Fifty Degrees Below Read Free Page B

three shower stalls stood behind white curtains, near an area with benches and lockers. Beyond it extended the room containing toilets, urinals, and a counter of sinks under a long mirror.
    Frank knew the place, having showered and changed in it many times after runs at lunch with Edgardo and Kenzo and Bob and the others. Now he surveyed it with a new regard. It was as he remembered: an adequate bathroom, public but serviceable.
    He undressed and got in one of the showers. A flood of hot water, almost industrial in quantity, washed away some of the stiffness of his uncomfortable night. Of course no one would want to be seen showering there every day. Not that anyone was watching, but some of the morning exercisers would eventually notice.
    A membership in some nearby exercise club would provide an alternative bathroom.
    What else did one need?
    Somewhere to sleep, of course. The Honda would not suffice. If he had a van, and an exercise club membership, and this locker room, and his office upstairs, and the men’s rooms up there. . . . As for food, the city had a million restaurants.
    What else?
    Nothing he could think of. Many people more or less lived in this building, all the NSF hardcores who spent sixty or seventy hours a week here, ate their meals at their desks or in the neighborhood restaurants, only went home to sleep—and these were people with families, with kids, homes, pets, partners!
    In a crowd like that it would be hard to stick out.
    He got out of the shower, dried off (a stack of fresh white towels was there at hand), shaved, dressed.
    He glanced in the mirror over the sink, feeling a bit shy. He didn’t look at himself in mirrors anymore, never met his eye when shaving, stayed focused on the skin under the blade. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he did not resemble his conception of himself, which was vaguely scientific and serious, say Darwinesque; and yet there in the glass getting shaved was always the same old sun-fried jock.
    But this time he looked. To his surprise he saw that he looked normal—that was to say, the same as always. Normative. No one would be able to guess by his appearance that he was sleep-deprived, that he had been thinking some pretty abnormal thoughts, or, crucially, that he had spent the previous night in his car because he no longer had a home.
    “Hmm,” he told his reflection.
    He took the elevator up to the tenth floor, still thinking it over. He stood in the doorway of his new office, evaluating the place by these new inhabitory criteria. It was a true room, rather than a carrel in a larger space, so it had a door he could close. It boasted one of the big inner windows looking into the building’s central atrium, giving him a direct view of the big colored mobile that filled the atrium’s upper half.
    This view was unfortunate, actually. He didn’t want to look at that mobile, for not too long ago he had found himself hanging upside down from it, in the middle of the night, working desperately to extricate himself from an ill-conceived and poorly executed break-and-enter job. He had been trying and failing to recover a badly worded resignation letter he had left for Diane Chang, the NSF director. It was an incident he would really rather forget.
    But there the mobile hung, at the new angle which Frank had given to it and which no one had noticed, perhaps a reminder to—to what? To try not to do stupid things. To think things through before attempting them. But he always tried to do that, so the reminder was unnecessary. Really, the mobile outside his window was a disadvantage. But drapes could be installed.
    There was room for a short couch against one wall, if he moved the bookcase there to the opposite corner. It would then be like a kind of living room, with the computer as entertainment center. There was an ordinary men’s room around the corner, a coffee nook down the hall, the showers downstairs. All the necessities. As Sucandra had remarked, at dinner