“You think you’re a curiosity.” Damon asked him, “or what?”
He swallowed the bile risen in his throat
“You get that impression, do you,” Damon asked, “from Elene and me?”
“Don’t want to think that,” he managed to say finally. “But I am a curiosity,
whatever else.”
“No,” Damon said.
A muscle in his face began to jerk. He reached for the bench, sat down, tried to
stop the tic. There were pills; he was no longer on them. He wished he were, to
be still and not to think. To get out of here, break off this probing at him.
“We like you,” Damon said. “Is something wrong with that?”
He sat there, paralyzed, his heart hammering.
“Come on,” Damon said, gathering himself up. “You’ve had enough heat.”
Josh pulled himself to his feet, finding his knees weak, his sight blurring from
the sweat and the temperature and the reduced G. Damon offered a hand. He
flinched from it, walked after Damon down the aisle and into the showers at the
end of the room.
The cooler mist cleared his head somewhat; he stayed in the stall a few moments
longer than need be, inhaled the cooling air, came out again somewhat calmed,
walked towel-wrapped into the locker room again. Damon was behind him. “I’m
sorry,” he told Damon, for things in general.
“Reflexes,” Damon said. He frowned intensely, caught his arm before he could
turn aside. Josh flinched back against the locker so hard it echoed.
A dark place. A chaos of bodies. Hands on him. He jerked his mind away from it,
leaned shivering against the metal, staring into Damon’s anxious face.
“Josh?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”
“You look like you’re going to pass out. Was it the heat?”
“Don’t know,” he murmured. “Don’t know.” He reached toward the bench, sat down
to catch his breath. It was better after a moment The dark receded. “I am
sorry.” He was depressed, convinced Damon would not long tolerate him. The
depression spread. “Maybe I’d better check back into the facility.”
“That bad?”
He did not want to think of his own room, the barren apartment in hospice,
blank-walled, cheerless. There were people he knew in the hospital, doctors who
knew him, who could deal with these things, and whose motives he knew were
limited to duty.
“I’ll call the office,” Damon said, “and tell them I’m going to be late. ”I’ll
take you to the hospital if you feel you need it.“
He rested his head on his hands. “I don’t know why I do this,” he said. “I’m
remembering something. I don’t know what. It hits me in the stomach.”
Damon sat down astride the bench, just sat, and waited on him.
“I can figure,” Damon said finally, and he looked up, recalling uneasily that
Damon had had access to all his records. “What do you figure?”
“Maybe it was a little close in there. A lot of the refugees panic at crowding.
It’s scarred into them.”
“But I didn’t come in with the refugees,” he said. “I remember that.”
“And what else?”
A tic jerked at his face. He rose, began to dress, and after a moment Damon did
likewise. Other men came and went about them. Shouts from outside reached into
the room when the door opened, the ordinary noise of the gym.
“Do you really want me to take you to the hospital?” Damon asked finally.
He shrugged into his jacket “No. I’ll be all right.” He judged that such was the
case, although his skin was still drawn in chill the clothes should have warmed
away. Damon frowned, gestured toward the door. They walked out into the cold
outer chamber, entered the lift with half a dozen others, rode it the dizzying
straight drop into outer-shell G. Josh drew a deep breath, staggered a little in
walking off, stopped as the flow of traffic swirled about him.
Damon’s hand closed on his elbow, moved him gently in the direction of a seat
along the corridor wall. He was glad to sit down, to rest a moment and watch the
people pass them. They were not on Damon’s office level, but on a green one.