have kept going if he could… had already run longer than he should, but he hated
to have the time end.
His knees shook, and his belly ached. “Come on,” Damon said, rising with more
ease. Damon caught his arm and guided him toward the dressing rooms. “Take a
steam bath, a chance to get the knots out at least. I’ve got a little while
before I have to get back to the office.”
They went into the chaotic locker room, stripped and tossed the clothing into
the common laundry. Towels were stacked there for the taking. Damon tossed a
couple at him and showed him into the door marked steam, through a quick shower
into a series of cubbyholes obscured by vapor, down a long aisle. Most places
were occupied. They found a few vacant toward the end of the row, took one in
the middle and sat down on the wooden benches. So much water to waste… Josh
watched Damon dip up water and pour it on his head, cast the rest on a plate of
hot metal until the steam boiled up and obscured him in a white cloud. Josh
doused himself after similar fashion, mopped with the towel, short of breath and
dizzy in the heat
“You all right?” Damon asked him.
He nodded, anxious not to spoil the time, anxious all the while he was with
Damon. He desperately tried to maintain his balance, walking the line of too
much trust on the one side and on the other—a terror of trusting anyone. He
hated being alone… had never… sometimes certainties flashed out of his tattered
memory, firm as truth… had never liked being alone. Damon would tire of him. The
novelty would wear off. Such company as his had to pall after a while.
And then he would be alone, with half his mind and a token freedom, in this
prison that was Pell.
“Something bothering you?”
“No.” And desperately, to change the subject, for Damon had complained he lacked
company coming to the gym: “I’d thought Elene would meet us here.”
“Pregnancy is beginning to slow her down a little. She’s not feeling up to it.”
“Oh.” He blinked, looked away. It was an intimacy, such a question; he felt like
an intruder—naive in such things. Women, he thought he had known, but not
pregnant ones, not a relationship—as it was between Damon and Elene—full of
permanencies. He remembered someone he had loved. Older. Dryer. Past such
things. A boy’s love. He had been the child. He tried to follow the threads
where they led, but they tangled. He did not want to think of Elene in that
regard. Could not. He recalled warnings… psychological impairment, they had
called it. Impairment…
“Josh… are you all right?”
He blinked again, which could become a nervous tic if he let it.
“Something’s eating at you.”
He made a helpless gesture in reply, not wanting to be trapped into discussion.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re worried about something.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t trust me?”
The blink obscured his vision. Sweat was dripping into his eyes. He mopped his
face.
“All right,” Damon said, as if it were.
He got up, walked to the door of the wooden cubicle, anything to put distance
between them. His stomach was heaving.
“Josh.”
A dark place, a close place… he could run, clear this closeness, these demands
on him. That would get him arrested, sent back to hospital, into the white
walls.
“Are you scared?” Damon asked him plainly.
It hit as close to the mark as any other word. He made a helpless gesture,
uncomfortable. Elsewhere the noise of other voices became like silence, a roar
in which their own cell was remote.
“You figure what?” Damon asked. “That I’m not honest with you?”
“No.”
“That you can’t trust me?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
He was close to being sick. He hit that barrier when he crossed his
conditioning… knew what it was.
“I wish,” Damon said, “that you’d talk.”
He looked back, his back to the wooden partition. “You’ll stop,” he said numbly,
“when you get tired of the project.”
“Stop what? Are you back on that desertion theme again?”
“Then what do you want?”