I’d heard nothing of the kind—I just wanted an excuse to get out of the taxi—but the men, startled awake, all believed me. Even the driver believed me. I think he was losing his hearing because he was clearly religious, and if he’d heard what the woman was asking for, he would’ve chastised her. As it was, he eased the taxi over onto the side of the road and let us out.

The smell of the eggs, which I’d been carrying all day at room temperature, was not all that different from that of the woman’s emissions, but we were all starving, and we wolfed them down in minutes—a significantly shorter respite than I’d hoped for—before piling back into the taxi. Only this time, the engine wouldn’t start.

“Brothers,” the driver said, “lend me a hand, would you?”

Obediently, all four of them got out, went around to the back of the taxi, and started pushing while the driver wrestled with the throttle.

“Are we okay?” I asked. “Is it getting dark out there?”

“Yes, it is dark,” the woman answered. “Let me take you over there in case you need to pee.”

“I don’t need to pee.”

“Just in case, honey. It’s nice and dark. These guys won’t see anything.”

“I’m good. I really don’t need to pee.”

I hoped it wouldn’t take much longer to get the taxi started, but my hopes were in vain: it took nearly an hour. At least we covered some ground in the meantime, thanks to the four men pushing. “We shouldn’t do that again,” the driver warned us once we were back on the road. “If we do, we’ll spend the night in the middle of nowhere.”

It was morning by the time we got to Meknes, and the water he’d been using to cool the engine was almost gone. If we’d been going any farther, my blind pee might’ve been of some use after all. While the other passengers sleepily counted out their fares, I spoke to the driver: I feared that the woman might follow me away from the taxi stand and forcibly separate me from my urine if we were left alone together.

“Yes, my daughter,” the driver agreed, “I understand.”

He called over several other drivers and explained the situation, and they agreed to help. Pooling their money, they came up with enough to put me in a taxi to another city. I was grateful and relieved.

In the second taxi, which was considerably newer than the first, my fear of the woman began to recede. I reminded myself that I’d given her no identifying information, and that she had no way to find me: that I was safe.

I’d been blind for several years by then, but the notion that my urine might cure someone’s addiction to cigarettes was a new one for me. Little did I know that this was only one of many therapeutic properties allegedly housed in my bladder. In the coming months and years, I would learn of my ability to treat all manner of ailments and injuries, mend broken hearts and broken bones, and even bring sundered loved ones back together.

More than once, when times were hard—and times were hard quite often—I contemplated using these folk beliefs to my advantage. I imagined ambling through the streets of Meknes like the men who sold water and buttermilk out of animal-skin sacks slung over their shoulders. Like them, I would carry a stack of plastic cups and hand them out to passersby in exchange for a few dirhams. “Blind pee!” I would cry, raising my voice to be heard above the roar of traffic and the other vendors. “Blind pee, blind pee, who wants the blind pee!”

If I’d pursued this idea, I might’ve raised myself from poverty sooner than I did, but I already hated begging, so much so that I used to travel to other cities whenever I needed money to avoid being seen by the people who knew me in Meknes. The idea of peddling a product that not only wouldn’t help the rubes who bought it, but might actually do them harm, struck me as significantly worse than simply asking for money and offering nothing but an abstract feeling of superiority in return.

Perhaps, if the woman from the taxi had remained the only representative of my target market, I would eventually have come around to the idea of giving the people what they wanted and letting natural selection run its course. But then a second woman joined my focus group, a woman whom I could not, in good conscience, exploit in this way, and the fate of my pee-hocking business was sealed.

She was the wife of a doctor whom I’d known for years, a friend and business partner to my father who’d continued to support me even after my entire family had turned against me and abandoned me to die on the streets. He used to give me food and shelter whenever I went to see him, treating me as best he could at no charge, and offering advice and guidance. He was clever, wealthy, handsome, and well-educated. His wife, by contrast—she was his second wife, actually—was uneducated, ignorant, and very young, barely older than his daughter by his first wife, with whom I’d played when we were toddlers. Together, they already had three children, aged one, three, and five, the year he introduced me to his wife, who begged me, as soon as we were alone, to donate my urine so that he wouldn’t cheat on her.

“Please!” She knelt before me, clutching my hands in hers, planting wet little kisses on my knees, bending in urgent genuflection as if my bladder were an idol and the chair I sat upon an altar. “Those women, they want to take him away from me. I know they do. I’m still beautiful, I’m still young, I do everything for him, but you know how men are. Men are men. But I know you can help me.”

Stunned, all I could think to do was clamp my knees together. In the taxi, I’d been as dry as a bone, but now, in the dining room of the apartment above the doctor’s clinic, I was about to burst. In what I’d initially taken for a display of hospitality, but which was beginning to look more like a calculated tactical maneuver, she’d forced three cups of strong mint tea on me as well as a plateful of cookies.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but I can’t. I’m on my period.” This was a lie. I was making things up as I went along.

“But you can still pee, can’t you?” she insisted. “Please. I just need a little.”

