As the Current Pulls the Fallen Under

by Daryl Sneath

  VICTOR

  I will kill him.

  SUNS GO DOWN

  From the Journal of Vector Sorn

  If only I’d been more in tune with her reaction when I came home that first day of high school and told her about the teacher who’d approached me and what he said.

  ‘Sorn.’

  I turned. He was jogging after me down the hall.

  I waited. He caught up.

  ‘Sorn.’ He pointed and feigned revelation. ‘Hey, you’re the kid whose dad was a big-time swimmer, right? Won two silver medals at the Olympics.’

  I nodded.

  He put his hands on his hips and shook his head, beaming. ‘Wow. That’s impressive. I’d love to meet him some time and shake his hand.’

  I didn’t say anything. I was uncomfortable. I looked over a shoulder. I didn’t know where to look.

  He pointed again, like he was just remembering something. ‘Listen. I heard you can run.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Not much of a talker, though, eh?’

  He shadow-boxed my midsection and laughed. ‘Hey, that’s okay. Reticence can be an admirable quality.’

  I could tell he was impressed with what he’d said. Though I’m sure he didn’t get the irony.

  There was a pause.

  ‘So. High school treating you alright so far?’

  I half-shrugged, half-nodded.

  ‘That’s good. That’s good.’

  The bell rang. I looked up at the clock.

  ‘Listen, kid. Before you go, I just wanted to tell you. I know a lot about running. I mean a lot a lot. You let me coach you and we could go a long way together. A long long way.’

  I scratched the back of my head, shrugged again, and nodded.

  ‘Great.’ He clapped my shoulders twice with both hands and let out a laugh. ‘Great. Hey, I can hardly wait. Listen, cross-country starts tomorrow after school. We’ll see you then. This is going to be a good fit, kid. A really good fit. I can feel it.’

  Jogging away from me he spun around, pointed as though he were just remembering something again, and told me to tell my mom that Charlie Baron says hi. Without missing a beat he spun back around and continued on.

  That was my first encounter with him, body language and dialogue pretty well verbatim. But I’m sure I only told Rayn the gist of what he said. I know I didn’t relay the last bit.

  This is what she said after I told her. ‘I don’t really know him (sigh), but I’ve heard he’s a really good coach. He was a great runner himself and he knows what he’s doing. You have a gift, Vector. It would be a waste not to develop it. I think you should go out for the team. Give it a try. See how it goes.’

  If only I’d paid more attention to what she didn’t say.

  CLIPPINGS (23)

  (taken from “The Quest Begins,” runnerspace.com)

  ‘We’ve been following the Vector Sorn story for six years now, and following is indeed the operative word. He is the quiet, unassuming leader and we here at runnerspace.com are his dutiful disciples. He is the son and the father and the purest of spirits and we march in line behind him. He has told us without telling us what it means to be a runner and we have listened with rapt attention. He has written the book without writing a word and we were the first in line to buy a copy.

  He runs without a coach and so more of us than ever toe the line unaccompanied by the backpack-wearing, arms-crossed, splits-calling father figure.

  We run alone together.

  He is Prefontaine without Bowerman. Bannister doing untimed solo quarters on the Oxford grass. He is Morceli on a hot Moroccan night holding 55s for fun. He is Zatopek. Gebrsalassie. Seb Coe unhinged.

  He runs alone and so do we. Unfettered and undaunted. The loneliness of the long distance runner incarnate and we hold onto that loneliness like it’s a lifeline. We know it now. We know what it means and we’re better for it. Tougher. Harder. Impervious to hurt. Unyielding. At one with the pain. Addicted to it. For better or worse. Filled with the rush of it. Driven by the push. Fueled by the synergy.

  And now the great stage: the heats are set for August 7th, 8:15 EST. The whole country will be watching. Indeed, the whole world. Go, Vec, go!

  So the quest begins.’

