Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  Years later, about six months after Shana had used up her first chance and had left Max on his own, his grandchildren asked him what his Second Chance had been, and he said he hadn’t had one. They didn’t believe him. “Grandpa’s a liar,” they shouted. “Grandpa’s embarrassed.” People had almost stopped using Second Chance by then, and had moved on to Meeny Miny Mo, which gave you an intriguing third option to explore, at no extra charge.

  ’Cause two birds in the bush

  Can’t beat three—all for you.

  Meeny Miny and Mo

  Nothing different will do.

  Strava

  by Steven Hayward

  Strava is a smartphone application invented by Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey, a pair of friends who were crewmates in college and missed competing with each other after they moved to different cities. Early in 2009 they realized GPS data had become specific enough to identify climbs based on elevation and distance and that it should be possible to record people’s times and compare them. This is what Strava does. It tracks your movement. It tells you how fast and how far you ride and compares you to the rest of the world. You upload your data and it takes your measure.

  The application launched in early 2010 and now has about ten million users worldwide. I am one of them. My name is Tim Babcock, and I’m forty-four years old. This puts me at the very edge of the thirty-five-to-forty-four age bracket on Strava. Twenty-nine days from now I’ll turn forty-five and expect to see a consequent jump in my Strava ranking.

  I am not, ordinarily, a competitive person. As a child I was the sort of kid who had his nose perpetually stuck in a book. I’m an English professor by profession. I do not play football or baseball. I am a poor swimmer. But who among us cannot be swept up in something larger than ourselves? Who among us does not want to win?

  STRAVA WAS BROUGHT to my attention by my new physician, Smith Barnard. At the time I was sitting on the edge of an examination table in my underwear in his Colorado Springs office. It was my first appointment with him.

  Colorado Springs is a city of a half-million people built into the foothills of the Front Range, an hour south of Denver. The people who live here tend to be part of two distinct though occasionally overlapping groups: they are either in the military or are ex-Olympic athletes. Smith Barnard belonged to both groups. He’d been a reserve on the 1992 Olympic volleyball team, and had spent two years training in Colorado Springs, at the Olympic Training Center in the center of the city.

  Though Barnard went to Barcelona with the rest of the team he did not actually get on the court. Nor did he even get into uniform, though he appeared briefly on national television, sitting in the stands in a patriotic sweat suit, clapping in an encouraging way. This information is readily available. Anyone can view the videos on YouTube. I have not spent a lot of time watching those videos, but I have seen the evidence. Smith Barnard, no matter what he might say, is not an actual Olympic athlete.

  When pressed he’ll assert that the fact that he didn’t see any actual volleyball action didn’t bother him. He knew he was going to enlist and that while enlisted he was going to go to medical school. His army life lasted a decade, during which he was stationed at various bases around the United States, including Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. When he left the service he came back to the Springs where he planned to open a practice, get married, maybe have a couple of kids. Which is what happened, more or less, except for the getting married and having kids part. Meghan met him in Natural Grocers buying protein powder in bulk. I don’t know exactly what was said but she came home telling me that she’d found me a doctor.

  Meghan is my wife.

  I had not entered Barnard’s office that day with a specific complaint. The appointment had been made at Meghan’s insistence. She had become worried about my inertia—that’s her word for it, not depression—and I appeased her by going for a physical. She had been impressed by Smith Barnard and said I should give him a chance. My current doctor didn’t seem to be having much success improving my condition, she pointed out, and it was clear I needed to do something. The week before I’d come in to have my blood taken, and now Barnard had my file open in front of him.

  It was not, I could tell, good news. In person Barnard is imposing. Six foot four, square jaw, blue eyes, shaved head. With his white coat on, he looks like Mr. Clean, only cleaner.

  “These are not good numbers,” he told me.

  I was unsurprised. I am the sort of person who has long ceased to possess good numbers and I am at peace with that. Once upon a time my numbers were okay, but even then my good numbers were of the temporary variety. I have a memory of my childhood pediatrician remarking to my mother that perhaps I should ease up on the waffles. Matters have not improved, but I have ceased to be cowed by the dismayed look that passes over a doctor’s face—something involving the eyebrows, a sort of facial throwing up of the hands—when confronted by my medical records for the first time.

  But Smith Barnard did something different. “See for yourself,” he said, and held the file open for me to see.

  I found myself staring at a chart delineating four categories: underweight, normal, obese, and morbidly obese.

  I nodded gravely, though the chart made no sense to me.

  “This is you,” said Smith Barnard. His finger lay atop an oversized dot firmly in the middle of the quadrant labeled “morbidly obese.”

  Despite a lifetime of humiliation in doctors’ offices, I was momentarily speechless. How does one gracefully respond to the news that one is morbidly obese? Is it appropriate to weep inconsolably? Fall on one’s knees and beg forgiveness?

  I did neither; I argued the point. The process of arriving at morbid obesity, I observed, should be more gradual, more in keeping with the manner in which the weight has been accumulated: skinny, not so skinny, not skinny, perfect, maybe a little heavy, a little heavy, heavy, quite heavy, quite heavy indeed, obese, and then, a condition almost impossible to contemplate, morbidly obese.

