Race Across the Sky (12 page)

She was followed by other people, coming from the same southerly direction. An older man, his eyes wide, screaming. Three black women sprinting with their heads down. Caleb turned back to his table to comment, but by then there was something in the air that forced them all outside. He saw the enormous crowd running right at him, jumped backward, out of its rush. That was when he noticed the rolling panzers of black smoke behind them, coming fast.

Caleb started to run. Instinctively, he reverted to the quick long-legged run of his youth. People were convulsed, sobbing, pointing upward. Confused, Caleb followed their hands as they lifted to the firmament.

Caleb grasped how close he was to being swallowed by the chemical smoke pouring over them. He ran as hard as he could with the stricken crowd until it broke into pieces like an army in retreat. Near Mott he was swept into a platoon pushing relentlessly toward the water.

The Brooklyn Bridge loomed ahead. In the windows of the endless maroon housing projects, people pressed at the glass, gesturing madly. Caleb never turned around to look at the devastated skyline, at the collapsed people on the street, or the screaming engines headed toward the smoke, and in this he was nearly alone.

Crossing the bridge he became deeply aware of its swaying; he felt sure that it would collapse and he would plummet. On the other side sirens blazed, blue lights flashed, the policemen's faces were tilted to the sky.

On the other side, he stopped. He had not considered direction, or how far he was from home. He needed to get back to the West Side. He spied a subway stop and descended its dark steps, but the trains had been shut down, and he stood at the locked gate searching inside the blackness for something alive.

He reemerged onto the smoke-filled street and finally watched the chaos across the river. Around him those he had run with were embraced by their families, friends, and neighbors. Caleb stood alone in his filthy shirt, his sweat-strewn face turned toward the burning, closed city, and understood that, for a long time, he had been running the wrong way.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

A week afterward, Caleb wandered into a bookstore.

His office was of course closed, and though he was meant to be working from his apartment, he felt a need to be near people. He flipped absently through books on ice, the Giants, Israel, looking for something to pull him into its world. Nothing engaged until, wandering through a dim aisle with a green plastic sign reading
SPORTS
, a cover photograph stopped him. On it, an elfin hippie looked to the camera with an expression of total, perfect confidence that reminded him of Shane.

The man wore an orange and blue tie-dyed T-shirt, and a scraggly black beard which highlighted eyes the clear blue of an infant's. He stood before the peak of a mountain. Across his chest, in proud yellow letters, read the words
YOU CAN RUN 100 MILES!

Caleb took up a copy, sat down on the worn carpet, pulled his knees to his chest, and began to read.

“Kinetic Energy is the energy that we build when we move. This is the energy that our body uses to repair its cells, to heal itself. It is blood's sister. And yet we deprive ourselves of this vital force in fatal amounts.

“The faster you build up your stores of kinetic energy, the faster your body will revert to the perfect machine it was born to be. You will be able to heal without the use of toxic drugs. You will be able to live on four hours of sleep a night, extending your waking life by almost a third. You will live without exhaustion, without doubt, without illness. You will experience a life totally unlike the one you know now. And all you have to do is run.”

Caleb flipped over the book. Its back cover showed another picture of the man, running up a mountain trail. Underneath it said: “John ‘Mack' McConnell is the founder of the Happy Trails Running Club in Boulder, Colorado. Runners coached by McConnell have dominated ultramarathons for the last decade.”

Caleb purchased the book and went back to his apartment feeling oddly awake. That evening, for the first time in a year, he went for a run through Riverside Park. Lactic acid seared his chest from the start; at three miles he sat down on a bench, chest heaving. All around him the world was in trauma, and yet for the last hour, he had been completely immersed in something else entirely, and not given it a thought.

When the airports opened, Caleb packed a small bag and flew to Colorado. His flight had been a mess, the paranoia of airport security outmatched only by that of his fellow passengers.

After the tension at LaGuardia and Denver International, he felt the peace of Boulder immediately. The mountains seemed almost too present, and he walked with his eyes focused on the streets, until he acclimated to them.