  ~

  There has been no mention in any of the media leading up to The Olympics of Silver Light. I was expecting there to be. I was expecting someone to stick a mic in my face and say something like, ‘Hey, I know you. You’re that guy from that show. The one with the blonde with that tattoo across her back. What did it say? Anyway, she was unbelievable. I wasn’t much for all those stories about your life. But the sex scenes were unreal, dude. Un. Real.’

  When I thought about it, though, I knew only a man would ever say anything like this and the audience had been ninety-eight percent women (Ghostdata). A woman would never talk like that. A woman would likely never say anything to me about the show at all now that it was finished. She might look at me in a way that said she knew who I was and whisper recognition to her friends. But she would never be overt about it. The odd fan might call out my name. It’s happened a few times. But except for the one time at Hayward Field it’s always been from a car whizzing by or from a highrise window as I run by on the street below. I wave and that’s that. Save for the two in Oregon nothing’s ever come of it. I’ve been asked for autographs, but I always assume (however purposely naïve it might be)—even when they go on their toes to kiss me on the cheek—that they’re track fans. The point is, I’m as certain as any man can be of anyone else’s future behaviour that no one will ever ask me about Silver Light in any formal setting. I’m certain. (Oprah might, if that moment ever comes, but I doubt she was a member.)

  I’m sure a few men were able to slip past Ghost’s screening process (like me) and there would have been a few women who let their boyfriends or husbands watch (more likely their gay friends). But not many. After every episode there was a survey every member had to complete in order to gain access to the code, the url, and the airtime for the next show. All the data from the questions pertaining to viewing patterns revealed that more than eighty percent of the members watched Silver Light alone. The community aspect of the show—the place where members could talk—was in the online chathouse that had multiple rooms dedicated to particular episodes, certain physical and emotional features of the characters, biorooms dedicated to the life details revealed during the story segments, fantasyrooms where members dreamt up hypothetical futures with Victor, fanfiction rooms where members wrote their own episodes. And on and on. Every room was always full. But the viewing itself, according to Ghostdata, was more than eighty percent private.

  Karl Knotold’s revolutionary Ghostware ensured that not one single bit of data—not one byte—survived beyond the airing of any of the episodes. There wasn’t a single image out there of Victor and Valerie in Silver Light. Not one line of text. Not a single soundbite. Not a speck of binary code. There were no hard copy images either. Someone might have written down sections of dialogue from memory or while she watched, but it was doubtful. And even if she did, there would be no evidence that what she wrote was said by anyone real. To any non-member the dialogue would be nothing more than fiction.

  The pilot program had worked. Silver Light had been the perfect platform to test it. Ghost was glitchless and Karl Knotold was on the cusp of becoming a software tycoon. A billionaire. A global communications revolutionary. By now every laptop, desktop, tiptop and bottom . . . every notebook, weebook, bigbook, and skybook . . . every iPhone, uPhone, yPhone, and tell-a-phone . . . every android, automaton, homo ex machina, and artificial-intel . . . every microchip, macrochip, subcutaneous chip, and bigbrother chip on the planet and beyond will have—indeed has—Ghost stock-installed.

  THE OLYMPIC STADIUM

  I’d run in front of large crowds before but nothing like this. It was other
worldly, gladiatorial, the roar of the world rolling like a boulder down a hill. Ceaseless, combative soundwaves crashing head-on within the concavity of the Olympic Stadium. Noise you could see. The mash of a million tongues. Not one single recognizable syllable. The din of language beginning. Sucked back into the tower. Babylon recalled.

  The temperature inside the stadium was three full degrees higher than the streets beyond: the bodies alone, the excitement they were charged with, the measurable energy they emitted.

  The smell of the track—something like home to me now—made me sick and calm all at once. It felt like someone was punching me in the stomach, but not too hard, and I didn’t want him to stop: a sensation that keeps me feeling, keeps me grounded, keeps me there.

  I’d raced the European circuit for the two years leading up to the Games and so I recognized most of the men on the line but there were a few I’d never seen. They were the dangerous ones, the potential heroes, the unaccounted for.

  I was fairly certain it would take nothing more than something in the high 3:30s to advance to the next round. I wasn’t worried. I had the fastest seed time in the heat. A new national mark I’d set a month before in a Diamond League race in Oslo. If we went out slow I might even get away with something north of 3:40.

  Here’s how it unfolded.

  The opening lap was, as the pundits of distance like to intone, pedestrian. The leader trotted through in 68. I was tucked in the back and heard 70. I smiled. To put it in perspective, a 70 would be the opening lap in the marathon and their pace for the whole thing wouldn’t be much slower. We hit eight hundred in 2:08. First to last was separated by less than a second. Everyone there could hold this kind of pace for twice the distance. Easily.

  With six hundred to go I pulled up to the front of the pack. I felt the knees beginning to drive, the heels cycling through. By the time we hit the line and heard the bell there were seven of us who had gapped the rest of the field. Six would make it through to the next round automatically.

  The clock read 2:50.

  I pushed a button and felt a solstitial calm come over me, a feeling I had put as much time and effort into as the physical work on the track. To the point where I could beckon the ­feeling without effort. I summoned an image of Val and I in half-sleep in the hemlock-strung hammock down by the water on our ten-acre Vancouver island oasis (the end she had always talked about for us had not yet come). The exact opposite in energy-output that I was about to kick into.

  With the next stride I pulled away from the lead pack and continued pulling away for the final four hundred metres. Which I covered in fifty seconds flat.

  I touched the line in 3:40 and let myself slow down for fifty metres before I stopped and bounced on the spot. By the time I trotted back to the line the rest of the field had finished and I felt recovered. They cleared us off to the side where I stood with my hands on my hips and answered the interviewers’ questions.

  Here’s how one of the interviews went:

  ‘I’m here with Vector Sorn after winning the first heat of the fifteen hundred.’

  Which, syntactically, sounded like he had just won the first heat of the fifteen hundred.

  ‘Vector, how do you feel?’

  I smiled. ‘I feel good, Jim.’

  I didn’t know him, but he looked like a Jim and he didn’t correct me when I said it.

  ‘You really left it close out there.’

  I hadn’t left it close at all.

  ‘In fact you were trailing for the majority of the race. Is that your usual course of action?’

  I’m sure the pun was unintentional.

  ‘Tactics are always at play in the 1500, Jim. It’s part of what I love about it.’

  ‘In what way?’

  I wanted to say, In what way what?

  ‘You see, Jim, in the first round all you need to do to move on is finish within the top six. It’s important to conserve as much energy as you can through the rounds.’

  Energy conservation between heats at this level is a bit of a myth, especially with the amount of time they give you to ­recover. It’s true the body has only so many truly maximal efforts within it, but after jogging two laps and racing not quite two I’d be fully recovered in two or three hours. It had been far from a maximal effort. Not to brag, but if I had to I could do it all again after a bite to eat and a solid two-hour nap.

  What is true is the amount of mental conservation that comes with being able to ‘save yourself’ for future rounds. There is no doubting the influence of the mind when it comes to the output of physical effort.

  ‘I have to ask you then, why did you finish the last lap so fast? Insurance?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as insurance in track, Jim. If you run out, you run out.’

  ‘But if you don’t win a medal in the final will it be because you spent too much in the opening round?’

  Medals. It’s all they care about.

  ‘If I don’t win a medal, Jim, it’ll be because I wasn’t among the best three on the day that it counted.’

  He put the fingers of his free hand over the ear that had a chord running from it. He nodded. ‘What I’m getting here, Vector, what’s just coming through, is that your last lap was the fastest last lap of any fifteen hundred metre race in recorded history. How do you feel about that?’

  He put the microphone under my chin.

  Hands on my hips I looked straight into the camera. ‘I feel good, Jim. I feel good.’

  That night I was on the CBC. I was told to wear my Canada gear and say positive things about the Canadian Olympic Committee. My slot was scheduled for eight and a half minutes. The first five would be the bio-bit produced back in June titled Vector Velocity. There were shots of me working out on the track and in the weight room, relaxing at home with Val, looking studious in class at Quest, lucubratory in the library at night, runinating on trails through the woods at dawn. Bookending the segment were images of me as a fourteen-year-old winning my first national title. The series—whose purpose was meant to highlight Canadian medal hopefuls—was called Canadian Mettle. Very CBC.

  Here’s how the post bio-bit interview went.

  We were in plush, rich-looking leather armchairs. There was an antique coffee table between us on which sat two mugs. There were bookshelves in the background. Besides the four framed pictures of me winning various races, there were volumes of ­philosophy, Canlit standards, the OED, a Latin grammar, and collections of essays by writers like Richler and Hitchens. There was even a copy of Karl Knotold’s Spectre. Someone had done their research. I was meant to feel at home. All for three and a half minutes. (More, I suppose, if I happened to become a story worth continuing.)

  The interviewer was a man in his late forties. He was tall, fit, and had dark but greying hair. He looked like a former Olympian who the CBC called upon every now and then to do special athlete-to-athlete interviews such as this one. We shook hands and sat in our respective armchairs. On-set hands flitted about: adjusting our tiny clip-on microphones, filling our mugs, dabbing our foreheads. There was a lot of effort, it seemed, to get everything just so. Part of me wanted to say something like, You know, in my experience all I ever did was show up and act like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The director wouldn’t even say action. When she was ready all she’d do is point this little silver remote at a hidden camera somewhere. Roll film. Pshew.

  I heard someone behind me count backwards from five.

  ‘In five, four, three . . .’

  The interviewer smiled, leaned forward, and began his scripted introduction. ‘We’re here this evening with Heron River native, Vector Sorn, who has in recent years taken the athletics world by storm. Son of two-time Olympic silver medallist Max Sorn and one-time C-1 great Rayn Down, athleticism pumps through this middle distance phenom’s body like the oxygen-rich blood that sustains him through the self-
developed, self-directed, rigorous regimen of a-hundred-sixty kilometres a week, a regimen which has landed him here on the cusp of Olympic greatness. With the fastest time in the world this season, Vector is seen by many of the most knowledgeable track pundits to be the clear favourite to win gold in the 1500 metre final three days from now. Vector joins us after having taken his opening round heat in history-making style and with ostensible ease.’

  On cue he turned from Camera-1 and looked at me. ‘Vector. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Tell us. How do you feel?’

  I sat back, made a tent of my fingers, rested the outside of my right ankle on my left knee, and nodded. ‘I feel good, Michael.’

  His name came to me as I spoke it.

  Michael Miller. He was indeed a former Olympian. He’d competed with Max in Seoul and Barcelona. They were the opening and anchor legs of the medley relay team. I remembered the pictures.

  ‘Well, Vector. Looks like the stage is set.’

  I made a show of scanning the bookshelves. ‘It does, Michael. It does indeed.’

  I smiled and leaned forward for my mug.

  ‘I have to ask, Vector. That last lap today. Why did you run it like that? I mean I can see if it was close, but there was no one around. You could have sauntered in over the last fifty and still qualified. Why spend so much on nothing?’

  ‘The thing is, Michael, I don’t think of it as spending and I don’t consider it nothing.’

  ‘Fair enough. But still. Some are saying it was a rookie mistake. Adrenalin-charged inexperience. That it might have cost you an Olympic title. Others are calling it showboating. One British correspondent called it an unnecessary act of unprepossessing posturing. What do you say to such indictments?’

  I tried to keep my tone light. ‘I say since when is winning a mistake? Since when does six years of anything equate to inexperience. I say I’m far more interested in titles of books than titles of men. I say the last time I checked the OED a showboat was a theatre on water and, borrowing from Prefontaine, I don’t think there’s anything about a race that’s a performance. I say negative-construction-reliant, purposefully alliterative, and verbosely condemnatory critics are themselves all three: unprepossessing, posturing, and unnecessary in the first degree.’