“It won’t work if I’m on my period.” I shrugged helplessly, as if we were both at the mercy of this fact. “The blind pee only works if I’m not on my period. We’ll have to wait until it’s over. Then you can have my pee.”

“You’ll come back next week?” She sounded anxious, desperate even.

“Yes, of course.” I had no intention of coming back, but I didn’t want to hurt her, either—and, more to the point, I was also desperate. The cups in which she’d served the tea were the largest I’d ever drunk from in Morocco, almost big enough to constitute an American serving size. Now that I live in the States, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them were handed to me through a drive-through window. If I didn’t make my escape, the doctor’s wife was going to get her blind pee after all—even if she had to wring it from the carpet.

“Thank you,” she told me, “thank you, thank you so much. May God smile on you.”

I barely made it down the stairs. It had been raining when I’d entered the clinic, and it was raining even harder now, a chilly winter cloudburst that should’ve driven everyone indoors, except that it was Tuesday, souk day, and the streets were alive. I’m sure that anyone in that crowd would’ve happily helped me find a restroom if I’d dared to ask, but I no longer dared. Paranoia had taken hold. What if, instead of helping me find a toilet, they took me home, shut me up in a room with a padlock, and left me there for years, visiting me only once or twice a day to force water on me and harvest my urine?

I had no choice. Trudging through the downpour, hemmed in on all sides by bustling shoppers, I gave in to nature’s call.

I believe that I peed for an hour or more, and as the pee flowed freely, bringing its ephemeral warmth to my femoral region before the rain swept it away, my thoughts flowed freely, too. Reflecting on the events of the afternoon, I found that while I had no reason to suspect the doctor of being unfaithful, I could also understand his wife’s fears. Their marriage was quite lopsided, after all. He held all the cards—experience, property, wealth, career, and reputation—and she had only youth and beauty, which would fade. He’d been married once already. He would not find it difficult to marry again. He was her world, but she was not his.

I wished I could help her. I wished I could reassure her that her husband would never cheat on her or leave her. If only I knew that she wouldn’t slip it into his tea, I might’ve gone back the next week and given her what she thought she needed, but I feared harming one of the few people in my life who’d supported me in times of need.

Eventually, the rain began to let up, and, as they say, as above, so below. The tight, white pants that I was wearing, the only pair I owned, were completely soaked, and while the downpour offered plausible deniability in the short term, it did nothing to mitigate the yellow stain that emerged as soon as the fabric dried. That enormous, sallow splotch became a feature of those pants from that day on.

Perhaps, if I still had those pants, I could tear off a few strips and post them on Facebook Marketplace or eBay. I’m sure they’d fetch a tidy sum. Since gaining access to the vast, postmodern playground of hyperlinks and rabbit holes and moral relativism known as the internet, I’ve discovered that I’m not alone in my entrepreneurial aspirations. On YouTube, self-proclaimed witches share recipes—“It’s got to have some sort of rust in it,” one content creator declares, “even if it’s just some iron filings off an old hotplate”—along with practical advice for getting the urine out of one’s body and into a bottle with the minimum possible spillage. In chat rooms, anonymous users complain that the medical-industrial complex has kept the secret of urine’s medicinal properties under wraps for long enough. They do not seem aware that the urine must come from a blind person: apparently, anyone’s pee will do. There’s even cow urine listed for sale on Amazon right now.

The days of standing on street corners with heavy sacks slung on our shoulders, sweating, swatting flies, and shouting, “Come and get it while it’s hot!” are over, evidently. Before us lies a brave new world. Online forums and ecommerce platforms connect those of us who’ve got the goods with those who are willing to pay for them, no matter where they are in the world. Perhaps, even as I type this, the doctor’s young wife, and the woman I met in the taxi, and countless other desperate souls are booting up their brand-new digital interfaces, firing up their Tor browsers, and scrolling the dark web in search of blind pee listings—organic and free-range, ideally.

“Oh, I’m way ahead of you,” my husband said, not missing a beat, when I shared this story with him. “Didn’t you notice the cup I’ve had under the toilet seat all these years?”

In addition to the all-natural, extra-strength, and vitamin-fortified varieties, which we hope will be available at Whole Foods, we envision a suite of cost-effective options: two- and one-percent blind pee, for example, with the other ninety-eight and ninety-nine percent, respectively, consisting of my sighted husband’s urine, or that of our neighbors, friends, and volunteers. We already have a business, and it has nothing to do with urine, but the minor obstacle of brand consistency has never stopped a true serial entrepreneur from chasing her dreams.

What did stop me, in the end, was the realization that launching this business would make us some powerful enemies, and while we might eventually amass an empire of our own, things might get pretty dicey in the short term. The tobacco companies, for instance, wouldn’t want to see my product get to market. I imagine the same must hold true for the world’s distilleries, dispensaries, pharmaceutical giants, and cartels, not to mention the psychiatrists, therapists, physicians, life coaches, yoga teachers, clergy, and bartenders. Oh, and the Pentagon. In the world that my urine will build, if only the powers that be are vanquished, there will be no more broken hearts, no divorces, no conflicts, no hatred, no famine, no pestilence, and no war. And no one will die.