Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  The road he was on right now was the correct one for him, he cried. After all, he had chosen wisely. The stars seemed to have receded while he was lost in this dream, and when he focused on the road again, he realized that his legs were no longer straining upward, but pushing against the blacktop as he moved downhill. In the distance he saw the dark shadows of a flatter plain.

  He pulled off the backpack, lifted Lily out, and examined her as best he could in the darkness. Her diaper was damp, and she allowed him to stretch her legs and hold her, thank God. But it was time to end this.

  Caleb settled the pack back onto the ruin of his shoulders; he began bleeding there directly. He clipped the waist belt shut and began walking down the final stretch of the mountain range, as the sky dialed back to a light gray of granite.

  He saw houses then, emerging from the shadows. Small, close together, nestled in a valley. He could smell the ocean in the air.

  And he understood that he was staring at the beginning of Oakland.

  • • • • • • •

  Shane awoke in agony.

  His lower back ached. His neck had stiffened discomfortingly. He was in a terrible bed, in a roadside motel. He had trouble getting up to go to the bathroom, and something had begun to pulse above his right eye.

  He went to the hallway outside the room and spoke with Janelle. When he returned, he stood in the doorway and stared at June.

  “I need,” he said quietly, “to stop for a while.”

  June seemed to look smaller, sitting up in her bed, pulling its thin bedspread against her chest. “Okay, sure. Of course.” She hesitated, looking down at the same stained shirt she had been wearing for three days. “You want to stay here and rest while I look?”

  “I need to go home.”

  “Home,” she repeated.

  “Food, a change of clothes, refuel. Caleb will call there. It’s the best place for us to be.”

  June’s face seemed to freeze. He watched her walk to the bathroom and shut the thin plastic door, heard the shower start. He closed his eyes, exhaling loudly. There was no right answer, that was the thing. Outside in the dusty morning sun the sight of his car filled him with dread. What he needed, he thought, were those beads that cab drivers sit on.

  “I can drive,” June told him.

  He looked at her. Standing in a damp towel she seemed frailer than he had yet seen.

  He smiled. “I got it. No worries.”

  He started down the same side roads, but they both understood that he was driving west. After two hours of silent motion, Shane saw his city rising up from the bay. The first mariners had built the initial houses by the docks, and the next wave had built theirs on top of those. The following settlers had wanted to live here so badly that they built even farther up the hills, creating this magic sweep of houses piled on houses like schoolchildren in a class picture.

  Rain came as they crawled over the Bay Bridge. His wipers squeaked sadly against the glass, but they did not seem to cleanse anything. He drove around the Embarcadero into the Marina, parked on the corner of Bay, and led June up the front steps of their narrow blue house. Janelle was waiting in the doorway with some rice noodles and jasmine tea.

  As she hugged June tightly, Shane watched her face. He could see she was repulsed by June’s smell, and the feel of her body, and yet he watched her pull this woman in even closer.

  “I’ve got clothes for you, honey, and a bath.”

  A flood of emotion washed over June’s face. Janelle led her up to their bedroom, sat her on their bed, and stroked her hair.

  “You guys are so nice,” June told her in a voice like parchment.

  Her voice sounded, Janelle thought, as if she had fractured both of her legs.

  “Are you in pain?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?”

  June began shaking wildly. Her teeth were chattering. Her eyes filled with tears. “I want my daughter.”

  Janelle watched helplessly. If she had lost Nicholas, she knew, she would have cracked much sooner than this. Outside the fog pushed past their front windows like a family of ghosts.

  Shane and June slept through the afternoon. Janelle phoned her long list of local hospitals again, but none had seen Caleb and Lily. When Shane woke, she decided firmly, police were going to be called. She had given Caleb two days, and it sickened her that they had not enacted a full-force and professional search by now. She had picked up her phone to do this herself but hesitated. She felt the need of June’s support; there were repercussions that she had not had the right to set off without warning. In the meantime, she took Nicholas for a walk down to Fort Mason, inhaling the damp air, until she felt ready to return home to whatever would happen next.

  When Nicholas was asleep she sat on the couch, listening to the still sounds of the house. She must have fallen asleep somewhere around one. When she opened her eyes, Shane was sitting next to her, staring at the bay window. She smelled coffee, and him, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  Shane checked his phone. “Five.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “I love you.”

  They stayed like that, arms around each other. When Nicholas cried, Shane was stunned to learn that a full hour had passed.

  “I got him,” he said, kissing her forehead.

  Upstairs Shane glanced at their bedroom door. It was still shut. He changed the baby and brought him down to Janelle.

  “I’ll go get some muffins on the corner. Then I’m going to head back out.”

  “By yourself?”

  “This is the first time June’s slept more than four hours in a year. And when she wakes up, you can get out and do some stuff with Nicholas today instead of sitting by the house phone waiting for Caleb to call.”

  Janelle swallowed. “Listen, I almost called the police.”

  Shane nodded.

  “It’s time, for sure.”

  “Okay, I’ll call now.”

  “I’ll do it from the car.”

  “Take some water with you, some . . .”

  They heard footsteps on the stairs and turned around. June was standing on the bottom step, thin and spectral, looking confused. He saw her lip tremble.

