As the Current Pulls the Fallen Under
Page 12
I digress.
I often felt like talking this way when the sex was finished. Especially when I’d just come from one of my Fate & Virtue classes at Quest. The things we’d get into in a session. Here’s an example: one time the tutor brought a twenty-six sided Scattergories die and set the parameter of sticking to figures whose names began with whatever letter came up. We all agreed and she rolled an S. Beginning with Socrates we drew a connect-the-ideas circle through Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Satan, Santa Claus, the biblical Sarah, the Alaskan political Sarah, the Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah and all the symbolic resonances within and of her “River” cover, the Canadian filmmaker Sarah and her award-winning genre-bending autobiodocudrama The Stories We Tell, all the way back to Socrates.
Three hours went by in a flash.
Again, I digress.
To the interview then. The talking bit. An example of Victor developing. Victor revealing. Victor creating pathos. Vector making Victor a character the members would be interested in.
The DIRECTOR fires her silver remote—pshew—and music comes softly from the ceiling.1 VICTOR recognizes the song: Amelia Curran’s ‘The Mistress’.
The DIRECTOR sits in a chair by the bed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. On the front of the t-shirt there’s this:
Fartlek:
it’s a running thing —
On the back, there’s this:
— you wouldn’t understand
VICTOR believes as long as she’s wearing one of his t-shirts he’s fine. It’s an objective link between them. It means she’s still interested. It means he’s safe.
The DIRECTOR snaps her fingers in front of her face three times and does an exaggerated wave.
DIRECTOR
Is anybody home?
Amelia Curran sings this exact line at precisely the same moment the DIRECTOR says it.
VICTOR
Sorry.
DIRECTOR
What were you so deep in thought about?
VICTOR
I’ve got this thing.
The DIRECTOR leans forward.
DIRECTOR
Care to be more specific?
VICTOR
They invited me to a race at Hayward Field. In Eugene, Oregon.
DIRECTOR
I knew you were good, but invited. Well.
VICTOR shrugs.
DIRECTOR
Hayward Field. Isn’t that where, oh, what’s his name?
VICTOR
Prefontaine.
DIRECTOR
That’s it. He was like a rock star.
VICTOR
He was.
DIRECTOR
Like you.
VICTOR
I don’t know about that.
DIRECTOR
Don’t kid yourself. People know who you are.
VICTOR
Track people maybe. As far as circles go they don’t get much smaller.
DIRECTOR
Your circle extends farther than you think.
VICTOR looks around the room wondering where the hidden cameras are.
VICTOR
Yeah, but they don’t really know me.
DIRECTOR
They want to.
The DIRECTOR looks at a notebook in her lap, flips a page.
DIRECTOR
Membership has gone from 50,000 in the first two years to more than 250,000 since Victor’s first episode. In less than two months.
VICTOR
You must advertise well.
DIRECTOR
I don’t advertise. More than 200,000 submissions in six weeks. At this rate we’ll hit a million by the final show. Imagine. A million. That used to mean something.
VICTOR ignores the phrase ‘final show.’ He shrugs.
VICTOR
So. What’s the story today?
The DIRECTOR glances at the backpack on the floor by the bed.
DIRECTOR
Did you bring it?
VICTOR nods.
DIRECTOR
Why don’t you read something from it, let the story go from there.
VICTOR shakes his head.
VICTOR
They don’t know enough about her yet.
The ‘her’ is Rayn. The ‘it’ is Rayn’s journal. Off-camera he’s explained about how he came to have the journal and how he has yet to read any of what it contained.
DIRECTOR
I agree. Closer to the end then. Maybe for the final show.
Again, VICTOR pretends he doesn’t hear the phrase ‘final show.’ He reaches for the bag and pulls out another journal.
VICTOR
I brought this one. I thought you might be interested.
DIRECTOR
Whose is it? His?
By ‘his’ she means VICTOR’s father, Max. The ‘murderer’ as VICTOR described him that night at Shebeen.
VICTOR
Max isn’t the journal-keeping type. It’s mine.
DIRECTOR
Yours.
She shakes her head.
DIRECTOR
You keep getting better, Victor. Maybe when all this is finished I’ll keep you on as story editor or character developer or something. Think you could handle that?
He is absolutely sure that he could not.
He nods.
VICTOR
Maybe. But I thought you liked to work alone.
This is VICTOR probing.
DIRECTOR
I never said that.
VICTOR
So there’s a silent partner somewhere. Behind the scenes.
DIRECTOR
I never said that either.
VICTOR
There must be. A Zuckerberg type handling the computer end. Keeping it all under lock and key somewhere.
