IF NOT

FOR
YOU…
by
Kim Bellard

Copyright © Kim Bellard 2004

All Rights Reserved
If Not For You

Chapter 1

He awoke in a torrent of sensation.

Imagine a poor sailor waking up stranded on a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a hurricane.
The rain comes down in almost solid sheets of water, driven in every direction by the
raging winds that make the water feel more solid than liquid when it hit. The ocean itself
cascades into mountain-sized waves that rise and then crash down with an explosion of
water and sound that, itself, is lost in the thunderous howl of the wind. All of these
combine to create a world that is neither water nor air, neither light nor dark, but
something that is all of those at once. The hapless sailor loses even the certainty of
knowing which direction is up and which is down, and each time he takes a breath he can
never be sure whether his lungs will fill with air or water. Life becomes a series of
terrifying moments that each seem to last longer than eternity, and from each moment to
the next the sailor cannot know if he will live yet another such moment or has already
been condemned to hell.

If you could interrupt to ask the sailor to describe what he was experiencing, he almost
certainly could not. At some point the experience becomes too overwhelming, and
keeping one’s sanity is all anyone could ask for. No one could blame the sailor for losing
that sanity, or for deciding to give up and simply allow himself to sink beneath those
waves into the quiet depths of the dark waters.

Now imagine that the sailor has no memory of how he came to be trapped in the storm –
and has no concept of wind or water or sound or, indeed, of any kind of sensation. That
is the world that this particular man woke to. He was no sailor, and this was no
hurricane; this was something altogether different. But what it was, he could not say.

To call him a man is, of course, simply for convenience’s sake. He did not know if he
was male or female, and had no understanding of what either word meant or even what a
human being was – if he was or ever had been, in fact, human. All he knew was that he

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If Not For You

was being bombarded by sensations he did not understand, could not make sense of, and
could not control.

Things felt different to him, somehow. Everything was so raw and so intense that it must
be new. Perhaps he had just come into this strange world and was being forced to make
sense of it for the first time. Or perhaps he had been there for all time and each moment
felt the strangeness as though it was for the first time. He did not know – he could not
know – but he despaired at the task of taking it all in. It was too much. It was too hard.
Better to not try, to simply slip back into wherever he had been, where all these crowded
sensations would be silenced.

It would be easy. It would be natural. Nothing made sense to him. He didn’t belong
here. Nothing belonged here. He could think of no reason to stop himself from drifting
back into the oblivion that had apparently been his world until just a few moments ago.
It would be quiet there, and he would not be bothered by all these things that he could
make no sense of. He didn’t know the words for peace and quiet, but he knew enough to
want all this to stop. He only had to let go.

But he didn’t.

Part of him – a part of him that he didn’t know he had and couldn’t ask for help from –
told him to not give up, urged him to just hold on. There was no good reason to do so
that he knew of, but still that little sense of not quite being ready for the final silence
nagged at him. He didn’t know who he was or what he was, but he knew he could try to
hang on a little longer.

It was something he was good at.

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If Not For You

Chapter 2

Leah Hutchins stood by the hospital bed. The patient had been flown from overseas after
a few days in intensive care in a local hospital after his collapse. Once the doctors had
been convinced he was stable, they acceded to his family’s request to fly him home with
a team of American doctors watching over him every step of the way. They hoped that
there would be something that the specialists at the University hospital could do for him;
if not, then at least he would be closer to friends and family.

She wasn’t sure what she was doing there. She hadn’t known Dan Peterson all that long,
and it would be presumptuous of her to say that she knew him all that well. Despite that,
she’d been present at the events that led him to being in this condition, and she’d been the
one who’d taken the long flight back with him, making sure he got here safely. Her and
the impersonal yet efficient medical team, hovering over him constantly, fighting the
latest challenge to their presumption of power over the various maladies that attack the
human body.

Still, that didn’t quite explain why she was standing here in the room with him, several
days after his return. He certainly didn’t care, or so it would appear. He was in good
hands now, and there really wasn’t anything more she could do here. She watched his
slow breathing, almost hypnotic in its regularity. He looked so frail, and she didn’t like
seeing him like that.

“Oh, good – you’re still here,” a voice said from behind her. Leah turned to see Christine
Sterling, Dan’s younger sister. Christine was cute in a pert sort of way, with curly
strawberry blonde hair that Leah suspected owed more to a stylist than to genetics. Leah
was sorry she hadn’t met her under different circumstances, but her sense was that
Christine was more outgoing than her brother was even at his best. She had been the
family’s social director, introducing her parents to the staff and shepherding them around
the hospital and the town. “I’m glad I caught you. Thanks again for bringing him back,
Ms. Hutchins.”

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If Not For You

“It’s not like I really did anything,” Leah protested, looking over at Dan. “I just rode
along.” She paused for a moment, while Christine continued to smile at her. She felt
compelled to say more. “I just happened to be there.”

“Well,” Christine said, smiling bravely, “my parents and I want to thank you anyway.
You did more than you had to. And your stories about him were all so great.”

Leah forced her eyes away from the oblivious patient. She looked at Christine
sympathetically. “I liked – I mean, I like – Dan.” She blushed at her inadvertent use of
the past tense, and couldn’t resist stealing a quick glance over at Dan in the unlikely case
he might have noticed. Her voice softened unconsciously, as though he might be
disturbed by their conversation. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

This time they both looked over. He looked so small and vulnerable in the bed there,
totally sleeping, like a young child. He was hooked up to an IV drip and connected to
various wires, with an impressive array of monitors behind him. One of them was
beeping very softly in a regular rhythm, reassuring them that his heart was holding stable.
Eventually, if he didn’t wake up soon, they’d have to marr his beautiful body with
feeding tubes, but that would come later. His heart and lungs were working on their own
again, and he could survive for a while longer with the IV feeding him fluids and some
nutrients. Needing help to stay alive wasn’t something that either of them would have
ever foreseen for him.

“So you have to get back to your family?” Leah asked, needing to fill the quiet with
something other than the monitor’s constant reminder of his precarious existence.

Christine nodded sadly. “It’s been tough on my husband even for these couple of days,
what with the store and all. Everyone’s been very helpful and all, but the boys are a
handful. My parents will come back when they can, but they’ve got the dairy farm and

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If Not For You

they really can’t stay away long. So it’s up to you.” She smiled tightly, stealing an
almost embarrassed glance at her brother.

If she was surprised by, or resented, this imposition of responsibility, she didn’t let it
show. “I’ll look in on him,” Leah promised, meaning it. “I’m sure he’ll have lots of
friends coming by too, but I’ll be sure to keep checking in on him.”

“We appreciate it.”

The two women smiled at each other, sizing each other up in the way women do. They
weren’t competitors for him, not in any real way, but each wanted to know how she
stacked up against the other. Leah was closer to Dan’s age – he was five years older than
Christine – and she was both taller and fuller-figured than Christine. Leah was by no
means heavy; it was that Christine was thin as a board, like her brother, although clearly
less muscled. Leah’s hair was short and dark, with soft brown eyes that invited people to
say more than they intended to her. Christine thought Leah quite pretty and wondered
what her brother thought of her. When he had first mentioned her, pretending to be
casual, she’d thought she detected something in his voice that indicated he found
something interesting about her, but it had been over the phone and only briefly, so she
couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just sisterly intuition acting up. She’d had to drag out of him
how he’d met her, and he had seemed as surprised as she was by Leah’s professional
interest in him.

Both women turned as the neurologist came in, trailed by his usual complement of
residents and students. He was younger than she would have expected him to be and as
good looking as television prepared viewers to believe all doctors were. He greeted them
briefly and quickly picked up the chart, scanning it for any changes. He checked Dan’s
pulse, rolled back an eyelid, and listened to his chest, then made a few notes in the chart.
He handed the chart to one of the students, who looked at it and passed it on. “Sorry to
disturb you, ladies,” he said gently. “Ms. Hutchins, and – you’re Dan’s sister, but your
name isn’t Peterson, is it? Let’s see --”

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If Not For You

“Sterling,” Christine offered, smiling at him.

“That’s right, Mrs. Sterling. I’m glad I caught you before you left. I missed saying
goodbye to your parents.”

“They were sorry to miss you as well. Anything new, Dr. Tollefson?”

He sighed and took a quick look over at his patient. The other doctors and would-be
doctors grew even more silent, wanting to be sure to catch any insight he might have to
offer. “No, nothing new. Let’s see, the family signed the permission form to let Ms.
Hutchins here have access to his information, right?”

“Yes, since we can’t be here as much as we’d like we want you to treat Leah like one of
the family,” Christine said. Leah had protested being granted the privilege, but the
family had been insistent. It was a sign of how much they had come to trust her, for
some strange reason. Leah felt she didn’t deserve it, and wasn’t sure she wanted it. For
one thing, she wished that Dan got to decide for himself who should know these most
intimate facts. It also obligated her to him somehow. That may have been part of his
family’s reason for doing it – unconsciously, of course – but she liked to think that she
would have wanted to keep track of how he was doing without the implied duty to do so.

“Well, OK,” he continued. “You really have to be realistic about what to expect. It’s
very good that he is breathing on his own. His heartbeat is steady, just very slow, but
some of that is because he was a runner and his pulse was apparently always low. But
there still is no brain activity that would indicate he is coming out of the coma.”

“How long is he likely to stay like this?” Christine asked, although she and everyone else
had asked the same question several times, in several ways, over the past few days, each
time hoping for a different, more definitive response.

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If Not For You

Tollefson shook his head wearily. “It’s like I said before. He could come out of this in a
couple days, a month, or a year.”

“Or he could never come out of it,” Christine said quietly, her smile extinguished and her
terror showing despite her brave face.

Tollefson nodded grimly. “That’s possible too.”

Chapter 3

Leah stayed in the hospital room for another hour, sitting quietly by his bed. It was a
habit she had somehow gotten into since he had gone into the coma. It wasn’t something
she particularly enjoyed, and she didn’t have any real sense that she was helping him in
any real way, but she hated the thought of leaving him alone. Rationally, she knew that
he wouldn’t be alone – the hospital was full of staff popping in and out of his room – and
that he was not capable of noticing anything anyway, yet here she was again.

“Oh, you’re still here,” one of the nurses exclaimed as she came through the door. She
didn’t stop but briskly moved to the bedside, where she fiddled with the IV.

“Mary, right?” Leah asked. She had met her, and several other nurses, over the past few
days, but she was easily the most outgoing and approachable.

“That’s right,” she answered, not taking her eyes from Dan as she took his temperature.
“And you’re…Leah. You’re the writer.”

“How’s he doing?” Leah asked, standing up and wishing she could help.

Mary looked over at her sympathetically. She’d been a nurse for almost twenty years,
and had seen more upset friends and families at patients’ bedsides than she could

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remember. Yet each one was different, and each showed their pain – and their hope – in
different ways. If she had not been graced with a calm and reassuring nature by birth,
her twenty years had helped her acquire it. “About the same, honey,” she said softly.
She recorded her observations in the chart and headed towards the door. She paused
before leaving. “I’m off shift tomorrow, but I’ll see you day after, OK?”

Without intending to, Leah took at quick glance at Dan before answering, and
unconsciously lowered her voice. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it the
next couple days,” she said. “I have a lot of work to catch up on.”

Mary nodded sympathetically, clearly not believing her. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”

Leah drove home and let herself into her apartment. She had rented it for the past five
plus years. It was half of a two-flat near the university – far enough away so that the
surrounding houses weren’t all full of rowdy students, but close enough that there was
still the University flavor to the neighborhood. It was a two bedroom apartment, and had
seen better days, but it was home by now. She’d cleaned, painted, and decorated it over
the years so that it suited her well by now. She supposed she could afford to move to a
newer place by now, or even buy a small house or a condo, but she rationalized that she’d
rather spend the money traveling.

She dropped her keys on the table in the entryway and took off her shoes. She went into
the kitchen and sat at the table while she checked her messages and sorted through the
handful of mail. There was nothing urgent in either. She poured herself a glass of wine
and went into the bathroom to draw herself a bath, adding some scented bubbles. While
the water filled, she took off her clothes and put them neatly away. Humming to herself,
she took her glass of wine and her mobile phone and eased herself into the hot bath,
sighing softly with the pleasure of it.

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If Not For You

Relaxing in the tub was one of her time-honored ways of relaxing. She supposed it was
almost an anachronism, but she didn’t really care. Life was so busy that she relished
these moments of quiet luxury. She rubbed lotion carefully over her body. Her thirtieth
birthday had been a few months ago, but she thought she was holding up pretty well. She
didn’t exercise as much as she should, and didn’t eat as carefully as she might, but her
figure was still trim and her face was still largely unlined. She’d never had trouble
attracting men, although she couldn’t say that she’d always had the wisest judgment
about her suitors.

Speaking of which, the phone rang. She checked the phone to confirm her suspicion.
“Hi, Rick,” she said.

Rick Moore was her latest beau. He was pushing forty, and was a highly successful
lawyer in one of the big downtown firms, mostly specializing in corporate law. They’d
met at a party and he’d been as intrigued by her profession almost as much as by her
looks. He asked her out to dinner within minutes of meeting her, and she’d boldly
accepted, starting what had now been a nine month relationship. “Where are you?” he
asked.

“In the bath.”

He chuckled. “Now there’s a mental image. Maybe I should come join you.”

She already had a feeling for how this conversation was going to go. “And how long
would I have to stay in the tub here before you got here?”

“Ah,” he hedged, “that’s the thing. I’ve probably got another hour or so of work left.”

Translated into Rick-speak, that meant closer to two hours at a minimum. “I think I’d be
shriveled up by then,” she told him.

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If Not For You

“Maybe you could get under the covers and keep warm until I get there.”

“Maybe.”

“Hey, have you had dinner? I could pick up some Chinese.”

In fact, she hadn’t eaten. On other nights she might have agreed to his offer of food and a
tumble in bed, but for some reason she wasn’t feeling like company. “I don’t know,” she
said at last. “I think I’ll pass. I’m a little beat.”

Rick was someone used to getting his way, but he was a shrewd enough judge of
character to gather from her tone that she wasn’t just playing hard to get. “Hard day?”

Leah really hadn’t done much. She’d intended to get back to a magazine article she was
supposed to be working on, but she’d wanted to see Dan’s sister before she left and so
had ended up staying at the hospital longer than she’d intended. “Oh, not so bad. I’m
just home and relaxed. I think I’ll make a salad and go to bed early tonight, catch up on
my sleep.”

“OK,” Rick said, after a pause that indicated he thought her decision was not the wisest
one. “Did you go to the hospital today?”

She had to give him credit. He might be pushy and self-centered, but he could figure
people out when he wanted to. He just didn’t always choose to. “Yes,” she admitted.

“And how is your buddy?”

He knew Dan’s name, but almost never used it. Leah felt as though calling Dan her
“buddy” was at best a sign he didn’t take the whole thing seriously, and at worst was
demeaning to him in some way. She hadn’t called him on it yet, but it was starting to
grate on her. “About the same.”

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“Still in the coma?”

“Still in the coma,” she confirmed. “They don’t know how long he’ll stay in it.”

“Or if he’ll ever come out of it,” he added, as if that fact might have somehow escaped
her.

They talked for a few more minutes, and he made another offer to stop by before he hung
up. She declined it, as she could tell that it was half-hearted and that his mind was
already somewhere else. As she had done many times, she thought about their being
together. He was good looking, aggressive, smart, and funny. The fact that he had plenty
of money didn’t hurt; he used it to take her to restaurants and little vacations that she
might not otherwise been able to afford. She liked to think that money wasn’t all that
important to her – and her lifestyle certainly reflected it, she thought wryly – but neither
was she opposed to it on principle. They’d been together long enough that he was
starting to get a little serious about things, she thought. She hadn’t been seeing anyone
else since their third or fourth date. She wasn’t as sure when he had starting showing the
same fidelity, and when he worked late like tonight she still occasionally wondered if he
was being faithful to her. All in all, though, there wasn’t anyone else on her horizon, and
she was happy enough with him that she was in no hurry to force any issues with him that
might cause things to end.

Plus, he was a great lover. That counted for something.

She refreshed the hot water and tried to figure out why she hadn’t wanted him to come
over. She’d only seen him once since she returned from overseas, and that trip had been
another two weeks away from him. She was seriously behind on sex, and she should
miss it more than she was. She should miss Rick more than she was. She should be
seeing her other friends more than she was. And, as was clear from her messages, she
should be getting back to work quicker.

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If Not For You

It was Dan Peterson’ fault. He was taking too much of her time, and too much of her
attention. She thought about the number of times she’d gone to check on him. Initially,
it had clearly been part of the story, and she’d simply been doing what she’d needed to
do. But that didn’t account for all the visits, or for times like today when she just sat
there with him.

She supposed she felt guilty about him being in the coma. It wasn’t like she was
responsible in any way, but she’d been there when it happened and throughout the
various ordeals that followed. Someone had had to watch over him, and she’d somehow
emerged as that person. She’d assumed that once he got back to the U.S., she’d become
less needed. Now he was here, his family was in the picture – even if not a daily
presence – and certainly he had friends who would visit. She could stop going to see him
and he’d never know.

She knew then that she’d be going back tomorrow.

It was that he was so fragile. Some people, when they sleep they seem to be still
practically awake. Rick, for example, constantly shifted position and mumbled in his
sleep. Others slept like babies, fully asleep but visibly using the sleep to recoup and
recharge. Dan, though: it was as if some cruel god had flipped off his switch. She
wondered if she sat with him simply to ensure that he didn’t just slip away. His breathing
and his heartbeat were so slow that she had to watch his chest, watch the monitor, to
ensure that he hadn’t simply stopped being alive. The flame of life in him had dwindled
to the smallest of flames, and she feared that the slightest breeze might extinguish it.

That wasn’t how she thought of him. Right from the start he had seemed so full of life.
His body on that hospital bed, stuffed full of tubes and monitors, was a travesty of how
she liked to picture him. She preferred to remember him as she had known him before all
this, back to when he had just been an everyday person. She was afraid that once she
replaced that picture with this shell of the person he’d been, then all hope would be gone.

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That couldn’t happen. She wasn’t going to let that happen.

Chapter 4

It had all started with a phone call five months ago.

“I have a story for you,” Frank Reid had told her.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “What’s that?”

Leah worked for the New York Times in their Midwest bureau, which basically meant
they paid her a steady stipend that gave them first call on her services, then paid her per
story depending on the story – whether she wrote the entire article or merely contributed,
or whether it ended up being a front page story or something in the regional or business
sections. She had to supplement her earnings with various other assignments – usually
articles for a variety of magazines – and through teaching a creative writing course at a
local college. She wasn’t going to get rich through all this, but it provided a comfortable
and surprisingly steady income, and people never failed to be impressed with her Times
credentials. Reid was her editor and was responsible for assigning her stories.

“Well, something different. You follow the Olympics at all?”

“Oh, usual, I suppose,” she told him dubiously. “Figure skating, skiing, basketball and
all that.” She rarely wrote sport-related stories and didn’t see where this is going.

“Know anything about running?”

“Like track and field?”

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“More like marathon running.”

She paused. “I go watch the Twin Cities marathon if I know people running in it. I
remember that a guy died running the marathon back in ancient Greece.”

“Close enough,” he said. “Listen, a couple weeks ago were the U.S. Olympic Marathon
Trials.”

“I thought the summer Games were not for a few more months.”

“They are. They hold the marathon trials way before the regular trials because it wipes
the runners out so much. Gives them more time to recover before the Games.”

“So…”

“So here’s the thing. You know in the U.S. trials only the first three guys go? No matter
how good you are, if you’re number one in the world but don’t get in the top three in the
Trials you stay home.”

“I didn’t know that,” Leah admitted, wondering why he was taking so long to get to the
story.

“So this year the third place guy was a guy no one had heard of. And not some young
kid; he’s in his thirties. And he lives in Minneapolis.”

Now she understood. ‘So you want me to what? Interview this guy?”

Frank sighed. “I don’t know. I’ll be honest with you. There may not be a story here. I
just have a hunch there might be something more.”

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“Why me?” Leah asked. “I don’t know that much about sports. Why aren’t you giving
this to someone who does?”

“You don’t want the story?” he said teasingly.

“I didn’t say that. I just want to get a better idea on why you think you want me for it.”

He thought for a second before answering. In truth, he really wasn’t sure there was much
of a story here, but he suspected that, if there was, it wasn’t just a sports story. If he was
right, Leah was the best person to find that twist. He’d been a newspaperman long
enough to listen to his hunches. “Just see what you can find out, OK?”

Reid gave her the information he had, as well as a few suggestions for leads. He was a
moderate track fan and had some ideas for her to pursue that might have taken her days
or weeks to uncover on her own. Over the next couple days she started tracking them
down.

Much to her surprise, no one really knew much about this guy. She talked to supposed
experts at Track and Field News and Runners World – publications she had been only
vaguely aware of, if at all, before this – who admitted he’d been a complete surprise to
them as well. She did end up tracking down his former college coach at the University of
Wisconsin, as it turned out that he had run cross-country and track there. He’d been a
fair runner, but still only maybe the fourth or fifth best runner on their teams. He’d been
part of the team that won the NCAA cross-country championships his senior year, and
he’d placed a couple times in the NCAA track championships, but he was no star. After
that, she’d been able to find a few road races he’d competed in, a couple of track races,
and then – nothing for several years until a few months before the Trials, when he’d
qualified for the Trials in an otherwise unnoticed race. It was as if he’d been asleep or
living overseas for several years, returning just in time to snag that coveted third place.
So where had he been?

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If Not For You

She was beginning to see why Frank had a hunch about the story.

When she thought she had enough background material to have a meaningful interview,
she’d called him at home one evening. “Mr. Peterson?”

“Yes?” His voice had the polite skepticism that is usually reserved for telemarketers.

“I’m Leah Hutchins from the New York Times.”

“I don’t really want a subscription,” he said quickly, trying to put an end to the
conversation before she started in on the whole song and dance about their special offers.

She almost laughed. “No, no, I’m not trying to sell you anything – I’m a writer.”

“A writer.”

She could tell from his voice that he didn’t quite believe her. “Is this the Dan Peterson
who qualified for the U.S. marathon team a couple of weeks ago?” she clarified.

There was a pause. “Yes.”

“OK, we want to write an article about you.”

Another pause. “You do?”

She was beginning to wonder if this was going to be a mistake. Most people she ran
across were thrilled to talk to a major newspaper like the Times, unless they had
something to hide. She didn’t think that was the case with him. “Look, how about I buy
you a cup of coffee or something and we can talk? I’ve got a bunch of questions for
you.”

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“Are you sure you want to interview me?” he asked. “I mean, I did only place third. You
should be talking to Meb or Peter. They’re the top guys.”

“Nope. I want to talk to you.”

They’d agreed to meet for lunch the next day, and she got to the restaurant a few minutes
early. It was a second-tier chain restaurant out in one of the near suburbs. He’d chosen
the location. She got a table and waited for him to come. She had looked up a picture of
him on the U.S. Olympic Committee website, but she almost missed his arrival. He
slipped inside the door of the restaurant unobtrusively, and he must have been standing
there for a few seconds before she spotted him. She’d only given him vague description,
so he was standing calmly by the door, carefully surveying the room to try to identify her
when she realized it was him. When his gaze passed near her she waved and his face
brightened and he started towards her.

Leah watched him approach. Her first thought was that he definitely wasn’t her type, not
that it was relevant. For one thing, even though he had on a sweater and a light jacket,
she could tell that he was very thin, almost painfully so. He walked softy, with an
athletic grace but without any hint of a swagger that she might have expected from
someone who’d made the Olympic team. She liked her men to have a certain attitude; for
example, when her current boyfriend walked into a room people noticed, and he made
sure that they did. Still, Leah thought analytically, Peterson had a friendly face and a
nice smile. His hair was cut so short that she couldn’t determine whether it was brown or
sandy brown. She was five eight, and she suspected he couldn’t be much taller, if at all,
which would have been another strike against him if they had been in the dating pool
together.

“You must be Leah,” he said when he got to her table.

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She stood up and put out her hand. “You must be Dan. Won’t you please sit down?”

He sat down and the waitress immediately came by to take their drink orders. “Are you
eating?” he asked once the waitress had departed.

“Sure, if you are. What’s good?”

He didn’t need to look at the menu. He ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, everything.
Let’s see. Sandwiches are pretty good. Pasta is good. The soups are really good.”

“What about the salads?”

“Hmm. They’re OK, but if you’re going for salad do yourself a favor and try the soup
and salad combo”

He evidently already knew what he wanted, and she felt a little self-conscious reading the
menu while he watched. She eventually decided to take his suggestion and put down her
menu. The waitress appeared to take their orders, delivering their drinks at the same
time. Leah ordered one of the salads and some wedding soup, but he surprised her by
ordering both a bowl of broccoli cheddar soup and a plate of spaghetti. She stared at him.
“What?” he asked defensively.

“Will you really eat all that?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“You’re so thin. I thought you must eat like a bird.”

“I do eat like a bird,” he told her, imperfectly suppressing a smile. “They eat a lot,
relative to their body weight. We both burn lots of calories and have to replenish our
fuel, you know.”

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If Not For You

She made a note in her notebook. He smiled at her. “You’re writing that down? People
will find that interesting?”

“I never know what I’ll need until I’m done, so I try to capture things. Is it OK if I take
notes?”

“Sure,” he said, a small smile on his face. “Can I ask you a question?”

“That’s fine.”

“Do you normally cover running?”

“No, I’m not really a sports writer, and, even among the sports that I know anything
about track is pretty near the bottom of my list,” she admitted.

He studied her frankly. “So --”

“So why am I here?” she finished for him. “Good question.”

“And why me instead of the good guys? Like I said on the phone, Meb and Peter
finished 1-2. They’re the lead Americans. I’m just…the other guy.”

“So I understand.”

The waitress brought their soup, along with some bread. She took a piece and buttered it,
while he started in on his soup. He ate it appreciatively but made no attempt at
conversation, evidently waiting until she restarted the conversation. “So,” she started.
She took a spoonful of her soup. “Wow, this is really good.”

He stopped and looked at her. “Told you,” he said, winking impishly.

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If Not For You

She took a couple more spoonfuls before resuming her questions. He seemed entirely
comfortable sitting there, happily eating away. Leah cleared her throat. “Anyway, I did
some research on you.”

He put down his spoon. “I did some research on you too.”

She gave him a surprised look. “You did?”

“I don’t often get calls from people claiming to be reporters,” he told her. “So I checked
you out.”

“And?” She arched an eyebrow, suddenly feeling a little vulnerable. She was confident
in her writing, but she found herself anxious to see what he would say.

He nodded solemnly. “Pretty good. I found a few of your stories in the Times, and I
found a few other stories you’d published.”

She smiled. “Which did you like more?” she asked, knowing that he was getting her off
track.

He smiled back, and she thought that it was quite a charming smile, shy yet open
somehow at the same time. “They’re both good. Just…different. How did you start
writing?”

He seemed genuinely interested, not just making conversation or diverting attention from
his own interview. “Long story,” she said with a smile, not ready to go into it with him,
at least not quite yet. She had to force herself to get back to her interview. “Let’s do you
first,” she suggested pleasantly. She recapped what she knew of his youth – growing up
in rural Wisconsin, starting to run cross-country his freshman year of high school, and his
career at Wisconsin, based on what his coach had told her.

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If Not For You

“You’ve been busy,” he acknowledged.

“It’s the job.” She paused as the waitress brought his spaghetti and her salad. Leah had
barely touched her soup, and she had to encourage him to go ahead and eat. She used the
diversion to look at her notes, and she wrinkled her brow. “You must be, what, thirty-
three or thirty-four?”

He smiled. “Pretty good. I’ll be thirty-four in two months.”

She stared frankly at him. “You don’t look it.”

“I get that a lot,” he admitted, smiling that innocent smile again. He started in on the
spaghetti.

“No, really. You could pass for ten years younger.”

He paused between bites to smile at her. “Good genes.”

“I thought your skin might be more, ah, weather-beaten from all that running. You must
be out in the sun a lot.”

He paused between bites. “The sun’s not up a lot of the time I run. Or it’s pretty low.
So, no, it doesn’t take too much of a beating.” He waited a beat. “But thanks for
noticing.” He resumed eating.

Leah finished off her soup – which had been quite delicious, as promised – and started in
on her big bowl of salad. “The thing that I noticed was that you sort of disappeared for a
few years,” she said at last.

He nodded, looking down at his plate, which was now less than half-full.

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If Not For You

“Why did you stop running?” she asked, still making notes.

He put down his fork. “I never stopped running. I just stopped racing.”

She paused in her note taking to look up at him. “What made you start again?”

He smiled at her and she felt something just then, something that wasn’t quite so obvious
about him. There was a quiet confidence to this man, and some clear intelligence. She
found herself leaning in to hear his answer. “I stopped until I thought I could race well
again.” He said it as if was the most natural thing in the world, as though it was obvious.

Under some prodding, with periodic the interruption of their meals, she gradually drew
out his story. He’d tried to keep racing after college, juggling his training with working,
but eventually decided he wasn’t going to get good enough doing what he was doing. So
he quit racing and revamped his training approach. “I do 80-90 miles a week now, all at
a pretty quick pace. And it worked out: I made the team.”

She found herself nodding. She didn’t really know enough to go into the details of his
training, and didn’t believe that’s what the story was about. She was starting to think
about how she might write it. “How do you support yourself? Do you have, like, a shoe
contract?”

He laughed. “Oh, no, although a couple companies have called since the Trials to offer
me free shoes. No money, but free shoes. How do I support myself? I have a job, of
course. How does anyone support themself?”

“It’s just that most athletes have these cushy jobs. What kind of job do you have? Do
you coach?”

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If Not For You

He shook his head, finishing off his spaghetti. She hadn’t thought he’d be able to eat
both his soup and his pasta, but he’d done both and had a couple of pieces of bread to
boot. She wished she could eat as much and stay as slim as he did. Despite his thick
sweater that added apparent bulk, she still could tell he was awfully thin. His face was
almost gaunt, and even his fingers looked like they were just skin and bone. She thought
he must have zero body fat, and found herself wondering what he’d look like without the
sweater. She thought of those pictures of starving children one sees late at night on TV,
but rejected the comparison. Despite his thinness, he looked extraordinarily healthy, with
a sense of vitality and submerged energy that one doesn’t associate with anorexia. Most
unusual, though, was that he seemed to really listen to her, taking a moment to prepare
his response before speaking. Leah found that refreshing; she was more used to people
so eager to tell her their opinions that they didn’t really listen too well.

Dan was ready with his response. “Oh, I have a real job. I manage technical support for
a consumer electronics company not far from here.”

“So you work like a normal schedule, like a 9-to-5 kind of thing?”

He nodded again.

Leah wrinkled her brow at him. “I thought runners needed all this time to train. Don’t
you need to, you know, go to the track or something in the afternoon?”

He had to suppress a smile. “Well, most good marathon runners are doing 120 to 150
miles a week, so, yeah, they need a lot more time to train than I do. Me, I do most of my
runs in the morning, before I go to work. A couple nights a week I do a run after I get
home, but, yeah, I work pretty normal hours. What about you?”

Leah was startled. “What about me?”

“You know, as a writer and all you must make your own hours.”

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If Not For You

She laughed. “Pretty much. I thought you were asking me when I run, and I was
embarrassed to tell you I don’t.”

He smiled at her, and she found it charming. “You look like you’re in pretty good shape
anyway,” he told her.

Now she found herself flushing with the compliment. There was something sincere about
him that she liked. He didn’t seem to be flirting with her, just making an observation.
“Oh, I work out sometimes, but not as often as I should.”

“Good genes, then.”

She smiled conspiratorially at him. “I’ll tell my parents.”

“You do that. So when do you write?”

Leah looked at him curiously. “Oh, no regular time. Some of it is time sensitive, so you
just have to crank it out, you know.”

“What about the writing you do for yourself?”

She had to look at him again. He still seemed genuinely interested, not just making
conversation. And he seemed ready to wait her out. “Ah, you know, there’s never
enough time in the day. You just have to make time when you can.”

He nodded, apparently appreciating her predicament.

She reviewed her notes. She had enough to write a decent little story, the human interest
of him coming back from several years away and surprising the marathon world by
making the U.S. team. She liked him well enough, but it was still just a little story.

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If Not For You

The waitress brought the check. “I’ll get it,” Leah said when he reached for it.

He held on to it. “No, my treat.”

“No, really,” she protested. “The paper will reimburse me. It’s a business expense.”

“But I enjoyed meeting you,” he said with that calm little smile. “I’d rather think of it as
getting to know a pretty lady.”

“Hmm, in the first place, I invited you, so unless you are an outright chauvinist you’d
have to let me pay.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And in the second place?”

“And in the second place your girlfriend probably wouldn’t like you treating a strange
girl out for lunch.”

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You don’t seem so strange, and, anyway,
there’s no girlfriend to worry about.”

“Alas.”

“Alas,” he agreed. He leaned back in and studied her closely again, before his smile
returned. “But you no doubt have a boyfriend.”

“I’ll never say,” she told him with mock coyness, thinking of Rick. He wasn’t officially
a boyfriend yet but it seemed like they were heading that way.

“Oh, well,” he said, giving her the check.

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If Not For You

She took care of the check and took her receipt. They got up and walked to the door.
The story wasn’t entirely clear to her, or, rather, the story she was starting to form in her
head seemed incomplete to her. As they got outside, she had a sudden inspiration. “You
know that job you were telling me about?”

“Yeah?”

“Could I go there and talk to a few people?”

Chapter 5

The storm continued unabated. True to his vow, he had held on. It wasn’t getting any
easier, but somehow he persisted. Time had no meaning; the things that might ordinarily
mark the passage of time were just sensations lost in the sea of other sensations. It might
have all been happening in a fraction of a second, in a lifetime, or in an eternity. It made
no difference to him. All he knew was that he was still there amidst the madness.

At some point – and he could not be sure when that point was or why it happened at all –
he realized something.

“Hold on to what?”

That was an interesting notion. He didn’t quite know what to make of it or how to think
about it. He didn’t really even know what it meant to think. Still, it was there, and filled
him with new determination. He worked on that small notion like an oyster working on
an irritating piece of sand. It was something different, anyway, something other than just
being pounded by everything around him. He worked and he worked at it, without being
able to say exactly how he was working at it and with no expectation about what might
emerge from these efforts.

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If Not For You

Eventually something did result. It was not an answer and did nothing to resolve
anything. It was another question: “Who should hold on?”

This was, if anything, more puzzling than the first notion, and he struggled to keep the
two separate. Perhaps they were really the same thing, but if that were true it would tell
him something as well. He kept focusing on both questions, using whatever energy he
could muster to keep the concepts fresh and sharp. The overwhelming pressure of the
surrounding sensations fought against him, battering him and trying to make him lose
focus. He knew at some level that at stake was not just these interesting questions, but
also the same will to hold on that had come from somewhere to allow him to even realize
there were such questions among all these powerful sensations.

Zen Buddhist monks spend their lives meditating on koans, seemingly meaningless
questions that they hope will force them to abandon their everyday consciousness and
reach enlightenment. He had almost the opposite problem, trying to emerge from an
undifferentiated universe and assemble something that might be construed as
consciousness. Either way, at stake was one’s soul.

Gradually, something occurred to him. It happened in fits and starts, moments of

realization that disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. It was like taking a step
up a slippery hill that advanced a foot, only to then slide back eleven and a half inches.
He simply kept at it until he reached something akin to solid ground.

“He” was the thing that was holding on.

He didn’t know what he was, or what holding on really meant, but the focus of his world
shifted to the island of thought that he now realized defined him. It was a powerful idea.
He had a reality that existed apart from the forces that raged against him. They might be
powerful and he might be puny, but he was here and he was not going to go away without
a fight.

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If Not For You

Much faster than it had taken him to realize the concept of himself, but still unimaginably
long, he saw the corollary to his latest realization: if “he” was the thought of holding on,
then what was he holding on against?

This was a novel and most interesting thing.

The sensations around him seemed different now. They had something to tell him. They
might not be meant to inform him, but they had the potential to do so. Instead of merely
fighting against their unstoppable force, he tried to absorb them, to take them in and
make sense of them. Previously they had been trying to destroy him, maliciously or
through their supreme indifference. Now they seemed his best hope of discovering
himself. So he forced himself to focus on them as rigorously as he had focused on the
two koans that had brought about his first signs of self-awareness.

It took much effort, and it was all he could do to not give in and return to merely
struggling against them. It would be much easier, just as slipping into oblivion would
have been in the beginning. But once he had resolved to learn from them, he found he
could no more back down than he had been able to let himself slip away back into the
storm initially.

This would require more study. If he had been able to sigh he might have. Instead, he
did all he could do. He kept at it, kept holding on to what he was doing.

Chapter 6

Much to her surprise, Leah found herself back at the hospital the next day, and the day
after that. When she came the second day she saw Mary on duty at the nurse’s station,
and remembered her prediction. Mary caught her eye and simply nodded. Leah felt
somehow immensely proud of that response, like the nurse was recognizing that she was
doing a good deed. From what Leah had observed, most of these nurses weren’t just

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If Not For You

doing a job; the care and attention they gave these even comatose patients spoke to a
higher calling. Mary seemed to feel that she had found this calling for herself, if only for
this one patient. Leah wasn’t sure she deserved the respect, and she definitely did not
feel up to the burden. But here she was, after all.

She sat quietly with Dan. He lay there totally immobile, and it always troubled her to
come into the room for the first time. It was as if when she was away from him her brain
whitewashed the images of him sleeping like that, and each time she returned she had the
shock anew. The Dan Peterson that she had known was a man in motion, a man full of
determination and drive – even if that was masked by his quiet demeanor. This body was
an empty husk, its life energy drained away. If not for the regular beeping of the
monitors and the almost infinitesimal signs of his chest moving, she would have thought
him dead.

“It helps if you talk to him,” a voice said from the doorway.

Leah was startled. She’d lost track of time, and quickly looked back at the door. The
speaker was her new buddy Mary. Leah checked the clock and found that she had been
here over forty-five minutes. “Excuse me?”

Mary stood in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. “You never know what
they can hear or not. Sometimes when comatose patients come out of their coma they
say they heard their loved ones’ voices.”

“Do they all say that?” Leah asked.

Mary shook her head sadly, and moved away from the door. “Sometimes they don’t
wake up at all.” She walked away as silently as she must have approached.

Leah checked her watch and tried to decide how much longer she should stay. “I really
should be going,” she told Dan tentatively. “Unless you object.”

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If Not For You

He didn’t say anything, didn’t show any sign of response.

“I thought not,” Leah said. Yet she did not get up. “What would we talk about, anyway?
Interested in what’s going on with the elections?” She waited for a response that she
knew wasn’t coming. “I didn’t think so. Hey, I’m going to have to report on the stuff
and I’m not all that interested.”

She stood up, but found herself going over to the window instead of to the door. There
was a view of the hospital entrance. A few people were walking to or from, no one in a
great hurry. She realized that her own pace slowed as she got on the hospital grounds, as
if visitors were unconsciously trying to hold off the encounter with the sick or dying that
the hospital represented. She took a deep breath. “I suppose I could tell you how famous
you are. How interested everyone in the world is in your story now. They are fascinated
by what you were willing to do to yourself just to run in a little old race like the
Olympics. Pretty amazing, huh?”

There had been lots of media attention to his collapse, and her follow-up stories had made
her a minor media celebrity for a brief time. Several of her stories got prominent
placement not only in the Times but also by countless other newspapers that had picked
them up through the wire service. She’d been guest on a couple of television news
shows.

The worst period had been the brief time that there were rumors of Dan’s collapse being
the result of drug use. These Olympics had been relatively free of drug allegations, but
Dan’s ability to literally run himself into the ground had made him an easy target,
especially given his emergence from nowhere that raised more than a few eyebrows.
Leah had been one of the journalists to investigate and thoroughly discredit the
allegations, but it had been an unpleasant few days. And so the public opinion had
turned back to sympathy, which would, she knew, eventually simply fade into benign
neglect.

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If Not For You

And Dan slept through it all.

She felt guilty about her celebrity-by-association. He genuinely deserved his fame; she
had done nothing except her job. She had to admit that she liked having her stories be
noticed, but at this point she would trade it all for Dan waking up safe and sound.

She shook her head and turned towards him. “Ironic, huh? I get my big break but it
takes something like this to happen to a nice guy like you to make it happen. I wish…”

She didn’t know what she wished. She couldn’t wish that he’d never run in the
Olympics, because she knew that isn’t the choice he’d want. She could wish that he’d
backed off in the race so he wouldn’t have ended up like this, but, again, he’d known
what he was doing. Or so she thought.

She approached the bed. “I guess I wish we could talk. I enjoyed talking to you, and I
wish we could talk now, get to know each other better. I can talk to you all I want but it’s
kind of one-sided, don’t you think? Don’t you think you should be talking to me too?”

Leah checked her watch again and decided she needed to get going. She gathered up her
purse and stood by the bed. “I’ve got to be going now, Dan,” she told him, finding her
voice curiously choked. She walked to the door, her eyes starting to tear up, which
embarrassed her. For a moment she teetered on the edge of deciding to not return; seeing
him like this didn’t do him any good, and it upset her greatly. But, just as quickly, she
dismissed the impulse. Perhaps it was the memory of Mary’s making her feel like she
was one of the clan; perhaps it was her innate good nature. Or, perhaps, it was his total
vulnerability and isolation that she could not bear. Whatever the cause, she knew she
would be back, tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that. As long as it took.

She turned in the doorway. “But I’ll be back,” she said, her voice choking up. “I
promise.”

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If Not For You

He looked different somehow. It took her a moment to realize that, another moment or
two to realize why, and several long moments staring at him to make herself believe what
she was seeing.

Dan’s eyes were open.

Chapter 7

“Why do you want to go to my office?” Dan asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

“I just want to talk to a few of them. You know, see what they think about their star jock
and all.”

He studied her, and she thought he might say no. It was clear that he wasn’t keen on the
idea, and she flashed him her most winning smile. “Please?

He sighed and relented. He told her to follow his car – a beat up Subaru Outback that
looked to have more miles on it than he must have on his own body, and seemed to wear
them worse -- back to his office, which proved to be an anonymous looking office
building in a non-descript office park nearby. He pointed her to the visitor parking and
went off to park his own car. She waited for him to come and escort her through the
lobby. “Hey, Ray,” he said to the guard at the front desk. “I have a visitor.”

“Well, Dan, any friend of yours is always welcome,” the guard said. He was an older
man, perhaps sixty and carrying a little more weight than he probably used to. He had
her sign in and gave her a visitor badge. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

They took the elevator up, and Dan guided her to his work area. It was a large floor
broken up by numerous cubicles that were filled with mostly young people wearing

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If Not For You

headsets. Most of them were busy talking on them, either ignoring Leah and Dan as they
passed or giving Dan a smile or quick nod of recognition while they listened to their call.
Leah quickly got the impression that it was a happy office. She visited a lot of offices
and had found that one could usually tell fairly quickly what the mood was: whether the
people there hated each other, or hated the company, or hated their boss. More often than
not, one of those resulted in the other two. She didn’t pick up that vibe here; people
seemed friendly and industrious. They kept their work spaces neat and organized, yet
most had added little personal touches to mark them as their own. And Dan seemed
genuinely happy to see them, which they returned.

They stopped at a cubicle with a pretty young woman was working on her PC. She
looked up as they approached. “Back from lunch?” she asked cheerfully, while giving
Leah a steady evaluation.

Dan smiled back at her familiarly. “Leah, this is the person that really runs the place.
Andrea, this is Leah Hutchins. Leah, Andrea Torres. She’s my assistant.”

“Please to meet you,” they both murmured to each other. Andrea looked at Dan
expectantly. He didn’t quite seem to know what to say. “Umm, Leah is a reporter.”

“Oh, really?” Andrea sounded skeptical, waiting for the punch line.

“Yes,” Dan said. “She’s doing a story on me.”

At this point, Leah noticed two things. First, from Andrea’s reaction it was clear that
Andrea had no idea why Dan might be being interviewed, or that he’d gone to lunch to be
interviewed. Second, she noticed that, amidst the various decorations in the office, there
weren’t any banners or photos or any other signs that Dan’s coworkers had celebrated his
making the Olympic team. She found this puzzling.

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If Not For You

Andrea’s reaction was one, indeed, of surprise. She looked back and forth between Dan
and Leah as if sure a prank was being played on her. “Really?” she asked carefully, not
wanting to sound too gullible.

“I write for The New York Times, Andrea. I’m writing about Dan being on the Olympic
team.”

Andrea’s face furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Remember I told you I ran a marathon a couple of weeks ago?” Dan asked, trying to be
helpful. She nodded.

“It was the U.S. Olympic team try-outs, Andrea,” Leah added.

Andrea looked dubious. “You’re kidding,” she said at last, looking only at Dan.

Dan shook his head, but didn’t quite meet her eyes. Leah thought he seemed
embarrassed.

“You mean like the real Olympics?” she asked. “The one on TV?”

Dan nodded almost guiltily.

Her face was incredulous. After a lengthy stare at Dan, she turned to a nearby office.
“Hey, Tony, come out here. Dan’s got some news.”

A man who looked to be in his late thirties came out of the office. He seemed very
professional, wearing a tie, pants with a razor-sharp crease, and not a hair out of place.
“Hi, I’m Tony Wayne. What’s up?” he asked, looking curiously at Leah.

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If Not For You

“Hi, I’m Leah Hutchins,” she introduced herself. They shook hands perfunctorily. “I’m
with The New York Times.”

He frowned and looked at Dan, who simply nodded. “It gets better than that,” Andrea
told him somewhat breathlessly. “She says Dan is on the Olympic team.”

He was taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Dan qualified for the U.S. team in the marathon,” Leah explained.

Wayne looked at her, his face alternating between suspicion and doubt. “You’re
kidding,” he said at last.

Leah told both of them a brief recap of Dan’s accomplishment, while Dan stood off to the
side and continued to appear embarrassed by the attention. When she’d finished Wayne
turned to him. “Is this for real?”

He nodded sheepishly.

“Jesus Christ, Dan,” Wayne exclaimed, his face visibly excited. “That’s unbelievable!
Why didn’t you say something?”

“It’s not that big a deal,” Dan demurred.

Wayne shook his head vigorously. “Like hell it’s not! It’s a huge deal.”

“You should have said something,” Andrea added. “We would have had a party or
something. Wow, an Olympic athlete! Cool.”

One of the people on the phones came up to ask for Dan’s help, so he left them alone
while she talked to Wayne and Torres for a while. They confirmed that this news was a

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If Not For You

complete surprise to them. Dan hadn’t even taken any time off around the Trials, and had
shown up for work as normal the Monday after the race. He had admitted to Andrea that
he’d run a marathon over the weekend – which had impressed her by itself – but hadn’t
explained the significance of it. Both of them seemed disappointed – practically
chagrinned -- that they hadn’t had a chance to wish him success. When they started
talking to each other about plans for a belated celebration party, she took the chance to
excuse herself to try to talk to a few others of Dan’s coworkers.

She wandered through the immediate area to try to chat with several other coworkers.
Most were in their twenties or early thirties, although she spotted at least a couple who
appeared to be in their forties or even fifties. Many of them had headsets on and were
talking while they checked their computer screens, presumably helping customers. Still,
she was able to find several willing to talk. Word of the unexpected news proved to
travel faster than she did, and one of them actually approached her to confirm the news.

No one she talked to seemed to really believe the news. They had too much Minnesota
politeness to outright say that they thought she might be lying, but it was clear that they
retained a healthy skepticism about the story she was telling them. They would listen to
her questions, express their surprise and admiration, but do so in such a way that made it
seem like they were waiting for someone to tell them they’d been punk’ed.

A couple of them – the more obvious sports fans -- seemed to understand the significance
of Dan’s achievement more than the rest, but they had missed the news just as
completely. “I could see it if you’d have said he made the chess team, or the curling
team,” one young man told her. “But the marathon?” He shook his head dubiously.

“Does he curl?” Leah asked, intrigued that perhaps Peterson had an even wider range of
accomplishments than she was aware of.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I didn’t know he ran marathons either.”

