short story: Running
Photo by lucas Favre on UnsplashI started running for the same reason as most people; because my life had no meaning and I thought I could remedy this by moving in a repetitive circular trajectory wearing a pair of $200 sneakers made by a child in sweatshop. It wasn’t easy at first, my body had long since acclimatised to a lifestyle that consisted primarily of sitting, drinking or a combination of the two, and it did not take kindly to moving more than it had to. I was, however, able to overcome my body’s complaints with the superbly motivating force of fear.
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I was running every day because I was afraid of a lot of things, and not just the usual ones like dying alone or going to hell or god not existing or god actually existing and hating me or peak oil causing world war or overpopulation or global warming. I was also scared of the things that most people don’t worry about often enough but really should like the fact that diseases are evolving at an exponential rate due to a societal over-dependence on antibiotics or colony collapse disorder or rapidly depleting helium supplies.
Ironically, even though running would not save me from any of these philosophical and global fears, it made me feel better about all of them. And it was doubly effective against the thing I feared most, which was my computer screen.
It had begun to mock me at infrequent intervals after the Bad Thing happened, and when Laura left a few months later it started it earnest. I could see it, always at the periphery of my vision, flashing the pixelated faces of my parents with their eyes lit with mortal fear or Laura yelling at me with tears cascading down her soft alabaster cheeks. As soon as I turned to look, it would revert to its predictably perfect landscape of a sun setting over a Caribbean beach. My computer also knew that, as much as I hated it, I would never dispose of it because then I would be unable to email or Facebook or tweet Laura.
I had activated a twitter account three months earlier and had not yet tweeted anything. I followed only three people: Laura, physicist Brian Cox and political theorist and linguist Noam Chomsky. Laura followed a total of 3 456 people including rapper Kanye West, supermodel Kate Moss, actor Charlie Sheen and famous person for no reason that I could discern Kim Kardashian.
I was not one of the 3 456 people that she followed and even if I had been I would have constituted only 0.000289% of her twitter contacts. In addition to these various internet-based communication methods there was always, of course, the option of picking up the phone and calling her, but that would invite the horrifying possibility that she would pick up.
I was running every day and when people asked me why I was running I told them one of the following lies:
1 To get healthy
2 To lose weight
3 As a sort of physical meditation
4 To improve my chances of survival once computers gain self-awareness and launch a worldwide attack on all humans.
Of all my answers, the fourth was the only one that bore even a passing resemblance to the truth. When I told people the fourth lie, they would laugh and call me ‘silly’ when really I was being completely serious and was concerned by their lack of concern in regards to this issue but I kept saying the fourth lie anyway because it often made them forget to ask me about Laura.
I was running every day because I was sick of my computer mocking me and of Laura not calling me and yet equally terrified that Laura would call me and I wouldn’t know what to say. I was not as graceful or tireless as the hordes of lycra-clad runners I passed every day, but I kept a steady pace and within a few weeks my body no longer felt like it wanted to implode with rage each time I finished a run.
I was running every day and the reason that I had time to do this was because the Bad Thing happened. I had very recently bought my own apartment with the money from the Bad Thing and I had enough to buy groceries and pay bills without having to work for perhaps as long as fifteen or twenty years. This was good because I have always hated my job, even though I was incredibly good at it and had been awarded employee of the month eighteen times.
The job that I had was selling insurance and I was intimately familiar with all of the data on the myriad ailments and calamities that can befall a person. Once you start informing a client about the inordinately long list of very bad things that can happen to them, you don’t have to so much convince them that insurance is a sound investment so much as just patiently wait for them to give you their credit card number.
My company insured against a long list of catastrophes but we did not offer insurance against some of the fears that were most important to me like colony collapse disorder, global warming, the absence of god or Laura no longer being in love with me. We did, however, offer very comprehensive travel insurance.
Once my manager invited me to do a speech to motivate some of the sales assistants and I told her that this was a terrible suggestion because working at that company made me consider suicide on a bi-weekly basis. She asked me if I meant bi-weekly as in twice a week or every two weeks and I said the conversation made me feel uncomfortable. She made an appointment for me with a company-approved psychologist which I did not attend because I looked him up online and his social media accounts expressed a disturbing level of devotion to Elon Musk.
I was running every day and also thinking about the Bad Thing every day. The Bad Thing happened when my parents travelled around Europe and caught the train from Madrid to Lisbon. I had convinced my parents to obtain travel insurance, but in spite of my expert advice they had only bought a basic package, my mother’s exact words were “Honestly Peter, we love that you want to look after us but you worry far too much. You’ve got to stop being so anxious about every little thing! We’ll be just fine.” But they were not fine at all because the driver of their train decided to type a text message whilst travelling in excess of 40kph over the recommended speed and consequently derailed the train and killed 36 people, including my parents.
