The malls, the grocery store, the cafes.
The Hotel rooms.
The massage parlors.
Summer is an affront to my hygiene. I saw a spit bobbing on the surface of the pool the other day. I had just finished a lap and was slightly out of breath, and as I came up for air, I saw the enormous stain floating like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. No amount of self-restraint and indifference would keep that image away. Even as I turned my head and looked straight ahead, at a point somewhere on the other bank of the pool, the archipelago of saliva kept dancing on the periphery of my vision. Any serious swimmer will tell you that a certain amount of pool water will make its way into your ears, nose and mouth. I couldn’t entertain the thought of diving back into the water without concluding the matter. This outrage needed a culprit. I yanked my eyes off the spot on the other side and looked at my companions in the pool. There was the usual assortment of multi-colored silly children splashing around and speaking to each other in a corny American accent. There was a German mother with freckled shoulders playing with her baby. There was a guy ogling at the mother with a rapist grin. I couldn’t know what was there to ogle at; even her lavish breasts were invisible under the water. But the balding, swarthy guy with flaps of fat and a potbelly didn’t seem to be doing anything at all but look at the woman. I could imagine the scene: the bald tourist from a neighboring country finishing off his heavy dinner of rice and lamb and ambling down to the pool to caress his penis below the water. At one point his throat- which no doubt played host to more left over food than the MOE food court trash bin – needed clearing. And off came the environmental disaster.
I take off my polyester shirt and walk the short passage to my favorite part of the ‘Health’ Club. Here at the steam room you can literally relax despite yourself. No amount of resistance will stand in the face of hot clouds billowing from the steam muzzles. The stone bench is narrower than what is comfortable for a person to lie down, and towels aren’t allowed inside. So I tuck my spongy rubberic flip-flop under my head and lay, supine, waiting for the crushing wave of nausea. It usually hits after a couple of minutes. My hearts starts beating audibly; my breath diminishes to the point of indistinctive heaving and receding of the ribcage. None of your senses is strong enough to harness the idle time and keep you distracted from this battle. Your eyes are focused on the ceiling of white acrylic sheets, dripping with condensed steam. Millions of particles of off-white vapor swarm in your vision. At first, you hear nothing but the squeal of gas as it emerges from the pressurized pipes unto the air, but after a while (how long you aren’t sure), you being to hear your heartbeat. It is distinctive and unique in rhythm. Not hurried, nor panicky. It is just loud. Your heart is hard at work, like the workman with the jackhammer, concentrating at the task at hand and oblivious to the inconveniences he’s wrecking all around him. Your heart needs to work overtime to deliver blood to the extremities that are expected to help you flee the scene. A dose of low-grade adrenalin, administered with care and steadiness. You hear your heartbeats, and it is like no other sound you had ever heard, it drowns out all other audio stimuli in the surroundings. The smell? Well, your sense of smelling is crushed with the first inhalation of steam. The first intake is the toughest one. It is a balancing act between the desire to fill your lungs with warmth and the urge to cough. There’s no greater inconvenience at the face of the earth than a trapped cough. And it’s all you get to have at first inhalation, a chough coiled at the center of your being, and you feel the urge to give it all you want, to hawk, to jump. And yet, you can’t. There is no enough dry friction inside to give it the necessary spark. You’re at the mercy of this heavy, fluid-clogged breathing. You want to reach out to the area in crisis and wipe it clean with a white cloth rag, watch the sooty dirt accumulate on it. For you know how it is for a smoker. It is a coal mine down there.
While you lie down on your back, with your palms turned up in resistance of imaginary pressure, exerted by the sweat and the dehydration, you’re on the verge of losing consciousness. You are borderline insane with heat. In your mind eye you see a tormentor with a smirk on his face, watching through a one way mirror, turning up the heat, shouting obscenities through loudspeakers, demanding answers to short-phrased questions: Who are you with? Where were you last Friday?… and in your mind eye, you’re searching for an alibi. You envisage various scenarios in which you fall asleep or lose consciousness and die of dehydration. But then you remember being told once that it is impossible for a human being to sleep in the supine position. You remember that this was the reason you had adopted this posture to begin with. Your tactile sense is obliterated; the tips of your fingers are blistered like boiled squids. You wipe the face of your wrest watch and check the time, you had only been here ten minutes, but you can’t take it anymore. You are not supposed to take it anymore. It is amazing how, at times of hard labor, the sense of self tend to morph into the third person. The struggle you are being subjected to isn’t yours, and the panting look of defeat, which greets you when you glance at the reflection in the glass door, isn’t yours. He, the person who took off my shirt fifteen minutes ago, lowers his feet to the floor and walks gingerly out of the steam room. He inhales frantically, pushes the door to the lavatory and looks at me in the mirror above the sink. What he sees is a study in paradox, a relaxed face with healthy-looking ruddy skin. Calm eyes. Frightened nose. And as the everyday perception of reality begin to circulate in my bloodstream, I feel the trapped cough once again. I could no longer take the clump of foreign substance in my steam-rolled windpipes. I bend over the sink and set off an artillery projectile that lands at the white porcelain with multiple smacks. I’ve collected all the health benefits I was promised from the chamber of torture: Relaxation, Healthy Skin, Rejuvenated Respiratory System.
