Ivan was a toxin to my marriage—one I couldn’t seem to sweat out.

I wasn’t oblivious. I knew I was punching above my weight class with Mikayla, and it was never as pronounced as when we’d go to the public pool together. Having grown up as a competitive swimmer, she was all business in the water, shooting back and forth through the fast lane like two rival submarines exchanging torpedoes. Then when she emerged glistening from the pool, she brushed back her black hair and readjusted her tiny, green swimsuit. The air always grew thinner—swimmers could barely catch their breath between strokes. Teens elbowed friends, careful to keep their lower bodies below the water’s surface. Children splashed in the shallow end while their dads sucked in their guts and tested their necks’ craning limits.

I watched confusion bloom on people’s faces when they realized we were together. I heard the whispers, the debates as to whether we were siblings, co-workers, a product of a Green Card marriage or masochistic dating show. The number of fist-bumps I got rivalled the amount of times Mikayla got hit on. I saw it through the window of the sauna. Most times Mikayla ignored the advances, but I could tell something was different in the way she humored Ivan’s.

Ivan was Mikayla’s male counterpart at the public pool. Women practically salivated into the hot tub when he walked by, mesmerized by his tribal tattoo sleeve.

“Can women get wet in a pool?” I asked Mikayla once, driving home.

“The right guy can us wet anywhere,” she’d said.

And Ivan looked like the right guy. He knew it too. He understood the hierarchy, the order of the jungle. I’d watch him prowl near Mikayla when she was poolside, ogle her when she bent over for a dive. Of course, he knew that we were together, that I eyed him eyeing her. He wanted me to know who the king cat was.

But the worst part was knowing Mikayla was attracted to him, too. Though she would later deny this, I noticed she started wearing more revealing bikinis when Ivan came into the picture at the pool, not to mention our weekly swim days were always the ones when Mikayla wanted to fool around. Christ, she could barely keep her hands off me on the drive back. Sometimes I’d have to pull over so she could ride me in backseat, while she was no doubt dreaming of riding an entirely different penis.

I encountered said penis plenty in the locker room. I wish I could say all of Ivan’s machismo was his way of overcompensating for his reproductive deficit, but this was objectively not the case. Ivan had no issue flaunting around the locker room naked – in fact, he took every opportunity to prolong the experience for everyone. After he undressed, he would stroll around the corner to take a piss, leaving his phone, bottle, wallet, everything out in the open. It read like a challenge: fuck around and find out. Even his piss stream was impressive – so strong you’d think the porcelain would crack under the pressure. Climactically hawking phlegm when he was done, Ivan would return to put on his trunks before closing his locker and entering the pool, looking like the definitive asshole in tropical neon print.

Though Mikayla and I referred to these as our weekly swims, I rarely stepped foot into the water. My skinny frame made it difficult to endure the cold, and the harsh chlorine didn’t do my dry skin any favors. It was the sauna I liked – a typical Finnish design with three levels of slatted benches and an electric heater on which the old-timer ex-Marines from the Legion across the street poured water to increase humidity, disregarding official pool rules. Not that there was much oversight – the 19-year-old lifeguards were too busy flirting with each other to actually care. Nothing short of drowning was worthy of their attention, and even that would be a privilege. The call would have to be pretty damn close.

While most people came to the sauna to unwind, Ivan came to dominate, refusing to leave until he outlasted every single person, including those who would come in after him. Sometimes that meant he’d be in there for a full hour, sometimes even longer. It didn’t matter, as long as he was the last to exit. Sometimes I’d see him, crimson-faced, the wood around him dark from his sweat like pieces of his shadow left behind.

I can’t recall when he started bringing the chair. It was a green aluminum camping chair, and Ivan brought it to sit on the high bench (or, as the ex-Marines called it, the “top deck”). All seasoned sauna frequenters love explaining to the uninitiated that “heat rises,” meaning the higher you sit the hotter it’ll be, and that chair was Ivan’s way of getting as much height as possible. With his glossy shaved head nearly touching the ceiling, Ivan wanted to prove that not only could he outlast the rest of us, but that he could do so in the toughest possible way.

Up there, he really did look like a king, holding court from his aluminum throne.

