This Is Running for Your Life (37 page)

*   *   *

Whether time got away from me or caught up is hard to say; the shape of its shadow is the same. Returning home for the summer after my first year, both the city and I seemed much changed. My beloved friends had scattered, my parents were freshly divorced, and for weeks I looked for work without luck—all factors I am loath to cite as more than incidental to the ticking void that opened before me, and the haste with which I turned and hit the bricks.

I have felt extreme aversion, over the years, to figuring out what happened that summer. When asked how I came to spend my early and midtwenties running up to twenty miles a day (and does that convergence harbor meaning?), I realize that I'm still not sure. Certainly I've thought about it—what I have resisted is shaping a story, which, once set down, will become
the
story, when after all I am not certain there is one story, or one I am capable of telling, or one telling more truthful than any other. In trying to get at the
most
true version, all of the glaring facts of circumstance shrink behind the ropes, leaving the fixed limits of time—fight name:
Il Morte
—leaning coolly in one corner and the enigmatic, many-footed creature of discipline huffing and glowering in the other.

It's a word with as complicated a history as the most road-battered feet. Derived in English circa the thirteenth century as a term of penitential punishment,
discipline
comes from the Old French
descepline
, meaning variously physical punishment, teaching, suffering, and martyrdom. The Old French derivation's direct Latin root,
disciplina
(instruction given, teaching, learning, knowledge), is itself the heir of what we know more directly from the Bible as
discipulus
, or “disciple”—the object of instruction; pupil, student, follower—which is in turn derived from the compound
discipere
, meaning to analyze thoroughly, to grasp intellectually. Where things really go pear-shaped is the breakdown of
discipere
into
dis
, meaning “apart” and
capere
, “to take, to take hold of,” also the root verb of
capable.
Logically the infinitive suggests the intellectual analogy of taking a thing apart, figuring it out; literally it conjoins possession and separation into a divine conundrum.

That dumb, seething summer there seemed a prohibitive number of hours ahead, and a baseline of dread that extended further still. In the mornings I set out as usual around eight thirty, just as the sun was settling its warmth into the sky, coming fully awake through the second mile. By the third, when I would normally turn for home, the day's blankness bloomed with invitation: with nowhere to be I might go anywhere—or anywhere my body would take me. The farther I ran, the greater the sense of progression I needed to earn the day, and the less of that day I had to spend at excruciating rest. If discipline appeared to be the last of my old friends that summer, I soon gained a new understanding of its many applications. Having relied on it as a kid to instill narrative consistency at life's sentence level—to maintain a sense of both myself and the world—I began to explore its limits as a means to both separateness and self-possession.

I wore a Walkman, always. Although my mind worried and argued and drifted as well, at cruising speed it turned primarily to the present, ecstatic moment, the collision of music and consciousness with motion. I've directed hundreds of videos on foot, reorchestrated thousands of movie scenes, blocked a million heart-stopping shots. If, early on, I played with the theme of punishment, say, in pushing through the last few miles, it was only in the sense that I occasionally imagined being chased by Tauntauns, or making an end run for first place while a row of dazed ex-boyfriends looked on. On well-defined terms I felt free to get lost within myself, territory that otherwise felt increasingly foreign and unfriendly. I even enjoyed getting lost in the streets, sometimes pitching myself deep into unknown trails and suburbs just so I could find my way out.

In this way I threaded through otherwise unpatterned hours, stitching their surface with a design that described time without being
of
it. The afternoons had no such scheme, so that the clock and I slipped, each day, into dull antagonism. When we talk about
killing
time, we refer to the banal death of disappearance; to kill time successfully is to have no memory of its passing. I labored through the ear-ringing boredom of the siesta hours with tools that included the entire Jane Austen canon, the endless O. J. Simpson trial, the garage's gardening arsenal, and dozens upon dozens of hollowed-out eggs, which I decorated—bent over murderously tiny scissors, glue and glaze pots, and decaled origami paper—in the Japanese style. The evening's soreness, when it came in, felt like purpose, the next day's route like plot.

I had never spent so much time alone, at such a stretch. Initially, at least, the novelty of extreme solitude suited me. If nothing else it was the endgame of what appeared to be my goal: a life free from not just conformity but the whole concept of choice. What a drag, this having to
choose
and then forever do/love/be that chosen thing. What a fiasco. The thought of committing to any one of the selves racked up before me like labeled garment bags—aspirant, striver, student, daughter, desired thing,
woman
, wife, mother, Catholic, Canadian, girlfriend,
girl
, straight, white, mammal, material, extant—filled me with dismay, so that even my clear choices were executed as halfsies. With no clear way forward I invested heavily in a personal hedge fund, opting for solitude whenever grazed by expectation and drifting, for all my will and granitic intent on the road, into a greater passivity. That being a social refusenik was not my nature only enhanced the challenge and the bitter purity of its reward. I started turning down invitations and stopped taking calls out of spite for the silence surrounding them: if loneliness is life's abiding, unifying certainty, then make me an expert of loneliness; make me the loneliest person in the world.

From those first outings in May, my route doubled every couple of weeks, an exponential loop that eventually traced London's outer limits. Having never seen my city from its distant sidewalks and soft shoulders, I mapped it out to the corners with a prospector's constancy. By July's height I was out for three hours at a stretch, sometimes more. Out there too, life's options shrank to a vicious few: the experience of running through to the far side of pain was an ecstatically private triumph; fatigue, boredom, illness, compact-size blisters—I braked for nothing. Each day's effort fueled a self-drama of exertion, of consuming endless swaths of pavement, the hours dissolved through my skin and dried to a saline dust on its surface. Here were the raw expressions of discipline: blood and sweat, of me and yet outside me. I ran and I ran, taking godly comfort in the endurance shoring my bones and in knowing that no matter how far I went, I had the strength to carry myself home.

