Jacob Atabet (15 page)

And now, on this October weekend, I was entering my first formal race, a five-mile all-comers’ event around Lake Merced in San Francisco, sponsored by the Dolphin Southend Club. Four hundred men, women and children would compete, and now most of them were gathered around the Club’s president and inspirator, Walter Stack, as he shouted from a wooden crate about the Club’s upcoming meets. He was a burly sunburned man of sixty, with a permanent tilt to the side. Rumor had it that he ran seventeen miles a day, worked during the week as a hod-carrier and that he had recently broken a record for the thirteen-mile uphill run to the top of Pike’s Peak.

Atabet pulled me away from the crowd. “See that guy over there?” He nodded toward a lean pale figure in shorts. “He’s blind. He runs holding on to his partner.” The partner turned as we watched them and I looked away. “How fast does he do it?” I whispered, struggling to hold back the nervousness that had been building all morning.

“In about 34 minutes,” he said. “I heard them talking.”

I felt a clammy pull in my stomach. That a blind man could run it in 34 minutes! What a struggle it would be to stay near him. “And her, over there.” He pointed to a slender woman bouncing on her toes. “She broke a woman’s marathon record last year. Ran it in two forty-four.” The woman was taking off her warm-up pants and smiled gaily at us. Her legs were neither muscled nor particularly well formed—no sign there of that unbelievable time. I tried to smile back as I imagined her leaving me far behind. “Two forty-four?” I muttered. “Are there any slow ones you can show me?”

He nodded toward a group of kids. One of them, a girl of eleven whose face had often appeared in the sports pages during the preceding year, ran with her family in all these events. She would run the five miles in
under
thirty minutes. She jumped up and down and giggled with her friends, then waved when she saw me.

I raised a tentative hand to wave back. “It’s kind of like there’re two races here,” I said faintly. “I think I’ll run in the second one.”

“No,” he said. “It’s all one race. You’ll be surprised how well you do.”

“But what if I can’t finish? With all of these women and children. Jake, I’m starting at the back. That way no one’ll pass me.”

”The hell you will,” he said. “We’re lining up at the front. I want you to finish in the first two hundred.”

“In the first two hundred? Oh shit! I’ll be lucky if I run it in under 40 minutes.”

He stood back and looked me up and down. “Listen,” he said. “You’ve lost twenty pounds. You look just great. You’re going to run it in under 35. Now come on.” He pulled me toward the starting line, edging ahead of the crowd. The group in front of us was jostling for position and Walter Stack was trying to hold them back. There were cries to begin and laughter and curses, and before the whistle blew the mob surged forth. Ten or twenty men in front went out with a sprint.

Spaces appeared between us and the cries and laughter died away. There was only the shuffle of shoes on the pavement as the line stretched out ahead. Atabet disappeared around a bend and I looked at the water. It was a brilliant day, a perfect day for running. The woman marathon champion came past with an effortless stride, then the blind man holding on to his friend. I let go to the momentum of the people around me.

The grave quiet mood was contagious, as if this run were both test and celebration. Looking back I could see a mob behind me, mainly women and fat men, and this place in the procession seemed right. The clean air and sunshine, the steady rhythm—suddenly I felt carried along. A heavy muscular man was shuffling down the sloping sidewalk, his shoulders rolling back and forth. I hung on behind him like a faithful dog.

The lead runners were going up a gentle incline around a bend in the lake. Five minutes into the race, they were already 400 yards ahead. We swung toward the turn and I could see Atabet a hundred yards behind the leader, running a good race for someone about to turn forty. His long stride looked effortless as he went up the hill, almost as if he were floating, but I knew that he was moving at better than a six-minute pace.

The muscular man ahead of me slowed to a walk and I went on past. Going up hills, I thought, we lighter runners had an advantage. But just as I thought it, the first hint of pain appeared, a faint sickness that might turn to nausea. It was two hundred yards to the top. Then suddenly my strength flooded back. A downhill slope had appeared, stretching for what looked like a mile. Sky and water vanished and there was only one consuming thought: it would be possible to break forty minutes. The one thought, and a first hint of the disembodied state that lay beyond pain and distraction. “It’s like a quantum jump,” Atabet’s voice seemed to say. “You find you run faster than ever. And it lasts for miles.” It had happened before, finding this unexpected free momentum.

