Blind Sight (12 page)

We’re not allowed to do any of our training runs on my cross-country team while listening to music. Part of it is a safety thing, but also our coach wants us to really forge unity on our team, and not shut each other out with headphones.

It’s important for us to forge unity because in cross-country the sum of the top five times of your team makes up your score. But on our team, we only have five runners total. (Our school has a long tradition of barely making up a cross-country team.) So on our team, everybody counts. It also means that nobody on our team can quit the team. Or get sick. Or injured. It’s a pretty motivating factor, knowing that if you quit you’ve just destroyed the team.

I signed up for cross-country freshman year. I was attracted to running because it seemed challenging, and also peaceful. I was pretty heavily recruited too. That’s not because I displayed some sort of incredible ability right off the bat. Two members of the previous team had just graduated, and the remaining three members were pretty desperate. At that point, my high school had never won a cross-country meet, ever, and recruitment was difficult. Cross-country is not glamorous, the conditions are often pretty rough, you have to train vigorously, and hardly anybody makes it through a season without finding themselves on their knees trying not to yack. We don’t have cool uniforms or a band or cheerleaders. We don’t have a bus that takes us to invitationals or meets. We go in Coach’s van. We train in the fall, when the other sport that’s going on is football. That means our little five-member team changes into shorts and T-shirts in a corner of a locker room populated by the largest guys in our school, whose equipment probably weighs more than we do.

Sophomore year, this guy Ivan Lowell transferred to our school and joined the team, which was great for Tim, because he wanted to focus more on violin, so he was able to quit. Ivan and I started trading off times.

Sometimes Ivan was faster, and sometimes I was. That worked well because whoever was slower in one practice session would then try to be faster than the other in the next one. So we both ended up getting pretty fast and last year we were in the top five of every meet, and that got our team score down low enough to actually win a few.
In fact, we ended up almost winning regionals. Ivan thinks we have a real shot at State next year. It’s kind of a long shot, but if Raj and Nick really step up, and Ethan sticks it out, who knows? We might even be able to recruit some of the guys from track to join us now that we’ve won some meets.

Ivan will be our team captain next year. We voted him that unanimously at the end of the season. Raj said that if I wanted to be team captain the other guys would vote for me, but I thought that Ivan wanted it more than me, and really wanting to lead other people is the one leadership quality I lack. It seems like a crucial one. Also I think I’m going to be running faster than Ivan this year pretty consistently, and being team captain will help him deal with that, so all around it worked out for the best.

Our last team captain was David Pollen, but he just graduated. David always led us in prayer before races. That’s not a school thing, praying, but David thought we should pray and nobody really objected (we are a mild-mannered team) and Coach thought it might help forge unity. Sometimes we would pray for specific things or people: “Lord, we ask that you be especially with Raj today as he just had dental work and is in pain.” When I say “we” prayed, I mean David prayed and the rest of us said “Amen” whenever he finished talking.

Running can be very meditative, because there is a pain point that you have to work through and if you let yourself get caught up in that, you are toast. I’ve tried to use some of the techniques you use in yoga. You are supposed to identify what hurts, acknowledge it, and then send it acceptance and love. I can’t say that I have ever truly loved burning lungs or quads, or the shooting pains that occur in the ankles, but if love means that you have learned not to resent something, then I guess I have loved.

A more useful technique I use is to call myself different names at different points in a race. You start off all lined up together in a bullpen at the start line and then you run toward the flags that narrow the course down. You want to run this pretty fast to get in with
the top guys. It’s a defensive kind of sprinting you need to do, because there is some trampling to be avoided. So for this part of the race I call myself Shade of Mercury. As the Shade of Mercury, I have the ability to move past other runners because I am not in corporeal form. Once the course becomes narrower I shift into Bolo Softsole. As Bolo, I can run the first mile and a half at my optimum pace, putting as much distance between myself and the other runners as I can. Bolo handles rough terrain well, due to his very soft soles, which keep him light and agile.