Though I began to bristle when pule-ish terms like
jog
,
jogging
, or
jogger
were applied to my travels, I refused to be wholly a
runner
as well. The notoriously scant basics of the sport eluded me; I ran as though a gunshot sent me flying out the front door each morning with whatever I had on my back. In the time it took to look into things like a proper sports bra, bulletproof sunscreen, balanced nutrition, and well-engineered footwear, permanent damage was done in the form of scarring, freckling, anemia, and a couple of extra bones.

It wasn't intentional in that it was not really conscious: even as metal fixtures rubbed wounds into my chest and back each day, it never fully occurred to me to address the matter. It never occurred to me that discipline could be a fickle companion, chimerical in form and purpose, loyal chiefly to its own insinuation. I thought I was writing a story of grit and perseverance, but for all of my exploring, my seeming kinetic engagement, rather than striking a balance with the world beyond my body and its powers, I had hit upon a way—even from moment to moment—to disappear.

In August I began to talk of feeling bad for my body, as though it were a neighbor who had just lost his job adjusting insurance. Fellow runners inquired of me in the presumed common language of distance and time—the metrics of control—frowning when I told them I didn't enter races and always ran alone; the lack of a finish line and the avoidance of crowds were kind of the point. I pitied them, I really did.
You don't run like I run
, I thought.
We're not the same
.

An extended-family member and frequenter of 10K charity runs became fixed on my refusal to bring a water bottle on my treks. I had to wonder that it wasn't perfectly obvious: I don't carry water, even for myself.

*   *   *

Late that summer I made my course selections for the coming year, organizing a schedule around the occupied zone that was now the morning hours. Because I was couch surfing, three to four days a week, off campus in my mother's midtown Toronto apartment, consolidating to limit commutes was priority number two. If a class met those conditions, I might consider enrolling.

Of greatest interest to me that year was a course on auteur theory—a study of four directors over two semesters: Howard Hawks, François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Martin Scorsese. Rumor had it that the professor hailed from New Jersey, had a terrifying background in semiotics, and was tougher than buffalo jerky. At the time cinema studies still suffered from its avian reputation, and every film professor I had—including this one—introduced the class with a bad Lee Ermey impression, urging those students who had signed on for a semester's nesting to watch their asses on the way out. I always thought a little less of them after that.

The auteurism class, held in the clammy auditorium at Innis College, the cinema studies department's home base, met twice a week—screening on Monday, lecture on Tuesday. During the break in the second week's talk, a boy seated behind me spied the
Sassy
sticker affixed to my binder's inside margin. The sticker referred to a progressive young women's magazine—often secretly read by intrepid young men—that had folded the previous year. It was my first subscription, and the mourning was heavy. Some part of the magazine's appeal, which I read throughout high school, was that no one else knew it existed.

“I like your
Sassy
logo,” he said, leaning forward. His voice was vintage So-Cal skate park: reedy but amiable, super-enthused. “Were you a fan?” After my happily indefatigable former roommate, the tall, tea-green-eyed, endlessly solicitous senior attached to that voice became the second of the two people, total, that I came to know over four years of university.

The auteur theory is an ungainly animal, and our instructor took the ten-foot-pole approach, presenting the notion of the director as a film's sole author as ours to “unpack”—a term I hadn't heard before university and didn't hear again until I enrolled in graduate school. Part of the year's work was deciding whether to emigrate to the floating, pseudo-exceptionalist kingdom of auteurism or whittle the spears that would send it caroming like a flatulent French
ballon
back to earth. Somewhat at odds with this was our plotting of each of the four directors on a map that was never firmly pinned to the table; one corner was always peeling up. The famously pan-genre work of Howard Hawks put up a terrific fight: certain of his films would inevitably scramble the meticulously cracked codes of the others. The rule there seemed to be that when faced with, say, Joan Collins's canine performance as a Cypriot princess in Hawks's only historical epic,
Land of the Pharaohs
, one should avert one's eyes or formulate an exception that proved the rule. Auteurism's sketchy diagnostics put it always on the brink of submitting to the interpretive soothsaying of ascribed intent. Because of this, its study served as a spot test for budding academics: either you took joy in the premise of unlimited speculation or it filled you with horror. If horror struck because yours was the obviously and only correct speculation, you became a critic.

Auteurism, unlike
Land of the Pharaohs
, is much easier to grasp in context. A product of the French cohort of critics behind
Cahiers du Cinéma
in the 1950s, it reflected the move to raise cinema to the level of literature—painting, music, theater—as a storytelling art. Still a coltish medium, film's champions—several of whom, including Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol went on to become directors themselves—were compelled to define it against the traditional artistic rubric of individualism.

Like the film professors who framed the mortal rigor of their coursework as half a notch below that of a winter term in the gulag, the study of film in its second fifty years was plagued by the perspirant whiff of overcompensation. To force all credit onto one artist and cohesion across a broad, inevitably business-inflected body of work is to escape the question of cinema's unique nature. All films, like all lives, are collaborative efforts with varying levels of leadership, vision, and exertions of style. No art is as lifelike, and as like life—never more so than in its surly coming of age, when fronting as a solo act seemed like the path to self-definition.

*   *   *

Heading into the auditorium the next Monday, I found Rafe, my
Sassy
co-fan, seated in my usual front-row spot, smiling. We were watching
Jules et Jim
, Truffaut's fiercely romantic World War I–era love triangle, and the experience of absorbing it in combination with the near-radiant designs of the body beside mine made a larger predicament plain: I had managed to trap myself between a girl's interest in the novelty of her own desirousness and the suspicion that there was something fundamentally embarrassing about being a young woman.