Race Across the Sky (24 page)

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O
n the eve of the Yosemite Slam, they attended a pre-race briefing out in the park.

Whatever Mack had expected in terms of numbers, Caleb thought, this had to be bigger than he had ever hoped for. Whether it was the Internet, or Mack's efforts at press, there were at least six hundred runners here. This was the kind of number Western States drew. Mack had really done this. It was, Caleb thought, something of a miracle.

The Happy Trails Running Club assembled at the front of a clearing by the Big Oak Flat entrance to Yosemite. Walking among the crowd, Kevin and Alice commented that some new force was present, tangible. They all felt it. Caleb was not sure if it was positive or threatening. Perhaps it was coming from the presence of the camera crews, the trucks, the rumors of this event's difficulty. Perhaps from some other source.

All day, the lines had grown for medical check-ins. All the entrants were weighed, their pulses taken, and given waivers to sign forgoing their rights to sue for any reason. Caleb came in at 173 pounds, up three from the Hardrock. He was given number 24.

As the sun slipped behind Glacier Point, a broad man in his fifties wearing a tan cowboy hat turned on a beige megaphone. Beside him stood Mack, his face hosting a long-toothed grin.

Kevin tapped Caleb's shoulder. “Barry Strong.”

Mack and Barry were nodding, looking out at the assembled entrants, at the camera marked
ABC SPORTS
, behind which stood a young man wearing headphones. The sun was falling rapidly, bathing the field in violet shadow.

Mack pointed to a young woman talking on a phone and gave a questioning shrug. She returned a thumbs-up. Barry adjusted his hat and began to address the crowd.

“Welcome to the Yosemite Slam!” he shouted into his megaphone.

Cheers went up and lasted a good two minutes. The producer flashed another thumbs-up at Mack. It seemed things were going well.

“I want you to take a good last look at yourselves. Okay? Because whoever you are tonight, you'll be somebody else from now on.”

More whooping and clapping. Barry handed the megaphone to Mack, who waved it manically. His voice sounded tinny and distorted through its plastic.

“As you can see, ABC is taping this event. You will see some cameras on the course, at positions we can get a cameraman to. Don't let them distract you.”

He looked around. An awkward stoppage of communication ensued. Eventually Barry took the megaphone back. He paced as he spoke.

“Okay, folks. Rule One. No bitching. I understand that a few newbies may be in attendance. So let me explain: you volunteered. We don't want to hear it.”

Still more cheering echoed across the field.

“Rule Two. Do not underestimate this terrain. These are old mining trails. We did our best to mark them. But animals may have run off with them. If you think you've left the course, turn around. Going off trail here can be fatal for about twelve dozen reasons.”

Caleb turned around. Was June here? He thought he might have seen her standing by John, obscured by his height.

“Yosemite has mountain lions. Grizzlies. Both have killed hikers in this park this year. They will attack a brightly dressed human running through their territory. We planned the course away from them, but we're not perfect listeners, and neither are they.”

Barry shuffled the papers in his hand, and the megaphone gave a shocking shriek of feedback.

“Okay, injury. We can get minimal supplies to the aid stations on mules. But rescue Jeeps and ATVs will not be able to reach you on about two-thirds of this course. Helivacs are not an option. You get hurt, you find your way to the closest aid station. We can get you out of the park from any of them, though it may be on an animal.

“Rule Three. Do not push. This is not the event to test your limits on. Walk. Rest. If you're thinking about dropping, drop. If it is determined at an aid station that it is in your best interest, you will be pulled.”

Barry Strong waited, narrowing his eyes, and looked at Mack with an expression of polite invitation to add a thought. Mack took the megaphone again but could not seem to think of anything to say.

“We have dinner in the camping area by the Ranger Station,” Barry concluded. “Please come by.”

The crowd rippled with excitement as they turned and dispersed. Caleb caught whispers of rumors, about the course, about the weather, about the news crews. The Happy Trails Running Club did not attend the pasta buffet. To the amazement of the other runners, they collected at the lodge bar, drinking beer and laughing until ten in the evening.

