Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

his face had changed. His body, which was hard and muscled, bore no relationship to that of the skinny kid he had been at school. One glance was enough to reveal, back then, that he was the kind of child who got picked on.
    No one would pick on him now.
    Leela focused on the eye holes in the mask. Her gaze was intense and unwavering. His face felt naked. On his left hand, he wore a close-fitting leather glove.
    Even if he were to remove the mask, he thought it possible she would not recognize him, particularly since he had a military buzz cut (although it was true she had once seen him—for several weeks—with shaven head.) That act of attention-getting having served its purpose, he had let his thick hair grow back. It was dark and wavy and a hank always fellacross his brow and she had turned one day and collided with him as he passed her locker. He had been avoiding her for weeks, ever since the standoff when he’d threatened to get his father’s gun, but on this day he walked past the girls’ lockers by design. She was reaching for her books, her back to the hallway, at the moment of impact.
    “Hey,” she said, “watch where you’re—oh, Cobb!” She put her hand on his arm. That was something she did instinctively: she touched people when she spoke to them.
    “I’m so glad you let your hair grow back. You look great.” She stood close and he could smell her breath, sweet and citrusy, as though she had just drunk orange juice. “You look like you again,” she said.
    He wanted to do something intense and passionate and possibly violent. He thought of biting her lips. He thought that he could not bear for the searchlight of her attention to flicker or move on.
    “I’ve missed you,” she said, and then he thought of what to do.
    He held her gaze steadily and coldly until her warmth turned to uncertainty and she withdrew her hand from his arm and stepped back a little, and then he walked on without speaking. His heart was racing. He felt that a victory had been chalked up. He felt something as decisive as a power surge in every nerve. There had been a transfusion, a reverse flow of energies: he was soaked with her power; she was flooded with his anxiety. He felt in such a state of excitation that he barely reached the men’s bathroom in time. He did not even have to touch himself before he came.
    He invented a word for the sensation: switch-flow.
    In the interview room so many years later, watching her bounce lightly against the back of the vinyl chair, languorous,swaying as a waking sleeper sways, he felt the old blood-rush coming on. He was addicted to switch-flow. He had the sensation that his ears were on fire. Hot needles, in small battalions, were pricking his extremities—his fingers, his toes—and advancing like shock troops toward his crotch. Adrenalin lurked in odd places when the switch-flow tide was on the rise.
    He was skilled at feeding his addiction.
    In high school, he had become an enigma to her. This was the weapon he could always count on because he knew she could not leave puzzles alone. He bothered her. She was preoccupied with him. He knew it from her perplexed smile when she looked at him. He did not return her smile and this puzzled her further. His status was assured. He settled into his niche and was warmed by it. It felt permanent.
    Knowledge was power: she had taught him that.
    Secret knowledge—knowledge illicitly gained and kept private—was absolute power, and for that awareness also, he had Leela to condemn and to thank. Her face at the window on the night of his broken thumb, the night of which she never spoke, not to him nor to anyone else (he was confident of that), had given sudden meaning to his life. It had shaped his career.
    If I were to tell… her silence said, though I never would…
    He knew with absolute certainty that she would never even be tempted to tell, that the possibility would never enter her head, that she could no more think of telling than she could