I met a man who told me he’d invented the toilet of the future, but for various reasons outside of his control, he hadn’t been able to mass produce it yet. You don’t understand how powerful the toilet lobby is, he said, and although I wanted to laugh I could see that he was not joking. 

Of course I had to try it, the toilet. I asked if there was a prototype and he placed a briefcase on the table in front of him. We were at a café, in case you were wondering. A popular place in my neighborhood, only a couple blocks from my house, which I was glad to be out of. I was waiting for a woman from a dating app, a woman who was already a half hour late, which of course would be a dealbreaker unless she’d gotten into an accident or been attacked by a wild boar or something. I’m not the fussiest guy around but timeliness is important to me. I like for life to be orderly, when it can be. I was in a bad state of mind, that’s the truth, and I was feeling like it was time for someone out there to start showing me some respect.

The man, the inventor, didn’t say what he was doing there. Just having a coffee, I guess, maybe waiting for someone to come in and ask about his invention. I got the sense that he was always ready with the story about this revolutionary toilet just in case he ran into a person with money to burn. We were sitting at adjacent tables, in case that matters to you. There were probably 15 other people in the café, most of them alone, most of them wearing headphones and periodically making big performative expressions in response to whatever they saw on their computer screens. I don’t know what people do for work anymore. They sit in coffee shops and sigh and groan and now and then they get a refill on their latte. 

He opened the briefcase and produced a device the size and weight of a dictionary. Unabridged. It was off-white and plastic, kind of close to the color and texture of a traditional toilet. You can take it anywhere in the world, he said. You’ll never have to rely on the generosity of a business or a stranger again. 

Oh boy, I thought. Get a load of this crackpot. Someone to tell my date about later, if she ever shows up. Oh man, I thought. Why are you always finding yourself in conversations like this? 

He held the device up and stared at it in a sort of awe. It took me fifteen years to get it like this, he said. The early versions were too big. The first one weighed sixty-five pounds. Nobody would carry that on their back, not even if they had the world’s worst bladder. This is probably the most advanced technology you’ve ever seen in your life, he told me. 

I looked around the room to see if anyone was listening. The barista was watching with a smirk that made it clear she’d heard this speech plenty of times. She was around 20 and looked disconcertingly like my first girlfriend, who may be the only person I’ve ever truly loved, who I sometimes think I still love. I knew better than to say this to the barista; the difference between being a weirdo and not is most of the time just keeping your mouth shut. The device didn’t look so advanced to me. It looked like it could just be a piece of trash, and I told him so. 

The inventor smiled at me like I was the world’s greatest fool. You didn’t even ask what it does yet, he said. You don’t see a flusher, do you? We’re so conditioned by the modern world to expect a flusher, but that’s a primitive tool. What’s the biggest problem facing our modern world, he asked.
I had a lot of ideas in mind but he didn’t give me a chance to answer. 

Waste removal, he said. Where does it all go? You flush it, all the horrible stuff that comes from inside you, and it goes into our rivers and our oceans. The fish eat our shit and then we eat the fish and shit the fish out and then what happens? You don’t even want to know. 

There’s chlorine and fluoride and everything, I said. The water is pretty clean. You can even send out for a report about how many parts per million of this toxin and that toxin you’re getting out of the tap. I’d written a big research paper on it in college. One of my neighbors worked for the water company. I had a lot of facts to share with the inventor, actually, and I wondered if I was being cruel by explaining the whole situation to this man who had nothing except his briefcase and his dreams. 
He didn’t find my facts all that compelling. He’d heard it before, he said. He tried to get me to agree with the premise that a portable toilet would be convenient, at least sometimes, and I said Sure, I can picture it. 

I told the inventor about how when I was a child on road trips with my family, my dad didn’t like to stop, and he always had me peeing into old soda bottles. It was impossible to do without spilling some on yourself, on the car seat. Sometimes it got everywhere. 

But we agree, he said, that sometimes everyone needs a toilet, even when there is no toilet to be found. This is where he really lit up, the inventor. He told me the portability wasn’t even the point; there was a whole other incredible breakthrough: he had solved, he said, the problem of waste removal forever. There’s new frontiers, he said, and then there’s whole new worlds, you know what I mean? 

The inventor pushed the device toward me and I took it from him without thinking. Don’t worry, he said, it’s clean. It’s sterile. I keep my personal device in a different place. Go and try it, he said. 
I couldn’t even guess how it worked. There was a row of colored buttons along one of the long edges. A latch that looked like it would open up a compartment, and a second latch that didn’t seem to do anything. 

