The Journey Prize Stories 28 (3 page)

B
odies open and close on the machines that fill the weight room. A man drags steel from his chest—front push, cheeks taut, and the winged twin paths of his arms move to full extension. His chest under the surgical light. Mechanical bird, his slow flight. Then, release. Arms in, he folds back in, weights clink into a neat stack. He rises, breathes, heads to the water fountain in the corner. At intervals, everyone in the room goes to that fountain, bends down to accept its hook of water into their mouths. The gym is at the front of the community centre, its long glass wall facing the street. The thick rainfall casts the gym in aquarium intimacy. Cars whip past, their headlights the eyebeams of giant fish. Inside, bodies struggle in the tinted air.

Laura watches her body in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. Knee-length black shorts, a black T-shirt, broad shoulders. Behind her, women power the treadmills, knees and elbows in suspended animation. She is always the only woman on the weight
machines. Men acknowledge her with nods. She knows them by the slogans on their giveaway T-shirts
(RUN FOR THE CURE 1998 Home Hardware CREW, Who are you RUNNING for)
. Nobody speaks to her here and that is part of why she continues to come back.

In the locker room, women peel clothes from their bodies. Steam is carried out of the showers on their shoulders and hips. A locker door bangs and shatters the warmth. Laughter of the exercise bike women entering in a crowd. After the quiet of the office and her condo, the locker room is jarring for Laura, a thousand electric shocks to her eardrums. As she adjusts her bra, Laura notices the clusters of red specks on her shoulders. She checks the other shoulder. The same. Twists her head to inspect again. A pattern of delicate explosions, where the blood vessels submitted.

That night in bed, laptop nestled on her crossed knees, she Googles:
blood vessels shoulders woman lifting weights
. The fitness pages instruct her to exhale while taking on more weight. Ease the speed of flow. Too much muscle development too fast and the body begins to break itself down, cell by cell. Gradual release of breath is easier on the blood. Trails leave her shoulders, head for her arms. She checks the rest of her body for implosions. Finds none. If she held her breath and lifted hard, how many marks could she make? Her body a map of ruined currents. She twists her torso, holds still for the MacBook camera's inbuilt eye to take a photo of one shoulder. She saves the image to the desktop.

When she double-clicks on the image of her shoulder, it springs up, huge, fills the screen. A planet in low light, a maroon edge, a dark world.

She Googles weightlifters, selects Images. Men with skin-tight balloons defending their necks, shoulders, chests. Their surplus limbs; her faint red trails.

Laura has been coming to the gym every day for two months and she has felt the change. Not the slimming she expected, but a shift in texture. The ease of heaving the steel and glass doors to the government building where she works, doors that make the sound of a bank vault opening and closing. On mornings after she has lain in bed all night awake, the unexpected panic of being alone coming and going in surges, she climbs the stairs slowly and the secretary at the front desk nods sympathetically, knowingly. Her name is Phillipa and her son's wife passed away five years ago, so she makes a point of over-identifying with every loss in the office—deaths of pets, ailing parents, breakups. Phillipa left a card on Laura's desk when the news about Mallory got around. On the front of the card, a boy reached upward to catch a star, a Little Prince knock-off, a halo of text around his head that read
You don't know what you're reaching for until you find it
. As if someone had died. Also? What an invasive bitch. But maybe Laura's getting bitter. Mostly she's just so tired, all the time. But when she feels her arms they are hard and widening.

Laura's job at the passport office rigidified as routine several years ago. She used to complain about it to Mallory—the
endless supply of people who took bureaucracy
personally
, scream at her earnestly over the phone,
but my flight for Cuba is tomorrooooow
—but now, she learns how routine is a crutch for numbness. Routine is everything to her now.

And today, the gift from Phillipa of a meditation book (left anonymously at her desk). Laura picks it up, makes sure to look down at it with a neutral expression—a careful performance for whoever is watching. She leaves the book on the magazine rack in the reception area with the VISA pamphlets after reading the first line on the back:
What you are experiencing is loss
.

Walking to her car, she texts her brother, Greg.

His response buzzes her hand as she slips her phone into her pocket. Greg, now thirty-two, texts like an irate teenager.

Then,

haha fuck you too

Fifteen minutes later, he texts:

Laura has watched other people go through breakups on Facebook. The suggestive status updates, half-scripts of a melodrama, the sound of a palm clapping on a hard bright
screen. Sometimes a few old photos of the couple from early days, posted ambiguously—these photos had a tendency to disappear. It was what people posted and quickly deleted that was most self-revealing, Laura thought. People thought people didn't see, but that's what everybody wanted—the satisfaction of watching life through a two-way mirror. Then, eventually, the Rumi and Hafiz quotes on letting go, the Facebook mourner giving public signs of personal growth. The appropriate I-am-moving-on updates always earned many heart icons (Laura hated these); any persisting bitter or wounded posts were quietly ignored, or condemned by receiving supportive comments only from the mourner's parents.
Things will look up love mom
. Laura has scrolled through many divorces. She read those stories distantly—the grinning avatars amassing sympathy. Facebook was not the place for tough love—you just looked like an asshole.
Have some self-respect
, she'd thought. This too shall pass. It was something buried deep inside her, this reticence. Really, Facebook was only about who was watching you, not what you posted. Still, she couldn't stop scrolling.