I despised the despot. I’d known entitled sociopaths like Ivan my whole life – the soccer jersey-wearing dickheads in high school who forgot your name each year no matter how many times you’d told them. The ones who stuffed you inside a sewer and piled cinderblocks on top of the manhole cover until some unsuspecting pedestrian heard screaming beneath their feet. I learned to avoid eye contact with them and stay out of their path – same way you’d treat a gorilla—and most of the time they didn’t pay us peasants any mind. That is, unless we had something they felt was rightfully theirs, like the uncontested smoke show of the local public pool.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I couldn’t imagine a life without Mikayla. We were high school sweethearts, each other’s first everything. Married at nineteen, we had the same friends, took the same classes at the local university. People talk about codependency like it’s a bad thing; we were proudly codependent. Granted, Mikayla and I were roughly on par looks-wise when we first got together. It was only later that she shot off into the stratosphere, while I was left on the ground squinting my eyes and sniffing her rocket fuel. Luckily, by that point, the marriage papers had already been signed.

But I could tell her eye had begun wandering. Maybe she wanted to dip her toe into strange waters. Or maybe she too believed that she deserved her male counterpart in Ivan.

It was then that I realized the only way for me to hold onto Mikayla was to overthrow the king.

The third law in Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power instructs to “Conceal Your Intentions,” which was exactly what I did. When attempting to topple a tyrant, the element of surprise is paramount. I found a bathhouse, a Russian banya with an array of saunas and steam rooms, some where the temperatures got at least ten degrees hotter than at the public pool. Even fifteen minutes felt like torture at first, but as the weeks passed, I trained myself to turn that hell into heaven. Before long, fifteen minutes became twenty, thirty, forty. During that time, I lied to Mikayla, leaning on excuses of being kept late at the office (so to speak, seeing as I stock vending machines for a living, though I do like to think of our warehouse as “my office”). It was still better than the truth, I reasoned. If I told her the truth, she’d just think I was being petty and childish. She wouldn’t understand that this was about my dignity, my worth as a man. She wouldn’t understand that I was going to war for her.

While our sex life was already on the sauna rocks, it was around this time that she stopped fucking me completely. Every time I came home, she’d be freshly showered and already in bed, often asleep. Maybe she suspected I was sneaking around with someone I’d met at the pool or at the office—an insane thought, given our considerable gulf in attractiveness.

Yet, as precarious as things were between us then, I firmly believed that once Ivan was dethroned and out of the equation, equilibrium would be restored.

Life would return to normal again.

 

Everything began the same way it always did. Ivan was already in the locker room when I came in, unzipping his green Adidas tracksuit, veins bulging from his inked-up arms.  He undressed and walked around the corner to take a piss, and as soon as I heard his uncanny stream hit the urinal, I took out the Ziplock bag from my jacket pocket, emptying the contents into his bottle and shaking to mix in the powder. Ivan didn’t notice the slight murkiness of his water, or the fact that I’d brought my own camping chair. I changed after he left, and since Mikayla was home with a cold, I didn’t wait for her outside the women’s change room like I always did, heading directly for the sauna instead.

When I entered with my chair and planted myself across from Ivan on the top deck, the ex-Marines in attendance went dead quiet, exchanging nervous glances. They’d been around long enough to know when a storm was brewing.

When I finally met Ivan’s eyes, I saw his face was blood-red, and likely not from the heat. He saw this immediately for what it was: an insurrection. A challenge to his so far uncontested rule.

Eventually he got a grip. He settled back and unclenched his fists. The veins in his forehead flattened out; a smile sliced through his face. This was going to be a long night.

Ten minutes in, I saw the first beads of sweat slide and fall from his skin onto the wooden slats. As planned, the antiperspirant I’d rubbed all over my body and face was doing the trick. I had yet to break a sweat, and it was throwing Ivan off his game completely.

Another ten minutes. Twenty. The eternal heat persisted. By this point, most of the sauna-goers had been made sufficiently uncomfortable by our standoff and opted for the hot tub. Even the cruising gay regulars were turned off. The few who remained spoke in hushed whispers uncharacteristic of the usual sauna atmosphere, afraid of disturbing something they couldn’t fully comprehend. By the forty-minute mark, when not even the antiperspirant could hold off the floodgates of sweat rushing from my pores, those people had left too. I took my first drink of water with an audible sigh of satisfaction, which Ivan made his best effort to ignore, aware he needed to conserve resources.

New people were still coming into the sauna, but at a less frequent rate than before. It was getting late, and the pool was finally quieting down. Parents collected their kids from the last swim classes, and the closing lifeguards were already flirting outside, concerned only with the pools of each other’s eyes – the surfer boy with blonde hair tinged green from chlorine, and the small Asian girl with long fake nails that could only be a detriment in a life-or-death scenario.

We were nearly an hour and a half in when the last person left. It was just us now.

