Burn My Shadow

by Tyler Knight

  Amanda says, “Honestly, that doesn’t sound fun to me, but I’m really glad you might have found something that excites you.”

  Then she laughs.

  “What?”

  “You’re what, two hundred twenty pounds? We’ll see how you feel about running a hundred miles after you try that fifty-k.”

  “Ha-ha, yeah, I got some work to do, but how hard can it be?”

  A woman in a short running skirt says, “Good job!” as she runs past me. I pull myself out of my malaise, pick up the pace and play Chase the Skirt. Hey, whatever works…left-right-left-right…

  • • •

  Seventeen-o-nine: Civil Twilight

  The sun has set, stealing all the day’s warmth with it. I’m not gonna give a poetic description full of purple prose about what the sun looks like setting over the sea. Fuck the sun. I’m not in the mood…you know what a goddamn sunset looks like. If not, Google “JMW Turner,” motherfucker.

  Before I turn on my headlamp, I run off the bike path a few yards into the sand and retch. Because I’ve not eaten anything besides Red Vines all day, this means scarlet slobber and drool on the front of my hoodie, but nothing solid. When I’m done, I look around to be sure I’m unseen before I pull my dick out to pee… It takes a long time for urine to pass…and when it does, it’s the color of a dark lager. A’ight…gotta hydrate better from here on out.

  I pop a handful of Ibuprofen. Water bottle is empty…I swallow them dry. Whenever I feel my morale sink, I open Twitter on my phone and tweet my progress in real time. Keeps me focused.

  Tweet: “In the motherfucking pain cave. Getting my mail there… I am the King of Pain.”

  I need to steel myself for the probability of this mental siege worsening, because this time of year I’ll run through fourteen hours of darkness. Ah, Darkness… You can’t wait to trebuchet flaming balls of doubt and self-loathing over my mental walls, can you? I death march while I wait for the pain killers to kick in.

  Left foot, right foot…left foot, right foot… Hello Darkness, my old friend…

  • • •

  Twenty-two-thirty-two

  Sixty-two-point-eleven miles

  Because the course is a multi-lap out-and-back along the same path, you get to see the entire field of runners several times. Since the sun has set, I see others with decreasing frequency. Most times, the only human contact I have for long stretches of time are Amanda and the volunteers at the aid station which I pass every lap. At the aid station, a volunteer fills my water bottle with Mountain Dew as I swap out my shoes for a pair with cushioning, and take a few steps to the food table… Oh my God, it feels like I’ve got pillows strapped to my feet! I grab Red Vines and Ibuprofen at the table, kiss Amanda, and go.

  Tweet: “Going on my 3rd marathon of the day. Left foot, right foot!”

  • • •

  Day two

  O-two-thirty

  Eighty-four miles

  Tweet: “Downhill from here. The last 22 miles were rough…stomach issues. Tweaked ankle.”

  Running on concrete isn’t an option so I walk in the sand. When I get to the aid station, I’m greeted by cheers and encouragement from the volunteers. Amanda is there. She kisses my cheek and hands me an extended battery for my Magellan GPS watch, and I stick it into place.

  A new volunteer takes my water bottle. She says, “Great job, I’ll refill this for you! What do want to drink?”

  “Hemlock.”

  The volunteers laugh. I wasn’t trying to be funny.

  I say, “Mountain Dew.”

  The volunteer hurries off to fill my water bottle with Mountain Dew while I shuffle over to the food table. There are pizzas on the table…sandwiches…varieties of fruits, as well as potatoes next to a bowl of salt for dipping them in to replace depleted salt levels. I ignore them all and grab a fistful of Red Vines.

  Amanda says, “You haven’t eaten anything but licorice and Mountain Dew all day. You should eat some pizza.”

  “I’m fine! I don’t want fucking pizza!”

