Running

by Cara Hoffman

  I explained the logic of coming straight to Olympos to a skeptical German couple who were fussing with a map; it was dark enough that they wouldn’t have a real sense of the disrepair of the place until they walked outside in the morning—and they’d be too tired to leave when they got up to their room tonight. Once I had them, three more tourists agreed to come along with us. Which meant I’d be able to eat a meal tomorrow and drink tonight.

  They lined up on the steps looking sweaty and exhausted, hunched beneath their packs. The things they couldn’t part with for a few weeks. Pairs of shoes tied together at the laces hung from their shoulders, cameras around their necks, rolled-up straw mats to lie down on because sand or sidewalk wouldn’t do, bottles of water, sunglasses, the secret passport, credit card, and money pouch hanging around their necks, visible through the college insignia T-shirts or the fluorescently colored tank tops. They were weighted down. Junk hung all over them. And I knew inside the packs it was worse still, ridiculous amounts of socks and underwear, I was sure. Travel games, Walkmans, souvenirs, bags to carry dirty clothes in, Frisbees, alarm clocks, fifteen shirts, and ten pairs of shorts, not to mention the right clothes for the disco, the hats to keep them from dehydrating too fast, the film, and the plastic film canisters now filled with drugs scored in Amsterdam, the travel guides, Eurail passes, the vitamins, conditioners, shampoos, and soaps, perfumes, toothpaste, sunscreen. Condoms, travel mugs, cassettes, the bags to put new souvenirs, new clothing, and other artifacts in, and of course a memento or two from home. They carried it all, and now they leaned near the door of Olympos, one behind the other, newly exchanged money in hand.

  “Do they take our passports?” asked a Danish boy rummaging through the zipper belt at his waist.

  I laughed.

  “They do,” I said.

  I slipped behind the line of tourists and ran upstairs to my room to put on the shirt I usually used as a towel and to get a pack of cigarettes, sat on my bed while it spun, staring at my boots, then checked to make sure my own passport was still there, flipped through the pages for a small, square photograph of my uncle that I carried. Dare standing in a field, holding his helmet, his red and white chute still connected, flattened, out of focus in the background, his cheeks flushed and sooty. The sun hits him and the shadow of his lean body marks the ground with a straight black line.

  I would call him later when it was morning there, I thought, before he went running. Or maybe when it was night. Or maybe I never would again. I put the picture back and stood up, throwing the wall onto the ceiling, strained to focus my eyes, and thought what a bad idea it had been to go upstairs. I would walk it off on the way to Drinks Time, I thought, stepped out into the hall. My legs had fallen asleep, my hands felt clumsy and numb. I fumbled with the key for what seemed like hours, then finally turned and pounded heavily and blindly down the stairs.

  The twisted column of empty space jerked in and out of focus. I hit the reception at last and ran straight into Sterious, who put my commission money into my hand.

  “Off to Drinks Time now?” he said.

  I nodded.

  The chill of night tore through me as I stepped outside. The bank of red lights cast their glow like little blood pools all down the block. And I ran to blur the gaze of men out on the street who might mistake me for someone small and weak.

  Dare said the fire they’d put out that day had been caused by a car exploding. Someone put a rag into the gas tank and lit it like a wick and the car blew up and trees caught fire and then part of the valley caught fire.

  He and some other men put it out and made it home in time to eat dinner. That’s a good day.

  “Why would someone blow up a car?”

  He shook his head, wiped his face. “Eat your food,” he said, pointing with his fork at my plate.

  It was a placid, sweet-smelling evening. Lightning bugs were out and the windows were open; the song of peepers echoed up from edges of the deep green pond.

  I took another bite of venison. We had so much deer in the freezer I could barely remember the taste of anything else. I thought about the swift lean lines of the deers’ bodies as I chewed; they were elegant, terrified, about to be hanging upside down from the tree at the back of the drive.

