by Meg Howrey
“Oh, well … I’m not working that hard, actually,” Luke says.
“Luke is a very disciplined guy,” Mark says. “Self-disciplined.”
“So where are you going?” Angela asks, leaning forward to take up her iced tea glass.
“Oh, I’m just going to the kitchen,” Luke explains.
Angela laughs again.
“Okay!” she says. “I meant where did you want to go for college, but that works too.”
Luke thinks Angela can hardly be a crack journalist if she asks vague questions like, “Where do you want to go?” out of the blue in this fashion and expects that he will know in what context she means.
“UCLA,” says Mark. “Right, Luke? So I can be an overprotective annoying dad for a couple of years?”
“Definitely UCLA,” Luke says. “That way, I have somewhere to bring my laundry.”
Everybody laughs at this. Luke wonders if his voice is making it onto the recording device.
“I’m going to get a soda. May I get you another iced tea, Mrs. Hewson?”
Luke is careful to say “may” instead of “can” and to speak in a polite tone. He would like to be helpful to Mark, and show what a well-brought-up young man he is. Luke can tell from Angela’s response that his strategy has worked. Mark makes a funny face at Luke and coasting on this, Luke sails into the kitchen, where he finds Kati putting together a plate of fruit and cheese. Kati mouths, “Hey,” silently at him. As he opens the refrigerator door, Luke overhears Angela saying,
“Okay, so you must have had Luke when you were a teenager yourself?”
“Yeah, I was young. Not much older than Luke is now.”
“How often do you get to see him?”
Luke pauses, one hand on the refrigerator door. He turns and looks at Kati, who has paused in her cheese arranging and is clearly listening too. Kati and Luke look at each other.
“Not as much as I would like,” Mark says.
“Good one, Dad,” Luke thinks. Kati smiles. Luke pulls a bottle of lemon ginger juice and the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator.
“It’s clear you are really proud of him,” Angela says.
“He’s a fantastic kid. Way smarter and pulled together than I was at his age.”
Luke refills Angela’s iced tea, and wonders if he should wipe the lipstick smudges off the rim of her glass. This is the first time Luke has heard his father refer, even vaguely, to himself as a young person. Luke knows that Mark was born in Illinois, that his parents divorced when he was four, and that his mother, Julia, raised him. He knows Mark attended Grover High School, where he played football and was a member of the Grover High Spotlight Players. After graduating high school Mark moved to New York City to study acting professionally. Luke knows these things from the biographical section of Mark Franco’s listing in the Internet Movie Database, not from anything Mark has said to Luke.
Luke hears Angela ask, “So what were you like at his age?”
Luke takes his time putting the juice back because he would very much like to hear the answer to this question.
There is a longish pause and then the sound of Mark’s voice saying, “Angry.”
“Angry at what?”
There is another long pause. Luke pretends to examine the contents of the refrigerator because he can feel Kati watching him. Mark laughs.
“Oh, all teenagers are angry, right?” Mark asks, lightly.
Luke prepares for his second pass. He mimes taking the cheese tray in for Kati, who shakes her head and waves him off. On the way back through the living room, Luke tells Angela that it was nice to meet her. Walking down the hallway, he hears her say, “I’d like to get back to this idea of masks …”
In another hour, the interviewer and Kati have left. Mark comes to Luke’s room, and flops down on his bed.
“Jesus, God, that was excruciating,” he groans. “I’m fucking exhausted.”
“It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” Luke asks. “Being recorded like that? I guess you get used to it?”
“I’m bad at it,” Mark says. “It’s impossible to say anything that doesn’t sound like … I don’t know … like, ‘Listen to these thoughts I have! They’re so interesting! Wait! Write this down!’ But she’s a Golden Globe voter so I had to do it.”
“I thought you sounded good,” Luke offers. “What I heard of it.”
“Oh yeah? Maybe I was okay. But, you!” Mark laughs. “ ‘May I get you another iced tea, Mrs. Hewson?’ ” he says, in an ultra-suave version of Luke’s voice.
“Hey, good job on answering the ‘How often do you see him?’ question,” Luke tells him.
“Oh,” Mark says. “Um, okay. Hmm.”
“I heard it from the kitchen.” It wasn’t really eavesdropping, Luke thinks, since Mark was being recorded, and was speaking publicly, as it were.
“No, no,” Mark says. “Of course. I’m just not sure what you mean, I guess. What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s nobody’s business but ours, right?” Luke says. “We don’t have to tell people the whole story. You were being interviewed for a magazine; of course you have to be careful what you say. I mean, you can get into a whole argument about moral relativism …”
Luke stops talking because he thinks he is starting to sound like he really does mean something else. And that maybe he was eavesdropping, since he wasn’t the one asking the questions.
“I don’t know about moral relativism,” Mark says. “But now I feel like a dick. I didn’t mean to pass myself off like some kind of … like I’m this great dad and I’ve always been there for you.” Mark looks upset, with himself or Luke, Luke doesn’t know, just as Mark doesn’t know how eager Luke is to embrace a three-sentence explanation of his father’s seventeen-year absence.
“Technically you always were there,” Luke says. “You’re half of me. The rest is just … shared experience, really. And we’re doing that now, right?”