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If Not For You

One woman she talked to had a certificate from the Twin Cities Marathon from the
previous October on her cubicle wall. “Oh,” Leah said, pointing to it. “You’re a
marathoner too. Congratulations. Did you guys ever talk about marathoning or
training?”

The woman seemed almost in shock. “You know, Dan would ask me how it was going,
and he and some of my other friends came to cheer me along. But, no, he never really
brought up that he was going to run one.” She stopped and seemed lost in thought. “I
can’t believe it.”

One of the things Leah liked about writing for the Times was that she generally could
work on her own, but at times she missed the camaraderie of an office. Her initial
impression about the atmosphere of the office seemed to be proving out. People’s
cubicle walls were decorated with photos or cartoons, and they seemed quite enthusiastic
on their calls, both good signs about the office culture. Leah thought that his coworkers
seemed uniformly thrilled for Dan; no one had a bad thing to say about him. They
seemed to be more impressed that he was having a newspaper article being written about
him than the reason it was being written, partly because she didn’t think they still quite
believed her. Still, before she left she saw that several people had found the Trials results
on the Internet and were sharing them around the office, adding to the hubbub she’d
started.

When it was time to leave, she stopped by Dan’s office, a small windowless office that
was most notable for its careful organization. The only papers visible were stacked in
symmetrical piles on a credenza, with the desk spotless except for a lone folder Dan
appeared to be using as he worked at his PC. He stopped as she came inside. “All
done?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and stretching.

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If Not For You

She told him that she was, and picked up the only picture frame in the office. It was of a
thin young woman with her arm around Dan. “Girlfriend?” she asked, hoping for another
avenue to investigate.

“Sister.”

“Oh.” She looked around the office, struck again by its neatness. He had a Twins
schedule on the wall behind him, and a nondescript print of a sailboat on another wall,
but nothing indicated he was a runner, much less one with the notable achievement he
now had. Taking advantage of her silence, he got up. “I’ll walk you out.” They walked
back to the guard’s desk, where she gave up her badge. She paused with him at the door.
“So why all the secrecy, Dan? These people seem to like you. They seem genuinely
thrilled for you. Why didn’t you tell them?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like that big a deal.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “You don’t think it’s kind of unusual to make the
Olympic team?”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t unusual,” he allowed, almost letting a smile slip out. “I just don’t
think it’s particularly noteworthy. You know, most people don’t really care that much
about running. I didn’t want anyone to make a fuss, especially before the real race.”

“I think they care when someone they know does something special like this.” She
watched his face for his reaction, not sure what to expect but wanting to see something.

He looked at her, yet seemed far away. He just shrugged.

Chapter 8

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Eventually he realized something else. Not all of the sensations were the same. They
changed. They had different textures, for lack of a better word or better concept to
understand it. He didn’t know what to make sense of these differences, but they were
there, and the more he looked for the differences the more he found them.

He tried to understand how they were different. He tried to see if he could influence or
predict the differences in any way, failing on both accounts. They seemed entirely
random, or perhaps merely subject to forces that were unknown and unimaginable.

Making sense of such an alien universe seems impossible, with no point of reference to
help. Yet it is something that newborn babies are faced with every day, and most of them
end up learning how to learn. He didn’t know this, of course, but it might have been
helpful if he had known of their success. As it was, he had only his own will to keep him
at it.

Many times he wanted to stop. He couldn’t recall if he had a life before this, or what that
life might have been like before awakening into this storm, but he could somehow
imagine how much easer it would be to give in. Holding “himself” together took enough
effort, and this effort to understand his world was taking more from him than he thought
he had.

Still he persisted.

In time he came to recognize some of the patterns. It started with one, as it revealed
itself, disappeared, revealed itself again until he finally realized it was all part of the same
pattern. Once he had learned to find it, he started the slow task to find other patterns,
gradually learning to separate new patterns from the ones he had recognized.

He still didn’t know what these patterns meant, or how they related to each other or to
himself. But it was all he could do, and so he kept at it.

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His efforts might have seemed boring, but he didn’t know what it meant to be bored, and
he did know that his existence was at stake. He could not hold out indefinitely against
the flood of sensations, hard as he might try, so either he learned to deal with them or
they would destroy him.

One might have thought that he would be lonesome, lost in this indefinable world entirely
alone. But lonely was not a concept he was familiar with, and since he didn’t have any
idea what he was, he couldn’t long for the company of another such creature.

At long last – longer than he could describe – one pattern in particular caught his
attention. He watched it, forming and reforming like an image lost in the fog. At first he
could only discern a small portion, and after much study he realized that several other
patterns were connected into one larger pattern. He focused the whole of his attention on
it, trying to draw the pattern into something that meant something. What it might end up
meaning, he couldn’t imagine. Indeed, one could argue that he literally could not
imagine, because to imagine one has to have at least some basic reference points about
which to imagine, and he lacked even those. So he watched, he waited, and he struggled.

The pattern was a wisp, barely there and almost totally overwhelmed by everything else
in his chaotic world that slammed against him from every direction at every moment.
Gradually the wisp achieved some stability, and gradually he was able to distinguish its
outlines from everything else. What it was, he could not yet say, so he watched and he
waited some more, focusing all of his considerable will on keeping the wisp together as a
single pattern. He felt there was some risk to this strategy, as he was forsaking fighting
off everything else, giving up on looking for meaning in anything else. He was making
his bet here.

He could not say when the thing became…something else. One moment it was just a
collection of patterns that he had practically willed together into a single pattern. The
next moment, a moment which otherwise should have been like every other moment he
had experienced and was expecting to keep experiencing, he suddenly knew what it was.

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How he knew, he could not say. Why he finally realized its nature, he could not know.
But for the first time he suddenly felt he knew something of his world, of something in
his world other than himself. He stared – if, indeed, it can be said to be staring when
vision itself is a concept that has no meaning -- in amazement at the barely there pattern,
and considered it.

It was a face.

Chapter 9

Leah didn’t quite know what to do. It took her a moment or two to convince herself that
what she saw was not some sort of optical illusion. She took a tentative step toward the
bed. “Dan?” she asked hesitantly. She tried again, this time a little louder. “Dan?”

He was laying on his back. The nurses periodically rotated him to avoid bedsores, and
occasional he would curl into a fetal position, but he’d been on his back during this entire
visit. As she came to his side, there was no possibility of any doubt. His eyes were open
and staring at the ceiling.

“Dan?” she tried again. His eyes remained in place, not moving even as she drew within
what should have been his field of vision. She moved her hand back and forth over his
eyes. There was no response, no sign of recognition, not even an automatic reaction to
the appearance of her hand. She tried nudging him gently. “Dan, are you awake? Wake
up, come on,” she pleaded.

He continued to lie there, dead to the world except for his open eyes, and even they
seemed dead as well. She sighed. For a moment, just a moment, she’d dared think that
he’d come back to the land of the living. She’d had a couple weeks to think about what
she might say to him once he woke up. The prospect that he might not wake up was
something she had steadfastly refused to accept. She’d been patiently waiting for him to

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wake up and open his eyes. Only now he had opened his eyes, but still hadn’t woken up.
She felt she’d lost something she hadn’t known she’d had. Those dead eyes offered no
sign of life, no hope for a future. Before, he had seemed like he was just sleeping, and
she could hope he might wake up at any moment. Now, with those lifeless eyes she
could no longer pretend he was merely asleep. This was something else indeed. She
wanted to go back in time and start over.

“Maybe you could try it again, hon,” she said softly, more to herself than to him. “Close
your eyes and try again, but this time wake up all the way, OK?”

If Dan was listening to her, he was ignoring her. His eyes remained open but staring at
the ceiling, or perhaps into outer space for all she knew.

Reluctantly, she hit the nurse call button.

It took almost a day for them to get the results of all the tests they wanted to run on him.
She finally was able to catch up with Dr. Tollefson the next afternoon, finding him busy
making notes on charts by the nurses’ station. “Dr. Tollefson,” she greeted him.

He paused and looked up at her. “Ms. Hutchins,” he replied. “Leah. Call me Jay.”

She had talked with him several times during Dan’s stay here, but this was the first time
he’d called her by her first name, and certainly the first time he’d offered her his own
name. She wasn’t sure whether to expect that might mean he had particularly bad news
for her, or that he might be hitting on her. She just hoped it wouldn’t be both. “So what
have you found out?”

He regarded her almost clinically. “Come with me,” he said, taking her elbow and
steering her to a small waiting area off of the corridor. It was deserted, and he directed

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her to one of the chairs. He sat down across from her, leaning in towards her but not
saying anything. He seemed like he wasn’t quite sure where to start.

“Good news or bad news?” she asked, taking the initiative.

“A bit of both, I’m afraid,” he replied. He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “OK, the good
news is that he’s no longer in the coma. His brain function is qualitatively different,
more active, and he hasn’t lapsed back into the coma state since yesterday.”

“He seemed really out of it when I saw him. His eyes were open but it didn’t really seem
like he was seeing anything.”

“He wasn’t. At least, we don’t think so. You never really know what is going in the
heads of people in this state, but his eyes don’t respond to stimuli and his brain waves
don’t show any changes when there are visual stimuli either. So if he’s seeing anything,
it’s not anything out here.”

“What do you mean, ‘in this state’?”

Tollefson took a deep breath and put his hands on his knees. “That’s the bad news. It’s
called Persistent Vegetable State. PVS for short. You can tell from the patterns of the
brain activity. So we know he’s gone from a coma to PVS.”

“Why is that bad news?” Leah asked. “You said his brain function was more active.
That sounds like a good thing. When he was in the coma you told me his brain was sort
of asleep, just the basic functions going on to keep him breathing and such. Opening his
eyes seems like a step closer to being awake.”

Tollefson shook his head, his mouth frowning slightly. “It doesn’t work that way. Coma
patients usually either wake up within a couple weeks, maybe a month, or they rarely do.
PVS patients – well, a month would be a short time in PVS.”

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“Will he come out of it?”

Tollefson exhaled heavily, his eyes heavy with sympathy. He studied her before
replying. He shook is head again. “We don’t know,” he said at last. He broke eye
contact to look away. There’s a chance, but I’d have to say the odds were better when he
was in the coma. We were hoping that his body was just reacting to the trauma and
would gradually come out of it. Now he’s in a new phase, and all bets are off.”

Tollefson stole a glance at his watch. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a few more patients to see
and a bunch more charts to update. I’m really sorry about your friend. But we’ll do all
we can.” She wasn’t sure if he was sorry or relieved at having to go.

He stood up and moved back towards the hall. “Dr. Tollefson,” she called out softly.

He stopped and half-turned. “Can he think in his condition?” she asked. “I mean, you
said his brain was more active. Even if he’s not seeing, he could be thinking, right?”

Tollefson seemed genuinely sorry. “We don’t know.”

Chapter 10

Leah had dinner with Rick. They want to an expensive French restaurant that she’d only
read about previously. The maitre’ d had greeted Rick like a long lost friend – or, rather,
a frequent and heavily tipping customer – when they had arrived, which just made Leah
wonder how many other women had preceded her here. It didn’t bother her. Still, she
had put on an expensive dress and her best earrings, smiling at herself in the mirror for
her vanity. She’d learned Rick was a guy who appreciated a pretty woman, and who
didn’t think twice about treating them extravagantly. Her last boyfriend had been another

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writer, whose idea of a gourmet meal was take-out Chinese, so she wasn’t minding at all
some of the places Rick was trying to impress her with.

The waiter handed out the menus – she noted that Rick got both the wine list and the
menu with the prices on it – and gave them a few minutes. Rick ordered some nice wine,
and made some suggestions on both an appetizer and her entrée selection, both of which
she accepted. It wasn’t like her to let a man take charge in the way that Rick seemed to
want to, but she figured she’d save the battles for things that mattered.

For most of the dinner Rick kept up a steady stream of conversation, filling her in on his
day and things he’d heard about various people. She was always impressed at the range
of people he knew, and wondered if Rick knew that she fully expected she’d end up using
him as a source for future stories. She wasn’t sure if she’d tell him when she was
pumping him or not. It made her smile just a little bit, which he picked up and inquired
what she was thinking. “Just girl stuff,” she demurred.

It wasn’t until they were lingering over coffee and dessert that she got a chance to talk
about her day. “Oh, hey, I met an Olympic athlete today,” she said as casually as she
could, knowing that he fancied himself a big sports fan.

That got his attention. He looked up with a forkful of pastry stopped halfway to his
mouth. “Really. Business or pleasure?”

“Business. I was interviewing him.”

Rick put the pastry in his mouth and chewed carefully. When he was finished he put the
fork down. “On the phone or in person?”

“On the phone or in person what?” she asked coyly, keeping her eyes focused on her own
fork. The pastry was indeed delicious, worth whatever Rick was being overcharged for
it.

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“Your Olympian. Where’d you interview him?”

“He lives here in Minneapolis.”

She could practically see him running through his mental database of local athletes and
cross-indexing them with people who might also be going to the Olympics. She didn’t
expect him to know who Dan was and she wanted to hold on to her edge for as long as
she reasonably could. “Winter or summer Olympics?” he asked at last.

She took a few seconds to cut another piece of the pastry, put it to her mouth, and savor
the richness of it before she replied, enjoying his slight signs of impatience. “Summer.”

“A past Olympian or one going this year?”

She again took another bite before answering. “This year.”

He drank some of his coffee, looking down at the table while he thought. He raised his
head and looked her in the eyes. “One of the T-Wolves?”

“No. Want a hint?”

His eyes narrowed slightly as he realized at last that she was playing him. He smiled
charmingly at her. “OK, spill it, woman. Tell me about this jock. And why the hell are
you doing sports stories?”

They both laughed, and Leah told him about Dan. As she expected, Rick had not heard
of him, or any of the other marathoners on the team, but he was impressed nonetheless.
He was a casual jogger who had run a marathon a few years ago just to prove he could do
it. Rick enjoyed hearing about the skeptical responses of all the people she had tried to
talk to about Dan, comparing it to an almost Michael Moore kind of trail of futile

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interviews. “The funny thing is,” she said, finishing off her recount, “is that they thought
I was the crazy one. They were more likely to think he was on the chess team than an
Olympic team.”

That made them both laugh again. “And why again are you writing it? You don’t
usually write sports stories.”

She shrugged. “I said the same thing, but Frank wasn’t really sure it was a straight sports
story. And now that I’ve met Peterson, I think he was right. It’s more of a human
interest story.”

“Which you’re good at.”

“Which I’m very good at, thank you, my friend.”

Rick paid the bill, waving off her pro forma offer to pick it up or at least split it. She
figured it might have maxed out her VISA anyway. He escorted her out, enjoying the
turn of many men’s eyes at her as they left the dining room and reclaimed their coats. He
gave the ticket for his Mercedes to the valet attendant, and they waited in comfortable
silence for his car. Once it had arrived and he had appropriately rewarded the attendant
for its safe return, he headed the car towards her house. “So you know how you’re going
to write the story?”

“I think so,” she said. In fact, she’d been thinking about it off and on all day, and she
thought she had a pretty good handle on it. She saw it as a humorous story, an Olympic
athlete hiding in the midst of his unwitting coworkers like a diamond hidden in the
meatloaf. OK, so he wasn’t really world class, but he was an Olympian and to most
people that was the same thing. She knew she was going to work in the chess team thing
someplace. It wouldn’t be a big story but it’d be cute and maybe a little heart-warming.
“I’ll review my notes tomorrow morning, but, yeah, I think I know how to tell it.”

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He pulled into her driveway and looked at her knowingly. “Want to come in?” she said,
knowing he was expecting the invitation and already looking forward to his next dessert.
She’d already discovered that he was a very conscientious lover and that they had pretty
good chemistry together in bed. And in the kitchen, the bath, and the living room, if she
was honest about it. Viagra wasn’t just a drug for old men.

It was almost two hours later when they were both satiated. That was one of the best
things about a new relationship, she decided, this feeling of never getting enough of each
other. She wasn’t one for sleeping around, preferring a series of longer term
relationships, but these early days of a relationship were a rush that she ended up missing
once things cooled down into a more sedate phase. She wasn’t sure if Rick was going to
last that long yet or not, but she was keeping an open mind.

“Should I stay?” he asked.

“If you want,” she said. He’d only stayed over a couple times, both on Friday nights. He
lived out in the suburbs and didn’t like to get up too early to go get a change of clothes.
He’d have rather they want to his house to begin with.

“Do you have to get up early tomorrow?” he asked.

She wondered if he was already looking for reasons to go home, and it made her a little
sorry, although she couldn’t say she was surprised. She slept better alone anyway.
“Nothing unusual.”

He thought that over. He was laying with his arm around her and seemed in no hurry to
move. “Maybe I’ll stay.”

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“That’d be nice,” she said, and kissed him. She excused herself and went to the
bathroom. When she returned he was sitting up in the bed watching the late news. “Hey,
I was thinking.”

“About what?” she asked, wondering if he was going to surprise her and say something
romantic. Like, hey, want to go to Paris for the weekend? It was the kind of thing he
might do, although Vegas or Acapulco were probably more his style, French restaurants
notwithstanding.

“Is this guy Peterson any good?”

That stopped her short. She certainly hadn’t expected him to bring up Dan Peterson
again, especially not in her bedroom. “Good? You mean aside from being on the
Olympic team and all?”

He shrugged, not really watching her but paying more attention to the local sports report.
“You know, some of these marathoners – especially white American guys – just seem
sort of clumsy, especially compared to the African guys. I’ve seen it at the Twin Cities.
I was wondering if he’s one of these guys that are painful just to watch.”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, thinking. She found herself trying to visualize Peterson
running, but couldn’t quite form a suitable mental picture.

He looked over. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

She came over and sat on the bed, but did not get under the covers with him. “I never
saw him run.”

“You didn’t even see video of his Trials race?”

She shook her head.

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“Huh,” he said, almost to himself, and lost interest, turning back to the television. She
continued to sit on the bed. She knew it was very comfortable under the covers there
with him, and that she’d enjoy waking up with him in the morning. Still, she was first
and foremost a reporter, and now something was nagging at her.

She put a hand on the covers over his leg. “Hey, Rick?” she said softly, looking at him
apologetically.

He looked over at her. “Yeah?”

“I think I’m going to have to get up early tomorrow after all,” she told him. “I’ve got
something I need to check out.”

Chapter 11

The face became his whole world. He studied it, watched it, thought about nothing else.
He would have been content to focus on it forever, and having that focus allowed the
previously unhindered flood of other sensations recede into the background. Not to
disappear or even truly quiet down, but now he could at least ignore them for a time. He
had something else, something concrete now, to occupy him.

It was such a simple thing: it took so few elements to uniquely identify a face. Those
oval circles were the eyes, he thought; the hint of a curve was the nose, and that slender
line were the lips, whose opening would allow the appearance of the mouth. Millions of
years of evolution had trained the human mind to recognize patterns, especially facial
patterns. Perhaps it was not so surprising that the first thing he would recognize was a
face.

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It was not, of course, actually a face, just as people seeing The Big Dipper in the sky at
night does not actually mean there is a large ladle sitting out among the stars. It is
perhaps a uniquely human characteristic that human minds can find meaning among a
mass of usually meaningless signals, can use symbols to represent things that are not
actually there. The face was, at best, a sketch of a face, the barest possible traces of what
a face might contain. The important thing was that he knew it to be a face.

One second he had no concept of a face. Then, suddenly, there was a face in front of him
and he knew what it was. He didn’t and perhaps couldn’t understand why he understood
this, where the simple fact of faces might have come from. Yet this he knew: all animals
had them; they generally had the same kinds of features as this face. Eyes. Ears. Noses.
Mouths. They might look different species to species – although, if pressed, he could not
articulate what any of those differences might be – but he knew what a face was.

He couldn’t say whose face it was. He couldn’t even have said it was a human face,
because he still did not know what “human” meant. All he knew was that there was
something here with him that wasn’t here before, something other than himself, and that
he knew what it was. Either one of those in itself would have been astounding enough,
but for both of them to be true was, well – he didn’t have the words anyway.

The face was just there. It wasn’t moving or animated in any way. He didn’t mind,
because he didn’t really have any expectation that it should be doing anything other than
just being there. Nor was he bothered by the fact that there was no neck, no hair, no ears.
The chin was only barely there, just enough to suggest where the face ended and the
formless void that was everything else started. To him, it was a full face, and the missing
portions had no meaning to him. Had they appeared, he might have accepted them as
well, but their absence triggered no response of incompleteness.

It took him a long time of contemplation to realize that the face hadn’t just appeared,
much as it seemed that way. As best he could, he tried to recreate what his world had
been like before the face, and he came to understand that the same features that now

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allowed him to recognize it was a face had actually been there for some time before he
concluded a face from them. He just hadn’t known how to recognize them, how to not
just look but also actually see them.

That was the second, and more startling, discovery: he could see.

The time that he spent studying the face was uncountably long before he came to this
understanding. He would have kept studying it indefinitely in the absence of this
conclusion, without caring exactly how he was that he was able to study it. Knowing
something has eyes does not mean one knows what they are for. He still had no idea
what the face might do with its mouth or its nose, but with a flash of insight he thought he
now understood what the eyes were supposed to do, and that he had that same ability.

There was nothing else in his world to see. Everything else was as featureless as before,
with no other patterns that caught his attention. Still, he was more sure than ever that the
same sensations that had once tried to overwhelm him might be carrying information, just
as he had managed to snag the face from the torrent of everything else that was all around
him. The face might be the only other thing here…but it might not.

For now, it would be enough.

Chapter 12

Leah called Dan’s sister to report the developments. “So he still isn’t awake?” Christine
asked, her voice small and afraid. Leah confirmed that the changes did not mean Dan
was any closer to returning to awareness than before. Christine sighed. “I hate to
imagine him with his eyes open like that, you know? Open but not seeing.”

Leah had to agree that it was most disturbing.

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“There’s not really any point in my coming up now, is there?” Christine said. “I mean,
he still won’t know I’m there. I’ve got so much going on here and all.”

Leah felt sad but not surprised. It was hard for her to see Dan like this, and it must be
even harder for his family. Christine had the additional excuses of a family and of
several hundred miles of distance to avoid seeing him like that. Leah didn’t have any
reason to doubt that she loved Dan, but she wasn’t sure that she could have let her life go
on as though nothing had happened if it had been her own brother. “I understand,” she
said, trying to keep any hint of judgment from coloring her tone.

Christine seemed grateful for the pass. “You’ll let me know if anything changes? I’ll
come as soon as something changes.”

“I’ll let you know,” Leah promised, realizing that – and wondering why – she had
somehow further committed herself to watching over Dan indefinitely.

The next day Leah stopped by the hospital in the early afternoon, planning to check in on
Dan. In the lobby she spotted two people who looked familiar, standing by the
Information desk waiting for assistance and looking very uncomfortable. Leah steered
over towards them. “Andrea, isn’t it? Andrea Torres?” she asked “And Tony – Tony
Wayne?”

They looked at her, first in surprise and then with some relief. “You’re that reporter,
aren’t you?” Andrea asked.

“Umm, Ms.--” Wayne fumbled.

“Leah Hutchins,” she finished for him. She shook their hands. “Are you here to see
Dan?”

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“We read your stories and all, and figured he could have visitors,” Wayne said, shifting
weight unconsciously from foot to foot. “Your stuff was great.”

“Thanks.”

“You really pegged him.” Leah assumed he was referring to the two stories she wrote
about Dan prior to the Olympics, when it was all still about Dan and not about what
happened to him.

“So he’s not conscious yet?” Andrea asked, looking both younger and more vulnerable
than her years.

Leah nodded. “I’ve seen him a few times,” she confirmed. “I was there when he opened
his eyes.”

“His eyes are open?” Andrea asked. “So he is awake?” She glanced over at Wayne, who
looked equally startled.

Leah nodded. “No, he’s not awake.”

“Then why are his eyes open?” Wayne inquired.

Leah explained about the PVS, seeing their eyes glaze over shortly into her description.
It wasn’t so much that they didn’t understand as that it made them too uncomfortable,
scaring them that someone they knew could end up in such a state. “Come on, I’ll take
you up,” she offered.

They looked at each other again, wary but not wanting to back out at this point. Leah
wondered if they might have lost their nerve had she not happened along. They were
quiet on the walk to Dan’s room. Leah decided they needed the time to gather their
courage. She left them alone in Dan’s room and went to the nurse’s station to get a report

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on how Dan had been since the previous day. The nurses knew her pretty well by now,
and were glad to share information with her. She suspected they believed she was his
girlfriend, and for some reason had stopped trying to disabuse them of the notion.

She was surprised when Wayne and Andrea came out less than five minutes later,
looking somewhat shell-shocked. She rapidly moved to intercept them in the hallway.
“Hey, leaving so soon?” she asked, regretting the words as they left her mouth.

They looked at her with haunted eyes. “Well, maybe he knows we were here,” Wayne
mumbled. He looked stricken.

“It’s like he’s a zombie or something,” Andrea said in a subdued voice. “His eyes open
like that, but…”

“It’s like he’s dead,” Wayne added. “It’s creepy.”

Leah put her hands on their arms in a comforting gesture. “It’s very hard,” she
murmured.

“You come a lot?” Andrea asked, looking at her in amazement.

Leah nodded, not feeling this was the time to admit she came every day. It wasn’t that
she felt any less distressed about his condition than they did, but when she thought of
Dan all alone in his room like that, she couldn’t stand the thought of no one coming to
see him. “How are things at work?” she asked, wanting to steer the conversation to safer
shoals.

Wayne sighed heavily. “Oh, we’re getting along.”

“Everyone is very upset,” Andrea said. “We took up a collection for the flowers and all.”

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“I saw them,” Leah said. She remembered wondering why anyone would send a flower
arrangement to the room of a comatose patient. It was nice that they had been thinking
about him, but it perhaps was not the most appropriate gesture for someone oblivious to
the world.

Then, again, she wasn’t quite sure what would have been.

“A bunch of us watched the race at Tony’s house,” Andrea offered, lost in the memory
and smiling despite herself. “It was pretty exciting, up until…you know.” The smile
faded as quickly as it had appeared.

“I know.”

“He was as cool as a cucumber when he left. We wanted to have a little good luck party
for him, but he refused,” Wayne said. “A bunch of us just went out for drinks the night
before he left, and he wouldn’t hardly talk about it. It was like it was no big deal, but I
knew better.”

“I asked him if he was excited and he just smiled,” Andrea said. “You know, that little
smile he had. The same smile he used when he’s letting people at work know everything
will work out OK.” She stopped for a couple seconds, her head down. She raised it to
look at Wayne. Her eyes misted. “I miss him.”

“It isn’t the same,” he admitted. “We’re all a little lost without him. He was always the
kind of guy who I could count on. My go-to guy. You know, he always got the job done.
Never complained, never whined. Just a great guy.”

Leah looked at Andrea. “Is that what you like about Dan too?”

She looked at Leah as if she was mad and shook her head. “He was just…he always had
a smile and something nice to say. I never once saw him in a bad mood or yell at anyone,

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nothing like that. People wanted to do things for him, because they knew he worked
harder than anyone and he was always watching out for them. He made you feel better
just by being around.” She sighed and looked again like she might cry.

Leah wasn’t sure what to say, so she offered an inane comfort. “Still, you must be awful
proud of him.” They looked at her in confusion, so she felt compelled to add, “you
know, because of the Olympics and all.”

Torres looked down to try to hide the increased watering of her eyes, but Wayne looked
at her incredulously. “I didn’t need the damn Olympics to be proud of Dan! I was plenty
proud of him before. As a coworker and as a friend. Hell, I wish he’d never gone to the
Olympics…” His voice trailed off and now he was the one looking at the floor.

Torres raised her head and touched Wayne’s arm lightly with her hand. “No, Tony, that’s
not right.”

He looked up at her questioningly. She shook her head and attempted a faint smile. “It
meant too much to him. You watched the race; we both did. You could see how
important it was to him. I didn’t know it was that important but when I watched him I
knew then that it was. He wouldn’t have wanted you to take that away from him.”

Wayne exhaled loudly in frustration. He stared at her for a few moments, then started to
nod his head slightly. “You’re right,” he agreed. He looked down the corridor back
towards Dan’s room. “I don’t know why it was so important to him, but it was. And,
knowing him, if he was taking that kind of risk” – he nodded towards Dan’s room – “then
he did it with his eyes open.”

Leah was struck by this comment; it reminded her of a conversation she’d had with Dan
the night before his fateful race, and a comment he’d made at that time. She thought that
Wayne was more correct than he might realize, or perhaps it was that he and Andrea
Torres simply knew Dan Peterson better than she did.

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The three of them stood there in silence for a few seconds. Wayne finally looked at
Andrea. “We better get going.” He glanced sheepishly at Leah. “We’re on our lunch
break, you know?” he added apologetically.

Aren’t you the boss, Leah wanted to ask. Instead, she simply nodded. “It was nice of
you to come. Can I show you the way out?”

They indicated that they could find their way back on their own, seeming grateful to be
on their way, and started down the hall. They hadn’t gotten very far when Andrea
stopped and turned to Leah. “Do you think he’s going to get better?” Her voice was
frightened and tentative.

“I don’t know,” Leah admitted.

Andrea glanced self-consciously at Wayne, then looked back at Leah, her gaze steadier.
“He was a nice guy, the best.”

“He still is,” Leah corrected her.

“Yeah, yeah, I know -- you’re right. The thing is, I can’t stand to see him like this.”

Leah nodded sympathetically. “I know. It’s pretty shocking to go from being in the
Olympics to being like he is now.”

Andrea appeared confused. “No, I wasn’t talking about anything like that.”

“What is it then?”

Andrea looked at Wayne for moral support. He just seemed like he wanted to get the hell
out of there, but he nodded at her as if he knew what she was trying to say. “Him being

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on the TV didn’t really seem, you know, real. I miss him --” she looked at Wayne for
affirmation – “we miss having him around. Talking in the office, going out for beers.
You know.” She seemed practically in tears.

“He was a good guy,” Wayne agreed gruffly. “Come on, Andrea.” He took her by the
elbow and steered her down the corridor.

“Is a good guy,” Leah said softly as they walked away.

Chapter 13

Leah felt foolish waiting outside Dan’s building in the predawn darkness, waiting for him
to emerge. She sat in her car, the lights off but with the motor running to keep the heat
on. She was a tough Minnesota girl but she wouldn’t have looked forward to standing
outside in the thirty-degree weather. She was glad for the car’s warmth, and wondered
how long she’d have to wait outside like this.

Dan had told her he usually went out to run between five thirty and six on work
mornings, and it was almost six before he emerged. Despite the cold, he was wearing
only shorts and a long sleeved t-shirt. He did have some gloves as added protection
against the chill. It was the first time she had seen him wearing so few clothes, and what
previously had only been am impression of how thin he was had now been dramatically
confirmed. Even his legs were thin, although wiry might describe them better, with
corded muscles that she could see from where she was. She expected that he might spend
a few minutes stretching or otherwise warming up, but almost before she knew it he took
off.

And he was gone.

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She had to quickly put the car in gear and turn the lights on, trying to keep him in her
sight. He had the advantage of knowing where he was going, and soon also had bike
paths that she could not directly follow him on, but she had the car’s speed on her side,
allowing her to swing by and around him.

Leah didn’t have any real way to gauge his pace, the car’s speedometer being a poor
measure at these speeds. Still, she’d seen enough joggers in her time to know he was
moving along pretty well, and he flew by the few other runners who were out at this hour
almost as if they were standing still.

Dan ran for almost an hour, and Leah was able to keep him in view for most of that time.
Sometimes she was several hundred feet away, while at other times she was close enough
to watch his face directly. He finished up at his building, breathing heavily but
seemingly not distressed or at all exhausted. He put his hands on his hips and walked
inside.

Leah sat in her car thinking about what she’d seen. She hadn’t intended to stay for his
entire run, but had found herself mesmerized. It wasn’t anything to do with how fast he
ran or how smoothly he ran; she simply had no way to tell how unusual he might be in
those regards. She didn’t really know -- or care -- much about running. What had
surprised her was his intensity. She was used to seeing joggers who either looked like
they were miserable or were trying to think about other things to help pass the time, and
she sort of assumed that was how all runners must look. Running for them was just
something to get through, a self-inflicted hairshirt that allowed them to feel virtuous. He
was something else entirely. This was no sacrifice for him. This was a crusade. His face
showed pure concentration on his running – yet not to the point of being oblivious to the
rest of the world. He seemed aware of anything and everything that might have any
impact on his run, adeptly dodging cars, joggers, or bicyclists who suddenly appeared in
his way. He was a runaway horse. Not one of those captive horses than run around silly
ovals with a puny man on their back whipping them on, but a wild stallion running free
and proud, full of run and only truly alive while doing it. An animal like that doesn’t run

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because they’re chased or because they’re trying to lose weight. They run because that’s
what they know best.

He was good enough to make the Olympic team, of course, but this was something else.
The story she had practically written in her head was a cute little story about a secret
hobby someone in an office had, but she knew now that this story would not suffice. She
had thought she’d known him from the afternoon she’d spent talking to him and his
coworkers. She thought she knew that Dan Peterson. That Dan Peterson was a nice guy
who had a little hobby that his coworkers didn’t know about, in much the same way that
someone might do karaoke or grow roses in their spare time. The look on his face was
not the look of someone with a hobby. It was the look of someone totally committed. It
scared her. She didn’t know this Dan Peterson, didn’t know anything about him other
than what she had just seen. She’d have to rethink everything else.

She spent the rest of the morning doing some more fact checking. She called his former
coach at Wisconsin back and told him she had a few more questions for him. “Mr.
Murray, why did you say you were surprised at Dan making the team?”

“I told you, call me Herb,” he chided her mildly.

“Herb, then. You didn’t think Dan was good enough?”

He cleared his throat, and she wished she was talking to him in person so she could watch
his face, to see the little tells that don’t quite translate through the phone. “Well, you
know he hadn’t been racing for a few years. It was kind of out of the blue. I’m really
thrilled for him, though. Great kid.”

Leah was enough of a reporter to know when someone isn’t quite telling the whole story.
“That’s not all, is it?” she prodded carefully. “What else?”

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For a second she wasn’t sure he’d respond, or if he would try to cover up what he knew
again. “Look, if you asked me to predict who’d be running ten, twenty, thirty years after
they got out of school, he’d be at the top of the list. If you asked me to give you a list of
the kids who always gave all they had, regardless of how much talent they actually had,
he’d be on that list too.” He paused for a second and Leah could sense him trying to
compose himself. When he continued, his voice was much softer yet more sure. “And if
you asked me who’d be a success in life, who’d be the kind of guy you’d want your
daughter to marry – Dan Peterson would be right up there. No doubt.”

He paused again, and Leah eventually had to interject. “But…”

He exhaled heavily. “But – if you asked me for a list of the kids with the most talent, the
kids most likely to ever make an Olympic team – no, he wouldn’t be on that particular
list. So, yeah, I was a little surprised.”

Leah checked the notes she had been rapidly scribbling as he’d been talking. “You said
he always gave his all, and you told me the last time we spoke that he was one of your
top four or five best his senior year. Why would it be so surprising he kept getting better,
that he eventually got good enough to make an Olympic team?”

“Pure and simple – he never had the leg speed. Put him in a sprint, he’d be dead last. It
wasn’t until a mile or two that he could be competitive with anyone, and not all that many
people then. He got better the longer the distance, because he could just gut it out,
because he didn’t slow down as much as other people did. The 10,000 meters was the
shortest distance he could really be competitive at.”

Leah was confused. “I would think the marathon would be perfect for him, then.”

“Ms. Hutchins, you have to remember that these are the Olympics we’re talking about,”
Murray explained patiently. “World class athletes. The top marathoners average a faster
pace than he could run for a 10k. Hell, the good ones average faster than he could run a

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5k. I never thought he could run fast enough to make an Olympic team, but I’m proud as
hell of him. I don’t know how he’ll finish but I know he’ll give it everything he’s got.”

Leah asked a few more questions, thanked him for his time, and got off the phone. After
she’d finished a few more phone calls it was mid-afternoon, and she sat back to review
her notes. She couldn’t write the article she’d planned now. And she knew she needed to
do one more thing before she could write a better article. She dialed the phone. “Dan,
Leah Hutchins here. I was wondering – could I come by and talk to you sometime later
today?”

Chapter 14

He realized that he had to make a choice. He could continue to concentrate on the face,
or search his otherwise blank and featureless universe for other objects, other evidence of
meaning amidst the meaninglessness that engulfed him. He knew that if he chose the
face, he might miss something more important, something that might unlock the secret of
where he was and why he was there. Perhaps even why he was at all.

Then, again, the face was there, waiting. It wasn’t a very difficult choice to make.

Time passed. He had nothing to measure it by. Nothing changed in his world, and he
had no way to count or otherwise note its passage. He had nothing to do other than stare
at the face, soak it in endlessly. And gradually, ever so gradually, something did change.

The face had initially just been those slight suggestions, of eyes and a nose and a mouth.
It had been enough to render it as a face, but not much more. It wasn’t until he had
minutely studied every piece of it, over and over and over again until he could get so lost
in the detail that he sometimes lost the whole of it, was so absorbed in, say, the curve of
that nose that he might not be able to remember that it was part of something larger. At
these times he’d had to struggle to force himself back, to gape wildly until the whole of

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the face revealed itself again. It was his greatest fear that he might lose it again, that one
of those times he would look for the rest of the face and not find it. It was something so
tenuously gained that he knew he had no real grip on it, that he could, indeed, lose it to
the void again. But it was a risk he had to take, and so he forced himself again and again
to learn even the smallest of details.

Despite his meticulous study, it nonetheless came as a surprise to him that the face had
something else different from its surroundings: it had color. He didn’t really know it as
color, of course, but he came to recognize that the area between the pieces seemed
different than the areas outside the face. It was barely there, but once he’d seen it, it
became more real to him, and provided him with the buoy that he could hang onto to
always return to the face. He watched it, analyzed it, viewed it with growing fascination.

It was a light color, almost white but mixed with faint tints that were hard to describe. He
eventually concluded that the face had a slight ruddiness, giving the face a hue with the
slight suggestion of pale red or pink. This was quite exciting, as the face gained a new
character due to the color. The color gave it life, made it seem not just like a
representation of a face.

Once there was color, he similarly began to notice texture. The face was not, after all, a
uniform, two-dimensional object. By studying every square inch, every square
millimeter of the face he could at last see small places where the skin rose and fell. It
undeniably had depth; his universe now had three dimensions. That was a concept that
took him much time to understand, and if he had legs he might have jumped from the
eureka of the moment. Once he grasped it, he delighted in noticing all the subtle
variations, down to the pores that had eluded him for so long but now were plainly visible
if he looked hard enough. The texture also led him more obvious findings: evidence of
cheekbones, of eyebrows, of the nose, and of the line of the jaw. Each discovery was a
revelation, a joy and a puzzle in itself. The puzzle usually came first, seeing the
difference and only with much painful observation concluding the feature that led to that
difference.

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The mouth puzzled him for the longest time. It started out as simply a line, but grew to
reveal lips, which themselves had a landscape all of their own, little peaks and valleys for
no clear reason. The mouth had a character, and those lips formed an expression. He
couldn’t have said if it was a smile, a frown, or something in between, or what emotions
any of those might have meant. He only knew that the mouth was a key that might
unlock something of the face – or, more accurately, of something behind that face. It
kept him watching.

It was the eyes that took the longest. At first they were simply dark spots where eyes
should be. It wasn’t until he had deciphered the nose and the eyebrows that surrounded
the eyes did he turn to the area between them. He recognized that they eyes were not
monolithic. They were ovals with circles within circles. The circles floated within the
oval, which was the lightest color of the face. The innermost circle was a dark void,
drawing him in until he feared he might fall and be sucked into some other abyss. Unlike
his current universe, though, he thought he might not mind being drawn into these depths,
although he could not ascertain where they might lead. The larger circle held the dark
circle in its center, and he came to understand that it held a variety of colors. From his
study of the rest of the face, his initial understanding of its color led him to see that not all
color was the same. The shade changed as he scanned different parts of the face, and
these shades had provided him with some of his earliest clues as to the shade that
suggested depth.

The eyes’ colors were different. He had no words to describe them, but they were
different from all the color shades of complexion he had learned from the face. The
colors varied even more than the different parts of the face. Within the small area
bounded by the circles within the eyes – the irises – there were more changes of colors
than anything else he had seen. They were quite beautiful, utterly unlike anything else.
If he were forced to make a choice, he would have given up the rest of the face as long as
he had those eyes to stay with him. There was a sparkle to them, a vitality that thrilled

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him and made him feel more alive as well. It did not occur to him, not yet, that those
eyes might be staring back at him.

Chapter 15

Leah went back to Dan’s room. He was laying in the bed, his eyes open and staring
blindly at the ceiling. No matter how many times she had come, she always felt awkward
in his presence, not knowing quite what she should be doing.

“His friends didn’t stay very long, did they?” Mary said, bustling into Dan’s room. She
took up position next to his bed and checked his IV lines.

“I think it was a bit much for them.”

Mary nodded and switched one of the lines. “It takes some folks a while.” She studied
the monitors, and took one of Dan’s wrists to feel his pulse directly. She put a hand on
his forehead and held it there.

“Don’t trust the equipment, huh?” Leah tried to joke.

Mary took her hand away, and gave Leah a skeptical glance. She took his chart and
started to write some notes. “Oh, they work just fine. I just think it does a body good to
feel the touch of another person every so often.” She moved towards the door, then – as
if it had just occurred to her – stopped and turned. “You might try it too. I bet he’d like
to have his girlfriend touch him.”

“I’m not his girlfriend,” Leah protested.

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“Whatever,” Mary said, waving her hand to indicate her disbelief, as though Leah might
have some other name for their intimate relationship. “You been talking to him like I
told you?”

Leah remembered how silly she had felt talking to him in this state, and yet was
embarrassed at having not tried very hard at it. “Dr. Tollefson said he thought he
couldn’t really hear.”

Her voice was kind. “Those doctors don’t know everything. I know if I was wherever he
is, I know I’d like the sound of someone talking to me.” With that she swept out of the
room, leaving Leah standing there feeling even more awkward. She edged closer to his
bed.

“So what would you like to talk about, Dan?” she asked softly, feeling a little foolish.
She glanced towards the door to make sure no one could hear her, and moved closer to
the bed. “Nothing in particular, huh?”

She paused and looked out the window to distract her from the futility of what she was
doing. “Your boss and your assistant were just here, in case they came and went before
you knew it.” She glanced down, and smiled wryly. “I don’t think they liked seeing you
like this. I mean, none of us do, but I guess I’ve had longer to get used to you like this
than they’ve had. This was their first time and all. I can’t say I’m really used to it either,
but at least I’ve seen you before, so it gets easier.” Not really, she wanted to add, but
even if he couldn’t hear her she didn’t dare say something as discouraging as that to him.
She tentatively put a hand on his chest. He was warmer than she had expected, and even
frailer than she had feared. The latter almost made her draw her hand away, pulling it off
his chest a couple inches, then with great courage she laid it back down. She could feel
his ribs through the thin gown, each one sharp and distinct. She feared she might
inadvertently break them if she wasn’t careful.

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Leah half-expected him to wake when she touched him, which she knew was sort of silly.
The doctors and nurses touched him all the time, and he never responded. There was no
reason for her to expect that he might react any differently to her touch, yet she found
herself wishing that he had. She had to rouse herself from these silly thoughts. It’s not
like they really knew each other all that well, and it certainly wouldn’t do him any good
to pretend otherwise. Or her.

She didn’t know what else to say, and for a few seconds she stood there in silence. She
could feel his heart beat through that thin chest. It beat so slowly, scaring her until she
remembered that he’d once told her that he had a very slow heart beat. “I’m just a big
heart, a big set of lungs, and some leg muscles,” he’d told her, smiling. It wasn’t far from
the truth, except that she also remembered his warm smile and the twinkle in his eyes
when he’d said it and she had known even then that there was much more to him than
those. Now even that mighty heart was slowed to a crawl, and his powerful legs would
soon slowly begin to atrophy. It was tragic, and too hard to think about.

“My editor gave me a new assignment today,” she told him, reluctantly pulling her hand
back and moving over towards the window. “It’s really a national assignment, for all of
the field correspondents. ‘The Mood of America.’ What do you think, eh? Sounds
pretty pretentious, doesn’t it? Of course, if the Times can’t be pretentious, who can be?
All the news that’s fit to print and all that. I don’t know where I’ll start. The mood of the
country – I barely know what mood I’m in. You’re about the only person whose mood I
can count on.”

She felt guilty about the latter; it had come out a bit too flip, a bit too casually calloused.
“I mean, you were always pretty laid back. Even right before the Olympics you were as
cool as a cucumber. The only time I ever saw you not laid back was when I saw you
run.”

That gave her pause, and also gave her the inspiration for a new line of conversation.
She came back over to the bed. “It’s a pretty day outside, Dan,” she said cheerfully.

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“Not too hot but warm enough for you to work up a good sweat if you were running. The
sun is out and the skies are a pretty blue.” She found herself smiling despite herself.
“Maybe I’ll take a walk when I go home, get some exercise. Maybe I’ll walk around one
of the lakes. Remember the lakes, Dan? You used to run around the lakes all the time.
You told me you’d run around all the lakes, that you knew practically all the bike paths
and running trails there were. If you were here maybe…” Her voice trailed off. She
could picture him doing just that, and the memory of how full of life he’d been when he
was running shocked her.

She slowly pulled back her hand and gripped the rails on the edge of the bed. She looked
into his face for any signs of awareness, hoping that he might have heard her or at least
the sound of her voice. His eyes showed just blankness.

“I don’t know if it helps you to have me talk or not. I don’t know if you can hear
anything I’m saying. Maybe I should tell you about what’s going on in the world, you
know, like your own version of CNN.” She paused. “I could tell you what’s going on in
my life, except I’m not really sure what I’d tell you. I just keep coming back here.”

She wiped away an unexpected tear that had slowly started to run down her face. It
surprised her, and she had to fight back its compatriots. “I better go now, Dan. But I’ll
be back.”

“So you went to see your buddy again?” Rick said absently. They were sitting at his
dining room table, eating dinner. He’d called her and invited her over for dinner; it had
been several nights since she’d seen him. She’d come over to his house around nine,
expecting to find that he’d cooked her a gourmet meal, like he used to do in the early
days in their relationship. Instead, she found that he’d ordered some Chinese food. She
was not big into cooking and ate take-out herself a lot, but found herself disappointed
nonetheless. He used to come over to her house for the evening a lot, too.

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She nodded, expertly taking a dumpling with her chopsticks.

“Any change?”

She savored the dumpling and chewed it before answering. She shook her head. “No, no
change. I did try talking to him, though.”

He looked up, momentarily interested. “Did it make any difference?”

“No,” she admitted, shaking her head again. “If he’s listening it’s pretty hard to tell.”

He took some of the sweet and sour pork and put it on his plate. His dining room was too
dark for her tastes, even when the lights were on, which they were not. Rick had used
candles to light the dining room, perhaps attempting a halfway romantic gesture. If so, it
had fallen flat. The dining furniture, like much of the house, was too heavy, thick and
formal. Even the walls were darker colors than she would have used, emphasizing the
formality of the place. It wasn’t an old house, but Rick had bought it as a showplace and
had paid someone to decorate it to impress rather than to live in. He had resisted her mild
suggestions to lighten it up, to add some personal touches, and at times she despaired of
ever being able to have an influence on it. She felt like rain falling lightly on an iceberg.
Given time, rain can melt the iceberg, but it takes a lot of time and it is more likely that
the rain will turn to ice itself than it is that it would win the war. It would never be her
house. She wasn’t sure it was really his house either, and she wasn’t sure if she was more
worried that he was oblivious or if it did, in fact, suit him.

Rick was such a find on so many levels. Handsome, good job doing interesting work,
very intelligent, lots of friends, articulate, and – despite all that – a kind man. She’d
never seen him raise his voice or lose his temper. Sometimes she wished he would. She
was less sure of his friends, who seemed to regard her as the trophy girlfriend. Still, at
parties together with his friends she occasionally wondered if they truly accepted her, or
if they thought of her more like researchers accepting an ape that has learned sign

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language. The researchers may take great interest in communicating with the ape, and
even be proud of it, but at the end of the day they went off and talked in a language the
ape could never follow.

