If you are not the person who wins, then the finish line of a 1,500 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 meters 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 my self. 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 thing 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 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 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.”
“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 and 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 and locate a recognizable landmark before you can be sure you’re on the right track.
Burner and I fell into a nice rhythm right away and our feet clipped along almost in unison. We went back past all those houses where nobody cared and it felt fine and comfortable. Our breathing was the only conversation and it said that we were both relaxed and taking it easy. Some of the neighbourhood kids were still out shooting baskets in their driveways and practicing tricks with their skateboards.
We just floated down those anonymous sidewalks and carved our way though the maze of minivans and garbage cans. We made a turn and were just about to head back to the stadium when a bunch of kids came streaking past us on their bikes. There were four or five of them, a couple boys and a couple girls, probably between the ages of seven and nine. Real kids, not yet teenagers. One of the boys almost hit us as he went by and another one kept trying to jump his BMX up and down over the driveway cut-outs of the curb. There was a girl on a My Little Pony bike. She had multi-coloured beads on all her spokes and red and white streamers trailing back from her handlebars. Her hair was wispy and blonde. As she came by, she turned around and yelled “I’m faster than you are.” She sort of sang it in a mean, bratty way, using the same up-and-down teasing music that accompanies every “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.”
“You can’t catch me,” she said and she stuck her tongue out and pedalled harder. Her pink shoes swivelled around in circles.
One of the boys, a kid wearing a tough-looking camouflage T-shirt, zipped around us and swerved in tight to cut me off. As he pulled away, he shot us the finger and said “Nice tights, loser.”
I glanced over at Burner and said “Let it go,” but it was too late. His face was tightening up and that angry stare was coming back into his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me.
“Hey,” he yelled and you could feel the edges hardening around that one little syllable. He pulled ahead of me and started tracking them down. I was caught unprepared and a step behind and I couldn’t figure out how we had managed to arrive at this point. Burner was charging again and the kids were running. They didn’t know. There was no way on earth they could have known. The little girl was pedalling as fast as she could and there was this strange, high-pitched, wheezing sound coming out of her, but there was nothing she could do. Burner had already closed the gap and his hand was already there, reaching out for the thin strands of her hair. It all disintegrated after that. He must have been a foot taller than the oldest one.
Wonder About Parents
Lice. The third week. Head checks in the morning and head checks at night after the baths. You need to go slowly. A separate bath for every person. New water. Fresh pillow cases every night. New sheets. New blankets. The washing machine is going to die. Hats and T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts. Brushes and combs and hair elastics. Water boiling in the kettle. Everything that touches us needs to be scalded.