“Do you even know what you want to accomplish here?” the trainer asked.
Jonathan hesitated. He didn’t know how to explain what he needed exactly.
“Um, I need to put on muscle, a lot of muscle, as soon as possible. But I also need to have good balance and not lose too much endurance, and be flexible, and I need to be fast.” Jonathan was rambling.
Lincoln frowned.
“So you basically want to be the perfect athlete, but you want to put on as much muscle as possible?” Lincoln asked.
“Yes!” Jonathan said. “But I can’t get injured. It’s important and I need to do this as soon as possible.”
“Mind if I ask what the rush is all about?” Lincoln asked.
“Yeah, I kinda do,” Jonathan replied, then realized it had been a little forceful, “but if you can help me I’ll do whatever you say.”
Lincoln raised an eyebrow.
Jonathan wasn’t sure he liked the way the trainer’s expression had changed when he said he’d follow orders without question. It made him think of a scientist receiving a fresh lab rat.
“I could help you a lot more if I knew what you were training for,” he said.
Jonathan shrugged.
Lincoln looked at him for a moment before checking his watch.
“Alright man,” he said putting his hand out. “I’m Lincoln, what’s your name?”
“Jonathan,” he said shaking the trainer’s hand.
“Well Jonathan, tell you what, I’m going to show you a few things because I have an hour and a half before my next client gets here. After that I’ll show you my rates. If you want to get stronger, I’ll teach you everything there is to know,” Lincoln said, “just don’t tell me you want to be a model, as of yesterday I’ve raised my rates for wannabe models.”
“No worries there,” Jonathan said, wishing his problems amounted to just wanting to look good.
Jonathan was pretty sure he’d just made a good decision as he walked away from the gym. At least it felt like he’d found a fast track to getting where he needed to go. Lincoln had spent an hour and a half running him though all sorts of stuff. There was so much more to each thing than he’d originally realized: Stretching, posture, form, diet, cardio vs muscle training, it went on and on. Jonathan could tell it was just the beginning, but he was still three times more knowledgeable now than he’d been at the beginning of the day and that was good.
Unfortunately, Lincoln’s assistance didn’t come cheap. He’d had to use his emergency credit card just to finance the ten hours of training. That wasn’t counting the tub of protein and various vials of supplements that were now crammed in his gym bag. He knew to some degree that Lincoln was being a salesman, but at the same time he didn’t doubt that the guy knew what he was talking about. In the last ten minutes before Jonathan had left he had mapped out a stringent schedule for how often and how many of each of the pills and powders that he was supposed to be taking each day.
Jonathan had only worried about the debt he was going into for a few moments, then he remembered that, if he failed, he wasn’t going to have to pay it off anyway.
He couldn’t think of all his purchases this way, only those correlated to his survival. He was getting an image, an inkling of how to save himself. Once he knew what he was doing, he could train by himself, without the assistance of a guide. Guides were clearly expensive, but right now they were indispensable. All of the knowledge he was in desperate need of could not be easily pulled from a book. He wasn’t going to learn to fight monsters by simply reading a self-defense manual. He needed teachers, he needed experience. He still had so much more he needed to know.
The nice thing about having roommates like Hayden and Collin was that they seldom had anywhere to be on a Saturday night.
Jonathan came home from a day that started at the gym and then six hours at the hardware store to find the two of them ready to drop their comic book panels and resume the Rocky marathon. He didn’t understand how they watched these movies over and over again, at least not with such enthusiasm. Of course, it wasn’t lost on him that this was exactly what Heyer had been telling him he needed to discover. He could see it in his roommates as they watched, a focus on the story that seemed to evoke some primal emotions in both of them. At times, Collin looked like his eyes had grown glossy.
Jonathan wasn’t experiencing whatever it was at first, but still, it was hard not to be infected by Collin’s and Hayden’s passion. It all changed rather abruptly, right when it seemed that Collin was about to give up on him.
They were in the middle of Rocky II. In the scene Rocky and his trainer, Mick, are sitting in a chapel praying. Rocky’s pregnant wife is in a coma at the hospital, but he is supposed to be preparing every day for his rematch with the heavyweight champion of the world. He can’t get his mind where it needs to be because he is too heart sick over his wife.
“Roc, you’re gonna be swapping punches with the most dangerous fighter in the world, and you’re nowhere near ready,” says Mick, as Rocky sits quietly listening. “Why don’t you stand up and fight this guy hard? Don’t lie down in front of him like this! This guy doesn’t just want to win; he wants to bury you, humiliate you. He wants to prove to the whole world that you were nothing but a freak the first time out—”
Collin paused the movie and looked to Jonathan.
“Seriously, Tibbs,” he said, “if I need to explain to you why this speech is epic, then I have to wonder if you’ll ever understand what these films are getting at. I mean, I have goosebumps right now.”
Jonathan nodded his head then.
No, he needed no explanation. The words of the film were so over-relatable to his life that he was hardly paying attention to Collin’s question. He’d felt something, and he knew now why Collin couldn’t explain.