The only part of the house she liked was the enclosed porch. It looked out onto the
adjoining woods and the small pond that bordered his property. Sometimes she’d get up
in the middle of the night, after he’d gone to sleep, and sit out on the porch to watch the
nightlife come and go. She’d seen deer, some raccoons, and even a fox or two. Even if
there weren’t any nocturnal wildlife, she could just sit and appreciate the stillness of it.
She’d watch the moon shine on the water or the quiet breeze rustle the trees, and was
happy to be part of it all. Once in the early spring there had been a surprise snowfall, and
she’d gone out in the yard in her bare feet just to let the snowflakes fall gently on her.
Rick never even noticed these absences.

She’d prefer to have had their meals out on the porch, but Rick insisted on eating either in
the dining room or the family room with its elaborate entertainment center. She
wondered if this evening would end up with her falling asleep during some movie, while
he worked next to her on the couch. Perhaps she’d call it a night and go home after
dinner.

“Why do you keep going back there?” he asked, bringing her back to earth. “Are you
going to write more stories on the guy?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly.

“Maybe there’s a book in all this,” he mused.

“Maybe.”

“I mean, you pretty much have the inside scoop on the whole thing, right? Even his
family trusts you.”

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“I’m not sure the world is beating my door down to read about a guy who can barely
blink on his own,” she told him with an edge she hadn’t planned on.

“Yeah, well, maybe he’ll wake up. That’d be a good story.” With this he put his head
down and resumed eating in earnest, apparently having lost interest in the topic.

“I’ll be sure to tell him,” she said.

Chapter 16

Leah felt a bit foolish standing in front of Dan’s door. When she told him she’d had a
few more questions for him, he’d indicated that he didn’t have much time for her during
the day, and so she’d offered to stop by his place after work. He’d even seemed reluctant
about that, but in the end had relented, as long as she came after seven. He’d buzzed her
in the front door and was waiting at the door when she made it to his floor. “Ms.
Hutchins,” he said formally, beckoning her in. “Making house calls?” He was wearing
sweatpants, a t-shirt, and flip-flops. His hair was still wet, as if he was just out of the
shower. She hoped he hadn’t cleaned up just for her, but at least he hadn’t dressed to
impress. His sweatpants and t-shirt both looked to have had better days – the inscription
on the faded t-shirt was no longer readable -- but she had to admit that they looked well
worn and very comfortable. Still, she couldn’t help but noticing that his wrists were no
bigger than her own.

“Always on the job,” she replied, flashing him a broad smile. She went inside and he
closed the door behind them.

His apartment was not quite what she might have expected, and she paused in the
entryway to take in what she could see. It was not a stereotypical bachelor’s pad. There
were no piles of crumbled beer cans, no plates of forgotten, half-eaten food, and no dirty

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clothes thrown over chairs. In fact, it was quite neat – neater than her own house, she
thought ruefully. She didn’t have a white glove but even just standing there she had the
sense that at least his living room would pass the dust test.

Maid service, she decided.

The other thing she noticed was that it was quite Spartan. The living room had just a
couple of chairs, a coffee table with a chess set on it, two small bookcases, and –
curiously enough – a desk with a computer in the corner by the window. She would have
expected it to be in a study or bedroom, just as she would have expected the living room
to have a big television and a sound system, neither of which was in evidence. The desk
seemed unnaturally clean, with no paper visible. She had to glance around the room
several times to realize what else was missing: the walls were barren, with no pictures or
photos to adorn them.

“Want the grand tour?” he asked, noticing her inspection.

“Lead on.”

It turned out to be a one bedroom apartment, with a bath room and modest kitchen. The
bedroom was as neat or neater than the living room, and there was a small television in
the bedroom – so he wasn’t entirely un-American, she thought with relief. The bedroom
wall, on the other hand, had an interesting poster-board that was filled with postcards.
She took a closer look, surprised at the variety of places represented, throughout the U.S.,
plus several European locations, one from Tokyo, and a few from Australia and New
Zealand. It seemed out of place in the otherwise sparse bedroom. “Your friends get
around,” she said, indicating the display.

“No, those are mine,” he said quietly, watching her closely.

“You send postcards to yourself?”

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He shook his head with a small smile. “No, I just buy them and bring them home with
me. Sort of a way to remember.”

She nodded knowingly, although it didn’t make a lot of sense to her. At least the kitchen
had a more normal set of decorations, a few pictures of a boy and a girl, at various ages.
“Who are they?”

“My niece and nephew,” he told her. “Cute, huh?”

“Sure,” she agreed. “I assume these are theirs too.” She pointed to some enthusiastically
but not artfully done pictures. One was of a man who appeared to be running, and who
presumably represented Dan. He responded to her inquiry with a nod of pride.

Once the tour was over, they settled at the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from
the living room. Her initial suspicions had been confirmed; either Dan was
extraordinarily neat, or he had a good cleaning service. She had to know. “So, your
place is very nice. I hope you didn’t have to clean up for me.”

He had to suppress a smile. “No, it’s pretty much always like this. I don’t like a mess.”
His face brightened. “Hey, have you eaten?” She shook her head. He continued.
“Listen, I haven’t had dinner yet and I was going to order a pizza. Do you mind?”

“No.”

He paused and regarded her thoughtfully. “You probably had dinner or have plans later,
but if not – would you like some?”

She had half-expected that she and Rick might get together later, but it was as likely that
he’d work too late as that they’d actually manage to do so. “I’d love to,” she told him,

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deciding on the spot. They negotiated the toppings, and he offered to make a salad,
which she again took him up on.

While he got up to start on the salad, she tried to get back on the track of why she’d
come. The apartment was bothering her. She’d expected it to not only be an unkempt
bachelor’s place, but also an athlete’s home, full of sweaty clothes and various trophies
and medals. The only signs of his running were a rack of neatly arranged clothes and
shoes in the bathroom, and a treadmill in the bedroom, folded up vertically for the
moment. It didn’t fit. Then there was the lack of a TV in the living room, and the chess
set. “You play chess?” she asked, trying to make conversation.

He looked up from the lettuce he was chopping. “I do,” he said. “A bit.”

“Who do you play with?” She could see that the board was frozen in mid-game, as if her
arrival had interrupted it, although Dan’s opponent had mysteriously disappeared.

He nodded towards the computer. “Various people online. I just use the board to work
through games I’ve got going.”

“Are you good?”

He smiled. “I’m OK. Not a grandmaster or anything, but I do OK. It gives me

something to do in the evening.”

“Not a big television watcher?”

He shook his head. “Not really. The odd baseball game here or there, or a track meet
when the networks deign to cover them.”

He resumed work on the salad, adding in carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers, plus some
croutons and a smattering of cheese. She watched enviously as he chopped efficiently.

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Her own skills in the kitchen were somewhat more rudimentary, and she was impressed
by people who seemed comfortable with preparing real meals, as opposed to her own
microwave expertise. He focused on his tasks with a singular concentration that she
found intriguing, not seeming eager to engage simultaneously in conversation. She
wondered if he was used to eating most of his meals here, alone.

“Voila!” he announced at last. “The pizza will be another few minutes, but we can start
on this. I have some bread too.”

He put some of the salad on a plate in front of her, and handed her a bowl with some
fresh bread in it. She used her knife to cut off a piece, and took some butter for it. He
waited until she started before taking any himself.

“Will your boyfriend mind that you’re having dinner with me?” he asked casually, not
looking up from his salad.

She stared at him. It was the second time he’d brought up her having a boyfriend, and
she wasn’t sure if he was teasing or prying. “What makes you think I have a boyfriend?”

His face came up, a small smile on it. “Girls like you always have boyfriends.”

He said this matter-of-factly, not sounding like he minded or was jealous, just stating a
truth that everyone would know. She would have objected but, in fact, she usually did
have a boyfriend, at least when she wanted one. “I don’t think he’ll mind,” she said,
trying to be nonchalant as well. “What about you? Will your girlfriend mind?”

As she said it she thought about the complete lack of a woman’s touch in his home that
she suddenly hoped he wouldn’t think she was making fun of him in some way. He just
smiled that small smile again. “No girlfriend. Guys like me don’t usually have
girlfriends.”

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Once again he said it so matter-of-factly that she was taken aback. There was no self-pity
in his voice or expression; it was something he had just accepted. “Why’s your hair
wet?” she asked, trying to change the topic. The salad was pretty good, made with fresh
produce that, again, was not exactly in the character she might have expected. The pizza,
maybe, but not the fresh salad.

He ran his hand through it sheepishly. “I just took a shower.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise, and he hastened to explain. “I ran after work and
then did my stretching and yoga afterwards, so it didn’t give me much time.”

“You’re into yoga?” she asked.

“I’m into anything that keeps these old muscles limber,” he said lightly.

The buzzer rang, announcing the arrival of the deliveryman. “Let me treat,” she offered.
He politely declined, and waited at the door until it arrived. He paid and brought the box
to the counter. “Dig in.”

They each took a few last bites of the salad, and took a slice apiece. “It’s good,” she
declared after a bite. “So was the salad, by the way. My compliments.”

He gave her a wry expression. “You’re a cheap date.”

She thought about the expensive places Rick usually took her and thought he would beg
to disagree. “So you run, you play chess, and you travel,” she started. “I didn’t know
about the last two until I got here. What else don’t I know?”

He chewed some pizza thoughtfully for a few moments, then took a look around the
apartment before answering. He gave her a guileless look. “I’m a pretty simple guy.”

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They ate in a comfortable silence for a couple minutes. “”You like Minneapolis?” she
asked.

“Sure.”

“Why here,” she probed. “I thought runners lived in warmer places, like California.
Pretty tough winters here for running.”

He smiled. “Nah, I figure it just makes them soft.”

Leah thought he was teasing her but wasn’t entirely sure. “Seriously, why here? You’re
from Wisconsin, right?”

He nodded. “I heard there was a good running community here, and I got a job here, so
here I am. You’re from here, right?”

“Yes.”

“You like it?”

She found herself smiling back at him. “Sure. It’s home, my friends are here, I make
enough money, and I like the cultural life here.”

“How so?”

“Oh, you know, concerts, plays, the museums, art galleries. It’s really a pretty
sophisticated city, as I’m sure you know.”

He eyed her cautiously. “I’m more of a DVD and sports guy, myself,” he told her drolly.
“I don’t really get out all that much.”

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She thought about this and took a couple of bites of the pizza, which was pretty good.
She was hungrier than she’d realized. “So where do you live?” he asked after a while.

“Dogtown,” she answered, using the nickname for the area around the University. “I’ve
lived there since school.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know the area pretty well. I have a few loops that go through
there.”

“Is that how you think of places? By whether you’ve run there or not?”

She was teasing, but instead of smiling he simply nodded. “Pretty much. Places don’t
really have an objective reality for me if I haven’t run there,” he said dryly, his face
deadpan.

She thought he might be kidding her, but she wasn’t quite sure. She stared at him for a
long couple of seconds, and then had an inspiration. “Thus the postcards,” she said.

He nodded, a half-smile on his face. “Yeah. Thus the postcards.”

“You’ve really gone to all those places?”

“Of course,” he said, appearing surprised. “A lot of them were weekends or long
weekends, but they’re all places I’ve been to.”

“And why those places? Like, are you a history buff or did you go visit friends there?”
she prompted.

He took a bite of pizza and chewed it before answering. “They were just places I wanted
to run.”

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“You really went to all those places just so you could run there?”

He nodded in confirmation, unabashed by the notion that one might go to Prague or

Sidney just to take a run. This was closer to what she had come here to find out. She
finished off a slice and took another. “So, I had a couple more questions for you.”

“Shoot.”

“I talked to Nike this morning, and they said they didn’t have a shoe contract with you,
even though you were wearing Nikes at the Trials.”

He nodded. “I also wear Adidas and New Balance, sometimes Asics. I like to vary my
shoes.”

“But I’d think one of them would want to sign you now that you’re on the team.”

His eyes took on a somewhat distant look. “Like I told you the other day -- a couple of
them called me, and offered me some free shoes. Nike offered a little money.” He left it
at that.

“Did you take them up on it?”

He shook his head. “No. I mean, I’m not opposed to it or anything, but I can’t afford any
distractions at this point.”

“Shoes and some extra money are distractions?” she asked skeptically.

He put down the slice he was working through very carefully, and flattened his hands
against the counter top. He seemed almost sad. “Nothing’s free,” he said at last.
“There’s always some strings.”

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“Sort of like a girlfriend?” she asked, fishing but pretty sure of her guess.

He nodded. “Sort of. I mean, I’m no monk or anything, but it’s tough to date when
you’re usually in bed every night by ten and up early in the morning.”

“Rain or shine?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Rain, shine, sleet, snow.”

“What about when it gets really cold?”

“I dress warmer,” he said simply.

She studied him carefully. She suspected that he’d have an answer like that for any
potential barrier she might put up. “I saw you run this morning,” she announced.

“I know,” he said, much to her surprise.

“How do you know that?”

He seemed amused by her surprise. “I saw you. There’s not a lot of cars out that time of
morning and when you see the same one several times you begin to pay attention. It took
me a few times to decide you weren’t a nut.”

“Or a stalker,” she added impishly.

He smiled at this. “I don’t get a lot of stalkers, to tell you the truth.”

“So I learned something about you by watching you run,” she told him, watching him
carefully.

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She wasn’t sure he was going to take the bait, but eventually he did. “What’s that?”

She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Well, you know, yesterday at lunch and then at
your office I thought maybe this was all kind of a lark. You know, that you were just a
guy who likes to run, had a great day and won the lottery, so to speak. You managed to
get all the way to the Olympic team on a fluke,” she said carefully, not wanting to hurt
his feelings. “I thought maybe you didn’t tell your friends because it wasn’t really that
big a deal to you.” She paused.

“And now?” he said, his voice entirely neutral. Only his eyes betrayed his interest.

“Now I think that everything else is a lark,” she said, not fully realizing the fact of it until
she said it. “I think that is what you care about and that’s why you don’t tell people about
it. It’s too important to you and you don’t think they’d understand.”

She wasn’t sure where her conclusion had come from, but her instincts told her she’d hit
the core of the story. She knew something about him, had understood something he kept
hidden from the world. Part of it was her skill as a reporter, but part of it was…
something else. Now she just waited to see how he would respond to her psychological
insight. He gave her that deadpan expression, then picked up another slice of pizza and
took a mouthful. “What makes you think that?” he asked at last.

She ate another bite of pizza herself to give herself time to think. “The look on your face.
Like there was nothing in the world. What do you think about when you are running?”

“Getting done,” he quipped immediately.

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious, sort of,” he said mildly. “I think about how far to go, how I’m feeling,
what’s going on around me--”

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“Like stalkers,” she interrupted.

He glanced at her, amused. “Yeah, like that. The weather, the road, my legs, my feet,”
he continued. “Just about running well and getting home safely.”

They looked at each other with something new, something shared. “I talked to Herb
Murray again this morning,” she told him. “He told me he never thought you’d be fast
enough to make a National team.”

Dan took a long swallow of water before answering. “He’s right. I wasn’t, and I wasn’t
going to be.”

“So how’d you change that?”

He sat back in his stool and seemed to consider this, chewing on his lip. It took longer
than she had expected. “I kept racing for a couple of years after college – road races, the
occasional track 10k, and so on – and I kept improving. A little. I also kept finishing
behind a lot of people, and eventually I realized I had to start over.”

“How do you mean?”

He looked away and smiled at something long past but evidently not long gone. “I
stopped racing, I stopped training with my buddies. I moved here to start over with fewer
distractions, and I broke down my training, running shorter but faster. It took a long time
until I could hold the pace, but gradually I built my miles back up. I don’t run as far as I
once did but I run enough, and I’m a minute or more faster per mile.” He suddenly
stopped and grimaced. He quickly stood up and bent over to rub his calf before standing
back up. “Sorry, my calf was cramping a little. I’ve been sitting too long.” He picked
up his plate and took it over to the sink.

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“Are you hurt?” Leah asked, concerned. She got up and brought her plate over to the
sink as well.

“Just the usual.”

She stared in surprise at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’m always a little hurt, and I’m always tired. It goes with the territory.”

“I expected it would be easy for you by now,” she admitted.

“Why would you think that?”

“Well, you’ve been doing it so long, and you’re clearly pretty good at it.”

He looked at her, amused. It’s never easy,” he told her flatly, not expecting any
sympathy.

“Never?”

“If it’s easy, I haven’t pushed hard enough.”

She thought about this. “So you don’t really like running?” she asked at last, surprised.

He shook his head. “You know, some days your body isn’t quite with it, some days your
head isn’t into it, and some days both are a mess.” He paused, and she knew that there
was something else there. “And other days?” she asked.

He smiled. “Other days you hit on all cylinders and it’s like magic, like flying. So, do I
enjoy it? I’m not sure that’s the right question.”

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“What is the right question?”

He studied her, and she wasn’t sure if he was amused by her or felt sorry for her. “You
saw me this morning. What do you think it was like?”

She shook her head, remembering how he had, indeed, looked. “It looked…intense,” she
said, struggling for the right word. “You were very focused, but very alive somehow.”
She left out that it had scared and thrilled her at the same time.

“That’s a good way to describe it.” He was smiling just a tiny bit.

“You must love it,” she said enviously.

“Love it?” he repeated, the distant look back on his face. “I suppose so. But, you know,
every day I wake up and think about not running. Every day.”

“But you do anyway.”

He nodded thoughtfully, acknowledging the truth of it. “But I do,” he repeated slowly.

“Why?” she prodded.

He looked at her carefully, considering her for something. He seemed unduly serious.
“Do you write every day?” he asked, throwing her off balance.

“Yes,” she admitted at last, thinking not of her articles for the Times but of her short
stories and poetry. The ones she didn’t talk about much, the ones she struggled to get
published in the odd writing journal here and there but which mattered more than a
byline.

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He watched her, and she had the odd sensation that he knew about them, knew that
writing wasn’t just her job but something more. “Do you ever thinking of not writing?”

“No,” she murmured. She pulled herself together and gave him what she hoped was a
stern look. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you and your passion.”

He just smiled. “Does writing ever get easy – you know, all that writing makes it easy
for you?”

She shook her head in mock frustration. He was ignoring her questions and getting into
her personal life. They were sitting in his kitchen sharing a meal and it suddenly didn’t
seem like an interview anymore. She wasn’t sure what it felt like. He listened to her so
thoroughly and spoke so thoughtfully that it was easy to get sucked in. “It’s never easy,”
she confessed, her voice low as she thought about the struggle to fill up those blank pages
with words that meant something, words that mattered, words that she would be proud of.
No, it never got easy.

He smiled at her, a sad smile of sympathy. “So you see.”

And she did.

He looked at her with something that could be pity, or something that could be fierce.
“You wanted to know why I run every day. Tell me, why do you get up in the morning?”

She was caught off guard. “I don’t know. Why does anyone get up in the morning?”

He looked at her as though she was a creature from another species, as indeed she now
thought she might be to him. “Is this for the story or for you?”

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She knew the right answer and she knew the answer that she should give. She had a
sense that he’d tell her anyway, but he wanted to know why she wanted to know. Most
surprisingly, she found that, story or no story, she wanted to know. “For me.”

“I honestly don’t know why other people get up in the morning,” he told her slowly. “I
get up to run.”

Chapter 17

The hair fascinated him. It was only after much observation that he realized the
eyebrows were not monolithic objects, not just lines drawn across the brows, but made of
individual hairs. He almost missed the eyelashes, and did not understand at first that they
must be made of the same thing as the eyebrows. The hair was clearly different than
skin, in both shape and evident texture, and he wondered at that. What purpose could it
serve?

When the hair on the top and sides of the head started to become visible he was surprised
but at least he had a speculation as to its nature, if not its purpose. It took much study for
the full head of hair to be revealed – hair by hair by hair, until the mass of trees made a
forest. It wasn’t like the other features of the face – those deep if expressionless eyes, the
seemingly soft skin on the cheeks, the almost bony rise of the nose. Its purpose, too,
puzzled him. Still, he couldn’t say it seemed out of place either.

The neck, on the other hand, didn’t seem to belong. When he first started to notice it he
thought it spoiled the symmetry of the rest of the face, even though it only extended a
couple of inches below the head. He couldn’t fathom what purpose it might serve, and it
didn’t occur to him to wonder where it might be going, what it might be connected to.
He just thought that it seemed unnecessary, the head resting on it uneasily. Of course, the
nose and the ears had appeared like afterthoughts as well, details that might have been
grafted on as an add-on to the original design, so perhaps this was something like that. It

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was possible, he now knew, that if he simply kept watching it carefully more details
might reveal themselves, so he kept tabs on it.

All in all, the face was now properly a head, to any external observer. It had depth,
appeared as a three dimensional object – not that he knew what they meant or understood
the distinction from the time when it had basically been a two dimensional picture. He
couldn’t imagine what the back of the head might look like – for all he knew, there might
be another face, or the same face – on the other side, but he wasn’t able to come up with
any way he might gain access to that other side. It might as well not exist.

As interesting as his constant study was, he began to be troubled by the whole matter. It
took a long time for his thoughts to come together. There were really two problems.

Why a face? And, in particular, why this face?

A benefit of his concentration on the nature of the face was that the cacophony of other
inputs no longer troubled him as much. They were still there, of course, a constant
torrent of sensations that had no meaning to him and that still pounded at him. His world
was still filled with things that had no meaning to him and no evident way for him to
understand. Only the face offered any kind of clarity, and he was at a loss as to its
meaning. He just could block out everything else in some sense, to some degree, by
thinking about the face. This was both a blessing and a risk, of course. He still
occasionally speculated that there could be other finds amidst the chaos, but he was
unwilling to cease his focus on the one thing that seemed coherent.

He tried to reason the problems out. He knew he was here – whatever “he” was and
wherever “here” was. And he knew that the face – or, rather, the head – shared this space
with him. But why should it be here? What connection might it have with him?

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Once it came to him, the conclusion was so obvious that it was startling. The simplest
reason why the face would be here in this madness with him was that it was his face, his
head.

He tried to think through this. He wasn’t sure why his face would appear as an object
that seemed separate from himself. He didn’t have any experience with these things, but
he wondered from what perspective he would view himself as he was viewing this face.
He didn’t feel either any particular attachment to the features of this face, but neither did
he feel any objections to the idea than it might be his. He had stared at it so long that
every feature seemed familiar to him, but that was no proof in itself.

If it was, indeed, his face, he ought to be able to control it, he decided at last. All he
needed to do was to make it behave according to his wishes and he would know for sure.
He could try to make the eyes move, the mouth curl, perhaps even move the head to one
side. There were lots of options, and any of them would be proof enough. He just
needed to animate the face in any way.

The trouble was – how?

People who can wiggle their ears know how to do so, and people who can't cannot even
fathom what muscles or string of commands would produce such an unlikely result. One
can’t be told how to do it; one simply must do it. He was in a similar but much worse
position. The face was static, and his long observation of it had given him no insight into
the mechanisms that might control it. Nor did he have any memory of having seen it
move, or of what might cause it to do so.

He tried everything he could think of, which wasn’t much. Aside from simply trying to
will particular portions of it to behave in particular ways – ways that he couldn’t even
predict the outcome of, couldn’t imagine the changes they might bring -- there wasn’t
much else he could think to do. After eon upon eon of failure to affect the face, he

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grudgingly came to the conclusion that, as unlikely as it might be for there to be a distinct
object in this wasteland he inhabited, the face wasn’t his.

If anything, this was worse. If it wasn’t his face, he had the issue of why this face was
with him. It led to the exciting but frightening concept that he was not alone, that this
crazy place had room for more than just him.

He wondered if the face was studying him as he was studying it. He tried to imagine
what it might see of him. Did he have a face as well, a head of his own? If so, was there
hair on it too? He tried to put himself into the place of the face and figure out what it
would be able to see of itself. Perhaps the nose, he thought; that might just extend far
enough for the eyes to catch a glimpse of it, although he didn’t. But perhaps his own
nose was smaller than the one of that face, so that his eyes stared out at a space that
offered no such hint of itself. He wondered if he should be able to feel his cheeks, and he
really wondered what was inside the line of his own mouth, if he indeed had a mouth.
But he was no more successful at any of this than he was trying to will the face into
action.

Had he not been lost in these speculations about what he should and shouldn’t be able to
know about himself – if “himself” was anything like the face he had come to know – he
might have noticed the changes that came over the face. Then, again, perhaps he
wouldn’t have, for the animation in the eyes was a subtle thing. Signs of life are difficult
to recognize when the concept of life is an alien one. He’d been wondering so deeply if
the face had been staring at him that he didn’t realize when it started to.

It wasn’t until the mouth opened and it spoke to him that he realized things were
different, and would never be the same. “Hey,” the face said. “What are you thinking
about?”

Chapter 18

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Rick was derisive when she told him what she was going to do. “Rather than just
skipping a day or two of visiting your comatose buddy, you’re going to get up at the
crack of dawn to see him before you hit the road, then try to get back early enough
tomorrow night to catch him then?” he asked.

She nodded bravely, aware of how foolish it must seem but determined nonetheless.

“You got a long drive as it is, you know. And it’s not like he knows what day it is or
anything. He doesn’t even know you’re there.”

“He might.”

“What, is he appealing to your maternal instincts?” Rick asked derisively. “I didn’t think
you had maternal instincts.”

That was a low blow. They’d never really talked about children, so he had no call to
draw such a conclusion – although it was something she might have said about herself
before all this. She folded her arms and glared at him.

He stared at her in amazement. “Leah, the guy is brain dead. I think it’s admirable that
you’re so faithful about going to see him and all, but this is ridiculous. He’s not going to
miss a day or two.”

Leah just gave him her “back off” face, and he did, realizing that he had more to lose than
gain by pushing the issue. “If you’ve got to get up early, maybe we should get to bed
early,” he suggested with an arched eyebrow by way of a peace entreaty. She let him
lead her into the bedroom.

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Ridiculous or not, she had stuck to her plan. She told Dan about the little fight she had
with Rick, sitting on the edge of the bed next to him. “He thinks it’s silly I’m coming
here first,” she told his unresponsive body, smiling a little. “He’s probably right, but I
thought you’d like a visitor.”

She watched him for a moment, and put a hand on his. He felt a little cold, yet it was she
who shivered. “I’m going up north to talk to some people about this stupid story. You
know, the ‘Mood of America’ thing. I’m going to hit Duluth, maybe International Falls if
I’m ambitious enough or if I strike out in Duluth. But I’ll be back by tomorrow night, so
don’t get worried if I’m late. I’ll come.”

The promise sounded faint even to her, and she wondered how it might sound to him.
She hoped he could hear. He probably had heard others make similar promises, and she
hoped that he couldn’t hear the insincerity in their voices. People make promises all the
time that they don’t intend to keep. Sometimes they do mean them, at least at some level,
but the other demands of their lives cause them to drift away from keeping them. She
resolved not to let that happen to her. It was important to him that she keep her vows to
him. It was important to her.

“Rick made fun of me going up there to hear about the mood of America,” she told him,
smiling again at the memory. “He says it’s not really even America. He says it’s more
like Canada, or North Dakota. I think he just doesn’t really want me to go. But, you
know, I like the country up there, and I don’t mind the drive. It’s pretty this time of year,
and the people are nice. Of course, with satellite dishes and the Internet and Wal-Mart,
it’s not really all that different from anyplace else. Just less crowded, but there’s lots of
places that aren’t very crowded.”

She paused and again wondered why she was rambling to him about this. He just lay
there with his eyes open to the world but with no signs of comprehension. He was curled
on his side in a fetal position this morning. She’d asked nurse on the overnight shift
about it, and the nurse had told her that he often spent the nights like that. When they

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gave him sponge baths or checked his IV they would straighten him out and he’d usually
stay like that until the night, when he would curl up again. Leah patted his hand again.

There were some noises in the hall, causing her to look at the doorway. Dr. Tollefson
came in, trailing a small retinue of students and nurses. Leah had met him several times
before, and he’d always taken time to talk with her. He seemed surprised to see her.
“Leah,” he exclaimed, noticing her hand on top of Dan’s. “You’re starting early today.”

“I have to go out of town,” she explained, not sure why she was bothering. As she had
the first time she’d met him, she was struck by his good looks, his tall frame handsomely
complimented by the shock of thick black hair and his deep, soulful eyes. More to the
point, she knew he knew it, and relished his appeal to women. This was not a guy who
would have to hang out in bars; they’d be lining up to give him their numbers in
restaurants, at dinner parties, in lobbies, even in hospitals; no, she thought, not for the
first time -- perhaps especially in hospitals.

He nodded knowingly. “Well, let me check up on our patient,” he said with a good
professional air. He looked at Dan’s chart, then looked meaningfully at Leah. “Excuse
me,” he said, looking at her hand. She pulled it off Dan’s, and Tollefson took his wrist.
He felt the pulse for a time, checking it against his watch.

“You’d think they’d have more sophisticated ways to count the pulse,” Leah said, feeling
like an outsider.

“They do,” Tollefson said curtly, nodding towards a monitor. It was steadily counting off
a variety of numbers in subdued electronic readout.

“Then why are you checking like that?”

He let go of Dan’s wrist and looked at her, smiling. “Old fashioned, I guess.” He
proceeded to listen to Dan’s chest and heart, pointed a small flashlight in Dan’s eyes to

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do some quick tests, and at last stopped to write up his notes. “Can I talk to you a
second?” he asked when he’d finished.

She didn’t like the sound of that, but followed him out in the hall. She was surprised that
he sent the others on ahead as he stopped outside Dan’s room. “So how’s he doing?” she
asked.

He took her hand, which she only reluctantly allowed. “About the same,” he told her,
looking straight in her eyes with his best sincere gaze. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” she replied, feeling foolish about him holding her hand. She suspected he
used this approach as a matter of course, and cautioned herself that it was probably more
force of habit for him than any genuine attempt at seduction. “Any news on any of the
tests you’ve run?”

Tollefson explained that the scans had confirmed some changes in Dan’s brain activity,
but added that there were still no signs of conscious brain activity or responses to external
stimuli. He told her that they would keep running the tests periodically to monitor any
changes but she got the feeling he wasn’t really expecting any. “I’m sure it’s very hard
on you,” he concluded, patting her captive hand with his free hand.

She smiled and politely disengaged her hand. This trick probably worked more often
than it failed, but she wasn’t so easily influenced. “I’m more worried about him than me.
I’m doing fine, thanks, Dr. Tollefson.”

He smiled that smile again. “Please, Leah, call me Jay. Listen, I’d be happy to sit down
and talk to you about Mr. Peterson’s condition sometime. Maybe I could buy you a drink
or even dinner sometime…”

Leah was used to being hit on, and under more normal circumstances might have
considered the offer. Tollefson had all the goods -- good looking, obviously aggressive

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and intelligent, and probably made a pretty good living – but she wasn’t exactly in the
market, and this wouldn’t really be the best of circumstances even if she was. Sensitivity
might not be one of his strongest assets. “I’ll keep that in mind, Dr. Tollefson,” she said,
deliberately not falling into his offer to get on a first name basis with him but not ready to
just blow him off entirely either. He might come in handy; she’d learned not to burn
potential sources just because they wanted to flirt first. “I’ve got to get going, so let me
go say goodbye to Dan.”

He affected a disappointed look, and took her hand again in a prolonged handshake.
With his free hand he took out a card and pressed it into her hand and holding it in both
hands. “Please feel free to call me if you have any questions,” he told her. “Or if you
just want to talk.” He finally let go of her hand and hurried off.

She went back into Dan’s room. “So your doctor is kind of a playboy,” she informed
him. “I think he’s hitting on me.”

Dan didn’t respond, and she looked at him sardonically. “Not too worried about my
honor, huh? Let’s just hope none of the nurses or orderlies get a fancy for you.”

She picked up her coat and purse. “Hey, don’t forget,” she told him with a cheerfulness
she didn’t really feel. “I’ll see you tomorrow night. Don’t talk too much until I get back,
OK?”

She walked out of the room, feeling a rush of emotion that brought tears to her eyes. She
always felt bad about leaving Dan, and the early morning hour made it seem worse
somehow. He’d come through a lonely night and now faced almost two days without a
visit from anyone. She almost changed her mind about going away, but steeled herself
that she had a job and a life too, but it was scant consolation.

Leah stopped to talk to the nurses for a few minutes before leaving the floor. They were
tired and were waiting for the eight o’clock shift to come on so they could go home,

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trying to wrap up the paperwork at the nurse’s station before they left to go home or
wherever they went after work. “You’re the girlfriend, right?” one of them said, eying
her knowingly.

She shook her head, knowing where that allegation had come from. “Just a friend.”

The other nurses all looked up at this, then at each other with almost hidden smirks
before turning their attention back to their work. Leah felt a little foolish. “Thanks for
watching over him,” she told them anyway, meaning it. They looked up again. “It’s our
job,” one of them pointed out softly.

Leah nodded. “Well, thanks anyway,” she told them, meaning it. She walked away and
went to her car. She headed off to her long drive, trying to decide what she wanted to ask
strangers about their mood, while trying not to think about what her own mood was.

Chapter 19

Leah’s article on Dan got some good responses from her editors and a few letters to the
newspaper. She was proud of the way it portrayed him as kind of a Clark Kent in the
workplace, hiding his secret identify from his coworkers. She had several great quotes to
their effect, making several of them minor celebrities themselves when the article was
reprinted in the local papers.

What writing the article did not do was make her and Dan friends. At the end of the day,
it was just another story, amidst lots of other stories. She might feel a little more proud of
it than some, and she did feel more connected to him than to most subjects of her stories,
but they didn’t really have a relationship of any sort.

He did send her a note of congratulations, attached with a copy of her article, thanking
her for the time she’d taken. He’d concluded the note by saying, “I guess you can make a

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silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” proving that he had retained his sense of humor about the
whole thing.

Every so often she thought about calling him to see how he was doing, on the pretext of
wondering about his preparations for the Olympics, but somehow she never quite picked
up the phone. Things with Rick were going pretty well, and she just wasn’t sure what she
would say to Dan. He lived in a different world.

Still, on a couple occasions when she couldn’t sleep she found herself driving over to his
neighborhood in the early morning hours just to get a chance to watch him run. There
was something comforting about it; there was a purity about his effort that made her feel
smaller somehow. She was a good writer, and her writing was important to her, but it
didn’t fill her world the way that his running filled his. She wouldn’t trade worlds with
him even if she was able, but watching him so absorbed in his own world she did feel
envious somehow.

She tried to be careful not to let him spot her, and he never gave any indications that he
did. Then, again, she hadn’t thought he’d seen her that first morning either.

“Ever been to the Olympics?” Frank Reid asked her on the phone.

“No,” she admitted, wondering why he was asking. She was in the middle of a couple
projects, including one for Reid. “Why do you ask?”

“Is your passport still valid?”

Now she definitely knew something was up. “Yes,” she said. “You want me to go to the
Olympics?”

“You didn’t even give me a chance to ask you,” he complained mildly.

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“Sorry. You want to start over?”

“Sure. How’d you like to cover the Olympics for the paper?”

Leah considered this. She knew they weren’t for a couple more weeks, and there was
nothing she was working on that she couldn’t either finish up or postpone. She didn’t
think Rick would be too crazy about her going away, but he took enough business trips
himself that he couldn’t complain about hers. “What’s the assignment?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not a sportswriter. You’ve got plenty of very good people who know this stuff
much better than I do or ever will.”

“I’m not sending you to do sports stories,” Reid told her. “I’m sending you to do human
interest stories. They just happen to be at the Olympics. You don’t ever have to go to a
competition or talk to any of the athletes.”

Leah thought about it. Two weeks overseas on a paid vacation of sorts. Maybe Rick
would even come with her, although she doubted he could get away on such short notice.
The idea of going was starting to appeal to her. Even without trying she felt confident
she could come up with a story or two, and with persistence undoubtedly more. It was a
pretty dramatic event, with the athletes viewing it as practically life and death and whole
nations focusing their attention on certain sports. If she couldn’t find some human
interest out of that, she should turn in her computer.

Still, Reid had lots of reporters who were as qualified as she was. “Why me?”

“What can I say?” he said easily. “I like your stuff.”

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“You should print more of it then.”

“Here’s your shot,” he pointed out mildly, knowing he had her.

She thought for a moment. “Does this have anything to do with Dan Peterson?” she
asked, taking a chance.

Reid’s pause told her she’d hit close to the mark. “What makes you think that?”

She laughed. “I am a reporter, you know.”

“I do know that,” Reid said, his voice amused. “Why do you think I’m sending you?”

“You think Peterson is a story? You know he doesn’t really have a chance, don’t you?
Even he admits that. He told me being third on the U.S. Olympic marathon team was like
being on the Jamaican skiing team – nice honor but not much chance.”

Reid cleared his throat. “It’s a good story, don’t you think? I thought it might be good to
see it through to the end.”

Leah looked around her study. The sun was out and it looked like a pretty day. She
thought she should go for a walk, get outside in the fresh air. The Olympics seemed a
long way away. She had to force herself to focus back on the phone. “What if he bombs,
does really bad? Where’s the story then? I don’t want to embarrass the guy.”

“So then you do a story on something else.” Reid seemed nonchalant.

“If you wanted stories on someone else,” she said slowly, working it out as she spoke,
“you’d send someone else. You think he’s the story.”

“Call it a hunch.”

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Chapter 20

It took Dan a long time to connect the movement of the face’s mouth with the changes
around him. He eventually realized there were sounds around him, that he was
surrounded with a din of competing noises, and that some of these noises were related
somehow with the movement of the mouth on the face. This was an astounding
revelation and one that, not so long ago, he could have spent eons thinking about and
trying to understand.

It seemed to take much, much longer to realize, in a flash of insight that he could never
have explained the source of, that the noises were words. Language was an alien
concept in this place. Until this moment, he could not have defined his own thought
processes in terms of language, but of course he had been using it all along. He just
hadn’t known there were words.

The words slowly coalesced in his brain.

“I said, what are you thinking about?” The face’s mouth moved again, almost in slow
motion. This time he took in the words almost as soon as they were uttered, and within
what seemed like years but really were only seconds he knew not only what she was
saying but also what she had said before. The face seemed to watch him, and an
expression slowly formed on it, something even he could recognize as disappointment.
“Aw, don’t tell me you can’t talk.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“I can talk,” he found himself saying.

He didn’t know who was more surprised – the face or himself. Actually, he was probably
more startled by his response than the face was, for it had asked the question. It must
have had at least some hope that he could talk about, whereas until those words came out

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from him he had no idea that it was even possible. He did not have time to wonder at
either the source of the words he used or of the sounds needed to carry them. Unlike the
face, he was not aware of having a mouth with which to speak.

The face nodded, looking much like a bobble-head doll – not that this was an analogy he
could have called to mind. He was astounded at the motion of the head; he had never
seen anything move, not like this. He wasn’t sure what it meant. He had to force himself
to not be so distracted by it that he couldn’t focus on the words that were coming from it.
“I thought so. I was wondering when you’d get around to talking to me.”

“I didn’t know I could talk. I didn’t know you could talk,” he told her. “I didn’t know
about talking.”

The face seemed to regard him curiously. It did not occur to him to think about what she
was looking at when she was looking at him, about what she saw while he saw her. Her
eyes were alive in a way that they had not been before. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” the
face said at last. Its eyes glanced around. “Where are we?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he admitted, still amazed at how easily the words came
now that he had started to speak. He had the feeling that there was more, much more,
hiding just behind the words – a whole army of concepts and perhaps memories. They
floated just out of reach, making him not entirely sure they were really there. They could
be another mirage, as shapeless and meaningless as the void all around him. Or they
could be as real and as full of surprises as the face in front of him.

“Can’t help you there, pal.” The face looked around again. “So what do you want to
talk about?”

“Are you me?” He blurted it out before he knew it. It had been one of the fundamental
questions of his existence. Even though he thought he had decided of his independent
existence, he could not be entirely certain.

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The face appeared to be surprised, an expression so different from all he had seen of the
face that it almost made him lose track of all he had just learned. He hadn’t had the
imagination to picture such things, and it made him eager to see if there were more. “Of
course not,” the face said at last. “Why would you ever think that?”

“I didn’t know.”

The smile on the face was a thing to see, even more wondrous than that look of surprise
had been. It was a kind smile, a gentle smile. “I see,” the face said at last.

It had been nagging at him, ever since he had initially concluded the face was not his
own. It was looking at something; he had to know what. “Do I have a face?”

The face registered too many emotions for him to take in. Had he been familiar with
them, he might have been able to sort through them all, given enough time. All he was
able to do was to see them, like catching glimpses of falling star. Eventually the face
settled on one that he liked, something matter-of-fact yet friendly. “Of course you have a
face. Everyone has a face.”

“Who’s ‘everyone’?”

The face looked around again. “Point taken,” it said, flashing another smile that made his
head spin. “I mean, everyone should have a face. Why should you be different?”

“What am I?”

The face didn’t move for a second, then looked down briefly. “That works better when I
have shoulders.”

“What does?”

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“A shrug.”

He shouldn’t have known what the word meant, but somehow he did. He wasn’t as sure
about what shoulders looked like, only that they were part of making the shrug express its
sense of resignation.

He wished he had shoulders.

Chapter 20

Leah didn’t get to the hospital until after eight the following night. After pausing to talk
to the nurses briefly to check on whether there had been any changes while she had been
gone – there hadn’t, of course – she went to Dan’s room.

She paused at the door before entering. He was laying on his back, his eyes closed.
Aside from him being hooked up to all the tubes and monitors in a hospital bed, and
looking so very, very frail, he could have been mistaken for someone simply sleeping.
The room was dark except for the television playing softly from its perch. She had asked
the nurses to keep it on when he was alone, just to give him the illusion of company. She
walked over to the bed and sat next to him. “Hey, don’t get up,” she said softly.

He didn’t respond.

“Are you mad at me for being away so long? I hope you haven’t had your eyes closed
the whole time. There’s too much to see out here.” She glanced up at the television,
where an old Seinfeld was playing. “I mean, you never get tired of Jerry and his friends,
do you?”

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She took his hand and held it while she told him about her trip. She’d gone to a peewee
hockey game, found some fishermen waiting patiently for fish on a small lake, and spent
some time in some fast food places and gas stations. “All in all, I can’t say I know an
awful lot more about the mood of America,” she told him. She thought back to the
people she’d talked to. Most of them had been suspicious at first, but gradually opened
up. It wasn’t because they wanted to be in the paper or because she had some great
interviewing skill. It was more that they just were friendly and they liked talking to other
people, even if that person came to them as a stranger from the big city.

“I suppose maybe I did learn a little about what I’m supposed to write about,” she
confessed. “Maybe it’s nothing newsworthy. I don’t know yet.” She was going to have
to write up her notes and see if she could make something out of it all, write something
that was more honest than a sappy homage to middle America. These people had real
feelings and real lives, and the things they expressed to her might not have been anything
of great interest to the readers of The New York Times but they were awfully important to
them.

Dan didn’t have anything to say about that.

“You did come up,” Leah admitted. She watched him closely for any reaction – maybe a
twitch of the face, opening his eyes – anything to indicate that he cared that someone he
didn’t even know was talking about him. There was nothing. “I didn’t bring it up, I
swear to God. I was talking to these teenagers at a McDonald’s and one of them
mentioned it.”

She’d talked to a few of the workers. There weren’t many customers so the manager, one
of the counter staff and the lone kitchen worker had gathered around. The manager was
an unattractive woman in her mid-thirties who looked like she’d had a few too many fries
a few too many times. The girl at the counter was a teenager, as was the cook, although
the cook was a couple years older and more resigned to being there. She was making
some money to help pay for college, while he was scratching out a living for a life that

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didn’t bode much better. Still, he’d been the one to bring Dan up. He cited Dan as
someone who ‘let it all hang out,’ despite the consequences. “Everyone knew about you,
and these weren’t people that could tell a marathon from a hundred meters. They may
never watch another marathon the rest of their lives, but they’ll remember you.” Leah
looked at Dan. “The funny thing is, none of them was sure how you actually did in the
race. They all knew that you were a big underdog, and that you’d put everything on the
line to challenge the favorite. That’s what they remembered so vividly. But the actual
finish?” Leah shook her head in amusement, thinking back to the little debate they’d had,
Lead staying out of the discussion out of reportorial impartiality, even though part of her
was screaming to set them straight. “The cook thought maybe you’d won, but the girl
thought you’d collapsed and finished out of the medals, and the manager thought maybe
you just narrowly got beat before you collapsed. None of them cared who won or lost,
but something in the way you fought and gave it all that you could really impressed them.
And isn’t that what sports, and especially the Olympics are supposed to be about?” She
nodded vigorously, seeing her story and, she realized, something much more. Leah
found this admiration fascinating, yet not so hard to understand.

“How about that, Dan? You impressed them more than if you’d just finished normally,”
she said with a teasing tone. The smile faded and she continued in a softer voice. “Me,
I’d have been just as happy without all the extra drama, you know what I mean?” She
patted his hand and stood up. She walked over to the window and looked out at the sky,
which was getting dark. She started to describe the sunset to him but stopped when she
heard someone in hall approach.

Leah had never seen the woman who entered the room. The woman came in boldly, but
halted when she noticed Leah by the window. She seemed startled at first, but it only
took a moment for recognition to cross her face. “You’re that reporter, aren’t you?” she
said. “Leah Hutchins?” Her face was impressively neutral.

The woman was quite beautiful. She had dark skin, but long, straight hair and fine facial
features that suggested she was of Indian decent instead of African. Her eyes were a

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deep brown and had an empathic intelligence to them that was obvious even from across
the room. She came out to Leah with her hand extended.

Leah put out her own hand and shook hands. “Have we met?”

The woman shook her head. “No, but I’ve seen you on television several times.” She
smiled, and looked over at Dan. She nodded towards him. “How is he today?” she asked
gravely.

“About the same.”

The woman stared at him for a few long seconds, her face very serious. She looked at
Leah apologetically. “Do you mind…”

Leah was surprised that the woman seemed to be asking her permission to simply move
closer to Dan, but tried not to let it show. “By all means. Help yourself.”

She walked over to Dan. She reached out as if to brush his hair, but did not quite touch
him. Leah wondered what the woman would have done had she not been present, and
thought that, either way, it was a tender gesture that seemed startlingly intimate
somehow. She cleared her throat. “And you are…”

The woman turned and smiled again. “I’m Sidra Wilson,” she said, as though that
explained everything.

“You’re a, um, friend of Dan’s?” Leah asked, putting an ambiguous emphasis on ‘friend.’

“Yes,” Sidra said simply while moving over to sit down next to Dan. Again she looked
at Leah, raising her eyebrows in an unspoken question. Leah wasn’t sure what the
question was, but figured nodding her head was safe enough. The woman seemed
gravely relieved at Leah’s gesture, and used it as permission to take Dan’s hand. The

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gesture didn’t appear to be possessive, simply natural, almost unconscious. She stroked
his forearm with her other hand -- really more of a caress than anything else – while
looking solemnly at Leah.

Leah leaned against the windowsill. She felt curiously conflicted about seeing this
woman with Dan. On the one hand, she was glad that Dan had other people who cared
for him. On the other hand, seeing this unusually beautiful woman caressing his arm
made her feel something dangerously close to jealousy. She knew how silly that was,
and forced herself to stop it. “So – how do you know Dan?”

Sidra looked up at her. “We work together. Well, I used to work for him but now I just
work with him. I’m a programmer now, thanks to Dan’s help.” She looked at him fondly
and squeezed his hand slightly.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” Leah offered.

Sidra looked up again and seemed surprised. “I come several times a week.”

“Funny we haven’t run into each other. I come every day.”

“Funny,” Sidra agreed, eying her curiously. “When do you usually come?”

“In the afternoon.”

“Well, that explains it,” Sidra said. “I’m at work then. I always come in the evenings,
except for the weekends.”

Leah didn’t have a response to that. She felt trumped somehow, although Sidra’s
explanation was perfectly logical. Her own hours were obviously more flexible than
most people’s. She wondered how many other of Dan’s friends she might have missed.

