Free Memoirs Of An Invisible Man by H.F. Saint Page B

When I was done I felt much better. But my headache was, if anything, worse. I leaned my head into the wash basin and turned on the cold water. Try to clear my mind. The water was too cold and the position extremely uncomfortable. There was a medicine cabinet over the washbasin. In it I located a bottle of aspirin and took three. I noticed that there seemed to be a sort of continuous, high-pitched whining sound just inside the auditory range, but I could not decide whether there was really such a sound or whether it was a sort of overtone incorporated in the pain of my headache. The lights seemed to be swelling and dimming with the throbbing in my temples. The pain in my head was really quite extraordinary. Making it hard to think. I decided there
was
a whining sound, but I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not the pitch was actually shifting up and down rhythmically.
    I straightened my clothing and looked dully at my own image in the mirror. I realized that my entire body was sweating. I turned and looked at the shower. A quick shower and then back to the press conference. Plenty of time. A bit presumptuous of me to come in and use their bathroom like this. Embarrassing if someone walked in. But they would all be watching the slide show. And it would make me feel much better. I took off my clothes and hung them carefully on one of the hooks. It annoyed me that there were no hangers. Weedy people, scientists, I thought crankily. Soon everyone will be an engineer or a computer programmer and there will be absolutely zero demand for dry cleaning. I should find out who makes dry cleaning equipment and go short. I folded my socks and underwear and set them carefully on my shoes. I stepped into the shower and ran it first warm, then cold, then very hot, then cold again, then off. I felt very much better. I stepped out of the shower and, taking a towel off the stack, began slowly to dry myself.
    Somewhere within the building an electric bell went off. It was the kind of harsh, overwhelming bell that announces the end of class at school— everyone closes notebooks, gathers up books, retracts ballpoints, shuffles out into the corridor — and for an instant I thought inanely that Wachs’s lecture must have ended. No, it was some sort of alarm bell. It went on ringing, like one of those burglar alarms that go off in the middle of the night and ring continuously, sometimes for hours, until the shop owner or the police come. It is always a marvelous relief when one of those alarms suddenly stops. I wished this one would stop. I really did feel much better, I told myself, but my head was still not at all clear. Above the sound of the bell there was still that painful throbbing whine. Someone ran by in the corridor, shouting something.
    All the commotion would have something to do with the Students for a Fair World. Probably they had shut off power to the building. No, the lights were still on. Perhaps just the power to the laboratory. Or perhaps they had simply set off a fire alarm. That would make sense. What they mainly wanted was to get everyone outside so they would have an audience for their demonstration. As I thought about it, I was more and more disinclined to give them that satisfaction. I could hear a lot of shouting and slamming of doors throughout the building; people were trooping down the corridor. Really, all this was nothing more than a school fire drill. If I stayed out of sight, I might spend the entire time comfortably inside while everyone else was herded out into the cold drizzle. I went over and locked the door by which I had entered the bathroom. To make sure, I hid my clothing under one of the sweatsuits. The thought of coming out so well compared to my fellows made me feel better.
    I pulled open the door to the sauna and peered inside. It was warm; someone must have used it that morning. I turned the heat all the way up and went out and got four towels from the stack. I laid out two of them as a sort of mat