Telemachus Rising (11 page)

Variations in the texture of the ceiling formed patterns I hadn't noticed when I'd entered the cell.  A wide band extended from one wall and branched out, forking into smaller and smaller lines until they reached each corner of the room.  They formed a tree, from the trunk to the branches to each little twig, all of them shaking and swaying in the wind.  They shimmered and rippled like a river delta, from rivers to creeks to streams.  In another moment they became arteries, veins, and capillaries, pulsing to the beat of a giant invisible heart.

“...Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day...”

I sank down into the concrete as it turned fluid under my weight.  My arms and legs melted and began to dissolve into the liquified concrete slab.  We mixed, and as the concrete hardened, my arms and legs ceased to exist.  I couldn't move.  I would never move again.  The throbbing ceiling pulsed more and more dramatically.  It began to sink lower, closing in on me.  The room grew darker as the lights dimmed.  I watched the lines shift and turn until I saw their true form.  The outline of a wolf's head snarled from the corner of the ceiling.  It bristled, its hair tousled by the wind.  I stared at it and it glared back.  It was menacing.  I knew it was on the ceiling and couldn't harm me, but it made me anxious.  I couldn't look away.  

“...The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older...”

I swallowed hard.  I forgot how to swallow.  Saliva pooled in my mouth.  My tongue felt thick and clumsy.  I lost my tongue.  My tongue got lost in my mouth.  I didn't know where it went or where to put it.  It wouldn't obey me.  I couldn't control it.  I blinked.  I closed my eyes.  The view didn't change.  Everything looked exactly the same whether my eyes were open or closed.  I couldn't tell the difference anymore.  My eyelids were gone.  The ceiling disappeared entirely.  I watched as the walls of the cell blew apart from one another.  I felt a light breeze as I stared up into the night sky.  Snowflakes fell onto my face, but I couldn't feel them.  I couldn't feel anything.  My entire body was gone.  There was nothing left.  I was dead.  I was a ghost, a mind.  I had never existed, but that was okay.

I was asleep in my own bed.  I was trapped in a dream.  This entire experience was a dream.  The whole last year had been a dream.  None of this had even happened.  I had imagined all of it.  The girl from the party was too good to be true.  She had to have been a figment of my imagination.  Everything I'd experienced in the past year had been meaningless.  It would all be gone and forgotten when I woke up.  Wiped away.  I cried inside when I thought of all the awful things I'd imagined as a part of the past year.  What I wouldn't give to turn back the clock.  What I wouldn't give if none of it had ever happened.  I cried for how much that would mean to me, and I cried because I knew it was only a fantasy.

I thought about my regrets, the mistakes I'd made, the people I'd hurt.  I thought about the things in life that meant the most to me, the things that were truly important.  I thought about how grateful I was, how lucky I was.  I thought about the things I'd lost.  I thought about the people I had lost.  I think I cried some more.  My limbs felt heavy and unwieldy, like they were asleep.  There still wasn't any sensation in my fingers, but I could feel the pull of gravity on my arms when I moved them.  I curled up into a ball as my head started to hurt, maybe from the crying.  The buzzing in my stomach was dying down.  I felt completely exhausted.  I was worn out.  I'd lost all track of time, but it felt like I'd been awake for a week.  Even with my coat on, I was cold.  I fell asleep shaking.

A voice over the intercom in the cell woke me up.  The faucet was still running from the night before.

“Can you press the button on the sink?”

I pulled myself into a sitting position.  I was all out of sorts, like I'd been half drowned.  I stood up and shambled over to the sink where I pressed the button.  It stopped running immediately.

“Thank you.”

I laid back down and tried to go back to sleep, but it didn't work.  It just made me more miserable.  Time dragged.  Eventually I got up to look for a clock through the window in the door.

“Can you tell me what time it is?”

Nobody answered.  I knocked on the glass.

“Can anybody tell me what time it is?”

Still no answer.  After about a week that probably only lasted a couple hours, the voice came back through the intercom.

“If you need to call someone to help you post bond, I can activate the phone for you.  It's collect calls only, so you have to dial a land line.”

