There was no question that I had been a disappointment to him. I had disappointed my father in ways great and small. If I had been one thing to him, over the arc of each day and over the arc of my wasted life, I had been a disappointment. I saw only one way to undo that.
Dad loved my running. His running years were behind him—he’d already had a knee replaced—but he loved hearing about my running, loved talking about running, and wanted a detailed report after each new race. In the same way that seeking revenge on my father had hurt us both, running was a way for us to both root for me. Each new accomplishment of mine felt like a joint victory.
I hit the dusty cobblestones that morning with new fire. I banged out ten miles before Albert crawled out of bed. After his breakfast, my lunch, I went out and ran another six.
I ratcheted up my weekly mileage, pushing the length and pace of my runs. I had never trained this diligently or consistently. Had I ever applied myself to anything with this much focus? From the time I awoke until I fell asleep, I had one thing on my mind: fifty miles.
CHAPTER 11
Darkest Night
My whole life, I’d been a lightning rod for trouble. But when I got back from Mexico, good things sought me out with the same urgency trouble had.
I was driving home from Costco with a carload of groceries in January 2011 when my phone chimed. At a red light, I fished it out of my pocket and clicked it on to check the email that had come in.
When the stoplight turned green, I was still staring at my phone, reading and rereading the short email, dumbfounded. The car behind me honked. I looked up, pulled through the intersection, then pulled over to read the email one more time.
hi mishka, is that you? if it is you call me, if it not you i’m sorry wrong person heheheh or call me talk to u latter bye
Chuong.
He had left a New Mexico number. I called it instantly, without thinking. The phone rang several times, and then someone picked up.
“Hello?”
The voice was distant and muffled. It could have been anyone. What was I supposed to say? If it was him, he wouldn’t recognize my voice right away.
“Chuong?” I said.
“Brother,” he said.
Chuong had been in Albuquerque this entire time. How many times had I been through there on tour? Five? Six? After the first time, I hadn’t even tried to look him up in the phone book. Had I given up hope of finding him? Or was it because I was wasted and hungover and depressed and had no idea how to deal with finding him? No matter. He had found me.
Chuong’s English hadn’t improved dramatically in the twenty years since I’d seen him, and his voice was indistinct. He ran his own landscaping business. He had a wife and a sixteen-year-old son. “How is Mom?” he asked, then “How is Dad?” He sounded stunned when I told him that our family had flown apart. How could he not know of the biggest thing in my life? But he had been gone such an incredibly long time.
He was sorry for running away, he had missed me, he had missed all of us. He had tried again and again over the years to find us, hundreds of calls to information, but it had been hopeless. He couldn’t wait to see me again, for me to meet his wife, meet his son.
I told him I was broke, but I promised that I’d find some way to come and visit him. That would be great, he said; we would drink lots of Heinekens, lots and lots. Hoo boy.
When we were saying good-bye, he said, “Tell Mom that I am okay and have a son.” He had always loved her, and she had always loved him. Then he said, “Please tell you dad I say I’m sorry.” He sounded sad. It was sinking in now, the divorce and all the sadness and pain that had followed. In his mind, we had been one big happy family this entire time.
One night in mid-March, I drove out to rural New Jersey for Ultrafest, an ultrarunning event with races of fifty kilometers, fifty miles, and a hundred miles run on the same loop course. When I got to the event home base—an open field behind a small church—Johnny Rocket grabbed me before I could set up my tent, the same tent my mother had given me when I was seventeen for Simon’s Rock graduation.
“We got a tent all set up for you, man. Don’t worry. Yo, Christine, I’m putting Mishka in your tent, okay?”
Christine Reynolds laughed her great throaty, honeyed laugh somewhere off in the dark. Sure, that tent was just set up as her changing station for when she ran the hundred-miler the next day, so I was welcome to it now. I quickly loaded my gear in, unrolled my sleeping bag, and lay down. It was windy, and the tent rustled and flapped loudly, but I forbade myself from changing positions for fear of tossing and turning all night.
