"Giving what up?” Suzie asked, uninterested. She was a redhead on the pretty side of plain, with a history major’s mind in a cheerleader’s body. I sometimes thought the combination was awkward, then remembered that that equation could have been reversed, and remained silent.
'The running. I’ve—gone too far. I know something I should never have found out.”
I nudged Owens. "A door Man was never meant to open, and so forth.” Owens sighed and looked at the clock again.
"If I let him start, I won’t be out of here until midnight.”
"Then don’t let him start.”
Owens’s expression was one of whimsical resignation. "Oh, why the hell not?” He walked up to the front door quickly and pulled the shade. Only the four of us were left inside, now.
We gathered around Bostic, who was still gazing into his carrot juice. "Well?” I asked finally. "Why are you giving it up?”
I searched my writer’s mind for a proper description of his eyes. Frightened? No, "haunted” was closer.
"It all started two years ago. You all remember what I looked like then?” Indeed we did. He was a quiet, plump man with thinning brown hair and a petulant mouth who came and went often, saying little to anyone. He read the Slender Age magazines on the rack, and tanked up on lecithin-kelp-B6-cider-vinegar tablets this week, expanding cellulose tablets the next, or anything else that promised fast, fast, fast relief from rotundity. But he never lost weight, until...
"Yeah, well, I went from diet to diet, and never seemed to get anywhere. Finally I read somewhere that diets don’t work, because the expression 'going on a diet’ always implies that one day you will go off of the diet, too. What I had to change, it said, was my whole self-image. If I thought like a skinny person, it would be easier to be one.” I nodded. Made sense to me, but Owens sat with his lips pursed as if waiting for a punch line.
"So I tried to think: What is a skinny person like? Or better, a healthy person? And I kept thinking about that, and I got into analysis, and selfhypnotism, and pretty soon I was finding out things about myself I’d never known before. I was dealing with stress with celery sticks instead of sausage, and the weight was creeping off. But then I wanted more, and I began exercising.”
Suzie wiped the counter lazily with her cloth as she reminisced. “Was that the day you came in and bought all of the Jack La Lanne books?” He nodded vigorous agreement.
"Calisthenics. Then weights. Then yoga, and finally running. I had found it at last. Running is a skinny-people’s sport, no two ways about it. And I got into it. At first I could puff out a half mile. Then a mile. Then two miles, and finally three. I tried everything I could, but couldn’t get above three without getting sick to my stomach. I just couldn’t. So I started researching, and improving my diet, and by then I had lost thirty pounds, and was a skinny person, but it wasn’t enough. Well, I finally squeezed my way up to five miles, but it took months to do, and I was just about to my limit. But wow! I could run five miles in forty minutes, and I was happy.”
He chewed his lower lip miserably, as if musing over the wisdom of continuing. "I’m going to need another Special if I’m going to finish this,” he said.
Owsly nodded to Suzie, and, careful to breathe only through her mouth, she whipped it up and held it out to him. He downed half of it in two glugs, and I felt a fish flopping in my stomach.
He licked a brownish-orange mustache off his upper lip and continued. "One day I was browsing through one of the little metaphysical bookshops off Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox, and I came across an old, yellowed book called Body Magicks. I browsed through it, and was stunned. It claimed to be an exercise manual for accomplished sorcerers and warlocks. I laughed at the time, but the book cautioned over and over against the use of these techniques by the uninitiated. I bought it, and the old man at the cash register made some sort of finger sign at me, and when I didn’t return it, he almost refused to sell me the book. I talked him into it finally, but he cautioned me against using the knowledge in the book.
"I took it home, fascinated and amused. Of course the warnings were absurd. Of course.”
"What did it say?” Owen asked, curious at last.
'It said that all fatigue was caused by the lack of proper breathing habits. That poisons build up in the bloodstream that must be cleansed by the ’air-fire.’ If you don’t breathe properly, the muscles will clog with poisons and stop moving.”
