His whole body resembles a caricature of an space alien. His head, all bald, nearly resembles an upside-down pear. His torso is much the same, broad on the shoulders, and slowly tapering off towards the hips. His limbs are skinny. He is, however, very fit. He is walking out of the fitness center, barely catching his breath. He had a good workout.
Two girls of his age walk by and they try not to stare at him, and can barely contain their giggles or show of awe. His face is entirely hairless, but its a young face. The only feature that stands out so much is his unibrow, or what appears to be a unibrow. Without careful inspection, one would miss the tiny space that separates the two eyebrows, which are thick and dark. His natural hair color, then, is probably black.
His eyes are big, but they are overshadowed by the unibrow when one looks at him. He is aware of this but does nothing about it. He is no longer self-conscious, though he is aware of how those girls, and others, must be feeling around him. His face is a curiosity to look at, and if he were in a different country where staring wasn't so impolite, he would be attracting a big enough crowd for someone to make money from.
Right now he is slowly catching his breath. His skin is slowly drying up, the sweat doing its job of cooling the body through evaporation. He is keenly aware of the changes his body is going through as it returns to a normal state after a long, hard workout. He takes the stairs down, just as he took them to come up the four flights, except that now he can feel the slightest movements and complaints in the most minute muscles, especially in his legs, the focus of today's workout. He feels tired from the shoulders, those broad shoulders that make him look like an alien wearing a ridiculous suit of broad shoulders.
A woman comes up the stairs. She has her headphones plugged into her ears. When she looks up to see him, she pauses a little. He must look even more strange with one of the wall lights of the stairwell shining directly behind his upside-down pear shape head. He wonders if she can see his unibrow and his shiny head in the silhouette. He notices that she is quite pretty. He doesn't recognize him, though he is pretty sure he has seen her somewhere, perhaps in one of the buildings where he and his peers go to classes. He has not seen her in the gym before. She has long, dirty-blond hair, dark blue eyes, and olive-brown skin. Maybe she's a Latina, or Mediterranean. He is sure. She is wearing a T-shirt with some logo on it that he can't understand, and sweatpants with the name of their university on it. It is a quick encounter where he gets to observe her calmly while she is surprised, at the very least, at seeing such a strange creature descending from the lights.
He continues his descent, and before he got to the first floor, he encounters an older man in a T-shirt that says "The End is Nigh... So Party High!". He wonders if the old man, who looks like a professor if you can imagine wrapping him in a suit, got his T-shirt from a son, or one of the students. He has a white goatee, curly salt-and-pepper hair. The old man looks at him for just a split second and then looks back down at the stairs that he has been climbing. The unibrow young man frowns a little, which makes his unibrow look ever more like a single brow. After the older man has passed him he turns around and says, "Excuse me." That does the trick of stopping the old man and making him turn around, their eyes meet. Now the light is casting down onto the hairless-except-the-unibrow face of the young man. It's nearly glistening, shiny, from the film of sweat that is slowly evaporating. The old man has a chance to see this wonder two steps down from him. Before he asks what the young man wants, he thinks for a bit, and then says, "Ah, Yuri. How are you?" Yes, he must recall that this is Yuri the Unibrow boy.
"I am doing fine. Long time no see. I almost didn't recognize you," says Yuri. But he knows the doctor very much recognizes him. After all those sessions, the doctor surely already knows the exact width of the tiny space between the two eyebrows, to the picometer. The doctor is no in his suit anymore, and his hair isn't done in the usual way. Also, more of his flesh is showing. He must be going to the fitness center.
They exchange a few more greeting-related words, and the awkward moment of needing to say goodbye quickly surfaces. But before their departure, Yuri says, "I am doing much better now. I have you to thank the most." Does he? He becomes self-conscious suddenly because their conversation is an echo in the stairwell. Although he has no friends and hardly any of his classmates even know he exists, he is still a little self-conscious.
"I am glad you've turned a corner," says the doctor, smiling.
Yuri bids farewell to his former shrink and turns around. He doesn't want to see this man again. He doesn't want to remember anything, and the feeling of cold, of finding himself shaking, bothers him immensely. He quickly runs down the few steps left before hitting the ground floor, no longer noticing the complaining muscles or the fatigue. By the time he reaches the reception, he can see the outside through the long hallway. It's sunny outside, in contrast to the rain when he entered the gym an hour ago. He feels a need to be outside and hide in the anonymity of the city.
