There was an awkward pause, and some runners pushed to angle ahead of Liam and Zane.
“That’s right,” said Zane said, as if in answer to himself. “Anyone.”
After completely blocking out all the runners around him for the first three miles of the five-mile course, Liam brightened to see that he managed to maintain an exactly 5:40 pace. The clock read 17 minutes flat. There were 12 minutes left in this race if he allowed the tired feeling in his legs to slow him, and only 11 minutes if he swung his arms with more determination and forced his legs to pick up the pace. Through the canopy of trees by the Central Park Boathouse, Liam saw a yellow and black singlet and focused solely on bringing himself closer to this runner. As they edged up Cat Hill—the deceptively long rise on the east side where the black statue of a lioness pounces out from a rocky lookout—Liam confidently passed the runner, whom he had never seen before. Maintaining his concentration on what lay ahead, Liam accelerated through the peak of the hill so that his momentum carried him through the downhill that ran behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a burning pain edged up his torso, Liam glanced at the pavement and studied the white painted cutouts of bikers outlining the cyclist lane. He began counting the strides between the figures to take his mind off the pain and the awful thoughts of defeat that flickered through his mind, the creeping knowledge of how good it would feel to slow down, to stop.
The four-mile marker was right in front of him—22:29 blinked into 22:30 and Liam forced his body past the clock as it switched over to 22:31. His stomach clenched and he couldn’t control his breathing. He heard the wretched wails coming from him as he attempted to move his mind off the pain and onto something else. Anything else. By the reservoir, he could see not one but two blue and orange singlets about one hundred yards ahead. Liam bit the inside of his mouth to wake himself up; it had felt for a moment as though his mind had left his body and was watching over him haplessly. Snapping out of this daze, Liam could tell that he was gaining ground on the runners ahead of him. There was less than five minutes left in the race. Liam kept telling himself that. Even if his body staged a mutiny on him, he could surely churn out four and a half minutes more of solid running. A sign directly ahead announced that there were 800 meters to go. How many times had Liam run a half mile at the end of a long track practice and finished it faster than any of the intervals he had run while fresh? Countless. He lengthened his posture into sprinting form and passed the first Fast Tracker ahead of him. Liam did not turn his head toward Marvin; he wanted to remain strong and feared that Marvin might shake his confidence. A second sign noted that only 400 meters remained in the race, and Liam knew he could finish and that he would be crossing the line in under 28 minutes. The only question was whether he could pass Zane with just over one minute left.
Liam watched the orange star in the center of Zane’s singlet grow nearer and nearer. As they approached the 102nd Street transverse, Liam came shoulder-to-shoulder with Zane and out of nowhere Zane slipped into another gear and sprinted madly toward the finish line just yards ahead of them. Liam flew through the finish line and immediately crouched over along the side of the chute. Everything in his field of vision turned a whitish blue. Was he going to vomit? The uncontrollable gulp of his breathing felt deep enough to vacuum out his insides. He hoped that if he just dry heaved something would come out, and he would feel human again. Liam stood up and walked for a bit. He drank two cups of the orange Gatorade being dispensed by the baggage claim, but the sugar didn’t return him to his senses. Damp sweat beaded across his face and down his neck, and a chill ran along the length of his spine. Something was wrong.
“You need to eat something quick,” Zane said. He appeared from behind Liam and already had his backpack over his shoulder, looking eager to leave. “You’re a ghost. We need to get some color back into your face.”
Zane ripped open an orange and stuck two sections right into Liam’s mouth, as though he were a diabetic in need of an insulin boost. The tart flesh of the fruit shot through his mouth, and Liam licked his lips to remove the sticky remnants of the orange. Next Zane forced him to scarf down half a cinnamon raisin bagel. A feeling of equilibrium began to resurface but then a different drama rose up around them.
“Where have you guys been? I was looking for help out on the course and no one came. No one. He was just lying there, and I couldn’t get anyone to stop racing this fucking five-miler. Zombies. Fucking racing zombies.”