  Conventional wisdom says you cannot digest more than 250–300 calories per hour. The challenge is, a man my weight burns about three times that sum per hour of running. It’s an impossible deficit to bridge. Marathoners feel its effects manifest in “hitting the wall” about fourteen miles into their 26.2-mile race. During an ultra, after hitting the wall and smashing through it enough times, you “bonk.” The only defense you have for this is accepting that it will happen, staying on top of your caloric intake, and keeping your emotions in check. Bonking has been known to turn ultra runners into jerks.

  “I’m sorry about that, mujercita…I can’t hold anything down in my stomach. Dew and licorice are the only things I can keep down. They give me the calories and caffeine I need.”

  Amanda points at a lawn chair. “Sit down a minute and I’ll bring you a cup of soup. It’ll warm up.”

  I look over to the series of lawn chair she’s pointing to. On one of them sits a runner getting blisters on her feet lanced by a member of her crew. Next to it is an empty chair with a blanket piled upon it. The chair has gravity…I feel it pulling me toward it…a whispered suggestion building into a command. My eyelids begin a reflexive droop… My weight shifts in the beginnings of a step toward the chair. Sitting down, even if my intention is just for a moment, would be the end of my race. I just don’t trust myself to get back to up to my feet if I sit. Even if I did manage to get going again, the endorphins would have long worn off and the first few miles would be a living hell until they kicked in again.

  The volunteer returns with my bottle and goes off to attend to another runner. A pair of runners blow through the aid station together without stopping, all long strides. My watch says I’ve lingered here for too long.

  “Can’t. Gotta keep moving. I’m on the clock.” I kiss her cheek and set off. “Te amo.”

  “Te amo… You can do it!”

  It’ll be a couple hours until I see them again. When I’m far enough away from the aid station, I take out my phone.

  Tweet: “Going to be alone with my thoughts for a while…”

  • • •

  O-three-thirty-eight

  Calories burned: 18,231

  I’m staring at a slice of pizza lying in the sand between my feet. It’s perfect… The very cliché of what a slice of pizza should look like. I nudge it with my toe. The race director warned us of our minds playing tricks on us…hallucinations…not entirely convinced that it’s real, I take its picture and tweet it.

  Tweet: “Am I hallucinating or is God fucking with me?”

  The consensus from my followers say that it is in fact a pizza, and not a notorious ultra marathon hallucination. I pick it up, brush the sand off and take a bite as I return to the bike path. Heh…I think of Dean Karnazes and his stories of running while eating pizza.

  A headlamp approaches from behind me. This is a race after all, so I run as hard as I can to put distance between us. My heart rate spikes and lactic acid snakes through my legs, so I slow to a walk. When I turn around, the light is closer. I walk off the path and make for a lifeguard tower. Just down the shoreline from the tower, a flame licks at the rim of an unattended steel drum. The tower reaches up, silhouetted against the stars like a hand of a buried giant left behind during the Great Ascension. At the base of its stairs, a plastic top hat, upside down and half-full of seawater, with “Happy New Year!” and “2014!” printed on it. Inside of the hat, a bee suspended in water by surface tension churns its legs to right itself and reach a side, but only manages to spin in circles. I collapse onto the bottom step, waiting for the runner to pass me. The night is clear and smells of salt. I turn off my headlamp. As my eyes adjust, stars burst from the sky. I scoop up a handful of sand. Moonlight glints off of the crystals. When I tilt my hand, a constellation of microstars cascades between my
fingers.

  Amanda holds a solitaire diamond mounted in white gold. Light glints off half its facets in an explosion of colors. The other half, an Event Horizon—black, and sucking in all light from the bedroom. Amanda closes her fist around the ring.

  “In all this time I’ve never met a single relative of yours. No friends come over, ever. Do you have friends?

  “I share your bed every night for twelve years, but I don’t know you… What do you know about me? What am I to you besides a two-dimensional anecdote in conversations with other people? Tell me, Erik…what are my dreams?”

  “I can change. I love you.”

  “No. No, you can’t, and you don’t. You think you do, but you’re incapable of truly loving anyone.