On the downgrade I stepped up the pace. A lady ahead was walking and I went past her with sudden elation. But as I did, the man I had passed appeared at my elbow. “How ya’ doin’?” he asked nonchalantly.

“Great!” I gasped. “What a day for running . . .”

“When you’re walkin’,” he grinned and surged ahead.

The first son of a bitch in the crowd, I thought. I would pass him on the final grade. But with the thought came a feeling of sickness. It would be better not to race him, for that would only destroy this surprising momentum.

In the distance, across the lake, the leaders were striding uphill, their pace as fast as ever. The long single file looked archetypal: lean bodies framed in the trees, ghost-like, defying gravity. And I could see all the runners ahead, hundreds of them in a bobbing line that stretched for over a mile. Looking back I saw hundreds more, all the fat men and ladies and cripples, some smiling, some in pain, but all running—all of them gamely surrendered to this communal ordeal. I felt a surge of feeling for them. In this run we were joined in ways it would take me weeks to understand.

But now a lightheaded mood had seized me. This was the last long uphill grade, and I refused to slow to a walk. Even if I didn’t break forty minutes I would say that I ran all the way. Runners ahead were slowing and I passed a walking group. Then something poisonous came up in my throat . . . .

“You all right?” someone asked.

“Yeah. I qualified.” A voice beside me answered. “Ran it in three twenty-nine.”

For the marathon? I watched myself ask. Was he someone who could run it that fast? I glanced back to see a baldheaded man and his friend. There were no hints of agony in their faces at all.

The finishing line had appeared in the distance, blurry through sweat and fatigue. Just to see it was a blessing. “But three twenty-nine won’t put me in the first two thousand,” he said. “I’ll have to do it in three-ten or twelve.” How could they talk? Were they out here to run or just visit? Then they came past me, twirling bandanas and leisurely scratching their sides.

But I was gaining a floaty momentum. Though I felt like a ghost without legs, I seemed to be picking up speed. As we turned toward the finish, I went past the baldheaded man. Together we started to sprint. People were cheering. Though I couldn’t see their faces I sensed they were cheering for me, for this effort against someone who had saved himself all through the race. When I got to the line I staggered into the arms of a tall grinning Black. “Thirty-two eighteen!” he yelled. “And nineteen. Twenty . . .”—he was counting off times for the incoming runners. I crossed to the grass and fell down. Atabet was standing beside me. “Thirty-two eighteen!” he slapped my shoulder. “That’s six-twenty-seven all the way!” Still gasping I lay down on the grass. “You came in 123rd!” he exclaimed. “Not bad your first time out.”

A glow was spreading through my chest, that strong addictive sensation. “I did it in twenty-eight fourteen,” he went on. “I came in twenty-second.” I could only shake my head in admiration. If I trained for another five years, I might match him. “In a year, you’ll be close to my time.” He seemed to be reading my thoughts. “Hell, we hardly train at all, compared to some of these guys. We’ll just let it happen.”

We put on our warmup suits and sat by the finish line to watch the runners arriving. And in they came, with smiles, gasps and whimpers. There were men in their sixties and seventies (a dozen of them in one group), kids six years old, and families that had run the entire five miles together. Some men had crewcuts and others hair that hung down to their shoulders (some lived in communes and others belonged to the Green Berets). Then there was a phalanx of women, some sweating and others still looking made-up. And among the stragglers came a man without feet, running on hard rubber stumps. And a man in a wheelchair—he had finished the race in forty-three minutes! Like a pageant they came, some relaxed, others struggling, some obviously close to collapse, but all of them determined to pick up a ribbon that would show they had run to the end. I was caught in a surge of admiration. This was a group I was proud to be part of.

“We’ll do it like Bannister and Chataway,” he said, toasting me with his Ramos Fizz. “In a year, you’ll break 30 minutes without running more than 40 miles a week.” Sunlit waves were breaking on the rocks below, and in the glow I felt this ambitious pronouncement had the ring of truth.

“Under thirty minutes,” I mused. “Yes, I think I can.”

The restaurant faced the ocean beach, and surfers were bobbing on the water below us. I had a sense of the pleasure they felt.

“This feeling,” I said. “It goes with the physicist’s description of matter. Everything has so much room, so much space to move in.”

He didn’t answer, and I looked around the room. A woman in the corner was frowning, as if something about us displeased her. I glanced down at the table. “That woman is watching us,” I said. “The one with the younger man. She’s awfully intent.”