  “I’m coming.”

  “I think . . .” And then Shane noticed a shadow upon their step.

  Frowning, he set his coffee down and walked to the door, and opened it, and his brother fell into his arms.

  7

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  For a moment Shane felt himself sinking. A dull roar filled his ears like a swimmer being pulled underwater.

  Then he emerged, his head clear of the sea, and he realized that the baby was in the pack on his brother’s shoulders.

  He held Caleb with all of his might. His smell was unfathomable. His legs spasmed as if alive apart from him. June ran over, screaming, reaching upward for Lily.

  The baby was crying loudly and pushed her arms out to her, her face bright red. June unbuckled her, pulled her out, and Caleb slipped down to the floor.

  Shane was frozen. His wife was waiting for him to move, but it was stomach turning, the way Caleb’s muscles were shaking inside his body. June knelt beside him, kissing his cheeks, Lily in her arms.

  “Get them in the car,” Janelle said.

  But June clasped Lily to her chest, shaking her head.

  “We’re going to the ER.”

  “They’ll take her.”

  “No one’s going to take her away.”

  Shane caught his wife’s eye. It was not, he shook his head subtly, out of the realm of possibility.

  June explained, “Caley needs an ice bath. He needs one right now.”

  Janelle said clearly, “We’ll take two cars.”

  Shane moved quickly. He t
ook Caleb and Nicholas, and Janelle drove June and Lily. They moved up the steep hill of Van Ness. In the mirror, he saw Caleb’s eyes closed. This did not seem good.

  “Hey,” he called.

  His brother’s brown eyes fluttered. His body shook immeasurably. Shane met Nicholas’s happy eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Your uncle,” Shane told him, “is out of his fucking mind.”

  At the hospital he was blindsided by melancholy; he had last visited here the day of Nicholas’s birth, perhaps the happiest day of his life. He carried Caleb to the emergency room as Janelle took Nicholas, June, and Lily to the Children’s Hospital across the street.

  Inside, they sat in the crowded waiting area between a large Chinese family and an old ponytailed man who stank of something he placed as gin. Janelle texted a constant feed of updates: her mother was coming to take Nicholas home. Lily was being registered.

  “Ice bath,” Caleb repeated.

  “Please be okay,” Shane muttered. “Please don’t go anywhere.” This was the finest hospital in San Francisco, Shane told himself. There was no need to feel any panic. Still, he returned to the triage nurse, and explained Caleb’s request.

  “We have a gunshot victim,” the nurse told him flatly.

  Over the next hour, Caleb seemed to worsen. His muscles stiffened and his breathing grew shallow. Finally, he was admitted to a bed. It was a small space, separated by stained green curtains from its neighbor, filled with clusters of wires, machines, the smell of pain and antiseptic. A new nurse brought in a thin faded hospital gown.

  “Everything off. Tie this in the back.”

  Shane removed Caleb’s disgusting rags. Underneath was a hell of welts around his waist from the pack’s belt, sunburns along his arms and ribs, blisters and open sores all over his shoulders. He looked as if he had been tortured. Shane pulled off his shorts and saw Caleb’s thighs, swollen and grotesque. Then he moved to his feet.

  Shane jumped back.

  They were all wrong. Gnarled, discolored, toes facing the wrong directions, absent of nails. The skin was black and scarlet. They were not even identifiable as feet. They were inhuman. He retched.

  “Ice,” Caleb slurred through cracked lips.

  Shane sat him onto the bed and began to pull the gown around him. Jesus, he kept thinking, this body. What it was capable of. What it had been through.

  “Hey, Caleb”—he tried to smile—“what do the losers of these races look like?”

  The short nurse attached a heart monitor to his chest and began inserting IV lines into his forearms. When the needle touched his skin Caleb sat up and attempted to push himself off of the bed.

  The nurse shot Shane a look of concern. “Please have him stop fighting.”

  “He needs an ice bath.”

  The nurse frowned. “He doesn’t have a fever.”

  “That will stop his muscles from . . . look.” He gestured to the convulsions in Caleb’s body.

  “You can ask the doctor,” she informed him, opening and loudly closing the curtain behind her. After some time, a small physician swept them aside. He struck Shane as tired; in his eyes were long shifts of service.

  “I’m Doctor Ong.”

  He began a cursory examination, pressing into Caleb’s abdomen, listening to his chest.

  “What happened here?”

  “He ran an ultramarathon. Two hundred miles.”

  “Ice bath. Reiki,” Caleb whispered weakly.

  “We don’t do reiki here. This is emergency medicine.”

  “He runs these all the time,” Shane suggested. “He always does this ice bath.”

  “You can do that at home.” Doctor Ong spoke seriously to Caleb. “Your heart rate’s over one-forty. You’re dehydrated. It’s putting a strain on all of your organs. I’m going to order a CT and some blood work to check your heart, kidney, and liver function.”

  Caleb shook his head back and forth. He looked to Shane like an animal under threat. “No radiation.”

  Doctor Ong turned to Shane with a sudden force. “He needs to let us do our job.”

  “He will.”

  Abruptly, he left.