Matthew had become teary as he spoke, and it was still unclear what had him so upset. Woozy from race exhaustion, Liam tried to piece together what had happened but left Zane to ask the questions.
“Who was in trouble during the race, Matthew? Come on, you’ve got to spell this one out for us.” Zane spoke calmly and placed his hand in Matthew’s hand for reassurance. “We didn’t see what happened and we don’t have ESP. Just breathe in deep and start from the beginning.”
Through some fragments and asides and an occasional welling into tears, Matthew managed to cobble together a crime scene of sorts. As he was accelerating past the reservoir and imagining the finish line before him, Matthew noticed a body—a tangle of bones in a modified fetal position—over by the brush that lined the eastern edge of the park drive. He veered off course to examine what had happened, to see who was in distress. As soon as he saw the knobby knees and spindly thighs, he knew it was Riser who had been injured. He called out to the runners who flew past, looking nowhere but straight ahead and hearing nothing of his shouts for help. Even men in Fast Tracker singlets just cruised along on autopilot. Riser moaned plaintively but could not elaborate on what had happened to him, which only heightened Matthew’s anxiety.
“Eventually a race official heard me caterwaul like a sissy and came over. A medic took Riser to Cornell Hospital. He had the nerve to blame the collapse on Riser … said something about people needing to eat to survive. Fucking fat medic bastard. If he knew what he was talking about, he would have become a doctor instead of riding around in an ambulette.”
“So he’s alone at the hospital?” Zane shifted his bag on his shoulders to punctuate the accusation that Matthew had neglected his friendship duties.
“You’ve seen enough sad gay movies to know that they never let the friend or lover stick around for moral support. They thought it was just heat exhaustion and that some fluid replacement would do the trick, so I promised to stop by in two hours to check up on him.”
“And you think that’ll make him right as rain?” Zane’s eyes bulged with incredulity. “I know you guys are BFFs but wake up.”
“He’s fine. Everyone is just jealous because he looks like a model now and is faster than ever.”
“Matthew, I realize that you are worked up right now and very emotional,” Liam said, placing his hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “And maybe you are too close to this situation to see clearly, but Riser has not been well for some time. I know that I have tried to speak to him. We can’t make him well, but if we speak to him with a unified message, there’s a greater chance that one of us will get through to him.”
“Exactly, Matthew—these are cries for help!” Zane shook Matthew as he spoke. “Don’t mistake these clues, princess. Riser is in sad, sad shape.”
“Zane, go easy now,” Liam said, knowing the last thing Riser needed right now was for his friends to be fighting over this.
“Riser was right about the whole lot of you,” Matthew said in a flat tone. “Nothing but a bunch of mean, little bitches.”
After Matthew stormed off, Marvin jogged over to congratulate Liam on beating him in the race. After having dreamt about this accomplishment for months, Liam had almost forgotten about it in a matter of minutes. The personal challenge seemed so silly and unimportant given the situation that Riser now faced. Liam still had a strong belief that Riser would snap out of the anorexia that now had so firm a grip on him. While he knew that any literature on the subject would say the exact opposite, Liam felt that his friend had just pushed himsel
f to an extreme and would now see that he needed to reexamine his life and return to center.
Liam reflected for a moment on the pushing of limits. In sports, being able to tear down any semblance of a limitation or barrier to performance led to excellence, achievement, and recognition. He himself had pressed against the inner walls of self-doubt to make a breakthrough at the race today. People need to dig deep and face their inner demons to grow. But it was such a fine line not to go too far and overdo it. Liam always hoped that he might learn from the pain and teach himself how to move within those awful sensations that came late in a race, but the truth was that as soon as he crossed the finish line, he could scarcely recall the struggle. He imagined that the forgetting was part of self-preservation. No one would ever run a race twice if they had even partial remembrance of the agony that came at the end. Liam guessed that the same amnesia afforded women the ability to have second and third babies. Riser had pushed himself to the brink for beauty and speed and the aesthetic trappings of young gay life in New York City—and that long, hard journey landed him in a hospital bed somewhere across town. Maybe he had learned nothing from the struggle. It was impossible for an outsider to guess. Liam felt empty inside.
