The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [180]
72
Affenlight rapped on the door. No answer. He pulled the pilfered key from his pocket, slipped it into the lock.
A dense stench, like that of a fetid locker room, assailed him before he could cross the threshold. He retreated to the stairwell, sucked in a breath of clean air, and entered the room, which was shrouded in evening gloom. No Henry. He raised the drawn shades and threw open the windows. Scattered across Henry’s blond-wood desk were several cylindrical plastic tubs of the kind yogurt or margarine comes in. Dotlike fruit flies buzzed about the lidless ones. They looked to be full of different kinds of congealed soup. Affenlight shooed the flies, picked up two of the containers, and carried them toward the checkerboard-floored bathroom, intending to dump them down the toilet.
The bathroom lights were out, but there in the tub lay Henry, naked, submerged to his neck in water tinged a pale unpleasant yellow. His diaphragm rose and fell, trembling the water. He was asleep.
Affenlight glanced down at the soup in his hands. Chicken noodle on the left, with a thin scrim of fat on the surface, split pea on the right. Henry looked ghastly pale, except for his scruffy brown beard and matching pubic hair. His slack hands were shriveled like white-grape raisins, his internal liquids leached out into the larger body of the tub. His jaw clenched and unclenched. Crammed inside that undersize tub, his cheeks drawn, flaccid muscles submerged in the stagnant water, he seemed both too large and too small for himself, precisely the wrong size.
Affenlight stealthily exited the bathroom, set the soup on the desk, and lit a cigarette. The pain had vanished for a while, but now it returned, this time in his chest. He sat down on the arm of the rose-colored chair to smoke and wait it out. It was strong, but not especially worrisome—he’d had a similar sensation a few times lately after serious exertion, whether with Owen or on the treadmill upstairs, and he knew that it would pass. When it did he tried to decide what to do about Henry.
There seemed to be no clean clothes in Henry’s dresser, so he opened Owen’s and pulled out the most masculine-looking pair of briefs. He dug around further until he found a clean white T-shirt and a pair of drawstring pants. He took a towel from the closet shelf, wrapped the clothes in it, and, having removed his shoes so as to make less noise, slipped into the bathroom to set the bundle on the checkerboard floor beside the tub. Then he shut the bathroom door and knocked on it. “Henry?” he called. “Are you there?”
Sloshing noises came from behind the door. “Minit,” Henry groaned, sounding weakened and annoyed. Affenlight heard water draining from the tub, gurgling through the pipes and finishing with a slurping flourish. He stubbed out his cigarette and flicked it through the open window. A minute later Henry came through the bathroom door, dressed in Owen’s clothes. His eyes looked sullen and uncommunicative, as if trapped behind thick glass. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” replied Affenlight with false chipperness conjured from who knew where. “I hope I didn’t disturb your bath. I just wanted to let you know that—” How to phrase it? The Harpooners? The baseball team? You? We? Affenlight was even less a part of the we than Henry now, though Henry didn’t know that. “—we won today.”
“I know.” Henry’s voice was flat and dull, like hammered steel. “Owen called.”
“Oh. You spoke to Owen?”
“He left a message.”
“Ah.” He looked awful, emaciated, his cheeks concave and gray above his beard. “When did you last eat?” Affenlight asked.
Henry thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“What about the soup?”
He shrugged. “Pella leaves it.”
“But you don’t eat it.”
“No.”
The Westish payroll was packed with professional counselors, people schooled in the art of connecting with students who were bulimic, anorexic, alcoholic, depressed, distressed, drug-addicted,