Exposure
by Parnell Stultz

Congressman Lionel Foster eased himself into the white enamel tub and did his best to avoid rippling the water as he clenched his jaw against the urge to cry out.  His skin quickly became a sheath of something inhuman beneath his touch--rubbery and numb--already enduring, in a way, its own expiration.  The block of ice, floating awkwardly between his knees, radiated a constant aura of strangeness.  Frostbite might be treated with suspicion; he couldn’t allow the ice to rest against his skin.  Slowly, inevitably, the drain allowed gravity to adjust the sudden elevation in the water, drinking steadily until equilibrium returned.

They said the overnight temperature would be somewhere in the mid-fifties, but there was no need turn off the furnace as an additional precaution.  The spring days had been warm enough for the past few weeks not to require the use of central heating.  He’d opened the window and filled the bathtub an hour prior to retrieving the slightly frosted block of ice.  His best guess placed the temperature of the room around sixty degrees.

His arrangements had been put into action with the calm deliberation of forethought.  The bag in which he’d purchased the steadily melting block of ice had been disposed of along with the morning trash, and would already be lost among the detritus of the nearest landfill.  The chunk of dry-ice, gently wafting frigid vapor from the floor beside him, had been purchased in bulk so that Leo Jr. could exhume his science project volcano to impress friends whenever the moment seemed ripe; Lionel didn’t think potential investigators would miss the small amount he’d liberated from the freezer.  The life insurance was in order, or at least it should be.  He hadn’t felt comfortable checking the particulars on the off chance a digital record might also rouse suspicion.  His wife would be well into valium’s dreamless repose, and his son could sleep through a train wreck.  No one would interrupt him.

Lionel leaned forward to start a thin, silent stream of cold water into the tub.  Though it would increase the rate at which his block of ice melted, the slight convection would insure a consistent loss of heat from his body.

The first tremors were making a vain attempt to warm his aching limbs, and Lionel momentarily dipped his head to muffle the sound of his clacking molars.  Beneath the inky blackness, the staccato rhythm of his teeth inspired vague fantasies which waxed and waned unpredictably behind his closed eyes.  He’d become trapped in some inexplicable depth--a collapsed mineshaft perhaps--but it was not the steady digging of rescuers that rattled in his ears.  Some ravenous little animal sensed him in this deep place.  He could envision, with disturbing clarity, the forward slanted teeth of a mole as it chewed through layers of stone in a blind urge to find him and gorge on his warmth.  The image vanished when he lifted his head above water. 

He felt a sudden impulse to leap from the tub, and resisted it with difficulty.  The body, he knew, had a basic wisdom that did not need to be learned.  It did not require conscious action to remove a wayward limb from the heat of a flame.  A drowning man would be protected, temporarily, by the mammalian diving reflex and finally, as the will to avoid breathing underwater failed, might be further protected by laryngospasm with the constriction of the larynx and vocal chords to prevent liquid from entering the lungs.  Lionel gripped the edge of the tub as if to hoist himself out, and then, slowly, let his hand slip back beneath the water.

There were other unpleasant rodents waiting for him in the relative warmth of the real world, and they were not delusions.  His predicament would have been easier to cope with had the principle rodent wanted nothing more than a payout.  Jacob Xavier Macintosh wanted control over his own personal Congressman. 

The second-term Washington State Congressman’s sterling reputation--long cultivated since early adolescence in a deliberate effort to avoid all possible vices--would remain intact as long as he cowed to his principle campaign contributor whenever J.X. Macintosh felt the need to pick up the phone and secure a vote. 

The party, attended the week before, might not have been set-up with the purpose of maneuvering Lionel into foolish action, but the result would probably have been the same.  It shamed him to recall how easily he’d allowed himself to be swept up by the bacchanalia of sexual and chemical excesses, especially after having avoided their allure for so long.   

He could easily recall the carved scrollwork of the estate’s massive double doors as they opened before him.  A plethora of green suffused everything within: balloons of every possible viridigenous hue from which glittering emerald streamers dangled like the trailing tentacles of airborne jellyfish; men in lime-green bowler hats, each trying to hide how self-conscious they were about the absurdity atop their heads; the multitude of beautiful women clad in sleek, ethereal fabrics with their delicate novelty fairy wings stirring the air as they sipped at absinthe or Chartreuse cocktails.  Lionel reached out to take one of the derby hats from the stack on the entryway table, and felt puzzled to find his knuckles jammed against cold, unyielding, bathroom tiles.