Marvin was surprisingly gracious in his praise of Liam. While countless other racers would have made excuses for why they had not run their best that day (it was the racer’s prerogative, after all, to manufacture reasons, even before beginning a race, as to how illness, lack of sleep, or bad preparation would excuse a poor showing), Marvin spoke only of Liam’s success. Marvin commended Liam on his smarter racing and on “looking more like a runner.” Liam thought to ask Marvin what it meant to look more like a runner but realized that Marvin was referring to the seven pounds he had shed since training more seriously. The intense focus on weight today had already depressed Liam more than he could express, and he now wanted to shift gears.
Enough time had elapsed that the race results had been posted by the baggage check. Though Zane had been ready to leave for the last half hour, he could not help but corral every Fast Tracker within earshot to come and see how the team fared. It took a few minutes of mental calculation for Zane, Liam, and a few other team members to collectively realize that the Urban Bobcats had eked out a depressingly narrow victory over the Fast Trackers that day. Zane slapped his arms hard against his sides and stomped back and forth in protest.
“You know what I am going to say. Liam, you know I can’t hold my tongue. No, not today. Not after we all worked so hard and gave it our all. I may ask you for forgiveness later, but right now I’ve got to say that if that closeted little trick of yours had run for us and not for them, we would have had this in the bag. Nolo contendere.”
It was too much to hear, too much emotion to follow all that had come before it. Liam shut down and drifted off inside himself.
“C’mon, you’re giving that asshole the time of his life—no strings attached! The least he could do is run for us. Every gay runner in this city should be running for us. It isn’t right.”
“Just let it be, Zane.” Gary gently put a hand on both Liam’s and Zane’s shoulders as he spoke. “People come to this club in their own time and in their own way. You can’t force it. This competition with the Bobcats has brought the best out in all of us so far. We had at least a dozen PRs out on the course today. That’s something to be proud of. Bet that didn’t happen over there at Bobcat central.”
Even after all that had happened to him in the past weeks—or maybe because of those trials—Gary was able to mend fences with a few sentences of life wisdom. Zane looked briefly into Liam’s eyes as though searching for some sentiment but then turned away in embarrassment. Liam reached out to grab his friend’s hand just as the skies opened up into a summer rainstorm.
MILE 22
“She was running the race with an iced coffee in her hands. I am telling you the God’s honest truth … I mean, could I make that up?”
Liam embellished a few of the details. It seemed like the right thing to do given the circumstances. Bertha Kurtzel had been seen sipping an iced coffee at the four-mile mark of the Club Team Championships, but no one knew for sure whether she had been handed the beverage by a spectator or had been carting it around the entire race. Either way, it seemed like a minor setback for competitive running in the club. And Liam knew that Riser of all people would find the tale amusing. Slumped in the hospital bed, Riser looked more like a concentration camp victim than a twenty-six-year-old athlete. His skin was sallow and his eyes, deep and haunting. Every once in a while, perhaps out of sympathy for Liam’s earnest effort, Riser would eke out a look of amusement and the misery in his hollow face would shift into a wan smile or the outline of a laugh.
“Even in mid-August that Bertha had a flannel shirt wrapped around her waist. I guess to cover her fat ass.” Liam had to keep talking to deal with the stress of seeing Riser in this state. “More power to her, really. I don’t think I’d bother to spend a full hour of my day running a five-miler. Someone should credit the slower runners; they are the ones who have to stay on the battlefield while we’re back at the diner wolfing down the lumberjack special.”
