The Journey Prize Stories 21

by Various

  “Come on,” he said, “you’re kidding me.”

  He reached over without breaking stride and gave me a little shot in the arm like he was trying to wake me up and bring me back to the real world.

  “Give your head a shake,” he said. “Think about next year. You’ll heal up and be back good as new.”

  We turned the corner and I could see the stadium coming back to us, getting bigger all the time. The stiffness was gone from my legs and I was rolling now, back to my old self, purring along. I felt fine, better than I had in months. The taper was giving something back to me too. But I was sure about this.

  “Sorry, buddy,” I kidded him. “You’re going to have to find somebody else to kick down in the last hundred.”

  “Stop it,” Burner said. He was looking at me hard. His lips pressed together and his mouth made a tight straight line across the middle of his face.

  “Seriously. Stop it. You can’t quit now. You and I do this together. That’s our deal.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not.” I thought he already knew about this part of it. “We have never done this together. It’s one of those things that can’t be done together. In the end we have to be by ourselves.”

  I didn’t want it to sound as bad as it did.

  “Think about it,” I was smiling now, trying to show him that everything would be fine. “Think about it. When you come around that turn today, you’ll be alone, and when you head down the stretch by yourself you are going to surprise a lot of people.”

  “Fuck you, Mikey,” he said. “I don’t need a cheerleader.”

  His face was a little flushed and he turned on me quickly.

  “You’re just covering your own ass. In about twenty minutes, I’m going to rip you apart and you can’t stand it. You can’t stand to lose to me and now you’re making excuses. Fuck you and your retirement party.”

  I wanted to laugh it off and make it slide away, but before I could even get to him, before I could say anything, he took off. Burner put his head down and shifted gears. In ten seconds, he had pulled away and opened up a gap that couldn’t be closed. I had to save everything I had left and I couldn’t go chasing after him so I let him go. It was just jitters, just nerves. That’s what I told myself. After it was over, everything would be fine again.

  When we got back to the field we split for good. He grabbed his spikes and his bag and went under the bleachers by himself. The last fifteen minutes are the most important. You want everything to feel easy. I put him out of my mind and lay on my back for a while, feeling the air coming in and going out of my body. I pulled my knees up close to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I held it all in like that for about fifteen seconds before letting everything go as slowly as possible. I rolled over on my stomach and did a few easy push-ups, and when I got back on my feet, I put my hands flat against the wall and tried to get my calves and my goddamn Achilles to go out as far as they could. I didn’t want to push it because you can only take as much as your body can give you on the day. I took off my socks and put on the ugly fluorescent spikes I’d been wearing all season. They were another Adidas freebie and I was expected to wear them, but I didn’t like them much. It had taken months to break them in, and the red blood stains were still there around the toe and heel from all the broken blisters I had to go through before my feet finally hardened up in the right places.

  When the announcer’s voice called us out, I took off my sweats and did a couple of short sprints down the back stretch, trying to keep it all quick and smooth and under control. All the rest of the guys were there too, and we did our usual nervous hellos and our cautious smiles as we passed one another. When they called us to the line, I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he’d know I was there.

  “Have a good one, buddy, you little psycho,” I said, and I smiled at him. The officials made us stand there, side by side, each of us in our pre-selected spot along the curved white start line while the announcer read out our names and listed all our best times and our biggest wins. He said this was shaping up to be one of the best 1500 metre finals of the last decade. When the voice got to my name, he said I had the fastest personal best in this group and he named all the different times I’d made the national team. He said Burner was always dangerous and that he had put together a great season and was rounding into top form at the right time. Then the rest of them each got their turns and their compliments, Marcotte and Graham and Bourque and the others.

  Burner stood still through all of this and didn’t even acknowledge his own name. Instead, he closed his eyes and made this big production out of rolling his head all the way around in a big circle. He went very slowly – first down, with his chin touching his chest, and then way over to the side and then straight up and back again. I could hear the bones in his neck crackling as he made the loop. He kept his mouth wide open, and when he looked up it seemed almost like he was waiting to catch a snowflake or a raindrop on his tongue. They called us to our marks and we crouched down, bending our knees just a bit and holding our arms away from our bodies. When they fired the gun, you could see the smoke before you heard the bang.

  The announcer’s voice took over after that and he described everything that happened to us. We were bunched up around the first turn so I made a little move and went into second place, just trying to stay out of trouble. Even as it was happening, the voice said, “There goes Michael Campbell, moving into second place, staying out of trouble.” It was like being inside and outside of yourself at the same time. I kept bumping back and forth with Marcotte and Bourque, trying to settle myself down and find a clear place on the outside of lane one. All the time the big voice kept going, describing how we looked and calling out the splits and telling the crowd what kind of pace we were on and our projected finishing times. I couldn’t see Burner, but I knew he was close by because I heard the voice say something like “Jamie Burns is safely tucked in at fifth or sixth place.” I remember this only because the announcer used Burner’s real name and it sounded so strange to me.