Owens glanced at me in unspoken question. "That’s a pretty fair description of the Kreb cycle,” I mused aloud.
"Kreb cycle?”
"Sure,” I said. "Your muscles are fueled by a chemical called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Exertion causes one of the phosphate bonds to break, releasing energy.”
"What does that have to do with breathing?” Suzie asked.
"Plenty. If you get oxygen faster than the ATP chains break down, you have an aerobic exercise, like distance running. If you break down the chains faster than oxygen gets in to the muscles, you have an anaerobic exercise, like, oh, sprinting or power lifting. But lactic acid builds up in the muscles due to oxygen debt during anaerobic exercise, and if enough of it builds up the muscles don’t get the message to twitch anymore, and activity stops. Oxygen re-forms the ATP bonds, so breathing is very important.” I searched my memory, and came up close to empty. "Almost every Eastern meditation or martial art has its own special breathing patterns. They all work.”
"Yeah, you’ve got it right,” Owsly said, glad to have me pick up the pieces of his explanation. 'They all work, but this one...” He shook his head, and a chill seemed to go through him as he sat quietly. Another pull on his drink, and he was ready to go on. "I can’t say if this technique would work for anyone else. I don’t know if I was a fluke or what. You decide for yourselves. I started using the meditations suggested. I fasted, I sniffed salt water up each nostril to clean my air passages, and I breathed.
"Lord, I never knew what breathing was until I got into that book. Breathing to the tips of my lungs. Breaths inhaled for ten beats, held for six, exhaled for twelve. That was the crucial thing, the proportion of inhalation to retention to exhalation. That, and the number of breaths per minute compared to the number of heartbeats. I don’t want to go into it too far right now. You decide for yourselves if you want to.
"I began to feel—different. Lighter. As if I weren’t really breathing, as if my body were part of a—a cosmic flow that moved the air in and out of my body all of its own volition. My breathing slowed and slowed and deepened, and soon I forgot where I was. I don’t know how long I stayed in trance, but it felt as if I could see myself sitting there. As if I were no longer in my body, that its lungs were breathing, its heart beating, and all of its functions taking place without me in it to guide. Then I laughed. Of course my body could get along perfectly well without my conscious mind. Lord knows I never told my organs how to operate, or my heart how to pump. They operated perfectly well
without me, without my conscious meddling..... And
then I understood what the book was trying to say. The body needs only to be pointed in the right direction, then get your brain out of gear and let it go. I was ecstatic. I had found the way!”
None of us interrupted Owsly as he drained his glass, and there was a terrible secret stirring in the depths of his bloodshot eyes. "What I didn’t notice was that I had trouble reentering my body. It was like trying to engage gears that were moving at different speeds, and neither wanting to yield. I was giddy and dizzy when I finally made it, but too exuberant to see the implications.....
"The next day was Saturday, and I knew that the track at the local high school would be closed. That would be perfect, since I didn’t want to be disturbed. I climbed the fence and walked out to the center of the field, sat down in a half-lotus, and closed my eyes. My breathing slowed, until the proportions were down to...to where they needed to be.” He looked at Suzie with a nervous apology on his lips, and a look that said Can’t you see I’m just tryin
g to protect you? "After a time, I got up and stretched, still maintaining the same breathing pattern. Then I started to run.
"I ran so slowly it was almost a walk, because I had to do all of my inhalations through my nose, and that limited my speed a lot. If I sped up too quickly, I’d go into... oxygen debt, that’s it, oxygen debt, and have to slow down again. Slowly, the rhythm caught, and I was able to pick up a little speed and some smoothness in my movement. And I began to sink deeper and deeper into the lure of the breathing. Every quarter-mile lap I got deeper and deeper into it, so that by the fifth lap, I was beginning to pull away from my body. I could 'see’ myself running, but I couldn’t feel the exertion. There was no hesitation in my movement, and my muscles weren’t fighting themselves. I began to pick up speed.
