Stecyk started at the end of the block and came up the first flagstone walkway with his briefcase and rang the bell. ‘Good morning,’ he said to the older lady who answered the door in what was either a robe or very casual housedress (it was 7:20, so bathrobes were not only probable but downright appropriate) whose collar she was holding tightly closed with one hand and was looking through the door’s crack at different points over Stecyk’s shoulders as if certain there must be someone else behind him. Stecyk said, ‘My name is Leonard Stecyk, I go by Leonard but Len is also perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve recently had the opportunity to move in and set up housekeeping in 6F in the Angler’s Cove complex just up the street there, I’m sure you’ve seen it either leaving home or returning, it’s just right up the street there at 121, and I’d like to say Hello and introduce myself and say I’m pleased to be part of the neighborhood and to offer you as a token of greetings and thanks this free copy of the US Post Office’s 1979 National Zip Code Directory, listing the zip codes for every community and postal zone in each state of the United States in alphabetical order, and also’—shifting the briefcase under his arm to open the directory and hold it out open to the woman’s view — something seemed wrong with one of the lady’s eyes, as if she were having trouble with a contact lens or perhaps had some foreign matter under the upper lid, which could be uncomfortable—‘additionally listing here on the back of the last page and inside the rear cover, the cover’s the continuation, the addresses and toll-free numbers of over forty-five government agencies and and services from which you can receive free informational material, some of which is almost shockingly valuable, see I’ve put small asterisks next to those, which I know for a fact are helpful and an extraordinary bargain, and which are of course after all when you come right down to it paid for with your tax dollars, so why not extract value from the contributions if you know what I mean, though of course the choice is entirely up to you’—the lady was also turning her head slightly in the way of someone whose hearing wasn’t quite what it used to be, noting which Stecyk put the briefcase down to ink one or two extra asterisks by numbers that in this case might be of special help. Then making a large motion of handing it over and letting the postal directory hang there in midair just outside the door while the lady had her face screwed up and seemed to be deciding whether to disengage the door’s chain in order to accept it. ‘Maybe I’ll just be leaning it up here against the milkbox’—pointing down at the milkbox—‘and you can peruse it at leisure at your own convenience later in the day or really whatever you might choose to do,’ Stecyk said. He liked to make a small jest or sally of employing a motion as if he were tipping his hat even though his hand never made contact with the hat; he felt it was both courtly and amusing. ‘Hidey ho, then,’ he said. He proceeded back down the walkway, missing all the cracks and hearing the door behind him close only as he reached the sidewalk and made a sharp right and took eighteen strides to the next walkway and a sharp right to the door, which had a wrought-iron security door installed before it and at which there was no answer after three rings and shave-and-haircut knock. He left his card with his new address and the gist of his greeting and offer and another 1979 zip code directory (the 1980 directory would not be out until August; he had an order in) and proceeded down the walkway, a spring to his step, his smile so wide it almost looked like it hurt.
§ 13
It was in public high school that this boy learned the terrible power of attention and what you pay attention to. He learned it in a way whose very ridiculousness was part of what made it so terrible. And terrible it was.
At age sixteen and a half, he started to have attacks of shattering public sweats.
As a child, he’d always been a heavy sweater. He had sweated a lot when playing sports or when it was hot, but it didn’t especially bother him. He just wiped himself off more often. He couldn’t remember anyone ever saying anything about it. Also, it didn’t seem to smell bad; it’s not like he stank. The sweating was just something particular about him. Some kids were fat, some were unusually short or tall or had crazy teeth, or stuttered, or smelled like mildew no matter what clothes they wore — he just happened to be someone who sweated heavily, especially in the humidity of summertime, when just riding his bike in dungarees around Beloit made him sweat like crazy. It all barely even registered on him, so far as he could remember.
In his seventeenth year, though, it started to bother him; he became self-conscious about the sweating thing. This was surely related to puberty, the stage where you suddenly get much more concerned about how you appear to other people. About whether there might be something visibly creepy or gross about you. Within weeks of the start of the school year, he became both more and differently aware that he seemed to sweat more than the other kids did. The first couple months of school were always hot, and many of the old high school’s classrooms didn’t even have fans. Without trying to or wanting to, he started to imagine what his sweating might look like in class: his face gleaming with a mixture of sebum and sweat, his shirt sodden at the collar and pits, his hair separated into wet little creepy spikes from his head’s running sweat. It was the worst if he was in a position where he thought girls could maybe see it. The classrooms’ desks were all crammed together. Just the presence of a pretty or popular girl in his sight line would make his internal temperature rise — he could feel it happening unwilled, even against his will — and start the heavy sweating.1
Except at first, as autumn of that seventeenth year deepened and the weather cooled and dried and the leaves turned and fell and could be raked for pay, he had reason to feel that the sweating problem was receding, that the real problem had been the heat, or that without the muggy summer heat there would now no longer be as much occasion for the problem. (He thought of it in the most general and abstract terms possible. He tried never to let himself think of the actual word sweat. The idea, after all, was to try and be as unself-conscious about it as possible.) Mornings now were chilly, and the high school’s classrooms weren’t hot anymore, except near the rears’ clanking radiators. Without letting himself be wholly aware of it, he had started hurrying a little bit between periods to get to the next class early enough that he wouldn’t get stuck in a desk by a radiator, which was hot enough to jump-start a sweat. But it involved a delicate balance, because if he hurried too fast through the halls between periods, this exertion could also cause him to break a light sweat, which increased his preoccupation and made it easier for the sweating to get more severe in the event that he thought people might be noticing it. Certain other examples of balancing and preoccupation like this existed, most of which he tried to keep from conscious thought as much as possible without being wholly aware of why he was doing this.2
For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat. The worst thing was that one degree could lead to the next if he worried about it too much, if he was too afraid that a slight sweat would get worse and tried too hard to control or avoid it. The fear of it could bring it on. He did not truly begin to suffer until he understood this fact, an understanding he came to slowly at first and then all of an awful sudden.
What he thought of as easily the worst day of his life so far followed an unseasonably cold week in early November where the problem had started to seem so manageable and under control that he felt he might actually be starting to almost forget about it altogether. Wearing dungarees and a rust-colored velour shirt, he sat far from the radiator in the middle of a middle row of student desks in World Cultures and was listening and taking notes on whatever module of the textbook they were covering, when a terrible thought rose as if from nowhere inside him: What if I all of a sudden start sweating? And on that one day this thought, which presented mostly as a terrible sudden fear that washed through him like a hot tide, made him break instantly into a heavy, unstoppable sweat, which the secondary thought that it must look even creepier to be sweating when it wasn’t even hot in here to anyone else made worse and worse as he sat very still with his head down and face soon running with palpable rivulets of sweat, not moving at all, torn between the desire to wipe the sweat from his face before it actually began to drip and someone saw it dripping and the fear that any kind of wiping movement would draw people’s attention and cause those in the desks on either side of him to see what was happening, that he was sweating like crazy for no reason. It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he’d have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day — and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse.