Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  Shane scrambled behind him. “I just don’t see why you can’t do what you love and stay connected with the world.”

  “I’m more connected to the world than I can ever explain to you.” He gestured to the thin aspens around them, the trail, the grass. “We just define the world differently. I do what I love every day. Isn’t that a great thing to you?”

  He wiped sweat from his forehead, trying to keep up. “Sure, of course.”

  “To make this life possible, I need to be around people who live the same way. I need coaching, training partners, a specific routine. Mack provides these things for me, and he just asks that I agree to a few basic rules that aren’t so different from the ones at any company.”

  Shane held his palms up. “Okay.”

  Caleb stepped off the trail into the brush. Their dad, Fred, had always taught them never to leave a trail, and so Shane hesitated. Then he ducked beneath the nettles after him, breathing in the moldy exhaled breath of the undergrowth. When he looked up, wary of stray branches, he saw that they had arrived at a small clearing.

  “You meditate?” Caleb asked casually, hands on his hips.

  “Janelle tried to teach me once. I started thinking about her boobs.”

  “Just count to two. Over and over.”

  “That’s not going to make me think about boobs?” Shane grinned. He was aware of a certain manic ascent in his voice. He attributed it to his low blood sugar.

  Caleb sank to the ground, crossed his legs, and stared ahead, his eyes defocusing. Shane watched him with some disbelief. Looking at the sunlight breaking through the chocolate branches, he felt an intense longing to speak with Janelle. He spent some time thinking about the baby, wondering how much it would change him.

  “Hey.” Somewhat louder, Shane said, “Hey, it’s been like an hour.”

  Caleb remained in the same position. Then Shane turned his back on his brother and made his way through the dense brush toward where he thought the trail might be. Once he found it, getting back should be simple, he thought. But he would need to be careful; this weak, it would be easy to become lost.

  The insects seemed to have tripled around him. Sweat streamed down Shane’s neck; he felt in danger of passing out. Far off he could see a small pinprick of blue. A butterfly? Some runner’s shirt? A branch scratched his cheek hard, startling him. A Clif Bar, he cursed. He might have been offered a goddamn Clif Bar. He placed his hands back on his hips and turned around, disoriented. He hurried his pace, afraid it might get dark.

  The more exhausted he became, the angrier he felt. He still had no clue why Caleb had asked him here; he had assumed it was to leave the house, but now he was fairly sure it wasn’t. A long time later he saw a clearing far below that looked familiar. Stumbling down the mountain base, he made out the wooden cabin in the distance. He experienced a fierce, visceral hatred for it.

  His rental car was parked at its side; he could get in, eat a big steak in Boulder, drive to the airport, and be home in time to sleep beside Janelle, wrap his arm around her belly, and feel the kicking heels of whoever was inside waiting for them. But first he would raid their kitchen.

  The trail widened into the field, and he walked the open half mile back to the house. Shane marched up the steps to the back door. In the kitchen, a short, dark woman with a long black braided ponytail stood over the sink. He stood in the doorway, streaming with sweat.

  She smiled. “Hey, you’re Caley’s brother?”

  He shook his head, breathing impossibly hard. “I’m really thirsty.”

  The woman stood on her toes, opened a cabinet, and took out a pint glass with the faded words ROCKING HORSE TAVERN printed on its side. She poured tap water and handed it to him. Shane chugged and refilled it three times.

  “I’m Rae,” she almost laughed.

  “Anything to eat here, Rae? I’m starving.”

  “Orphans in Sudan are starving. You’re hungry.”

  “Crackers? Banana?”

  “’Fraid not. Supper’s in an hour.”

  “How do you guys live?”

  “How do you?” she smiled, amused.

  Shane shrugged agreeably.

  “Your brother’s one of my favorite people. He’s always so busy. I don’t see him as much as I’d like to.”

  “Me neither.” He hoped the resentment in his tone was apparent. “Where’s the shower?”