Somewhere between two miles and the last four hundred yards is where Stoke Fireforge comes in. Stoke is a running machine. He churns. He must run because if he does not, the Earth will stop rotating on its axis and darkness will cover the land. He has a task to do and it’s not up to him to question the task.

Unfortunately for Stoke, there comes a point where he gets attacked by dwarves. They attach themselves to his ankles in order to slow him down. The dwarves are very, very, very heavy. I don’t like to think about this part.

The last four hundred yards is where I became Luke Skywalker. Yeah, I know. But when my sisters came to meets, they positioned themselves at the last four hundred, and they used to scream the theme song for
Star Wars
for me. Even if they weren’t there, I would do it in my head. I used to think of the finish chute as that narrow lane that Luke has one shot of firing into in order to destroy the Death Star.

I guess my feelings about being part of a team, and running in general, have changed over the past three years. At first I just really liked running. It was painful, and hard, but it was also pleasantly hypnotic, like a physicalized mantra: one foot in front of the other, the other, the other, the other. I liked the other guys on the team, we were all friends and sat together at lunch and did stuff together away from school. Ivan became sort of my best friend, we got faster, Nick joined the team and he’s really funny, and so on.

But last year things started to change, right after we won our
first meet. That made it more serious. Before that, there was just no way we were going to win, and it was all about finishing and being these underdogs that were doing it for the love of sport. Suddenly we all got more intense. Coach got excited and started really riding the other three guys on our team. Nick and Raj were okay with it, but Ethan became this, like, miserable wreck. All of us said stuff to him like, “Ethan, all you have to do is finish. Your one job is to make it to the chute. If you give it your all, then you’re our best runner, because you’re the one it’s hardest for, and that makes you the toughest guy on the team,” etc. Sometimes I would say to him, “It’s okay if you quit,” because he would always say back, “I’m not quitting,” and just saying that amped him up a little bit. You have to do things like that, because in theory a cross-country team is only as good as its weakest runner. It’s not about individuals.

But after I finished first out of all the runners for the first time, I noticed that I started becoming, well, kind of obsessed with winning. With me, Luke, winning, as opposed to our team winning. I don’t get upset if our team loses, as long as I’m first. I can’t explain it exactly. There’s some particular high that I get going into that chute first. I just really want it. Sara would say that it is Ego, and that’s probably right. And even though I know I should release my Ego, and still run with the same spirit of the guy I was when I was finishing in the bottom third, I can’t help myself. It’s almost like a possessive feeling. I want to own that chute, and have everybody else be the people that came after me.

My sisters were both at college last year, so they weren’t at meets anymore, and I didn’t sing the
Star Wars
theme in my head. To be totally honest, what I’m thinking for the last part of a race now is something along the lines of, “MINE, MINE, MINE.”

I think maybe I could do sort of a humorous essay about running and my secret names, but
50 Successful College Application Essays
warns against the humorous essay. Also, it probably wouldn’t get me into Caltech.

I should really take a shower.

• • •

By the time Luke is out of the shower, Mark is home, having only been called in to a short day on the set of
The Last
. They are now going to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for the Rothko retrospective.

At the museum, Mark rents headphones so they can listen to the audio lecture, but at a certain point they agree that the lecturer’s voice is annoying and they want to stop listening and just look at the paintings.

“These,” Mark says, “are really great paintings.”

“These,” Luke agrees, “are now my favorite paintings.”

They sit down on a bench in front of the last piece and look at it for awhile: an orange square floating in a larger yellow rectangle, the edges of the paint faintly blurred and thin. There seems to be an additional rectangle floating on top of the orange one, but the yellow has mostly swallowed this.

“I feel like I’m watching it,” Mark says. “Do you know what I mean? Like I’m not just looking at it.”

“Like you are observing it. Like it’s happening right now.”

“Exactly,” Mark says. “Would this be, like, a Zen moment we are having?”

Luke laughs.

“I don’t think so. People think of any peaceful moment as being Zen, and Buddhism as being all passive and gentle, but that’s not always the case. It was Buddhist monks that convinced the kamikaze pilots in World War II to sacrifice themselves.”

