I fully understood that one of my fellow members was going to casually happen along, open the door, and subject me to club-wide ridicule for the next five years. I was willing to accept that fate at this point.
But again, nothing. I slammed my fist against the door and tried to shake it open, to no avail. Any moment now, the after-work crowd should be arriving. They’d get dressed at their lockers and maybe hear my cries for help. Any moment now, Mike or Angel, the attendants, should come back to the supply closet and see that I was stuck. Problem was, any moment now I could be dead of heat stroke, if you can die of such a thing, though I wasn’t sure. It certainly felt like it.
I yelled again, then retreated from the scorching pipe to the bench on the other side of the small room. It felt as if half my body had already sweated out of my pores and dripped down to the floor. It felt as if I’d never be cool again.
“Help!”
Nothing.
My mind began to drift in a way that probably wasn’t too good. I was pushing a blond-haired, pigtailed six-year-old girl who was sitting on a swing set wearing a little denim skirt and a Red Sox T-shirt with Bill Mueller’s last name spelled out across the back. I mean, no one wears a Billy Mueller T-shirt, but this girl always needed to be different, so she did.
She was laughing, calling me dad, telling me to push her higher into the clear blue horizon of a gorgeous weekend afternoon. We were at a neighborhood park. My Audi was within eyeshot, which was interesting, because I’ve never driven an Audi. We were meeting my wife, the girl’s mother, for dinner at a local clam shack in a little while, but we stopped at the field to play along the way. And the girl kept laughing, and I felt this emotion in my chest, tranquility, or maybe it was security, or some combination of the above. Regardless, it was a feeling I hadn’t had in years.
The girl got off the swing set, gripped my hand, and out of nowhere asked, “Daddy, why do people have to die?”
“It’s a natural part of life,” I replied. “It’s what happens after you’ve done everything you wanted to do in life.”
She looked up at me as she walked along, her big blue eyes boring into mine, and she asked, “But what happens if you didn’t get the chance to do everything you wanted to do?”
I thought about that for a moment as we arrived at my car and I buckled her into the backseat with a kiss on her temple. I said, “It’s why you should live your life as hard and as well as you can, every single day. Everybody has to die sometime. It’s completely natural. But you want to make sure you did everything you wanted to do first.”
At that moment, I felt someone’s hand on the back of my neck. A voice called out, “It’s Jack Flynn. He’s unconscious. Hold the door. We’ve got to get him out of here.”
I was boiling hot and limp as a leaf of lettuce at a Texas barbecue. I mumbled something that no one heard. I suddenly felt myself being moved in someone’s arms, carried, then another voice called out, “I’m a doctor. Get him under some cool water.”
And then I felt the chilling spray of a shower. As I gained my bearings, I saw three guys looming over me, and one guy in a suit kneeling down in the shower beside me, taking my pulse, getting soaked in the process.
“I’m Bill Dennis. I’m an MD,” he said. “You’re going to be fine. You just had a little scare in there.”
I half recognized him around the gym as another member, but never knew him well enough to say anything beyond a hello. I mumbled, “I thought you were a plumber.”
“That’s my wealthier brother, Bob,” he said.
I was regaining more and more of my faculties, enough, anyway, to realize that the tranquil feeling in my chest was a figment of my imagination, or the stuff of a very good dream.
Dr. Dennis asked, “Did you black out in there?”
I said, “The door was stuck.”
Another member, standing off to the side in a sweat suit, said, “I found a mop wedged against the door, so it couldn’t be opened from inside. When I looked in, I found you there.”
I said, “I think Mike or Angel might have dropped it there by mistake.”
Mike, who was in the background, said, “I’ve been on break for the last half hour. Angel’s not in yet. None of us put that mop there.”
I asked, “Why didn’t the steam valve shut off?” The thing is supposed to go off automatically when the temperature in the room goes above 116 degrees.
Mike walked over to the wall where the On/Off button is for the bath. He called out, “This is weird. It looks like there’s a glob of glue or something holding the button in.”
I stood up and leaned against the tile wall. I knew then precisely what had happened, but it wouldn’t do any good for anyone else to know — not that they’d believe it, anyway. Sure, Jack, someone tried roasting you to death, like you’re a fucking hot dog, a Fenway frank. Good one.
Dennis said, “Listen, you’ll be back to normal by morning. Take some aspirin. Prepare yourself for a headache. Get to bed early. And most important, drink lots of fluids tonight to rehydrate.”
“Does beer count?”
“Ah, no.”
Dennis walked away, as did everyone else, leaving me in the privacy of a cooling shower.
“Yes, little girl,” I whispered, mostly to myself, “it’s pretty bad when you die before you’re ready to go.”
I had just gotten my clothes on and downed a second two-liter bottle of water when a faint buzzing sound made its way up the back staircase and into the locker room. When I first heard it, I didn’t think I heard anything at all; I told myself it was in my head. But then I saw Mike, the attendant, grab for the phone, and I yelled over to him, “What’s that?”
“Sounds like someone went out the emergency exit in the back,” he said.
I bolted. I descended the back staircase three at a time, my hand on the railing to balance me. I shot across the short first-floor landing and crashed against the bar that would open the fire exit, finding myself in the small rear parking lot of the club.
A Latino kitchen worker sat on a milk crate with his back against the brick building. “Did someone just come out of here?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Which way?” I said, trying to control my excitement.
He pointed out across Clarendon Street, heading toward the South End. I took off in a sprint. It was the early side of rush hour, and as such, the sidewalks were growing crowded with pedestrians on their way out of work, a fact that might have impeded my chase.
I say might have, because it didn’t. The workers were mostly attired in suits and ties, walking purposefully, but by no means urgently. Across the street, I spied a guy in a windbreaker running wildly on the sidewalk as he looked back over his shoulder. So I stormed across the street in pursuit. I mean, I’ve heard of chasing down a story, but this was taking it to ridiculous extremes. He was about forty paces ahead of me, the two of us weaving in and out of other pedestrians as we headed toward Columbus Avenue, when it happened: a cramp in my thigh so immense and intense that I immediately fell to the ground in restrained agony. Truth be told, I thought my leg would need to be amputated. What I really needed was more fluids.
From my vantage on the sidewalk, I saw my would-be killer slow down to a fast jog as he approached the next intersection. I saw a blue van pull to the curb, and the side doors seemed to pop open at just the right time. I saw my assailant jump inside the van. I saw said van melt away into the rest of this big city.
I was in desperate need of a break on this story. What I felt like I had was a broken leg.
27
A guy walks into a bar with a weight on his shoulders.
All right, the guy was me. The bar was the always luxurious Max Stein’s in the wealthy suburban town of Lexington. The weight was of the whole world — or at least it felt like it at the moment.