Cartilage and Skin (33 page)

Staggering back against the easy chair, I watched the bizarre and furious spectacle. Nothing in McTeal's expression indicated that he was alarmed or afraid; he was simply angry. I could see the pocks in his face clearly now as his jaw appeared distended and his eyes turned to fierce slits behind his glasses.

He hissed, “I'm going to kill you.”

Without the door between us, I never would have been able to get this close, face-to-face, with the lunatic.

He kept wrapping the butt of his palm savagely against the glass. The entire door shook, as if ready to explode.

And he kept hissing, “I'm going to kill you.”

But I already knew that, so there was nothing for me to do but to leave him on the balcony. There was no way I could safely release him. I backed away, keeping my eyes on him, as he stood framed against the dark night with the snow falling around him. His ferocious expression didn't change or soften by the slightest degree, not even when he must have realized—in the instant I started to turn my head away—that I was going to run out the front door.

The exact details no longer mattered, for not only was the plotting out of certain points in my life an arbitrary and fantastic construction, but also no one point was definitively linked to any other point, for each was a cause ad infinitum and an effect ad infinitum, within a larger system of constant flux, a web of contingency, governed by attraction and repulsion, push and pull, a sad and pointless bumping together of parts. Of course, looking at my life in a grander, metaphysical—or perhaps macrophysical—context provided me another way of sighing and slouching over in resignation. From a more grounded perspective, I was tired and confused, and I didn't want to bother with thinking any longer. More precisely, a naked old man—his arms covered by the dark purple splotches of long ago tattoos, his belly flabby and pasty—made a grunting noise as he reached down to towel off his inner thighs and scrotum, and while witnessing this horrible spectacle, I had no idea what I was doing or how I had managed to make the sort of choices that brought me to this particular circumstance. Another old man at least had the decency to wear a pair of thin, yellowing briefs.

“We should've spent ten minutes in the sauna,” he said. “It loosens you good.”

“Don't blame me,” the naked one replied. “You do what you want to do.”

“You got the appointment, not me.”

“Drive yourself next time.”

“Who's stuffing the barrel now?”

Although this question completely eluded me, both men laughed.

“Crazy bastard,” the naked man said.

His pale penis looked like a soggy, uncooked chicken neck drooping from a puff of gray hair.

I turned away from the men. Unfortunately, before they had emerged from the showers and stationed their slow, wet bodies beside me, I had already committed myself to a locker by hanging up my muddy green coat and shelving my shoes. Since I'd been caught in the process of disrobing, I now stalled, poking around in my locker, searching my pockets, and delaying my nudity, but the men showed no sign of urgency. The one in the yellow briefs, which at one time had probably been white, sat down on the bench, uncapped a green can, and began to spray each of his feet in turn. The other man, still nude, bent over a duffle bag and rifled through an exorbitant arsenal of beauty supplies, before finally selecting his deodorant. He eventually revealed a pair of crisp, white underwear and a tee-shirt, but rather than put them on, he set the garments on the bench and began combing his hair.

I soon realized, after inspecting all my pockets twice, that I had no choice but to strip out of my clothes.

Thankfully, the men disregarded me. The one in the yellow briefs was explaining different cuts of beef, from chuck steaks to filet mignon, which evidently intrigued the naked man.

Once all my clothes were stored in the locker and a towel was wrapped about my waist, I headed toward the showers. Even though my back was to the old men, I sensed a momentary pause in their conversation and imagined them simultaneously lifting their heads and eyeing me, as though I offered them a bit of droll amusement. My suspicion was confirmed the moment I passed through the swinging wooden door and stepped onto the cold tile floor: Both men chuckled.

Of course, this could have been a reaction to my exaggerated poking around in my pockets or my silly display of painful modesty, but I felt the deeper sting of their ridicule. Despite the pale loose flesh that was draped over their deteriorated meat, packed with clumps of pudge, and held up by their brittle, rickety frames, like an overburdened coat-rack—I became fretfully conscious of my own body, as though my shrunken chest and slumped shoulders were innately humorous, even to old men.

On my left were two doors, one glass and one wooden, that led to a steam room and a sauna. Across from them stretched a long counter with several sinks, where men customarily lathered, groomed, and preened themselves. The shower room was up ahead. Although I heard no water spewing from the showerheads, I averted my eyes in fear of seeing anyone.