The DIRECTOR grins.
DIRECTOR
You’ve gone looking.
VICTOR
I’m no expert. But it’s like hunting ghosts looking for what you send your ‘members’, as you call them.
The DIRECTOR looks at the tattoo on her foot. She points her French manicured toes—replete with curlicued Vs on each little digit’s nail—and wiggles them.
DIRECTOR
You are intuitive, Victor.
He waits for her to explain.
DIRECTOR
It just so happens the software we use is called Ghost.
VICTOR
We?
DIRECTOR
I meant it royally.
VICTOR
Right.
DIRECTOR
Ghost is going to revolutionize online intellectual property.
VICTOR
No doubt.
DIRECTOR
Silver Light is its pilot. Members who are given access to an episode can’t rewind, fast-forward, pause, record, save, or manipulate the file in any way. If they try to use their phones or some other device to record an episode—video or audio—all they get as a result is a scrambled screen or a garbled mess. An episode exists online for the thirty or forty minutes of its lifespan and then it’s gone. It vanishes. Wshh. Into thin internet air. Regardless of any user’s abilities—even the hackerist of hackers—the files are untraceable, undownloadable, uncopyable, unsaveable.
VICTOR
Impressive.
DIRECTOR
Yes.
VICTOR grins.
VICTOR
You’ll have to show me how it works some time.
The DIRECTOR shakes her head.
DIRECTOR
I don’t think so. I come from the Woody Allen school of film. You only get to know what I say you need to know.
VICTOR salutes her.
VICTOR
You’re the boss.
DIRECTOR
Yes. I am. So we understand one another.
VICTOR isn’t sure they do. But what can he say?
VICTOR
We do.
DIRECTOR
Good. So here’s what you need to know today. Put the journal back in your bag and we’ll start from you reaching for it. Say something like, ‘I’ve kept this journal since the day Rayn died,’ and then pull it out and hold it up. I’ll edit in a voice-over that reminds the audience who Rayn is. It’ll add a layer of interest that you call her by her first name. Read a bit from the journal and then fall into a story from there. Maybe something about you running. A prelude to the race at Hayward Field. I’ll get some footage of you on the track and merge it in. It’ll be great.
VICTOR returns the journal to his bag and awaits further direction.
The DIRECTOR fires her silver remote—pshew—and the music fades out as Joe Keefe from Family of the Year sings about how he doesn’t ‘want to be a big man, just wants to fight like everyone else’ and the little red record button goes on somewhere out of sight and the DIRECTOR mouths the word action and VICTOR falls into role, which is little more (or less) than a slight exaggeration of his true self.
VICTOR leans over and pulls the backpack onto the bed, opens it, looks at the DIRECTOR, and retrieves the journal.
VICTOR
I’ve kept this journal since the day Rayn died . . .
He holds the journal up, opens it, flips to a page he has marked, and begins to read.
VICTOR
National Youth Championships, Varsity Stadium, Toronto. We were at the start, the twelve of us. We looked like we’d been punched from a mould on a factory line. Tall, lanky ectomorphs. Springy. Sinewy. Like gazelles. One guy was short. Another, overmuscular for his age and looked more like a sprinter. One had a beard already. For the most part, though, we were physically the same. We’d been engineered to do this. Not by choice or by happenstance but by evolution. Every anatomically equipped human being can run—opposite arm, opposite leg, one foot after the next—but we were among the few whose muscles fire at a greater rate over time, whose hearts pump more blood more efficiently, whose bodies can withstand more pain because of a brain more willing to push. We were the rats in some god’s science lab.
1 I use the screenplay format here to help replicate and make real the episodic nature of the post-coital chats VA and I always had. Since I have no access to the actual recordings, I am, it should be noted, relying strictly on memory, which I have unlimited access to, and which, in my case (not to brag), can be, and usually is, highly reliable.
HAYWARD FIELD: EUGENE, OREGON
It was difficult not to get caught up in the history of the place. The tradition. The energy. The stories that had been written there. Like Fenway or The Forum or Madison Square Garden. Being there quickened your heart and made your body want to run.