Goosebumps had prickled on his own skin. Inspiration from the words sank deeply into him, past his conscious thought, bypassing the barrier of his mind that over analyzed things, stirring something primitive. It wasn’t simply motivating; it was angry and rebelling. It was like a drug coursing through him bringing out the urge to conquer. It pushed to the forefront an unexpected desire for strength and the willingness to sacrifice whatever it took to obtain it. It ignored his limitations, and he felt an angry refusal to be victimized.
In that moment, deep in his core, he’d felt the thing inside of him stir. He’d forgotten about it, that part of him that had rammed itself into the back of the Ferox and dragged it down to the bottom of the black water; that thing that had risen up just when he was losing himself. It was awake within him, resonating with the words of the film, taking strength from them. It had been starving, and was now getting fed after years of being locked in a box.
He briefly understood how words could drive a man to bleed to death fighting.
Don’t lie down in front of him!
Hayden and Collin were both looking at the intense expression on Jonathan’s face.
“Fight this guy hard,” Jonathan whispered, his teeth tightening together.
This was what he needed; the competitive edge, the desire to challenge monsters that would come here thinking to destroy him. He couldn’t just be hoping to survive; he needed to be thinking of how he was going to beat that leathery bastards face through the pavement for daring to trespass here. That thing, feeding inside him now, felt like it knew all this somehow.
As soon as he had started to over think it, the feeling seemed to slip away. He found himself hungry for more words, for another hit of that drug. When Jonathan finally looked back to his roommates, he only had one thing to say.
“We need to watch all of these.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MONDAY | JULY 16, 2005 | 8:00 AM
LINCOLN had to help him return the bar to the rack. He didn’t have the strength left to get the weight off his shoulders. He dropped down to the floor and gave into the fierce need for air. He wasn’t being dramatic; he had pushed himself to the point of failure again
, always trying to do more than he’d been able to before, always trying to break past the previous barrier. He couldn’t let himself be happy with anything that wasn’t progress.
“I’m on the floor again,” he said between hurried breaths.
Jonathan had spent the last two weeks getting his proverbial ass handed to him. He’d amassed a number of new enemies. They had names like kettle bell, dead lifts, and overhead press. He’d lost many a confrontation with his arch nemesis, squats. After the first day, once Lincoln had really started his training, he’d woken up and found he could hardly move through the soreness that had seemed to spread to every muscle he was unfortunate enough to move. Now, Jonathan couldn’t remember the last time that some part of him didn’t hurt.
Lincoln stood over him now, shaking his head in mock amazement.
“Always with the extra rep, Tibbs?” Lincoln said. “You know when you first showed up here, I admit, I didn’t think you’d have the spirit for this, but sometimes, well, I wish I had some of whatever is driving you.”
You really don’t, Jonathan thought from the floor.
He didn’t remember when Lincoln had taken up the habit of referring to him as Tibbs. It wasn’t like when Collin did so. When Lincoln said it, it was more sportsmanlike, the way football players referred to each other. Jonathan recovered his breath enough to get onto his knees and immediately started looking for his shaker bottle, a sealed beverage holder designed for mixing powdered supplements into water; another thing he didn’t know existed until two weeks ago. He drank down the protein mixture, trying not to overdo it; he had learned his lesson early on with fluids, too much meant cramps and vomit.
“Convince yourself that if you don’t get stronger you’ll die,” Jonathan said between sips of protein and attempts to breathe.
Lincoln rolled his eyes.
“Psychology games don’t tend to work for me. It’s too easy to remember I’m lying to myself.”
Jonathan nodded his agreement. Of course, he couldn’t explain that he wasn’t lying to himself.
He knew it was a puzzle to the trainer. He didn’t really fall into any gym clichés. It wasn’t so much that he was a skinny guy who seemed to have no sports interest and suddenly needed to become as big as possible. There could be reasons for that. It was the urgency. A lot of people showed up at the gym for training thinking that their willpower would carry them to their goals. In their heads, they imagined some kind of delusional montage from a movie where they grit their teeth and sweat themselves into muscles. The reality generally destroyed their illusions within a few days.
Jonathan didn’t have that problem; he hadn’t come here with a preconceived notion. He’d come out of necessity. He would either do this and do it well, or he would die. That kind of motivation was as unwavering as it got.
Jonathan had been trying to concoct a story. Something he could say if pressed for why it was so important to be hitting the gym so much, but he had yet to think of anything that was very convincing. He wasn’t a talented liar. When Lincoln probed, his usual response was just to shrug and hide behind his own face, as though he himself didn’t know the answer. Lincoln didn’t seem to buy that, but he usually dropped it. According to Lincoln, the way he was training reflected what he would expect if Jonathan had woken up one morning with an overwhelming desire to compete in the Mr. Universe competition. Jonathan didn’t think he could sell that story.
Eventually, it seemed, he would need some kind of explanation, but that moment had not yet arrived. Lincoln, after all, wasn’t going to be the one to pester him for information. Like they had discussed on day one, the trainer trained and Jonathan did as he was told.
Following those instructions, he soon found, didn’t end at the gym.
“Want to be a monster,” Lincoln said, “you don’t just train like a monster; you gotta eat like one.”