“That's alright.  I've got my credit card.”

Technically, they had my credit card.

“Am I going to be free to go soon?”

No answer.  I have no idea how much time actually passed, but I think someone came to open my door about fifteen minutes later.  I repacked my pockets and carried my shoelaces with me.  When they asked me how I was going to pay my bond, I gave them my card.  After that, they gave me a receipt and some paperwork with the date of my preliminary hearing several weeks away.  I sat on a bench in the public part of City Hall and put the laces back in my shoes before walking the mile back to my car.  One of the rear windows was rolled part way down.  I brushed the previous night's snow off the seat and drove home smelling like jail.

I sat down on the sofa bed to tie my shoes.  Every time I sat down too hard, the cushions offered less padding than I expected and reminded me of the police car.  As a piece of furniture, it didn't make a great couch or a great bed, but it was okay as both.  I had to have something dual purpose for the studio apartment I lived in, and all the combination furniture I'd looked at was some kind of compromise.  Either you got a great couch and a lousy bed or a great bed and a lousy couch.  The giant corner sofa/pull out bed combo I got weighed about a million pounds and took up the entire room, but it served its purpose.  It gave me a place to sit during the day and sleep at night.  I hadn't gotten around to converting it back into living room furniture that morning.  There were a lot of days like that, when I think about it.  There were probably entire weeks my blankets and pillows stayed out on display.  I guess I was focused on other things.

The sheets were cold and rumpled from sitting all day.  It was winter, so everything was cold, but it was hard to believe this was the same bed that would be so warm and hard to leave in the morning.  I wasn't tired, though.  It was going to be another late night.  I had a solid thirteen miles ahead of me and freshly tied shoes.

It seemed crazy to most people, myself included, that I had gotten in the habit of running after midnight.  I knew it wasn't really safe, but I didn't really care.  Something about being out there every night made me feel invincible.  Once I started a run, I was spoiling for a fight.  I had fantasies about one of the drunk idiots who'd yell “Run Forrest!” taking a swing at me.  God, it'd be so good.  I'd fight anybody after a ten mile run.  Even so, I shouldn't have been running so late.  My chosen time of night aside, some people thought my mileage was extreme.  I guess it was.  I never thought to question it though.  Like every good Quentin Cassidy wannabe, I'd made the decision to run a long time ago, and there was no use dredging up all the old arguments every time it rained or I had to run late at night.  When people asked why I did it, I told them I liked to race.  The truth is, running had become a major part of my identity.  By the time I was getting up from that bed to go outside, running felt like one of the few things I could hang on to.  I can see now, that was a dangerous place to be.

Trotting down the back stairs, I was wearing running tights, shorts, sweatpants, a thermal shirt, a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, stretchy gloves, and a knit hat.  Even with all those layers, the wind could cut right through if I didn't overlap them the right way.  Wind chill is a killer in Michigan – literally.  I dropped out the back door and into the alley behind my apartment building.  There was a six foot fence that shielded it from the worst of the wind and snow, but there was a small gap that I always squeezed through where it met the wall.  Somebody was parked back there where they weren't supposed to be.  I had to fight an urge to key their car.  I guess they weren't hurting anyone.

I slipped through the gap and into the parking lot.  There was a hidden trough on the inside lip of one of the car ports where I stashed my keys.  I didn't like thinking about what else was hiding in there, so I tried not to waste any time worrying about it.  The parking lot was totally iced over, but there was a thin snow pack that kept it from getting too slippery.  I picked my way across to the sidewalk that would carry me to the trail head.

Sidewalk is terrible to run on.  It's too hard.  I hate it.  Asphalt is actually much softer.  You never think about the relative densities of things like that, or how elastic something like concrete is.  Hard materials just seem...hard.  But even structural steel compresses.  Steel!  When they build a skyscraper, the supports actually shrink several inches under the load.  The engineers have to account for it beforehand.  There's some kind of formula.  Anyway, the snow was a small blessing because it padded the concrete sidewalk.  At least it seemed like a blessing at the time.