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“I have all your articles,” Sidra told her. “I made up scrapbooks with all the articles
about Dan, but yours were my favorite.”

“When did you find out he was going to be in the Olympics?”

Sidra shook her head. “I hate to admit it, but not until you came to work that day. I knew
he ran, and I was sure he’d be good at anything he’d do, but he didn’t tell me he was even
going to try out.”

“Did I talk to you when I was there?” Leah asked. “I have to admit I don’t remember
you.” And she was pretty sure she would have remembered this one.

“No, I just heard about why you were there.”

The two women regarded each other. Sidra had the upper hand, in the sense that she
actually was holding Dan’s hand. “Have you met Dr. Tollefson?” Leah asked. Seeing
the blank expression on Sidra’s face, she added, “Dan’s doctor.”

Sidra shook her head, a shy smile on her face.

Oh, he’ll like her, Leah thought to herself, picturing his eyes popping open at the sight of
her. Rather than saying anything further, she just looked at Sidra, smiling lightly. Sidra
turned to Dan.

They stayed like that for a long minute, and Leah distinctly felt like a third wheel. “I
guess I’d better get going,” she said. “I’ve had a long day.”

Sidra looked at her and smiled encouragingly. “OK, then. It was great meeting you.”

“It was nice meeting you, too.”

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Sidra placed Dan’s hand on the bed and stood up to shake Leah’s hand. “It’s good of you
to come to visit Dan.”

Leah felt as though her line had been stolen, but kept the smile on her face. “You too.”
She moved towards the door.

“I look forward to seeing you again,” Sidra called out as she left.

I’ll bet you do, Leah thought.

Chapter 21

The Olympic venues were all Leah might have imagined, and more. The host city had
chosen to concentrate as many of the venues together as was possible, and located the
Olympic Village near the main stadium. She had a press pass that allowed her access to
most areas, including the Village, and it didn’t take her too long to realize that she
preferred to wander around the Village instead of watching the multitude of events
available to her. She enjoyed the competitions that she did watch, but that wasn’t really
why she was here. Other, more qualified journalists were quite happy to record all the
facts of those various triumphs and tragedies. She still wasn’t quite sure why she was
there, but she figured it had more to do with putting a human face on the spectacle than it
did to further glorify the athletes’ prowess. So she spent as much time around where
people hung out – in the scattered parks, food courts and around the various venues.

As expected, Rick had not taken her up on her offer to accompany her. In fact, he hadn’t
been all that thrilled that she was going at all. He’d tried to talk her out of it, noting that
the Olympics would conflict with a concert they had tickets for and a cocktail party his
office was having for some key clients. She’d had to carefully point out that she had a
career too, and that this was a great assignment. In the end, he’d stopped arguing about

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it, but even when he took her to the airport she sensed that he still wasn’t too pleased
about the whole thing.

It wasn’t too hard to find stories. The Olympics were a microcosm of the world, at its
very best and, she supposed, some of its worst. The athletes were generally quite happy
to chat, and the spectators who shared her interest seeing the athletes in their off time
were similarly gregarious. Most of the stories were small and personal, not really what
she thought Frank was looking for, but the more interesting ones she wrote up anyway
and sent them off to him.

She came across an engaging British man in his eighties, running across him the way she
found most of her interviews – a combination of luck, observation, and good instincts. In
his case she’d noticed him sitting in a small park outside the Olympic Village, passing
him over the course of several days. He was already there, shifting his bench to alternate
between shade and sun or, perhaps, whim. “John Tulloh,” he’d introduced himself when
curiosity finally had gotten the better of her. She’d seated herself next to him and
introduced himself. He told her that he’d been to every Olympics since the 1948 London
Olympics. He’d worked for the railroad and had saved all of his money between the
Olympics just to be able to go to the next one. “Not that easy to do on my salary, you
know,” he’d told her wryly.

“How do you manage now that you’re retired?” she’d asked, assuming that, given his age
and obviously frail body, he must have long since retired. His hair was white and his
body was thin and stooped with arthritis or osteoporosis.

He’d raised an eyebrow and seemed moderately taken aback. “My dear, why ever would
I do that? Do you think I could afford these holidays on a pension, eh?” His eyes
sparkled with mock indignation.

She’d apologized for her gaffe. “It means that much to you?” she’d asked, indicating the
hubbub all around them.

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He’d nodded and told her that he never had married, and his one sister had died twenty
years ago, leaving no remaining relatives. “My life is here,” he’d said, simply. From
anyone else, it might have sounded pretentious, but from him it just was a statement of
fact. He told her that he didn’t have a favorite sport and didn’t particularly follow any
sport between the Olympics. “I like seeing all the young people, living for this time and
having it mean everything to them. It’s like living or dying to them – the good ones
anyway.”

“You mean, whether they win or not?”

He’d shaken his head at her, almost as if he was disappointed in her. No, exactly as
though he was disappointed in her. “Not at all. Not at all indeed. Don’t you know what
the Olympics are all about? “Citius, Altius, Fortius,’” he recited to her with a raised
eyebrow. “‘Faster, Higher, Stronger.’ That’s why they are here.”

A purist in a very cynical world, she’d thought fondly. She could have argued with him,
pointed out how the NBA now constituted the US basketball team, how millions of
dollars of endorsements and future prize money were at stake for many of the athletes,
and how doping and other scandals always lurked in the background. But she didn’t. “I
know a guy like that,” she’d murmured, almost to herself, and he’d seemed pleased.
“They usually don’t know how special a time it is, you know,” he told her softly.

Leah didn’t. She looked at him curiously. “What do you mean?”

The old man looked around them, at the bustling crowd. It was easy to pick out the
athletes from the tourists or other bystanders, less by their physique than for their casual
physical grace and confidence. “Most of them will only make it here once. They haven’t
yet had to face getting old,” he told her with a grimace, making a gesture to illustrate how
his own failing body was an example of how age robs one. He might never have been an
athlete but he was once surely more than he was now. “They take for granted that every

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year they’re going to be better. And, at some point, sooner than they realize, they won’t
even be as good. So, you see,” he said with a sad smile, “I like to watch them while they
still have that innocence, but I wish I could tell them to treasure it.” He shrugged. “But
why would they listen to an old man like me?”

She wrote that story. She could have made him look eccentric, quaint, or simply cute, but
she hadn’t. She wrote about him as if his quest were the equal of the athletes he came to
watch. And, to her, it was. “Now that’s why you are there,” Frank said approving. “Do
you think anyone else would have gotten that story?”

She wasn’t sure that anyone else would have missed it, but she would have missed
meeting John Tulloh. And, she had to admit, it was damn good writing. So she kept at it,
wandering the fringes of the Olympics, looking and occasionally finding little nuggets
that captured the drama, the pathos, and the unbridled joy that were there to be found.

Leah wasn’t there to find Dan. She found herself constantly reminding herself of that
fact, yet she found herself scanning the faces of the crowd for his. There were lots of
people in USA team outfits, and a number of athletes with his slim body type, but she
failed to spot him amidst the thousands of people she saw. He didn’t march in the
opening ceremonies, and she didn’t run across him in the Village. Of course, he had no
idea that she was there, so it wasn’t like he would be looking for her. She’d thought
about calling him before she left, but things got busy and, anyway, she hadn’t wanted to
interrupt his last minute preparations. Plus, until she knew if Rick was going to make up
his mind she hadn’t wanted to complicate the trip any further.

After a week of casually looking for him, she finally broke down and checked the
dormitory for the track team, where she found that he wasn’t registered yet. “I think he’s
staying someplace outside the Village,” one of the U.S. officials told her after she’d tried

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to track him down. She’d feared that something had happened to him, that he’d gotten
injured or perhaps even scared off. “So he is running?” she confirmed.

“He’s scheduled to,” the official confirmed helpfully, happy to help a member of the
press. “He picked up his credentials and passes. The marathon is not until the last day of
competition, so maybe he’s just trying to stay away from everything.”

So Leah simply waited, keeping a special eye for him but beginning to wonder if all
she’d see of him was during his race. That would be all right, and she planned to watch
as much of the marathon as she could, but she had to admit that she’d like to see him
before it so she could wish him luck. As if that was what he needed most, she thought
wryly.

Chapter 22

“So where are we?” the face asked him, peering intently at him.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

The face pursed its lips before replying. “I have no idea. You were here first, after all.”

“How do you know?”

“I mean, I opened my eyes and there you were. So you must have gotten here first.”

“I’d been watching you for a long time before you opened your eyes,” he told the face.
“Maybe you were here but didn’t know it.”

“Maybe,” it agreed dubiously. It thought for a moment. “I was here before I opened my
eyes?”

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“Oh, yes,” he said, thinking back to the time he’d spent studying it, how it had become
the focus of his world.

The face seemed troubled by this. “When did you first notice me?” it asked at last.

He wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that. “I don’t really know. Things were, um, kind
of overwhelming for a long time there. I didn’t really know what anything was, and
gradually I realized you were there.”

“But with my eyes closed?” the face asked suspiciously.

“Yes.” He didn’t try to mention how sketchy the face had been initially, how it only
slowly took its current form and vitality. Or that the eyes had actually been open the
whole time, but only just recently acquired the ability to see.

The face thought about this. “I still think you must have been here first,” it concluded at
last. “As soon as I was conscious I opened my eyes.” Speaking of which, the face’s eyes
looked downward. “Whoa, where is the rest of me?”

“The rest of you?” he repeated numbly, not knowing what she meant but feeling horribly
embarrassed somehow anyway.

Before either of them could say anything further, a miraculous transformation occurred.
As his startled eyes watched, the face and neck were rapidly joined by the rest of the
neck, then a torso, arms, hands, legs and feet – a full body. It was the body of a young
woman. He had no recollection of ever having seen a woman before, but he immediately
knew what one was and that this particular body most definitely qualified, passing the
test with flying colors. The body was dressed in a white top and jeans, but – curiously
enough – the feet were bare. The toenails were painted a bright red, the color at odds

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with the undifferentiated colorlessness that surrounded them. “That’s more like it,” she
said, moving her arms experimentally.

Even more surprising, he found himself suddenly in possession of a body as well. Its
sensations almost overwhelmed him. After his eternity of just existing as a mind in this
place, with the flood of everything around him constantly slamming at him, it was a
shock to have a physical body that was the cause of sensations of its own. He could feel
his heart beating; he could feel the warmth of his skin, he could wiggle his toes, and a
host of other feelings that he couldn’t describe. Unlike her, he had not known he should
have a body, and he wasn’t at all sure what it should be like to have one.

Not that long ago he would have been content spending his time minutely analyzing
everything that this body was telling him. Watching the face do nothing would have
paled in comparison to the richness of feelings that this new body of his now generated.
It was a world unto itself, and had things been different he might have been able to
gradually study it. He did not have that luxury. Everything was simply happened too
quickly, with no reason. He had to wonder how many of the things he had been
experiencing had actually been his own body trying to get his attention; he had simply
lacked the ability to recognize the signals for what they were, not realizing there was his
body calling. He wasn’t sure if that might be preferable to believing that his body had, in
fact, suddenly appeared, whisked into being by some genie’s spell. Perhaps hers. “I have
a body too,” he said incredulously, talking more to himself then to her.

She looked up. “But of course you do. Why wouldn’t you?”

He moved his head, marveling at this simple ability. There was nothing other than her to
see, but merely the feeling of being able to change his point-of-view was mind boggling.
He flexed his hand experimentally. “This is amazing.”

She looked up at him sharply. “What did you expect?”

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He looked back at her, confusion clear on his face. “I didn’t have a body. You didn’t
have a body. Then, poof, here they are. I honestly didn’t know there were such things as
bodies until yours appeared. I didn’t know about talking until you spoke to me. And you
asked me where we are?”

She studied him, searching for signs of either disingenuousness or insanity, and
apparently saw neither. “How long have you been here?”

He could only shake his head in ignorance.

Chapter 24

Leah called Rick on her way home from the hospital. “I’m back,” she told him. He was
still at work, but claimed to be finishing up. He invited her to meet him at his house, but
she demurred. “I just want to go home. You could come by if you want.”

They agreed he’d pick up some Vietnamese take-out on his way. She was unpacked and
catching up on the mail by the time he arrived. His tie was loosened and he carried his
jacket over one arm. “Tough day?’ she asked sympathetically.

“The usual,” he admitted noncommittally, holding out the bag of food. “Hungry?”

They had dinner at the kitchen table, and made small talk. Rick expounded more on his
day, which largely had been spent in conference with some clients. He’d had to spend
the evening hours catching up on reviewing some contracts. He warmed up as he spoke;
talking about his work usually had that effect. They had eaten most of the food before he
thought to ask about her trip. “How were the yokels?”

Leah made a face. “I don’t know, Rick. I didn’t meet any yokels. I did meet a lot of
nice people.”

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“Who happened to live in the sticks with the rest of the yokels,” Rick said, getting up to
go to the kitchen. He took out a second beer.

“Hmm, let me think – where was it you grew up?” Leah asked caustically. She knew
Rick had grown up in a small town in northern Iowa and went back as rarely as possible.
He tried to disavow all connections to Iowa or anyplace before law school.

“Shaddup,” he told her mildly. “So did you get any ideas for any good stories?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. She got up and cleared the table, putting the dishes in the
sink and deciding to deal with them in the morning. The leftover food she threw away.
“I’ll write up my notes in the morning and see what I can come up with it.”

Rick went into the living room and sat down on the couch, turning on the television. She
came over and sat next to him. “So I take it you’re staying after all?” She wasn’t sure if
she was hoping he would stay or go. He didn’t come over so much lately, and she was
tired. Having a night alone wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

“I don’t know,” he said, flipping through the channels with the remote. “Maybe I’ll just
finish the beer and head home.”

“How romantic,” she said dryly. “The least you could do is take advantage of me while
you’re here.”

He gave her a dubious look. “I dunno, there’s a ball game on.”

She flexed her leg provocatively. “It’s almost time for the seventh inning stretch anyway.
You could be back for the top of the eighth if you play your cards right.

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He feigned indifference. “Oh, hell, they’re in sixth place. Do I have to get up or can we
stay here?”

“The bedroom would be nice.” She smiled encouragingly.

He put his beer down. “Do I get to keep the remote?”

She reached over and gently removed it from his willing hand. “You can use the one in
the bedroom.” She took his tie and used it to lead him to the bed.

Later – much later than the eighth inning – they lay naked under the sheet. “That was
nice,” she told him.

He patted a hand on her stomach. “Always a pleasure, my love.”

He usually only said things like that after making love. They’d avoided the l-word, along
with specifically defining their relationship aside from a presumed exclusivity and
guaranteed dates for weddings or family affairs. She’d been happy with things the way
they were, but at times like this she wondered what, indeed they were doing.

He sat up and started to put on his t-shirt. “Not staying, I gather,” she said neutrally.

He grimaced but did not stop dressing. “Early meeting tomorrow. I’d have to get up way
early, drive home and change. It’s easier if I just go home and crash now.”

She nudged him with her foot playfully. “Going home to that big old house all alone?”

He turned and looked at her. “You could come with me. You don’t have to get up early.
I’d be happy to the company.”

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It was tempting, but so was staying in her own bed. A few months ago he would have
stayed, or she would have gone home with him. And they would have made love more
than once before falling asleep. It could just be normal relationship stuff, or something
more serious. Leah didn’t have a great record in these things. “I’ll stay here, I think,”
she said slowly, putting her hands behind her head.

“Your loss,” he told her none too gallantly. He stood up to put on his pants, and sat back
down to put his shoes and socks on.

“Yeah, well, I’ll survive somehow. Maybe I’ll have some ice cream.”

Rick stood up, mostly dressed. At least he didn’t put the tie back on. He looked tired but
still handsome, and Leah felt a small pang that he was going after all. That reminded her
of something. “Oh, hey, I think I met Dan’s girlfriend tonight.”

That got his attention. He looked at her with interest. “Really? Where was this?”

“At the hospital.”

He nodded. “That’s right, you said you were going there after you got back. I thought
you said he didn’t have a girlfriend.”

“I guess maybe I was wrong. She acted like she was his girlfriend.”

“How about that,” he said, with a smile that had a hint of a leer in it. “So who is she?”

Leah shrugged. “A woman he works with.”

He smiled at her teasingly. “Is she pretty?”

“Beautiful,” Leah had to admit.

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“Good for him,” Rick said. “How do you know she is his girlfriend? She come right out
and tell you?”

“Not in so many words. Just a feeling I had watching her around him.”

Rick leaned against the doorway, half in and half out of her bedroom. “How come you
never met her before?”

“It would appear I’ve been going at the wrong times, stupid me. They’re going after
work. She said he has lots of visitors.”

“So the boy has friends. Good for him. I guess you don’t need to single-handedly keep
him going after all.”

She stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’ve been spending a lot of time there. Maybe you should let his friends take
care of him. Your story is over, remember?”

She nodded, her face neutral.

“I was getting kind of worried,” he told her, putting a hand against the doorjamb. “Glad
to hear there’s already a girlfriend.”

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, knowing perfectly well.

“The guy’s a vegetable. You got your story, you did your good deed. Maybe it’s time
you got your life back to normal.”

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She pulled the sheet higher and looked at him with annoyance. She didn’t really want to
fight, but she was too stubborn to just let it go. “I don’t know what you’re worried about.
Like you say, Dan’s no threat.”

Rick didn’t seem to want to leave fighting either. “You’re right,” he said. He smiled and
pushed off from the doorway, ready to go. “Still, I’m happy he’s got a girlfriend.”

Chapter 25

In the end, Dan found her. “Hey there,” a voice said quietly to her as she stood next to
the stadium railing of the track. She knew immediately who it was, and was surprised to
feel her heart beat a little faster at the sound of his voice. She took care to turn around
slowly.

There were two days of competition left, with track and field nearing its zenith. Leah
didn’t know a lot about the various events, nor did she have many particular favorites
except for a couple athletes she’d happened across during the last two weeks. There was
a thirtysomething female high jumper, jumping on knees surgically repaired so many
times that she’d lost count. She was a few inches off the marks needed to win
international competitions and had barely squeezed on to the U.S. team, but she had
literally mortgaged her house to buy her this one last chance at competing. Leah also
met a forty-five year old equestrian, competing in his fifth Olympics. Contrary to the
stereotype, he was hardly wealthy, squeaking out a living as a plant manager in a small
manufacturing company in Iowa. He plowed all of his spare income into his horses and
his competing. “Beats working for a living,” he told her cheerfully. “Well, actually, I am
working to support what I really live for, which is this.” He laughed about how some of
his competitors had yachts or even private jets, and more than a few were second
generation Olympians. “I’m sort of the outlier, I guess,” he conceded. But he noted that
most of the people in the sport were very nice, and they’d been very generous to him at

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times when he needed help getting to a competition. “At the end of the day, it’s about
you and the horse, and we all share that.”

She made a point of meeting both of Dan’s marathon teammates, although she did not
end up writing about either of them or admitting that she knew Dan. She couldn’t really
say why. They both had their own interesting stories. Klouri was second generation; his
father had emigrated from Ethiopia as a young man, ended up driving a cab in LA. He
met Meb’s mother there, and Meb had grown up in South Central LA, his parents
fighting to keep him out of the gangs. Baks, on the other hand, had come to the US from
South Africa while in his mid-twenties to run on the road race circuit, making a decent
living. He eventually decided to become a naturalized citizen. “More prize money for
US citizens, you see,” he’d told her unabashedly in his quasi-English accent.

Both Klouri and Baks had been vocal admirers of each other, but neither seemed to know
Dan very well. Each made polite comments about respecting him and thinking he
seemed like a nice guy, but it did not appear that they’d spent much time with him, even
in training.

Now here was Dan himself, finding her in the crowded stadium. Casual fan that she
might be, simply watching the intense efforts and listening to the crowd roar were
surprising stirring to her. “I was wondering where you’ve been,” she said casually,
pretending not to be surprised, but surprised nonetheless.

He looked happy to be there. Unlike the other athletes she’d run across, he wasn’t
wearing his team uniform – he was clad in a pair of shorts, t-shirt, and running shoes.
Just another American tourist. Only the credentials on the lanyard around his neck
identified him as one of these select few who were here not just to honor but also to fight
for honor. Leah thought that Dan seemed, if anything, leaner than ever, but she also had
to admit that he also seemed filled with vitality. His eyes were as alive and intelligent as
ever. “I’ve been around,” he said.

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“Imagine running into you here,” she said dryly. “What luck.”

“For you or for me?”

Leah laughed, becoming worried when he kept a straight face and then laughing more
when his face finally relaxed into a friendly smile. “How did you know I was here?”

“One of the team officials mentioned you’d been looking for me. I think he was one of
the press guys.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” she said. “How’d you know I’d be here?” She gestured at the
surroundings around them.

He shrugged. “I didn’t, but I knew you were around somewhere. I’ve been keeping my
eyes open for you.”

“I looked you up in the Village but they didn’t know where you were,” she admitted,
wanting him to know that she had wanted to find him too.

Dan smiled shyly. “I have a room in one of the hotels outside the Village. Fewer
distractions.”

They both turned as the sound of the crowd cheering caught their attention. There was a
1500 meters semi-final going on, and the race had come down to a mad dash in the last
three hundred meters. Dan called her attention to the two runners she should watch, and
they watched as both of them burst through the pack on the straightaway to finish in the
top two slots, much to the crowd’s approval.

“I’ve been reading your articles,” he told her. “They’re good.”

“Better than my story about you?” she asked teasingly.

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“Lots better,” he assured her with a straight face. “You had better subjects. I really liked
the one about the British guy.”

Leah smiled. “Yes, I liked him. He’d like you, too.” She thought for a moment. “I hope
Peter wasn’t disappointed about not doing well in the 10k.”

Dan shrugged. “I think he’s got plenty on his mind without that. He was hoping for
better results but he was just using the 10k to sharpen up. Like he told the press, if he’d
done better it might have hurt his race Sunday.”

“Have you been resting?” Leah asked, feeling oddly maternal.

He nodded with a shy smile. “It’s funny, tapering down. Too much energy and too much
time on my hands. Then I go to the track events and get all caught up in the competition,
so it’s tough to stay relaxed.” He paused and looked out at the track, where they were
setting up for one of the finals. “I’m ready.”

He said it with the quiet determination that didn’t include any false bravado, and it gave
her a little chill. They watched the drama in the infield for a few moments, watching the
end of one of the field events. “What are you doing here?” he asked at last.

She was startled, and looked over at him. He continued to watch the action on the track.
“Do you mean here here or at the Olympics here?” she asked.

“Either. Both.” He turned and smiled. “You once told me that you weren’t a sports
writer.”

Leah relaxed a little. “Then I went and wrote this story about a crazy marathon runner.”

Dan was pokerfaced. “Now you’re typecast?”

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She sighed dramatically. “Ruined.”

They both laughed. The crowd was starting to disperse, the events being over for the
evening, and they found themselves caught up in the exodus. They drifted along with the
crowd until they were outside the stadium. They eddied to a halt off to the side of the
current of people, and stood there uncertainly. “Buy you a drink?” Leah heard herself
ask impulsively. “I mean, you know, coffee or a soda. Maybe some ice cream?”

Dan smiled, but it seemed a little sad. “It’s getting late.”

“That’s right,” she said, recovering. “Early to bed, early to rise.”

“Something like that.”

“Your big day is day after tomorrow. Nervous?”

Dan looked steadily at her for a few seconds, as if trying to determine something, then
looked away briefly. He flashed a shy smile. “Not so much.”

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, either for her question or her reckless invitation,
but somehow his answer seemed both brave and mysterious to her at the same time.
“How about a rain check on that ice cream?”

He studied her again, his eyes crinkled with what she hoped was amusement. “OK,” he
said at last. “How about dinner tomorrow night?”

Chapter 26

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He was flying. He didn’t know that word and didn’t attach any of that word’s more
specific meanings to it, but he reveled in the sensations he was experiencing. He was
moving, he was strong, and he felt in control, for the only time he could recall. This was
life; this was what he was made for. He wanted it to go on and on.

But it didn’t. He bolted upright, not sure where he was or where he had been.

“So you’re awake,” the voice said.

He turned and saw the face – now the body, the person, his sole companion in this place.
She smiled at him welcomingly. “You were asleep.”

He was having a hard time getting his bearings. Her voice was the same, her face was the
same, but things were very different. For one thing, she was reclining on something that
he unconsciously recognized as a lounge chair, with a long cushion draped over it. A
small table sat next to the chair, with a tall glass of liquid resting on it. She smiled
encouragingly and picked up the glass for a short sip. She inclined the glass towards him.

For another thing, he himself was on a lounge chair that appeared to be the twin of hers.
He had no recollection of sitting down on the chair, but evidently he had done so.

He also noticed that she was now wearing shorts, her long legs displayed on the bottom
part of her chair. Their chairs were sitting on what appeared to be a concrete patio,
perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. They were facing a plot of grass, looking so green that
his eyes could not quite believe what they were seeing. It was the first such vivid color
he had seen and it took him a few seconds to take it in. It was breathtaking.

“Where are we?” he said, almost under his breath. The scene was completely different
from what he might have expected to see, with more types of objects now in it than he
had previously been aware even existed. His whole world had changed, in ways that
literally would have been unimaginable. Their surprising and sudden appearance scared

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him. But what scared him even more was that, now that they were here, they seemed
familiar to him. It was now hard to imagine this place without them.

She looked at him in amusement. “Where we’ve always been, of course. You were
asleep so I just thought this would be more comfortable. Have something to drink.”

He looked over at the table next to his own chair, and found it held as glass of its own.
He picked it up hesitantly. “What is it?”

“Diet Coke, as I recall.”

He didn’t stop to think that the words held meaning for him, and cautiously took a sip. It
tasted good, and the liquid was refreshing. He looked around them again. It wasn’t as if
the whole world had changed. The green grass only went so far before blurring at the
edges into the formless, shapeless yet constantly changing void that surrounded him
without break prior to his discovery of her face. Their little patio and yard seemed
entirely at odds with it, but were so convincing. It took him a moment to realize that he
could smell the grass as well as see it, like it had been recently cut. He thought he could
even see the individual blades of grass if he looked closely. “Where did all this come
from?” he asked helplessly.

She looked at him in amusement, still holding her glass. “I don’t know. You were
sleeping and I just, I don’t know, I thought it’d be nicer if we could sit down.”

“And it, what, just appeared?” he asked skeptically.

She nodded, her face slowly dissolving to a frown. “Something like that, I guess. I don’t
know how to explain it. It just was, as if it had always been there.”

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“Sort of how you showed up,” he said, more to himself than to her. He shook his head
and looked around again before returning to stare at her. “What do you mean, I was
sleeping?”

She hesitated, evidently not sure how to explain. “Your eyes were closed, and you
seemed so relaxed. Every once in a while you twitched, like you were dreaming or
something.”

“Dreaming?” The word would have never occurred to him, but somehow he knew what
she meant. It was inconceivable that he had been asleep. Although he seemed to now
know what that meant, he had been in this place for what seemed to be an eternity
without sleeping. He didn’t understand how or why he would have suddenly just gone to
sleep, especially not with her here as company. And dreaming? Impossible – what
would he have to dream about? But he had no better explanation. “I wasn’t here,” he
told her haltingly. “I was someplace else.”

“Oh, really,” she asked with great interest. “Where were you?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, his eyes staring off at the ground as he tried
to recall. “I don’t know.”

“Well,” she started, putting down her drink. “You said you were someplace else. What
was it like?”

He thought for a long moment. “I don’t remember. I know that I was moving, moving
fast. I could tell that I was going past things that didn’t look like this,” he said, nodding
his head at the void that hovered at the edges of the grass. “But I don’t know what they
were. I wished I had paid more attention to it all, but it didn’t seem to matter. I just was
too focused on the moving. And I liked it. It felt right somehow.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Were you in a car?”

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Almost as soon as she said it, he knew what a car was, and also knew that he had not
been in one during his dream. They similarly established that he had not been in a plane,
on a boat, riding a bike or a train. Each time she introduced it, the word was a surprise to
him, a concept that had not previously existed in this place but that was born fully formed
in his mind once she suggested it. He didn’t know these things by direct experience – he
had no memories of himself in relation to them – yet he somehow fully understood what
they were. Each was a shock to him.

“Maybe you were a bird,” she tried.

It wasn’t right, but there was something right about it. “Not a bird,” he concluded. “But
I was flying.” He thought for a few more seconds, struggling to recapture that sensation
that he had been enjoying while he was still dreaming. “I wasn’t in the air, and I didn’t
have wings, but it was the same sort of freedom. Not free of gravity, but fighting against
it, and liking the fight.” He looked at her sheepishly. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

She looked at him with a proud expression on her face. “Not at all, dear,” she comforted
him with a warm voice. “You were running.”

Chapter 27

Leah went to see Dan in the late morning. She stopped by the nurse’s station to check in
with them. “No change, Leah,” Mary told her tolerantly. “But no worse either.”

“I suppose that’s something.”

Mary eyed her carefully. “Your boyfriend’s looking forward to your visit,” she said at
last, suppressing a smirk.

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“He’s not my boyfriend,” Leah responded in mock exasperation. “Anyway, how can you
tell?”

Mary tapped her forehead. “You get a sense of these things, staying on the ward long
enough. He likes it when you come and misses you when you go.”

As if I don’t have enough guilt about the time I spend here, Leah thought to herself. She
just smiled and excused herself to go to Dan’s room, hearing the hushed conversation
behind her back and some stifled laughs. She thought it must be especially hard duty
with these patients. They rarely got better, and the nurses didn’t even get to talk to them
and get to know them. If the patients knew of the nurse’s attentions, they couldn’t
communicate their thanks.

Still, it had to be better than something like the pediatric cancer ward.

Dan was resting on his back, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t react in any way to her
arrival. “Hey, there,” she called out cheerfully, not letting his distant stare and ever more
fragile body throw her. “How you doing today?” She flurried next to the bed, reaching
out to take one of his unresponsive hands. She squeezed it. “I thought I’d read you the
paper today. You can’t get all of your information from the television,” she admonished
him, glancing up at the murmuring set. Someone had left it on a station showing
cartoons. Leah sighed and shut it off, then pulled up a chair next to the bed.

She spent the next hour slowly reading the Star-Tribune aloud to him. She wasn’t sure
what articles might be of interest to him so she read them all, at least parts of them.
When she got to the personal ads she became more selective. “It’s sort of fun, you
know,” she told him. “Or maybe pathetic, I don’t know. I understand that online dating
services are now one of the leading ways for people to meet other people, but at least
there you can see pictures or hear their voices. Maybe this is more like writing letters –
one way, non-interactive attempts at communication. I like the idea of it, telling someone
things without knowing if you are getting through. Another lost art.”

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For once, the irony was lost on her, as Dan simply stayed as he was, worlds apart.

She picked out a few of the more amusing ads. There were just about every conceivable
combination -- women seeking men, men seeking women, women seeking women, men
seeking men, and those entirely flexible. “No animals, though,” she clarified. “Maybe
that’s the line between print and the Internet. Doesn’t say much for the Internet, does it?”

He might have agreed with her, but it was hard to say. He just laid there silently.

Leah was there about an hour before packing up. “Special treat -- I’m coming back later
today. I want to see who is coming to see you after work.”

It was about five when she returned, and she didn’t have to wait long for his next visitors.
First was Andrea Torres, who seemed surprised and a little embarrassed to find her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said when she caught sight of Leah. “I thought he’d be alone.”

Leah assured her it was quite all right, and invited her in. She only stayed twenty
minutes or so, obviously uncomfortable around Dan and glad to have Leah for company.
Leah didn’t recognize the next two visitors, until one of them reminded her that they’d
met when Leah had come to the office for that first interview. “Derek Brant,” the young
man reminded her. “I told you what a good mentor he was.”

Leah dimly remembered; the quote wasn’t memorable enough to make its way into her
story. She supposed it was still in her notes somewhere, so she simply smiled and shook
his hand.

“Naomi Gibson,” his companion introduced herself. “We didn’t meet. I must have been
on the phone while you were there. That’s OK. I probably would have gotten too
tongue-tied and would have sounded stupid.”

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Leah smiled at her. She was young and cute, with short hair dyed several colors. It
didn’t strike her that they were involved, even though they had come together. Naomi
appeared younger than Derek, but Leah had a feeling she would have seemed less
confident at any age. By contrast, Derek did not appear to lack for any confidence, and if
he was involved with Naomi, Leah hoped that once they left Naomi would give him a
piece of her mind for the way he was eyeing Leah. He was a few years too young for her
and not really her type, but she didn’t mind so much the attention.

They stood by the side of Dan’s bed. Derek cheerfully tried to tell Dan how good he was
doing, that he could beat this, and a few other clichés that he’d probably picked up from
the movies of what brave friends were supposed to say to their hospitalized friends.
Naomi seemed too intimidated to say anything. She stood slightly behind Derek,
clutching at his sleeve in an unconscious gesture.

In the end, they only stayed ten or fifteen minutes. Derek ran out of things to say, and
once he’d ran out of steam he seemed anxious to leave. Leah, wryly finding herself
acting as a hostess, thanked them for coming. She caught Naomi reaching out to touch
Dan on his forearm in a curiously tender gesture that more than made up for the words
she could not find while she was there. Leah found herself giving her a hug before she
left.

Leah was about to leave around seven when another young man came rushing in. He was
moderate height and wiry – not as thin as Dan, Leah thought, but she suspected he was a
fellow runner. “Give me that remote,” he called out. He stopped short when he saw
Leah, and took a quick glance over at Dan as if to reassure himself that he was in the
right room. “Oh, excuse me.”

“I’m Leah Hutchins,” she introduced herself, putting out her hand. He slowly put out his
and they shook. “Mike Francis. I’m, um, a friend of Dan’s. I came to watch the game
with Dan.”

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“The game?”

He brightened. “You know, the Twins and the Brewers. Winner gets bragging rights
until the next game.”

She handed him the remote and watched him switch to the game, which was just starting.
He was taller than Dan, moderately good looking, with nice blue eyes and closely shorn
hair. “Did you guys used to do this a lot?”

He nodded vigorously. “Sure. Dan’s really a Twins fan too, but the Wisconsin-
Minnesota thing is just kind of fun. We just like to watch baseball. We used to go to the
park, or just hang out and watch it on TV.”

Leah didn’t want to interfere, and told him that she should be going. He seemed
disappointed, and urged her to stay. “Really,” he affirmed, glancing at Dan. His
expression dropped a little. “I could use a little company.”

Leah had planned to go home and get some work done, and there was an outside chance
Rick would get done early enough to stop by. But she was intrigued by Dan’s new
friend. “OK, but I have to warn you – I’m not much of a fan.”

Mike told her that was all right, he’d explain everything to her. She pulled up a chair on
the other side of Dan’s bed and settled in.

She found that she liked Mike. She wasn’t sure if he was one of those people who
couldn’t stand silence or if he was just a natural chatterer, but he kept a constant if largely
one-sided conversation going. Over the course of the game, Leah learned several things
she had not known. For one thing, that Dan was a baseball fan. “Absolutely,” Mike told
her. “He liked the strategy and the stats of the whole thing. He could tell you amazing

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stuff – batting averages of utility second basemen, ERAs of pitchers on teams in the
basement of the National league. Stuff like that.”

Mike told her that he and Dan would sometimes go to the park to play catch, or maybe
Frisbee golf. Other times they’d watch games at a sports bar or one of their homes,
sometimes just them and sometimes joined by a loose circle of other mutual friends.
“Another buddy of ours was supposed to come over tonight but his girlfriend had other
plans.” He got a laugh out of that.

“What about your girlfriend? Doesn’t she mind?”

His look was almost comical. “Uh, you could say I’m between girlfriends right now,” he
told her with an embarrassed tone.

She thought this was a good opportunity to ask the question she was most curious about.
“Do you know Dan’s girlfriend?” she asked innocently.

He looked at her questioningly. “I’ve known a few of the women he’s dated over the
years, but I don’t think he’s got a girlfriend right now.”

“Are you sure? What about a woman named Sidra Wilson? She works with him. You’d
remember her.”

Mike wrinkled his brow and looked at Dan, who was evidently not listening to the
exchange. He gave her question some thought, then looked back at Leah. “No, I don’t
think I know her.”

Leah let the topic go, although she was more curious than ever about Sidra. She let the
conversation slide, and eventually Mike returned to safer areas. She learned that Dan had
resisted joining Mike’s softball teams; Leah assumed it was more out of concern for his
running than any lack of talent or interest. Mike lived near Dan, and had run against each

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other in college. “I ran for the U, of course, and they always kicked our butts. I was a
couple years behind him and didn’t really know him, but we ran into each other at a road
race in St. Paul a few years ago.”

“Dan was running?” Leah asked, interested that Dan might have had a secret racing
career that he hadn’t admitted.

Mike shook his head. “No, he was volunteering as an official, and somehow we got to
talking. He knew a couple guys I knew and we sort of hit it off.” Mike shook his head.
“I used to try to convince him to race, you know. I knew he was still running a lot and
thought he’d enjoy it.”

“What did he say?”

“He used to just smile and tell me he wasn’t interested.” Mike shook his head. “I feel
pretty stupid. I mean, here I was trying to convince him to try fun run 5ks and he goes
and runs in the Olympics.”

Leah looked at Dan, who was still staring unresponsively at the ceiling. He was
surrounded by his usual array of IV lines, monitors and tubes, and looked helpless and
frail. It was hard to remember him as an Olympic athlete. “Did you ever think…” she
asked delicately, unable to finish her question.

He seemed to know what she wanted to know. He, too, stared at Dan, and his face grew
serious. “I don’t know. It’s hard to think he could be that good, you know. He was just
a regular guy, he never let on that he was that ambitious or anything.” Mike paused, but
Leah had a sense he wasn’t done. “But…” she prodded carefully.

He looked over at her almost defiantly. “But he was someone who, when he put his mind
to something, you know, he’d do it.” His face drained.

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They both looked over at Dan, who bore mute witness to the consequences of his having
put his mind to doing this one thing all out.

Chapter 28

Dan suggested they have dinner at his hotel, the new Hyatt just outside the Olympic
Village. He made a reservation at the upscale restaurant on the second floor, which had
big picture windows that overlooked the Olympic Park. She’d had to scrounge up a dress
for the occasion, as her wardrobe hadn’t included quite the right thing. She didn’t really
think he would mind what she wore – and, in fact, she wasn’t at all sure that he would
even pay any attention – but she wanted to make an impression.

It must have worked. “Wow,” he said when he saw her. “Great dress.”

She smiled and did a mock curtsey. “Like it?”

He nodded, his face studiously appreciative. “I don’t think it’s the dress, though.”

“You don’t?”

He shook his head. “It’s the person wearing the dress.”

The maitre d’ – an older man with distinguished graying hair and who was extremely
well groomed and attired -- was watching all this with a bland tolerance, certainly having
seen more awkward exchanges among the tourists who had swarmed the city. He led
them to their table, which was elegantly set and which had great view of the street and the
park. Outside people were walking around, in pairs and small groups, no doubt still
caught up in discussing what they’d seen and experienced in the day’s competition.
None of them were wearing an evening dress, Leah thought wryly. A quick survey of
their fellow dinner companions revealed that they were closer to her sartorial level than to

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the people ambling along the street, making her feel better about her impulsive purchase.
She noticed that they were one of the few couples present, and that they were among the
youngest. The rest of the diners were larger groups, mostly men and generally much
older; she suspected that they were businessmen or representatives from the various
sports federations, and that they were adding to their already budging expense accounts.
She wasn’t one to talk; she fully intended to treat Dan on the Times’ dime, or whatever
the local equivalent was. Meanwhile, Dan was comfortably outfitted in jeans, an open
collar shirt, and a sports jacket. He wasn’t even wearing running shoes or his Olympic
badge; nothing about him, except perhaps his wiry frame, distinguished him as an athlete.
She wondered if that was why he wanted to have dinner here, or if he was just trying to
impress her.

Outside, the evening sky was still light but dimming, adding a strange poignancy to the
view. Or so Leah thought, before catching herself and chiding herself for getting
sentimental just because the Games were drawing to a close. She could see a street
performer – no doubt sanctioned by the autocratic overseeing Committee – had drawn a
small crowd. The glass window between them transformed him into a performer from
the silent era, soundless strumming a guitar and mouthing words to some song she
couldn’t make out. A juggler would have been easier to watch from here, but Leah didn’t
figure she was there to watch the street show.

“How did you get reservations here?” she asked, looking at him across the table.

He shrugged and smiled mysteriously. “For that matter,” she continued, “how did you
manage to get reservations at this hotel? Didn’t you say you’re staying here? My paper
tried to get me in here but they were all sold out.”

Dan had a look on his face that she couldn’t decipher. “I made reservations three years
ago.”

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She had to think about it. “The hotel only opened up a year ago, and you only made the
team six months ago, so why did you make reservations three years ago?”

He smiled, still with that mysterious look on his face. Instead of answering, though, he
just looked out the window. Maybe he was watching the musician; maybe he was seeing
something else entirely. She wasn’t sure. She thought he seemed a little wistful
somehow. “I’ve been planning this for a while,” he said at last, turning back to her.

They looked over the menu, listened to the specials from their very formal waiter, and
made some choices that he evidently didn’t disapprove of too much. They ate some
bread while chatting about the events of the past few days. She thought he might be
nervous or distracted, but she found him to be his usual amiable self, and she was struck
again by how he seemed fully with her when talking to her. She’d found that most
people were only partially involved in a conversation; the rest of them are thinking ahead
to what they’ll say next, or to their day ahead, or to the myriad of other pieces of their
lives. With Dan, though, despite all he had to be thinking about, he seemed genuinely
glad to be sitting here with her having dinner.

The food came before they knew it, and looked almost as amazing as it proved to taste.
They were halfway through the meal when Leah came back to the question that had been
running through her head. “So,” she started tentatively, toying with a remaining piece of
tuna on her plate, “why did you make a reservation three years ago? Just a big fan?
Have you gone to other Olympics?”

He smiled slowly. His plate of pasta was finished, and he was polishing off a heavily
buttered roll. “No. I’ve never been to one before.”

“But you planned three years ago to come to this one?”

He nodded, and she had one of those intuitions that made her a good reporter. “Would I
be wrong to guess you’ve visited here before too?” she asked.

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“Four times.” He seemed to be enjoying her probing.

She considered this. “So when you made those reservations --”

He just smiled.

Somehow it didn’t surprise Leah that Dan might have methodically planned his way to
these Olympics that long ago, and she suspected that if she pressed him she would find
that his previous visits had familiarized him with every inch of the marathon course.
“Why aren’t you staying in the Village?” she asked at last. “Don’t you want to make the
most of being on the team? You know, the camaraderie and all?”

He looked out the window, perhaps catching a glimpse of the Stadium or the Village. He
was silent for a few moments, taking in the view before turning back to her. “The room
I’m assigned to is actually a pretty nice room, kind of a two bedroom suite. They try to
mix up the athletes, you know. I’m supposed to share a room with one of the high
jumpers – who, by the way, is like the tallest set of legs you’ve ever seen – and the other
room has a gymnast and one of the swimmers. I hang out there during the day
sometimes, so, no, it’s not like I’m missing out entirely on the whole thing.”

“But…” She let her sentence linger.

He laughed. “I think my roommate’s girlfriend kind of likes the fact that I’m not around
at night.” His face grew more serious. “I’m too old to be living in a dorm. Besides, I’m
not here for the experience or the camaraderie or any of that.”

“You don’t think you’ll regret not experiencing more of the Village life?”

“No.”

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She gave him a coy smile, not quite a leer but not quite not a leer either. “I hear it’s party
central, especially after people finish their event.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s the thing. The marathon is the last event. Everyone is gone or
getting ready to leave by the time we’re done.” He raised his hands to illustrate the
injustice of it. “What are you going to do?”

She had to laugh. “Doesn’t seem fair. Still, I feel bad for you, missing all the fuss.”

His smile grew resigned. “Maybe next time.”

Leah’s eyebrows arched dramatically. “Is there going to be a next time? I sense major
scoop.”

Dan shook his head, in resignation or in apology; Leah wasn’t sure which. “No next
time. One and done. This is it.”

Something in the finality of the way he said it chilled Leah. “You’re just here for the
race?”

He nodded slowly, a smile eventually leaking out. The smile seemed both conspiratorial
and sad at the same time.

Leah had to admit that, despite all the articles and all of her admiration for him, she
hadn’t really taken his Olympic effort all that seriously. Sure, just making the team was
very impressive, but impressive in the way that most people would be impressed by
someone they know being on a television reality show. She’d seen lots of great
performances in the time she’d been on assignment here, met a few outstanding athletes,
but had been more struck by how ordinary most of the people she’d met were – ordinary
people with extraordinary drives to be very, very good at something, whether it be rowing
or riding a horse or jumping over a bunch of 42 inch barriers. She admired them all, and

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she admired him. But she had not, even for a second, given a thought to him actually
doing well in his race.

The waiter came by to check on them, and Dan talked her into sharing an ice cream
sundae. She had some coffee while he stuck to his ice water. When the sundae arrived,
they were taken aback at its size, and mutually launched a greedy attack on it, savoring its
richness. “I guess this counts as carbo loading,” Dan teased between bites.

“Like that plate of fettuccini didn’t already take care of that,” she retorted.

“It’s a long race.” He grinned at her, and took another bite.

She scooped up a spoonful of ice cream, careful to load it up with the fudge sauce, and let
it linger in her mouth to capture its full flavor. “Dan,” she began.

He looked up, hearing the change in her tone of voice.

“Remember when we talked about writing, that time in your apartment?”

“Of course.” He smiled at the memory.

“I was thinking, you know, about what you asked about writing every day and all. And I
was thinking, you know, how much I’d like to write a masterpiece, something that I could
really feel was great.”

“I’m sure you will,” he promised. He regarded her intently. “And if – or, rather, when –
you do, will you keep writing?”

She didn’t have to think about her answer, but she paused before answering anyway. “I
imagine so,” she said with a laugh. She grew serious. “I like to think so anyway.” She

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paused before continuing, locking his eyes in with her own. “Are you going to win
tomorrow?”

It seemed ludicrous to even say the words, and she found herself afraid that he might
think she was making fun of him. The question had just come to her, unbidden and
unexpected. Dan seemed taken aback as well, his brow furrowing quizzically before
gradually relaxing as she smiled at her. “Am I going to win? Why do you want to ask
me that?”

She put her spoon down, noticing that he had as well. “Well, it would be your
masterpiece, wouldn’t it? You’ve obviously been preparing for this for a long time. I
mean, you told me you made reservations for your hotel three years ago.”

“Maybe I just wanted to come watch.”

Leah thought he was teasing her, but he kept a straight face. “Maybe,” she allowed, “but
I kind of think maybe not. So answer my question.”

He considered this, breaking her stare to look out the window for a few long moments.
He chewed on his lip before answering. “Leah, the best guys in the world run like 2:04.
Two hours and four minutes. The best Americans run 2:05, 2:06. That’s fast, damn fast.
Unbelievably fast. I qualified at 2:13 and change, and that was a big personal best.”

“Maybe you’ll have a breakthrough. People do that, don’t they?”

He smiled gently at her, as if amused by her naivety. “Yeah, sometimes they do. But,
you know, I’m never going to run that fast. I could train two hundred miles a week for a
million years and I’d never get that fast.”

“That’s kind of self-defeating, isn’t it?” Leah asked, surprised at his lack of confidence.

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“Just realistic.” He sat still, and it took her a couple seconds for her to notice the smile he
was working to suppress. “What is it?” she prodded.

“The thing is, people don’t usually run all that fast in the Olympics.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “The fast races have flat courses, pacemakers, big money payoffs, and
don’t have the whole world looking on like the Olympics do. These races are usually too
hot, too “scenic,” and when they get here people get very conservative -- going for the
gold, not the time.”

“So what does that mean?”

He rocked his head back and forth, just slightly. “The winner often comes in at 2:09,
2:10, maybe 2:11.” He paused a moment, then leaned towards her slightly with a
conspiratorial air. “Now, I can run a 2:11.”