He wasn’t shivering anymore.  There was no way to tell how much time had elapsed, but the block of ice, when he grasped it, seemed about half as large as it had been.  His eyes wandered among the speckles of feeble light which leaked in through the small basement window, and fastened on two white dots glinting from the edge of the nearby hamper.  Although he couldn’t say why, they seemed important.  He continued to stare at them in a state of mind eerily similar to the one he’d been consumed by when J.X. Macintosh showed him the video of his drunken romp with one of the Kentucky Derby party nymphs.  The girl had been underage, or so the malicious rodent had said.

The abrupt recollection of what he was doing prompted Lionel to reach out for the two capsules of Valium he’d smuggled away from his wife’s bedside table.  It was impossible to grasp the minute objects with his insensate fingers.  After a few moments of indecision, he leaned his other arm out of the water to brush the pills into one numbly cupped hand.  He placed them on his tongue, took a gulp from the frigid darkness beneath his chin, and swallowed.

His family would be able to live comfortably on the life insurance if his wife used less than half of it to pay off the mortgage and auto loans.  Between her substantial income, and what remained of the insurance, Leo Jr. should be able to attend the college of his choice when the time came.  They would never see him shamed--the good guy everyone could always count on brought low--and he would never endure the degradation of becoming a kind of political prostitute.  He couldn’t choose between losing his family and being forever at the end of a monomaniac’s diamond studded leash.  The first, unconscionable decision of his life, made the week before, would be his last.

He settled back into the water, idly deflecting the much diminished block of ice into a more comfortable position.  The taste of the Valium lingered on his tongue, and evoked memories of childhood illness, his mother, and long afternoons spent cocooned in idle warmth.  He recalled how the vicissitudes of a preadolescent fever engendered a kind of hypnotic window into the picture books he’d loved at the time: searching for rabbits amid the surreal images of Kit Williams’s Masquerade as if each scene could be journeyed through rather than simply observed; wallowing with King Bidgood in his bathtub as battles with toy soldiers and little boats among the suds became a twisted mire of bug-ridden reeds disturbed by the frantic leap of a fish caught at the end of the monarch’s line; scheming along with Ul De Rico’s greedy little goblins as they conspired to steal pure colors from the rainbow to make their magical paints.

“Help, Help,” mumbled Lionel through lips that scarcely parted, “King Bidgood’s in the bathtub and he won’t get out!”

It seemed perfectly natural to see the rotund monarch lounging at the far end of the tub.  Steam rose from the water in gentle wisps as Lionel and the king sampled dainties from the tray floating between them.  The warmth of the bath in his mind instilled a calm, contented somnolence, and he found it easy to understand why the jolly old man would want to linger in it.  Lionel dipped his head repeatedly to cleanse the sweat that must be dripping from his brow.  So warm--so, comfortable....  

The phantasms gained depth and detail when he closed his eyes once again.  The rainbow goblins lounged at the margins of the tub between Lionel and the king, and had, apparently, upended their little pots of stolen color so that the surface of the water beneath the steam transformed into an oily mélange of swirling crimson and violet and gold.  Lionel’s breathing grew short; the space between each slight respiration longer than the last.  Gradually, the storybook images faded behind his closed eyes as an approaching wall of rain might eclipse a landscape until everything within view is indistinct and without depth.

Excerpts from The Olympian:

Congressman Lionel Foster found dead at his home on Bay drive.

Initial report from the coroner’s office is that the second-term congressman fell asleep in his bathtub and succumbed to complications arising from hypothermia.  A local representative of the police department said, “Though it is the oddest example of a person dying from exposure I’ve ever come across, it appears to be nothing more than an unfortunate accident.”

Lionel Foster is survived by....

Auto accident causes four-alarm-fire at the estate of local business magnate.

At some point between the hours of 2 and 3 A.M., according to information provided by arson investigators, the well-known millionaire, Jacob Xavier Macintosh, appears to have lost control of his sports car and crashed into the natural gas meter adjacent to his home.  Due to the estate’s isolation, a majority of the structure was destroyed before emergency equipment arrived on scene to contain the conflagration.  It is unclear if alcohol was a contributing factor, and Mr. Macintosh’s remains have been transferred to...