  I said this to Smith Barnard.

  “Is that a joke?” he asked.

  I confirmed it was a joke.

  “I’m glad you can joke about this,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.

  “Give me your phone,” he said. I unstuck my legs from the examination table and got down on the cold floor. The phone was in the front pocket of my pants. When I gave it to him he handed it back immediately. “Unlock it,” he said.

  I did as I was told.

  “This is Strava,” he said, banging away at the screen with his index finger.

  I watched him install the application. When he was finished he handed the phone back to me and there descended into the office an awkward silence that I recognized immediately as the same silence that descends at the end of Chekhov plays as the characters contemplate their impossible future. It is the sound of a way of life ending.

  “It’s not just about getting into shape,” he said. “It’s about getting moving. That’s what you need right now. Motion.”

  “Were you ever actually in the Olympics?” I asked him.

  “I was on the team, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “But we’re talking about other things.”

  I nodded in the direction of a large photograph of him spiking the ball. “Is that a picture from the Olympics?” I asked him.

  He closed my chart. Then he said: “You’re going to love Strava, Meghan does.”

  I stared at him.

  “It’s all she talks about,” he said, then laughed.

  I laughed back, but the fact is that until that moment I’d never heard of Strava.

  CARL “KIP” FILMORE was a forty-one-year-old project manager from Piedmont, California. He was married with two children, a steady job at Assurant Health, and was well liked by his friends and coworkers. He died suddenly after a gruesome cycling accident that occurred while he was descending a road near Mount Davidson in the San Francisco area.
As awful as the accident was, the events leading up to it were unremarkable, even mundane. He hit the brakes with slightly too much force and lost control. Though it is difficult to know what exactly happened, police determined that he had not been hit by any car, nor had the crash been the result of some obstruction in the roadway. A car had pulled out and stopped. That was it. It distracted him, momentarily, caused him to brake a little too vigorously and that was all it took.

  According to Strava, Filmore was doing at least twenty miles above the thirty-mph limit. Previous to that afternoon he had been the KOM record holder for that descent and, earlier that afternoon, had learned that someone had clocked a better time.

  KOM stands for King of the Mountain. In Strava language it means that you’re winning. Not the winner. There are no winners in Strava because the race does not end. Someone can always show up to unseat you. Clock a better time.

  Strava is a Swedish word. It is a verb meaning “to strive.”

  After leaving Smith Barnard’s office I considered going by the college, but thought better of it. I was still on a leave of absence and knew that my presence might be disconcerting to some. The details behind my decision to take a leave need not detain us here. Suffice it to say I was under a great deal of stress and I do not respond well to stress.

  Instead, I went home and dug my bike out of the back of the garage. It was a steel-framed ten-speed that lacked even toe clips. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ridden it. Miraculously, the tires inflated and the pedals turned. I decided to ride it to the park at the end of the street. Some part of me felt certain that Smith Barnard had installed Strava on my phone because he was sure I wouldn’t use it. He’d sounded encouraging, like he was trying to help, but there was something about the way he pushed at my phone, prodded it with his index finger like he’d have preferred to knife into it, that made me think otherwise. The house Meghan and I live in is located halfway up a long hill. That means it takes about a minute to get to the park—it’s downhill the whole way—and much longer to get back.

  This is what it’s like to own a bike in Colorado Springs. You’re either going up or down a mountain. The fact is I couldn’t make it home. Eventually I got off and walked my bike up the hill. When I got to the house I uploaded my data to Strava and it was then that I noticed that Smith Barnard had sent a request to “follow” me.

  This is the verb. On Facebook you “friend” someone; on LinkedIn you “connect.” Follow is what it is people on Strava do to one another.

  As I stood there sweating in the driveway, it occurred to me that under normal circumstances, in any other year, I’d be about halfway through my Milton course, giving my lecture on the question of free will and predestination and the Miltonian understanding of it. Free will, I would be telling the students, is the ability to make a choice between two actions. You have the free will to choose to jump off a cliff or not. Once you make the choice to jump, you can’t stop falling.

  MEGHAN IS A medic in the Canadian army stationed in Colorado Springs to look after the sizable Canadian contingent of soldiers stationed there because of NORAD. Actually, she’s an obstetrician, but if you were to meet her—say in downtown Denver, say on the sixteenth floor of an upscale apartment building at a cocktail party that you’ve been dragged to by a colleague to celebrate the launch of a local poet’s work—that is precisely how she would put it. She would say “medic” and then wait while her interlocutor got a faraway look in his eyes as he pictured her darting selflessly between foxholes, kneeling down in the dark, muddied earth, staring into the despairing eyes of a soldier.

  “Really,” I said. “A medic?”

  “Actually,” she said, “I catch babies.”

  Her tone was dismissive. I thought: this is what it’s like when you are a soldier. Babies aren’t born. They’re caught. Then back to the battlefield.

  “What’s a medic like you doing at a poetry reading like this?”