If they had bought the comprehensive package I recommended they would have been posthumously awarded five million dollars but instead they were paid a total of $700 000, or $350 000 each, which I inherited. This is roughly the same amount that supermodel and Laura’s twitter associate Kate Moss earns in one week. Everything that my parents were; their chromosomes and thoughts and memories and skills and love for each other was fiscally equivalent to the weekly earnings of a skinny blonde woman who was paid money to pout and wear ludicrous outfits.
At first Laura was sad about my parents dying and then she was happy about all of the money they left me and then she was miserable when I sat at home all the time checking news reports on airline crash statistics and viral outbreaks in Equatorial Guinea and locust plagues in rural China. I stopped shaving and began drinking excessively and eating nothing but Coco-pops and toast. When she left I didn’t wash the sheets for weeks because I didn’t want to lose the smell of her, but eventually my smell overpowered the lingering traces of hers and the sheets started to make me itchy and I washed them and then I understood that she was really, truly gone.
I was running every day, sometimes for as long as two or even three hours. People always say ‘there aren’t enough hours in the day!’ but really this is because large portions of their days are occupied doing jobs they hate and watching sitcoms and when you stop doing those two things you realise that days are as long as dolphin penises (which are fourteen inches and also prehensile, meaning they have the capability to grasp like a tentacle.)
My body began to change. It got slimmer and firmer and my skin transitioned from near translucent white to a soft brown. I noticed that women watched me when I ran with the same look that Laura gave me when we first met. I felt a little embarrassed, because I had entertained a firm-seated although clearly illogical belief that you are born with a certain kind of body and you just have to deal with it and that it will never change no matter how hard you try.
Some people attempt radical alterations like rhinoplasty and Botox, despite the fact that Botox is the world’s most powerful neurotoxin. Paying $2 000 to have the world’s most potent neurotoxin injected into one’s face does not strike me as a wise decision. If someone put neurotoxin in my face, I would unquestionably pay far more than $2 000 to have it removed as quickly as possible.
I was running every day and my speed and stamina were increasing. I found that I could run for longer without needing to stop. My breaths were slow and easy, my muscles stopped aching like they had in the beginning. My phone wasn’t ringing because Laura wasn’t calling me because she had a new boyfriend and my parents weren’t calling me because they were dead and my friends weren’t calling because they were busy tending to the tiny humans they had created or they had given up on me when I never called them back.
I was running every day and sometimes I would see interesting things like people who looked like their dogs or a beautiful sunset or two men kissing and one of the men was a Muslim and the other an Orthodox Jew but mostly I just saw my two feet left right left right left right etc. One day I came home and heard the sound of a ringing phone. My first thought was ‘someone has broken into my apartment and their phone is ringing!’ but then I realised that the ringtone was my own, I hadn’t heard it in so long I forgot that it was mine. I ran into the kitchen and picked up the phone just as it stopped ringing.
Missed call (1)
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
It said that because that is the name that I gave to Laura in my contacts list instead of just ‘Laura’ because that it is what she was to me. Now she was someone else’s Most Beautiful Girl in the World and I didn’t know if they listed her as this or if they called her something awful like Big Titties #2 or something nauseatingly optimistic like My Future Wife. I had never met Laura’s new boyfriend, but I had gathered from Laura’s Facebook page that he was a wedding photographer named Steven who enjoyed Gotye and kayaking.
Kayaking was rated by my insurance company as a class 5 activity (very mild risk of injury or death) and I secretly wished that he had a passion for class 1 activities (extremely high risk of injury or death) like BASE jumping or bull riding. I wondered if I called her would her kayaking wedding photographer boyfriend pick up the phone? I didn’t call Laura aka the Most Beautiful Girl in the World back because of this and also the fact that she had called me didn’t seem real and I thought I might actually be dreaming. I did not sleep that night.
I was running every day and Laura began calling me every day and I wasn’t picking up even though I really, really wanted to. Everything that was inside of me was saying ‘Call her! Call her!’ but then everything that was outside of me like oxygen and leaves and granite and mangrove swamps and Roman ruins and circuit boards and ultraviolet radiation and the Pacific Ocean and housing estates and incompetent train drivers and funeral parlors and empty bourbon bottles and everything in the whole universe had conspired to tear us apart so who was I to fight that? Sometimes I thought about what I would say if I called her, but the only thing that I could think to say was nothing and that is what I said.