I silently cursed the old men, holding against them their freedom to come to the gym at eleven o'clock in the morning, on a weekday, when ordinary people were busy with life, as though the old men were slighting the rest of society and failing to respect their own decrepitude and inevitable fate. The old fools ought to have been in bed. What was additionally offensive was that the door had not even swung closed behind me before they'd begun to chuckle because they didn't care whether or not I heard them. Instead of being enfeebled by their old age, stricken and humbled by a constant awareness of their tenuous mortality, they were emboldened. They no longer concerned themselves with civility, not simply because they'd lived long enough to stop worrying about what other people might think, but also because they no longer had any stake in society—similar to a pair of rutting high school boys, limited by the milky flush of testosterone over their spongy brains.

But then I saw myself reflected in the mirror above the long counter. Although my body might have given the two men plenty of reasons to laugh, the true cause sat atop my head: I had forgotten to take off my hat.

Continuing forward, I saw a series of hooks mounted to the tile wall near the entrance to the shower. The floor was wet, a small pool gathered about one of the drains. There were no stalls or partitions, just one common room with all the showerheads jutting out with a fierce, cold formality, such as in a hospital ward or a torture chamber.

I placed my hat upon one of the hooks, and turning my eyes to the floor, I removed the towel and hung it up also.

Naked, I stepped across the threshold into the vacant communal shower. The tiled walls were the color of peach pulp, and the dark floor glinted like the raw side of a kiwi's skin. I selected a spot in the corner, moving somewhat slowly and warily, as though I were afraid to make any noise—but the water exploded out of the showerhead, the sound amplified by the starkness of the room.

I showered facing the wall. Even though I dispensed a long pink coil of shampoo into my palm and lathered myself all over, I felt as though I couldn't get completely clean. A thin film of grime coated my skin. Perhaps some contaminant lurked in the public water—or perhaps it was just in my head. After all, a long time seemed to have passed since I'd last bathed, and in the interval, random forces had evidently conspired to defile me. By a volition other than my own, I had fallen on my back in a slushy street, been chased by dogs, sweated beneath my clothes, put vintage hand-me-downs over my clammy body, suffered through a police investigation, dined in disguise with Vanessa Somerset, followed a perverted creature back to its den, and escaped only by locking it out on a cold balcony. And then I had wandered the nighttime, all the while forsaken, miserable, and homeless. Despite finally having the opportunity to run away, I had continued to linger in the city. Rather than flee to a bus station and keep on traveling until I was safe from everything that threatened me, I had roamed the streets like some lost or abandoned pet, some slush-bellied mongrel. In an all-night diner, I had taken a long time eating a potato pancake. Afterwards, brandishing my identification card, I'd entered the college library, stowed myself inside a cubicle, and fallen asleep atop a musty book. Although I'd found some relief in my dreams and allowed myself to play in the garden of my memory—where I could nurture my private flowers and pluck my weeds—I wasn't aware at the time, or perhaps I simply lacked the comfortable distance from which to speculate, how this gesture of mental retreat was merely the precursor to a more definitive action: my final escape.

But the pitiful irony, of course, was that I hadn't done anything wrong; I had nothing for which to reproach myself: not the ruined boy on my bathroom floor, the lurid pictures on my computer, the frothing madman behind the sliding glass door, and especially not Vanessa Somerset. On one level, perhaps my sense of innocence accounted for my delayed getaway, but surely the main cause—if I could be honest with myself—was my loneliness. Throughout the night, a heavy smothering feeling had gradually crept upon me, transforming by degrees the desperate and divorced Vanessa Somerset into a viable option for love. How could I forget that she'd treated me like a man or how she'd softly, willingly, kissed me? She seemed to be the reward at the end of a long series of blunders. Not long ago, I had committed myself to pursuing risky choices, to venturing not just out of my apartment but also beyond the imaginary barriers I'd erected around myself, and to making a concerted effort upon the playing field of men. I'd vowed that I was no longer going to repeat all the mistakes that, regardless of my intentions, always led me back to solitude. After I had tried to step out into the world, and after all my stumbling and abortive advances, in bookstores, bars, and art galleries, which had left me stewing in my own lethargy and funk, Vanessa Somerset had emerged by luck. Dogs had chased me toward her, and she'd received me. Now she was expecting to see me again, and no excuse but my own cowardice could have explained avoiding her.

I lathered and rinsed myself a second time. Despite the fierceness of the water, I still felt the residue on my skin. Perhaps I was unaccustomed to something in the gym's water, such as calcium or salt, or the lack thereof. When I began to consider seeing Vanessa again, and how I would be in the same clothes from the day before, and that I had no deodorant for my body or comb for my hair, I felt a compulsion to prepare myself for her as best as I could—so if my first ablution was to cleanse my body, the second one seemed to have Vanessa as its goal.