My muscles were still sore from that morning's run.  Just from a scheduling standpoint, it's tough cramming one hundred miles into a week.  There's no way to do it without going out twice a day.  It's rough.  You're always sore, and you eat and sleep like a bear.  Act like one too, half the time.  I was peaking at this hundred miles a week, and all the signs of over training were rearing their heads.  I managed to get my legs moving, though, and my form smoothed out pretty quickly.  One convenient side effect of all that running is muscle memory.  I swear to god I've fallen asleep mid stride.

The trail started about a mile and a half away, which made the trip there an easy warm up.  Then it would be a quick five miles into the woods, a turnaround, and the psychological downhill all the way home.  Gliding along the sidewalk, I hit an intersection and went right across without breaking stride.  Runner's Karma.  See, mankind was made to run long distances.  It figured in our evolution, the ability to run game into the ground.  They think being able to run small animals down gave human beings the extra amount of protein they needed to grow big fat brains.  My theory was that when people ran long distances the way they were meant to, the cosmos would align and the runners would fit into the universe like high precision gears.  That was why I never had to stop or slow down at intersections.  Another weird side effect of Runner's Karma had to do with turning street lights off when you ran under them.  I'm not quite sure how that part figured in, but it was definitely a related phenomenon.  Street lights didn't always turn off when I ran by, but there was more than one night I knocked out three or four in a row.

The opening mile and a half flew by, and I was past streetlights and intersections before I knew it.  The trail started in an unlikely place.  It was right by all these businesses, and the entrance was in what looked like an abandoned parking lot.  Even so, you'd go from pavement to heavy woods in about fifteen feet.  Seriously.  One turn in, and you might as well be in the upper peninsula.  The trail itself went more miles through the woods than I'd ever run, although I'd walked most of it one summer afternoon a year or two earlier.  There weren't many leaves left on the trees in the winter, but the branches still formed a canopy over the path.

I broke the tree line at a decent pace.  The snow on the ground gave off a faint purple glow where it wasn't blocked out by the mass of black tree trunks and dead brush.  There was a thin moon out, but it wasn't doing much to light my way.  I watched it hanging there in the sky ahead of me, tree branches zipping along in front of it.  We were alone out there, me and the moon.  I thought about that every time I went out for a late night run.  The idea that it was a huge silvery rock floating out there in space was a fascination of mine.  I was jealous future generations might get to make casual trips back and forth someday, but I never would.  But that's not where my moon obsession ended.  The other thing that always got me was that I was looking up at the same moon a previous generation had walked on, the same moon people had been running under since the ancient Greeks.  Could Greek runners in Sparta have imagined that some day, thousands of years in the future, young people half a world away would call themselves Spartans and run under the same moon?  That kind of thing never occurred to me when I glanced up at the sun.  Only the moon.  The moon made me feel connected to the past, especially those runners, those messengers.  Even though their motives were different, they did the same thing I was doing.  They felt the same burn in their muscles, the same bite in their lungs.  At night they looked up and thought about the same moon, and right then, in those moments, the only things that separated us were time and footwear.

There's a saying, that a run only truly begins once you forget you're running.  My run was well on its way.  If you aren't a runner, it might be difficult to imagine how anyone could forget they were running.  For one thing, you stop noticing the vertical bounce of your stride.  Part of that is a matter of efficiency.  You really do bounce around less when you have good form.  All the same, the ride starts to feel pretty smooth after a while.  That's another thing.  You don't notice your body a whole lot, especially your feet.  Don't get me wrong, you can still feel them.  It's not like they're numb.  You definitely notice them if you take a funny step or if the ground is uneven.  But for the most part, you start to work like a machine.  When something goes wrong, your body tells you, like the indicator lights on a car's dashboard.  Breathing rhythm starting to get difficult - reduce pace.  That's something people don't think much about either, breathing rhythm.  When you're running, you automatically match an in/out breath pattern to your steps.  It puts you in a kind of trance after a while.  I never understood people who listen to music when they're running.  It ruins your rhythm.  Totally spoils the atmosphere.  Anyone who runs out of things to think about on a run isn't doing enough living.