In the room he shared with Kevin, Hank, and Juan, Caleb carefully checked his drop bags, which had been packed with lightweight clothing for night and bad weather, shoes in increasing sizes, energy gels, water. As darkness fell, he would slip close to sleep, but halt there, touching vivid, mad visions. Finally he slept. At four, Kevin nudged him awake. He put benzoin on his feet, pausing to touch the oddly smooth skin where his toenails had been. He rubbed Vaseline on his body and partook of twenty minutes of lying meditation.

In the lobby he saw Lily and June, speaking with a middle-aged woman. Mack had arranged for Lily to stay with the lodge's owners. She was sitting up in a Pack 'n Play behind the front desk when Caleb last saw her. He thought June looked nervous; certainly leaving Lily here for two or three days would do that. He hoped it would not distract her on the course.

He opened the door and emerged into a chilly mist. Caleb wore red shorts, white and green striped Montrails, a yellow tank top. The seventeen members of the Happy Trails Running Club and their coach stood together in front of the lodge. Mack greeted them with great solemnity. This time, rather than shout his Whitman with joy, he spoke softly, slowly, with a rich resonance in his voice and an honesty in his eyes.

“‘O secret of the earth and sky. O winding creeks and rivers! Of you O woods and fields! Of you strong mountains of my land! O clouds! O rain and snows! O day and night, passage to you! I in perfect health begin, hoping to cease not till death. Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.'”

He nodded solemnly to each of them in turn.

Then he turned and they began to jog up a snaking service road to the opening of Big Oak Flat Road. A yellow banner strung between branches of black oak signified the start. The swelling crowd mingled there uneasily. Each had numbers written on their foreheads and shirts with black marker. A white ABC Sports van with a satellite on its roof was parked in the campgrounds lot. A reporter for the Outdoor Network stood by her own van, speaking into a camera. Light fog filtered through the trees, simultaneously enticing and foreboding.

The buzz of anxious runners swarmed over the field like mosquitoes, irritating Caleb considerably. Why can't they listen to the energy all around them, he wondered?

“I've been working all winter for this,” a wiry woman said to Caleb, laughing, “and now I don't want to do it.”

Caleb did not respond. Around him he heard the names of leading ultrarunners. The other name he heard everywhere was Steve Brzenski, whose death from a broken back had ended this event years ago.

Caleb inhaled hard, and jumped up and down. It did not matter whether it rained. It did not matter which elite runners were here. It did not matter whether someone had died. Caleb was not running against rain or Scott Jurek or the park. He was running into himself. He stood still, arms dangling at his sides. Later, Kevin Yu would say that the absence of his usual focus was obvious. But that morning, everyone had been concerned with his own race.

Barry Strong began speaking through his bullhorn, but it was hard to care about anything he said. In the sky a pink wave appeared like the wake of oncoming jets, revealing the distant peak of El Capitan rubbing against the belly of the sky.

He did not hear the gunshot. He just felt the crowd surge tentatively into the forest. Caleb shouldered past other runners, wove in and out until he was out front on the hard-packed dirt of Big Oak Flat Road. He should not be running this fast, he understood, but he had to get himself some space.

As Caleb disappeared into the park, Scott Jurek gestured at him, shaking his head. Someone else said that they would pass him heaving over a rock by Crane Creek.

Caleb, of course, never heard them.

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At ten o'clock that morning, Shane dismantled his lab.

His golf shirt stuck to his back like a desperate lover as he bent over the open cardboard boxes, which lay everywhere, tops flapping like hungry birds.

He had told himself he had no time for melancholy. He double-checked each box to make certain the right equipment was returned to the right company. Microscopes and Bunsen burners, beakers, corks, the stuff he had ignored in middle school, now forever symbols of his life's greatest risk.

He dumped the large bottles of media into the double sinks. The petri dishes full of multiplying black miracle spores he tossed into the garbage can. He did discover an emotional attachment to the chairs he had assembled in December and decided to leave them for whoever was renting the lab next.

But the gloves and droppers, the big computers, the cables, went into cardboard boxes, which he assembled one by one with packing tape and an X-ACTO knife. He stacked the boxes outside in the hall by all the other closed doors, like a freshman expelled from college. UPS was supposed to be picking it all up in an hour.