  One time, years ago, when Dare and I were playing cards, we stopped to watch a doe grazing by the drainage ditch in front of the house. He took out his handgun and shot it from the living room window and I remember laughing so hard I had to wipe tears from my face.

  Dare said, “Go on downstairs and get the tack skinner, we’ll get it dressed before it’s too dark.”

  I shook my head. My stomach hurt. “Why don’t we wait until civilization actually ends to live like this?” I asked.

  “Do it, Bone,” he said.

  “What makes you think we will ever need that much deer meat?” I asked.

  “Forty-five thousand Russian nuclear warheads,” he said. “And all the ones pointing right back at them.”

  Occasionally we’d eat rabbit or squirrel or pheasant, or some other gamey change. We had dozens of shrink-wrapped packs of dried venison in the basement, too, which I’d occasionally throw out. The idea of spending the end times in an underground bunker playing cards with Dare, surrounded by posters of forests and coastlines, was fine if the outside world was nothing but shadows and fires. But I wasn’t going to do it while eating nothing but deer jerky.

  “Why would someone blow up a car?” I asked him again.

  “There was something in the car they wanted to hide,” he said, getting up and going to the sink. He would come home thirsty, sometimes drank a whole gallon of water in several long gulps. He’d shower at the base but his skin still looked raw. He scratched and rubbed his hands over the indentations the helmet left on his forehead.

  “What did they want to hide?”

  He shrugged and his eyes looked blank and wet. “Dunno specifically,” he said, but I could tell by his face that he did know specifically; it was the same look he had when he picked me up from my old house. Whatever it was that Dare had seen, he felt bad about it for me and tired for himself.

  “Dunno,” he said again. “They did a real good job of it, though.”

  After I’d cleared the table and washed the dishes, we went outside to sit on the front porch and watch the sky get darker. Dare tipped his folding chair back so it touched the metal siding on the house.

  “How was school?” he asked.

  “Good,” I said, as though I’d actually gone.

  When Dare was at work I ran to the Okanogan County Library and lay in the stacks reading. I had no plans to keep attending Liberty Bell Junior High.

  “I want to blow up a car,” I told him.

  He looked up and the corner of his mouth twitched.

  “Just don’t do it anywhere near the woods,” he said.

  Drinks Time played old American movies on a large-screen TV, and the place was filled with runners spending the night in a stupefied nostalgia, drunk on ouzo and Amstel, our feet sticking to the grimy floor.

  Candy and Stephan were talking about the fight; Stephan was bruised and swollen and sick-looking. Candy said Tom was to blame and got what he deserved. And most people said “If it wasn’t for Declan” or “Thank god for Declan.” Then someone began singing the IRA song Come out you black and tans come out and fight me like a man as if runners had experienced eight hundred years of oppression by Greek cab drivers, as if Stephan was Bobby Sands.

  “Do you want another drink?” Candy asked.

  The drinking was not good for forgetting or remembering. The bar was too loud, the movie impossible to watch and the only voices I wanted to hear were Jasper’s and Milo’s, wanted to go back to the room and find them there.

  * * *

  I remembered waking up from the sound of traffic and the sudden shock of sobriety and letting myself into the room
through the balcony doors. Milo was sleeping in his boxers, hands locked over the pillow on his head. His long, flat feet hung off the edge of the mattress, which was ringed with their possessions. Bottles, cigarettes, clothes, books and comic books, scraps of paper, pens.

  Jasper lay unconscious beside him. Tender looking, his pale skin shone in the gray light like a body floating just below the surface of water. I remember being very awake that night and sitting on the cold tile with my back pressed against the wall, smoking his cigarettes and trying to read one of his books by the light of the burning ash. They turned in their sleep, held one another. Jasper breathed heavily and I held the cigarette close to his face so I could see him better in the red glow. Smelled his hair, put my cheek against his.

  We’d drifted south from the same lost places to find this life. Bright overcast haze, darkness and clouds, traffic and silence, the smell of diesel and baking bread. And all around the low white postwar architecture and empty plazas and crowded ruins, the temples built by slaves, like an internal landscape at last made visible.