  “Let them check you out,” Shane said.

  “I want to go home.”

  “What’s one CAT scan, to make sure you’re okay?”

  “I have the right to leave here.”

  The nurse returned shortly, carrying a pill.

  Shane squinted at it. “What’s that?”

  “It’s to calm him down. Doctor Ong wants him to have it. I can put it into his IV,” she whispered.

  “It’s up to him.”

  Caleb turned his head away. He’s pushed his body like this for a decade, Shane thought. He knows what to do. But then he gazed at his brother’s body and thought, maybe he has no idea.

  He sat on a stained chair and attempted the conjuring of memories which might bind Caleb to him. Fred’s Mariners obsession, the duck wallpaper in their kitchen, the time Potter ran into the woods for two days. When he mentioned Potter, Caleb smiled.

  Then his phone rang, and Janelle’s voice, one of his favorite sounds on this earth, came to him in the cramped room.

  “How is Caleb?”

  “He’s a mess. But they’re taking care of him. How’s Lily?”

  Janelle sighed. “She’s lying on a cot with an IV in her. It’s so hard to watch. She keeps saying ‘cay cay.’ June says that’s Caleb.”

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “So, one doctor said babies are resilient, she’s a little sunburned and a little sore, but she doesn’t need to be admitted. They were going to let us go. But a few minutes ago, this other younger doctor came in. She’s acting like we left Lily outside and went to a bar for a weekend. Her eyes,” Janelle reported, “hold large quantities of anger.”

  “What’s her deal?”

  Janelle’s voice was shaky. “She wants to know how she got this dehydrated. I said my brother-in-law got lost on a hike, I didn’t tell them it was a three-day run. June was right, they’d have called DCFS before I finished the sentence. She wants to do tests, but I don’t see how they have anything to do with being dehydrated.”

  “What tests?”

  “She’s paging an eye doctor.”

  “Maybe she thinks her eyes got hurt in all that sun?”

  “They want to x-ray her whole body.”

  Shane swallowed. “They what?” From over the phone, he heard Lily cry.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Shane touch Caleb’s shoulder. “You really took care of her. She’s fine.”

  Caleb’s eyes lightened.

  “She’s just pissed off.” Janelle paused. “She’s awesome.”

  Doctor Ong opened the curtain, accompanied by an unshaven resident and a thick-muscled Latino orderly.

  “So, we’re going to take him for his scans.”

  Caleb shook his head again. And then he swung his long legs over the side of the bed onto the linoleum floor. The resident gasped.

  The orderly stepped forward, and Shane moved to block him; there was a second when violence seemed possible. Doctor Ong’s expression communicated an exasperation that Shane felt deeply sorry for.

  “If you refuse treatment, we are not responsible for the result, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Caleb replied weakly, holding out his IV. “Please take this out.”

  “I’ll need you to sign a document to that effect.”

  “Hey,” Shane said softly to him, “you need to stay here.”

  “I’ll sign.”

  “Well then,” the doctor said to no one in particular, “discharge him.”

  “Hey, no,” Shane said again.

  “I know what to do,” Caleb told him gently. “Trust me.”

  Slowly, the nurse
bent to Caleb’s arm and pulled out the plastic tubing of his IV line. No, Shane shook his head. He stepped outside to find Doctor Ong, the nurse, a hospital administrator, someone to stop this. Caleb dressed in what was left of his soiled clothes and limped out of the room. Moving past other green curtains, which hid other patients, he felt an obscene negative energy overtake him. He walked slowly back to the waiting area, his limbs shaking. Soon he would get his bath, more fluids, sleep. He decided it would be much better to wait for Shane outside, in the fresh air, under the healing sun.

  He stepped through the hospital doors into the world. Caleb had never been in San Francisco before; immediately he could feel the sea-level oxygen, as rich as cream. The texture of this air, damp and rough with salt, surprised him. It was so different from the mountains. Behind light clouds a golden sun was beating, he could feel it soaking into his skin. He felt sanguine and alive. He was here. He had made it.

  Running alongside the Arthur Breed Freeway, from the end of the mountain range into Oakland, had been a fever dream; he was still unsure what had been real and what was delirium. Drunk with hypoglycemia, he had woven nearly into the street. And then the Bay Bridge had risen like the hull of a battleship to a man in the water, offering rescue. Caleb had limped up its bike ramp and onto the swaying steel. At its summit, he had stared out over the water at San Francisco. A hill there possessed a beacon which appeared as if it had been placed there for them. He had started walking across the bike lane, suspended over the boats of the bay. Suddenly he had smelled black chemical smoke, heard police sirens, screaming. He froze, reaching up to take Lily’s dangling feet. But then he had nodded, understanding; that had been another bridge, a different day. Now he was not running into chaos, but into safety.

  In ultramarathons, Caleb was well aware, it was not uncommon to see runners collapsed within sight of the finish line. The agony on those runners’ faces was one of the most horrible sights on earth.

  And so Caleb had determined from the start never to visualize San Francisco as his finish line. He had focused only on an imaginary house called 122 Bay Street. And in the end, the moment he had seen that number on Shane’s door, his mind had assumed victory and his body had ceased to function.