His statement stunned her. His words were calm and unemotional, but there was
something behind them that caught her attention, that hinted at some strength of resolve
that Dan didn’t publicize but which she believed he had. She’d been the one who’d
initially brought up the prospect of him winning, but, in retrospect, she realized she
hadn’t really been serious. She’d just asked because she was caught up in the whole
thing; she really was rooting for him to do well and she wanted to help give him
confidence. She didn’t know a lot about marathoning but she’d learned enough about
athletics to doubt that someone she personally knew, that she could have dinner with,
could actually be that good. “Are you saying you might be able to win after all?” she
asked carefully at last.

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He looked at her, deciding if he should say more or not. She was a reporter, after all, and
he wouldn’t want to say something that would just end up looking ridiculous if it showed
up in the paper the next day. “See, this is my shot, my last chance, my only chance.”

“What do you mean?” she interjected. “This doesn’t have to be the end. You’ve just
gotten really good; why would you stop now? You could always run at some of the other
big marathons – Boston or New York, even Minneapolis. Being on the Olympic team
probably means they’d pay you; you could get a shoe contract, make some money.”

He shook his head almost regretfully. “No, this is it.” His voice sounded final. “I’ve
been getting ready for this for a long time, and I’m not going into it thinking I can always
try again. It’s tomorrow or never.”

Leah was starting to get worried. She didn’t want him to push too hard and wind up a
casualty of sport. She’d seen that already in the two weeks she’d been watching other
athletes, and it scared her to think he might succumb to the temptation. Some of these
athletes were crazy, letting success consume them to the point where they risked
damaging themselves, sometimes permanently. She hoped Dan was smarter than that.
“What do you mean?” she said slowly. It suddenly struck her how terribly thin and
vulnerable he seemed, sitting there in his grown-up outfit like a ten year old dressed up
for church. She wasn’t sure which persona was the real him – the casual Dan at work,
hard-working Dan on the run, or this Dan trying to pretend to fit in with this crowd of
expense-account bearing stuffed shirts.

He looked out the window again, a slight smile on his face. “I don’t have anything to
lose, you know? No one is really expecting anything out of me. I’m not only an
American, I’m the third string American, and surprise placer at that. If I do poorly, well,
of course I would, what else would anyone expect?”

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He turned back to her, that little smile still there but sadder somehow. She thought it
presaged an expectation of failure on his part, and she hated that. “You might surprise
everyone, you know,” she insisted.

The smile faded from his face, and was replaced by a look it took her a second to
recognize. It was the look she’d seen on his face when she’d seen him running, a look of
determination and focus that always seemed to her to be somehow at odds with his
normal easygoing nature. He nodded in agreement, quite serious but without any hint of
boasting. “Well, you know, I might just do that.”

On impulse, she reached out and put her hand out over his, the remains of their sundae
long forgotten and melting sadly in its crystal bowl. He seemed surprised by her gesture,
but didn’t move his hand. “You don’t have anything to prove, you know. Just getting
this far is great. You’ve already impressed a lot to a lot of people. I’m impressed.”

Dan looked out the window again, only this time he wasn’t smiling. “I’m not trying to
prove anything,” he said at last, speaking in such a quiet tone that she had to strain to hear
him. “I’m trying to find something out.”

Chapter 29

He looked at her as sternly as he was capable of. “I don’t understand any of this.” It was
hard for him to maintain his expression, but he forced himself not to soften.

She looked up at him with the innocence of an angel. “Any of what?”

“Any of this!” he said vehemently, sweeping his arm to illustrate their little oasis. He
stood up and his voice got louder. “Where are we? Why are we here? Who the hell are
you?” He stopped, suddenly spent of energy, and sat down. He stared down at the

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lounge chair. “And who the hell I am?” he finished in a tone so quiet that she could
barely hear it. She didn’t really need to hear him; she knew what he was asking.

She waited a few seconds. “That’s a lot of questions,” she pointed out.

He nodded grimly, acknowledging the truth of it without hope of believing anything

could be done to answer them. He slowly looked, not at her, not at their little patio or at
the nice lawn around it, but at the featureless area it edged into so gradually that it was
impossible to tell where one stopped and the other started. Perhaps there was no real line
that separated them; it was more like they were the same in some sense that defied his
understanding. He exhaled deeply and looked at her. “None of this makes any sense.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Probably not. What bothers you the most?”

He looked off in the distance again and thought for a while. “How do know about all this
stuff?” he asked at last.

“All what stuff?” she replied.

“You know. Cars. Planes. Birds. Lounge chairs.” He patted the one he was sitting on,
emphasizing his point with some force. He looked over at her. “How do you know about
dreaming?”

She matched his eyes, holding them with sympathy and, he thought, understanding. “I
don’t know,” she confessed at last.

He was the first to look away. “When you showed up, I didn’t know what to make of
you. You were just a face – not even a face, just the barest outline of a face. Now there’s
all this. I didn’t know about anything, and yet none of this surprises me. You start
talking to me and I can understand what you’re talking about. You give me a diet Coke
and I know what it is. You ask me if I’m in a car and I know what it is. But I don’t ever

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remember having had a diet Coke, and there sure as heck aren’t any cars here. So how is
that possible?”

“I don’t know.” Her face seemed untroubled, yet her voice conveyed her sympathy.

“You must know something,” he told her, his voice low and urgent. “You’re bringing all
this up. How do you know about them?”

She stood up and walked over to the end of the patio. She put her foot out and just barely
brushed the top of the grass with the tip of her toes, feeling the softness. He watched her,
fascinated by her mere presence and struck anew at how real she was, how perfect she
seemed to him. He liked the curve of her back and the muscles in her shapely legs. He
liked how the hair touched her neck, caressing softly.

He almost let things go, almost just gave in to the peace of the moment. There was a
time not so long before when this scene would have contented him for eons, just being
able to have her there to look at. He would have been able to endlessly spend his time
studying every inch of her, taking it all in without any expectation of understanding any
of it. But he couldn’t do that any more. “Do you remember anything before…here?” he
asked softly.

This time she was the one to sigh. He could see enough of the side of her face to see the
small grimace or tight smile – he couldn’t tell which – she made before answering. “I
guess there are a couple of options,” she said at last. She put her hands in the back
pockets of her shorts, and stood there with her elbows out. She stared off into that
indeterminable distance.

“Which are?” he asked carefully, after it seemed that she wasn’t going to go on
otherwise.

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She slowly turned to look at him, swinging her foot through the air until it rested back on
the patio. Her toes playfully scuffed the surface. “Well,” she began. “We could be dead.
This could be the afterlife.”

“Oh, that’s encouraging,” he said with some slight sarcasm. He hadn’t ever thought
about the concept of being dead or of the afterlife, but – as usual – once she spoke of it
the concepts were as real as anything else he knew. And he didn’t think he liked the
prospect of being dead. “What else?”

She smiled wearily. “We could be waiting to be born.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. What if before people are born they are in
someplace – someplace like this – waiting?”

He didn’t think he felt dead, but her second theory didn’t fit any better. “Then how
would we know about anything? I mean, if we haven’t been born yet, why would any of
the words mean anything? How would we even know how to talk?”

She regarded him with a long, calm look. “It’s a puzzle,” she admitted.

He looked away, feeling a keen disappointment. He once had no thought of questions,

much less of answers or even any of expectation for answers, but now he hungered for
something that might explain the holes in the fabric of their little self-contained universe.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.

She went over to her chair and sat down, leaning back comfortably. She even closed her
eyes. “Isn’t it nice here?” She clasped her hands across her stomach and seemed the
picture of contentment, a sunbather basking in the warmth of the sun – except for the fact
that there was no sun, nor any clouds to block any such a sun that might come along.

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It could be worse, he admitted to himself. In fact, it had been worse. He had been
trapped here all alone, without knowing that anything else existed or could exist. That
was a dark, soundless, entirely solitary existence that had no past and no future. It should
have driven him mad, but it hadn’t. Unless this was madness and everything he now
knew or thought he knew was the figment of his insanity. That was an explanation that
she hadn’t suggested, thankfully. “It is nice,” he admittedly slowly, “but I still don’t
understand why any of this is.”

“Does it really matter?” she said, opening her eyes and looking at him with a gaze that
was partly concerned, partly almost hurt.

Looking at her, he wished he could sit back too, wished it could be different. But it
wasn’t. “Yes,” he told her firmly. “It does.”

Chapter 30

Dan’s sister Christine came in that weekend. She’d been busy on the phone, talking to
lawyers, utilities, the bank, and was finally in a position to take care of a few of Dan’s
practical affairs. She’d called Leah and asked her to accompany her, which surprised
Leah a little. They met at the hospital in the morning. Leah took Christine to see Dan,
offering to leave the two of them alone, which elicited an alarmed response from
Christine. “Stay, won’t you?” she pleaded, her eyes wide in near panic at the thought of
being left alone with this shell of her brother. “Is he always like this?”

Dan was in a fetal position, with his eyes closed. “No, not always. He often has his eyes
open, and he’s not usually curled up like that.”

Christine regarded her brother with sympathy, or perhaps pity. “I think I’m glad his eyes
are closed. It must be even harder when he looks like he’s awake.”

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Oh, you don’t ever really think he’s awake, Leah thought but did not say, thinking to her
hours with him. Not really, although you might hope. She just nodded and watched as
Dan’s sister held his hand for a few minutes and tried not to cry.

They gathered up his mail from the post office, as he had had it stopped before he left,
and headed to his apartment. Christine had a key, so she let them in. The lights were off
but the sun lit the living room comfortably. Still, the apartment seemed unusually still,
not like someone was merely away but gone, truly gone. Entering it was more like
entering a tomb than someone’s home. It sent a small chill down Leah’s back, and,
looking at Christine, she didn’t think she was the only one.

Christine put the mail down on the kitchen table, while Leah felt compelled to open the
refrigerator, for reasons she couldn’t explain. She was surprised. “Gosh, I was afraid
there’d be spoiled milk or rotten leftovers or something. Lord knows if I was gone this
long my refrigerator would qualify as a science experiment gone bad.” The refrigerator
was not only virtually empty – save for a few unopened bottles of water and some
condiments – but also spotless. It looked like it had been recently cleaned.

Christine joined Leah at the refrigerator door but only peered in briefly. “That’s Dan. He
would have planned ahead. Just like stopping his mail.”

Leah moved away and went into the living room. Christine followed her, looking around
distractedly. They checked out the other rooms, finding nothing out of the ordinary. “It’s
all so neat,” Leah marveled, sitting down on the couch in the living room. “Not a paper
out of place.” She remembered it being so, but this was even tidier than she recalled.

“Dan’s place is always neat,” Christine noted, sitting down as well. She looked around
the room. “He probably straightened up before he left.”

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They attacked the mail, of which there was surprisingly little. A few pieces of junk mail,
a couple magazines, several requests for donations to various worthy organizations.
“Where are the bills?” Leah asked, realizing their absence. “If was my mail, there’d be
mostly bills, even if it was just a couple days.”

Christine looked up from the pile in front of her. “His bank told me he had most of his
bills set up for automatic payment. I guess he didn’t like to bother with paying bills
manually.” She let a small smile leak. “You know, it was one of those things he didn’t
want distracting him.”

Leah chewed on her lip. “He’s always done this?”

Christine thought about the question, thinking back to her conversation with the very
helpful bank manager she’d spoken to a few days ago. “No,” she said at last. “He’s been
paying his bills mostly online for awhile, but the automatic payment is relatively new.”
She looked around the apartment and let another pass at a smile cross her face – only it
wasn’t very convincing. “Just before he went overseas.”

So before he goes, he cleaned up the place, Leah thought, made sure his financial
obligations were covered. Like he was expecting he might not come back. Another
small shiver went down her back. She got up and went over to the window. She
wondered if he looked out this window before he went out for his runs, checking out the
weather or how light it was out or if there was any traffic. Maybe he just launched
himself out the door, not caring or not wanting to know what the external world was
doing. Or perhaps it wasn’t this window he would look out at all; more likely it would be
the window in his bedroom, when he got up.

The truth was that Leah didn’t know and might never know. She thought about asking
Christine but didn’t, not knowing if she would know this kind of daily detail and fearing
that asking about it might cause her to burst into tears. It scared her that she might never

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know even this little thing, this simple everyday fact about the man whose home she was
now invading and whom she sat with for long, quiet hours each day.

“Did you see the postcards in Dan’s room?” Christine asked, surprising Leah. Her tone
sounded wistful.

“Yes,” Leah said, not admitting that she had been here before, although she couldn’t say
why she held that fact back.

“They’re from all over the world.” Her voice carried both her wonder and her pride.

“I noticed. They’re very impressive.”

Christine smiled, only this time it seemed more genuine. “He used to send postcards like
that to my boys. We never knew when one would show up; he wasn’t very good about
letting us know when he was headed off somewhere. It made every day kind of special,
you know, knowing that there might be a postcard from somewhere unusual.”

She paused and they both shared a moment. “So your kids --” Leah began.

“--Ted and Josh.”

“Ted and Josh – they like their uncle Dan?”

Christine’s eyes widened. “Oh, yeah, they think he’s the coolest. And that was before he
made the Olympics! They really got into it once he qualified, reading the papers,
watching every minute of the coverage. At least, until…” Her voice trailed off.

Leah let that go, not wanting to think too much about these young boys, so proud of their
uncle, watching Dan run without any way of knowing what was yet to come. It must
have been so thrilling, then so horrifying for them. She was glad Christine had kept them

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from seeing Dan in his current state. Leah saw that Christine seemed to be getting lost in
the gloom of her thoughts, and thought it best to change the subject. “Dan has a lot of
visitors at the hospital.”

It took a few seconds for Leah’s comment to sink in with Christine, but when it did she
looked over at her with interest. “Really?”

Leah nodded eagerly. “Every day someone comes.”

Christine seemed pleased but not surprised. “People always liked Dan. He was – I mean,
is – a good guy.”

Leah was quick to agree, nodding vigorously. “Most the people I’ve met have been
people he knows from work, but the other night a friend of his named Mike came. Mike
Francis.”

“I know Mike,” Christine said. “I met him a couple times. Nice guy.”

“He came over to watch a baseball game with Dan in Dan’s room. I guess they used to
watch baseball and such a lot.”

Christine nodded, smiling fondly. “He was a big sports fan. I mean, not like with track,
but, you know, he liked to watch people competing.”

“I met another friend of his,” Leah said carefully. “A woman named Sidra. Do you
know her?”

Christine thought for a second, then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“She worked with Dan,” Leah added helpfully. “Very pretty girl. I think they might
have been, well, involved.”

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Christine looked surprised. “No, I don’t remember anyone named Sidra, and I don’t
remember him talking about a girlfriend lately.” She looked apologetically at Leah.
“Brothers don’t always tell their sisters everything, but if he was serious I kind of think I
would have heard about it.” She paused for a second, evaluating Leah’s face. “So you
think it was something serious?” she asked carefully.

Leah wasn’t sure if her tone was hopeful or concerned, if she felt left out of this facet of
her brother’s life. She shrugged noncommittally. “She seemed very attached to him.”

“It would be nice to think that there is someone waiting for him,” Christine said slowly,
looking around the apartment carefully before smiling sadly at Leah. “It probably would
be a help to Dan, too.”

“You’re probably right.”

Something in Leah’s voice must have caught Christine’s attention. She sat forward and
reached for Leah’s hand. “Of course, you’ve been great too, just great. I can’t tell you
how much it means to us that you’ve been so good to him.”

“Don’t mention it.”

But they both knew it wasn’t the same as having his woman waiting anxiously for him to
come back from wherever he was.

Chapter 31

It was hard for Leah to go back to her hotel room after dinner. Her hotel was not quite as
close to the Olympic Village as Dan’s. The doorman at the Hyatt tried to persuade her to
take a cab, but she demurred; the streets were relatively safe and she wanted time to clear

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her head. She walked slowly back to her hotel, thinking about Dan as she strolled
through the streets. The sidewalks and cafes were still filled with tourists, drawn to the
city to see the athletic drama and now enjoying their night before the last day of
competition. They were loud and cheerful, and she felt both invisible and curiously out-
of-place as she slipped between various collections of them on the sidewalk.

Once back in her room, she looked out of the window of her room, taking in the pretty
spectacle of the lights twinkling in the darkness. The brightly lit stadium and other
venues were merely a glow in the sky from here. She knew they were there, but they
were like lights from a distant sun, seemingly separated from her world by such a vast
gulf that she could never cross it. And, indeed, she never would, not truly.

But Dan would. Tomorrow.

That was what was making her so restless, the thought of what he was set to do the next
day. Perhaps he was asleep this very moment, gathering his strength and resting while it
was still possible to do so. More likely he was awake, imagining every detail of the long
race that lay ahead of him. She wondered if he pictured the race happening in different
ways, playing out various scenarios, seeing himself perform in different ways – some
good, some great. If he did, she wondered how he decided which one to believe in –
hoping for the best without hoping too much. She hoped that he didn’t think about the
possibilities that he might fail, that his hard-earned training might come to naught
because of bad luck, bad weather, or simply an off day.

She felt like talking to someone. There was always Rick, of course, and she thought
about calling him. But there was the time difference and, well, she really didn’t know
what she would say to him. While she had been away they’d talked a couple of times,
and emailed each other periodically, but they were your garden variety I-miss-you-wish-
you-were-here kinds of communications, nothing of substance of deep meaning. The
truth was that she wasn’t sure she really did miss him all that much. She didn’t want to

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admit it, and she wasn’t going to think about it just now, but there it was. She’d deal with
it when she got home.

She had enjoyed being here much more than she ever would have expected. Part of it
was the novelty of the whole thing, the exotic location and the pack of assorted humanity
that had come here to witness it, but it was more than that. The stories she had found and
reported on had pierced her journalistic objectivity and cynicism. Neither the athletes nor
the fans were pure, not in any sense, but some of them aspired to be, and that touched her
more than she would have thought possible and more than she would admit to anyone.
Especially to Rick.

None had touched her more than Dan Peterson.

She stood at the window wishing they were still talking, wishing there was something she
could do to help him in his big race. She realized, with no little amazement, that if he had
asked her to come back to his hotel room, she would have done it, and would have given
herself to him gladly. Not out of love or even lust, but for the same reason that women
had given themselves to warriors on their last night for as long as there had been
warriors. Or men giving themselves to women, or any of the other creative combinations
human beings can devise for comfort and closeness. They did so because those who
remained behind admired those who did not, and by being with them they could
contribute to or at least share in their valor in some small way. She knew that being with
him wouldn’t have helped, and that he would never have asked, but she still wished she
could do something to, if not help, then at least comfort him.

Standing in the light, feeling impotent and isolated, she wished she could talk to
someone. But there was no one to talk to. So she did what she did: she wrote.

Tonight I had dinner with an Olympian, in the truest sense of that word. I won’t say the
name, because it doesn’t really matter. It happened to be this particular, but it could

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have been any number of the fine athletes, young and old, men and women, who come
here every four years to discover anew the meaning of that word.

His competition is yet to come, but he is not worried. Perhaps he should be, and in his
place I find myself worrying for him – wishing for the best, praying against the worst.
He does not look at it in that way, although he would never speak of such things. His
confidence is in his body, and in his will, and he is looking forward to the struggle.

He is here alone. He is part of a team in name only; he trains alone and will compete
alone. He doesn’t have a retinue. There is no coach, no masseuse, no nutritionist, no
publicist, and certainly no bodyguards. Nor will there be any cheerleaders spurring him
on tomorrow. He will compete all on his own, and he likes it that way.

He is rather like you and me. You wouldn’t pick him out on the street; he is not a hulking
specimen, nor is his face one that you do or are likely to recognize from television or
magazine covers. He is not a professional; no franchise has him on salary, and he has
no endorsements to support him. He works a normal job, just like anyone else might,
except that before his workday and after his workday he trains harder than the rest of us
ever work at anything. Every day, not just now and again. It is a life of dedication we
can only imagine. We might wish that we had that determination, but in fact it scares us.

He is not going to win. He knows this. The people he is competing against know this.
We in the media and various other pundits know this. It does not matter to him; he is
going out there simply to do his best.

We’ve gotten this Olympic thing wrong, you understand. We cheer for the winners,
praise and reward them. But they aren’t what this whole thing is about. The Olympic
motto is “Faster-Higher-Stronger” – not “Fastest-Highest-Strongest.” It is not about
being the best in the world but, rather, about being the best that one can be. He
understands this and that is exactly what he is looking to do tomorrow. We can hear the
words, we can understand the concept, and we can pretend to try to uphold that ideal in

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our own lives, but it takes someone like my dinner companion to show what it truly
means.

I have been fortunate enough to get to know him, at least a little. I have watched him
prepare for his competition and I have seen the look in his eye. Forget all the clichés: he
is different than you or me. I know this, even if he would never admit it. He is better,
much as our supposedly equalitarian, classless society hates such distinctions.

So tomorrow I will be there cheering for him. I may be the only one, and it may be
fruitless, but for me he is the Olympics.

She saved the story, and, after debating it, posted it to the Times working site, and went to
bed. It took a long time for her to fall asleep.

Chapter 32

“Let’s say we were dead,” he began. They had been silent for some time following their
prior discussion, and it was killing him. It was so easy to just sit there with her, admiring
her beautiful face, shapely body, and comfortable presence. The air was soft and clean,
smelling faintly of something he couldn’t quite place. It might be the grass, or perhaps
her perfume. Maybe flowers, he thought absently, then suddenly realizing that he knew
what flowers were. “Hey!”

She looked over at him, her curiosity sparked by the tone of his voice. “What?”

“Flowers.”

Her eyes swept out into the grass and around their perimeter, searching for the flowers.
“Where?”

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He shook his head. “No, I don’t see any. I just know what they are. I was sitting here
thinking about the smell of the air and flowers just popped into my head.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “So?”

“So,” he said, leaning towards her, “that’s the first time I thought of something that
wasn’t here without you bringing it up. I know what flowers are, and I know what they
smell like.”

She smiled at him tenderly. “I almost forgot what flowers smell like. Roses, lilacs,
poppies. God, what I wouldn’t give for some flowers! Maybe someday I’ll look up and
there will be rosebush in our little yard.”

They each surreptitiously eyed the edges of the grass in case such a rosebush had
suddenly appeared. They were not entirely surprised to not find a single one, but neither
would they have been astonished if one had been hiding there. The grass, the patio, the
chairs they now reclined in – all of these were mysteries, things that had no right to be
there and yet they were. A rosebush would not have been asking for so much more.

“I wonder why I knew about flowers,” he mused. “Why I knew that but you had to tell
me about cars.”

“You knew about running,” she pointed out. “You dreamed about it.” She picked up her
drink, which was damp with condensation, and took a satisfied sip.

“No, you had to tell me what it was. I didn’t know until you told me.”

She smiled tolerantly at him. “You knew. You just didn’t know that you knew.”

He stared at her challengingly. “This just proves that we had to have a life before this.
We knew these things, these little facts about a life that definitely is not here.” He looked

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around wildly, looking for something that he was not going to find. “But is this supposed
to be heaven?”

“Or hell?” she asked dryly. “What makes you think this is heaven?”

He paused, cocking his head thoughtfully. “Because you wouldn’t be in hell,” he said
simply at last.

She nodded her head, playfully acknowledging his compliment. “And you would?”

“I think I was in hell before you came along,” he told her. “Once you were here, even
before I could talk to you, it didn’t seem so bad.”

“Maybe we’re in hell together,” she teased.

“It’s still better than each of us being in hell alone, or being in hell with people you can’t
stand.”

“So this is your theory?” she asked. “Just because you’re with me you must be in
heaven? I think that’s just about the best compliment I’ve ever had.” Her face flushed
slightly, and she partially turned her head away to hide it.

He was unaware of her embarrassment, and continued to watch her. She was aware of it
and tried not to acknowledge it. She seemed happy to just sit there quietly, enjoying the
quiet beauty. In fact, it was not entirely quiet. He listened carefully. “It’s crickets,” he
declared in surprise. “I hear crickets.”

She smiled at him. “Of course. It wouldn’t be summer without crickets.”

“They weren’t there a few minutes ago. At least, I didn’t notice them.”

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She shrugged and turned her head slightly to listen the sounds of the crickets. “I suppose
we have ants too. So much for this being heaven.” She sighed dramatically.

He didn’t seem to notice. “That just proves the point. I knew what crickets sounded like.
I can even picture what one looks like.”

She swung her legs over the edge of her chair to face him. There was a small smile on
her face that one might almost call devilish. “Let’s suppose you’re right. Let’s say you
were alive before. Do you actually remember hearing crickets, or seeing flowers? Or
riding in cars.”

He sat up and faced her as well. “No,” he was forced to admit.

“So --” She let him draw his own conclusions, a tolerantly amused smile on her face.

He thought for a few moments. It was true that he knew of these things but not in the
context of himself. Except for their surroundings, now including the crickets and the
smell of the unidentified flowers, everything else he knew about were simply
abstractions. “Maybe dying does something to your memory,” he offered weakly.

“Maybe,” she agreed without really agreeing. “Or maybe it’s like Plato’s cave. Do you
remember the reference?”

It was vaguely there, like something studied long ago in school and set aside for quicker
access to more immediate memories. “The world is an illusion, everything in it are just
shadows of these perfect ideals?”

She beamed at him. “Give this young man an ‘A’!” she announced proudly. “Not bad
for a dead guy. Don’t you think that makes more sense than being dead?”

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“I don’t know,” he said slowly, not entirely convinced. He stood up and walked over to
the grass. He stepped into it, feeling the coolness of the soft grass against his feet. He
kneeled to run his hand over it as well.

She stood up and walked over to the edge of the patio. She crossed her arms over her
chest, and touched her foot to the grass playfully. She looked happy. He straightened up
to face her. Standing on the patio she was about at eye level with his own eyes. She
looked so lovely that he again thought he must be in heaven, even if she was dismissing
the idea. “If we’re in heaven, are we both dead?” she asked softly.

“You might be an angel.” He meant to say it lightly, but it got caught in his throat along
the way and came out somewhat more serious.

She pressed her lips together in a fond smile. “Thank you, but I don’t feel dead.”

“How do you know?”

She reached one hand out as if to touch him on the cheek. He realized that they had
never touched, and his heart pounded at the prospect of it. He could feel the grass under
his feet and the warmth of the air on his skin, but he could not imagine the feel of her
hand on his face. He was disappointed when it stopped not an inch from his face. There
it stayed for a few moments of precious indecision. She seemed sad when she slowly
drew it back, but not as sad as he was. She put her hands in her pockets, as if to help
resist any future temptation to touch him. “Do you remember your dream?”

He wasn’t expecting that particular question, but it prompted a rush of memories so sharp
that it surprised him. He nodded.

She didn’t seem surprised. “Tell me – did you feel more alive then or now?”

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It was a terrible question. Now meant her, in this strange but comfortable place. He
could imagine being with her forever. In fact, he might already have been here with her
forever, and he didn’t mind. The other, well, it was only a dream. “Then,” he admitted at
last, surprising himself but not, so it seemed, her.

Neither one of them noticed the small rosebush crouching at the edge of the grass, its
buds just starting to open.

Chapter 33

Leah felt bad about leaving Christine all alone for the evening, but she and Rick were
scheduled to go to a play at the Guthrie with some friends. Christine had demurred
anyway, telling Leah she was beat from their day and was just going to relax in the hotel
for the evening. “I’ll be fine, honest.”

They agreed to meet up at the hospital in the morning before Christine headed out.

Rick surprised Leah by showing up at Dan’s room. She had stopped by before going out,
and was expecting him to pick her up at her building. “What are you doing here?” she
asked as he strode through the door.

He smiled. “You look great,” he told her warmly, giving her a quick peck on the cheek.
“I thought I’d come and see what all the fuss was.” Leah thought he looked pretty good
as well, but she didn’t tell him that. Rick went over to the hospital bed cautiously. Dan
was lying on his side, his eyes open and staring blankly. “What’s he doing?” Rick asked.

“Nothing. The usual, I mean.”

He looked at her curiously. “So you just sit here with him like that? It’s kind of creepy.”

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Leah shook her head, not feeling like defending herself to him. Rick turned back to Dan,
and edged closer to Dan. He leaned over to get closer to his eye level. “Hey,” he called
out tentatively. “You in there?”

“He can’t answer,” Leah told him slightly crossly.

“You talk to him,” Rich replied, not taking his eyes away from Dan. “What’s the harm of
me trying?” He stepped back a half step, and suddenly snapped his fingers in front of
Dan.

“He’s not a toy, Rick,” Leah said, definitely annoyed now. “Don’t play around.” She
had visions of him poking Dan or otherwise trying to provoke him, as if Dan might be
faking it.

Rick straightened up. “I’m just seeing what happens,” he said in a reasonable tone of
voice. “It’s the first time I’ve seen him, after all.”

“Just leave him alone, OK?”

Rick stepped back further. “He looks terrible,” he concluded. “The poor bastard is dead
and he doesn’t even know it.” He shook his head sympathetically.

“He’s not dead!”

Rick looked at her with a frown. “Not technically, but – come on, Leah – look at the guy.
I tell you, if I ever get like that put a pillow or something over my head. Anything but
that.” He shook his head in dismay. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

The play was uneven at best, trying for a blend of comedy and pathos that it couldn’t
quite pull off despite a few good moments and a surprisingly good cast. Leah enjoyed

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seeing the actors and actresses – some of them youngsters on their way to bigger things,
some of them veteran stock performers from regional theaters, and some of them just
amateurs who simply liked the theater taking any part that let them be onstage. She
found the latter the most interesting, and when the action in the play got too slow she
thought about talking to some of them for her Mood of America series.

After the play they all went to a nearby restaurant that catered to the after-theater crowd.
It was a small place, but, as usual, Rick knew the owners, so they’d reserved him a small
table on the patio, much to the annoyance of the people standing in line for a table. The
other couple was Ann and Donald – not Don – McKenzie. Ann was another partner from
Rick’s firm. Leah had met them on a few occasions. They weren’t quite her cup of tea
but Rick really enjoyed their company. Ann was pretty in a sharp-edged way, with short
blond hair and a trim figure. She was always dressed impeccably. Tonight she had on a
well-tailored pantsuit, with an emerald necklace and matching earrings. Donald worked
in some capacity for Cargill, and was close-mouthed about his work. He was large and
almost purposefully bland. He and Rick both had on sports coats and slacks, although
neither one of them was what anyone would really call casual. She wondered if Ann or
Donald had a pair of jeans; if they had jeans, any signs of wear came from the designer,
not from actual wear.

Leah thought that Ann was something of a shark and suspected that Donald was unafraid
to swim in those same waters. Perhaps that was what they had in common. Leah knew
they had two children, now in their early teens, but had never made their acquaintance.
The McKenzie’s regularly bragged about their kids’ accomplishments but Leah felt sorry
for the children anyway. She knew that went to private school and could picture their
regimented schedules.

Rick ordered wine for the table while they chatted and scanned the menu. They ordered
some appetizers and shared their critiques of the play. Rick and Ann both professed to
have liked it, dismissing Leah’s reservations. Donald abstained from commentary.

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It seemed to Leah that the wine was coming faster than the food, even after their entries
arrived. Rick in particular was drinking a little more heartily than usual, and Leah
resolved to do the driving home. It was a nice night out, with clear skies and
comfortable night air. The restaurant was busy, half the theater crowd and the rest just
people out beginning their night. At one time Leah would have belonged to the latter
crowd but now they seemed like another generation. So this is what growing old is like,
she thought to herself grimly.

“So, Leah, how were the Olympics?” Ann asked during a conversational lull. They
hadn’t seen her since she’d returned.

“Oh, interesting,” Leah told them noncommittally. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to
minimize it but she did.

“Yes, I imagine so.”

“She’s quite the media star now, you know,” Rick said loudly, putting his arm around
her, although whether proudly or possessively, Leah wasn’t sure.

Donald nodded. “Yes, I read your stories and saw you on television a few times. I liked
your stuff.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t usually read the sports pages but even I read your article,” Ann added cheerfully.

“That’s my Leah,” Rick said proudly, squeezing his arm tighter.

“You should think about doing sports all the time,” Donald said. “There’s lots of money
in TV sports, you know.”

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“I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing now,” Leah told him. “I’m not really a sports
writer.”

“Yeah, tell them about what you’re doing now,” Rick prodded.

Leah gave him a warning look, but Ann insisted. “It’s something called ‘The Mood of
America.’ All of the field correspondents are contributing,” Leah told them. “I’ve
lucked out – I had a couple pieces printed already.”

Donald and Ann shook their heads to indicate that they’d not seen the stories, which
didn’t surprise Leah. “So what is the mood of America?” Donald asked in his deep
voice.

Leah thought perhaps he was teasing her just a little, but it was hard to say. Ann smiled
expectantly, while Rick poured everyone another round of wine. They were on their third
bottle by now. “Hard to say,” Leah said, forcing a small smile. She thought for a second,
trying to come up with an answer that would make sense to them, or to her. “I suppose
you could say it’s one of waiting.”

“Waiting?” Ann asked, her eyebrows rising skeptically.

Leah nodded. “I don’t know if it is the economy or the Presidential elections or just the
summer. But, yeah, it’s like people are waiting for something.”

“Huh,” Donald said, nodding slightly in agreement. “That reminds me -- how is that
runner?”

Leah forced herself not to show her surprise. “Dan Peterson?”

Donald smiled in confirmation while Ann’s face grew concerned. “Yeah, the guy who
collapsed,” he said. “You were right there when it happened, weren’t you?”

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Leah put her fork down carefully, her appetite suddenly gone even though her plate was
only half empty. “Yes, I was there.”

“Is he going to make it?” Ann asked in a hushed voice. She paused her fork midway to
her plate.

Leah exhaled in a brief burst. “No one knows.”

“Leah here goes to visit every day,” Rick said, his voice just slightly slurred. Leah might
not have noticed it had she not been concerned about how much wine he was drinking.
“The poor guy doesn’t even know it. Yeah, she’s a regular Florence Nightingale.” He
leaned in and gave her a wet kiss on the cheek. Leah pushed him away carefully.

“That’s very admirable of you,” Ann said. Leah was willing to bet that she was thinking
about all that time away from working. Donald just looked at her without a comment.

Chapter 34

The phone woke her the next morning.

“Nice piece,” Frank Reid told her.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, stretching and sitting up in bed to clear her head. It was later
than she had expected, and she was still tired. She’d stayed up later than expected
working on her story and had slept fitfully, haunted by strange dreams that she could no
longer remember. She yawned. She wasn’t entirely surprised by Frank’s call, but she
wasn’t really expecting it either. “You liked it?”

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“I did. I don’t think I’m going to put it in the print edition, but I already put it on the
web, and it’s been getting a few hits and some nice comments.”

“Wow.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She’d written it mostly to sort out her
feelings, but in the light of the next day it suddenly seemed too personal. If she had to do
it again, she didn’t think she would have posted it. Maybe that was why she had sent it
last night: so she couldn’t take it back. If Dan could take his chances, she could take
hers.

“I didn’t know you were so sentimental.” His tone was slightly sardonic and mildly
surprised.

Leah thought to herself that she hadn’t known it either, but didn’t say anything.

“So,” Frank said after he realized she wasn’t going to respond to his taunt. “What are
you doing today?”

She stood up and wandered over to the window, taking the telephone with her. Outside,
the sun was shining and there were people out and about. The streets were already
crowded, with cars, motorbikes, bicycles, and people on foot, all starting to head towards
the Olympic Stadium. “The usual. It’s the last day of competition, so I’ll go over to the
stadium to see what’s going on.”

There was a pause, during which Leah could hear the static from the international line. “I
suppose you’ll be watching the marathon,” Frank said at last.

“I imagine.” Leah smiled faintly at the suggestion that she might somehow find
something more interesting or important. She’d come thousands of miles to see Dan run
his race and she wouldn’t miss it for the world now, especially not after last night.

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Frank laughed. “Yeah, right. I kind of thought so. You’ve really gotten into this kid,
haven’t you?”

“It’s a great story.” She thought she sounded defensive even to herself.

“That it is,” Frank chuckled. He paused, then added, “That all it is?”

Leah was glad this was a telephone conversation, as she felt her face reddening. Outside
it looked like a beautiful day, and she found herself momentarily distracted, hoping it was
not too warm out for Dan’s race. “Yes,” she replied when she thought her voice was
under control.

“Leah, you’re a good reporter. A very good reporter,” Frank told her, his voice softening.
“And he sounds like an interesting guy. But because you’re a good reporter you know
there’s a line. You’re there to report the story. Not to be his friend, not to be his buddy,
and definitely not to be biased. Just tell the story. Think you can do that?”

Leah’s throat didn’t want to work. It was all choked up. She didn’t really know Frank all
that well – theirs was a mostly electronic relationship – but she thought it was scary how
he could always tell what was going on with her. She suspected that he’d been a hell of a
reporter before he became an editor. “I understand,” she said at last.

“Good,” he said warmly. “I didn’t doubt it. Listen, I have a proposition for you.”

“What’s that?”

“How would you like to see the marathon up close and personal?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, intrigued.

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Frank explained that he had pulled a few strings to get her a seat on the press bus. “It’s
not really a bus, of course – more of a flatbed truck,” he informed her. But it would ride
near the runners along with the television crew, just a few meters from the action. “Best
seat in the house,” he told her proudly.

“You’re kidding,” Leah said when he was done explaining his proposition.

“Nope. It wasn’t easy to get this slot, you know.”

“I can imagine.”

“And you know that it really only covers the lead runners. If your boy isn’t up there, you
won’t see him. But you wouldn’t see him if you were at the stadium either, and maybe
you can sweet talk the driver into falling back to wherever Peterson is.”

“Maybe he’ll be in the front,” Leah protested half-heartedly. Despite her dinner with
him, she didn’t think he could do that well. She knew he’d try hard, but some things
were too much to hope for.

“Maybe.”

Frank told her the details – where to pick up her credentials, what time she had to be
there, where she had to be – and offered one more helpful tip. “Look for a guy named
Garry Barnes. He’ll be watching out for you.”

Leah put down the phone absently. She suddenly felt claustrophobic. She was in a nice
hotel room – not the best in the world but certainly not the worst she’d ever been in –
surrounded by literally thousands of other guests in their rooms. And yet she felt alone.
It didn’t really seem possible that a couple miles away Dan was probably in his hotel
room awake too. She wondered if he had slept well, if he was worried now, what he was
thinking about. For all she knew he’d already been up and taken a run to relax. It didn’t

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seem out of the question for him, although she hoped he was saving up his energy. He
was going to need it.

She wondered if he was thinking of her.

It would be better if he wasn’t. She knew that. He needed all his focus on those lonely
miles ahead, that unforgiving distance that he had to run. He might set off in the
company of a couple hundred other runners, but she knew enough about the marathon to
know that, in the end, he was running alone. There were hundreds of other Dans in the
city, each of them with their own private thoughts and hopes. All of them were alone this
morning. They might be surrounded by friends and coaches and a variety of other
hangers-on, but when one came right down to it they were each alone on this sunny
morning. Some of them were desperately hoping to hold on to their past successes; some
of them were there to establish their own successes. Some of them were just there to do
their best, not even expecting to have a chance at a medal or a record. They were just
there hoping to do their best. Like Dan. And he couldn’t be distracted by her or anything
else. Certainly he shouldn’t be thinking about a reporter, or a woman he’d just had a nice
dinner with the night before.

She still hoped he was thinking of her, even if just a little.

Chapter 35

The dream was the same, only more so. He still didn’t know where he was, but at least
now he knew that he was running. He could feel the strain his legs were feeling, tired but
full of strength and raring to go. His lungs were bursting as they struggled to bring in
enough oxygen to keep him going, and his arms sliced through the air in perfect
synchronization with his legs. He couldn’t see a foot in front of his face, yet somehow
each foot strike landed just so, automatically compensating for small imperfections in the

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surface. He didn’t know how long he had been running or how far he had to go, and he
didn’t care.

He awoke with a start. She was reclining regally on her lounge chair as she read a book.
He must have made a noise, because she looked over at him with a gentle smile, letting
the book slip to her lap. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. “You’re
back,” she commented, a small note of surprise mixing in with the welcome.

She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless white top, one of her bra straps slipping out of
the right side. It was pink, he noticed absently, picturing the rest of the bra against her
skin. “Of course I’m back,” he replied. “Where else would I be?”

She shrugged, her smile slipping just a notch.

“It’s not like I went anyplace,” he continued. “I was right here.”

“Were you?” Her face was perfectly innocent, but the question wasn’t, not really.

He stared at her. “I must have dozed off, I guess,” he told her at last. He looked around
them, seeing their little oasis, their little island of color and quiet amidst the seething
nothingness that lay just beyond. He swung his legs to the ground and sat facing her.
She picked up her book, carefully placed a bookmark into it, and placed it on the table
next to her. She folded her arms together and tilted her head towards him. “I guess so,”
she agreed without much conviction in her voice.

He stood up and walked over to the edge of the patio, staring out at the grass. If he
noticed the rosebush lurking at the edge, he didn’t comment on its appearance, just
another wonder in a place where wonders were never expected but sometimes possible
nonetheless.

“Were you dreaming again?” she asked.

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He nodded without looking at her.

“Same as before?”

He turned to face her, scratching his head. “Yes. No.” He paused, trying to recall what
it had, indeed, been like. “I don’t know. The same but more somehow.”

“You were running again,” she confirmed. She casually put her hands on the edge of her
chair and straightened her legs. He noticed how nice they looked, smoothed and slightly
browned by the sun she must have imagined.

He nodded.

“In what way was it more?”

He looked away, and put his hands in the pockets of his baggy shorts. The grass looked
inviting, and he wondered why they had never sat out in it. He knew it would be soft and
smell fresh. He wondered if there would be many insects to marr the pleasure of it,
suddenly aware of the existence of the array of such bizarre creatures. They would have
no use in such a place, he decided, smiling just barely. The smile faded as he realized
that he wasn’t sure what his use in this place was either.

“I don’t know,” he told her slowly. “I can’t explain it. I was there.”

“Where was it? Do you know?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember. I don’t think I even knew while I was in it. I
didn’t really care where I was, just what I was doing. Weird, huh?”

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He heard her stand up behind him, and she walked over to stand next to him. He felt
comforted by her presence, but as close as she was to him, he felt as though she was
further away than she had been before he had closed his eyes. He didn’t remember
drifting off to sleep; one moment he’d been sitting quietly here with her and the next he’d
found himself in mid-stride in that other place. Perhaps that’s how all dreams
happened…but he didn’t think so.

“Before you said that being there felt more real than being here,” she said softly. “Do
you still feel the same way?”

He thought about it. He remembered saying it, and tried to remember why he’d said it.
He didn’t doubt that it was true, only how to describe it. “It’s hard to explain,” he ended
up telling her lamely.

“Try.” She stood next to him, looking closely at him with an expression that was patient
yet persistent. It was clear that it was important to her, for reasons that he didn’t quite
understand.

He exhaled with some frustration as he tried to put himself back in the moment, back in
the dream. It was so different from here. As strange as this place was, there was a
certain comfort to it, a definite familiarity about it now that she was here. It was their
place. “I don’t know. I’m just there running. The funny thing is, it’s not running any
particular place or any particular time. I still don’t remember running, not any specific
run. But I know what it feels like to start out fresh, to be really tired, to be hot, to be
cold, to run in the rain and the wind, to go up and down hills. I know what it is to run,
and I know what it feels like to run, and I know more about that than I think I ever will
know about being here.” He stopped and stood staring off past the edge of the grass, into
the void where the nothingness began. “It’s like I remember all the times rolled up
together.”

“Plato’s cave again,” she offered with a tired smile. “The essence of running.”

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He looked sharply over at her. He wouldn’t have thought of it had she not suggested it.
“Something like that, yeah.” It sounded ludicrous.

It also sounded true.

Chapter 36

On the way to see Dan, Mary stopped Leah at the nurses’ station. “So that was your
other boyfriend last night?”

“You met him?”

Mary nodded. “He stopped by to ask what room you were in. He’s a fine looking man.”

“Well, thank you,” Leah said, not sure how to respond. Mary kept a straight face, so
Leah wasn’t sure if she was approving or not. “He got a good job?” Mary asked gruffly.

Leah nodded. “He’s a lawyer.”

This seemed to confirm Mary’s opinion. She nodded knowingly. “I bet he’s got a nice
house, nice car, nice suits.”

“He does all right,” Leah admitted.

Mary laughed appreciatively. “Woo-hoo! Fancy lawyer man.” Her face grew serious
and she looked shrewdly at Leah. “I’ll bet he would never run himself into a coma, not
like your other boyfriend.”

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Leah shook her head. “In the first place, you know Dan’s not my boyfriend.” She tried
to glare at Mary, but the latter was unmoved. Leah gave up and sighed. Rick worked
hard, but not at the expense of his health. And while he liked big rewards, he wasn’t one
for big risks. “But, in the second place, no, I suppose you’re right. Rick wouldn’t push
himself like that, not knowing he might hurt himself like that. He wouldn’t take that kind
of risk.”

“Most people wouldn’t,” Mary said, her face impassive. Leah wasn’t sure if she was
criticizing what Dan had done, or praising him. Say what anyone would, he had taken a
big chance, and paid a big price.

Leah read the Sunday paper to Dan. Not the whole paper, of course, but stories she
thought he’d like. She even made herself read the sports pages to him, especially the
baseball stories and the standings. She looked at him every so often, wishing he’d show
some sign that he heard her. He was laying silently, curled up with his eyes closed. She
had found him that way and an hour of her being with him had not changed him. She
could never predict when he might open his eyes, or uncurl from the fetal position; when
he did so it was always a surprise, and never in response to any stimulus that she could
understand. When his eyes did open, she always hoped for a sign that he knew where he
was, who he was maybe even who she was.

She was always disappointed. There was still no spark in those eyes, and she doubted
that, even when open, they saw anything, much less her. She thought, not for the first
time, that perhaps it wasn’t so bad that he kept his eyes closed as much as he did. She
could still pretend that he was just sleeping, and might yet awake.

“Oh, Dan, Dan,” she murmured softly. She patted his arm gently. “Anything else you
want to talk about? Your sister’s gone back home, but I imagine you’ll have some other
visitors today.” She stopped and listened to the sounds from the corridors. Even at night
there was always something going on – a discussion at the nurse’s station, stretchers

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wheeling patients off to yet additional medical indignities, the barely heard sounds of
patients crying out in pain or confusion. She found the mornings more hopeful: there
were more people around, they were more likely to be having normal conversations, and
patients were sometimes being released. It all seemed quite apart from Dan’s world,
wherever that was. She sighed. “I better get going, but I might stop by later, OK?”

She said goodbye to the nurses, and took the elevator down to the ground floor. She
almost missed seeing her, but something prompted her to look a second time at the crowd
getting in line at the coffee stand. “Sidra,” she called out, turning and walking towards
her.

Sidra initially seemed to not hear her. She stiffened almost imperceptibly when her name
was called, but then relaxed and turned to Leah. “Ms. Hutchins,” she said, smiling
politely. “How nice to see you.”

“I was just up visiting Dan. Is that why you’re here?”

Sidra nodded. “I thought I’d have some coffee with him.” She flashed a sheepish smile.
“Well, I’ll bring him a cup, but I don’t think he’ll be having any.”

“That’s OK,” Leah said encouragingly. “I just read the paper with him.” The two of
them shared a smile, recognizing their sisterhood of hopeful futility. “Hey, how long
are you going to be?”

Sidra eyed her skeptically. “I don’t know. Maybe a half an hour or an hour?”

“How about if you meet me when you’re done?”

It had taken some convincing for Leah to persuade Sidra to join her. Sidra tried to make
it appear that’d she’d be inconveniencing Leah, but Leah had the impression that it was

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really more than Sidra was wary of spending time with her. She wasn’t sure why that
would be, but she intended to find out. It had been almost an hour before Sidra appeared
at the little diner Leah had suggested, just a block from the hospital. The diner was doing
a busy Sunday brunch business, but Leah managed to snag a small booth by the time
Sidra appeared. She waved and motioned her over.