Caleb checked into a Marriott on Canyon and went for a jog. He made it to Flagstaff and meandered slowly into the dirt trails. The sun was strong, bathing the woods in olive, ginger, and gold. He loved how these trails were as alive as Manhattan. Birds, lizards, runners, passed him in all directions. His lungs gave out after three miles in the unfamiliar thin air, and he stood with his hands pulling down on his shorts, watching the sun lower behind the Front Range.

The next morning he went without his coffee, walked to Fleet Feet, and asked one of the employees about the Happy Trails Running Club. The name seemed to inspire suspicion.

“I heard they all live together,” a salesgirl nodded her head, tying his new Salomon trail running shoes.

A pockmarked kid told him, “They're all at the Rocking Horse on Thursdays.”

All week, Caleb ran beneath the autumn sky. He taught himself Mack's running form as described in the book, landing lightly on the balls of his feet, never his heels, body straight, running on a treadmill by a mirror in the Marriott gym until he felt confident of his posture. He ate Boulder food, organic, less meat. The following Thursday, Caleb ran six miles in the deep woods. At dusk he emerged and went straight to the Rocking Horse Tavern.

His nose was running as he hesitated by a pile of free local newspapers in the doorway. Inside, twenty people in old T-shirts relaxed in a cluster amidst the damp thick pub smell, conversing noisily at round wood tables, cradling pints of dark beer.

He inhaled as he recognized John McConnell seated at a window table. Mack was digressing on his unique method of tying shoes; he had found some pattern to the laces that he swore added milliseconds to one's time. When he finished, Mack pounded a pint in two swallows and shot his eyes unexpectedly straight to Caleb.

“I read your book,” Caleb blurted out. “I came here.”

Mack smiled. For the first time, Caleb felt the pull of those eyes.

“You run, dude?” His voice was surprisingly nasal.

“I just did six.”

“Miles?”

“Yes.”

A pained pause followed. The other people at the table were looking at him.

“Come back when it's hours.”

“I can't run six hours straight.”

“Sure you can. Isn't that why you came here?”

Through the holidays Caleb ran seven days a week, base building, exercising ladders and cutdowns and pyramids. He practiced meditating, to direct kinetic energy deeper into his body. He e-mailed his resignation to his manager and signed a year lease near Centennial Park.

By then he had cut refined sugars and red meat from his diet. His musculature began to harden, while he lost fifteen pounds. His first runs through subzero temperatures made him gasp. In February Mack saw him on a frozen trail and complimented him on his progress. It was considered a long winter, but to Caleb it went by in a white blur.

That April Caleb returned to the Rocking Horse, and waited for Happy Trails to arrive. When Mack sat down, Caleb approached his table.

“Come out with us Friday,” Mack offered as he lifted a shot glass.

“I can't do six hours yet.”

“Let me tell you what you can do.”

Caleb's first run with Happy Trails was ecstatic. As the sun rose he moved with fifteen other rigid-spined, piston-armed, wide-smiling runners. He could feel warmth emanating from their bodies, just as Mack's book had described. The runners in front of him kicked up last evening's rain, which fell around his eyes like an angel's tears. After five hours he bent over on a narrow trail, his hands on his knees, and threw up. Mack jogged over, and leaned down.

“Run.”

Caleb shook his head, heaving. He tightened his eyes, shaking, acid burning through his chest. But somehow his legs started moving. Within a half mile his stomach cramped, and he stumbled, fire raging through his spasming body.

“Drop,” Mack explained quietly, “and this is your last run with us.”

Caleb stared wide-eyed at him, seeing that he meant it.

Suddenly Mack raised his hands and shouted, “‘Now triumph! Transformation! Jubilate!'”

Caleb straightened. There followed the hardest minutes of his life. He deteriorated from a walk to a crawl. Mack stayed beside him the whole hour, repeating affirmations. When the stopwatch hit six hours, some of the others carried him, he had no idea how far, to their house.

He awoke on a mattress on a floor, to the sound of group chanting downstairs. When he appeared in the big room, they all stopped and clapped for him.

