The Sauna
A naked John Smith lies on the lowest of the three levels. He can take, but this time does not want to take, the most intense heat of the uppermost level, where The Hunched Cornish sits, also naked, hunched over, broken by thoughts, unfocused eyes directed at the steam-blurred space between his knees, huge fingers gripping the edge of the bench he’s on to his either side.
John Smith props himself up on his elbows and puts The Cornish into his peripheral view without directly looking at him.
He knows what The Hunched Cornish looks like – all that old huge muscle and massive mass – and like his face, covered in scars.
He wonders why a monster-god, who can light himself on fire and thereafter set anything he touches likewise, would feel a need to indulge in a sauna, but then he realizes he has answered his own query with the word ‘indulge’. For there he was, The Hunched Cornish, sweating, very much the way Smith was sweating, except far more profusely; like his flesh, his beads of sweat were also massive – hailstones rather than raindrops.
And Smith wonders about all those scars – some almost whimsically fine, others, deep-deep gouges, and long-broad gashes. Hard to believe he had been born that way… although maybe…
Or were they the ornaments and trophies and memories of his wars and battles over the millennia? Or did the other, older, gods who’d made him – if that is, in fact, how he’d come to be – inflict these injuries into him as they fashioned and molded The Cornish; but why?
From spite? Why would makers despise their own creation? But then again, why not? Why not put their hatred and mockery and gleeful malice and scorn into a thing of their own making – for their own amusement? Throughout our ages people have done no less to their unborn and smaller and weaker children and brothers, taking the example of the gods.
Or did they do it in some strange way to benefit him – The Hunched Cornish?
So he’d suffer, only to perhaps one day finally be rewarded in some way he can’t even guess or imagine?
So he’d be terrible in looks only to be great in spirit; or so he’d be driven by rage but tempered by compassion?
No. If they did do this, it was to ensure precisely the effect that his ghastly abominable ugliness has produced: a lack of love and a starving need for it, and the resulting overflow of hatred and frustration driving him insane. If the gods had done this, they couldn’t have been crueler if they’d tried.
John Smith and The Hunched Cornish both rise and, taking their towels, descend off the hot wooden benches.
Smith opens the door and they enter the large marble and tiled hall of pools.
Smith knows The Hunched Cornish is very fond of this particular chamber. There is an elevated section of tiled floor between two pillars flush with a wall that looks very much like an open stage.
As Smith dips into a large round pool of cool water, The Hunched Cornish steps up onto this stage, as Smith knew he would, and with his towel wrapped around his giant waist, paces back and forth. His head is down in thought, but a smile plays on his gruesome mouth, as he remembers a song, perhaps, or the lines of a play. Now his head nods in a rhythm as he smiles and walks. Smith also smiles, happy there’s something The Cornish is remembering that is making him happy.
It is clear that his spirits are lifted, and so The Hunched Cornish removes his towel and heads toward the pool. Though he has seen them before, John Smith still cannot believe the size of those genitals. Hard to believe, Smith thinks, that in more than 3,500 years, with all the rapes he must have committed in that time or, who knows, possibly even a number of consensual couplings, The Hunched Cornish has been unable to score even one kid out of all those lucky dames. Fantastic, John Smith thinks; very hard to believe. In fact, John Smith begins not to believe it at all, and begins to lose himself in what very well may be, and probably is, wishful thinking – for The Cornish’s sake. There’s just got to be one or two younger Cornishes somewhere out there… he thinks…
The Hunched Cornish is in the water. At first slowly, almost imperceptibly, John Smith begins to feel the water grow warmer, but he dismisses this with the thought that his body has simply grown used to the cool water.
But then there is a surge of heat through the water that suddenly surrounds Smith and pricks his flesh with red-hot madness. It scares the daylights out of him and he yells in fright and scrambles as fast as he can, with his dick and balls flapping and slapping against his abdomen, out of the pool.
With mouth open and still aghast, Smith looks back at the pool and sees steam rising off the surface, and within an instant, the pool is boiling. He peers through the steam and sees The Hunched Cornish, his shoulders moving up and down in silent laughter.
Wrapped in towels, the two go into the antechamber to relax, watch the war news on TV and enjoy some cool beverages.
Then they head back into the sauna.
They emerge again and head into another, far simpler room where they fill large buckets that are more like tubs with cold water and take turns pouring them over each another. John Smith, of course, must stand up on a bench to douse The Hunched Cornish.
They go back into the sauna, and when they come out again, it is all the way out – outside, into the night, naked, and there is no way John Smith is leaping into that pond first, filled with the passing winter’s ice water, wary lest The Hunched Cornish’s bulk land on top of him.
But he feels the rumble of The Hunched Cornish’s feet behind him, and then he sees the outline of the massive scarred figure running past him and plunging – his arms wrapped around his knees tucked up against his chest, into the pond. Smith watches as the head surfaces a little further out from the middle and then he runs and jumps into the water in precisely the same way.
He feels his flesh tighten all about him and his life rise up into his head as he breaks the surface and breathes in the cold clear air.
March 22, 2015