“Great place,” Sidra commented once she’d sat down and looked around. The
neighborhood was a little edgy, but close enough to the University to have a diverse set
of residents. Leah often came here for breakfast or just to sit and read the paper while
she had coffee. She’d thought about doing one of her mood pieces based on it, or its
clientele, but hadn’t quite come up with an angle that she was happy with. Still, she
hadn’t given up on the idea.

“So did Dan open his eyes for you?” she asked.

Sidra smiled meekly. “He opened his eyes just as I was getting ready to leave. That’s
why I’m a little late.”

“You were waiting…” Leah couldn’t finish, but Sidra knew what she meant and nodded
gratefully. It was something that they apparently shared, this hope that one day his eyes
would be open and he would actually see. Leah hoped she’d be there when he did, but
she wasn’t so self-centered that she’d begrudge him if it happened without her. Just as
long as it happened.

Sidra ordered a cup of coffee. “Try the omelets, they’re divine,” Leah suggested.

“Are you having something?”

“I could be persuaded.”

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They perused the menu. Sidra ordered a cheese omelet while Leah indulged herself by
asking for the French toast. She told herself that she’d take a long walk later in the day to
help pay for it. The waitress cheerfully took their orders, leaving them alone again, but at
least with the shared purpose of dining together.

“So I was wondering,” Leah began, suddenly losing her confidence to finish the thought.

Sidra looked cautiously at her. “Wondering what?”

Leah eyed her carefully. “You seem very attached to Dan.”

“I am,” she said simply. She seemed so composed, and her response was so definitive,
that it almost deterred Leah from asking her next question. But she didn’t get to be a
good reporter by being so easily scared off. “You and Dan – I gather you are a couple.”

Sidra seemed nonplused. She sat back, her eyes widening in surprise. She didn’t seem to
know how to respond. “I, I don’t know why you say that,” she said at last, her face
darkening in embarrassment or anger.

“You’re not involved?” Leah didn’t know whether to believe her or not, and couldn’t
quite place her own reaction to the possibility.

Sidra shook her head. “Of course not. I thought you were his girlfriend.”

Now it was Leah’s turn to be surprised. “You did?”

“The nurses call you that, you know. They’re teasing but I think they are a little jealous,”
Sidra told her, smiling a little. “I think I am a little too.”

Leah smiled awkwardly. “I’m not his girlfriend. I thought you were his girlfriend.”

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Sidra’s mouth opened in disbelief. After a couple of long moments, she covered her
mouth with her hand and laughed. Leah wasn’t sure what was so funny but soon found
herself laughing as well, the two of them trying to keep their hilarity from spilling out to
too many of the surrounding tables. A few of their immediate neighbors looked at them
tolerantly, seeing the two pretty women having such a good time and probably assuming
they were talking about boyfriends or romantic misadventures. In a way, they were, but
more in the misadventures category.

The arrival of their food broke up their laughter, and they gratefully set upon their plates
to help the moment pass. They were several bites into their meal before one of them had
the nerve to bring it up again. “Why did you think I was involved with Dan?” Sidra
asked politely.

Leah took a drink of coffee before she responded, eying Sidra carefully. “I guess it was
the way you were with him when I saw you,” she said. “You seemed…very tender.”

Sidra smiled shyly. “Ah, yes.”

“And I heard you were visiting a lot.”

“As do you,” Sidra pointed out.

Leah nodded. “So tell me, what is your relationship with him?”

Sidra smiled sadly and put down her fork. She looked down at her plate. “Friends.
We’re just friends.”

One didn’t have to be a reporter to hear more in her words, to understand the things she
wasn’t saying. She had the strong sense that Sidra was a private person, so she chose
next her line of inquiry carefully. “Tell me how you met Dan.”

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Sidra had been working on the late shift of the call center – midnight to eight a.m. – when
she met Dan. He had responsibility for all three shifts, but had a supervisor who was
directly responsible for her shift. When she heard that their manager was visiting she
didn’t know what to think; some of her coworkers who had been there for longer told her
that it wasn’t unusual for him to stop by, and they pointed out with some pride that they
couldn’t recall any of his predecessors doing so. Dan had stopped by her cubicle to
introduce herself and chat for a few minutes. She’d been struck even then by how down-
to-earth he seemed – no airs, no management condescending, and no macho posturing.
He seemed bright and friendly and genuinely interested in her. She found herself telling
him more about herself and her background than she intended, more than she’d told any
of her coworkers during the weeks she’d been there. And then he’d moved on, leaving
her slightly breathless. She’d found it hard to go back to the calls.

“I didn’t know he ran then, of course,” Sidra admitted. “Much later, when I found out
how serious he was about it I asked him what he did about running on those nights he
stopped in – two in the morning, three in the morning, whatever. He didn’t make a big
deal of it. He just sort of shrugged and said it was good to get his body used to running at
different times, to do it when his body wasn’t used to doing it.” She smiled fondly at the
memory, fork paused midway from the plate to her mouth. “He said he actually liked
running then – no one else was out. He told me he felt like a ghost, all alone in the world,
just him and his run.” Leah could picture him out in the early morning darkness –
floating along the ground, pushing himself for the joy of it, for the love it of, and not at
all concerned that normal people were home in bed asleep.

Sidra went on to recount that Dan had come by twice more before she transferred out to
the Marketing department, to an entry level position but one more in line with what she
was hoping to do. She had posted for the job without any real hope of getting it, and was
surprised when her supervisor congratulated her. “You know how I happened to get the
job, don’t you?” Sidra asked Leah. “Take a guess.”

“Dan?”

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Sidra nodded, smiling at the memory. “He never told me himself, but eventually I found
out that he’d taken a look at my file, then put in a good word for me when the job came
open. That was four years ago.” She sat back in her chair, still happy at the thought of
Dan doing something special for her. She picked up her fork and took another bite of her
omelet.

“So how did you come to get to know him better? Or did you?”

Sidra’s smile turned sheepish. “You know, I think, that his staff goes out for drinks every
week? I found out about it and invited myself along. I was oh-so-shy at first, not even
sure he’d really remember me, but Dan made me feel welcome right from the start and no
one else really seemed to mind me being there. Sometimes they’d go out to a concert or
the Arts Festival or something, and I’d tag along too.”

“Did Dan notice you?”

Sidra’s smile lost some of its luster. ‘He noticed I was there, sure, but he didn’t ever do
anything about it, no. He’d talk to me, but then again, he’d talk to anyone. Mostly he’d
sit there and just listen to everyone around him. I always tried to grab a place near him
when I could, try to talk with just the two of us. I kept hoping he’d ask me out – just me,
by myself. I dropped enough hints, but I guess he didn’t get them or didn’t want to ask
me.” She stopped and seemed lost in thought.

“I’m sure plenty of other guys ask you out,” Leah offered. “You’re a beautiful girl, after
all.”

Sidra touched her face in surprise, as if feeling her face for a beauty she did not believe
she possessed. “Not that many,” she said in a low tone. She paused contemplatively, and
allowed a wry smile. “I don’t suppose I make it too easy for them, and I don’t believe

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there are quite so many who would ask as you seem to think. I’ve gone out with a few
guys, but I really didn’t give them a fair chance, you know?”

Leah studied her. She wasn’t sure if Sidra was simply shy, if her upbringing discouraged
casual dating, or if she was truly unaware of her appeal to men. And she wondered if
Sidra’s attraction to Dan had made other men seem superfluous to her. “Why him?”

Sidra sighed and looked outside. She took a deep breath and looked at Leah with a
knowing understanding and a small but fierce smile. “Do you know anything about Zen
Buddhism?”

That took Leah aback. “Do mean like the sound of one hand clapping, that sort of
thing?”

Sidra nodded, a faint smile on her face. She toyed with her coffee cup. “A koan.”

“You’re telling me that Dan Peterson was a Zen Buddhist?” Leah asked carefully, not
able to get her head around the idea.

“No, no, no,” Sidra said quickly, shaking her head. “I just wanted to tell you a story, a
parable.”

“OK.”

Sidra looked around, seemingly gathering herself for the forthcoming story. “There were
these two monks, bragging to each other about their masters. The first one says his
master was the greatest master. He could fly through the air, he could breath fire, he
could walk on water. All those kinds of things.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Leah said, slightly impatient with this meandering but a good enough
reporter to let Sidra tell her in the way she had to.

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“So after the first monk finishing listing his master’s incredible feats, the second one just
shakes his head. He says his master is greater still. ‘When he walks, he walks. When he
eats, he eats.’” She stopped and looked up expectantly at Leah.

“Huh,” Leah said, not sure how she should react.

Sidra stared at her a long moment, and a wave of disappointment swept over her face,
only to be quickly replaced by a mask of neutrality. “That’s the essence of Zen
Buddhism, you see. Just being totally in the moment, whatever you’re doing.”

It began to make sense to Leah. “And that’s what you saw in Dan?”

Sidra’s face brightened. “Yes. When he talked to you it was like everything you said or
did was important. He listened, really listened, and when he talked it was clear that he
didn’t think he was all that important, but you were.” She shook her head ruefully.
“Most guys just want to impress you with how much money they make or how smart they
are or how charming they can be, but Dan wasn’t interested in any of that. He made me
feel special.” She paused and looked at her plate, before continuing, in such a quiet voice
that Leah had to strain to hear her. “He made me feel special.”

Leah thought about trying to interview Dan, how he had always seemed to be amused by
the prospect someone would be interviewing him, and giving away more than she
intended about herself in the process of trying to question him. “Why didn’t you ever ask
him?” she asked at last. “Why didn’t you tell him how you felt?”

Sidra’s face drained. “I couldn’t, you know. I was just another girl to him. I thought he
would have a girlfriend like you.”

“What do you mean?”

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“You’re beautiful and so successful, and you just are so…confident about things. I read
your articles and I see you talking to people. As soon as I met you it all made sense, how
you wrote all those wonderful stories and knew him so well. I mean, you could just tell.”

Leah laughed. “Girlfriend, you could have most any man you set your mind to get. You
got me beat ten ways to Sunday about looks, believe me. I’m just a reporter.”

Sidra smiled at her, her big brown eyes not hiding the sadness. “A reporter who visits
every day, who not only writes the newspaper but takes the time to read it to him?”

Put that way, Leah had to admit that Sidra’s suspicions about her were at least as valid as
hers were about her. She shook her head appraisingly. “You come and visit him because
he doesn’t know,” Leah said gently. “Because you can say the things you couldn’t say
when he was awake.”

Sidra nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. “Because I can touch him like he was mine,
care for him as though I had a right to, and no one can say anything,” she said bravely,
her voice quiet but resolute. “Because I hope that somehow he knows I’m there, that he
can tell what I’m saying and what I’m feeling, and that it means something to him.”

Leah knew what she meant. Her own eyes filled with tears, and she reached over to
touch Sidra’s hand, to comfort her and to share with her. Still, she couldn’t help but
thinking: and when he slept, he slept.

Chapter 37

The day of the race, the last day of competition, had dawned with clear skies and
moderate temperatures. The race itself wasn’t scheduled until late afternoon. She tried to
keep herself busy during the day – starting her packing, checking email, having lunch
with a few other reporters she’d met. She took a long walk around the Village to kill

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more time. Things seemed much more relaxed, everyone walking around smiling and
laughing. Most athletes had finished their Olympics, and the ones who remained were
enjoying mingling with the rest of their peers, trading their country pins and trying to
impress members of the opposite sex. More than a few seemed to be recovering from too
little sleep from the night before, their sunglasses helping to lessen their pain of their
hangovers. It was a festive atmosphere, but Leah found herself unable to share in their
good cheer. She knew that for a hundred or so runners an ordeal remained, a test of
strength and courage that was hard enough to face first thing in the morning. It seemed
almost sadistic to make them wait not only until the last day but also late in the day,
stretching out the time as long as possible. She still wondered what Dan had done all
day. Had he slept in? Had he sat in his hotel room all day doing yoga or meditating?
Had he been restless, taken a walk or even a short run to burn off a little of his nervous
energy? She knew he’d been waiting so long for today, and she thought that moments
must tick off agonizingly slowly for him today.

She was relieved when it was finally time to go to the check-in area.

The security officials carefully inspected her identification and cross-checked her on their
lists, verifying her access on their computer. They told her where to go next, where she
found a handful of other journalists sitting and telling war stories – in some cases,
literally.

“Leah Hutchins?” a man asked, approaching her. He was about her height, with a slight
frame that carried a small paunch around the waist. She nodded warily. “I’m Garry
Barnes,” he told her.

She nodded in recognition and extended her hand. “Oh, yes – Frank told me to look you
up.”

He had a phone on his belt, a backpack, and a small laptop, and seemed carefully
organized. He grinned broadly at her, pleased that she’d heard of him. They exchanged

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a few comparative background details. “Ready for the big race?” Barnes asked her at
last.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she said, feeling unprepared by comparison to him. “I take it
you’ve done this before.” His hat appeared to be a souvenir of the Atlanta Games, well
worn and comfortable.

He nodded. “I’ve been writing for Track & Field News since 1980, and been to every
Olympics since 1984. Plus World Championships, European tours, the whole nine
meters.” He smiled sheepishly. “That was a bit of a joke.”

“I got it,” Leah told him. She looked around. “Is this it?”

There were now perhaps ten of them, a handful of them chatting and the rest either on
their phones or typing away at their laptops. There was only one other women, and only
a couple of them appeared younger than Leah. She felt like the rookie she was, and the
surreptitious looks she got from a couple of them suggested that it was more her gender
or her looks that they were checking out than her reputation for writing. She shrugged it
off; it was nothing she hadn’t experienced before.

“Going to be a hot one,” Barnes told her, looking up at the sky, which was clear and
sunny. He took off his hat and wiped his thinning scalp, then replaced his hat. He
looked better with the hat, she decided.

“I didn’t think it felt so bad,” she said.

He looked at her with surprised eyes. “Yeah, but you aren’t burning thirty five hundred
calories an hour. They heat up pretty quick, especially in the sun and with this
humidity.” He shook his head. “Best temperature for marathoning is in the forties, but
you’re not going to get that at the Summer Olympics.”

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“Why don’t they at least run it earlier in the day, when it’s cooler?” she asked. It was
now twenty degrees warmer than when she had gotten up, and she was starting to get
worried.

“TV,” he said simply, appearing disgusted.

She knew she shouldn’t be surprised, but she reacted in surprise anyway. “Isn’t that
dangerous for the runners?”

He nodded, his eyes regarding her seriously now. “Every time they run a marathon in
conditions like this they get a bunch of heat stroke victims – and that’s just the spectators.
The runners just have to take plenty of water and try to survive, conserve their energy as
best they can.” He looked back at the sky. “They’ll be all right. Most of them, anyway.
It’s been worse than this.”

He introduced her around, a few of them seeming surprised that she was from the Times.
That they’d heard of, but none admitted having seen any of her stories. Even Barnes
admitted that he had not read them. Then again, she hadn’t heard of any of them either.

Some officials came by eventually, full of themselves in their spiffy jackets, hats, and
badges. Just taking one look at them, Leah suspected that they enjoyed being the powers-
that-be every four years, and wondered what they did in between. It must be hard for
them to go back from these Olympian heights to their everyday jobs. Perhaps some of
them were mayors or other elected officials, allowing them to preserve their illusion that
they were special in themselves rather than simply the reflected glory of the more
deserving.

The lead official solemnly told them when and where to gather to watch the start and the
first, almost ceremonial lap around the track, before the runners headed out onto the
course. A second official told them that they were then to quickly load onto the special
electric carts – which reminded Leah of nothing so much as the vehicles that one would

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see in airports conveying elderly travelers, just on a larger scale. Looking again at the
officials, though, who were all in their sixties or older, Leah wondered if that was,
indeed, where they had gotten the idea. Having passed on their instructions, the officials
swept out as one, leaving behind one rather minor functionary to warily keep watch over
them.

Only one hour to go.

“How do you know Frank?” Leah asked.

Barnes smiled. “Oh, Jeez, I’ve known Frank for a long time. He and I worked together
at the Chronicle when we were both starting out. ” He looked at her. “That was a long
time ago.”

“I didn’t know Frank had worked anywhere else.”

He nodded, his eyes crinkled in amusement. “He must like you. Or maybe he’s pissed at
you, I’m not sure which.”

“What do mean?”

Barnes swept his arm to indicate their companions. “Well, you could be sitting in an air
conditioned bar someplace watching this damn thing in comfort, drinking margaritas or
whatever the local equivalent is -- not stuck with a bunch of old reporters on a hot truck
for a couple of hours.” He shook his head sympathetically.

“Why are you here then?” Leah inquired, not sure if he was teasing her or not.

“Usually I wouldn’t,” he admitted. “Usually one of the other correspondents would

cover it, one of the guys who knows the field a little better.”

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Leah arched an eyebrow. “What’s different this year?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Well, an American actually has a chance this year. OK,
not a favorite, but a chance to medal.” He considered this for a second. “Yeah, a definite
chance to medal.”

It was her turn to look at him in surprise. “You think Dan has a chance to medal?
Really?”

It seemed to take a second for him to catch on who she was even referring to. “Dan
Peterson? Oh, that’s right – Frank told me you’d written a couple stories on him. But,
no, I was talking about Meb Klouri. He’s been running well, he’s managed to stay
healthy, and I think he’s going to surprise a lot of people. Top five isn’t too much to
hope for, and top three if he gets some breaks. Baks just missed the top ten in the 10k –
which is pretty good for him, he’s not really a track guy – and I think he’s got a good shot
at the top ten here. First time in years that two of them are ranked so highly. It’s very
exciting.”

“What about Dan Peterson?”

His expression practically said it all, going from incredulity to understanding to

sympathy, or maybe it was pity. He shook his head sadly. “Peterson? He doesn’t have a
chance.”

Chapter 38

They were back on their lounge chairs; how, he was not sure. She was now wearing a
loose white cover-up, which accentuated a tan he hadn’t realized that she had. Her hair
was pulled back, twisted in a casual braid and piled up on the top of her head, held in

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place by a wooden hairpin. Her sunglasses, like her book, sat on the small table next to
her, and she was regarding him intently. “You were saying?”

He looked back at her stupidly. “Huh?”

She smiled warmly at him. “I was just kidding with you. You’ve been sitting there
zoning out for a while and I just wanted to say hello. What’s on your mind?”

He looked back to the grass, and to the not-distant horizon where it merged into
something shapeless and colorless, into the place that had been his existence before she
had appeared. “I don’t know.”

“Were you thinking about running again?” she asked him.

He thought about it. “No, I don’t think so,” he told her cautiously.

She nodded thoughtfully, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she stood up and stretched
like a cat. He admired her ability to make even the formless shift she was wearing look
appealing. She walked over to the edge of the patio, holding her hands together in front
of her. “It’s quite beautiful here, isn’t it?” she asked, turning towards him and gesturing
behind her. “Everything anyone could ask for.”

He stood up and walked towards her. She watched him with eager eyes, wanting him to
agree with her. He stared into those eyes, which once held the world for him, and
perhaps still did. He broke the gaze first, diverting his look towards the lawn. It was
lushly green and manicured like a country club. He wondered, for the first time, who – or
what -- kept it looking this way. He noticed the existence of its rose bush and smiled,
appreciating the irony. “It’s very pretty.”

She eyed him skeptically. “You don’t sound very convinced.”

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He took a deep breath, staring off into the distance, such as was possible. “What else do
you suppose there is?”

“What do you mean?”

He stepped into the grass, halting after only a couple of strides. “Have you ever walked
to the edge of the grass?”

He turned around to look at her. He thought her face showed some slight panic at the
question. “I mean, what if I walked out there? I kind of wonder if it’s like a shell of
some sort, if you could touch the point where the colors fade out and the rest of it starts.”
He turned again and faced the horizon. “Or do you think the edge would just keep
getting further away, like trying to touch a rainbow?”

“I never thought about it,” she replied carefully.

He took another stride, then looked back at her. She looked increasingly worried. One
hand fingered her throat nervously, and she watched him anxiously. “Come out here with
me,” he suggested, watching for – and seeing – the slight panic that appeared on her face
at the suggestion.

She bravely touched the grass with her foot, but did not take that first step into it. She
pulled her foot back. “I don’t think so,” she said at last. “Not right now.”

“Why not?” he asked, turning fully towards her. “I mean, why have this lovely lawn here
if we’re not going to use it? It’s nice and soft. The patio is great, don’t get me wrong,
but we have a yard to play in. We could take walks, we could play tag, or we could just
lay out in the grass and take a nap.”

“Please,” she said. “Come back up here.”

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“I could take you over there and pick you one of those roses. You deserve a rose, but I’d
like you to come with me to get just the right one.” His voice was soft and inviting,
almost pleading. He didn’t know why it had become so important to him that she come
off their patio, but it was.

She appeared torn, and for a long moment he thought she had decided to do as he’d
asked. Her balance seemed to falter, almost shifting her center of gravity towards that
floating foot. “No,” she told him sadly. “No, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. I’m not
going to do that.”

“Why not?” he asked her quietly.

She shook her head, unable or unwilling to respond.

He took another deep breath and turned back away from her. “I know,” he said
sympathetically. It was his lack of surprise that surprised him the most. “I just don’t
know why.”

“I don’t either,” she confessed, wrapping her arms around herself.

He stared off into the distance. “What if there were lots of little oasis like this one? They
could just be out there, just past where we can see. Maybe there are other people too, all
living in their own cocoons like we are. Wouldn’t they be surprised to see us appear,
walk out of the, whatever it is, and just show up?” He turned back towards her, smiling
almost mischievously.

She tried returning his smile but it didn’t really take. “They would be surprised, yeah.
They definitely would be surprised.”

He looked past her at the horizon on the far side of her, as if searching for any signs that
someone else had taken that first bold move and would now be entering their universe.

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He shook his head in amusement, picturing that first contact. He wondered who he might
find, and who he might want to find. He wondered if he was looking for someone, or just
wanted something new. Since her face had arrived, his world had changed with a
frequency and fluidity that should have shocked him, but somehow failed to. It wasn’t
novelty he was after, it would appear, because he had that without asking. Nor could he
imagine wanting to find anyone else to be with.

He still wanted to know what was out there.

Chapter 39

Leah was surprised to find Dan not in his room when she came to visit on Tuesday
morning. It surprised her, and she felt a touch of fear too. She’d grown used to him
always being there. She knew that there were lots of reasons why he might have been
taken someplace else, but she didn’t like it. Every time she came to see Dan she was
hoping for a change, but this wasn’t the kind of change she was hoping for. She rushed
out to the nurse’s station, trying to convince herself that this was just routine. “Mary,”
she said, catching sight of her buddy. “Where’s Dan?”

Mary looked up from her terminal. “Your boyfriend?” she asked in a teasing voice. “Oh,
he woke up and checked out.”

Leah’s jaw dropped in shock, and Mary’s face, in return, cracked its serious demeanor to
flash a broad smile. “Just kidding. They took him for some tests this morning and he
hasn’t come back yet.”

Leah felt the relief flood through her like a wave. “What kind of tests?”

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Mary punched in something on her terminal and studied the results for a few seconds.
“He’s down in Neurology, getting a full work up. Dr. Tollefson keeps coming up with
new things he wants to try on him.” She looked up at Leah and smiled.

“Was there any change in his condition?” Leah had a faint hope that they’d wanted to
test something because he’d shown some improvement from when she’d seen him the
night before.

She looked at Leah with sympathetic eyes. “Honey, you know there aren’t going to be
any good changes, don’t you?”

Leah found her way down to Neurology, and was directed to Dr. Tollefson. She found
him in a large room filled with computers, large color monitors, and, in a small room
separated by glass partitions, Dan’s gurney. Leah could only see about two thirds of his
body, as the upper part of his body was inserted into a cylindrical tube. Several wires
were hooked up to him, leading to the usual array of basic function monitors that she had
watched so often in his room, the steady routine of his oh-so-slow heartbeat and the
almost unchanging pace of his breathing. A gaggle of med students were occupied with
various tasks, most sitting at computer terminals but a couple of them standing by Dan. It
all looked very high-tech, like something from a science fiction movie.

“Hello, Ms. Hutchins,” a voice said. “Welcome to my lab.” It was Dr. Tollefson, leaning
back in his chair. He was seated before the largest array of monitors. He gestured
around. “We’re trying to see what is going on with your Mr. Peterson.”

It struck Leah that, in some ways, she had almost forgotten that Dan was a patient in a
hospital. She came every day to visit him in his hospital room, bantered with the hospital
staff, saw the regime of monitoring and drugs that they kept him on, but, for all that, it
had become such a familiar scene that she had practically disassociated it from the place
that it really was. It was his room; it was their shared place. It was the place where she

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could go and quietly spend time with him. This was something different. This was the
place where they tended to ill bodies, experimented with sick people. She shivered at the
realization.

“Won’t you sit down?” Tollefson said, pulling up a chair near him.

Leah gathered herself together and took the indicated seat. She took a few seconds to try
to take in the images in the monitors that where in front of Tollefson. He paused in his
review of them to watch her settle in. “Pretty cool, eh?” he said.

“Very impressive.”

“We think so. We can study processes that people could only dream of just a few years
ago. Hell, we can practically watch people dream, while they are doing it.” He seemed
extremely proud, almost smug, and crossed his arms.

“So what is Dan dreaming about?” she asked.

His face seemed to lose some of its proud expression, and he turned to the monitor
directly in front of him. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I don’t even know if he is
dreaming, or if he can dream.”

Leah watched the images, which showed ongoing patterns of color changes and other
activity, none of which had any meaning to her. It was fascinating in a weird sort of way,
but none of it made any sense to her. “So what is he doing, Dr. Tollefson?”

He turned to her and gave her a quick smile. “Call me Jay.”

She gave in. “OK, Jay, what is Dan doing, if he’s not dreaming?”

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He looked at her and she could see him turn back from the playful guy into the serious
physician. She thought she liked him better this way. “We don’t know. We honestly
don’t know.”

She nodded towards the monitors. “So what are all these for?”

“Oh, we know his brain is doing something,” he told her. “We can compare it to what it
was doing a week ago, or to what your brain or my brain does, but that doesn’t mean we
know what it is doing.”

She took a few moments to look again at the monitors, but couldn’t help stealing a glance
at his inert body laying helpless in the other room. “Is he making any progress?”

Tollefson exhaled heavily and leaned towards his keyboard. He typed in a serious of
keys, and several of the images on the monitors in front of her changed. “The ones on
your far right are from when he first arrived her. The ones in front of you are from a
week ago. The ones on your left are now.”

Leah studied the images intently. The first pictures were much different from the other
two sets, showing relatively small patches of color that Leah assumed meant Dan had
been deeply unconscious. The images from a week ago and the current set were much
more vibrant. She tried to determine if they were the same or different, but ultimately
gave up. “So what do they tell you?”

He smiled one of his professionally reassuring smiles. “Well, something is going on. He
clearly is not in a coma, as you can probably tell he was in the first set. But if you
compare these to someone dreaming or to a normal conscious state – here, let me show
you,” he explained, as he punched in some keys.

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Two new sets of images replaced the earlier stages of Dan’s pictures. They were
different from each other, and even to her neither looked the same as the ones from Dan.
“So what does this mean?”

Tollefson shook his head. “That’s what we’re studying. I’ve studied dozens of PVS
patients, and there are more differences between them than between them and conscious
patients or among conscious patients. The ones in the middle are another PVS patient,
and the ones on the right – well, those are mine.”

Leah studied them closely. “They still don’t mean anything to me.”

Tollefson nodded solemnly. “Mine look a lot like yours probably do, with similar
stimuli.”

“Of course, yours are probably lots brighter,” Leah said with a straight face.

It took Tollefson a half second to realize that that she was joking, and he smiled once he
got it. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said gallantly. “Anyway, I’m trying to catalog
the differences. Peterson’s images look different than other PVS patients, but they all
look somewhat different. There are some similarities, but…soon we’ll have enough to
publish.”

Leah looked away from the images and over at Dan. “Is that all he is to you? A guinea
pig?”

He shook his head resolutely. “I’m trying to help these patients, and their families. I’m
hoping to find ways to bring them out of their state, or at least do a better job of
predicting when they are coming out of it.” He stood up. “Come with me.”

He extended his hand and she took it reluctantly, standing up. He led her into the room
where Dan lay. The med students looked at her almost resentfully. Tollefson led her up

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to the gurney. He spoke to one of the students. “Dr. Edwards, try touching Mr. Peterson
on the leg.”

A young woman, dressed in scrubs and a white lab coat and who Leah took to be in her
mid-twenties, obediently placed her hand on Dan’s leg. She looked over at Tollefson for
further instructions.

“What am I looking for?” Leah asked.

Tollefson indicated the monitors next to the bed. “If that were you or I, and Dr. Edwards
placed her nice soft hand on our leg, there would be a flare-up here” -- he pointed to a
region of color that had remained unchanged -- “as the nerves registered the sensation
and signaled the brain.” He looked sadly at the monitor, then looked back at the student.
“Now try saying something to him,” he requested softly.

“What should I say?” she asked.

He shook his head casually. “It doesn’t really matter.”

She shrugged and leaned closer to Dan’s head. “Mr. Peterson, can you hear me? Mr.
Peterson?”

The colors on the screens showed no response, and Leah didn’t need Dr. Tollefson to tell
her what that meant. She had a pretty good idea. Tollefson moved closer to Dan, and
absently put his hand on Dan’s chest. Leah had the feeling he wasn’t just trying to
provoke a reaction. She’d thought of him as a man of science, and never more so than in
this sterile, high tech environment. This was a different man. He patted Dan’s chest
tenderly, more like a friend than a physician. “He’s so frail,” Tollefson said, shaking his
head.

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Despite the situation, Leah smiled. “You wouldn’t have thought him so frail if you’d
seen him run,” she said softly, remembering the sight of him striding away under full
power. She wasn’t sure what touched her the most: the memory of Dan in better times,
or the realization that Dr. Tollefson wasn’t just using Dan as a lab rat. He cared about
him, and wanted to help him get better. If not him, then patients like him. She liked him
better for it, and her smile softened further.

Tollefson seemed obvious. He frowned slightly. “He hasn’t lost that much mass since
he’s been here. He couldn’t have been much bigger.” He patted Dan’s chest for
emphasis, and Leah could understand why he could only see Dan’s frailty.

She shook her head. “That’s not where the strength came from.”

Tollefson nodded, perhaps understanding but perhaps not. “Why don’t you try?”

“Try what?”

He stepped aside. “Let’s see if he responds any differently to you.”

Feeling awkward, Leah stepped forward. She talked to him all the time, even touched
him, but that was when it was just the two of them. It felt odd to do it in front of these
people that she really didn’t know, and it felt wrong to have her efforts measured like a
science project for them. She paused, looking back at Tollefson. He made a small hand
gesture to encourage her.

She slowly placed her hand on Dan’s chest. She could feel the ribs, and thought that they
were so thin that she could break them if she put too much weight on them. She thought
about those lungs that had once brought in the oxygen that had powered those muscular
legs. She leaned closer to him. “I’m here, Dan. I’m here with Dr. Tollefson. We’re
trying to get you better.” She stopped, feeling slightly embarrassed. She looked at Dr.
Tollefson, whose face told her all she needed to know.

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The patterns on the images hadn’t changed. He didn’t even know she was there.

Chapter 40

The runners started gathering with about forty five minutes to go, slowly at first and in
more numbers as time started to draw down. They came one by one or, more commonly,
a country at a time. They all shared a similar body type – lean to the point of being
emaciated – but they came in varying colors, heights, and expressions. Some seemed
practically cheerful, while others appeared so apprehensive that Leah felt sorry for them.
They mingled in the staging area, pinning on their numbers or checking their shoes, doing
a number of mundane tasks that all shared the common feature of trying to find
something to do to while away the time until the start.

Dan Peterson appeared with a little more than a half hour to go, walking out of the
athletes’ staging area with his two teammates. They were talking amongst themselves as
they emerged, and looked up at the stadium and at the rest of the field when they got in
the staging area. Leah felt a flush of excitement that was only partially explained by the
prospect of the long-awaited race.

“There they are,” Barnes exclaimed, standing next to her.

“Yes, I see them.”

Klouri and Baks said hello to a few competitors that they apparently knew, and headed
towards the backstretch of the track. They started doing some easy jogging to loosen up.
While watching them Leah momentarily lost sight of Dan, and it wasn’t until Barnes
pointed that she saw him again. He was sitting along the wall in the shade. The other
athletes around him were stretching or chatting, keeping busy. Leah thought that Dan’s
eyes might be closed. “He doesn’t look too worried, does he?” she asked.

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Barnes laughed. “You have to give the guy credit. It’s not just his first Olympics, it’s his
first international competition of any sort, and he sits there practically asleep. Most guys
would be too nervous to relax like that.”

Leah looked up in the stands, noticing for the first time the crowd that had gathered.
They’d only see the very beginning and end of the race live, when the runners would take
a lap of the track. The rest of the race would be out in a winding trip throughout the city,
and would be broadcast on the large stadium flat screens, but the stadium had already
gathered a large number of spectators who wanted to make sure they were there to share
their little piece of this experience. She had been in the stadium on other days of the
competition and had heard how loud the crowds could be. She tried to imagine what it
would be like for Dan. She turned to Barnes. “Do you think he’s too relaxed?”

Barnes was watching some of the others through some binoculars, and reluctantly put
them down. He looked over at Dan. “I don’t think it’s going to make any difference, to
tell you the truth.”

She pulled back slightly at his bluntness, and he looked over at her in sympathy. “Hey,
nothing personal. I mean, it’s a great story and all, but there are some very good runners
here. Very good runners. You have to recognize that he’s not really in their class. It will
be fun watching him race, but you have to understand that he’s not even in the class of
his teammates.” He looked over at the track. Klouri was walking along swinging his
arms, while Baks was stretching diligently on the ground. Both of them suddenly seemed
much more ready than Dan did.

Leah nodded, trying to regain her professional composure. She was here to report, not to
cheer, and, much as she liked Dan and wanted him to do well, that didn’t change the facts
of the situation. “Thanks.” She asked to borrow his binoculars. Barnes gave them to her
and excused himself to go to the bathroom. “It’s a long ride, you know.”

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She used the binoculars to study the various runners up close. She forced herself to
carefully study several of the runners. She had done some research on the field, but not
enough to know many of their faces. She had a press packet that listed their numbers,
complete with brief bio and photo of each of them, but she didn’t want to use it just now.
She just wanted to see them as individuals, each with their own stories. She was
fortunate to have gotten to know one of their stories, but she also knew that each of them
had their own version of the story that had gotten them here. Maybe not as unusual as
Dan’s, but possibly even more dramatic and often much more celebrated. She was struck
by how normal most of them appeared – certainly, thinner than most of the population,
but not showing any of the histrionics that she’d seen earlier in the week from some of
the competitors. They weren’t trying to psyche each other out, or to pump themselves up.
They all knew they had a long race to go.

Eventually she turned her attention to Dan. With the binoculars she could see his face as
clearly as if he was next to her. He couldn’t know she was watching, of course. He
looked completely relaxed, leaning against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of
him. He had his eyes closed, and his face seemed calm. While she was watching, he
took a deep breath and opened his eyes. He looked at the activity around him, checked
up at the stadium clock that was inexorably counting down the time until the race, then
closed his eyes again.

It would have been unnerving to her, Leah thought. Knowing you had over two hours of
such hard effort ahead, knowing that – literally -- the eyes of the world were watching
you, knowing that you were wearing the uniform of your country. She didn’t know how
any of them stood it, and she especially didn’t understand how Dan could sit there on the
ground with his eyes closed. Perhaps he was visualizing the race ahead of him; perhaps
he was stealing a few more moments of rest while he could. She couldn’t put herself in
his place to even hazard a guess as to what he was thinking, but she suspected that he was
in a place that she couldn’t ever truly understand.

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Barnes came back and she returned his binoculars. She took his advice to also go to the
restroom, washing her face and preparing herself. When she came out the group of
reporters were starting to move. “Time to get ready,” Barnes told her cheerfully.

She looked over to where Dan had been sitting, but he was already gone.

Chapter 41

He heard the sound behind him. He was staring off into the distance, with the patio
behind him, and the noise took him by surprise. At first he tried to pretend that he didn’t
know what it was, but he couldn’t really fool himself. He knew what it was. He didn’t
know how what the noise meant could be there or how he could know what the noise
was, but he did. It was the sound of a splash, of something diving into a body of water.
He turned around.

It was as if the patio had been stretched into a long rectangle, and a swimming pool
magically inserted in the middle. He guessed the pool must be twenty-five meters long
and perhaps ten meters wide, with marked lanes that one could use for lap swimming.
Around the pool there were now a few small tables, with beach umbrellas shading the
chairs. The lounge chairs that they had been sitting on were still there, but now there
were several other pairs of similar chairs positioned around other portions of the pool.
Theirs were distinguished by the beach towels draped over them, and by her sunglasses
sitting on the table by her chair.

Someone – and it wasn’t hard to guess who – was swimming gracefully under the water
away from him.

She moved well, emerging to the surface a few yards away from the far end of the pool,
then doing a neat flip turn and submerging again for several strokes. She came to the
surface again and split the water cleanly swimming in a strong crawl. He noticed that she

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was wearing a dark blue one-piece suit, and that he himself now had a swimsuit on as
well, a pair of long red trunks that almost reached his knees. He wasn’t wearing a shirt,
and had a pair of sunglasses hanging from his neck on a lanyard.

She reached his end of the pool and stopped. She quickly brushed the water from her
face and hair, then treaded water as she regarded him with a big smile. “Hey, come on
in,” she urged him. “Water’s great.”

He took a step forward, but stopped. “Where’d the pool come from?”

She gave him an amused look. “What do you mean?”

He looked around. In truth, it seemed perfectly natural that the pool was there. In
retrospect, it had been kind of absurd having a patio sitting by itself in the middle of the
grass, especially with the lounge chairs. The pool made much more sense. He shrugged.
“Never mind.”

“Come in the water. It’s nice and cool.”

Now that she mentioned it, he was a bit warm. He looked up, half expecting to see
something different about the sky, although he couldn’t quite say what. He was only
slightly disappointed to find that there still was no recognizable sky, but the featureless
air above them did seem brighter, as if light was trying hard to break through some
particularly thick smog. She looked very comfortable, treading easily in the beautiful
blue water. Her wet hair was plastered against her head and she looked sleek and quite
beautiful. He walked slowly over to the edge of the pool, but stopped at the edge. He
thought about how she had never quite stepped into the grass yet had no similar
reluctance to take a dip in this pool. Perhaps she just didn’t care for grass. Perhaps she
simply enjoyed swimming; certainly she swam well. But something kept him from
joining her. Instead, he sat down and put his legs in the water. As she had promised, it

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was very cool and very refreshing. He decided that he liked seeing her in the water
across from him.

“That’s it?” she teased him with an upturned eyebrow. “Afraid to get wet?”

“I’m not sure it’s been an hour since I’ve eaten,” he told her with a straight face. He
couldn’t remember ever eating, much less within the last hour.

She nodded her head sympathetically. “Let me take another lap.”

With that she started off towards the other end of the pool, doing a medley of strokes that
further illustrated her prowess. He watched her almost wistfully. When she reached him
again she pulled herself up in a single motion to the edge of the pool and sat next to him.
She flicked some droplets of water at him, laughing cheerfully.

“You swim very well,” he told her.

She smiled politely. “Thank you. I take it you’re not really into swimming?”

“I guess not.”

She eyed him carefully. “It is true that you definitely have a runner’s build.”

He laughed in a self-depreciating way. “You could say that. With a body like this you
don’t have a lot of options.”

She laughed again. “What, did you want to play in the NBA?”

He had to think about it. “I don’t think so,” he admitted at last. He couldn’t really
remember thinking about it either way, but it something like that seemed inconceivable.

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He thought back to his dreams, as she called them. “I don’t think I ever wanted to do
anything but run.”

She didn’t seem surprised. She nodded encouragingly. “I suppose not.” Her face grew
serious, almost concerned. “Were you good at it?”

He should have simply protested. How would he know if he was any good at it? But,
instead, he considered the question carefully, in much the same way that he’d thought
about her question about the NBA. He pictured himself running again, and at long last
answered her. “How do you mean? I don’t think I was famous or anything, if that’s what
being good means.”

“Being famous and being good aren’t the same thing,” she chided him mildly.

He agreed, and looked out at the pool for a few moments. From somewhere there was
the barest whisper of a breeze, cooling the air slightly and causing tiny waves on the
surface of the pool. “When I think about running, I don’t see medals or ribbons or even
breaking a finish line tape,” he told her. “I just see myself running.”

She smiled warmly at him. “I bet you were good. I bet you were very dedicated and
determined, and I don’t think you’d be that committed to something that you weren’t
good at. I really admire that.”

He felt embarrassed, and felt his face flush. He hoped maybe she would attribute it to the
heat. He looked down and absently splashed the water with his hand. “I don’t know.”

“You should be proud of it. I think that’s why you still think about it, because it was so
important to you.”

He looked over at her, his face serious. “It seems pretty selfish, don’t you think?”

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She seemed surprised. “How so?”

He had to look away. “Well, ultimately it’s about being alone. You have to make
running the priority, plan your life around it. I think it’s kind of scary that when I think
about not being here I think about running – and it’s always by myself, never with other
people or even with people watching – instead of thinking about friends or family.
There’s never any other people.” He stole a furtive look at her. “Not even you.”

“Well, doing great things requires some selfishness,” she said, not seeming bothered by
his confession.

He shook his head. “It’s not like I was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize or something
like that because of it. It’s not like doing something artistic, like drawing a great picture
or writing a poem. I don’t think you could call it great.” He looked away again. He felt
sad. “But you could call it selfish.”

She appeared to consider this, her brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Maybe. Maybe.” She
raised her head to look directly at him. “But I think it’s inspiring that someone can
demand so much of himself, make so many sacrifices. I mean, doing that to yourself,
every day, always practically killing yourself pushing so hard.”

He had to laugh. In truth, her words about the type of effort made sense, were consistent
with his mental image of what it was like. But he wasn’t going to let himself off so
easily. “I think it’s more like an addiction,” he told her quietly.

“An addiction?” she repeated, humoring him.

He nodded grimly. He placed his hands on the cement on either side of him and placed
his weight on them as he stared down at the water. “Every day you have to have that fix.
Every day nothing matters until you get it. It wipes you out, but then you start to think
about your next fix. Your body craves those feelings.” He smiled sadly. “Yeah, it’s an

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addiction all right. Nothing to be so proud of, nothing to admire. Just something that had
to be done.”

“You’re wrong, you know,” she told him sweetly. She jumped into the water, getting
him a little wet in the process. She turned towards him, treading water again. “And I’ll
bet you were good.”

She dove under water and swam away.

Chapter 42

Leah spent the afternoon trying to work on an article. She liked to work at her kitchen
table, her laptop on the table and her notes spread out on either side. She could look out
her windows and catch a glimpse of the trees and the skies, which today were sun and
virtually cloudless. She was resisting the temptation to go someplace where she could sit
outside and work, because she feared that the nice weather would just be one more
distraction. She worried that she wouldn’t progress on the article, and she feared that she
would end up thinking too much about the implications of Dan’s tests.

Several days ago, on something of a whim – of course, reporters liked to call it a hunch –
she had driven out to one of the far-flung communities that were starting to become part
of the Minneapolis-St. Paul sprawl. Once it had been a thriving river town, as well as a
stop on the railroad lines, but it had gradually withered away as the Interstate and the
airlines made its access to other modes of transportation less crucial. Still it had hung on,
its town folk too stubborn to abandon it. Like the good Scandinavians they were, they
simply waited out the bad times just as they waited out the winter, working hard and
finding enjoyment where they could, but mostly working hard.

The town was enjoying something of a rebirth. There were several new housing
developments in the township, whose residents either commuted to the city or worked in

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some of the new office parks that had also found the cheap real estate seductive. The
downtown had spruced itself up, with the obligatory array of antique shops and cute little
bistros where the day-trippers could leave some of their money. Leah found the contrast
of the old and the new interesting, and had driven around town for some time before
picking her target.

She had noticed a volunteer fire department outpost with several cars parked outside –
well, more SUVs and pickups than cars -- and had stopped by for what ended up being a
long afternoon. She always found the notion of volunteer fireman curious in itself,
amateur heroes who risked their lives out of some ideal of community service, or perhaps
youthful recklessness. She thought it would be interesting to find out for herself, and had
gone inside to introduce herself. It didn’t take too much pleading on her part to persuade
them to let her hang out with them for a while.

Her interviews found some of both the recklessness and the idealism, but something more
as well. They simply enjoyed each other’s company, sitting around playing poker or
video games, shooting the breeze and telling stories that sometimes had the ring of truth
and sometimes embellished beyond credulity.

There was a certain Heisenberg effect to her being there, she had known. Simply
observing changed the thing she was there to observe. It did not escape her that word
must have gotten out over the course of the afternoon that she was there, as gradually
more volunteers stopped by on one pretext or another, or on no pretext at all.

It wasn’t simply an old boys club, as she had originally expected. Several of the EMS
volunteers were female, and a couple of the firefighters as well. Their presence was
muted in the very masculine settings – the trucks and hoses and big boots, not to mention
the broken down couch and food-stained kitchen – but not entirely lost. Leah wasn’t sure
that the men truly considered them as equals, but they appeared to tolerate them without
being condescending – sort of how Leah had felt they had acted towards her.

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Leah sorted through her notes. It seemed old-fashioned, but she preferred not to record
her interviews. She didn’t really have a good reason, but she liked to believe that it made
her focus more on the people she was talking to. Her notes were always scribbled
frantically, but, fortunately for her, she had an excellent memory for conversations that
helped give the notes the context that she needed. She was flipping through those notes
now, searching for one of the comments that she had found insightful. She’d asked one
of the men why he volunteered. The man was an insurance agent in his day job, and was
physically unimposing – late thirties, his belly no doubt several inches bigger than it had
been in his college days, and his hair thinning noticeably. He had seemed embarrassed,
made more so when the others teased him about his inability to give a quick response.
“Most times calls turn out to be no big deal,” he’d told her at last, looking somewhat
sheepish. “It’s a false alarm or a small fire that’s no problem to control. People are so
appreciative, you know, and it’s kind of fun.”

He’d stopped and smiled at her, and Leah hadn’t been sure if he was done or not. “What
about the ones that are for real?” she’d prodded carefully.

He had looked away, his face growing weary in a flash. The others had quieted around
him, no longer in a mood to tease. He looked away. “Well, those are the ones that scare
the hell out of you,” he admitted, shaking his head.

Another firefighter had come to his assistance. “You do what you can,” he chimed in
softly, as the others nodded in agreement.

Leah remembered that there had been a few moments when no one spoke, the quiet
broken only by a new arrival who had shouted out his greetings. They had all seemed
relieved to go back to other topics, like the fate of the Twins or the prospects for the
Vikings. She looked through her notes and found another conversation she remembered.
“Life is always about putting out fires, isn’t it?” one of the older volunteers had told her
late in the afternoon. He was in his fifties and claimed to be a fifth generation settler and
a third generation volunteer. He was smiling when he said it but Leah remembered that

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he seemed calmly serious. He’d shrugged almost apologetically. “The ones you can’t
put out – well, that’s when you find out who your friends really are, don’t you?”

There was an article here, Leah was sure, but it was slow going. She’d put it aside the
last two days, and had spent the last several hours with multiple false starts trying to
frame it right. It was unlike her; usually she was able to see the story in her head before
she ever started writing. This time it remained stubbornly murky.

Leah stood up and went to the refrigerator for a fresh bottle of water. She took a drink
standing at her counter, and found herself wondering what she’d serve if Dan ever came
to eat. She had never enjoyed cooking all that much, and ate more meals prepared by
others than by herself. Her larder was not well stocked with options, she found herself
thinking. There was a box of spaghetti, but she wasn’t sure how old it was and doubted
that even boiling it for hours would make it edible – not that she had any kind of sauce to
serve it well. There was some fruit, and a jar of peanut butter, if worse came to worst. “I
mean, it’s not like you’re a gourmet, now, is it?” she asked his spirit aloud. “You weren’t
too picky even before. I bet you’d love just to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
wouldn’t you?” She thought for a moment about the contents of her refrigerator and
sighed. “OK, how about just a peanut butter sandwich?” She thought for a moment
longer, trying to remember how old the bread in her breadbasket was by now. “Well,
how about some peanut butter?” she waffled.