  The pace was fine, not too fast, not too slow, and after a lap and a half there were still lots of people close enough to the lead and feeling good. The problem with feeling good in a 1500 is that you know it can’t last and that eventually, sometime in the next ninety seconds, everything you have left has got to come draining out of you, either in a great explosive rush at the end or some painful slow trickle. The kickers would’ve been happy to let it go slow and leave it all to some blazing last one-fifty, but the rest of us didn’t want that to happen. As we went through 800, most of the serious guys were looking around, waiting and watching to see who would make the first move. After about thirty seconds, Dawson decided it would have to be him. He threw in this big surge coming off the turn and broke the whole thing open, dividing the race up between those who could go with him and those who could not.

  The voice said, “Eric Dawson is heading for home early.”

  Graham and Bourque and I hooked up a couple steps back and it felt like we were breaking free of the others. I never turn around when I race and everybody knows it’s not a good idea to look back, but I was sure Burner must have been close by. Even then it was clear that Dawson didn’t have a chance. He’d given it a pretty fierce try and the rest of us probably owed him something for being brave enough to go, but he didn’t have enough left and I could see he was starting to break down.

  People in the crowd always wonder why the guy with the lead heading into the last lap almost never wins. They wonder why he can’t hold on and why he can’t look as good as he did just a minute earlier when he came flying by. Some people believe that myth about Roger Bannister and John Landy back when they ran the Miracle Mile in Vancouver in 1954. That was probably the only time in history when the whole world actually cared about two guys who could run a mile in under four minutes. Bannister was the first to do it, everybody knows that, but by the time they met in Vancouver, Landy had gone even faster.
He was the new world record holder and most people were betting on him to win. You can look it up if you want. The Miracle Mile was pure craziness, like the Tyson/ Holyfield of its time. Every country sent their reporters to cover the story and more than a hundred million people listened to the call on the radio. It was the first time CBC Television ever broadcasted live from the west coast. If you go to Vancouver today, the famous statue is still there, the one where Landy is looking over his left shoulder as Bannister comes by him on the right. The press and people who don’t know anything always say that if Landy had looked the other way – if only he’d looked to the right – he would have seen Bannister coming and he never would have let him go by. They call it the phantom pass, as if Landy was just a victim of bad luck and bad timing. As if Bannister was like some ghost, slipping past unseen.

  That’s the story they tell, but it’s not true. If you ever watch a tape of that race you’ll see that poor Landy is dead before he even starts the last lap. It’s one of those things you recognize if you’ve been through it yourself. When a guy is done, he’s just done and no amount of fighting can save him. The exercise physiology people will explain that it’s all about lactic acid fermentation and how when you push beyond your limit your legs run out of oxygen and the tissue starts to fill up with this burning liquid waste. We called it “rigging,” short for rigor mortis. When your body started to constrict, to tighten up involuntarily, first in your arms and your calves and then your quads and your hamstrings and your brain – when parts of you gave out like that, dying right underneath you at exactly the moment you needed something more – we called that rigging. At the end of a mile, everybody is rigging, everybody is dying, just at different speeds. Dawson was dying in front of us that day and we could see it in every broken down step he took. Just like Landy was dying in front of Bannister fifty years before and he knew it too. Look back at the grainy black and white video of the Miracle Mile. You’ll see it. Landy wasn’t taken by surprise. He knew exactly where Bannister was coming from – he just couldn’t do anything to stop it. For that whole last lap Bannister is right behind, tall and gangly and awkward and just waiting, deciding when to go. When Landy looked to his left – in that moment they made into a statue – he wasn’t trying to hold on for the win. That possibility was gone and he knew it. No, Landy was looking out for the next guy; he was trying to hold on to second and not to fall even farther back. People forget that Richard Ferguson, a Canadian, finished third in the Miracle Mile. He’s the important missing character, the one who didn’t make it into the statue. Ferguson was the threat coming up from behind; he was the guy Landy feared. It’s always like that. The most interesting stories in most races don’t have anything to do with winning.

  Dawson was almost shaking when we came by him. The last lap was going to be a death march for him. Graham and Bourque and I went past in a single step and there was nothing left in Dawson to go with us.

  The voice said, “Graham, Bourque, Campbell. It will be decided by these three.”

  I couldn’t believe I was still in it and feeling OK. Graham looked like he was getting ready to drop the hammer and put an end to this, but as we headed down the final back stretch Bourque seemed a little wobbly, and for about five seconds I thought I had a real shot at bringing him down and getting myself in there for second and a spot on the team. I was just about to release my own kick, trying to gauge how much I had left and deciding how I could fit it into that last 250 metres. I got up on my toes and I was getting ready to charge when I felt this hand reach out and touch the middle of my back, kind of gently, just a tap so I’d know he was there. I looked to my right and Burner came roaring by with his tongue hanging out and that enraged look in his eyes.

  The voice said, “Look at that. Burns is making a very strong move.”

