Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

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.