Lights Out

“Alcatraz,” Eddie replied. He’d learned something: It mattered whether JFK was alive, and where he was. It mattered a lot.

He went into the weight room. Eddie always started at the squat bar, but a woman in sheer tights and a pink leotard was there already. He waited until she finished her set and hoisted the bar back on the rack. She’d been lifting fifty pounds. Eddie added four hundred more, got under the bar, set his feet, got his grip, shouldered the bar, squatted, thrust himself back up. Usually he did three sets of ten, sometimes four. Today, feeling strong, he knew he could do five or even six. But after just that one lift, he lowered the bar back in the rack. He didn’t want to lift. Lifting was for making time go faster, a prison thing. Why would he want time to go faster now? He was free, free not to do something a little too much like breaking rocks in the hot sun. He walked away from the bar.

The woman in pink was chalking her hands and watching herself in the mirror at the same time; she was watching him too.

Eddie went into the showers. He was drying himself with one of the fluffy towels when he saw a sign: Steam bath: Co-Ed-Please Cover Up. He wrapped the towel around himself and went in.

Eddie had the steam bath to himself. It was small, with wooden benches lining three sides. He sat at the back, leaned against the tile wall. Steam hissed out of a nozzle in one corner, filling the room with wet heat, wonderful wet heat that reminded him right away of the shed by the red clay court.

I need more memories, he thought. He got hotter; sweat poured off him. Eddie forgot about the shed and simply felt his body relax, relax as though gravity had failed and all the muscles, ligaments, and tendons could finally stop straining to hold his bones together.

“Tell me your plans,” El Rojo had said.

And he’d answered, “A steam bath. After that I’d only be guessing.”

There was nothing wrong with the steam-bath part. It was a good plan. He wished he’d carried it out sooner. As he sweated he imagined that all the foulness, dirt, and corruption of the past fifteen years was seeping out of him, leaving him clean, pure, untouched.

Time passed. A man with a sandy mustache peered through the window of the steam-bath door but didn’t come in. Eddie grew thirsty, but he was so calm, so detached from everything outside that steam bath, that he made no move to leave. Even his thirst was strangely pleasant, perhaps because he knew he could slake it at will. Slake: he liked the word. It had lake in it, so it meant an endless supply of drinkable water. It was also good for rhyming.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

We could nor laugh nor wail;

Through utter drought all dumb we stood!

I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,

And cried, A sail! a sail!

Arm biting, bloodsucking: Eddie had seen crazy things like that. He was remembering some of them when the door opened and a woman with a towel wrapped around her body materialized in the clouds of steam. She sat down on one of the side benches, sighed, and leaned her head against the wall.

The woman had a trim body, nicely cut hair, cool blue eyes. Because he didn’t think New York was the kind of place where you ran into people you knew, and because she wasn’t wearing her tortoiseshell glasses, it took Eddie a few surreptitious looks before he was sure he recognized her: Karen de Vere.

“Hi,” he said.

She gave him a cold glance, said nothing.

Karen? Miss de Vere? He wasn’t sure of the proper form. Ms. de Vere? Ms. sounded funny to him; he’d never used the word in conversation and it brought to mind eye-rolling black servants in old movies, but he had a hunch it was the right choice.

“Ms. de Vere?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re Karen de Vere, aren’t you?”

She squinted at him. “Do I know you?”

“Ed Nye. Jack’s brother.”

“Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses.” Her towel slipped slightly, exposing the tops of her breasts. She hitched it back up.

“Jack’s a member here, isn’t he?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I never see him. I do aerobics and he’s into squash. The two crowds don’t mix. I suppose you’re a squash player too.”

“No,” Eddie said, trying to imagine Jack on a squash court. Even with the added weight, he’d probably be good. There wasn’t a game he couldn’t play.

Karen was starting to sweat too. Her skin shone; a drop rolled down her neck, disappeared between her breasts. Her eyes went to the “Yeah?” tattoo on Eddie’s arm, then up to his face.

“What do you do to keep in shape, Eddie?”

“Swim.”

“Do you belong to a place like this in Albany?”

“Albany?” said Eddie, and then remembered. “I use the Y.”

Karen’s towel slipped again. This time she didn’t bother adjusting it. “What do you do up there?”

“Nothing too hard,” Eddie said. “Just stretching out a little.”

She laughed. “I didn’t mean in the pool. I meant for a living.”