  “Upstairs, to your left.”

  Shane went weakly through the kitchen door. The main room of the house was enormous. People milled about with what seemed to him to be very clear purpose. He looked for June but didn’t see her. On the stairs he had to grab both railings to steady himself.

  “Caley take you out hiking?” a grinning young guy asked him.

  Shane nodded.

  “Don’t let him brutalize you.” The guy squatted beside him. “I’m Kevin Yu. Caleb’s roommate.”

  They shook hands. Carefully, Shane asked, “How’s he doing?”

  “Great. He rocks, man.” Kevin waved some people over. “Hey, meet Caleb’s brother.”

  This drew a crowd. People gathered around the stairs, peppered him with questions. Fuck, Shane thought, my brother’s a Beatle.

  He went back down to the couch with them. Why not? No one else here seemed to care about showering, and he was cooling down with the house as the light faded out its windows. He listened to stories about his brother, insane races they had run, up mountains, through snowstorms and mudslides, on broken bones and under blazing sun. What concerned him was that none of these people seemed crazy. A couple of them had that weird gleam in the eye he had been expecting, like very committed Evangelicals, but nothing made him feel uncomfortable.

  And suddenly everyone turned toward the front door.

  A small man bounded into the house with the energy of a Labrador. His black beard was patchy, as if it had been stunted in childhood. He wore a swirling blue and yellow tie-dye, damp with sweat. But mostly Shane noticed his eyes. They were made of a blue unlike any other he had seen before. As if they were filled with souls.

  Shane smiled and said, “Hi, Mack.”

  6

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  “Hey,” Mack cried gleefully, “the brother.”

  Shane considered him: he was much smaller and slighter than he had expected. With the ponytail, the ungroomed beard, he might be sitting at a bar in North Beach, complaining about gentrification. Instead, he ruled seventeen impossibly conditioned athletes with a glance, possessed a reputation for faith healing, and according to Internet reports, could outrun any of them on their daily eight-hour sojourns.

  As Mack walked into the house, the others seemed to part to make way for him. Shane stood and shook his hand, and followed him toward the mantel, where two younger housemates were starting the evening’s fire.

  “So finally,” Mack grinned. “What took you so long?”

  Shane stared at him. Was that mischief in his tone? He decided to return to his policy of respect. “Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.”

  “No worries. What do you do for work, Shane?”

  “I’m in sales. Just starting for a biotechnology company.”

  Mack’s blue eyes intensified. “Biotechnology? Let me ask you, I read this thing about biology once. It said the single-cell organism is the most perfect form of life on this planet. If you lost all the weak parts of us, the parts that are vulnerable to attack, to disease, and stripped us to our purest being, that’s what we would be. A virus. The amoeba isn’t what life’s evolving from, it’s what life’s evolving to. You ever heard that?”

  “I haven’t. It kind of makes sense though.”

  “Yeah?” Mack asked happily. “I thought so. Hey so, where’s big bro at?”

  “Meditating on the trail.”

  A warm bell sound
ed, and the sixteen present members of the Happy Trails Running Club appeared. They came from outside, upstairs, from places Shane had never noticed, and sat in front of the fireplace in a circle.

  “So, we have a guest with us tonight,” Mack announced to them. “Caleb’s bro, Mister Shane.”

  Immediately two members of the circle shifted, making space. He sat down appreciatively.

  “Hi, Shane,” came a chorus of voices from around him. Pats on the back, nods and smiles from across the circle.

  Shane came alive a little, unable to resist the vibe. In its cloistered, warm ritual it reminded him of visiting a friend’s fraternity house. They had established their own patterns, which happens, he thought, whenever people live together.

  Rae, whom he’d met in the kitchen, and a taut young man with a buzz-cut named Hank brought wooden bowls filled with something that smelled very strong. Shane took his with a grateful thank-you and inhaled its steam, marvelously happy for it. He guessed it would be the healthiest dinner he had eaten in a while.

  The conversation revolved around who was running tomorrow, and who was working. A woman talked about a dying deer she’d seen in Rocky Mountain National Park. The bowl held a thick stew of vegetables and herbs. Shane devoured it. When he stood to get more, Kevin quickly touched his arm.

  “One helping.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t eat today.”

  “It’s an engineered stew,” Mack explained from across the circle, “for people who run thirty miles a day. You don’t need any more.”

  “Cool,” he said, sitting back down.

  “Good deal.”

  When everyone finished, Shane spotted a bookshelf by a closed door near the stairs and went to it. It was filled with some well-thumbed books about meditation, vegan diets, reiki. And numerous copies of You Can Run 100 Miles!

  Shane took a copy; his left knee cracked worrisomely as he shifted his weight. The back cover was a shot of a much younger Mack, smiling triumphantly against a mountain background, wearing yellow running shorts. His wrinkles were shallower, and his skin looked better. His eyes were just as mesmerizing. Under the photograph Shane read, “Ultrarunning is the sport for our times. Now Ultrarunning’s premier trainer shares his methods for taking your body—and your life—past all limits.”

  He thumbed through the book with a grin.

  “Prefer chick lit?” Mack asked jauntily from just behind him.

  There was an awkward silence, not helped by Shane’s near complete mental and physical depletion.

  “It’s amazing”—Shane’s face spread into his most salesy smile—“what you do with people.”

  “Shit.” Mack pushed a hand through his thick black hair. “It’s amazing what you do. Selling biotechnology. Tell me, how does it work?”

  “Basically, we help the body heal itself.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Instead of adding man-made chemicals, we use proteins that our bodies already make to cause a reaction it already knows how to. Just hasn’t been doing.”

  Mack pointed excitedly, his finger barely missing Shane’s chest. “See? That’s exactly what we do. We help the body heal itself and do things it already knows how to, with a substance it already makes. You call it proteins. I call it kinetic energy. We believe in the same things.”

  “You think so?”

  Mack raised his bearded chin. “You guys make a cure for the cold yet?”

  “Nope.” Shane replaced the book.

  “We do. No one here’s needed antibiotics for years.”

  “But our patients are free to leave and visit their families.”

  Mack locked eyes with him, nodding. So, here it was.

  “Caleb has a job up in Boulder. If he wanted to leave, he’d hop a cab to the airport. He’s living here because he wants to.”

  “He thinks he wants to. You have him running all day, sleeping four hours a night, eating twice a day. That’s not a recipe for clear thinking.”

  Mack smiled, much more pleasantly than Shane would have supposed. “You think if Caleb was eating steak and sleeping in, he’d wake up and think, what am I doing, I want to be a consultant, and move back to New York City?”

  Shane did not break eye contact; he felt like a fighter before the bell.

  But Mack’s face burst into a wild grin. “Come on, brother. He’s happy. He’s not sleep or food deprived, he’s sleep and food heightened. His body is functioning in a near-perfect state, rid of the toxins of oversleeping, overeating, over-Tylenoling. You have to understand the compulsion of feeling this good. Of course he avoids anything that might try and pull him away. Once you get your body to this point, you don’t stop. Trips home, different food, people telling you you’re crazy, it’s not the way to stay in the flow. It’s great you’re here. He needs you to be supportive.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that.”

  Mack looked as if he was trying to determine the extent of Shane’s sarcasm. “It’s great to meet you, Shane. I’ll tap the keg in an hour.” He opened a door beside the bookshelf, and shut it behind him.

  Caleb means too much to these people, Shane realized, standing there. They would never let him out of here. He had found a home, of that there was no doubt. Whether it was a healthy home, that was the question. He looked through the back window out at the field. The older military man, John, and a large-boned woman with star tattoos stood on the grass in some kind of yogic pose, their arms raised toward heaven. Behind them the base of the mountain was cast in amethyst shadow.

  And then he saw a slender silhouette walking calmly toward the house, thin amber hair slipping over his ears. And like healthy cells mutating into cancer, Shane’s good feelings transformed into a thunderous resentment. He opened the back door, ran down the steps, and charged him. He felt he might be flying. When he met the yellow-shirted figure of his brother, bone thin and of sour smell, Shane shoved him with both hands.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for hours.”

  Caleb looked surprised.

  “You asked me to come here. You wrote to me.”

  “I was meditating. If I came to see you, I wouldn’t be angry if you went to meditate.”

  “If you came to see me,” Shane spat back sarcastically. “When exactly is that happening?” His voice rose into the bruised sky. “It’s so incredibly now, isn’t it Caleb? To do this extreme running lifestyle thing? In the fifties you’d have been riding trains and talking about individuality. In the sixties, you’d have moved to a commune. Every generation has its way to rebel against society. But it’s all as conformist as working at any consulting company.”

  Caleb’s voice came oddly even. “This isn’t about conforming or not. I don’t care what anyone else is doing.”

  “We know that, Caleb.” Shane looked up to the thin branches. The summer mountain air was breathless around them. He felt so tired he could hardly believe he was still moving. He heard his words coming out of him too fast, as if whole sentences were simply syllables. “But you care about Mack. He tells you what to eat, how long you can sleep, and you do it. And you care about that girl, June.”

  Something in Caleb’s face noticeably changed, and Shane straightened. It came to him now. The way Caleb had looked when he’d walked in and seen them talking. The way she’d looked back at him.

  “Is that why you wrote to me? Because of June?”

  Caleb paled. “I call her Bluebird.”

  “Because of her eyes.”

  Caleb’s eyes swelled. It moved him beyond words, that Shane could see her that way.

  And Shane watched the old Caleb materialize out of the blackness like a ghost. It was in the muscles around his mouth, the relaxing of his shoulders. He touched Caleb’s shoulder. “What do you need? You want to get in the car? With her? Just tell me.”

  “I need to help her.”

 
“With what?”

  Caleb started to tremble, looking around at the aspens. “She can’t breathe. Her lungs don’t work. Her feet are all swollen.”

  “Okay. We’ll take her to a doctor.”

  “I did that.” Caleb looked up, as if pleading with the sky. “They did a blood test. There’s something wrong with her genes. Mack is doing energy healing but I don’t think it’s working. This is . . .”

  “This,” Shane said respectfully, “is beyond him.”

  Caleb looked spectral. Shane had thought it was the physical stress he put on his body that had aged his brother so drastically, but now he saw there was more than that.

  “You work with doctors,” Caleb whispered. “You know about new drugs. Can you find out what we should do?”

  “I . . .”

  Caleb bent his forehead to his brother’s. “I’ll leave here to help her.” He pulled back, blinking, as if shocked at having said these words out loud.

  Shane stared at him, his mouth dry.

  Caleb walked past him to the deck, opened the back door, and Shane followed him through the kitchen, into the main room, where some of the Happy Trails members sat by a fire drinking black beer. Together they ascended the creaking stairs.

  At the landing, instead of going left for his room, Caleb turned right. At the very far end of the hall was a door. The old floors creaked underneath them as they moved toward it. Caleb hesitated, his face narrowed in concentration.

  He reached for the doorknob, quietly turned it, pushed the door open. Shane took in a pale light. On the left side of the room he saw June, standing over something he recognized. She looked up, smiled shyly, waved him over. A sweet, familiar smell rose around him. He realized now that he’d caught traces of it in the air downstairs, that it had been there the whole time.

  A wooden crib had been pushed against the left wall. Shane walked over slowly and peered down. Inside, a baby was sleeping. Wisps of reddish hair shimmered in the starlight through the window. She seemed very thin, and pale. She wore a yellow sleeper that was too big for her, her tiny milk white arm curved above her head as if performing an arabesque. She was, Shane guessed, maybe ten weeks old.