“Dammit!” he whispered. “She has cancer.”

“Oh come off it. You can tell with a glance?”

“I always can. I can smell it. If I had more courage, I’d go over and tell her.” “Don’t you think she knows?” He leaned back in his chair to see her.

“I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so.” He shook his head with a discouraged expression. “But if I were to go over and start something, she’d think I was nuts.”

He signaled our waitress, a freckled jaunty girl with long blonde hair. She came up to our table and we ordered breakfast. “What handsome legs,” she said to Atabet.

“What about mine?” I asked. She pursed her lips. “Well hell,” I said. “I know someone who likes them.”

She rolled her eyes and blushed, then wrote down our orders. Atabet reached out to touch her. “Would you tell that woman over there to buy a Ramos Fizz or a glass of Champagne on us. Tell her she reminds me of a special friend.”

She glanced at the corner, then crossed the room and delivered the message. The woman looked over with a stiff little nod. Were we teasing? she seemed to ask.

The man turned to see us and smiled. Apparently won over, they ordered something and gestured to thank us. Now the woman seemed flattered.

“What’re you doing?” I whispered.

“That’s the least I can do.” He was stirring the straw in his glass. “I wonder if . . . . I wonder, shit! I feel helpless. Absolutely helpless. She can’t breathe. Can’t really move right. God, why can’t people start to live?” As if to confirm his judgment, the woman coughed and lit a cigarette. She looked to be in her fifties, though it was conceivable she was younger than that.

“Then go over and make up a story. Maybe you can give her a lift.”

He looked at me sadly, glanced her way, then stood abruptly and crossed to her table. I tried to follow their talk. Was he giving advice or some strange diagnosis? He took a seat and they talked for five minutes more. Then he pressed her arm, smiled at her companion and came back to the table. “She’s having an operation,” he said. “Cancer of the lung. The doctors think they’ve caught it in time.”

I asked him what he had told her.

He held my gaze, as if he were deciding whether I should hear it or not. “It was your idea,” he said. “It’s all your fault.”

“But tell me,” I whispered. “I was amazed that you did it.”

He glanced back at the woman. She and her friend were eating their breakfasts in silence. “I’m giving her one of my paintings. She promised to study it. I think it’ll do her some good.”

“Now wait. What did you tell her about it? She must’ve thought you were nuts.”

“Flattered though. And she thinks it’ll help her. I said it was based on an ancient Egyptian formula for healing.”

“But that’s a lie!”

“Not completely,” he said. “And it made her day. I’m delivering it to her tomorrow.”

The glow of the race had passed, and I felt a sadness for the diminished life I sensed in the people around us. “So you think running cures diseases?” I asked. “Has there ever been a study of disease among dedicated runners?”

He shrugged, and I said I would try to find out.

“But that’s why so many people are running,” he said. “You saw that crowd today. Did anyone there look depressed? Did you see anyone out there with a hopeless expression?”

He was right, I thought. There had been misshapen bodies and cripples out there, but everyone had life in their face. Even the last ones to finish and the ones who were close to collapse had resilience and courage. I guessed that there wasn’t a cynic among them.

In the sparkling waves, the surfers looked like otters. Swimming in water like that might cure cancer too. “And then these people up here,” he said. “See how we sort ourselves out?” Indeed, the crowd in the restaurant was different than the one in the race. With health and renewal so close, they would choose their discontent.

But at least the lady in the corner might find a new opening to life in the mysterious depths of his painting. She waved as we went down the stairs. It was obvious that a crazy man with a painting had made her day.

O
CTOBER 6

I continue to tutor him in Western metaphysics. His interest and insight fills it all with new meaning. Today we talked about Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, about the
Geist an und für sich
, comparing Aurobindo’s psychology of higher states with Hegel’s lack of same. But Hegel had the seed of the vision, a seed that has grown in strange gardens since. We compared some versions of the “coming race”: Nietzsche’s, the Theosophists’, Rudolph Steiner’s, Teilhard’s, Whitman’s, Henry fames, Sr.’s—and talked for a while about the higher delusions. No wonder these speculations about the future humanity seem thin or aberrant, he said, considering the misunderstandings that arise even among those who are deeply committed to contemplative practice. The history of spiritual disciplines teaches us as much about wrong turns as right ones.