  “A girlfriend of mine is a girlfriend of the girl who copyedited the book,” she said. She held in her hand a glass of white wine. Stemless, untouched.

  “I teach English,” I said.

  “So you’re a writer?” she said.

  “I teach the Renaissance,” I said. “There is a difference.”

  “Still,” she said, “it’s literary.”

  She raised the glass of wine to her lips and took a small sip.

  Instead of a glass of wine I realized that I held in my hand a paper plate stacked with cheese. The reason: I’d been standing in front of the cheese plate when it dawned on me that the colleague with whom I’d come that night was more interested in the mediocre local poet whose book was being launched than she was in me. Of course she was somewhat younger than me, but I had believed, however foolishly, that a connection was possible. This realization was followed by a wave of dismay and it was then that my eyes alighted on the cheese.

  Under normal circumstances—in a less fragile state—I would not be the sort of person who would ever do such a thing. But I was not quite myself. Meghan seemed to perceive this—to see something my colleague had not—and looked at the cheese on my plate for a long moment. I prepared myself for a negative reaction but it did not arrive. She winked, reaching out to take a single cube of cheddar, lifting it to her lips to take a single bite out of its corner. A discreet, tiny dent.

  Then she replaced the piece of cheese on my plate. Her eyes were locked with mine the whole time. Without breaking my gaze I took the cube she’d bitten into and swallowed it whole.

  “You want to get out of here?” she said.

  It was, simply, a very forward thing to say. I was taken aback. I have grown used to such things. That is Meghan. She moves quickly.

  The next thing I knew we were out in the hallway, in an embrace, but the elevator turned out to be broken. I pushed the button, then hit it again. Nothing. I was prepared to go back into the cocktail party, if only temporarily. The host would make a call and technicians would be dispatched. Meghan, however, was undeterred. “Catch me if you can,” she said, and ran toward the exit sign at the end of the hall. She pushed the door open and ran down the stairs.

  I sprinted after her, calling out for her to slow down. She did not. Below me I could hear her heels clicking against the concrete. I realized she was serious. If I didn’t catch up to her—if I didn’t catch her—before she reached the ground floor, she’d be out the door and I’d never see her again. Now with real desperation, I quickened my pace—I was running, jumping down two and three sets of stairs at a time. I was gaining on her, I believed, though it was hard to tell. Meghan is fast. And thin. Looking at her undressed what strikes you is the way the bones of her shoulder blades protrude upward, as if they had at one point considered extending out into wings. She was a swimmer originally—200m IM—but in her thirties she turned to triathlons. If we had been moving in the other direction, I would not have stood a chance. But gravity was on my side. I was gathering momentum and by the time we rounded the corner on the third floor, I could see the blond of her hair flashing, hear her laughing.

  “Stop,” I called out, winded. One floor remained. It dawned on me that I was not going to be able to catch her, and was about to give up when I tripped. I felt my left foot hit against my right calf and then, suddenly, I was airborne. I flew by her, smashing into the exit sign above the doorway. The last thing I remember before the back of my head hit is the look on her face as I sailed by her. I’d beat her down; she was impressed.

  She rode with me in the ambulance and we were married a couple of months later. It was good, for a while. For almost three years. Then she met Smith Barnard. I imagine they both had protein powder in their hands at the time, or else not quite yet. Perhaps they were both standing in front of the protein powder section, making the kind of obscure deliberations that one makes when buying protein powder.

  Colorado Springs: city, so called, of champions.

  THOUGH MOST OF the photographs of
the horrific bike accident involving Carl “Kip” Filmore have been suppressed by the family, there were witnesses and many of them used their phones to photograph a scene that would soon become almost mythic. Filmore, it seems, after braking, went over the handlebars and skidding along the pavement. It was his face that hit the ground, and on which he skidded, for some thirty meters. This is how fast he was going, the velocity required to maintain his standing as KOM on Strava.

  Doubtless the gruesomeness of what happened is part of the reason why the incident has achieved such notoriety. It is hard to look at the photographs of the faceless, clearly screaming dead cyclist. All it took was an unlooked-for car pulling out a little too suddenly. It could happen to me, you find yourself thinking. It could happen to anyone.

  When Meghan arrived home from catching babies that evening she was surprised to learn about Smith Barnard putting Strava on my phone. She was pulling her biking shorts over her lean legs, and seemed confused about what exactly had happened.

  “He made you give him your phone?” she said.

  “He installed it himself.”

  “That’s pushy,” she said.

  “He’s pushy.”

  “He’s intense.” She didn’t look at me. “It’s part of his training, he’s that person.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange he’s not married?” I said. “I mean, in his office there are no pictures. Not of anyone. Not even a girlfriend.”

  “Why would anyone put pictures of his girlfriend in an examination room?” she said. “I don’t have a picture of you in my office.”

  “A guy like that?”

  “What do you mean a guy like that?”

  “He’s Ajax,” I said. “Seriously.”

  “Ajax?”

  I took a breath and started to explain but she raised a hand. “I’ll get the footnote later,” she said. Then she sighed. “Maybe he’s just waiting for the right person.”