“Well, hey, that’s solved, then.” Mark swings himself off Luke’s bed. “Thanks for letting me off the hook of any responsibility. What a relief.”
Luke has heard his father be sarcastic about things, and people, but this is the first time that he’s felt himself to be the object of Mark’s sarcasm. Luke does not know what to do, or say, next. People do not usually require Luke to be less understanding.
“Well, I can’t act mad at you if I’m not really mad at you,” Luke tells him. “I’m not an actor.”
Mark sits down on the bed again.
“You can be mad at me if you want to,” he says.
Luke wonders if this is like when Pearl wants you to be mad at her, so she can unload whatever monologue she’s been devising in her head. You have to throw the first punch, so she has proper justification. But with Pearl, Luke more or less knows what’s coming, how long it will stay, and what the aftermath will look like. Luke doesn’t know Mark well enough to know what he’s going to do. He could walk away entirely, disappear behind glass doors that make a sucking air sound when you pull them apart.
“My dad split when I was little,” Mark says. “I wasn’t mad at him, for bailing. I never knew him. My mom didn’t have anything good to say about him. There’s been times that I’ve been grateful, I didn’t have to … it’s complicated.”
Mark’s face looks sad.
Luke waits.
“I want us to be honest with each other,” Mark says, after a moment. “I think that mostly means that I want to be honest with you.”
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Luke agrees.
“I would like to say that you are a really amazing kid, apart from the fact that you are … that you’re my son. I’m really glad I’m getting to know you.”
“Thanks,” Luke says. “I feel the same way about you.”
Of course, Luke can’t be sure that how he feels about Mark is how Mark feels about him. Luke is reminded of a philosophical thought experiment: if six people are each holding a box, and can only see inside their own box, and t
hey are all asked, “What’s in your box?” and they all say, “A beetle,” it doesn’t follow that they are all seeing the same thing. Because what one person may call a “beetle” may be what another person would call an “apple.” Even if everybody speaks the same language they can still be talking about different things.
Luke makes the upside-down smile at his father, who makes it back at him.
“Wanna go see a game tomorrow?” Mark asks, reaching into his back pocket and producing a small white envelope, “Dodgers? Me and you?”
“Seriously?”
“I’m not a huge baseball fan. But one of the show’s producers gave me these, and it seems like a classic father/son opportunity.”
“That’s awesome, Dad. Yeah.”
“How ’bout we stay in tonight and watch some movies, play some Scrabble. I had Kati pick up that Japanese film you were talking about. Or you want to go out? We can go out, too.”
“Let’s stay in,” Luke says. “That sounds cool.”
The next day Mark takes Luke to Dodger Stadium. Luke has never been to a professional baseball game. It is exciting being there, with his father, in a special section called “The Dugout Club.” Luke feels dazed and almost guilty by the sense of privilege and status their seats convey. They sit closer to home plate than the pitcher, close enough to hear the players swearing and talking to each other, close enough to hear the sound of disturbed air in the wake of a flying baseball. So many people want to say hello to his father, or take his picture, that Luke wishes that Kati were with them to be reassured that his father gets a lot of attention and has heat. In between cheering their heads off for the Dodgers, or thinking up what archaic abuse to hurl at the Mariners (“Scurvy curs! Lecherous knaves!”) Mark turns to Luke and says, “I meant it. I think it’d be great if you went to college out here. If you want,” and Luke says, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too, I’m going to look into UCLA. Maybe even Caltech.”
Luke does not want his father to feel guilty about him. This is not altruism on Luke’s part. Luke does not want any potential feeling his father might have for him to be contaminated by guilt. He wants for his father and himself to look into separate boxes and see exactly the same thing. He does not frame these wants into sentences. Instead, he tells himself that if he gets into Caltech, or UCLA, then maybe he will live with his father for a year or two. And maybe they can get a dog together. If Mark likes dogs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My dad gave me an iPod yesterday. It comes in different colors, but my dad chose the black one, which is what I would have chosen for myself. This was a real gift, too, from him, because there weren’t any iPods in the garage. I checked.
My dad doesn’t make a ceremony out of giving things. He just does it. With the iPod, he pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to me, saying, “Oh, you could use one of these, right? These are good for working out.” He gets embarrassed if you thank him too much, so instead I will just make sure he sees how much I am using and enjoying it. I liked having it at the gym, but I don’t think I’ll take it for running in the canyon.
We’re not allowed to do any of our training runs on my cross-country team while listening to music. Part of it is a safety thing, but also our coach wants us to really forge unity on our team, and not shut each other out with headphones.
It’s important for us to forge unity because in cross-country the sum of the top five times of your team makes up your score. But on our team, we only have five runners total. (Our school has a long tradition of barely making up a cross-country team.) So on our team, everybody counts. It also means that nobody on our team can quit the team. Or get sick. Or injured. It’s a pretty motivating factor, knowing that if you quit you’ve just destroyed the team.