“I love the Nana stuff you wrote, by the way. So your Nana is really Christian and your mom is …?”

“She would call herself a Pantheist,” Luke says. “Pearl calls her the Sony Cineplex of belief.”

“Does it offend you that I swear?” Mark asks.

“Oh, no,” Luke laughs. “Everybody swears.”

“You don’t,” Mark says. “I don’t think I’ve heard you swear yet.”

“Well, I swear mostly in extreme situations,” Luke answers. “Or just in my head. But I have no problem with it. It’s more that I’ve grown up with this emphasis on words, and word choice, so …”

“No, it’s good,” Mark says. “You speak like a gentleman.”

“I say ‘yeah,’ though,” Luke points out. “Nana hates that. It should be ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah.’ ”

Mark and Luke turn back to the Rothko painting.

“But you never got saved, or born again, or anything like that?” Mark asks, after a moment.

“Well, actually,” Luke begins, and then pauses. The gallery is beginning to get more crowded, and Luke thinks that the couple off to their left has recognized Mark. This turns out to be the case, and Mark autographs the couple’s museum map.

“Let’s go walk around outside,” Mark suggests. “The La Brea Tar Pits are next door.”

It is possible to wander around cordoned areas of tar pits. Luke is intrigued by their smell, and the proximity of thirty-thousand-year-old Ice Age fossils still unexcavated lying so close to Wilshire Avenue, where you can get Mexican fast food, and office supplies.

“You were saying?” Mark asks, after they talk about the smell. “About getting saved?”

“Well, a weird thing happened to me once,” Luke says, slowly. “When I was at Assembly. I was just sitting there, kind of thinking my own thoughts, and I don’t know why, but I flipped open my Bible and put my finger down, you know, randomly, just to see what it would land on?”

“What did it land on?” Mark asks.

“ ‘
For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again,
’ ” Luke quotes.

Mark asks him to repeat it, which Luke does.

“So that’s, like, you get what you give, right?” Mark asks.

“Yes,” Luke says. “And, well, I read it over a couple of times and then I got this really weird feeling, almost like the feeling you get
when you are getting the flu. Like your bones and joints ache and you feel about a half step removed from everything around you?”

“Okay,” Mark says. “Interesting. Go on.”

“It was exactly like what a lot of people describe as a moment of getting saved, but in reverse,” Luke explains. “Because you are supposed to have, like, an overwhelming feeling of radiance, or love, or maybe even something happens, and you see something or do something. I mean it doesn’t have to be huge, like you lift up a car or anything like that. But your whole body is supposed to respond very intensely and you just KNOW that the moment has come.”

“But you’re saying that it happened in reverse for you?”

“Well … I mean I didn’t feel any radiance or light or anything like that. I felt heavy, and tired, but also … detached. I felt a certainty, but not the kind of certainty that I was supposed to feel.”

Mark and Luke are no longer walking at this point, but standing at the southern end of the tar pits, where a giant fiberglass family of mammoths has been erected in a reenactment scenario: a mother mammoth flounders in the tar as her mate and baby look on from the safety of dry land. An explanatory placard describes the “helplessness” of the father and baby mammoth. The baby appears especially distressed: its fiberglass trunk is lifted in panic.

“You know how if you say a word over and over, a bunch of times, it loses its meaning and starts sounding incredibly weird?” Luke asks.

“Yeah, for sure,” Mark says. “It was like that?”

“Well, in a way it was. I read that one verse over and over and I just moved farther and farther away from it, and I thought, ‘Well, this is all just
nonsense.’
I guess it finally really occurred to me that everybody else around me, they actually
believed
all this stuff. I mean, really, really
believed
it. And then I knew that I wasn’t going to give anything to God, and so I wasn’t going to get anything back. I couldn’t give anything to God. I didn’t believe in God. And it wasn’t just a part of me that felt that, or the rational part of me, or the skeptic part of me. It was all of me. My
body
didn’t believe. My
body was like, rejecting the whole thing. Not just the idea of religion, or organized religion, or Christianity, but the entire idea of God, of anything separate from myself. Of belief in belief without evidence.”