Strangled - Brian McGrory [95]
So I gave up. In fact, I got up, staggered toward the door, opened it, and proceeded to take the most delightfully reinvigorating cool shower that anyone could ever possibly imagine, the memory of which would hang with me for a lifetime.
That was the plan anyway, but I ran into a problem, that problem being the door. It didn’t budge. So I pushed against it again. Again, it didn’t move. I shoved my shoulder into it. Still nothing.
Meantime, the steam was roaring out of the small pipe as hard as ever, and that pipe happened to be near the door, which meant that my feet were about to be scalded off.
I stepped back and gave myself a little bit of a running start, figuring that the door must have swelled in the heat and was stuck on the frame. I took two long, fast steps and hit it hard with the sole of my foot. I might as well have been pushing against the side of a Greyhound bus, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do such a thing. The door wasn’t going anywhere, and its sheer physical obstinateness knocked me to the hard, hot floor.
I scrambled up. Steam everywhere. I took a different approach now, trying to jigger the door around, maybe loosen it from whatever had it stuck. But again, it wouldn’t move.
The gushing sound was all-consuming. The heat was raging. The thought struck me that I could die in the steam room of my private club, and I wondered how that would look in my obituary. How long before my fellow club members began using the room again? A day? Probably more like an hour. The coroner wouldn’t even be halfway down the street. How odd it would be to have my boiling body shoved in the back of a refrigerated van.
I yelled. I had no choice. “Help!” I called out. Granted, it wasn’t particularly original, but my brains were melting down into my neck.
Nothing but the gush of steam in response. I hollered, “Please open the steam room door! Help! The door is stuck. Help!”
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