  Jasper could sleep but Milo would eventually wake. “Com’ed, why are you up? Come to bed, little Bride.”

  I would curl beside him, my back to his chest, his hands along my skin, and we’d doze, the three of us, a tangle of limbs.

  Now I had nothing, no letter, no message, not one book left behind.

  “I think it was genetic,” Candy said, looking down at the condensation on her glass. The sound of the bar suddenly loud all around and I must have asked her a question.

  “He probably had some predisposition to dying young, weak liver.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you bloody think? Last I talked to him, he was headed to Drinks Time from that shite flea market past Monastiraki; had some things to sell, he said. Because he was going back to school in the Alba Cathedral to study nonexistent objects. What? That’s what he said. Got quite angry when I laughed. Next time I came round Drinks Time, day or so later, he was gone. That week it got hot. They said his parents came.”

  “Why does everyone keep saying when it got hot? It’s always hot.”

  “Not like this,” Candy said. “Your shoes melted to the sidewalk. Bunch a people died that week from the heat. You musta read ’bout it, nah? D’you stop reading the news after Murat?”

  I said, “Where’s Milo?”

  “Who?”

  I looked at her incredulously. “Milo.”

  “Right, your boyfriend’s boyfriend. I got no clue, love. Left after a run; didn’t meet us back here, either, did he?”

  On the television there was a montage of aerial views: cliffs, oceans, forests, highways, buildings, factories. I drank the last of my pint, closed my eyes and the images kept flashing: white deer, men walking through the trees out into a bloom of asphodels. A river creaking as it froze. And tangled in the weeds on the low muddy bank, a tiny paper house on fire.

  Milo didn’t expect to see Navas in his office at the usual time because he’d seen her barely four hours earlier. She was yelling that she was going to “give a motherfucker a beat-down” for thinking he was “all that.” Apparently he’d thought he was “all that” since back when he got into Horace fucking Mann.

  She was yelling this outside the building of the better fighter, who, within nine minutes, had cut her brother Jorge’s face, buckled him with a punch to the belly, and dropped him straight down like a pillar of sand. Milo tried to talk her out of climbing the fire escape.

  “Shut up, Professor!” She twisted roughly away from his touch. “Nobody even understands what the fuck you’re saying with that white boy accent! Why’s your voice even sound like that?”

  In the end he let her stand on his shoulders so she could grab the metal ladder and pull herself up, then paced below the fire escape smoking while she made out with the kid who’d thumped her brother. He called up to them occasionally to remind her he was there and to ask if they had any Four Loko. There was no more drink, but the fighter said someone named Alexis could give him a ride home, because Alexis was leaving for work in midtown and owned a car. Milo didn’t know who Alexis was but waited, as finding the underground seemed too great a task. By the time Alexis came down wearing a suit and tie and carrying a backpack, Navas had gone inside with the winner and it was starting to get light.

  Alexis said, “Good morning, Professor.”

  “Oh,” Milo said.

  In the car he learned that Alexis was twenty-six years old, had no Four Loko, and hadn’t seen the fight. He didn’t know if Jorge had a boyfriend but suspected he might have a girlfriend. She was the mother of the baby whose image was tattooed on his neck.

  After a sickening drive, which made Milo realize he was no longer drunk but quite hungover and possibly suffering heart palpitations, Alexis dropped him outside the subway at Fifty-Third Street, gave him two dollars for coffee, and said, “Have a blessed day.”

  Traffic was jammed, the sidewalk thick with people in suits. The scraping, grinding din of a street cleaner was too much. Milo threw up in a garbage can, then made his way downtown.

  He was in his office, jittery and raw, still wearing clothes from the day before and aware of some occluded feeling that he might at any minute lose consciousness, when Navas came by. Perfectly put together, happier than usual, and ready to talk about poetry.