Except for the cooler. Fifty milligrams of Prajuk's humanized drug in small glass vials rested contentedly in a styrofoam nest inside, chilling at a perfect 51.7 degrees.

“It's seventy degrees outside,” Prajuk had explained, his voice high and slow. “The solution must be kept cold. You cannot be stuck in traffic.”

Shane agreed, feeling extremely off-balance. “I'll blast the AC.”

He rode the freight elevator down, carrying the cooler in his arms. It was more difficult than he had anticipated. Heavy, awkward, slippery, it was difficult to maintain a proper grip. He was breathing hard and felt unwell. The six months of worry and stress, that someone at Helixia would find out about the lab, of ignoring Janelle and Nicholas, of underperformance at work, over if what they were doing here would work, and Caleb not returning his calls, had all been far too much. It had launched an attack upon his systems. His sinuses throbbed, and he felt the stirrings of fever.

He desperately wanted to wipe the sweat dripping down his forehead as he stepped out into the bright day. Trying to get a better handle on the styrofoam, he blinked into the parking lot sun ricocheting off a dozen windshields.

Who was that, he squinted, leaning on his car?

“Hey,” Shane said as he approached.

A thin man with short blond hair was watching him, affecting friendliness. “You're Shane Oberest?”

Shane's fingers squeezed the cooler.

“Can you get off my car?”

The thin man pushed himself off the Civic and walked right up to him, violating norms, Shane thought, of personal space.

“What are you doing up there, guy?”

In this sun he couldn't quite see the man's expression, but his voice was tinged with acid.

“Excuse me,” Shane said, pushing past him.

The man grabbed his shoulder, and Shane whirled around, his fingers slipping down the cooler. Sunlight careened off the myriad of car mirrors, creating the effect of being inside of a moving marble.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Jon Benatti. From Helixia.”

The name struck Shane as somewhat important.

“I'm Deputy Director of Science. You're in a lot of trouble, boss.”

“You want to let go of me now.”

Benatti considered him and then took his hand away, and pointed at the building behind him. “You've got stolen property up there.”

“What are you talking about?”

Benatti's voice rose. “You took a protein from our gene library. One of our centrifuges. God knows what else. Whatever's in that box belongs to Helixia.”

Shane stared at him in disbelief. “It's medicine for a baby.”

“Give it to me.”

There was no choice at all. He shouldered Benatti hard, knocking him backward, and started for the passenger door. He balanced the cooler on his left knee, found his keys in his pocket, and pressed his keypad. He slipped the fingers of his right hand out from underneath the cooler to lift the trunk.

He felt the contact just after he registered the rush of wind, and the peculiar energy of a human being in full motion. The ugly feel of Benatti's bony body against him. The horror of the cooler slipping out of his hand, falling onto the parking lot blacktop, the styrofoam top flying off.

The sickening sound of the vials spilling onto the ground, the cracking of glass, and the sudden spilling of liquid.

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T
he trail wove through the forest like fine brown thread.

Caleb scanned the ground for rocks, loose roots, the occasional yellow lizard, anything that might trip him. Small bright birds darted out of the foliage, and red-tailed hawks floated above as if covering the race for ABC.

His stride was metronomic. His feet hit the earth lightly on their balls, regardless of whether he was leaping over a rock, or hit an unexpected dip in the ground. His breathing was perfect, his spine straight as pipe. A great confidence enveloped him; he had reached the point in his run where the cells of the body bind with those of the trees.

The first aid station came at Tuolumne Grove. A gray-haired official yawned in a chair behind a fold-up table. Plastic bowls of M&M's, energy gels, and bananas sat on the table; a cooler lay underneath. Hank was waiting for him beside the table. Hank was a huge live-music guy, always grabbing people for a run up to Catacombs, one of the happier and most helpful of the house. Caleb always blew by the first aid station, he knew, so he had prepared himself to start running as soon as he saw him cantering close. But surprisingly, Caleb stopped at the tent, grabbed a bottle of Powerade, and sat in a folding chair.

Other runners ran by for a bottle of water and back to the course; some didn't stop at all.