I was running every day and Laura was calling me every day and now my phone said:
Missed calls (100)
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
The fact that my number of missed calls had now reached 100 caused me a great deal of consternation because my grandfather died on his 100th birthday just as he opened his letter from the queen that everyone gets on their birthdays, despite the fact that a monarchist system is an obsolete and anachronistic method of governance in Australia. My grandfather did not perceive the monarchy to be obsolete or anachronistic, he loved the queen dearly and when he read her letter he was so thrilled that he literally died of excitement.
I kept trying not to think about the 100 missed calls, as well as the hundreds of texts and emails that Laura kept sending me that I just kept deleting because I thought that might make them not real.
I was running every day and some of the things that I saw when I ran were trees and dogs and children and Frisbees and couples laughing and kissing in ways that made me jealous and the water and the grass. None of the things that I saw when I went running were ever Laura. This is why it surprised me when one day I went running and I saw Laura. Seeing her made my whole upper body go limp like it had been hit by a tranquiliser dart but my legs were so used to keeping a constant rhythm that for a moment they just kept running and I briefly resembled an animatronic robot with a perfectly operational lower portion and a violently malfunctioning torso.
When I finally came to a halt I had run about three metres past her and I had to turn around and walk back in her direction. She looked sad and angry. I had seen her look sad and angry lots of times before, especially just before we broke up and she became someone else’s Most Beautiful Girl in the World. I had seen her sad and angry, but now she was sad and angry and also had the appearance of defeat hanging around her like a grim psychic fog. Her skin looked sallow and her eyes were sunken and black as though she had not slept for a long time. None of the pictures that my computer screen had shown me had been anywhere near as horrible or beautiful as seeing her in front of me.
She called out “Peter!” in a voice that sounded as close to breaking as is humanly possible without actually breaking. I was covered in sweat, every part of me. I felt like I was about 90% Peter’s sweat and 10% Peter. She said a lot of things with her eyes, I tried to read their language but I was never very good at that. One of the last things she had told me before she left was that I never understood how she was feeling, which hurt me more than anything else because how I wanted her to feel was happy and I wanted to be the one to make her feel that way.
She did not look happy now, not in the least. “Peter, you fucking bastard, why didn’t you … god I’ve been trying for weeks … you fucking …” She did not finish her sentence but instead threw her body at mine and wrapped her arms tightly around me, like some sort of highly ineffectual flesh-based snare.
My shirt was already wet with sweat but now it was wet with her tears too. I put my arms around her, now her snare was caught in mine. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to touch someone else’s skin. “I didn’t know where you’d moved to … I kept looking for you in the cafes we used to go to … all your friends said that they barely heard from you but that you’d started running around here. I’ve been sitting on that fucking bench for four hours you PRICK!” Her voice cracked as though it was playing through a dying stereo.
I was running every day and I was not used to stopping. My body was still heaving with adrenalin, my legs twitched in irritation and anticipation. “Peter … I’ve … I’m not well …” I thought about saying something but decided that nothing would be the best thing to say. I waited for the words to emancipate themselves from her mouth. “I got some tests back and I’m sick. I have been for a while. I think I caught it from Steven.” I said nothing with my mouth but in my head a war began, fires were lit, trumpets were sounded, heads were placed on spikes.
“Do you understand what I’m saying Peter? I’m talking about AIDs. I’m on a bunch of medication and it’s okay, I’m managing, but if you have it and you don’t see someone soon…” She stopped and sobbed and I said nothing as my heart imploded and then she continued. “I started sleeping with Steven before we broke up, so there’s a chance you…”
Her words were arrows joining in the war inside my head. There was too much fire and heat and blood and fear. The sun was beating down on my face and I felt dizzy. Runners ran past looking at the two of us with quizzical expressions, oblivious to the fact that god probably did not exist and even if he did that global warming or colony collapse disorder or biological warfare or nuclear catastrophe would kill them no matter how far they ran or how many push-ups they did or how many protein shakes they drank.
“Can you please promise me that you’ll see a doctor and not just hide away from everyone like you always do? Please?”
I was running every day and I could run for a very long time without pausing for breath. I could run until my feet bled. I could run until my legs collapsed. I could run until my heart exploded.
I could run forever.
____
I’m going to dig a few more short stories out of the archives in the coming months. Let me know which ones you like, because I’m going to put together a collection for publication sometime next year.
Rumors of Her Death is out in the USA right now! Worldwide release in October. (Pre)order links here: Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Bookshop.org / Dymocks (Australia)
Meanjin/Brisbane launch party October 21st at EC Venue.
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