  “You’ve fooled everyone into believing you’re such a sweet man, but you’re really a Rorschach inkblot. People see in you what they want to see. I deserve more than being used as a prop to make you seem normal. I love you, but the woman who marries you is doomed to be the second loneliest person in the world.”

  She opens her fist. The diamond has dug an impression into the flesh of her palm. She holds the ring up and, giving it a quarter turn, looks at it for the first time. Fire and ice. She gazes into the diamond and her thoughts take her to another time and place which I will never know.

  She says, “I can’t be alone again. You’re all I have… Our relationship is a Gordian Knot, but if I had sense I’d cut it and run.”

  Amanda hands the ring back to me. The metal is warm from absorbing her body heat.

  She says, “Get on your knees. Ask me again, properly. Give me that much at least.”

  I do. Then I tell her I love her, and I swear to her that I will never leave her. Never.

  I cough, and when I do my bladder releases. I pee myself, soaking my tights and shorts through. My dignity runs down my leg, and I weep. An offshore gust buffets the lifeguard tower. Because I’m sitting still, my body cools. Soon it feels like my rib cage is made of icicles surrounding my organs, radiating coldness and chilling my heart from within. My legs won’t obey my pleads to stand… It’s all I can do just to keep my eyes open. There’s a lulling sound as waves shussssh against the shoreline…

  The runner approaches. Instead of continuing straight, the runner veers off the path and toward me. I wipe my eyes dry with the heels of my palms. When he gets close, he turns his headlamp off. He is a she…no bib.

  She greets me with a “Hey,” the way only someone familiar with you would as she steps over the top hat and sits next to me on the bottom step without asking. If she saw the piss puddling in the sand between my feet, she doesn’t let on.

  “Hi,” I say.

  I steal a glimpse of her face… There is a familiarity, but…placing how I know her eludes me. Although the night is chill enough for my breath to mist the air, enough for me to wear a hoodie and tights, she’s in shorts and a T-shirt. Horizontal scars line up in ranks on the insides of her forearms…she’s a cutter. I look away.

  I say, “Are you the sweep?”

  “Yes.”

  In ultras, the sweep is a designated runner who pulls runners from course who fall behind the slowest pace possible to finish the race within its time limit. On top of this, your progress is tracked at each aid station, which may have its own designated maximum allowable time to pass through it corresponding with the overall race cutoff time. The reasoning is: Being chased by the cutoff times for thirty hours with no hope of finishing the race is cruel, so late in the race if your progress at each aid station along the way is not tracking within the finishing time limit, you get pulled early. Sometimes the distance between aid stations can be vast. That’s where the sweep comes in. The sweep is the physical embodiment of time, reaping straggling runners from the course between aid stations and culling the field as she goes. If the sweep catches you, you’re done.

  She says, “Don’t worry, I’m early. You have a bit of time. A bit.”

  I pop a handful of Vitamin “I” (Ibuprofen).

  “How many have you had?”

  “All of them.”

  “During the pre-race address, you were warned of what of what could happen to a runner’s body over the course of a hundred miles. You also were warned of the potential dangers of overdosing on Ibuprofen during an ultra.”

  “Yep.”

  “Rhabdomyolysis. Possibly even renal failure. All those toxins building up as you run that are no longer filtered by your kidneys. The toxins will begin to seep into your blood.”

  “Then what?”

  “Roll the credits.”

  The bee floats in the hat. It does not move.

  • • •

  The sweeps begins her story: There was a boy who saw bumblebees in his backyard garden. His mom gives him a jar with holes she punched into the lid with a screwdriver, and the boy catches a bee in a jar. Later, his mom puts some flower buds from the garden into the jar with the bee. He names the bee Bee. That night, the boy places Bee’s jar onto his nightstand and falls asleep watching Bee, a yellow and black puff of fuzz, crawl upon the flowers. Bee is his first pet.