Hank took a tentative step toward him, his hand held out, as if about to touch a wound, when suddenly Caleb snapped his brown and earthy eyes open. He took the time to pour a salt packet into his sports drink. Then he stood and nodded, and they ran back onto the trail.

Hank ran out in front. He knew his role was to slow Caleb down, keep him from burning out. But Caleb never challenged him. In fact, turning around at one point, Hank had seen Caleb almost fifty yards behind him.

The course corkscrewed into a series of stunning ascents along narrow mining trails that had been closed for half a century. A yard to Caleb's left, the cliff dropped straight down to a canyon. On his right rose a solid wall of large pink-sheened granite rippling with blue veins. Rae had been right, of course; injury here would be fatal.

Eventually, they wound down into a canyon. With utter amazement, Hank watched Caleb run this stretch with his eyes fluttering closed.

Then he screamed.

Caleb whipped his head around. Hank was leaning against an oak, clutching his ankle, looking at the bottom of his sneaker.

“What?”

“Fucking acorn,” he said in a calmer voice, sweat pouring from his crew-cut head. “Let's just go.”

Later, Hank told Mack that he had been surprised by his ability to keep up with Caleb. They hit Jacob's Furnace just before noon, a shelf of exposed dark rock seven thousand feet in the air, under the burning midday sun. Caleb drained the last bottle of water in his pack and walked across the shelf trail. A wide stream circled below, taunting him with cool water to dive into. After a brutal hour he discovered himself at the top of a breathtaking gorge. Happily he watched hawks flying underneath him.

“Beautiful, right?” Hank smiled. “What a course.”

Alice was waiting to replace Hank at the next aid station. She handed Caleb a banana, and took off with him into the afternoon. The course flags marked a path down to a fast-moving stream. White caps gurgled where its water met the rocks. No rope line had been fixed; this was either a major oversight by Barry and Mack, or their first hint of just how dangerous this race would become.

Alice looked around. “No good,” she muttered.

Caleb waded into the water; immediately its force shoved him downstream. This was the answer. Rather than expend energy fighting the current, he let it push him like commuters exiting a subway as he walked, and crossed on a sharp diagonal, reaching the opposite bank two hundred yards downstream.

Alice followed him, but by the time she made it across, he was already disappearing into the distance, his long legs loping over the slippery gray rocks. Alice tried to pace him, but she was small, with stout legs, and when Caleb leapt like a palomino over a fallen stump, it was difficult for her to match him. Five miles in, she fell forever behind.

The light in the park turned a godly green. Prisms shone through the pine. Night, Caleb saw, was coming. At the Antibes aid station there was no one from Happy Trails waiting to meet him. Caleb found his drop bag, retaped his feet, put on a GoLite shell, fresh sneakers, and clipped a black rubber flashlight to his waist. He drank two cups of chicken broth, filled his water bottle, and left by himself.

Somewhere near Tamarack Flat, Caleb understood he had left the course. His eyes tried to adjust, but it was such a perfect blackness that he could not see the roots, rocks, or the steepness of the inclines. He stopped, enraptured by the woods around him. Above he saw a crescent moon among an initial gathering of stars. The world ahead felt like black water; Caleb imagined he could push his arms through it and swim upward, break the surface, and arrive somewhere entirely new.

In his peripheral vision he could make out pale purple silhouettes of sequoias, like pillars holding up Heaven. He stuck out a hand and stroked one; a tree that had stood here since Plato. In each of these trees, millions of insects were birthed, lived, mated, died, none aware that he was off of his trail, off his course. He felt he had it made it somewhere he had always guessed existed. He might wander in any direction, encounter any magic.

Caleb swept his flashlight around him, trying to find the small blue glow sticks that marked the course. He caught only the bizarre depths of nature, no less mysterious than space. In the distance—he hoped it was the distance—he heard the howl of something doglike.

And then, at last, his flashlight revealed a cluster of five blue glow sticks, removed from the trail and grouped together with definite intent. He closed his eyes thankfully.

When he opened them again, June was standing in front of him.

The moonlight bathed her face in alabaster. Caleb kissed her, stroked the back of her head.

“Okay,” he whispered, and they turned into the backcountry.