  I understand that sometimes people get their priorities mixed up. And I know that when you give yourself over completely to just one thing, you can lose perspective on the rest of the world. That’s a feeling I know. I think it’s what happens to those old ladies who donate their life savings to corrupt televangelists or to those pilgrims in the Philippines who compete for the honour of being nailed, actually hammered, to a cross for their Easter celebrations. We have to scrounge for meaning wherever we can find it and there’s no way to separate our faith from our desperation. You see it everywhere. Football hooligans, scholars of Renaissance poetry, fans of heavy metal music, car buffs, sexual perverts, collectors of all kinds, extreme bungee jumpers, lonely physicists, long distance runners, and tightly wound suburban housewives who want to make sure they entertain in just the right way. All of us. We can only value what we yearn for and it really does not matter what others think.

  This is why I cannot expect you to understand that when Jamie Burns came past me and started up that now infamous kick which won him the national title in the 1500 metres – his wild, chased-by-the-train sprint that carried him around me, past Bourque and all the way up to Graham – I cannot expect you to understand that when this happened, I was caught up, caught up for the first and only time in my life, in one of those pure ecstatic surges that I believed only religious people ever experienced. Even as it unfolded in front of me and I watched Graham hopelessly trying to hold him off, I knew I had never wanted anything more than this, just to see Burner come up even and then edge his way forward in those last few steps and come sailing across the line with both his hands in the air. I did not care that this was such a small thing or that it could be shared with so few. I knew only that this event, this little victory mattered to me in some serious way that was probably impossible to communicate. I didn’t pray for it to happen, because there would be nobody to receive a prayer like that. But I did wish for it and even the wish told me something I had never known about myself before. We are what we want most and there are no miracles without desire. That’s why a mom can lift a car off her child after the accident and a guy can survive a plane crash and live in the woods for a week drinking only the sweat wrung from his socks. That’s how Burner won that race, by miraculous desperation.

  If you are not the person who wins, then the finish line of a 1500 can be a crowded place. There are bodies collapsing and legs giving out and people wandering around with dazed and exhausted looks on their faces. Burner’s kick caught everybody by surprise. Even the announcer lost control of the story. For the last fifty metres he just kept shouting, “Will you look at that. Look. It’s Burns at the end. Look.”

  I’d been so busy watching that nothing changed for me. I ended up exactly where I was before and never got past Bourque. I finished fourth, the worst place to be, but it was still more than I expected. People from the paper were taking pictures as I walked over to Burner. When he turned around we both just started laughing and shaking our heads.

  “You bastard,” I said, and I pounded both my fists against his shoulders. “Where did that come from? How in the hell…”

  “No idea,” he said. “I thought I was out of it, but I decided to go in the end and everything else just happened.”

  Other people, strangers I had never seen before, were coming around slapping him on the back and giving their congratulations. The whole place was still kind of quivering because no one had ever seen a guy come back from being that far down. Every eye was on Burner and everyone was talking about that last stretch and trying to find a place for it in their own personal histories.

  One of the drug officials came over and took Burner away to go pee in his cup and prove that everything was natural. As he was being led off, he turned back and told me to wait for him.

  “You’re going to be busy,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “Just wait,” he said.

  For those next fifteen minutes, I was kind of stuck between two different versions of myself. I wandered back over to my bag and started to get dressed again. I looked around the track and it seemed like this big chunk of my past was kind of crystallizing behind me and freezing into permanence. Whatever the next thin
g would be was still way ahead, indistinct and foggy, and I had no idea what it would look like. I pulled off those ugly spikes and in a mock-dramatic moment I tossed them into a garbage can.

  “Good riddance,” I said, and I just stood there for a while feeling the cool grass on my bare feet.

  Burner came jogging back from his test soon after that, but every step he took there was somebody else there shaking his hand and patting the top of his bald head. All around him people were smiling and a couple of younger kids asked for his autograph and wanted to get their pictures taken with him. Burner drank it in like one of those actors standing on the red carpet before the Oscars begin, and even though it took him a while to make it across the track, he kept looking up at me every couple of seconds, letting me know that I was still the final destination and our planned warm-down was still going to take place.

  When he finally made it over he had this ridiculously huge grin on his face and he kind of shrugged his shoulders.

  “What can you do?” he said. “It’s all crazy.”

  “Did they get your pee?” I asked. “Everything okay in that department?”

  “No problem,” he said.

  He pulled on a dry T-shirt and his own pair of high-tech sweatpants and said he was ready to go.

  When we made it out of the stadium everything quieted down very quickly. The announcer’s voice had moved on to the final of the women’s 400 hurdles and we could just barely hear him as we turned away and went backwards along the same streets we had run earlier. Whenever you do that – go back along the same course, but in the opposite direction – it’s strange how some scenes are so familiar while others look so completely different you wonder how you missed them the first time around. It’s just the change in perspective, but sometimes, especially when you’re in a foreign city, you can get yourself pretty disoriented and lost. Then you have to slow down and look around and try to locate a recognizable landmark before you can be sure you’re on the right track.