Drazen, young, untarnished by years of solitude that he would much later in life endure, snapped off his goggles, puffed up his under-masculine lack of pectoral muscularity, shook his hair a bit to shed the water, and opened the door to the steam-room. He’d been swimming for a while at his local sports club, and it was time to relax and/or detoxify his pores.
   Entering the steam-room is an experience you don’t quickly forget if you’ve done it before. From the outside, all you see is a murky glass door – you think that maybe the glass is frosted so you cant see straight in – but it’s due to the density of steam trapped on the inside of the white-cyan room. As you open the door the heat rushes across you, and the lemon-scented steam billows towards you in a few blast-like waves before you brave the unknown, step in, and seal the exit behind you. Then the unnatural equilibrium of the room is restored, the escaping steam calms its childlike tantrum, and once more the room saturates with the vapour, until every surface atom is rubbing shoulders with a water molecule.
   You are already damp from having been swimming, so the only place in which you notice a moisture-change is within you. The water vapour sails into you, through your eyes and nose and breathing mouth, carries with it its heat, and sticks to the lining of the insides of your lungs. You feel it down your throat, you feel the warmth pressing on your diaphragm. Your heart-rate skyrockets as your blood vessels dilate: your body can’t take this heat, and is working like its never worked before to cool you down.
   By a wonder of homeostasis, the vasodilatation and increased blood flow allows enough heat to escape your body for the external temperature not to misbalance your internal life-sustaining thirty-seven degrees. But you feel your thumping heart in your chest screaming “I can only do this for so long!” Your brain is shouting, “Get the hell out of here!” And for some reason, countless people reply on both accounts, “Just five more minutes!” The pores like it.
   Drazen entered this voluntary torture chamber, and took a seat on the highest of two tiers of tiled-top benches. He peered through the dense steam like it was fog, every particle made visible by the ceiling-lights, and he saw that the room was not empty. Sitting opposite him was a middle-aged man, slightly rotund, highly endurant.
   Drazen’s pounding heart.
   Drazen watched the man in front of him, who stared straight back. Their eyes didn’t lock, but they were examining each other. There may as well have been swords between them. The man was comfortably seated, pressed against the tiled wall, staring casually at the boy before him; there couldn’t have been a bigger contrast in their bodies, and they knew it: one fat, old, balding, past-prime man, and one thin, young, pre-prime boy.
   Drazen made to assume a more powerful pose of relaxation, but looked foolish when his back touched the burning tiles and he recoiled. The man merely looked at him; he did not laugh, did not smirk; his silence was even more sinister. Drazen knew that the man was like him: the man kept his thoughts a safe distance from his tongue; Drazen knew that he’d seemed a fool, and he knew that the man, inside, was laughing.
   “That bastard,” thought Drazen to himself. “Look at him, reclining like he’s King of the Steam Room. I could take him. What a egotistical fool. He’s past his days of power and he isn’t letting go. Pathetic. He has to play social inaction games even in a steam room to feel good about himself.”
   Drazen carefully slid his back onto the wall, allowing his skin to adjust to the new heat, and finally attained a suitably relaxed pose. There he made sure that his swimming trunks appropriately concealed his genitals before feeling entirely comfortable, and then resumed eye-contact with the man.
   They stared.
   At least five minutes passed in perfect silence. Not a single noise was heard, for the room was isolated; sound-proof doors and two men engaged in mental battle. Blinking was not against the rules – this wasn’t a mere childish staring game – this was conflict and understanding. “He knows me,” thought Drazen, “he sees me like I see him. We both know we are men of separate minds,” and minds in conflict.
   The nature of the conflict was simple: both of them knew it instantly because both of them understood each other instantly. Instantly both of them saw their own mind-body distinction, saw the other as – just maybe – an equal – and this could mean only one thing.
   “Rivalry. If I break, it will be his victory and we won’t be equal: he’ll feel assured that he is the greater. There’s no way that this balding bastard will out-power me. If he breaks, I win. I prove my prodigy, my precociousness, my integrity, my worth, my life. I defeat him. He feels decrepit, exhausted, blown out. He gives up his power-mongering. I subsume him, I enlarge. My name is Drazen.”
   There was no way that Drazen would break, and several things constituted breaking. If Drazen broke eye-contact with the man, it would show that he couldn’t stand up to the man’s penetrating gaze: it would display a weakness of mind and resolve – and the man would win. If Drazen left the steam room altogether, it would be like retreating from the battlefield: it would display passivity, a lack of wille zur macht, walking away to leave the man to – bask in his victory. No; Drazen would have to out-stare and out-endure this man in front of him. Drazen would win when the man overheated and had to leave, and the chance of that happening soon was fair, considering that the man had already been here for some time when Drazen had entered.
   So they waited, and stared, and sized each other up with menace, for a further five minutes. Both of them knew and were thinking exactly the same thing. Neither would ever give up: they’d have to be dragged out of here when the sports club closed. Or maybe, just maybe, the man would leave first.
   But Drazen was quailing. His heart was racing. His veins were expanding beneath his skin, pushing outwards and grotesquely reforming his arms. He breathed as if he’d been running on the treadmill for half an hour. Sweat was mingling with the lemony mist, and the outcome odour was beginning to stifle both men.
   Drazen checked his watch surreptitiously. The sports club would be closing soon, and they’d been here for eleven minutes and thirteen – fourteen – fifteen – sixteen – seconds. Every tick seemed to signal another degree rise in the steam room’s heat. Drazen remembered reading somewhere outside that one should not spend any longer than fifteen minutes within. All the same, he chained himself to the tiled bench: he would not give in.
   Despite Drazen’s internal worries, his outside face was as composed and smug as ever. So too was the face of the man in front of him, still reclining comfortably against the burning wall. Maybe the man could see Drazen’s inner anxiety, though Drazen didn’t admit to himself that he couldn’t see the man’s. As far as Drazen knew, the man’s exterior was tough, and he couldn’t penetrate it. The man seemed perfectly okay, both inside and out.
   Drazen would not be beaten.
   Ten minutes passed.
   They stared, and stared, and didn’t move.
   Their hate grew like their determination.
   With a bang the door burst open.
   Drazen hadn’t realised it, but he’d nearly passed out, and if that door hadn’t made such a noise he might have lost the whole match. But the door was wide open now, and the heat seemed to be dissipating. Drazen righted his posture and continued to stare at the man, not even looking to see who was standing in the doorway.
   But now Drazen knew something was wrong: the steam was thinning, thinning, clearing, gone. The heat left. The room was empty of vapour. The sports club security-lady ran from the doorway across to the man in front of Drazen and shook him, shouting, “Sir? Sir? Are you okay?”
   She checked his pulse.
   He was dead.
   Later, Drazen would discover that only a minute after he’d entered the steam room, the man had died of a heart failure. Paramedics and sports club officials asked him why the hell he’d not alerted them that there was a motionless, vacantly-staring man slumped against the tiles in the steam-room, but Drazen did not answer them. True, if he’d done so, the man would probably have been saved, but Drazen saw no moral code engraved in adamantine stone held high for all to see.
   What he did see was that he’d won.