For athletes the track opened an hour before the meet was scheduled to begin. I spent most of that hour walking around in quiet awe. I pictured Prefontaine circa 1974 pounding out the laps in his first race back from the hiatus he took after Munich. I played out the season-beginning Bowerman speech in Donald Sutherland’s voice from the movie Without Limits I committed to memory when I was fifteen: ‘Men of Oregon, I invite you to become students of your events. Running, one might say, is basically an absurd pastime upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd pastime: life.’ I saw the ever-smiling late 90s Gebressalassie kicking down the finishing straight, crossing the line with his hands above his head, never in a solely celebratory way, I imagined, but in large part as a submission to the story he always seemed to know was greater than him. I could see the supernatural-seeming strides of the 1980s Seb Coe ushering his body around the oval in performances otherwise reserved for gods, driven, it seemed, by an effortless, unrelenting engine. I thought of Alan Webb, the eighteen-year-old phenom who set an age-group world record here in 2001 with the improbable mark of 3:53.53. The symmetricist in me wanted to let the palindromic beauty of that performance stand forever but the competitor in me, far fiercer than the astheticist when it came to tearing up the track, wanted to wipe it unapologetically from the record books. The potential story of the feat attracted me as much as the feat itself. As I’ve mentioned, I—sorry, Victor—was in great need of stories.
. . .
‘It’s him. It’s fucking him. I told you it was him.’
‘Ohmygod. It is.’
‘Victor. Hey, Victor.’
‘We fucking love you, Victor.’
‘We. Fucking. Love you.’
I was on the third lap of my warmup. Spectators had begun to fill the stands. The two girls shouting were leaning against the rail that separated the stands from the track. I turned and smiled.
‘Ohmygod he smiled at us. Did you see that?’
‘I did. He fucking smiled at us.’
‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe he’s real. Pinch me. Fucking pinch me.’
Entering the bend that would take me to the far side of the track, I could still hear them. For reasons that belong solely to ego and contradict all impulses toward reason, I looked over my shoulder as I jogged away and waved.
‘Ohmygod did you see that?’
‘He waved. He fucking waved. At us.’
I spent ten minutes on the far straight doing running drills and strides. Occasionally I’d look across the infield to the stands to see if they were still there. Whenever I stopped to look, hands on my hips, I’d see them grab the rail and point.
Minutes before the meet was scheduled to start, the announcer came over the loudspeaker and started in on his welcome speech. He asked all spectators to remain seated and referred them to their programs, pointing out the various stages the athletes would take in the field, highlighting certain events. As the announcer continued to speak I jogged over to the bleachers which were now to capacity. I found someone with a clipboard wearing an O-Ducks shirt who looked like an official. I asked him for a pen and a piece of paper which he gave me. I jotted a note that read, ‘Meet me at the East 19th Street Café after the race,’ folded it in half twice, and asked the official if he wouldn’t mind delivering it to those two girls in the stands. I pointed in their direction. Beaming, clutching each other, they waved again and so did I. The official said of course he’d deliver it, of course, no problem, no trouble at all, but before he did he was wondering if it would be too much to ask for an autograph. I looked at him and thought he was joking, but then I remembered where I was and that people who knew running were more than likely to know me and probably considered my scribbled name something worth asking for. I took the pen again and he held the program open on the clipboard to the page dedicated to the mile. There were two other signatures there already that I couldn’t make out. I thought of Max and Rayn and what they used to write when strangers asked them for their autographs. I thought about the first time I’d been asked. Fame by association. I was ten and instead of my own name I’d written Superman. My first secret identity. I smiled and considered scribbling the hero’s moniker for old time’s sake. I noticed my name at the bottom of the performance list. Next to it was my seed time: 3:58.80. I thought about writing R. Bannister across the bottom of the page but I wasn’t sure the official would appreciate it. If ever in my short life I’d taken refuge in anonymity, that was clearly over now.
I wondered as I jogged across the infield whether the two girls in the stands had actually called me Victor. Maybe they’d said Vector and I misheard them. I was so used to Valerie calling me Victor. Maybe they were track groupies. It wasn’t unheard of. Prefontaine had droves of female followers. And male. They wore t-shirts: Sto
p Pre! Maybe running as a spectator sport was making a comeback. Fashion and music were always giving nods to the past. Why not athletics? Maybe it was our time again.
The gun went off and we tore through the first three hundred metres like we were kids in a field racing to a tree, undaunted and unaware of the impending pain. There was no pressure, no purse to be won. We’d all been given a nominal appearance fee and that was it. There was no point in running tactically. It was a hard workout early in the season in front of a crowd that wanted us to run fast. They didn’t care who won. We didn’t care either. None of us did. We were loose and unpressured, cajoling even as they lined us up and called out our names, each of us decorated with various national and international successes. As the announcer said our names each man raised a hand and smiled and we put our arms about one another’s shoulders for the photo op before the gun: a fraternity whose members knew something of each other no one beyond their shared circle of pain possibly could. We had nothing to lose—not a single thing to prove—which is exactly how we ran.