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Chapter 5. I Get Up

  At this point in my remembering I began to get uncomfortable again, this time for two reasons. First, I really didn't want to go on and think about what I thought I ought to think about, and second, I really needed to pee. So I got up.

  There was a door in the wall to the right of the bed, and it wasn't the door we'd come through the night before. I knocked on it first and, when nothing happened, opened it carefully. As I had hoped and expected, it was a bathroom. I went in, feeling for a light switch, but the lights came on by themselves before I found one.

  After unloading what felt like about a gallon of used water, I noticed a nice big shower stall and decided I'd really like to take a shower. I looked down to where the bandages were, wondering if I could take them off, only they weren't there. Strange—I really did remember bandages, one on my ribs and one on my right knee. There was a faint red patch on my ribs and a curved red line on my knee, but no bandages. Well, I thought, that was pretty weird, but it would make showering easier. Now all I had to worry about was the cast, and I figured I could angle the shower head and aim it low, so it would be easy to keep the cast dry. Probably a little water wouldn't hurt it anyway.

  Holy wow, was I ever totally wrong about that. I got into the shower stall and adjusted everything, turned on the shower nice and hot, and then like an idiot I turned around to reach the soap, so the cast got wet. Got wet, and dissolved, and ran down the drain. I stood there with my mouth open for a moment, then looked sort of tentatively at my arm. It looked all right. There was a scar on my biceps, where I had seen the bone sticking out, but I could bend the arm every which way and nothing hurt, so I decided to go ahead and enjoy my shower.

  There was a shelf in the shower with soap and shampoo and shaving cream and a razor, so I washed and shampooed and then started to lather my face. It felt really weird. I actually opened the shower door and stuck my head out so I could look in the mirror, and I had more of a beard than I ever had before—maybe a week's growth, maybe more. Had I been here that long? I decided that I look terrible with a beard, and there was so much of it that I was afraid to try to shave it in the shower.

  I finished showering and got out and dried off, then wet-shaved the stubble so I was nice and smooth again. I actually managed to not cut myself for once.

  There were new toothbrushes, still in the package, and toothpaste, and deodorant, and a comb, and after-shave balsam, so I did all that too. Then I turned around and looked in the full-length mirror.

  My hair is straight and light brown, sort of a nondescript color, but it was a little lighter now from the sun, and my skin was a little darker, so it made more of a contrast. At the cabin we had swum and lain on the raft and the dock naked, so I was pretty much the same color all over, beige beginning to be tan from the sun. Shep always gets kind of ruddy tan, and his hair is blond, like Aunt Jean's, with tight waves. His had gotten lighter as well and was more gold. He has blue eyes. Mine are brown.

  I looked at myself for a long time. I don't think I'm particularly vain, but I thought I was okay-looking. I'm already a little over six feet, a little taller than Dad, and reasonably well built, not fat or anything, although I'd like to have more muscle definition and basically more muscle. I think I have nice long legs.

  Shep is shorter, maybe five ten, which is about the same as Uncle Will. He's more wiry, I'm more lanky. He looks to me like somebody who would play shortstop, but I'm actually the baseball player, right field on the J.V. Baseball is too slow for Shep—he's on the high school varsity basketball team, point guard. He's quick and his body is always sort of humming. He's not really nervous, like his mom, but he's never really totally still. I'm slower and more sort of steady, more calm maybe, like my mom.

  My sister Cammie's an artist. I mean, she can really draw. She's always sketching, not just landscapes and still lifes but Mom and Dad and me, and sometimes she asks me to pose. Not so she can sketch me, usually, but so she can get the muscles right when somebody's turning their head, or how a hand looks holding different things.

  A little over a year ago, when I'd just turned sixteen, she was doing a drawing of a bunch of Roman legionaries in a battle with Gauls or something, I don't remember why. Anyway, she asked me to pose, in shorts, and I said okay. She had me stand barefoot with one foot about a yard in front of the other, knees bent, up on the toes of my back foot, as if I was running.