The hundred-mile race started at 4 a.m., so all my buddies rattled my tent and heckled me as they ran past. Had I slept at all? I felt like I’d just hallucinated all night long. I willed myself to take more sleep, but my heart was already hammering. I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag and began getting dressed. No way could I run fifty miles today. I felt ill prepared to run five.
When I stepped outside, the night was pure black, as dark as it had been when I’d pulled in. My stomach felt like a plastic grocery bag full of live eels. It was hopeless. I would fall apart. I would fail.
The darkness was still untainted when we clustered at the starting line, each runner just a voice behind a blinding headlamp, familiar or unfamiliar. Too cold. Too early. Too lonely. Rick McNulty, who ran the New Jersey Trail Series, gave us his usual spiel: The course was well marked but pay attention. Use the port-o-potties provided, as this was a bridle path through a residential neighborhood. Don’t litter. Stay warm. Have fun. And . . . go.
We ran through the wet grass up a sloping incline into some trees. I could see my feet and the ground immediately in front of me, maybe the back of the next runner, and that was it. As we ran, the pack dispersed. Lonely as it had been at the start, it got lonelier.
The morning grayed as the sun began to approach the horizon. The air filled with mist. I saw figures weaving through the trees toward us. They looked like aliens. Then, one after another, they called out to me.
Zsuzsanna. Christine. Johnny Rocket. Luis. All running the hundred-miler. They high-fived me, they hugged me, they slapped my ass. No way I could run the fifty miles, but I couldn’t drop yet. Wait till the sun comes all the way up, see what the course looks like, see how my knee holds up.
I fell into step with a stranger, and we talked for a while. We shed layers as the sun climbed in the sky. I stopped to stretch my IT band at an aid station, and the other guy left me behind. I struck out alone. The scenery . . . there was none. It was banal, nowheresville New Jersey, brown and gray, post-snow and pre-green. My exposed skin was too cold, my torso too hot, my legs leaden and half-asleep. But I got a boost each time I encountered a running buddy I’d made over the last year. Christine gave me a huge smile and a thumbs-up. Luis slapped me five and danced by, jamming out to his iPod. Zsuzsanna hugged me without breaking stride. I got a quick sniff of her conditioner before she was bounding away down the bridle path. The miles ticked by.
Every race, someone commented that I was too big to run. They’d said the same thing to my dad. It didn’t matter. We ran. My feet hurt, often for days after a race. Had his feet hurt like that?
Thirteen miles down now. The ascent of Pike’s Peak was thirteen miles. My father had run it twice. Yeah, but that was thirteen miles at high altitude, thirteen miles with more than a mile of vertical gain. Thirteen flat miles in New Jersey was nothing.
My mother had never been a runner, or at least I had never seen her run. She had always been an avid hiker, so I had asked her once, as a little kid, why she didn’t run like Dad. She explained to me that I had been such a big baby that giving birth to me had damaged her bladder. If she tried to run now, well, she leaked a little bit. That was my mom, answering honestly every question her kids asked, even if what she told them blew their fucking minds. And that was me, a ruiner before I even left the womb.
A marathon down. Had Tatyana ever run a marathon? I couldn’t
remember. She’d run something—a marathon or half marathon—but that was before I could differentiate between the two. Back then, 13.1 and 26.2 had both extended well into the realm of impossible numbers.
The farthest my father had ever raced had been 26.2 miles. Less than a mile from the finish of the Russian River Marathon in California, he’d blacked out cold and come to with road rash on his face and a medic standing over him, but he’d finished a marathon in Colorado. I still remembered the long-sleeve T-shirt from one of Dad’s races, designed to look like hands pulling a button-down shirt open to reveal the race name underneath it, like Superman revealing the emblematic S under his shirt, as though finishing that race had made you a superhero. That was my dad.