She shook her head wearily and went out on her porch to breath in the warm air. The
problem wasn’t the story. The problem was that she had other things on her mind, other
fires to fight. She sighed and went to get her car keys.

Tony Wayne, Dan’s boss, was in Dan’s room when she arrived. “I was just about to
leave,” he said, standing when she came in the room. He seemed relieved to see her, or
to have an excuse to leave. They talked for a couple of minutes before he left and she
was left alone with Dan. Dan had his eyes open and was laying on his back, staring at the
ceiling. She went over to the bed and put a hand on his chest. “They didn’t hurt you,

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now, did they?” she asked quietly. She shook her head, suddenly unsure what she wanted
to say. She sat down in the chair Wayne had recently vacated.

“I’m having trouble with one of my articles,” she told him. “I met these really interesting
people. You’d like them. They all volunteer, either as firefighters or emergency
specialists, and they spend a lot of time hanging out. They’re cool guys.” She paused,
not sure why she was telling him all this. She stood up and walked over to the window.
There wasn’t much of a view, mostly just the side of one of the other wings. She turned
around and leaned against the windowsill. Dan hadn’t moved. His breathing was no
faster, no slower, and his eyes remained resolutely at the ceiling. “Hey,” she called
softly, to no visible response. “Hey,” she repeated, this time louder.

He still didn’t react.

Leah laughed bitterly and came over to his bedside. “So am I wasting my time here?
You know, I knew you were in a coma, PVS or whatever they want to call it, but I keep
coming here because part of me thinks it matters to you. I know it doesn’t make much
sense, but it’s important to me. I figure if I keep trying someday it’s going to get through
to you. It just has to.”

Dan’s eyes fluttered and abruptly closed. His hands twitched slightly, then were still.
Leah had seem all this before, dozens of times, but she found herself holding her breath.
How could she know if it meant something or not? Was he trying to signal her in some
way? Or was it just random, as his doctors would tell her?

“Dr. Tollefson is getting a little discouraged, I think,” she told him carefully. “And, I tell
you, watching you with those machines today discouraged me some too. It’s one thing to
talk to you and not know if you are hearing me, but it’s another thing to see that you
really aren’t responding.” She shook her head ruefully, and put her hand on his thin arm.
She stroked it tenderly. “Or, at least, not responding in any way we can make sense of.”

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She continued to touch his arm, like a mother touching her baby, like a lover. He was so
thin that she could feel the bones in his arm, and she knew that soon, if something didn’t
happen, she would be able to see them, like she could already see his ribs. She wanted
him to know she was there. She wanted to make a difference. It was very important to
her, and she had to resist the urge to shake him in an attempt to force him to respond, as
well as not to break down and cry. Maybe she felt guilty he was like this, as if she shared
some responsibility for his collapse in some way. Or maybe she just wanted him to again
be the person she knew him to be.

Dan just laid there, his chest moving so faintly that a casual observer could be forgiven
for believing him dead.

“He always was a quiet one,” a voice from the doorway said.

Startled, Leah stepped back from the bed and looked around. The speaker was a woman,
about her own age and build. She had shoulder length blonde hair pulled back by a hair
band, revealing a pretty face with sharp features. Her mouth was pulled back in a smile
that showed no teeth, and which revealed more sadness than anything else. She took a
tentative step forward, halting just inside the room.

Leah had never seen her before.

“Yes, I imagine so,” Leah agreed. She took a quick glance over at Dan, feeling as guilty
like an intimate moment had been interrupted. She also wanted to check Dan’s face on
the off chance that Dan had reacted to the stranger’s voice. She wasn’t sure if she was
hoping that he had or that he hadn’t, but it didn’t really matter, as he showed no reaction
to the newcomer either. She forced herself to affect a more chipper tone. “Still, you’d
have to admit that he’s quiet even for him.”

The woman nodded thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen him before,” she told Leah softly. “I
mean, not like this.”

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She was talking to Leah but seemed unable to take her eyes away from Dan’s prone
figure. Leah’s heart went out to her. She’d been shocked when she’d first seen Dan like
this, and she’d been with him from the start. Plus, she’d time to get used to his gradual
further deterioration. Seeing it all for the first time now must be terribly difficult. She
stepped towards the woman. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said, offering her hand.
“I’m Leah Hutchins.”

The woman pulled her gaze away from Dan and made eye contact with Leah. It took her
a moment to realize that Leah had put her hand out. “I’m sorry,” she said, lifting her own
hand in response. “I’m Amy Rhimes.”

They shook hands for a polite moment, then by unspoken agreement released their
handshake and turned towards Dan. They watched him silently for a few more moments.
“Are you a friend of Dan’s?” Leah asked at last.

The woman seemed to smile again, this time even more mirthless than last time. For a
long second Leah wasn’t sure the woman was going to answer, not until she sighed
deeply. She half-turned towards Leah. “I don’t know,” she confessed in a small voice.

“You don’t know?” Leah repeated, puzzled.

The woman put her hand on the bar at the foot of the bed, as if to stabilize herself. She
looked back at Dan’s inert figure. She wasn’t smiling any longer and seemed to Leah to
be terribly lost. “No,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I’m his wife.”

Chapter 43

The cart was like the result of a mating between a golf cart and a flatbed truck. The
always solemn officials – identical in their matching blazers and slacks, adorned with

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various badges and wearing their official hats – explained to them that its electric motors
were non-polluting yet still allowed it to run smoothly at speeds up to fifty kilometers per
hour. The reporters could choose to stand or sit on one of the multiple cushioned seats,
watch the runners live over the top of the railing or check out the action on the television
monitors installed at the front. Leah didn’t know why anyone would come along for the
ride just to watch things second hand on the monitors.

Barnes explained to her that the television crews – both the pool coverage and NBC – had
their own transportation, sporty motorbikes with handheld cameras, plus multiple
commentators scattered along the course. “Makes me glad I’m on the truck,” Barnes told
her cheerfully.

The stadium had gradually filled up, with the noise level gradually rising from the
impressive silence to a quiet roar of babbled conversations in dozens of languages. Leah
was amazed that so many people would come just to watch two laps around the track,
separated by over two hours of watching the action second hand on the large stadium
screens. Of course, that was exactly what she would have done had Frank not offered her
the chance to watch the entire race first-hand. She liked to think she would have had a
more personal reason to sit here in the stadium waiting for the runners’ return, but she
supposed all of these people had their own reasons for being here. She shook her head
and looked again at the track.

Dan had gotten up and was walking slowly on the backstretch, his head down. Around
him the other competitors engaged in their own pre-race rituals. Some of them were on
the ground stretching their legs, while others sprinted down the track. Many just stood in
small groups of fellow athletes, making conversation. Leah wondered what they would
talk about. The weather? Checking out the crowd? Bragging about races run or old
girlfriends? She knew that she could ask them after the race but could never really know
what it was like for them.

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The officials on the track started herding the runners towards the starting line. There
were so many of them that it was difficult to corral them all. Most of them seemed eager
to get to the starting line and get going, but some of them didn’t quite seem to understand
that it was finally time to go, wanting to get in that one last pre-race preparation or
perhaps just not quite ready. Leah wondered if they were simply scared. She knew she
would be. The crowd noise hushed noticeably as the runners gathered.

“Pretty exciting, isn’t it?” Barnes said, appearing at her side. “Almost time to go.”

Leah nodded absently, searching for Dan. She spotted him walking towards the starting
line. He had reconnected with the other two Americans and the three of them headed
towards the growing pack at the staging area. He walked a half step behind the other
two, perhaps in deference to their stature. In truth, though, he simply appeared to not
really notice.

She and Barnes also moved over to their designated spot, along the fence by the outer
side of the track. They would watch the start and most of the first lap, then quickly hop
into their vehicle so it could speed out of the tunnel ahead of the runners. She edged her
way to the front of the fence.

Dan stood behind Klouri and Baks. Leah watched as Klouri waved at someone in the
crowd, while Baks was talking to one of the runners next to them. Dan, on the other
hand, seemed distant, lost in his own world.

There was, indeed, something special about the Olympics, Leah realized. It had been a
magnificent spectacle during the time she had been there, and she had met many people
in whom the awe and wonder had shown through, like her new friend John Tulloh. She
had enjoyed the competitions she had witnessed, but until this moment she had not truly
felt it herself. Despite all the politics and all the bickering and all the scandals, there was
something truly special about the Olympics. The crowd knew it; the runners knew it,

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and, right now, she knew it, not just intellectually but in her heart. She shivered and felt
goose bumps on her arms.

It must have been more visible than she realized, or perhaps he was just watching her
more closely than she’d realized. “It still gets to me too,” Barnes told her softly. “My
sixth Games and I’ve got them too.” He raised his left arm to show her his own raised
skin, smiling almost apologetically.

Leah took a deep breath and looked around her, finding it hard to believe she was here.
What was she doing at the Olympics, not just watching but actually covering a story? A
few months ago she not only would not have believed it but also would have passed on
such a chance. Now she was here and she genuinely cared what happened. She shook
her head ruefully. She hoped that Dan appreciated the experience he was about to face.
She watched him closely and feared that he was so absorbed in his mental preparations
that he wouldn’t have time to take in the fact that, for now, the whole world was
watching. Maybe not watching him specifically, but watching the event that he was
about to take part in. He was helping to make this what it was.

Then she saw him take a deep breath and look up. He gazed around the stadium full of
spectators, all of them intent on the crowd of runners, and she thought he gave a very
brief smile, although whether in amazement or amusement, she couldn’t be sure. He
looked at the runners on both sides of him, then back up at the crowd. He turned his head
in Leah’s direction and she flattered herself that he might be looking for her. But he had
no way of knowing that she’d be there. He might expect her to be in the stands
somewhere, one of the tens of thousands of animated fans, but he didn’t know that she’d
be riding along with the race. He turned away and looked ahead, nodding his head
slightly. It was so faint, and disappeared so quickly, that she almost missed it, but she
was certain it had been there. It was a sign of satisfaction, and of eagerness. He took a
deep breath, almost like he was breathing in the atmosphere of the place, remembering it
for later, then retreated to his distant stare.

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The starting gun fired. The race was on.

Chapter 44

He was looking up at the sky. It was formless and colorless, and he couldn’t tell what the
source of light was. It was just brighter somehow, not like it was coming from any one
place in particular. That did not seem quite right to him, nor did the lack of color. He
couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong, but felt sure if it was pointed out to him he
would understand it immediately. In the meantime, though, he contented himself with
simply sitting here on his lounge chair and watching. He tried to find something of
meaning in the sky above him, something he might recognize, but there was nothing. He
was used to that.

“Do you know what is strange?” she asked him.

He looked over at her. She was on her own lounge chair, laying on her side facing him,
her bent arm supporting her head. The irony of the question struck him, and he looked
around him in an exaggerated sweep of his head that took in their strange little island
universe. “Surprise me,” he replied, not sure if she was being serious or not.

She smiled at his small joke, then her face grew serious. “Well, I was thinking. You
have all these dreams about running but you’ve never actually run while we’ve been here.
It just seems kind of funny.”

He was dumbstruck. Like everything thing else she had brought up, it seemed
remarkably obviously once she said it, but it had not occurred to him in the least until she
had said it. All those dreams when it seemed so clear that running was so much part of
him, how he’d loved the feeling of it – yet he had just let himself dream about it, not
actually done anything about it. He didn’t know how he could not have thought of it on
his own, not done something about it. It didn’t make any sense. He sat up and swung his

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legs over the side of the chair facing her. She looked out at the grass. “Of course, there’s
not much room to run here,” she noted.

He stood up and walked over to the edge of the cement, where the grass started. He
calculated that if it was just twenty yards to the edge, then the circle would be a little over
a hundred yards around. Sixteen laps to the mile. It wasn’t ideal but wasn’t impossible
either. And it was hard to gauge quite how far it was to that horizon. Perhaps it was
forty yards, maybe fifty or even a hundred yards. Doing laps wouldn’t be so bad. The
person in his dreams would have run in place if necessary. “I don’t think that’s it,” he
said at last, not looking at her.

“Well, you don’t really have the right clothes or anything,” she told him mildly. “No
shoes, for example.”

He thought about running barefoot on that grass. It looked smooth and soft, and from his
previous excursions in it he doubted there would be any litter or sharp objects in it to
interfere. He could almost imagine the sensation of the grass against his feet, and was not
sure if his imagination was that strong or if he was reaching some memories of some
previous time. “No, I don’t think that’s it either,” he said.

He turned towards her and she sat up. “It’s not a big deal,” she told him. “It’s not like
you have to do it every day.”

“You’re wrong. It is something I have to do every day,” he said. “At least, it used to
be.”

She stared at him. “You remember that?”

He matched her look, then broke his gaze away, looking around them. “No, but I know it
anyway.” He sounded almost sad. He walked over to the swimming pool and sat down
at the edge, putting his legs in the water. The water was refreshingly cool, and he liked

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watching the water ripple with small waves. She came over and sat down near him. She
ran a hand idly through the water. “Maybe this is like a vacation for you. You know,
taking a little break, getting away from it all. Doesn’t this seem like a vacation?”

He smiled. “Well, I can’t complain about the company, I’ll give you that. And the pool
is nice. But I don’t really associate vacations with vacations from running.”

She looked at him with a twinkle in her eye. “You remember that, or just know that
too?”

He grinned back at her. “I just know it.”

She nodded thoughtfully and looked out at the water. “Perhaps you’re just tired and
needed a break. Everyone needs a break once in a while.”

He shook his head. “I think of running as always being tired. Part of the thrill of it is
doing it despite being tired, of knowing you can push yourself through it. I don’t think I
would skip running just because I was tired.” He paused for a few seconds, then looked
over at her. “Besides, I don’t feel all that tired.”

She matched his look. “OK, what’s your theory?” she asked.

He had to look away first again. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

Chapter 45

“His what?” Leah asked, shocked.

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The woman smiled what had to be the most tired smile Leah had ever seen. “Well, ex-
wife, I suppose you’d have to say,” she admitted. “Still, as far as I know I’m the only
wife he’s had.” She eyed Leah warily. “Unless I’m out of date on that account.”

“No, as far as I know he hasn’t had any other wives, “ Leah told her. “I just didn’t even
know there was the one.”

“Well, it was a long time ago,” Amy told her sadly. She looked at Dan. “A long time
ago.” She took a tentative step into the room. “I was here a while ago and there was a
woman sitting with him. Really pretty. She was holding his hand and crying. I mean,
not sobbing, just sitting there quietly with tears streaming down her face. I didn’t think I
should interrupt.”

“I imagine that was Sidra Wilson,” Leah told her. “She’s a friend of Dan’s.”

Amy arched her eyebrow. “Just a friend? It seemed like rather more than that.”

“Just a friend, at least for now.”

Amy now eyed Leah more carefully, and put her hand out. ‘And you are?”

Leah accepted the offered hand. “Leah Hutchins.” She wasn’t sure that she answered the
question Rhimes had really been asking.

They released hands, and Leah could see the recognition in the other woman’s face. “Oh,
the reporter – I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve read all of your articles. It’s awfully nice of
you to check in on Dan like this.”

“It’s no problem,” Leah assured her.

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Amy took a couple more steps towards the bed, and put a hand on the railing. “He’s so
thin,” she said softly.

“He’s lost some weight since, well, since it happened,” Leah explained. “They’ve been
feeding him intravenously but it’s hard to get enough in him. At least he’s not losing
much any more.”

Amy shook her head, unable to take her eyes off Dan’s inert figure. “No, I meant when I
watched him on television.” Her eyes watered up. “I watched the whole race. He was
thin when I knew him and he looked even thinner. Stronger somehow, but definitely
thinner. I didn’t think he could get any thinner but he managed.”

“When was it you were married?” Leah asked.

This brought a smile to Amy’s face, but it was a lost and lonely smile at best. “Oh, years
and years ago. I met Dan in college. I ran for the woman’s cross country and track
programs, so we sort of hung out in the same circles. We started going out our senior
year, and moved in together after college.”

Leah still could not quite fathom that Dan had been married. “Was that here?”

Amy shook her head, looking back at Dan. She edged closer towards the bed, still
holding on to the railing, but not reaching out for him. “No, that was in Milwaukee,
where I’m from. We lived together for a couple years, and then got married. He would
have just been twenty-three.”

At that moment Dan turned and curled up in the fetal position facing them. Any was
startled and stepped back, holding her breath until she saw that he wasn’t going to do
anything else. “He does that sometimes,” Leah explained.

“Why does he do it?” Amy asked cautiously. “Does it mean anything?”

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“Not as best we can tell,” Leah admitted. “Sometimes he opens his eyes but that doesn’t
seem to mean anything either.”

Amy stepped back towards the bed, only this time she put her hand on Dan’s leg. “It’s so
sad.”

“That it is,” Leah agreed, wishing she could reach out and touch Dan as well. Ordinarily
she would have, but she wasn’t sure how Amy would take it. Instead, she tried to turn
the conversation back to its previous topic. “So you got married a couple of years out of
school. How long were you married?”

Amy didn’t respond right away, and Leah wasn’t sure she was going to. She seemed lost
staring at the wreck of her ex-husband, the strength and vitality cruelly drained out of him
to leave this shell. Finally she took a deep breath. “We were only married for a couple
of years. Then we got divorced and he moved here. End of story.” She pushed her lips
tightly together, as if resisting letting anything else slip out.

Leah moved fractionally closer towards Dan. “Did you two stay in touch?”

Amy shook her head. “Not so much. I was kind of mad at him when we got divorced
and I didn’t really encourage him to stay in touch. We knew some people in common,
and I was always kind of friendly with his sister, so we sort of kept track of each other
third hand.” She paused, thinking back. “I sent him a note congratulating him on
making the Olympics. I couldn’t believe he really did it, really did it. I didn’t think he
ever would. I guess you could say that’s what split us up.”

“How do you mean?”

Amy looked sheepish. “We were both runners, you know, it wasn’t just him. Only he
took it more seriously than I did, especially after school. I encouraged him and I was

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proud of him. He did all right, but he wasn’t quite national class. He wasn’t going to
make the Olympic team, you know?”

“His old coach said the same thing,” Leah noted.

“Herb?” Amy asked in surprise. She took her eyes away from Dan. “You know Herb?”

“We talked on the phone. I never actually met him.”

“Herb’s a great guy. He always liked Dan. Everybody did.”

“Everyone still does,” Leah told her. “He has people come visit him every day, even
now.”

Amy nodded almost motionlessly, not surprised. She started to stroke Dan’s leg slightly,
perhaps not even realizing she was doing it. “So I have to ask,” Leah started, knowing it
was at best an indelicate question, “why did you guys get divorced?”

Amy stopped stroking Dan’s leg and pulled her hand back, crossing her arms across her
chest. She continued to stare at Dan, but shook her head wearily. “It was a long time
ago.”

“Please,” Leah said, “I’d really like to know.”

Amy pursed her lips thoughtfully, making up her mind about responding. Eventually she
made up her mind. She took a deep breath. “I wanted to settle down, start a family. He
wanted to get better at running.”

“You couldn’t do both?”

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“He didn’t think so. He told me he did want kids, and that he wanted them with me, but
he needed to focus on getting better. He thought the kids would be a distraction, and he
was probably right. I thought us having a family was more important than him chasing
some dream that was never going to come true.”

“So you split?”

Amy nodded. “He told me to wait. He said he wanted to stay married to me, but he
needed eight years to see what he could do. I thought that was unreasonable. All my
friends thought it was unreasonable. They told me we should just stay together and I
should just ‘accidentally’ get pregnant, but I couldn’t do that.” She made a face. “Funny
thing, huh?”

“What?”

“He really did it, in the time he thought it would take. He planned everything out. I think
he moved to Minneapolis to reduce distractions, and once he was here he just focused on
his running. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he did exactly what he wanted.
Except I don’t think he intended to end up like this.”

Leah looked at Dan, whose chest was barely moving. She could see the painfully slow
beat of his heart on the monitor, but otherwise he showed no real signs of life. “No, I
don’t think so. At least, I hope not.”

Chapter 46

The crowd of runners set off in a mass, seemingly too many arms and legs cramped into
too little space, skinny though they all might be. Leah was fearful that surely someone
would go down, and had visions of a domino-like effect in which one unlucky runner’s
errant leg caused the entire field to go down, toppling down one by one of them until the

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last, astonished runner hit the ground. Amazing, that didn’t happen. Somehow they each
found their own space and stayed upright. She struggled to try to keep an eye out for Dan
among the crowd, but quickly gave up. She also gave up trying to separate out any
individual runners, and found that the confusion of their heights and colors and styles
merged into something larger and more cohesive if she watched it as a single entity, like
watching a flock of birds fly through the sky. It became a force of nature, a work of art
that was quite beautiful in its own way.

The journalists were hustled onto the cart when the runners were about two hundred
meters from the tunnel. Leah found it curiously exciting to climb on the open air,
crowded vehicle, bringing back fond memories of high school days of riding too many
people in an open convertible. She quickly established a space along the rail, and stood
holding on to it rather than sitting in one of the seats. Most of the other journalists
followed suit. They could sit and still see over the rail, or could turn to watch one of the
several television monitors at the front of their space, but they were all too excited to not
want to get the more immediate sensation.

The cart sped through the tunnel ahead of the pack, accompanied by the police escort and
the television motorbikes. The roar from the stadium crowd gradually dimmed, only to
be replaced by more personal shouts from the crowds lining the street outside the
stadium. Leah was surprised at how many people were gathered, and wondered if they
would stay here until the runners returned in little more than two hours. It seemed
unfathomly long to wait, and she wondered, for the first time, how she would find the
watching. She didn’t dare think about how Dan might be approaching his long time of
rather more demanding effort.

Leah anxiously waited for the runners to emerge, and was surprised when Dan came out
in the lead pack. He was part of a group of five or six runners that had a slight lead over
a much larger pack. “Look,” Leah called out to Barnes, who was standing next to her.

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“He better settle down,” Barnes muttered, almost to himself. “He is probably just trying
to stay out of trouble.”

They continued to watch, only to find that the lead pack, with Dan in it, didn’t merge
back into the rest. It was amazing how quickly the starting field sorted itself out; within
a mile or so two-thirds of the field had basically eliminated itself from contention. That
still left a large number of athletes jockeying for Olympic glory, but with so far yet to go
even a newcomer like Leah could guess that their numbers would dwindle quickly as
well.

“Who are these guys with Dan?” Leah asked Barnes at the three thousand meter point,
the lead pack now just four runners. They had a lead of perhaps forty meters on the rest
of the field, which didn’t appear to be too concerned.

Barnes was watching the trailing pack, and had to divert his attention to her. He took a
quick look at the runners in lead pack, and frowned, having to consult with his official
information packet to identify the other three runners. “Let’s see. Garcia from
Argentina, Pilko from the Netherlands, Mi from China, and Gasson from Canada. None
of them faster than 2:15.”

“So they’re not really that good?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Peterson is actually the best of that bunch, and he’s over his
head. He should tuck back into the main pack.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re going faster than they’ll be able to maintain. They’re going to start
blowing up in the next few miles. The action is back there,” he told her, pointing to the
next group of runners.

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Leah looked at the trailing group, and spotted the other two Americans. “Hey, look –
both Meb and Peter are up there!”

Barnes nodded. “They’re running a smart race, but it’s early.” He started pointing out
runners for her. “There’s the three Kenyans, and right next to them the three Ethiopians.
Those two countries could probably field ten or twenty guys better than most of the rest
of the world – good thing they only get three each.” He identified a Spanish runner, a
Japanese runner, two Moroccan runners, and a Mexican runner as ones to watch for, and
included the two Americans as having a good chance. He dismissed the rest of the pack
as unlikely. “You never know, not with the marathon, but I think the medals will come
from there.”

Meanwhile, Dan was still in the front group. He looked steady and smooth, his stride
economical and his face untroubled. She thought some of the others with him already
seemed less comfortable, but wondered if she was projecting or if perhaps they always
looked that way when they ran. She had to admit that the following runners looked intent
and none too concerned about Dan’s group. Just watching them, she could tell why. In
contrast to Dan’s group, they barely looked like they were making an effort, moving
along so efficiently that she thought she was probably working harder than they were.
They looked like they were out for a quiet Sunday jog, not an all-out race. “I think Dan
looks good,” she ventured to Barnes, trying to encourage herself.

Barnes again switched his gaze to Dan, then over at her. “He looks OK now, but he
better get back in the pack pretty soon. I’m guessing he just got over-excited.”

“Over-excited?”

“It’s pretty common,” he told her, not taking his eyes off the runners. “Your adrenaline
gets fired up, what with the crowd and the excitement and all, and you go out faster than
you realize. The first few miles in the marathon can seem kind of slow to these guys, and
it’s easy to forget about what’s going to happen later on.” He shrugged, looked at his

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watch, then and pointed grimly to Dan’s companions. “Those guys are fifteen or twenty
seconds per mile too fast. Peterson is at least within a few seconds of a pace he can hold,
but when those three give up he’s going to be out on his own.”

“He likes to run alone,” Leah told him, not seeing the problem.

“Not in a race like this, not with this far to go. He’s going to need that pack to help him
hold the pace.” He shook his head. “It’s one thing to run with the pack, but it’s
something else to have the pack catch up with you. It’s tough to readjust your pace once
they’ve started gaining on you.”

As they watched, the runner from the Netherlands started to lose ground. At first it was a
half stride, then a yard, and before he knew it he was ten meters back and out of touch.
Dan and the other two runners didn’t look back or otherwise take note of his absence.
True to Barnes’ prediction, the trailing group of runners quickly swallowed him up,
moving around him like water flowing around a stationary rock. Leah soon lost sight of
him altogether.

Leah watched Dan pick up a bottle of water, not breaking stride or even looking down to
take the bottle. He took two quick drinks, then tossed the bottle to the side. Leah
grabbed her own bottle of water and took a sip, reminding herself that there would be no
bathroom break for the next two hours.

They had just passed by ten thousand meters.

Chapter 47

He was sitting at the edge of the pool, his legs in the water, his arms resting on his legs.
He was watching her swim.

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She was doing the backstroke, still wearing the conservative one-piece suit that wasn’t as
much fun to watch as her bikinis but which was probably better for swimming. Her
strokes were perfect. She would pick up one arm, reach for the sky, then smoothly knife
it into the water ahead of her, her torso twisting just slightly as she did so. Then her other
arm would emerge and the pattern would repeat. Meanwhile, her legs kicked strongly in
the same rhythm. She swam as naturally as a dolphin or a seal, a creature of the water
whose body seemed made for aquatic endeavors. Unlike them, though, she was equally
as graceful on the land.

It didn’t really look like she was working all that hard. This was more like a casual stroll
would be for most people. She was just enjoying the movement, the grace of being in the
water and using her muscles. And he was enjoying watching her.

He wondered if he knew how to swim. Even if he did, he doubted he would swim as well
as she did. It did not, in fact, occur to him to join her. He didn’t mind sitting with his
legs in the water, but letting himself be swallowed up by the water, attempting to do even
a simple crawl or dog paddle, just wasn’t something he considered. It wasn’t that he was
afraid, and it wasn’t that he was worried about her being better than he was. He simply
could not conceive of doing it. He could more easily imagine that her strokes would lift
her in the air to begin flying than he could picture himself swimming.

Idly, he kicked one of his legs and watched the water swirl away, drifting away until the
rest of the water absorbed its energy and made it part of its own implacable self. He
kicked again, this time his attention caught by the movement of the muscles in his thigh.
He tried again, and then tried the other leg. He was fascinated by the ripple of the
muscles under the surface of his skin, his legs pulling together an array of muscles,
tendons, and ligaments to accomplish such a simple task. Of course, he could only guess
at the mysteries that lay beneath his skin, but he knew enough to be amazed at the modest
perfection that his body contained. It made him think of how it must be to run.

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He felt no stir in him to run, no more than he did to swim. Despite his ability to visualize
running, be they memories, dreams or whatever they were, he still could not picture
running here, in this place. It was physically possible. He had the right body, the right
capabilities. There was room to do it. But the concept of standing up and launching in to
a run, like she would dive into her backstroke, was simply not credible. He couldn’t
figure out why.

“What are you doing?” she asked, surprising him. She had stopped swimming and was
treading water a few feet from him, a smile on her face. Her smile was so joyful that it
was infectious, urging him to smile back. But he did not.

“It’s not real,” he told her sadly.

Her smile faltered, if only for a moment. She regained it and looked at him as if
expecting a joke of some sort. “What’s not real?”

He looked around him, at the sky and the grass. He still could not pinpoint any particular
source of the light, which bothered him slightly. He looked back at her and essayed a
brief attempt at a smile. “This. All of this.” He moved his hand through the water to
illustrate that the pool was included in the unreality.

Her forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“It doesn’t feel real. If it was real I would feel different,” he tried to explain. He thought
for a moment. “I would want to run.”

She shook her head sympathetically. “Not this again.”

He nodded his head, but didn’t say anything further. He wasn’t sure what else to say,
how to explain his growing sense of not belonging to this place, even as it was growing
more livable, even as she continued to find new things to enjoy.

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“Look, let’s say you used to run,” she said, coming closer to him and putting a hand on
the edge of the pool to support herself. She ran her other hand through her hair and
across her face to wipe away the excess water, looking lovely as she did so. “Maybe this
is a place where you don’t have to do it any more. Maybe you’ve outgrown running,
maybe you’re just in a different place in your life now.”

“Maybe,” he said, not sounding at all convinced.

“It happens,” she offered.

“It didn’t,” he told her firmly, shaking his head. “This place – I just don’t fit in. It isn’t
about running, not really. It’s about how I felt when I did. At least, when I remember or
whatever it is I’m doing when I picture it. That felt real. This doesn’t.”

She studied him silently for a few moments, then her face broke into a sly smile. “This
isn’t real?” she asked, splashing him playfully.

He looked down at the water, which dripped down his chest until it ran back into the pool
or dripped on to the cement next to him, making a wet spot that would dry quickly. He
ran his hand across his chest, feeling the wetness. “No, it’s not,” he said at last. He felt
sorry having to say it, but he had to.

Her smile fell. “OK, it’s not real. So, what is this?”

He essayed a smile. “Well, we’ve already decided it can’t be heaven, because then I’d
feel more alive. And it can’t be hell, because you’re here.”

She smiled appreciatively. “You say the nicest things.”

“Does it seem real to you?”

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She tiled her head quizzically. “Real enough.”

“Maybe you belong here. I don’t.”

She pushed back from the wall and treaded water again a few feet from him. “I’m only
here because you’re here, dear.”

He stared at her. “How do you know?”

She smiled mysteriously at him. “I just do.” She paused at looked at him more seriously.
“Tell me – when you think of your someplace real, are you alone?”

He had to think back, imagining himself running along and that indefinable sense of
vitality that he lacked here. But he still could not visualize anything outside himself. “I
suppose so.”

“And isn’t it nice being here, with me?”

He had to agree. “I do like being with you.”

She smiled. “So maybe you were lonely before, and you just don’t know what it is like
not to be alone. You should just enjoy it.”

What she said made sense. He remembered what it was like here before she appeared.
There was no light, no dark, no grass, no sky. There was not this body with the rippling
leg muscles, and there certainly was no pool in which to watch the beautiful sight of this
warm and friendly woman swimming, nor see her in her constantly changing attire or
have her unendingly supportive conversation. He should pray for such a life; he should
envy such a reality.

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But he couldn’t.

She must have seen the internal struggle pass over his face, and realized that her words
had not convinced him. She shook her head sympathetically again. “Can’t, huh? So
why do you think you’re here?”

He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”

She continued her concerned look at him, until at last she broke into a broad smile and a
laugher that sounded like joy itself broke out of her. “Maybe it’s me,” she told him
cheerfully, diving into the water and swimming away.

He thought about life here. He thought about sitting here at the pool with her, either
while she was in the water or in their lounge chairs lounging. It was nice talking to her,
and it was just as nice sitting in comfortable silence. He liked being with her. His
memories of running didn’t have anything like that – there was no sense of loneliness but
he was definitely alone.

She swam for a couple of laps, submerging for long periods at a time and finally
emerging a few feet from him, gasping for air and looking invigorated. She pulled
herself up onto the edge and twisted around to sit next to him. She turned to look at him
with a look he had to classify as brave. She raised her eyebrows as if to silently ask what
was next.

“Maybe it is,” he said softly.

Chapter 48

Leah spent much of the day at home, trying to get some work done but not making much
progress. She kept thinking back to Dan’s wife – or, rather, ex-wife – and how she fit in,

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why she had shown up now. She wondered how Dan felt about her. Had he given up on
her when she hadn’t shown enough faith in him to stick by him? Or was she his first
love, the one he loved totally -- the way he did everything else totally. Sidra might be
wasting her time.

She also kept getting interrupted by phone calls. Frank Reid called to go over some edits
on a piece she had submitted that was almost ready to be printed. When they had
finished their business, he asked her how Dan was.

“About the same,” she told him.

“That bad, eh,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

“It’s always hard to see him. He keeps getting thinner and thinner. I’m afraid one day
I’ll go there and he’ll barely be there at all.”

“So don’t go.”

Leah paused before answering. “I can’t do that,” she confessed.

“Why not?” Reid asked, his voice careful. “Think there is more of a story here? Like
maybe the ex-wife?”

Leah shook her head, realizing that Reid could not see it. “It’s not a story, not anymore.
It’s, it’s – I don’t know.”

“What is it?” Reid asked softly.

Leah looked out the window. She could see the top of the old tree in the backyard, and
the shadows it cast in the bright sunlight. She wished she could avoid admitting the
conclusion she had come to, but she couldn’t. “I blew the story, Frank.”

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“What do you mean?” His voice sound interested but dubious.

“I mean I got it wrong. I missed the point of the story.”

“Leah, stop beating yourself up,” he told her sternly. “No one could have guessed he’d
do what he did. Nobody. You did great.”

Leah sighed. “That’s not it.”

There was a pause. “What is it,” Reid asked carefully.

Leah shook her head, knowing again that he couldn’t see it but doing it nonetheless. She
was just realizing the full extent of her mistake. “You know, at first it was kind of a joke,
kind of a lark.”

“I remember.”

“Then it wasn’t, and I wrote the story about this ordinary guy who was trying to do this
incredible thing. It was a great angle.”

“I know,” Reid confirmed. “Like I said, who’d have guessed a guy like that would have
the guts to do what he did? Great story.”

“That’s what I got wrong,” Leah told him sadly, although she was speaking more to
herself than to him at this point. “See, the story was this special guy. The people who
know him don’t care about him because of being in the damn Olympics. They care about
him because of how extraordinary he was every day.”

“Uh, Leah,” Reid said, carefully inserting himself into her monologue. “That’s always
what people feel about the people they care about.”

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“No, he really is that extraordinary,” Leah objected, her voice unexpectedly strident.

Reid was silent for a few moments. “Do you know what you’re doing, Leah?” he asked
with care in his voice. It wasn’t the question she might have expected; it was as if he had
jumped past all the preliminaries and had hit on what was really troubling her. Leah felt
that he might have some insight that she herself didn’t; he was a pretty fine reporter
himself, just stuck in the thankless role of editor. “I hope so,” she told him wryly. “I
sure hope so.”

Rick called as well, suggested they have dinner. He seemed both unusually insistent that
they make a definite plan and unusually solicitous of her schedule. She really had not
been spending as much time with him as she once did. Between his long hours, her own
work, and her twice or more visits daily to the hospital to see Dan, their getting together
had been pretty hit-or-miss lately, and talking to him now made her feel guilty. He was
being very nice about it all, she reflected, and she agreed to meet him at his house at
eight. “Promise?” he asked solemnly. “Girl Scout honor,” she assured him, smiling.
She started looking forward to not just dinner but some more intimate contact with him.
It had been awhile she since had been laid, and she started to imagine a nice backrub,
followed by some more stimulating hands-on activity. She made a mental note to wear
some sexy panties and to pack a small overnight bag; she planned on spending the night.

Mike Francis called not long after she had gotten off the phone with Rick. She was still a
little flushed from thinking about her night of passion ahead, and she blushed when she
heard Mike’s voice. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. They went though the usual
pleasantries, with Leah trying to figure out why he was calling. She had given him her
number early on, and had seen him a few times in passing at the hospital, but it struck her
that his calling was a little bolder than she had given him credit for. “What’s up, Mike?”
she asked at last, worried he would never get to the reason for calling if she didn’t nudge

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him. He told her that the Vikings were playing a night game and he was planning to
watch it on TV with Dan later in the evening. “Want to join me?” he asked casually.

Leah immediately thought that his tone was too casual, and that he was much more
nervous than he was letting on. She had enjoyed watching the Twins game with him, and
this sounded like fun as well, something Dan might enjoy, to the extent she could
imagine what he might enjoy. Had she not agreed to dinner with Rick, she would have
probably agreed to go without any hesitation. Had he not seemed so insistent about it,
and had she not let herself look forward to a little fun herself, she might have broken the
date or gone late to Rick’s. “Can’t do it, Mike,” she told him. “I’d love to but I have
plans tonight.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed but not surprised.

“I just made these other plans a few minutes ago. Timing is everything.”

“Yeah, I know.” He sounded quite glum.

Leah thought he was taking this too hard. She wondered if Mike was really using this as
an excuse to see her -- in effect, asking her out – or if he felt he needed her to help him be
with Dan. She could understand the former, and sympathize with the latter, because it
was getting harder and harder for her, too. A crush would take a little more tact. “Look,
I don’t have to be there until eight. What time does the game come on?”

“Seventy-thirty.”

“That’s perfect. I’ll probably be there from around maybe five-thirty or six till about
then, so just come a little early. Maybe I can stay for a little of the pre-game show.
How’s that sound?”

“Umm, yeah, that’d be good,” he mumbled.

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“Hey, I met Amy Rhimes today.”

There was a slight pause. “Who’s that?” he asked at last, sounding slightly confused.

“His ex-wife.”

Now there was a definite pause. “Oh, that Amy. You met her? She’s here?”

“She stopped in to see Dan. We talked a little bit. I take it you never met her?”

“No, they were divorced or maybe just separated when Dan moved here. He never really
talked about her much, but I knew he’d been married and all. He was pretty down about
the whole thing, I think.”

“He was?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Mike told her reflectively. “He really never dated much. I always
kind of wondered if he still had a thing for her, but I never really knew what had
happened between them. He wasn’t much of a talker.”

They said their goodbyes and Leah turned back to her computer, shaking her head at all
the new information. Deep down, she didn’t really think Mike was getting too attached
to her. More likely, it was that the circumstances of their knowing each other were
compelling, making closer bonds than one would normally form. For better or worse, she
had become a de facto member of Dan’s family, a coworker, and a friend to his friends.
His ex-wife and his would-be girlfriend felt they could confess their feelings about him to
her. She could only shake her head.

She didn’t know what to make of Amy, or what Dan’s feelings toward her might have
been.

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Leah was having a hard time writing up her latest story idea, although she thought that
the source material was great. She’d visited a kindergarten two days ago, spending the
morning with the young teacher and her brood. The teacher had seemed amazingly
young to her, only a couple years out of college, and the student teacher who was
assisting her was actually still in college. Both were cute in that wholesome midwestern
way, the teacher tall and slender, with short dark hair, the student teacher shorter and
slightly heavier but with long blonde hair that undoubtedly drew second looks from her
fellow students. They looked at her with that unconscious appraisal of age that women
do, especially while they still have the advantage of youth on their side. Both of them
admitted to their love of children, and plainly were a little surprised she was in her
thirties, not only childless but also unmarried – not even an engagement ring to show off.
She snidely thought that Rick would pass all of their tests, from his good looks to his
income to his car and house. But she refrained from flaunting her girl credentials and
instead kept the conversation on their teaching and the students.

The children were a joy, and Leah felt energized and exhausted by them at the same time.
Some of their activities, like playing games on the computer, were new since her own,
long ago days in kindergarten, but the basic interplay between the kids was pretty much
unchanged. They still jockeyed to establish their position in the social hierarchy, still
formed the little cliques that would follow them throughout high school, and were
beginning to establish the awkward male-female dance that would continue for the rest of
their days. And they were always in motion, running around, screaming, even fidgeting
when sitting still.

The teacher informed them that Leah was a reporter, a concept that none of them really
could quite grasp. They could understand a television newscaster, or at least being on
TV, but not someone writing for a newspaper. Many of them had seen their parents read
the newspaper, and they got excited when they thought for a moment that she might be

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referring to the comics when she spoke of what she did, but they weren’t quite sure what
else she might write about that people would want to read.

“Are you a sports reporter?” one young boy asked hopefully.

“No, not really,” she confessed. Their faces fell again, so she added. “But I did go to the
Olympics.”

That had sparked a wave of interest, as some of them reported having watched at least
portions of the television coverage. They pestered her with questions, and somehow she
found herself telling them about Dan. It wasn’t really appropriate and it seemed to be
somewhat daunting to them. They could understand the concept of running but had no
concept of how far a marathon was. Shortly after that conversation the teacher had them
go back to their normal activities and Leah had left feeling chagrined that she’d let her
own story, the story that she had become intertwined with, interfere with this story – as a
result, scaring a room full of children with a grim tale of a brave man confined in the
hopeless shell of his once-proud body. It made her shiver now to think of it.

More for something to do than out of any real need, she got up and went to get the mail.
It was the usual array of bills, catalogs, and third class marketing pieces for products she
neither understood nor cared about. And one large manila envelop, from the school that
she had visited.

She took the envelop back to her desk, opening it on the way. There was a short
handwritten note from the teacher, thanking her for visiting and the “show-and-tell.”
Enclosed with the note were drawings the students had done, some embellished by
writing – in most cases, an adult’s, but in a couple, crude efforts that reflected the
student’s own writing.

One picture in particular caught her attention. It was really three drawings in one. The
top one was of a stick figure, apparently running along and looking about as healthy as a

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stick figure can. It made Leah smile to compare the stick figure with Dan’s own lean
physique, which now had gone from its normal thin status to something rather more like
this stick figure. The middle picture showed the stick figure in a bed, apparently asleep.
To the side, someone had written “Sleeping Beauty.”

The third and final drawing showed two stick figures standing arm in arm – as best the
thin arms could. This frame, too, had a caption, written in a neat adult’s handwriting:
“Woken by a kiss.”

Now why didn’t I think of that, Leah thought to herself, wiping the tears away from her
eyes.

Chapter 49

Between ten kilometers until the halfway point Dan gradually shed his companions. The
runner from Argentina fell away around the thirteen kilometer point, suddenly losing
contact with Dan and the other two as if he was shot. The trailing pack swallowed him
up a few seconds later, moving around him like he was standing still and then reforming
their configuration almost immediately, as if he had never existed. Soon Leah could not
see him.

Dan’s pack went from three to two at the water stop at the fifteen kilometer point. Dan
reached out for a bottle without looking, snagging it with one hand in a smooth motion,
while the Chinese runner knocked over a couple bottles before getting hold of one. His
juggling cost him a couple meters relative to Dan, though, and he looked like he was
struggling to keep that gap from growing any larger. It took Leah a few additional
seconds to realize that the third runner, Gasson of Canada, was no longer with them;
when she looked back she saw that he was just standing by the water table, dumping a
bottle on his head and evidently not intending to get started again. He edged aside as the
second wave of runners swept by him, their arms reaching out eagerly for their own

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refreshment. He looked forlorn standing there, practically in tears. It made Leah realize
what a difficult task they were undertaking, and what a risk the ones in front were taking.
She had no doubts that others had dropped out further back, but by running in front his
acquiescence to fatigue was now very publicly documented to a worldwide audience.

It took another three kilometers for the struggling Chinese runner to lose contact with
Dan. He made a game effort, but his face showed the increasing strain and his arms
labored more and more until it was obvious that he was not going to make it. Eventually
the couple of meters turned into five, then ten, and before he knew it the trailing pack was
past him and Dan was on his own, with more than half of the race remaining.

Leah thought that Dan seemed oblivious to all of this. He hadn’t seemed to pay much
attention when he had the other runners with him, moving with determination along with
them without seeming to rely on them or let them get in his way. There had been
occasional conversation among them, but Leah had not noticed that Dan had not been
involved in any of these conversations. He just ran.

The trail pack, too, gradually dwindled, down from thirty or so to ten to fifteen runners,
moving in a loose arrangement that shifted around in seemingly random motions. The
five or so runners at the back never quite made it to the front of the pack, and there were
seven or eight runners who were never far off the front, but otherwise there was
considerable shifting around. To Leah, it looked like tentative feints, each of them
wanting to see who would respond and who could be had. They had already shed the
other runners who had started out with them, and no doubt a few of them expected more
casualties shortly.

“What do you think?” Leah asked Barnes when it became clear that Dan was on his own.

Barnes was watching the other runners, and had to adjust his gaze to check Dan out.
“He’s moving pretty well,” he admitted. He watched Dan for a few more strides. “I’d

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bet he’s on his way to around 1:05 for the half marathon, which I bet would be his
personal best.”

“That’s good, right?” Leah asked hopefully.

Barnes gave her an exasperated look. “If they were running a half marathon, maybe.
Only then the other runners would be running their normal races too and your boy would
be a couple minutes behind. Trouble is, those other guys can do the same thing for
another half marathon, whereas pretty soon he’s going to crash and burn. He just can’t
run this fast much further. Sorry, but that’s the truth of it.”

The cart driver had figured it out too. Instead of just staying a few meters ahead and to
the side of Dan, once Mi had fallen back he started letting the cart drift back to the
following pack, so the writers could get a closer view of the other runners. He’d stay
with them for a few minutes, then speed up to the front again, and repeat the cycle a few
minutes later. The television crews were doing the same thing, perhaps spending even
more time with the trail pack. From the monitors at the front of the cart’s bed, Leah
could see that they’d lost interest in Dan’s story, only occasionally showing images of
him in front. A viewer tuning in now might be surprised to find out that Dan was, in fact,
leading.

The streets were lined with crowds, two and three abreast in most places. They cheered
politely when Dan swept by, but reserved their loudest encouragement for the second
crew. They seemed to regard Dan more as a warm-up act, not entirely taking him
seriously. The aficionados among them – or those with radios or even hand-held
televisions – had already come to the same conclusion that Barnes had, that Dan was
running way out of his class and would soon be gone. On such a hot day, they were
going to save their energy for athletes that might actually be around at the end, people
that they might one day brag of having seen in person. Dan would be a trivia question, at
best. Leah thought it unfair, that his effort deserved as much, if not more, accolade.

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Dan paid no attention to any of this. He simply ran along, his gaze focused steadfastly
ahead of him. She’d seen him like this before, on his practice runs, and it encouraged her
that he seemed in his own place. He wasn’t showing any undue signs of strain, but he
was perspiring freely, as was everyone else.

Leah had to admit that the runners in the second group were impressive. The African
runners still seemed to be barely trying, just loping along effortlessly. The few other
runners seemed to be trying harder, especially the Japanese runner, but all seemed solidly
entrenched where they were. Barely five meters covered the front runners from the last
of them, and they almost seem choreographed, running in sync.

“They’re pacing off of him,” Barnes concluded.

“What do you mean?”

“Peterson’s running a very even pace, I’ll give him that. Any of them could put on a
burst that would catch up to him, but they have to figure, why bother? They all know
he’s no threat. The first of them that pushes it just gives the rest of them someone to draft
off of. So they’re just going to wait him out, see who’s still around that they have to
worry about. It’s all tactical.”

They watched the two packs, Dan by himself and the larger group moving along together
in his wake. “I feel like I’m waiting Butch Cassidy,” Leah observed.

“How so?” Barnes asked, giving her a quizzical look.

“You know,” she said with a wry smile. “The part where he and Sundance are being
chased by the railroad’s posse. No matter where they went, the posse just kept after them
– day and night, prairie and mountains, rain and shine. They just kept coming.”

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Barnes shook his head. He looked from Dan to the rest of the runners. “Yeah, and
looked how that ended up.”