I took another gulp from my bottle, prompting Ivan to glance at his own, and, unable to hold out any longer, he took a big swig, brows furrowing slightly at the strange taste.

“I have to ask,” Ivan said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “That wife of yours. How’d an ogre like you land a dime-piece like that?”

I knew he was trying to psyche me out, making me lose frame. I said nothing, burrowing into the silence.

“She’s something else, your wife. Mikayla.”

I knew he’d approached her before, probably asked for her Instagram. Had she given it up just to appease him? Suddenly I began to feel lightheaded. The heat was becoming harder to ignore.

“I thought it’d be a long shot, sliding into her dm’s like that. But she replied. I guess you were busy with something at work. Must’ve been important.” Ivan paused to take another gulp from his bottle. Water ran down his chin like blood from a wolf’s mouth.

“We’d meet at my place. It was cute,” he went on, “how she refused to go all the way at first. Then a few weeks later I was nutting inside her and eating her ass out on my balcony. How’s she doing by the way? I hope I didn’t give her my cold.”

As Ivan was speaking his eyes seemed to glaze over, as if someone had flipped a channel in his brain. He was beginning to look feverish. Ever so slightly, I could see his body shiver. Still, that smug smile kept clinging to his face.

“It’s a shame,” he slurred. “That’s a girl who needs someone to fan her flame, not put it out. Someone who – someone who can handle the – the –”

All of a sudden, Ivan keeled over, clutching his chest, falling from the high bench face-first onto the rubber mat on the floor. He thrashed for a moment, his body contorting into various dioramas of agony.

Then he went still.

I descended from the high bench and kneeled to check Ivan’s pulse, placing two fingers against his wrist, right at the edge of his tribal sleeve. When I was sure he was fried, I detached the locker key safety-pinned to his swim trunks and threw it against the wall beneath the bottom bench. Patrons often opted to keep lockers keys in their pockets rather than to use the safety pin to preserve the integrity of their swimwear. On more than one occasion, this has led to keys slipping out of people’s pockets through the wooden slats, at which point they’d have no choice but to get down on all fours and crawl beneath to recover them. Once, an ex-Marine had a stroke trying to reach his key under the benches. He’d been alone, and luckily a lifeguard who was actually doing her rounds found him just in time to save both his life, and his dignity (can you imagine what the boys at the Legion would’ve said?).

Exhausted from the heat, it took all the strength I had left to shove Ivan’s meaty, Creatine-infused mass on top of the key to recreate that same scenario, reminding me of the bullies who’d shoved me into the sewer all those years ago. I stood back to make sure I’d have plausible deniability, that Ivan’s body wasn’t visible beneath the slatted wood. It wasn’t – not unless you knew what you were looking for.

In the end, the doctors would know it was the megadose of car fentanyl that did him in, procured through a Russian dealer I met at the banya. Judging by appearances alone, coupled with the fact that this was a public pool, frequented by all kinds of freaks, they could make the safe assumption that this tribal-tatted patron was no stranger to narcotics. Still, I had to be sure no foul play would be suspected, so before I left, I took his water bottle with me and threw my own in the trash.

As I was leaving the sauna, I saw the shiny claws of the small female lifeguard approaching.

“You the last one?” she asked.

“Yep,” I went, cool as a morgue. “There was another guy here earlier, but I stepped out for a moment to cool off and when I came back, he’d already left. His chair’s still in there, though.”

“Oh, Ivan. Must’ve forgotten it. He’ll be back tomorrow, anyway.”

“I’m sure he will.”

As I walked off, I looked behind at Ivan’s throne through the sauna window, vacant on the high bench.

In the empty locker room, I tossed aside my swim trunks and sauntered around with my cock out. I felt like a king. When I went around the corner to take a piss, even my stream sounded stronger, more distinguished.

But something was off. I heard his voice in my head, something Ivan had said when he was playing his head games. How could he have known about Mikayla’s cold?

Distracted, I felt my hot urine splash on the skin of my foot. I quickly realigned, releasing an irate growl. Fuck him, I thought, reminding myself of his pathetic defeat. I was Him now, the motherfucking man, and he was a lifeless sack of flesh on the sauna floor.

I thought about going home to Mikayla, what I would do when I saw her. In Ivan’s own words: would I fan her flame? Or would I snuff it out?

I didn’t know for sure, but as I stood there and shook out the last few drops, hawking a mouthful of phlegm like icing atop the pink urinal cake, I knew I’d want to make her sweat a little first.