Thirty-four miles. The furthest I’d ever run. Dad had run thirty miles one time, maybe thirty plus. He couldn’t recall exactly how many, but every time we talked about that run, it got longer, stretching to thirty-two miles then thirty-four then thirty-six. That was my dad, always retreating into the distance.
Running a fifty-miler in under twelve hours qualified you to apply for a hundred-mile race. I’d soaked up that information somewhere and stored it in a dark corner of my mind, shielded from hope. If I kept this pace up, I would beat twelve hours. I would beat eleven hours. Shit, I would beat ten hours.
Thirty-seven miles. Further than I’d ever run. Further than he’d ever run. No questioning it. Each step was a new personal best. The sun was all the way up now, had been for a while. It made the water in the creek sparkle. Then the snow sparkled. Then little rocks in the bridle path sparkled. Then the whole path was sparkling and breathing and moving, like I was running on the back of some great jeweled serpent.
I had heard someone say that 90 percent of running an ultra-marathon is mental, and the other 10 percent is mental. Old joke. Big laugh. It had just scared me. My brain was always trying to eat me alive. As a kid, terrified of the dark, I had insisted my parents tie my closet door shut. But then the monsters were under the bed. “If you don’t believe in them, they don’t exist,” my mother had said, her final word before she stalked out, exasperated with me. Great, so what you’re saying, Mom, is that if I believe in them, they do exist. I’d learned to fall asleep fully covered with blankets, drenched with sweat, sucking air in through just the tiniest gap. Well, I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had thirteen more miles to run so, Brain, if you don’t have anything positive to contribute, shut the fuck up.
Everything was breathing and moving and sparkling, the sky not just a faraway thing or a tinted absence but an enormous sky-blue air mattress, inflating and deflating, its surface a rough but soft texture, like velvet. I had never been more alert.
A mental game, then. How much could I remember from my life, from my first memory till now? No, stupid idea; that would be torture, sick as I was of sorting through my life. My dad’s life, then; how much could I recall? I waded back through his life, before us, before Mom, before college, before high school, before school . . . What was the earliest thing I knew about him, as a child, a boy, a baby?
When it came to me, my right leg buckled. My body canted to the right. I kicked the back of my right leg with my left foot and almost sprawled into the dirt. Adrenaline hit me instantly. Seconds earlier, I had thought I couldn’t be more alert. Now I almost had X-ray vision, my heartbeat a drumroll.
A decade earlier, during my kamikaze yearlong tour, I had stopped off at my father’s house en route to a show—LA, maybe. He had been traveling for work, so he left me the key. It was an opportunity to get a good night’s sleep in a clean bed, wake early, take a shower, then leave feeling rested and recharged, with plenty of time to make the drive.
My father’s house was full of wine. I opened a bottle as soon as I walked in, one of the big ones, a cheap one he wouldn’t miss. I took it in the shower with me and sucked on the bottle thirstily, the cool wine so luxurious in the steaming shower. I dried off. Friends in San Francisco had given me some pills, so I ate them and went to my father’s computer. Nobody home—I could get as loose as I liked and jerk myself into oblivion.
One hour? Several hours? I tried to make it last as long as I could.
Hands shaking, I cleared the Internet history, then closed the browser. I took a long, parched pull from the wine, killing it, then put the empty bottle on the desk and glanced at the computer. There, on the desktop, was a file labeled “Annulment.”
It would be wrong to read it. It wasn’t intended for me. My father had read a letter I’d accidentally left on the printer when I was sixteen, and that had been incredibly violating. I wanted so badly to read it. But I had to be better than him. I could not allow myself to do it.
I put both hands on the desk and pushed the rolling chair back, away from the computer. I let my head fall back. Whoah, I was fucked up. My head lolled to the left.
One filing cabinet drawer was slightly open. One folder peeked out. I had to close one eye to read the label. “Annulment.” It could not have been any clearer—I was meant to read it.