When I left the shower, my feet smacking on the tile, I discovered that the two old men hadn't left the locker room. Fortunately, they were both dressed now, one in gray trousers and a button-down shirt, and the other in a red sweat-suit. They were still bickering about quitting the gym early and skipping their customary sauna because one of them had an appointment with his lawyer. The details weren't important, something about an escrow account and a contractor's lien. Feeling less self-conscious about my public nudity, I dropped my towel in front of the two men and got dressed. After slipping on my coat, I ran my fingers through my hair, and holding my hat in my hand, I started away from the men. They seemed as though they would go on talking long after I was gone, even though they were supposedly hurrying away on business.

In the weight room, the metal plates struck and clattered as several men occupied themselves either with grunting and huffing upon the benches or else strutting about the machines, tottering forward with their broad chests, one shoulder and then the other, rocking themselves into slow mobility.

Further on was the dull murmuring of motors as the belts of a pair of dueling treadmills whisked round and round, thumped upon by the thumping footfalls of two lumbering, middle-aged women, bent over and supported by the rails.

A row of bikes sat unused, their plastic stirrups looped beneath their pedals.

One wall was all mirrors, and another was windows, offering a view of a drab parking deck that seemed to be rendered heavier and more compact by the gray weather.

On my way to the exit, I had to pass a counter, behind which a boy was folding towels. When he had admitted me earlier, he had been overfriendly, and not only his alacrity but also his sculpted black hair and the rolled-up sleeves of his tee-shirt had bothered me a little.

He wasn't going to let me walk past him unmolested.

“Done already?” he asked, smiling.

“I only used the shower,” I said, deciding to be honest.

His smile waned, as though he were disappointed.

“Use the rest of the gym. Enjoy yourself,” he said.

“No, thank you.”

“You need to try the facilities. Did you see the nautilus machines?”

“I saw them.”

“Did you try them?”

“I saw them,” I repeated. “Thank you.” I started moving toward the exit.

“Hopefully, you'll spend more time with us next time. Remember that your trial membership only lasts for—”

“Okay,” I said and cut him off by stepping outside.

Windless and unmoving, the cold issued itself all about me and blanketed everything in sight with a gloomy silence, such as might have pervaded the gutted interior of an abandoned cathedral. The vaulted sky was as gray and unadorned as flat, gray stone, and the dark, damp sides of the buildings were tall, drab walls. No echo could have sounded here, and no puny voice could have survived the suffocation, and even now, it is difficult for me to say whether I was coloring the urban landscape with my mood or whether I had been the one who had suffered a long, general smearing of my consciousness from the world without.

Compelled by my solitude, I headed down the sidewalk, trying to settle on my reasonable options. I didn't want to be swayed in the wrong direction by my emotions. If I simply disappeared, then the social worker, Dr. Ferguson, and the black man, who reminded me of a blood-bloated tick, would have assumed that I'd fled the continent and joined up with two perverts to play in the Orient, where parents and other beloved family members sold the favors of their children for food. But I wasn't one of these perverted men. I was just a reclusive scholar who possessed neither a strong allegiance to what he studied nor the literary ability to assemble and convey a lifetime of random gleanings. Nothing in my character would have prompted me to behave like those two men in the photographs, not to sit victoriously astraddle a discarded refrigerator and certainly not to prey upon the children of a ruined country. Even so, as much as I didn't want to do anything that would have further incriminated me, the authorities already regarded me as a suspect; otherwise, they wouldn't have searched my apartment. Now they had my computer with its cache of Claudia Jones's choice bits. What everyone thought of me was beyond repair, so perhaps I shouldn't have cared if my sudden disappearance caused them any further disturbance or alarm. In fact, it was their false suspicions that gave me the best reasons to leave at once. But then again, I couldn't forget W. McTeal. He was an excellent reason in himself. Even though I had locked him out on his balcony and thus beaten him at the game of ambush, I knew that I couldn't preen down the street as a proud champion. I doubted that I was responsible for the frozen corpse of that strange, solitary man because if his fury hadn't smashed the glass door, then his screams had surely startled his neighbors, and if neither his fury nor his screams had rescued him, then the snow covered ground, just a story beneath his balcony, had broken his fall. I half-wished that he'd contorted his ankle, popped his knee, or shattered both of his thighbones. Any of these injuries was better than a soft, harmless landing, which would have allowed him to hunt me again, but with additional rage and revenge to add to his usual state of lunacy. I was convinced that he was planning something devious and that I—not Claudia Jones or somebody else—was his primary object. While I had been out with Vanessa, he'd lain in wait at my apartment building. Moreover, from the look of his home, he was evidently in the process of moving, as though he'd already plotted his escape route. Although I remembered his table with newspapers spread atop it, the pair of pliers, and the hammer with the bent nails that kept the head from flying off, I had no way of guessing what was being constructed or destroyed.