Atropos Read Free Page B

Present—January—Kirkester, New York
    T ROTTER HATED TO STOP on an even number. He pressed his back down into the bench, tightened his hands on the grips, and forced the muscles of his legs to lift the weight one more time. It was burning, tearing agony, but it had to be done. When the thirty-pound weight clanked home at the top of the hinge, Trotter was tempted to let go and let the thing crash back down, but he didn’t. He eased it down, if anything that took that much effort could have anything to do with “ease.”
    There, he thought. I should videotape these things. Let the Congressman and all the Agency doctors see he wasn’t dodging his rehabilitation. Trotter had even been given to understand that the President himself had been asking after him.
    This is what I get, he thought, for going tame.
    Trotter sat up, pulling the sweatband off his head as he did so. As always, he held it out at arm’s length and squeezed. Liquid oozed from the top of his hand and between his fingers, fat drops of sweat that spatted loudly on the floor. He threw the sweatband across the basement of his new two-bedroom ranch, making a basket in the open top of the washer. He missed maybe one day out of six. He didn’t bother to retrieve the ones that went behind the washer.
    Trotter said, “Ah,” as he stood up. He always said “Ah” when he stood up these days. When the doctors felt like being particularly honest with him, they told him he probably always would make some kind of noise. When they were being brutal about it, they told him he’d probably be in some “discomfort” every waking hour for the rest of his life. Even a doctor being brutal doesn’t like to use the word “pain.”
    “After all,” they’d tell him, as if he’d been looking for an argument, “you were hurt very badly.”
    Yeah, Trotter thought. I remember. I was there. Thirty feet, from the catwalk to the concrete floor of the Hudson Group’s press room. Fractured skull. Ten smashed ribs. Broken hip. Three bones broken in his legs. Punctured lung. He knew all about it. That’s what he was rehabilitating himself from.
    It was even working. He hardly limped at all, now, and he had stopped using the cane weeks ago.
    He limped after these goddam workouts, though. He limped now over to the laundry area. Trotter kicked off his sneakers, slid out of his sweatpants and jock, pulled off his shirt. He threw everything but the sneakers into the washer, added soap and softener, and started the machine. When they’d first let him out of the hospital, he used to take a rueful inventory of his surgery scars every time he found himself naked; now he didn’t bother. Rehabilitating the mind, too. Trotter said, “Ah,” bent down and pulled a towel out of the dryer. He wrapped it around himself and headed upstairs.
    Going upstairs was no problem. Trotter had been surprised to discover that. It was going downstairs that was the killer, the forcing of muscles and joints to give in to gravity, but only just enough. The only times he missed the cane were when he found himself at the top of a steep flight of stairs.
    Trotter padded across the kitchen floor to the cabinet next to the refrigerator. He took out a bottle of Advil, carefully counted out six of them. Then he opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Gatorade and a jelly doughnut. He swallowed the pills, washing them down with the Gatorade.
    Forget cocaine, he thought. Ibuprofen was the new drug of choice. This dose every six hours kept the “discomfort” to a level he could manage. He could get a prescription for Motrin, which was the same stuff in bigger doses, but why bother? Hell, with his connections, he could get codeine, morphine, Demerol, stuff that would make him forget there was a thing called pain.
    Trotter didn’t want them. It wasn’t that he liked the pain. It was that he worried about what else the stuff would make him forget. Too many lives depended on the functioning of Trotter’s