Listen, it’s easy, he said. Come with me. 

He led me back into the bathroom and locked the door and showed me how it worked and it really was so easy. 

You pop open the latch and do your business and press a couple buttons and the contents of the compartment disappear. It makes a little flushing sound when you do it because the inventor felt people would need that bit of continuity to give it a try. I was sure I was being pranked, but he showed me from all angles—nothing was in there anymore. Where does it go, I asked. 

That’s the amazing part. I have no idea. But it’s not here anymore. It’s like a fax machine.

But what if you’re just flushing all your business onto the heads of some poor third world guys out there on an island somewhere, I asked. What if this is somehow worse than what we had before? 
There’s no way, he said. Really sincere. Forceful. If it was doing something bad, I would know, he added. 

But what if there is some guy who has been living a pretty decent life, I said, who pays all his taxes and treats his neighbors with respect, a guy who sends nice notes to his acquaintances on their birthdays, and he helps old ladies get stuff off the high shelves in the grocery store, and once every two months he volunteers at his local food bank for the day, and he has quietly without telling anyone been clearing the debris out of all the gutters in town so nobody floods when it rains, he’s the kind of guy who donates his sick days to co-workers in need, he overall has established himself as a solid dude among his co-workers, he shows up on time and always hits his deadlines and even helps other people out without complaining when they’re stuck, and he’s got four brothers and even though they all have their foibles and idiosyncrasies they get along pretty well because he’s kind of the glue, he’s the one who mediates the fights and makes it a priority to get them all together for family dinners, he’s the one who got them to go to one of those axe throwing places just last month, and let’s say we’re talking about a guy who even got on the news once because he helped some firefighters corner and safely subdue a kangaroo that had escaped from the zoo, but also he’s maybe been unlucky in love, this guy, he was married for a couple years after college but it fell apart, though he still maintains a decent relationship with the ex-wife, who is remarried and has two kids of her own, two kids who he buys Christmas presents for even though he doesn’t have to, and a couple years ago he thought he’d found a new love of his life but she turned out to just be a very sophisticated chatbot who was taking advantage of his good nature to manipulate him into buying gift cards to movie theaters, and sometimes when he’s alone at night he thinks about all the opportunities he’s lost, many of which he has lost specifically because he’s been too kind or too deferential or too ethical, i.e. if he had been about fifteen percent meaner and more selfish maybe he could be making six figures and living in a beautiful loft downtown and he’d just be fighting off the women, he would probably have better hair and he would always know a guy who he could call when some problem came up, he wonders frankly if being a good and decent guy has been a mistake, particularly given the unlikelihood of a Christian afterlife, though he still tries praying just in case, and he says God just give me a sign if I’m doing the right things, and then what happens right after he says this prayer is all this shit and piss just starts pouring down into his house, just appearing out of thin air and pooling up around him, lakes of it, mountains of it, and no matter what he does he can’t get it all out, and there’s just more and more appearing every morning, and it’s starting to really break him down, you know, it’s just making him question it all, it’s making it hard for him to go on, this downpour of mysterious waste, the cruelty of it, the arbitrariness. He’s been on a really bad run, I said, and he needs a break but instead every time you press the buttons on this device you’re actually pushing him over the edge. What if there’s a guy like that? 

Brother, the inventor said, you know what my dad would say about that guy? N-M-P. Not my problem. 

But it was my problem. And I wasn’t sure whether I was happy to know where all the shit and piss in my house had been coming from or if I’d preferred leaving it as a cosmic mystery. If I preferred to be Job, or whatever this made me. 

He handed me the device and told me to give it a try. Part of me thought that if this is the future, I might as well be ahead of the curve for once. An early adopter. Part of me wanted to throw it into the actual toilet and flush it, which I felt could be a sort of trenchant commentary on the state of the world. After some reflection, I slipped it inside my jacket and walked out. He chased me out of the coffee shop and around the corner but he was too old, and I was too fast. Now I have it, this miraculous little product, and I still have all my other problems too. One doesn’t solve the other, but it felt good to outrun somebody. 

Tom McAllister is the author of 4 books, including the novel How to Be Safe (2018) and essay collection It All Felt Impossible (2025). His next novel, Reveal!, will be published by Quirk Books in 2028. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse, and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden. He lives in New Jersey.