  Navas was, it was becoming increasingly clear, some kind of god. She sat by the window, lit a cigarette, and sighed out a cloud of smoke, her face breaking into a smile. He wished desperately that they could lie on the floor together and take a nap. The idea of going back into the classroom, of reading poetry by people who’d never held jobs, traveled with their parent’s money, and took pictures of themselves all day long was nauseating.

  Maybe he would go home and Navas would come with him. If they stopped for a drink, things would be brighter, the sickness would lift. They could head over to Tompkins Square Park and spend some time with the right kind of people.

  Navas flicked ashes out onto the ledge. She was so tempered and self-possessed, he thought for a moment the night before hadn’t happened and that she might not actually exist but was a phantom he’d created. He sat down and pressed his back against the cool wall, rested his head on the metal of the radiator, covered his eyes with his hand.

  Then, as if to confirm his fears that she was a hallucination, Navas said, “Running is Anatomy of the World.”

  Milo reached out and pinched her.

  “Ow, what the fuck?” she said, slapping his hand away. “If I’m wrong, tell me; you don’t gotta do shit like that. It is, though, right? It’s full of anagrams of the John Donne poem.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “I didn’t! I woke up this morning and was, like, the stanzas are paired. You can read them back-to-back; the content’s like a reply or a contradiction. Then I took some of the words apart and got this: ‘She, she is dead, she’s dead: when thou know’st this thou know’st how dry a cinder the world is!’ In Running the gender’s changed but—”

  “It’s not the same poem,” Milo said.

  “No,” she said, “because Running’s not a eulogy. It’s a confession.”

  Dare understood about the history of man: the potato famine, the Holocaust, the slave trade, Malthusian disasters, the earth’s atmosphere disappearing, rising oceans, nuclear arsenals, government surveillance. After listening to his history lessons, I doubted the stupidity of man could be survived with just a crank radio, a generator, and enough canned food to last a year, but I respected him for trying.

  When I was fifteen Dare taught me to hunt with a bow and arrow instead of a gun, and bought me a good skinning knife. In the future he said we couldn’t count on getting ammunition.

  He taught me to build lean-tos, though we would probably have to stay in the basement because of the radiation. We tanned deer hides, scraping every bit of fl
esh and fat from inside the skin, then stretching it to dry, sanding it smooth; put the deer’s brain in hot water and mashed it, then soaked their hides in the mash to tan the leather; sealed the brain oils in by smoking them over a hole filled with coals. The smell would cling to my clothes, seep into my own skin.

  Sometimes he’d sell the hides and give me the money.

  I bought fertilizer from the garden shop and peroxide from the drugstore; stole M-80s and sparklers and boxes of matches, plastic containers and bottles, wicks and wires and clocks, nails and glass. I couldn’t see how hiding under the house would fix the immediate problem. I’d lie in the stacks at the library, immersed in research. These studies might have remained purely theoretical if Dare hadn’t found my toolbox.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Bonehead, what the fuck are you planning on doing with all this shit?”

  I shrugged.

  “You don’t know?” he asked. “You don’t know?”

  “Blow something up,” I said, annoyed because he could clearly see for himself.

  “Blow what up?”

  I shrugged again. I’d not been able to find a car and put a rag in the gas tank and light it. I couldn’t use our car because he needed it to drive to work.

  “You can’t keep explosive stuff around. You could blow your arm off or worse. You could really hurt someone. Goddamn it. How much of this shit do you have? Why the fuck do you do stuff like this, Bridey? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to.”

  He had a look on his face like he was standing in the bright sun.

  “Carlos the Jackal,” I said, “would have been more successful if he’d had a better understanding of explosives.”

  “Why the fuck do you know about Carlos the Jackal?” he was asking himself in a whisper, the same way he would say, “Why won’t you comb your hair?”

  Dare’s face flushed. “Bone,” he said calmly, ran his hands over his head and stood staring at the floor for a minute. He looked like he was going to say something, then went downstairs to the basement, came up with two pairs of goggles, and thrust the box of incendiary things into my hands. “C’mon,” he said.