Afterward, Caleb was admitted into membership. He ran with Happy Trails several times a week. He discovered how to absorb the energy in the steam emitting from a buck in the woods, and from the friction of a warbler's wings against a branch.

By this time, it had become very difficult to speak with his family. When he called, Julie spoke to him as if he were a child suffering some shock. Fred wanted to find him a job in Seattle. Shane explained that he
understood
and wanted to come out and see him
.
Their disconnection from what he was experiencing frustrated him; they assumed he was in trauma, when really he was in transcendence.

That fall, Caleb ran his first ultramarathon, a fifty-mile Fat Race in Winter Park. When he finished in eleventh place, Mack hugged him, his breath steaming in the cold.

“‘Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. Strong and content I travel the open road.'”

Caleb felt hot tears streaming down his face. Afterward, Mack gathered the house in a circle. They held hands, and quietly initiated Caleb into Sunday energy healing.

Once he moved into the house, he experienced total clarity about his life. He knew what was expected of him each day, and still each minute was filled with unpredictable pleasures. Every two months he competed in hundred-mile ultrathons, moving gradually from placing sixtieth, to thirtieth, where he plateaued for some years, and then the twenties, and now, finally, the single digits.

Caleb kept his life this way for ten years, until the morning when he had been in the kitchen and heard a knock from the front door, and watched it open, revealing June and Lily.

After that, there was no such simplicity again.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Now, lying on this narrow shelf, inches away from an endless drop, the smell of Lily's skin washed over him like a rain. He thought of how he had accomplished nothing to help her, and he let loose a prolonged and agonized scream. A face appeared upside down far above him.

“Oh, Jesus!” a woman shouted.

Eventually someone arrived with a rope. Caleb pushed his pelvis up and tied it around his waist as instructed, held it even as it sliced into his fingers, as he was lifted from the berm, dangling in the perilous air, his feet kicking at the dirt and rock, multiple hands grabbing his shirt and pulling, and only when he felt the canyon trail beneath his back did he let go of the rope. A stretcher, oxygen, and blankets awaited him.

“We've been looking for you for an hour, buddy. Thought you fell through a cornice. Your pacer's been going crazy.”

Caleb's voice, husky and broken, asked simply, “What's the cutoff?”

The Search and Rescue workers stared at him as if he had lost his bearings. But a watching race official understood.

“You're forty minutes over.”

Caleb accepted water, thanked them, and started into his antelope strides back around the ridge of Engineer Mountain.

Behind him he heard the rescue workers shouting for him to come back. His lungs hiccuped brown sputum as he made his way down toward Telluride, where the sudden appearance of people and cars panicked him. He ran as quickly as he could through its streets, for the safety of the trails.

After miles of switchbacks he encountered a runner dry-heaving on the near bank of a river. The recent storm had flooded its banks; the water was far too high to run through. Caleb jogged west, his exhausted eyes searching for some way across. A mile upriver he dove in to swim. The current pulled him back east. It didn't matter; he was simply moving.

On the other side he found the course and began to see other entrants sitting wretchedly along the trail like refugees; one young guy lay on the ground sobbing. Caleb's sides began cramping, and his incoming breaths sounded like Lily's exhales. He guessed himself to be around eighty miles in.

At the Chapman Gulch aid station, Juan hugged him.

“Where you been man? Mack almost called out Search and Rescue.”

“I had a problem.”

“Man, you hear about John?”

“No.”

“He lost it at ninety-nine.”

It sometimes happened that a runner collapsed within sight of the finish. The mind has focused on this image for so long that as soon as it sees it, it assumes the goal has been met, and shuts off its systems.

Juan gave him an energy gel. He gagged on it, spitting blue fluid onto the ground. Then they ran to Porcupine Creek. Each mile took much longer now. The runners he passed now smelled like sulfur.

He could see Silverton far below him, its colorful small buildings in a crooked line, like dominoes placed by a toddler. He had run the equivalent of four marathons, up thirteen peaks. Six hours later than he had intended, Caleb stumbled into town and kissed the white-painted rock at the finish.