"It was marvelous. Soon I was whipping around the track at close to top speed, only I was doing it for lap after lap after lap, without fatigue! I 'watched’ myself, knowing that if I could only surrender to the deeper rhythms, still more wonderful achievements could be mine. So I concentrated, and widened the gap between my body and my mind, so that I was drifting off alone in a black void while my body moved endlessly around the track.
"At last I noticed that the sun was going down. Why, I must have run eight miles! And without a stumble or single painful moment. I figured that it was time to end the experiment.”
He looked at Owen with a face whose muscles had gone the way of warm butter. "I don’t know if you will believe this, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t regain control of my body. The gears just wouldn’t mesh. I tried... Lord, how I tried, but it was as if I just didn’t belong in there anymore, that my body preferred running, sweaty and glassy-eyed, around the track. And it was speeding up. The heartbeat was the same, and the breathing was the same, but there was no mistaking the fact that I—or it—was beginning to move at an absurd speed. Maybe that speed was believable for a sprint, but over a distance of miles, well, I was starting to panic. Again I tried to get back into my body, and it wouldn’t let me back.
"And now I knew why the book had cautioned me. All my life my conscious mind had denied my body exercise, had stuffed it with garbage foods, poured dope smoke and alcohol and God knows what else into it, and now it wasn’t letting me back in. It considered me a bad influence.
"Well, I may have been dumb, but I’m still all the brains my body has, and it clearly didn’t know what to do without me. I mean, it kept running until the perspiration stopped running from my pores, and until I was staggering and my limbs were shaking, and still it didn’t stop, and I knew it—I was going to die if I didn’t do something quick.
"I tried again to gain control over my legs, but it was hopeless, they just plodded on and on. I tried to move my hands, and they twitched a little, but when I tried to force them to grab on to a drinking fountain or fence, they wouldn’t move more than a few inches, and I almost gave up.
"Then I remembered my eyelids. I focused all my willpower on them, and finally they shut. I stumbled on in total darkness for a lap or so, then ran off of the track and smack into a wall.
"When I woke up, it was daylight. I was so tired I couldn’t feel anything, and my feet were a swollen mess, but somehow I managed to get home. I swear I must have run all night.” He sighed with the drooping shoulders of one whose story is finished, and trickled out his few remaining words. "I missed a day of work, but I was happy just to be alive. Anyway. That’s why I’m giving up running.”
Owen and I winked at each other as Owsly slid off his stool and plunked down a couple of bucks and change for the drinks. Owen waved him off. “On the house, Owsly. What you’ve just got to learn is that you get too wrapped up in your activities. You just overdo.”
"Yeah,” he said wearily, "I guess you’re right. That’s why I’m giving this”—he pulled a tattered copy of a book out of his pocket and laid it on the counter—"to you. I hope you use it more wisely than I did.” And, shaking his head sadly, Owsly walked out of the store. Owens locked the door behind him.
The three of us, Owens, Suzie, and myself, looked at the book for a long time before Suzie, bless her fearless little heart, turned it over. Sure enough, the cover read Body Magicks. I thumbed through it for a moment, and Suzie whistled under her breath.
"Well, Owen...” I said, laying it down gingerly, "are you game?”
He looked at it with dreadful curiosity, then shook his head. "Not me. I’m an old man, dammit.” He said this while trying to poke out his gut and relax his arms into flabbiness. "What about you... ?”
I started to be brave, but shook a negative. "Naw. I’m too far behind in my reading to check this out. I guess it’ll just have to wait..... ”
But Suzie’s hand had already snaked out and snagged it. "I’ll give it a read...” she said thoughtfully.
"Whatever for?” Owens said, curious. "You’re not into any sport.”
"True enough,” she said, gathering her sweater and turning off the lights behind the juice bar. "But I’ve got a heavy date with the captain of the tennis team Friday night, and...well, you never know, do you...?”
Politely, she affected not to notice our lowered jaws as she skipped to the front door and vanished, the tattered copy of Body Magicks tucked firmly under her left arm.