  The next morning when his mom takes him to day camp in the city while she works, he takes Bee with him. He avoids the other kids whenever he can at day camp because they are always pushing him and taking things from him and laughing. He sits in a patch of grass. Bee will keep him company.

  “What’s up, little man?”

  Two older kids stand before him. The boy stands.

  “Hello.”

  “What’s in the jar?”

  “It’s my pet bee… His name is Bee.”

  “Gimmie the jar. Lemme see ’em.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not gonna do anything. I just wanna see ’em, that’s all.”

  “But—”

  The older kid snatches the jar from the boy. His hands cover most of the jar, so the boy can’t see Bee inside. “Hey, it’s got holes in the lid for air!”

  He tosses the jar to his friend, who makes a show of almost dropping it.

  “May I have my jar back, please?”

  Both of the older kids laugh. “Damn, you country boys sure talk funny.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The older kid with the jar turns the jar upside down, then rights it. The flowers tumble inside. The boy still can’t see Bee.

  “Please. You’re going to hurt Bee. Can I have him back, please?”

  “Why don’t I open the lid and let ’em go?”

  “No! Don’t!”

  The kids toss the jar back and forth like a football, until it ends up with the older kid who first snatched it from the boy.

  “We’re gonna play a game. I gonna shake this jar for a minute, then I’ll give it back.”

  “What’s a minute?”

  “This is a minute.”

  He clutches the jar with both hands in front of him and shakes.

  “No. Please, stop!”

  The boy reaches for the jar, but the second kid intercepts the boy’s stomach with a fist. The boy falls to the grass. He fights for air as the older boys laugh.

  From the ground, the boy watches a jet plane streak across the sky stretching a long cloud tail behind it. He touches each fingertip to his thumb on one hand, repeats the task on then the other hand. His lips move in silence as Bee’s jar shakes.

  The jar falls into view onto the grass in front of the boy’s face. Bored, the older kids have dropped it and walked away. Still laying on the grass, the boy reaches for the jar and unscrews the lid and lays it on its side. Bee staggers from his jar and collapses. The boy gives him a gentle nudge with his finger, but Bee doesn’t fly away. Bee doesn’t do anything anymore.

  One minute.

  You count to ten on your fingers, then you do it again six times. The instant the boy grasped the concept of time was the m
oment he understood death.

  That night, while his dad is drawing him a bath, he tells his dad what happened. Dad lifts the boy’s chin with a finger and looks into his son’s face. Then Dad slaps his son with enough force to send the boy’s head cracking off the tile behind him. The boy slides down into the cold porcelain to cover himself as Dad chases him around the tub with his fists.

  Dad says, “You let a white boy kick your ass, and you didn’t fight back? Get out of the tub. Put your hands up.”

  • • •

  It’s the end of another day at camp and the boy sits in the rec room with the other remaining children who wait for their parents to pick them up. Children play in groups, but the boy stays in a corner to himself. A boy his age walks over to him and tells him that a CIT, counselor-in-training, told them both to come over to her. He lets the other boy lead him across the room and toward the closet. None of the other children look up or are paying attention. A Camaro passing by the windows plays Hall & Oates “Sara Smile”; the verse, “It’s you and me foreveerrrr” stretched out as the car travels farther down the street. A woman, waiting inside the closet, pulls both boys in and shuts the door. The closet smells of Play-Doh.

  She says, “If either of you makes any noise, I’ll kill you.”

  The woman says, “Pull down his pants,” to the other boy. “Then pull yours down, too.”

  The boy is confused. The other boy, however, does what he’s told and does not seem to care.

  Then woman orders the other boy to touch himself and put his hands on him, too. The other child obeys, as if this wasn’t his first time.

  Voices pass by the other side of the door. He expects the door to burst open and Mom to pick him up. She doesn’t.

  “Hurry up.”

  He knows this isn’t right… He should say something… Yell. The door is right there! But the woman is very tall. Much taller than the older kids even, and her face looks mean.