Eating. Meal preparation and constant food consumption had become a full time job. His roommates hadn’t seen the kitchen get so much use in the entirety of their living together. He was constantly cooking meals that were high in protein. Collin and Hayden had openly been sickened by the amount of healthy crap they now found in the refrigerator. Lincoln had told him that for optimal muscle growth he was going to have to have food available at all times.
“Tibbs, if you start feeling hungry, I want you to start getting scared,” Lincoln had said. “I want you to be thinking, if I don’t eat soon my body might burn calories from my hard-earned muscle mass.”
Jonathan had at first found this to be a hassle. Twice a week he was cooking large quantities of food, then constantly carrying around a backpack full of pre-made meals. Soon though, he understood the necessity. Constant training was causing him to be perpetually hungry, just like the trainer had advised him. When he started feeling hungry, he started to worry.
This was, of course, in addition to the plethora of new supplements he’d been instructed to take at varying intervals. Protein powders, creatine, nitric oxide supplements, in addition to simple multivitamins, which were the only thing he had recognized prior to hiring the trainer.
Still, that hadn’t been the end of it. On the second day of training Lincoln had asked him how often he was doing things like jogging. When he found out Jonathan ran frequently he just shook his head.
“You need to knock that off immediately.”
He’d forbidden him from doing more than an hour of cardio throughout the whole week. Seeing as Jonathan had been running since high school for all of his exercise, it came as a blow. Apparently cardio and muscle building didn’t go together well. It had been the one thing he’d thought he’d be bringing to the table at the beginning, now it was considered a hindrance to his progress. He just had to accept it all as the price of survival. If he wasn’t making progress, then all he was doing was dying. Few equations were ever so simple.
“What are we watching tonight?” Collin asked Hayden. “Your turn to choose.”
“Blood Sport,” Hayden replied.
“Ugh.” Collin frowned. “Are we really including Van Damme movies?”
Hayden didn’t dignify the question with a response. Instead he riffled through the bookcase full of DVDs looking for the box he wanted.
He’d grown accustomed to the shift in routine. Jonathan came home, always appearing exhausted, and Collin and Hayden used his arrival as an excuse to take a break from their biblical comic book adaptation to watch action movies from their childhood. Which, if they were being honest, wasn’t much of a departure from their ordinary routine, except that it now included Jonathan.
Collin appeared to love the company, especially with the way Jonathan seemed to hang on their every word regarding the films. Although, he’d admittedly seemed less and less enthusiastic about it over the past week.
Hayden’s eyes finally found the box he was looking for and pulled it from the shelf. He placed the film in the player and turned on the TV so that the menu options would be showing once Jonathan arrived. He felt like a professor getting a PowerPoint presentation ready before class.
To say Jonathan’s change in behavior was noticeable was an understatement. Hayden felt that the only way he could be supportive was to provide the distraction that Jonathan seemed to be looking for. The whole house had commented on Jonathan never being at school anymore, or at least they never saw him there, and he was never studying.
Paige had said she was going to talk to him about it, but then the nightmares had started.
Hayden and Collin had both noticed it. Despite the fact that he appeared completely wiped out, he seemed to struggle to stay awake when he was with them, like he was afraid of going to sleep. They had all heard him, crying out in the night, walking around the house, or typing away on the Internet at early hours of the morning. No one had said anything to him yet. It wasn’t a courage issue; it just felt impolite.
Paige said Jonathan was showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Collin and Hayden had just nodded when she said it. It wasn’t
like he was qualified to argue, but he wouldn’t have anyway. Given their roommate’s circumstances the assessment seemed to fit. Frankly, Hayden wasn’t so sure that he’d even recovered from that night. Images of blood all over the kitchen floor still made him cringe from time to time. He couldn’t imagine being Jonathan, having woken up in it.
Of course, PTSD still didn’t explain Jonathan’s strange new obsession with cooking. Hayden was putting that in the distraction category, along with the movies.
A few minutes later the front door opened and Jonathan came in. He moved sluggishly; his legs walked, but only in protest. He waved to them and they nodded, but he immediately ducked into the kitchen. A moment later they heard the microwave running.
“Ugh.” Collin whispered to Hayden. “Chicken breast and broccoli again.”
A few moments later Jonathan sat on the couch and started putting the meal away. He looked tired and distant. He chewed, but didn’t appear to be enjoying the meal, just sustaining himself.
“Tonight, we watch Blood Sport,” Hayden said hoping to rouse some excitement out of him.
Jonathan nodded. Both Collin and Hayden noticed a change in his behavior. This wasn’t less enthusiasm. It was bordering on no enthusiasm.
“What’s up, Tibbs?” Collin asked. “Seem kind of disinterested suddenly.”
Jonathan looked up at the two of them and paused. He sighed and put his knife and fork down on his plate.
“Sorry guys, it’s not you; I’m just starting to think this might be a waste of time.”
“Tibbs, we are watching action movies from the 80’s. Of course it’s a waste of time,” Collin said. “What did you think you’d be getting out of it?”
Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero Page 18