Incontinence

Incontinence is a recurring condition in Oskar Eriksson’s life, not an abstract label but a problem he must handle in the middle of school days, under the threat of humiliation. He has learned to manage it privately with a homemade Pissball, a piece of foam cut from an old mattress. The object works for now, but its usefulness depends on secrecy: after rinsing it in a school bathroom, Oskar has to hide from approaching footsteps with it still in his hand. The condition therefore reaches beyond the accident itself, shaping his movements, his attention to other people, and the small calculations required to keep his vulnerability unseen.

Naming and managing the condition

Oskar has found the word incontinence in a pamphlet he secretly took from a drugstore. The pamphlet says it mostly affects old women; his private recognition that it applies to him places him outside the pamphlet’s implied picture of who has the condition. He knows there are prescription medicines, but does not intend to spend his allowance at a prescription counter where asking for them would humiliate him. Nor will he tell his mother. He expects her to feel so sorry for him that her pity would make him sick. His choices are thus not simply between treatment and no treatment: they are constrained by the prospect of being exposed, pitied, or made to feel more conspicuously different.

Instead, Oskar makes an improvised device. The Pissball is about the size of a Clementine, with a hole for his penis, and he carries it in his underpants. When he discovers that he has wet himself during recess, he takes it out in the bathroom, rinses it under the tap, and squeezes out the water. He smells it, confirms what has happened, and cleans it for reuse. The sequence gives the condition a concrete routine—wearing, checking, rinsing, squeezing, hiding—rather than treating it as a one-time mishap. The device is effective enough to let him continue for the moment, but it cannot remove the labor or risk of managing the condition in public.

School, fear, and bodily exposure

The school setting makes concealment especially precarious. During one recess, Oskar stays away from the class gathered around a police car because he expects that someone would knee him or pull up his underpants in a wedgie, even with a policeman present. He goes around the back of the building to the bathrooms instead. When he hears footsteps and voices, he flees into a stall, locks the door, and climbs onto the toilet seat so his feet will not show beneath it. The Pissball in his hand is part of the immediate danger of discovery; the ordinary act of cleaning himself becomes an occasion to hide from classmates.

Fear also produces a bodily sign he cannot control: Oskar’s nose sometimes starts bleeding when he is scared. On this occasion, he sits curled on the toilet seat with toilet paper against his nostril and the Pissball in his other hand. He connects nosebleeds with the moments when boys have considered hitting him and then reconsidered because he was already bleeding. In his own harsh inventory, wetting his pants joins nosebleeds and talking too much as evidence that his body gives him away; he imagines that he may soon lose control of his bowels as well. That fear is not presented as another confirmed symptom. It is an anxious projection, made amid the bullying that has taught him to anticipate further humiliation.

After leaving the bathroom, Oskar does not wipe the drop of blood from the tile. He lets someone see it and wonder, turning a trace of bodily vulnerability into the suggestion that someone has been killed there. His thought that someone has indeed been killed there, for the hundredth time, gives the gesture a darker edge: rather than erase every sign of what his body does, he permits one sign to carry a meaning of his choosing. The contrast is small but telling. The accident remains something he conceals, while the bloodstain can be left behind as a frightening message to others.

The Pissball and the mirror

In another episode, Oskar checks his underpants in front of a mirror and finds them soaked. He takes out the Pissball and rinses it, as before, but then stops before putting it back. With a wound visible on his cheek, he places the yellow foam ball on his nose like a clown nose. The ordinary aid becomes part of a deliberately strange face: yellow against the red wound. Looking at himself, he opens his eyes wide and tries to look crazy, decides the effect is creepy, and talks to the clown in the mirror.

The scene does not suggest that the condition has been cured or that Oskar has overcome its practical consequences. He has again wet himself, and the Pissball still requires rinsing. What changes for a moment is how he uses the object and looks at his own image. Instead of immediately returning it to its hidden place, he makes it visible and turns it into part of a performance. The mirror holds together the condition’s shame and a brief act of self-fashioning: the foam remains equipment for managing incontinence, but it can also become a comic, unsettling feature of the face Oskar chooses to show himself.