And I managed to do it without spitting in the pool.
Summer is an affront to my hygiene. I saw a spit bobbing on the surface of the pool the other day. I had just finished a lap and was slightly out of breath, and as I came up for air, I saw the enormous stain floating like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. No amount of self-restraint and indifference would keep that image away. Even as I turned my head and looked straight ahead, at a point somewhere on the other bank of the pool, the archipelago of saliva kept dancing on the periphery of my vision. Any serious swimmer will tell you that a certain amount of pool water will make its way into your ears, nose and mouth. I couldn’t entertain the thought of diving back into the water without concluding the matter. This outrage needed a culprit. I yanked my eyes off the spot on the other side and looked at my companions in the pool. There was the usual assortment of multi-colored silly children splashing around and speaking to each other in a corny American accent. There was a German mother with freckled shoulders playing with her baby. There was a guy ogling at the mother with a rapist grin. I couldn’t know what was there to ogle at; even her lavish breasts were invisible under the water. But the balding, swarthy guy with flaps of fat and a potbelly didn’t seem to be doing anything at all but look at the woman. I could imagine the scene: the bald tourist from a neighboring country finishing off his heavy dinner of rice and lamb and ambling down to the pool to caress his penis below the water. At one point his throat- which no doubt played host to more left over food than the MOE food court trash bin – needed clearing. And off came the environmental disaster.
I take off my polyester shirt and walk the short passage to my favorite part of the ‘Health’ Club. Here at the steam room you can literally relax despite yourself. No amount of resistance will stand in the face of hot clouds billowing from the steam muzzles. The stone bench is narrower than what is comfortable for a person to lie down, and towels aren’t allowed inside. So I tuck my spongy rubberic flip-flop under my head and lay, supine, waiting for the crushing wave of nausea. It usually hits after a couple of minutes. My hearts starts beating audibly; my breath diminishes to the point of indistinctive heaving and receding of the ribcage. None of your senses is strong enough to harness the idle time and keep you distracted from this battle. Your eyes are focused on the ceiling of white acrylic sheets, dripping with condensed steam. Millions of particles of off-white vapor swarm in your vision. At first, you hear nothing but the squeal of gas as it emerges from the pressurized pipes unto the air, but after a while (how long you aren’t sure), you being to hear your heartbeat. It is distinctive and unique in rhythm. Not hurried, nor panicky. It is just loud. Your heart is hard at work, like the workman with the jackhammer, concentrating at the task at hand and oblivious to the inconveniences he’s wrecking all around him. Your heart needs to work overtime to deliver blood to the extremities that are expected to help you flee the scene. A dose of low-grade adrenalin, administered with care and steadiness. You hear your heartbeats, and it is like no other sound you had ever heard, it drowns out all other audio stimuli in the surroundings. The smell? Well, your sense of smelling is crushed with the first inhalation of steam. The first intake is the toughest one. It is a balancing act between the desire to fill your lungs with warmth and the urge to cough. There’s no greater inconvenience at the face of the earth than a trapped cough. And it’s all you get to have at first inhalation, a chough coiled at the center of your being, and you feel the urge to give it all you want, to hawk, to jump. And yet, you can’t. There is no enough dry friction inside to give it the necessary spark. You’re at the mercy of this heavy, fluid-clogged breathing. You want to reach out to the area in crisis and wipe it clean with a white cloth rag, watch the sooty dirt accumulate on it. For you know how it is for a smoker. It is a coal mine down there.
While you lie down on your back, with your palms turned up in resistance of imaginary pressure, exerted by the sweat and the dehydration, you’re on the verge of losing consciousness. You are borderline insane with heat. In your mind eye you see a tormentor with a smirk on his face, watching through a one way mirror, turning up the heat, shouting obscenities through loudspeakers, demanding answers to short-phrased questions: Who are you with? Where were you last Friday?… and in your mind eye, you’re searching for an alibi. You envisage various scenarios in which you fall asleep or lose consciousness and die of dehydration. But then you remember being told once that it is impossible for a human being to sleep in the supine position. You remember that this was the reason you had adopted this posture to begin with. Your tactile sense is obliterated; the tips of your fingers are blistered like boiled squids. You wipe the face of your wrest watch and check the time, you had only been here ten minutes, but you can’t take it anymore. You are not supposed to take it anymore. It is amazing how, at times of hard labor, the sense of self tend to morph into the third person. The struggle you are being subjected to isn’t yours, and the panting look of defeat, which greets you when you glance at the reflection in the glass door, isn’t yours. He, the person who took off my shirt fifteen minutes ago, lowers his feet to the floor and walks gingerly out of the steam room. He inhales frantically, pushes the door to the lavatory and looks at me in the mirror above the sink. What he sees is a study in paradox, a relaxed face with healthy-looking ruddy skin. Calm eyes. Frightened nose. And as the everyday perception of reality begin to circulate in my bloodstream, I feel the trapped cough once again. I could no longer take the clump of foreign substance in my steam-rolled windpipes. I bend over the sink and set off an artillery projectile that lands at the white porcelain with multiple smacks. I’ve collected all the health benefits I was promised from the chamber of torture: Relaxation, Healthy Skin, Rejuvenated Respiratory System.
And I managed to do it without spitting in the pool.
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