I worked my way through the thin, stapled document, concentrating hard to keep my eyes from crossing. It was shit I’d already read in the email he’d sent me, supposedly explaining why their marriage was invalid. I chafed at his insincerity, his fake humility, how he sounded so blameless and put-upon. Some mean-spirited stuff about Mom, about them smoking pot together once, but none of the earth-shattering revelations I had hoped for.
I’d had a rough time of it with women. Even if it was mostly my fault, it had left me bitter. But the way Dad talked about Mom suggested a rancor deeper than anything I’d felt. Even after he had bailed on her, had bailed on all of us, had successfully made his escape, to still hate her like she had been his jailer . . . it scared me, and it made me incredibly sad.
It had been a mistake to read the annulment, in part because it was the wrong thing to do, but mostly because it was a waste of time. Our family and the tragedy of our family were unexceptional, mundane, almost impossibly so. Christ, had my father just wanted a younger wife and a convertible sports car? Could he be that shallow, that mercenary? There was nothing in his writing to justify the great tearing apart, no explanation. Then I found it.
My father had been molested by his mother until he was fourteen.
That was the memory, suddenly issuing forth in the middle of the sunlit bridle path, that had buckled my knee. The earliest thing I knew about my father’s life was that he had been horribly, horribly betrayed. I hadn’t known what to do with the information, had secreted it away in a corner of my brain I never used, concealed it from myself. I’d been searching and searching for a key to understand how my father could abandon us. I couldn’t find that key because I’d been carrying it, hidden, in my head for almost ten years.
It explained everything. My father, the most powerful man in my world, a helpless child, stripped of all power, used by the very one charged with his protection. What had it done to him? The sound of my feet in the dirt was suddenly thunderous, my breathing like an approaching hurricane. It was all there. The relentless compulsion to please. The avoidance of confrontation. The unerring conviction that he was both special and persecuted. The poisonous guilt he carried. His emotional alienation. His vacillation between arrogance and self-loathing. His debilitating resentment. All things I’d intuitively learned from him.
We weren’t just from different generations or different experiences. We were from different worlds. Turning his back on us was an appalling thing. There was no justification for it. But here, finally, was an explanation. A way to understand it. And, maybe, a way to finally forgive him.
I crossed the finish line at a dead sprint. The muscles in my legs twitched and protested when I tried to brake. I circled and slowed. Ah, fuck it. I flopped down on the cold, wet grass.
“Heartbreaker,” Rick called out to me. “You came so close to breaking nine hours!” He looked down at his laptop for the exact time.
“Nine hours and twenty seconds. Not too bad. Faster ba
throom breaks next time.”
I lay flat on my back, sucking air too hard to even laugh. Rick had no idea who I really was. Or at least who I had been. For Rick, it was twenty seconds too slow. It was also two hours, fifty-nine minutes, and forty seconds faster than I had dared to hope to run it. This was an accomplishment not even I could diminish. There was no denying it. I was one of those top-tier wackjobs. I was an ultrarunner.
Once I caught my breath, I wobbled into the church we were using as our home base. I dug my phone out of my bag and made a call to my old nemesis.
“Well, you can’t be finished yet,” my dad said when he picked up.
“Dad. I did it.”
“Congratulations, my son!”
“Nine hours and twenty seconds.”
“Wow. That is fast! Jesus, that’s like two 4:30 marathons back-to-back. Mishka, that’s really incredible.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I am so proud of you, Mishka. All the changes you’ve made, and now this . . .”
“Thanks, Dad.”
He hesitated.
“You know, Mishka . . .” and his voice softened, “it’s not a competition.”
He was right. The competition was over. We had both lost: lost years and years of our relationship. If there was a competition now, we were competing together—against time, against circumstances, against distance, against the burden of our convoluted history, against the ineffable distance between fathers and sons—to try to love one another.
“I know it’s not a competition, Dad.”
I could hear him smiling through the phone before he spoke.
“But I never ran fifty miles.”
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 27