I signed up for cross-country freshman year. I was attracted to running because it seemed challenging, and also peaceful. I was pretty heavily recruited too. That’s not because I displayed some sort of incredible ability right off the bat. Two members of the previous team had just graduated, and the remaining three members were pretty desperate. At that point, my high school had never won a cross-country meet, ever, and recruitment was difficult. Cross-country is not glamorous, the conditions are often pretty rough, you have to train vigorously, and hardly anybody makes it through a season without finding themselves on their knees trying not to yack. We don’t have cool uniforms or a band or cheerleaders. We don’t have a bus that takes us to invitationals or meets. We go in Coach’s van. We train in the fall, when the other sport that’s going on is football. That means our little five-member team changes into shorts and T-shirts in a corner of a locker room populated by the largest guys in our school, whose equipment probably weighs more than we do.
Sophomore year, this guy Ivan Lowell transferred to our school and joined the team, which was great for Tim, because he wanted to focus more on violin, so he was able to quit. Ivan and I started trading off times.
Sometimes Ivan was faster, and sometimes I was. That worked well because whoever was slower in one practice session would then try to be faster than the other in the next one. So we both ended up getting pretty fast and last year we were in the top five of every meet, and that got our team score down low enough to actually win a few. In fact, we ended up almost winning regionals. Ivan thinks we have a real shot at State next year. It’s kind of a long shot, but if Raj and Nick really step up, and Ethan sticks it out, who knows? We might even be able to recruit some of the guys from track to join us now that we’ve won some meets.
Ivan will be our team captain next year. We voted him that unanimously at the end of the season. Raj said that if I wanted to be team captain the other guys would vote for me, but I thought that Ivan wanted it more than me, and really wanting to lead other people is the one leadership quality I lack. It seems like a crucial one. Also I think I’m going to be running faster than Ivan this year pretty consistently, and being team captain will help him deal with that, so all around it worked out for the best.
Our last team captain was David Pollen, but he just graduated. David always led us in prayer before races. That’s not a school thing, praying, but David thought we should pray and nobody really objected (we are a mild-mannered team) and Coach thought it might help forge unity. Sometimes we would pray for specific things or people: “Lord, we ask that you be especially with Raj today as he just had dental work and is in pain.” When I say “we” prayed, I mean David prayed and the rest of us said “Amen” whenever he finished talking.
Running can be very meditative, because there is a pain point that you have to work through and if you let yourself get caught up in that, you are toast. I’ve tried to use some of the techniques you use in yoga. You are supposed to identify what hurts, acknowledge it, and then send it acceptance and love. I can’t say that I have ever truly loved burning lungs or quads, or the shooting pains that occur in the ankles, but if love means that you have learned not to resent something, then I guess I have loved.
A more useful technique I use is to call myself different names at different points in a race. You start off all lined up together in a bullpen at the start line and then you run toward the flags that narrow the course down. You want to run this pretty fast to get in with the top guys. It’s a defensive kind of sprinting you need to do, because there is some trampling to be avoided. So for this part of the race I call myself Shade of Mercury. As the Shade of Mercury, I have the ability to move past other runners because I am not in corporeal form. Once the course becomes narrower I shift into Bolo Softsole. As Bolo, I can run the first mile and a half at my optimum pace, putting as much distance between myself and the other runners as I can. Bolo handles rough terrain well, due to his very soft soles, which keep him light and agile.
Somewhere between two miles and the last four hundred yards is where Stoke Fireforge comes in. Stoke is a running machine. He churns. He must run because if he does not, the Earth will stop rotating on its axis and darkness will cover the land. He has a task to do and it’s
not up to him to question the task.
Unfortunately for Stoke, there comes a point where he gets attacked by dwarves. They attach themselves to his ankles in order to slow him down. The dwarves are very, very, very heavy. I don’t like to think about this part.
The last four hundred yards is where I became Luke Skywalker. Yeah, I know. But when my sisters came to meets, they positioned themselves at the last four hundred, and they used to scream the theme song for Star Wars for me. Even if they weren’t there, I would do it in my head. I used to think of the finish chute as that narrow lane that Luke has one shot of firing into in order to destroy the Death Star.
I guess my feelings about being part of a team, and running in general, have changed over the past three years. At first I just really liked running. It was painful, and hard, but it was also pleasantly hypnotic, like a physicalized mantra: one foot in front of the other, the other, the other, the other. I liked the other guys on the team, we were all friends and sat together at lunch and did stuff together away from school. Ivan became sort of my best friend, we got faster, Nick joined the team and he’s really funny, and so on.
But last year things started to change, right after we won our first meet. That made it more serious. Before that, there was just no way we were going to win, and it was all about finishing and being these underdogs that were doing it for the love of sport. Suddenly we all got more intense. Coach got excited and started really riding the other three guys on our team. Nick and Raj were okay with it, but Ethan became this, like, miserable wreck. All of us said stuff to him like, “Ethan, all you have to do is finish. Your one job is to make it to the chute. If you give it your all, then you’re our best runner, because you’re the one it’s hardest for, and that makes you the toughest guy on the team,” etc. Sometimes I would say to him, “It’s okay if you quit,” because he would always say back, “I’m not quitting,” and just saying that amped him up a little bit. You have to do things like that, because in theory a cross-country team is only as good as its weakest runner. It’s not about individuals.