Unable to stop his rambling, Liam delved further into detail about the other heftier runners on the team and their slovenly habits. He knew going into the visit that his level of discomfiture would be high (he never had been good in hospitals) and had begged Gary to accompany him for that reason alone. But Gary would hear nothing of it. In his book, Matthew and Riser had become prima donnas and behavior like theirs was not to be rewarded. “Yes, you’re the only queen bee,” Liam had retorted during their heated phone conversation. Gary had voiced many strong opinions during Riser’s bodily transformation. The idea of willful starvation deeply insulted him. Having seen the way disease steals the body of itself, Gary called anorexia an affliction of pampered affluence. He had reduced Riser to a sad cliché.
Liam could feel nothing but sorrow for the lost soul lying beside him. The harsh afternoon sunlight streaked the blue veins in Riser’s neck and the deep gully of his collarbone. Liam searched unsuccessfully for something reassuring to say to his friend. All Riser could talk about was how stupid the doctors were. They claimed that his bones weren’t strong enough to run, which he noted was clearly misguided given his string of PRs in recent months. Riser waited for a response, eagerly canvassing Liam for some sign of agreement. Hoping to offer his friend some perspective, Liam laughed and said that it had been a long summer of racing for Fast Trackers and that the whole team was taking a couple of weeks off. A lie, of course, but Liam wanted to help Riser slay the demons of his type A personality.
Months ago, the doctors had shown Riser the striations and cracks in his bones on an MRI. Through unflinching will and determination, he had pushed past the shin pain and continued to train and race, but at some point the body demands its due. He now had no choice but to rest. Riser nodded as the doctor explained the situation, but Liam could see his friend’s eyes glaze over as the man spoke to them. The first thing that Riser said after the doctor left his room was that the physician, who was handsome in an avuncular way, should drop twenty pounds before telling other people what to do with their lives.
Random Fast Trackers had been talking behind Riser’s back for what had felt like an eternity, offering a selection of theories as to whether he was healthy or unhealthy, sane or insane, going to live or destined to die. Watching him in the hospital bed now, helpless like a child, Liam began to resent the jeering onlookers who had turned Riser’s illness into sport. Could Riser die? A human could only make it for a few days without water. Longer without food, clearly. But what was the threshold? In many religions, starvation was a rite of passage or a cleansing ritual. Maybe Riser had ascended to a higher plane of being that none of his friends could yet understand. Life offered many a yin-yang tension—abundance and scarcity, satisfaction and yearning, completion and emptiness. The dualities swirled in Liam’s head when he was suddenly ambushed from behi
nd.
Sets of hands grabbed at Liam’s rib cage, fingers fiddling under his armpits. He caved into a helpless ball of laughter, writhing on the cold hospital floor. As he wiped the tears from his eyes, Liam saw Gary and Matthew standing above him. Given his relief at their presence, Liam sloughed off his embarrassment and hoped that Riser had been entertained by their folly. In truth, Liam suspected that Gary might be the only person who could wake Riser up and help him reclaim his life. For a Fast Tracker, not having Gary on your side was like being abandoned by your father. No matter how many times you told yourself that you didn’t care, that the old man was a loser, you never really shook yourself of him. A Fast Tracker—at least a male Fast Tracker—needed Gary’s acceptance to be whole. It was just one of those annoying yet unassailable truths. Gary knew it better than anyone and deftly used it to his advantage within the club, maintaining what some of the bitchier women and bitter old men called his “entourage” of cute, fast boys.
“Why do they always make hospital rooms so dreadful?” Gary circled around Riser’s bed and drew open the blinds, exposing the dirty brick of the neighboring building. “A pretty pastel yellow or subtle pink paint could be purchased at Janovic Plaza for the same price as this penitentiary white. The chalkiness makes me think of Imodium A-D.”
“Gary, I love that you still carry that Fifth Avenue haughtiness even though you’re now a dirty Chelsea boy like every other queer in Manhattan!” Riser lifted himself out of the bed to pat Gary on the back. “I hope to be just like you in thirty years.”
“Bitch, I came up here just to throw sunshine up your sorry ass.” Gary spoke with feigned indignation. “And FYI, if you lose any more weight, you’re going to look fifty-five years old. Emaciation has a way of aging you. The pounds drop off and the years pile on … ”
The Miles Page 20