  "Lean back a little, I mean put more weight on your toes, as if you're pushing off," she said at one point. "I need to get the calf muscles right when they're all bunched up."

  I stood it as long as I could and then told her, "I'm getting a cramp in my toes, Cam."

  "Okay, I've got it, I think."

  I stretched and shook out my foot and leg, then came over to see what she'd done. It was just a study of legs, almost directly from the back, with the back of the back leg very detailed and the foot sole hardly roughed in.

  "My legs aren't that big," I said. She'd drawn the legs of someone a lot more muscular than I was.

  "Yes, I want this one to be older, so I just sort of widened and emphasized." She tapped the very defined calf muscles with her charcoal. "How would you lace a sandal over that?"

  "Sandal?"

  "I've Googled 'legionary' and 'hoplite' and 'Roman sandal,' and unfortunately all the pictures of actual people are wearing greaves"—

  "What?"

  "You know, leather or metal shin guards. And none of them are pictured from the back. So you can't see how the sandals work. And the pictures of Roman sandals are mostly from costume catalogues, so they're just somebody's idea of how a Roman sandal might possibly look.

  "See, I think it would be awfully hard to wear a sandal that laced all the way up to the knee if you were running and your muscles were flexing and extending underneath the laces. Either they'd slip, or they'd be too tight."

  "Maybe the sandals weren't laced all the way up, but just around the ankle," I suggested.

  "I know, that seems logical, but I can't find any pictures that show an actual legionary from the back, wearing actual sandals that you can see the lacings. I did find a picture of a bas relief of a hoplite, which I think was probably sculpted at or near the actual time, and he was wearing greaves and bare feet."

  "Ouch," I commented.

  "But probably if you'd spent all your life going barefoot, your soles would have calluses an inch and a half thick," she mused. "Do you have calluses?" She grabbed my ankle and tried to lift up my foot.

  "Hold on!" I sat down on the floor in front of her and held up my feet.

  "Mm. Not really," she said. "But maybe I can sort of fake it. Or maybe they wouldn't actually show…Stand up again, like before, and I'll do your foot."

  This seemed like a good moment to ask Cammie if I was good-looking. I'd been wanting to, because she was an artist, so she would have an informed opinion, and also she's a girl, and I wanted a girl's point of view. While I was at it, I also asked her if Shep was good-looking. I think I sort of wanted to know if he was handsomer than I was.

  "You haven't quite grown into your face yet," she said. "Put more weight on your toes, just for a second. You need to fill out more. You're not, not finished. Shep is more the way he'll look when he's grown up. He's cute, girls would think he's very cute, in kind of a flashy way. Put your other foot up on the chair—I need to see the heel better. You—you're going to be more handsome, more mature-looking when you're done. More classically handsome. You're also built better, I think, but I like tall lean types. Shep would actually be better for this—I bet the Roman legionaries were shorter and stockier.

  "You have a good mouth. I think Shep's is a little too, I don't know, lush for my taste, and too pink. He's just a little too, in most ways.

  "Girls will like you," she went on, "but not the same girls who like Shep, or anyway not at the same age. Shep looks like he'd be a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. You look like a keeper—somebody to marry. I don't mean you don't have a sense of humor, because you
do, and that's very important. In fact, I think you actually have more of a sense of humor than Shep. Okay, you can go now."

  You have to discount some of this because she's my sister, of course, but it sounded honest to me, and it made me feel better about myself.

  So I looked in the mirror for a while. I looked at myself in profile. I even found a hand mirror and looked at my back. I thought it was basically the right shape, broader at the shoulders and narrower lower down, but I realized that I had no idea whether I had a nice ass. I looked at it and it looked okay, but I just don't know what qualifies as a nice ass on a guy. Maybe I should ask Cammie, I thought. Although she would only be able to say if it was nice in clothes—we quit taking baths together a long time ago.

  And of course I couldn't ask her about my dick.