Steven Barnes, who has collaborated with Larry Niven on the SF novels Dream Park and The Descent of Anansi, and published one solo novel, Streetlethal, comments that this story came out of a dare from Larry Niven, who bet him that he couldn’t write a tall tale set in a health-food bar. So he said, "Oh, yeah?" and ”Endurance Vile” is the result. As for the inevitable question, as Barnes put it, of whether or not such a technique as described in the story actually exists: "Yes and no. There is a very definite key to unlocking conscious control over the autonomic nervous system, and 1 could tell it in one line of type. It would be insanely incautious for me to do so—not every experiment ends as humorously as Owsly Bostic's
THE CENTIPEDE’S DILEMMA
by Spider Robinson
Callahan’s Place is somewhere in Suffolk County, Long Island.
What happened to Fogerty was a classic example of the centipede’s dilemma. Served him right, of course, and I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. But things could have gone much worse with him if he hadn’t been wearing that silly hat.
It was this way:
Fogerty came shuffling into Callahan’s Place for the first time on the night of the Third Annual Darts Championship of the Universe, an event by which we place much store at Callahan’s, and I noticed him the moment he walked in. No great feat; he was a sight to see. He looked like a barrel with legs, and I mean a big barrel. On its side. On top of this abundance sat a head like a hastily peeled potato, and on top of the head sat—or rather sprawled—the most ridiculous hat I’d ever seen. It could have passed for a dead zeppelin, floppy and disheveled, a villainous yellow in color. From the moment I saw it I expected it to slide down his face like a disreputable avalanche, but some mysterious force held it at eyebrow level. I couldn’t estimate his age.
Callahan served him without blinking an eye—I sometimes suspect that if a pink gorilla walked into Callahan’s, on fire, and ordered a shot, Callahan would ask if it wanted a chaser. The guy inhaled three fingers of Gin in as many seconds, had Callahan build him another, and strolled on over to the crowd by the dart board, where Long-Drink McGonnigle and Doc Webster were locked in mortal combat. I followed along, sensing something zany in the wind.
Some of us at Callahan’s are pretty good with a dart, and consequently the throwing distance is thirty feet, a span which favors brute strength but requires accuracy along with it. The board is a three-foot circle with a head-shot of a certain politician (supply your own) on its face, concentric circles of fifty, forty, twenty, ten, and one point each superimposed over his notorious features. When I got to where I could see the board Doc Webster had just planted a dandy high on the right cheek for forty, and Long-Drink was straining to look unconcerned.
"Quarts of Scotch,” I told him. "The challenger stakes a bottle against the previous winner’s total. Last year the Doc there went home with six cases of Peter Dawson’s.” He grunted, watched the Doc notch an ex-presidential ear (you supplied the same politician, didn’t you?), then asked how he could sign up. I directed him to Fast Eddie, who was taking a night off from the piano to referee, and kept half an eye on him while I watched the match. He took no part in the conversational hilarity around him, but watched the combat with a vacuous stare, rather like a man about to fall asleep before the TV.
It was reasonably apparent that wit was not his long suit. Doc Webster won the match handily, and the stein, that Long-Drink disconsolately pegged into the big fireplace joined a mound of broken glass that was mute testimony to the Doc’s prowess. One of my glasses was in that pile.
About a pound of glass later, Fast Eddie called out, "Dink Fogerty,” and the guy with the hat stood up. The Doc beamed at him like a bear being sociable to a hive, and offered him the darts.
They made quite a pair. If Fogerty was a barrel, the Doc is what they shipped the barrel in, and it probably rattled a lot. Fogerty took the darts, rammed them together point-first into a nearby tabletop, and stood back smiling. The Doc blinked, then smiled back and toed the mark. Plucking a dart from the tabletop with an effort, he grinned over his shoulder at Fogerty and let fly.
The dart missed the board entirely.
A gasp went up from the crowd, and the Doc frowned. Fogerty’s expression was unreadable. The champ plucked another dart, wound up, and threw again.
Tales From the Spaceport Bar Page 13