Chapter 50

He stood on the edge of the cement, looking out. Behind him, he knew she was sitting in
one of the chairs around the closest table. He knew this because until a few moments ago
he had been sitting there with her, having a drink. She had an exotic concoction that was
topped with one of those funny little umbrellas, while he was having his usual diet soda.
He wondered if she was watching him.

He never failed to be amazed at how the grass blended into the void, doing so in a way
that defied finding the place where it happened. There was no true horizon, not that he
knew what he was looking for in one. They just merged together, for a time being
something that was neither grass nor void but yet both as well. It could not be, and
should be, but there it was. He just knew, instinctively, that something was awry. The
sky should be different, it should be something definite, not an absence of everything. He
should be able to look up and see something. He suspected that if he stayed there long
enough, something would emerge in that sky, something he might then recognize as a
sky, just as the lawn had emerged, just as the pool had emerged, just as the rose bush –
which was now thriving in full bloom – had emerged, simply showing up unannounced
and unexpected, but never unknown. He almost couldn’t wait to find out what he would
next have the opportunity to realize that he had forgotten that he knew about.

He also thought that one day he would be standing here, just like this, and turn around to
find a house there. It didn’t somehow didn’t surprise him that he already had the concept
of a house. He didn’t know what one looked like, or what it was made of. He was sure
that it was something that hadn’t been there the last time he’d looked. More importantly,
he sensed that it was a place for them to be together, that they couldn’t just sit around the
pool forever. He didn’t question how he knew this.

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He turned around and looked at her. She was watching him patiently, looking at him
expectantly. When he didn’t come towards her or say anything, she took the initiative.
“What were you thinking about?”

“A house. A house for us.”

She accepted this calmly. Clearly, she knew what a house was, and wasn’t surprised that
he had at least some idea of what one was. She smiled at him. “That would be nice.”

He came over and sat down next to her. He took a drink from his glass. It tasted…like it
should, he supposed, but he reflected that he wouldn’t really know otherwise. Perhaps
this wasn’t really tasting, any more than any of the rest of this was real. “We can’t stay
here,” he announced abruptly. There, he’d said it, and now he couldn’t take it back,
although part of him already wished that he could.

Her face became troubled. “Why not? Especially if we had a house.”

“I told you before,” he said quietly. “It’s not real here.”

“Maybe real is overrated,” she replied, a sad smile on her face as she said it. “Maybe
most people would think this is like a dream come true. Why can’t you just be happy
with it?”

He wished he had a better answer, but he didn’t. He wished that he didn’t have to say
these things, but he did. “Because it isn’t real,” he repeated, shaking his head.

She stood up and walked over to the edge of the cement, where he’d been standing. It
gave him a chance to admire her. She was now wearing shorts and a tank top. She put
her hands in the pockets of her shorts and stood there thinking. He thought she was

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almost as beautiful from behind as she was from the front, the key difference being that
from the front he could see her expressive face and that smile.

She stood in silence for a long time, and he was content to simply watch her. He could
watch her for hours, perhaps for days, if he had known what those measures meant. All
he knew was that he was happy doing it. At last she spoke. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’re here because you gambled and lost.”

“What do you mean? Gambled on what?”

She turned towards him and shook her head, not coming towards him. “I don’t know. It
doesn’t really matter. You just weren’t meant to be here.”

“And you were?” he asked softly.

She looked around them carefully. “No one was meant to be here, I think. We’re just
here.”

He got up and walked over towards her, stopping a foot away from her. He could see the
fine lines in her face, the laugh lines around her eyes and mouth that spoke of him of
times that had caused her to smile and laugh. He hoped that he had helped add to those
lines. “We can’t stay,” he repeated.

She laughed. “Umm, we kind of have to. I don’t see any way out of here, do you?”

“There has to be a way.”

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She shrugged. “OK, when you find it, let me know.” She went around him, picked up
her drink and took it over to one of the lounge chairs. She installed herself on the chair,
reclining regally and pretending to not pay him any attention, even closing her eyes as if
to take a nap.

He thought about going over to the chair next to her and closing his eyes as well, but he
couldn’t. He might then dream of the place that wasn’t here, in the body that was not this
one but was the real one. He thought about just remaining silent but found that he could
not. So he asked the question. “If I found a way, would you come?” he asked her softly.

She opened her eyes slowly, and he thought perhaps he detected those lovely eyes
welling up with some tears. “You know I can’t,” she told him.

“If I could leave, why couldn’t you?”

“Well, I don’t think you can leave, but even if you do find a way, I can’t come with you.”

He stared at her, puzzled. “Why not? If we gambled to get here, why can’t we gamble to
leave?”

She shook her head, like a parent might do with a child who does not yet understand the
way the world works. “I said you gambled and ended up here. I never said I did. I’m
not sure I could take that kind of chance.”

“Then how did you get here?”

She looked him dead in the eyes, and he fell a bit further in love with her. Those eyes
spoke of caring, tenderness, passion, and so much more that he could not yet speak of but
which he certainly would like the opportunity to come to know. “I told you before, I’m
here because you’re here. I’m here because you shouldn’t have to be here by yourself,”

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she said. She shook her head sadly. “But if you leave, if you find a way out of here, you
have to leave alone.”

She smiled at him with a smile that was the saddest yet, and closed her eyes again.

Chapter 51

Leah got to the hospital by six, wanting to have some time alone with Dan before Mike
got there. She said hello to the nurses on duty – Mary wasn’t one of them – and went
straight to Dan’s room, only to find out that she wasn’t alone.

Amy and Sidra were both there, standing on either side of Dan’s bed looking at each
other silently. Dan was on his back, his eyes closed and seeming blissfully unaware of
the tension that Leah sensed. The two women simultaneously looked at her as she came
in. “I see you’ve met,” Leah said, more to break the ice than anything.

“Yes, we’ve met,” Amy confirmed, turning back towards Sidra and essaying a tired
smile.

“So, how is Dan today?” Leah asked, more to make conversation than anything else.

Both of them moved closer to the bed, and Sidra put her hand down on the bed next to
Dan. “About the same,” she said. She looked up at Amy. “I never knew he had been
married.”

Amy nodded gravely. “I guess he didn’t want to talk about it to you.”

“He apparently didn’t want to talk about it to too many people,” Sidra said matter-of-
factly, although Leah had to wonder if Amy would think of it as catty.

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Amy looked at Dan, her face unreadable. “I suppose I didn’t like to talk about it too
much either.”

“Why don’t we all sit down?” Leah suggested. The other two seemed uncertain at first,
eying each other warily. Sidra gave in first, pulling up one of the visitor chairs next to
the bed. There wasn’t a chair on Amy’s side, so she slowly walked around the bed and
pulled up the chair next to Sidra. Leah perched on the edge of the bed. No one else
seemed to be willing to break the ensuing silence, so she took a shot. “So here we all
are.”

The other two women each pretended that the other wasn’t there, staring intently at Dan.
Leah tried again. “Come on, we’re all here because of Dan. Can’t we at least have a
conversation? I think he’d like to hear us talking, being friendly.”

A small tear escaped from Amy’s eye, and her mouth quivered tried to fight back
bursting into tears. Sidra looked at her and her face softened. “I met him at work,” she
offered.

Amy wiped her face and looked at Sidra. “He asked you out?” she asked, sounding
surprised.

Sidra smiled with amusement. “No, he never did, although I kept giving him lots of
chances to. And I never had the nerve to ask him out.”

“So you two never, umm, were involved?”

Sidra’s face dropped. “No, not really. Not until now.”

Amy and Leah exchanged glances at the latter statement, but silently agreed to let it pass
for now. Amy looked at Dan, a fond smile on her face. “We met in college. We knew
each other a little from the cross-country team. I talked to him at a few parties but I think

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he was too shy to ask me out. So I ended up having a friend of mine set us up on a blind
date.” She smiled wistfully at the memory.

She briefly recounted some further highlights of their courtship and subsequent marriage.
Sidra seemed fascinated, turning away from Dan to listen more closely to the story. Amy
told the story like one would tell it in a self-help group, without the kind of intimate
details that she might share with friends. “When it came time to think about children, it
ended,” she concluded.

The three of them sat in silence for a few moments. The only sounds were the periodic
beeping of the heart monitor, quietly ticking out Dan’s agonizingly slow heartbeat. “So
did you get what you were looking for after all?” Sidra asked at last. “Did you have
children?”

Amy laughed bitterly, and had to wipe another tear from her eyes. “Well, I did get
married again, but that didn’t take either. And I never did have kids. So here I am, after
all this time, sitting at his bed. Maybe if I’d just been willing to wait for him, wait until
he was ready, we’d have stayed married. Maybe he’d have given in on the kids.” Her
face was forlorn.

And if they’d stayed married, if they’d have had kids, maybe Dan wouldn’t have been
able to do what he’d done, make himself into someone who could run in the Olympics,
who could give his all, Leah thought to herself. He might be sitting home now, getting
ready to watch the Viking game, maybe with his son. Instead, he lay there motionless
and evidently mindless. It didn’t seem like a tough choice, but it was the choice he had
made.

Sidra reached over to talk Amy’s hand, gripping it sympathetically. Amy looked at her
appreciatively, then put her head back down. “I didn’t believe him, you see. I never
thought he could do what he said he was going to do. I should have trusted him, I should
have believed in him.” She started crying. Sidra continued to hold on her to hand, and

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Leah hopped off the bed to join them. She crouched next to Amy’s chair and put her arm
around the crying woman. Amy was racked with sobs that only slowly subsided.

“I’m OK now,” she said with a tear-ravaged voice. She wiped her face as best she could.
“I must look like a mess.”

Leah patted her shoulder. “It’s OK. There’s a bathroom if you want to wash your face.”
Amy got up and went into the bathroom. They could hear the water running and the
sound of Amy blowing her nose loudly. She emerged a few minutes later, looking paler
but less upset. She stood at the foot of Dan’s bed, looking at him pensively. “I’m better
now.”

“Are you staying in town long?” Sidra asked.

Amy nodded absently. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She stared at Dan’s silent body. “I
think I’d like to stay a while, until I know what’s going to happen to him.”

Sidra stood up as well, as did Leah. “That might be a while,” Leah warned her. “They
don’t know how long he might stay like this.”

Amy didn’t take her gaze from Dan. “This time, maybe I’ll wait for him.” Her face was
resolute.

“It’s too late,” Sidra announced.

Amy and Leah looked at her, both of them confused. “What do you mean?” Leah asked.

Sidra looked at Dan intently for a moment, then back at the two of them. She looked at
Amy. “You had your chance, and you let him go.” She looked at Leah in turn. “You
might have had a chance, but you didn’t take it.” She paused for moment, shaking her
head in disbelief. She looked at Dan with a fierce expression of a mix of love and

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longing. “I never took my chance either, but I’m not going to miss whatever chance I
have left. I think he knows I’m here for him. And I think he knows I will be here for
him, however long as it takes.” She turned to stare at Amy. “And I will wait, however
long it takes.”

Chapter 52

“Now the going gets tough,” Barnes told her at the twenty-five kilometer point.

Indeed, the strain was beginning to show. Dan still was running strongly and smooth, but
there were small signs that it was not as easy. His head had a slight tilt to it, as though
there was a tough puzzle he was trying to figure out, and he was leaning forward just
slightly, like he was carrying an unexpected weight.

In a sense, perhaps both were true.

“He’s in way over his head, and it’s catching up to him,” Barnes said.

“I give him four kilometers,” the Reuters correspondent declared in his quaintly accented
English. “Maybe only three.”

“Two,” the man from the BBC countered with. Quickly, the rest of the reporters took
their positions, and placed bets to back them up. None of them predicted longer than a
few miles. “How about you, Barnes?” one of them asked.

He looked uneasily at Leah before replying, also taking a quick glance at Dan. “I think
he may stick around another six or seven kilometers. He’s proving to be tougher than I
thought.”

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Leah’s face fell in surprise, and she looked around at them. “What are you all talking
about?”

The Reuters man looked at her with some contempt. “When the pack catches him, when
he gives up,” he told her. “You didn’t think he was going to win, did you?”

Leah felt defensive, knowing they were all much more knowledgeable than she was. In
fact, she very much wanted Dan to win, but she knew that wishing it wouldn’t make it so.
“Well, maybe not, but he’s doing really well. I think he’ll be in the top five,” she said
defiantly.

This was the cause for some amusement among the rest of them. “Leah, look at the trail
pack,” Barnes pointed out gently. “There’s five of them right there, and they’re all world
class runners. Then there are three or four guys within twenty meters of them. Once they
start passing Peterson he’s going to drop back really fast. Remember what happened to
the guys who were with him earlier?”

Indeed she did. They had vanished within a few seconds, and she no longer knew if they
were even running any longer. The five who were running together in the next pack
were still some forty meters behind, but all looked very comfortable. They seemed to
take comfort in each other’s presence, drawing strength from those around them. It was
an internationally varied bunch: Adame from Ethiopia, Kipchoge from Kenya, Sardir
from Morocco, Seko of Japanese, and Morales from Mexico. All of them had been on
someone’s list of potential medallists. They ran, watched each other, and waited for Dan
to crack. Leah thought they looked like a pack of wolves, gracefully bounding after their
prey, happy to run them down and confident in their eventual ability to make the kill.

Behind them, she could see Meb Klouri stubbornly running along in the next group,
pacing along with another one of the Ethiopians. Leah wondered if he was aware that
Dan was still leading the race, or if he assumed that Dan had dropped out at some point.

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To him, the race was the runners in the pack just a tantalizing twenty meters ahead of
him.

Still, Dan held on, powering along seemingly without a care in the world. He still took
his water bottles at the periodic refreshment tables, but his grabs were not as automatic as
they had been earlier, and he held on to the bottles longer, taking slow gulps and dousing
the water over his head and chest to help combat his steadily increasing body
temperature.

The cart slowed to get closer to the second pack, and Leah thought that Dan noticed it
moving parallel to him, something he had not seemed to pay attention to previously.

“See, none of them want to make a move,” Barnes informed her, speaking quietly into
her ear. “Peterson is still running a very even pace, and they still don’t regard him as a
threat. If there were a couple teammates in the pack they might try to make a breakaway,
but it’s still early enough that all they figure some of the others will drop off in the next
couple miles.”

The crowds were larger, standing several deep in many stretches, and much louder.
Interestingly, Leah noticed that the applause for Dan in particular had gotten louder as the
race had progressed. Earlier it had been more polite, making noise more pro forma than
out of any passion, but now the crowd was calling out to him. They at least seem to
respect him for lasting this long, and for making such an effort – misguided though it
might be. They might have thought he was going to embarrass himself previously, but by
now he had done well enough for long enough to be respectable. So there were more
encouraging cheers for him.

“Your boy is actually running smarter than I’d realized,” Barnes told her around thirty
kilometers, about seven miles to go.

“How so?”

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“Well,” he started, looking back and forth between Dan and the trail pack, which was still
forty meters back and still consisting of the same five runners. Behind them, Klouri and
his companion had fallen further back. “I noticed that he’s not just running evenly.
Anytime he’s out of their sight, like around a corner or over a hill, he speeds up a little,
puts another meter or so on them without them realizing what he’s doing.” Barnes
paused for a second, and took a drink of water. “He does the same thing at the water
stations – while they are all reaching for their drinks he gains a couple meters. It’s really
pretty smart of him. And I think he’s using us to help gauge where the other runners are
– he just has to listen to how far we fall back when the truck gets closer to them.” He
nodded appreciatively. “Pretty smart.”

“So that’s a good sign?” Leah asked hopefully.

Barnes looked thoughtful. “Maybe. I might have to change my prediction to top ten after
all.” He smiled.

“But not top five?” she said teasingly.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, frowning.

The cart pulled up along past Dan, and this time Leah was sure that Dan looked over. It
was just for a second and seemed more an unconscious gesture than anything, too quick
to do anything other than to register the cart’s existence and ensure that it was no threat to
his running. Then, much to her surprise, he slowly turned his head back, and unerringly
found her.

He couldn’t know I’m here, Leah thought, almost gasping when it appeared that he had
made eye contact. She feared that he must think he is hallucinating or something, seeing
her there. She wasn’t even sure that he could recognize her, between the unexpectedness

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of the situation, her hat and sunglasses, and his current physical and mental state of
fatigue.

Much to her surprise, he raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated expression, one that she
immediately thought of as “look-what-I’m-doing!” expression of pride and mutual
surprise. It was funny, it was brave, and it was meant as a shared moment just between
the two of them. Before she could truly digest the moment, his face turned away again,
focused solely inwardly and straight ahead, and she wondered if she had imagined the
whole thing.

No one else seemed to notice.

Kipchoge let go at the thirty kilometer water stop. He seemed to fumble with his bottle
for a moment, and when he looked up he had lost contact. It wasn’t much, just a couple
of steps, but Leah could see the indecision on his face about closing the gap or not. Then
he was a few meters back and out of it. Behind her, Leah heard the other reporters
express their surprise; Kipchoge and Adame were the two favorites. His dropping back
changed the odds greatly. Those odds changed again about a mile later when Morales
started looking back, gauging how far back to the Kenyan. Kipchoge’s head was down,
struggling to just keep going and not fall prey to the runners behind him, but Sardir
noticed Morales’ distraction and took advantage. He put on a small surge during one of
Morales’ backward glances. Seko and Adame covered the move easily, but when
Morales looked back the three had moved away. Once again, Leah could literally see the
calculation play out over his face – to try to keep up and risk disaster, or to play it safe
and let them go. He made the latter choice.

“And then there were three,” Barnes murmured to her. “There are the medals.”

Leah looked at him. “What about Dan? He’s still leading,” she protested.

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Barnes shook his head, not taking his eyes off the trio. Sardir and Adame ran side by
side, both impeccably smooth, looking much as they had ten miles ago. Sardir reminded
Leah of a thoroughbred horse, galloping along powerfully and easily. Adame was shorter
and even thinner, but by contrast he seemed almost weightless, his stride such a smooth
glide that his feet barely seemed to touch down at all. Seko was tucked in right behind
them, his effort much more obvious. He was drafting off of them, looking to be in agony
but also appearing totally resolved to stick to them like glue, no matter what the cost.
And they all had Dan in their sights.

“Any of them could put on a surge to close the gap any time they wanted now,” he told
her. Indeed, Peterson’s margin appeared smaller, more like thirty or thirty-five meters
instead of his previous forty plus meter lead. He was slowly losing his lead. “With their
speed, either Adame and Sardir could probably outkick Peterson by that much in the last
four hundred meters if they had to.”

Leah looked at him suspiciously. “So why don’t they just get it over with?”

Barnes shook his head. He looked at Peterson for a second, then back at the three
runners. “Same story as before. They know he won’t last, and they’re watching each
other. No one wants to make the break until they know they can put the others away for
good.”

The runners had just passed by thirty-three kilometers; less than six miles to go. “Now
they hit the wall,” Barnes told her.

Chapter 53

He woke with a start, coming to like waking from a dream in which one had been falling.
He looked wildly around him until he saw her sitting in the lounge chair next to his.
“Have another dream?” she asked sweetly.

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He shook his head, still in the world from which he had fallen out of. “It wasn’t a
dream.”

“What was it?” she asked with an interested expression.

He looked down at his body, at his legs. He was wearing a pair of long, baggy shorts,
along with a t-shirt, while she was still in a tank-top and shorts, both of which showed off
her nicely tanned body. They were sitting here so comfortably, but he could vividly
recall the pain. It had been like nothing he could have imagined, every part of him –
mentally and physically – exhausted and wanting to stop, but nonetheless not stopping.
“I was running. I think I might have been in a race. But it was real, not a dream. It
happened. It was happening.” He wanted to add that it had felt more real than being
here, but did not. It would have felt rude.

She tilted her head curiously at him. “What do you mean, you might have been in a race?
Were there other runners, were there people watching you?”

He continued to stare at his legs, reliving the moment and not sure how to answer. “I
don’t know,” he confessed. “I couldn’t really see or hear anything. I was just focusing
on staying on the blue line, just looking a few meters ahead of me. So I think I was
racing or maybe running on a race course.” He thought for a moment. “The last bit of it
was on a track.”

She didn’t say anything. She just continued to look at him with her interested expression,
wondering what he might say next.

“What I remember most of all was how hard it was. I was so tired. I just wanted to stop.
The whole time I thought I wasn’t going to make it.” He looked up and smiled
apologetically at her. “If I had been a jockey they would have arrested me for whipping
the poor horse to death. If I’d been driving a racecar I’d have been redlining the damn

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thing until the engine and the wheels and everything else were falling off. But it was just
me, making myself keep going.”

“Sounds hard,” she said noncommittally, not seeming too concerned.

“Harder than I could have imagined. Harder than I could describe. It scared me.”

“But you kept going.”

He nodded. “But I kept going.” He stood up and walked over to the edge of the cement.

She stayed where she was. “What do you think it means?” she asked at last.

He didn’t reply at first, and she wasn’t sure he heard her. But he had. “It wasn’t a
dream,” he said softly, “where things mean something else. It was what happened. It
was real. It happened to me. It was happening to me.”

“You brave boy,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked, turned to look at her with a hurt expression.

“I believe you,” she told him, and he could see the sincerity in her expression. And
something else too, something in her eyes, that he didn’t know what to make of. “Did
you win the race?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he told her. He thought for a second. “Like I said –
I don’t even know if anyone else was even there. I could have been by myself.”

“You might have won some big race,” she interrupted cheerfully.

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“I might have won,” he agreed, not sounding too convinced. “Or I might have been in
last place, behind a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand faster guys.” He paused,
looking at her. She was listening to him intently, her eyes wide. He smiled at her,
shrugging. “The thing is, I don’t think it mattered. It wasn’t about winning or losing or
running a particular time.”

Her face showed confusion. “Then what was it about? Why were you trying so hard?”

Those were logical questions, he thought. He faced the grass again, buying himself time
to think, to remember, to put himself back in that place – as best he could while in this
place. He stared at the void and realized the answer. “It was about doing as well as I
could. It was about trying my best, pushing myself as hard as I could.”

She waited until she was sure that he was finished before responding. “And did you?”

She hoped he would turn towards her, that he would come and sit next to her. But he
didn’t. He stayed where he was. “I remember the struggle to make it to the end, the
awful time I had getting to those few steps. And I remember once I’d reached the end it
was like I was falling. I was dying. It didn’t surprise me to be dying; if anything, I was
surprised I’d held it off as long as I had, that I’d made it to the end.”

“So you died?” she asked. She sounded surprised.

He nodded almost imperceptibility. “I guess so. I think that’s what led me here. I was
falling, then I was here. I think that’s what happened.”

She wanted to go and stand next to him, to put her arm around him and comfort him, but
she knew the moment was too fragile and she could not. “Was it worth it?” she asked at
last.

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He again nodded just barely. “In that brief second – really just a nanosecond, just the
smallest amount of time you could possibly imagine – between the finish and the falling,
I knew that I had finished. And I knew that I had done all I could, run as well as I could,
tried as hard as I could. I hadn’t held anything back. And in that brief moment I felt such
pride, such joy – really, such triumph -- that, yeah, it made it all worthwhile, both the
pain and the dying.” He shook his head firmly. “First place, last place, or all by myself.”

Behind him, she nodded, less surprised than he might have expected her to be. “Don’t
you think there were people that would have missed you once you’d died? People who
would be sorry you’d gone? A wife, your family, friends?”

He sighed heavily “I don’t know. All I know is that it all felt worth it for that tiny
second.”

Both of them were silent for several long moments. She formed her thoughts first.
“Would you do it again?”

It took him by surprise, and in response he laughed, more out of surprise than out of any
sense of humor about the question. “Well, if you mean having done it, would I do it
again,” he said deliberately, “I’d have to say no. You can only do something like that
once, I think. It’s too hard, both the doing and the sacrifices I must have made to be able
to do it. I don’t think I could do that again, or that I’d feel like I had to.” He smiled sadly
and turned towards her. He smiled sorrowfully at her. “But if you mean, if I hadn’t done
it yet, and I knew what it would mean, both during it and what would happen because I’d
done it – yeah, I would do it again.” His face was firm in his resolve.

She looked at him and saw the core of him, the strength and pain and determination that
showed in his eyes, as well as the kindness and sweetness she had always known were
there and that he’d always shown her. “It was worth all that?”

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He nodded and turned again to look out to the void. “Yes,” he said in a voice so soft that
she could barely hear. “That moment was worth all that.”

Chapter 54

Leah had packed an overnight bag for her dinner at Rick’s, figuring she’d be spending the
night. She dropped it by the stairs once inside his house. “Hello,” she called out. The
house was quiet except for some soft classical music on the sound system. She walked
towards the kitchen.

“Hey,” he called out, coming in from the patio. “I was out back.”

He kissed her on the cheek and Leah immediately thought something was up. She had
come in shorts, a sleeveless top, and some sandals, but he was wearing some pressed
khakis and a nice long-sleeved shirt, the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm. She thought
he seemed slightly nervous, at least as much as he was capable of showing. He ushered
her into the dining room, confirming her suspicions. He had set the table, complete with
his best silverware, cloth napkins, and lit candles. There was a salad already made and
waiting. “Have yourself a drink,” he told her “The steaks are almost done.” He
disappeared to the patio to complete his barbequing duties.

Hmm, she thought to herself, what’s up. She had been looking forward to the dinner, but
she had expected maybe burgers in front of the television, not a nice candlelight meal.
She poured herself a glass of wine, noticing that he’d put out one of his better vintages.
She figured she might as well indulge herself; she didn’t need to worry about driving
later tonight.

They made small talk through dinner. The food was excellent and they enjoyed it
leisurely. He kept up his end of the conversational bargain, but Leah’s suspicions about

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the evening increased. He was holding something back; he was not as relaxed as he
should be, not at a dinner of his own choosing in his own house with his girlfriend. In the
back of her mind she tried to think about what was on his mind. He was changing jobs.
He was moving. He had been seeing someone else. An old girlfriend had informed him
he was the father of her child. It had to be something major enough to shake him, enough
for him to think he needed to butter her up by the special meal and mood lighting.

“How’s Peterson?” Rick asked late in the meal.

Now she knew something was up for sure. Rick rarely asked about Dan. “About the
same.”

“Poor bastard,” he said gruffly, although not unsympathetically. Leah sighed and he
looked at her curiously. “What’s that for?”

She told him about her running into both Sidra and Amy at once in Dan’s room. The
incident was fresh on her mind, and she was still processing their exchange. She found
herself talking longer about it, telling him more than she intended to. He watched her
with interest, even putting his fork down.

“So he’s got an ex-wife and a would-be girlfriend to fight over him,” he asked with a
smile. “Who’d have guessed? Bully for him.” He started eating again.

Leah frowned. “It’s not a girl fight, or a competition.”

He paused his fork on the way to his mouth and shrugged. “Whatever.” He finished his
bite.

Leah felt the need to defend Dan, although she wasn’t exactly sure against what. Rick
hadn’t said anything negative about him. “He’s a nice guy. Lots of people care about
him. Why is it so surprising they care about him too?”

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He eyed her suspiciously. “I didn’t say it was surprising. I’m happy for the poor bastard,
not that he can appreciate their attentions.”

She knew him better than that, that there was more to his statement than he was saying.
“But…”

He put down his fork and looked directly at her. “He’s got other people. He doesn’t
need you now.”

Leah was stunned. “What?” she asked incredulously.

“I said he doesn’t need you anymore. You’ve been great, sticking with him out and all.
I’m sure his family appreciates you spending as much time with him. You’ve got your
story. It’s over. He’s got other people in his life. Let them take care of him.”

She didn’t know what to say at first, staring at him open mouthed. After his exposition,
he sat back, staring at her intently, his position clear. “What, you think I shouldn’t go see
him as much?”

He shook his head and leaned towards her. “Not as much, not at all. You need to move
on with your life. The guy doesn’t know you’re there. He’s never going to know. Let
his family and his friends do the death watch.”

She couldn’t believe her ears. After a few seconds she shook her head. “I can’t do that,”
she protested. “I can’t just leave him like that.”

He moved closer to her and took her hand. “If it matters that someone is there, let these
other women bear the burden. If it doesn’t matter, then why do it? You should live with
the living.”

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“What do you mean by that?”

He stroked her hand gently. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. We’re good
together. Our trouble is we get too involved in our work. We both spend too many hours
doing our job, and we don’t get to spend enough time together.”

Leah liked the feel of his hand on hers, and his presence next to her, but his words were
disturbing. “And what do you suggest we do about it?” she asked softly.

Rick took her hand in both of hers and looked deeply into her eyes. “Move in with me.
Give up your little student apartment and come live with me. I’m pretty sure we’ll find
that we like being together more, and I can see us getting married.” He paused, and a
confident smile came over on his face. “I’d like that.”

A few minutes earlier, Leah had been wondering if he was going to announce he was
leaving her. She hadn’t expected this. Certainly she’d thought about it idly over the last
few months. She liked her cozy apartment, but at some point she would have to admit
she’d outgrown it. Living with Rick, marrying him, would definitely raise her standard
of living. She could get used to the things he would want to provide her. She shook her
head in amazement. “Rick, I’m – I just don’t know what to say.”

His smile widened, confident that he was winning her over. “Say yes then. I promise
you that I’ll make you happy.”

She was tempted to retort that no one could make someone else happy, that it wasn’t a
condition that could be forced upon someone. At best it was something that could be
shared, and that was special enough. Under more normal circumstances she might have
been flip like that, but not tonight. “But you see that my spending time with Dan
interferes with this in some way?” she asked.

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The smile on his face flickered, and something colder passed through his eyes. “I’m just
saying, it’s time to put that behind you. Focus on our life, our future.”

Leah took a deep breath, and broke the gaze. She looked down at her plate. The food
was now cold. “And if I say no, that I think I can do both?”

He took a deep breath, then patted her hand reassuringly. “You won’t, I’m sure,” he told
her in his most charming voice. “You really have to decide what’s important to you. But
if it comes down to a choice – and I think it does – I’m pretty sure you’ll make the right
choice, the only choice that makes any sense.”

In other words, she thought distantly, it was Rick versus Dan. She looked up, seeing the
beautiful things all around her, her gaze coming to rest on the handsome, smiling, vibrant
man next to her holding her hand, with his vision of a happy life together. When it came
right done to it, she realized, he was right; it really wasn’t much of a choice.

Chapter 55

The crowds were larger and more vocal now, in the late stages of the race. They packed
both sides of the course, cheering and applauding for the runners as they swept by. Their
attitude had changed as well. They no longer treated Peterson as an interloper, as a
curiosity; he had lasted long enough, and tried hard enough, that he had unwittingly
created a swell of passionate admirers. They yelled loudly for him, trying to spur him on.

Not that he noticed. Peterson’s face showed no reaction to the outside world. He ran on
the thin blue line that marked the route, and his eyes focused solely on a spot a few yards
ahead of him, not paying any attention to the crowds, the media, or the other runners. He
had gone somewhere distant, somewhere entirely alone. He had a ferocious, ruthless
concentration to him that was a marked evolution from his earlier intense focus. There
could no longer be any doubt: he was not there to pace the other runners, and he was not

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there to drop out. He was running all out and he was running for the finish. He would
not give them the lead; they were going to have to catch him. His legs still moved
relentlessly along in their steady pace, but even casual student of the sport like Leah
could see the suffering underneath the surface. It was as if all the agony he was suffering
was being bottled up and used like steam in a boiler, the steam building hotter and hotter
to drive the boiler. It would carry him along until it blew.

“Jesus,” Leah heard the BBC reporter say in a low voice as he watched Dan push himself
along.

“I wish to change my prediction,” the Reuters man noted. “I believe top five is not out of
the question.”

The runners passed by the water station at thirty-five kilometers, grabbing their bottles
gratefully. All except Peterson. He ran by the table without even a glance, and it wasn’t
clear if he was even aware it was there.

“That may have been a mistake,” Barnes said. “Still, it gained him a meter or two. I
think a medal is not impossible. All he has to do is hold on.”

Leah watched Dan, his face a mask of utter concentration. She had seen lots of great
athletes over the last two weeks, witnessing them in their own moments of focus, but she
had never seen anything like this. It frightened her. Medal? She knew better now,
thinking back to what he had told her at dinner. He was not going for a medal. He was
going for the victory. Or he would die trying. Watching him now, either of those seemed
a distinct possibility – and the latter seemed the more plausible scenario.

It must seem to him, she speculated, that gravity itself was growing stronger, or that air
was getting thicker. For certainly his body was having a harder time of it, fighting
against his iron discipline to keep going, to keep pushing as hard as he was. He was
having to fight against these implacable forces, and he could simply not beat them.

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Gravity always triumphs; entropy always ends up the winner. And the body can only do
what it can do; his was way past his abilities. Well, Leah thought grimly, he may be
going to lose these battles, but, by God, he was game for the fight.

Adame made a move with five thousand meters to go. He quickly opened up almost ten
meters on Seko and Sardir. Leah noticed that the distance came at the expense of Dan’s
lead; he was that much closer to Dan now, while the other two remained around thirty-
five meters behind, a lead which now seemed all the more terribly fragile to Leah.

Still he held on. Adame was now focused on Dan’s back, and he seemed to be running
smoothly and with great confidence. He didn’t seem quite as weightless now, fatigue
bringing him down to earth, but neither did he seem to be in nearly as much pain as the
rest of them. He looked around to assure himself that no one else was going to put a
move on him, then back ahead to start his calculated drive towards the gold.

Leah expected it to happen suddenly, with a spurt that evaporated Dan’s lead in the blink
of an eye, but it was not to be that way. Still, it appeared that each stride brought him
closer and closer to Dan.

“Peterson isn’t just a sitting duck,” Barnes commented, looking at one of the monitors.
“He’s picked up the pace the last two miles. If he hadn’t, Adame would have passed him
by now. Adame must be surprised that he’s having to work so hard to catch him – he’s
probably expecting Peterson to be dying, and instead the faster he goes, the faster
Peterson is going too. They’re both really hammering. It’s a race.” He looked from
Peterson to Adame – now only ten meters separating them – and back to Adame. “Still,
the question is what happens to your boy when he gets caught.”

Leah looked at him. “You still think he would crumble once someone passes him? After
watching him doing all this?”

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Barnes nodded reluctantly. “It’s a tough psychological blow for anyone, but especially
for him now.” He pointed towards Dan. “He’s wound pretty tight, and he’s been leading
for so long.”

“I’m not even sure he would notice if someone passed him,” Leah said, almost to herself,
as she watched Dan’s total focus on that moving target a few meters ahead of him on the
blue line.

Barnes didn’t say anything.

At forty kilometers, Peterson’s lead was only slightly more than five meters over Adame,
and his fate seemed assured. Adame was a track runner, and he could afford to just sit in
this position and kick once the runners hit the final circuit on the track. Seko and Sardir
was still holding steady, still some twenty meters behind Adame but appearing capable of
catching either of the two runners ahead of them should either of them falter.

It came down to that final lap. The cart had to speed up to enter the stadium first to give
the reporters time to dismount and take their positions along the track. It was only a few
seconds, but Leah was worried that whatever was going to happen would happen in that
brief period when Dan was personally out of her sight, as though her observation and
mental support was all that was keeping him in front. Amazingly, Peterson still held the
lead as they entered the stadium. The crowd roared as the runners came on to the track,
having watched the race on the stadium monitors and knowing how hard Peterson had
tried to get to this point. Leah thought that most of the cheers were for him, imploring
him against all hope to hold on just these last few meters, just one lap.

Leah thought that this last lap must seem as long as the rest of the race to Dan at this
point, if he was even capable of thinking. Sardir, Seko and even Meb Klouri were not
far behind the front two, and it seemed impossible to Leah that Dan could hold up for
another few hundred yards. A small stumble, a momentary loss of concentration, even an

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unintended bump from one of the other runners could destroy him, cause him to be
swallowed up by all of them, just as they had easily overtaken the rest of the brave
runners who had dared to race in the front. Getting this far guaranteed him nothing, gave
him no easy victory lap. Dan would have to battle every step of the way, and his best just
may not be enough. It didn’t seem fair to Leah, but she knew that was the way it was.

“Adame should move now,” Barnes told her. “Take him at the beginning of the lap and
take his victory lap in front of the crowds.”

But he didn’t. He pulled up to Peterson’s shoulder, but no further, as they moved into the
first turn. Leah wondered if Dan even understood that he was no longer out on the roads,
that he was running in a circle on a track, that the end was almost here. “Hold on,” she
implored, although she could not have said if she spoke aloud or merely thought the wish.

“Watch the start of the backstretch,” Barnes advised a few moments later. “Adame is
likely to blow by him when they enter it, make sure he takes control. Then we’ll see if
Peterson can hold on to second.”

Leah wished she were closer, but Dan was across the stadium and watching his image on
the big screen was no match for seeing him up close as she had from the cart. Even from
her more removed view – or perhaps because of it – it was clear to her that Dan was in
trouble. His iron control was cracking, and she could see the unbelievable strain on his
face, as if the weight of all the fatigue had granted him a grace period until just this
moment, only to come crashing down all at once.

But he did not crack. Or, rather, he might have been cracking but he still refused to
crumble. Adame came to his shoulder once more, but did not pass him even once they
entered the backstretch. Leah could see that he, too, was suffering, his stride no longer
quite so fluid. He seemed baffled by Peterson’s continued presence, that what should
have been a ceremonial triumphant last lap was now something quite else. He was going
to have to get by this dying but mightily determined competitor. They entered the final

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turn in lockstep, Adame hanging off of Peterson’s shoulder. Sardir had pulled ahead of
the grimacing Seko, with Klouri close on Seko’s shoulder, but they were all running out
of time to win the race. They could only hope for one of the front two to make a mistake.

“Go, Peterson!” Barnes shouted among the din of the crowd’s roar. He leaned over to
yell excitedly into Leah’s ear. “I think he’s going to hold on for the silver!”

Adame pulled even with Dan in the final straight. The noise from the crowd was
deafening. Dan seemed to slowly realize that he was no longer alone, and his head turned
to see who it was with him. His eyes seemed to gleam at the new challenge, a fierce look
that scared Leah almost as much as the devastating effect the long race was obviously
having on both of the runners, but on Dan most of all. He seemed so worn out that he
was pure will, his body just a wisp that had been burned to a crisp by the intensity of his
effort. Leah found herself not afraid of him losing; she was instead suddenly terribly
afraid of him dying, of him withering away to nothing in these last few meters of effort.

Peterson turned his head back towards the finish.

Chapter 56

They stood side by side at the edge of the cement, starting out towards the end of the
grass. They had not spoken for some period of time, although in this place time had little
meaning and no means of measurement. She was waiting for him to decide, or at least to
say something.

He stirred at last. “I wonder what happens at the edge there. I wonder what would
happen if you just kept walking.”

She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

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He didn’t look back at her, continuing to stare out into the distance. “I mean, is it like a
wall? Would you just hit something that won’t let you go any further? Or is it like fog,
where you can keep going, always seeing just a little further off into the distance?”

She bit her lip pensively. “And you want to find out?” she asked quietly. She didn’t
seem surprised that he knew about fog.

It took him a few moments, but eventually his head nodded slowly, as though he were
sorry to have to admit it to her. He turned towards her. “Yes, I do,” he said. “Well, I
don’t want to, but I have to.”

“You don’t have to,” she argued. She gestured with her arm towards the pool behind
them. “You can stay here, with me.”

He took a quick glance towards what had been their place, looking at it for what might be
the last time. Then he looked back at her with a sorrowful expression. “Yes, it has been
great. You came along when I needed you, and I wouldn’t have made it without you.”

“You don’t know that,” she told him with a broken smile. “You’re a pretty special guy.”

He held her stare for a long time, then broke it off and looked back off into the distance.
She wondered what he was thinking, if mentally he was already gone.

“Maybe there are lots of places like this,” he ruminated aloud. “Maybe there are other
people just out past the end there, people like us, alone in their own worlds. Out there
just waiting for us to find them. Maybe they all think they are alone here. Maybe all it
takes is for someone to just walk out of their little island.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, her face terribly sad. “Or maybe this is all there is. Maybe once
you walk out of here you can never find your way back.”

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He remembered his existence before her, and how thrilled he had been even to see the
curve of her chin appear. The appearance of all the rest of this still seemed miraculous,
something impossible that he could never had dreamed of but which had happened
nonetheless. It was an oasis in the madness, an area of refuge and restoration. He could
imagine walking out of here, having the void fill in behind him, with no way to mark his
way back here. He thought it possible that this place might cease to exist once he had
gone, that it existed just for the two of them to be here together. If he left, there might be
no place – and no one -- for him to come back to. But he could not stay. “There is that
chance,” he agreed at last.

“Doesn’t it frighten you?”

He smiled wearily, and looked at her again. “Of course.”

“Then why go?” she pleaded. She didn’t want to beg but she would if she had to “Stay.
Stay with me.” That was it; that was her whole case.

He looked at her for a long moment before replying, and she almost convinced herself
that he would be swayed by her plea. “I can’t,” he said instead. He looked almost as
sorry as he felt, and his voice trembled as he said the words.

“Why?”

He looked back at the void. “Come with me.”

She turned and looked at him. “I can’t.”

He had known that would be the answer, but he’d had to ask anyway. “I know,” he told
her softly, more sorry than there were words for.

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She turned away. “You’re going because of what you said before? About not feeling
like you were real here?” She spoke without looking at him, at least not directly.

He nodded.

She seemed to either see his response or had known what it would be anyway. “You
don’t think I’m real, do you?” she asked after a few moments, wiping a solitary tear from
her cheek.

He smiled sadly and took a deep breath. “I think you’re real all right. I know you’re real,
and I know how I feel about you is real. I just don’t think this is the real you.”

She wrinkled her brow and half turned towards him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

He nodded his head slowly, not sure what to say. He exhaled heavily again. “I don’t
know if you are someone from my past or someone I haven’t met yet, but somewhere
there is a real you out there. And if I’m going to spend time with you, I’d like the real me
to be spending time with the real you.” He turned and looked around them. “Not here.
Not like this. Not this pale imitation. I want the real thing.” He looked back off into the
distance again. Maybe out there the void would shape itself into new worlds, just as this
world had formed around him. Maybe all this had always been here, and what mattered
was just in learning to see.

She was silent a long time. “You might not find what you’re looking for, you know.
You might lose what you have here and go back to what it was like before.”

It was terrifying to imagine being all alone again, without anything around him, not even
a body or a sense of himself to help anchor him. He had survived it before, but he wasn’t
sure he could survive it again.

He had to risk it.

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Chapter 57

He didn’t know where he was. It took a long time for him to conclude that, first, he was
laying down, and, second, that he was looking through a window at a bright sky. The
details around these only very gradually filled themselves in, such as the fact that he
appeared to be in an institution of some sort, in a bed with various tubes poking him in
multiple places, and that he felt terrible. All of these were strange and new, and he
thought that, well, different was good.

It was only then that he realized that something specific had awoken him, a sound that
had penetrated whatever daze he had been in. He searched his memory for what it had
been, and tried to hear it now. At last he found the sound, amidst a welter of other noises
that he could not make sense of. He focused on this one sound, trying to remember what
it was and why it meant so much to him.

Only gradually did he understand that it was the sound of a woman crying. Not only that,
but the sound of someone he knew. Someone he cared about. He raised his eyes to look
for her, to try to understand if he was seeing her but not realizing it. And, gradually, he
found her right in front of him.

She was sitting on a chair between him and the window. She sat with her head down, and
he could not see her face. Her hands were up on her face anyway, pressed against her
face as she wept as silently as he could. These were not loud, wailing tears; these were
quiet tears of hopelessness, tears she did not expect him or anyone else to hear.

Even without seeing her face, he felt sure that he was right, that he knew exactly who she
would be. He wanted to speak to her, to tell her everything would be all right. Nothing
was so bad; nothing was hopeless. He found, to his surprise, that he could not speak. His
throat was extremely dry. He looked around and saw a small pitcher on the tray near

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him, with a cup next to him. All he had to do was reach it and pour himself a drink.
Then he could talk to her, cheer her up.

He found that he could barely pick up his arm, much less reach out and pick up the small
pitcher. This was at least real, these feelings, but not in the way he would have preferred.
He struggled to straighten his arm, and something in his doing so must have made a
sound that alerted her. She looked up at him, and the shock on her face was almost
comical.

He tried unsuccessfully to move his face into a smile, happy that he had been right, that it
was her after all. His face wasn’t used to smiling and he gave up for the moment,
focusing on the problem at hand. Once again, he pointed to the pitcher, then cupped his
hand in a gesture of drinking. She seemed confused, standing up in a half crouch and
looking from his face to his hand and back again. She stood up straight and moved
towards the nurse call button. He saw what she what she was intending and raised his
hand in a cautioning gesture. She stopped, and he shook his head. Then he pointed
towards the pitcher again and made the drinking motion again. This time she got it.

She poured a small amount of water into the cup, and helped him put his hand around it.
She helped him raise it to his lips and take a small sip. The water tasted better than
anything he had ever tasted before, and he realized how parched he truly was. He took a
second drink, then a third, all while her hand supported his and held most of the weight of
the cup. As light as the cup was, he would have dropped it without her help. Once he
had greedily drunk some water, he became aware of the simple sensation of her hand
against his, and he reveled in it.

“It’s you,” he said in a ragged voice. He tried again to smile, this time with moderately
more success.

Her face still had an amazed expression on it, afraid that if she looked away he might
disappear. “I’m here,” was all she could say.

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He smiled wider in satisfaction. “I knew you would be.” He put the empty cup down
next to him but continued to hold on to her hand. “You are real, aren’t you?”

She nodded in surprise, and took the opportunity to buzz for the nurse with her free hand.
Within a few seconds, one of the nurses hurried in. “What’s --” she started to ask, until
she caught sight of him awake and aware. She stood stock still, frozen into place by
indecision. “My goodness,” she gulped, her eyes wide. It didn’t take long for her to
make up her mind. “Wait here,” she commanded. With that she rushed out of the room
and they were alone again.

He didn’t care. He had not even turned to acknowledge the nurse’s presence, content to
lay there holding her hand. Within a few more minutes, though, a number of other
medical personnel had flooded into the room – nurses, residents, and, rushing in last, Dr.
Tollefson. He was out of breath, but immediately came to the bedside. He tried to take
his hand, but Tollefson found that he refused to let go of her hand. He looked at the
monitors, and took out a stethoscope and listened to his chest for a long time. Then he
looked up and smiled at her. “What did you say to him?” he teased with a mock look of
indignation.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Tollefson smiled and looked down at his patient, who still refused to take his eyes off her
every move or to let go of her hand. “I’d like to take him for some tests.”

“I don’t feel so great,” he said wearily.

“No wonder,” Tollefson told him cheerfully. “We’ll see what we can do about that.” He
gestured towards a couple of the nurses to move him onto a gurney. “You’re going to
have to let go of her hand.”

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He shook his head. “I want to stay with her.” He kept staring at her, unwilling to miss a
second of the sight of her.

“Later,” Tollefson promised. “Let us run some tests and then you can come back here.”

“I’ll be here,” she told him, and from the look in her eyes there was no doubt that she
meant it, that nothing would prevent her from being right here when they brought him
back. He let go of her hand and let them cart him away.

She stayed behind, and noticed that Mary had remained as well, standing at the doorway
with her arms crossed over her chest and a cynical look on her face. “He didn’t seem too
surprised to see you there,” she noted.

“No?”

Mary shook her head. “No, he didn’t.” She smirked. “Like he knew you’d be waiting
for him. Like he knew you’d been there all along.” She laughed raucously. “I bet there
are a couple of other ladies who are disappointed they weren’t the ones who were here
when he woke up.”

“Maybe,” she said, thinking about it and hoping that it did mean something that it had
happened while she was there. She knew now that she wanted to always be next to him
when he woke up, and, if she had any say in the matter, she was going to be.

Mary laughed and started to leave, only to turn around with an interested expression on
her face. “Say, you know, I never really knew. He ran in the Olympics, right?”

She nodded, wondering why Mary was just bringing this up now.

“So – did your boy win?”

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She looked down at the now-empty bed, still showing the outline of his body. She had
feared coming in one day to find the bed empty because he had died while she was away,
and didn’t quite know how to deal with the feelings of joy that came from knowing that
he was back in the world of the living again. She thought back to the years of sacrifices
he had made to get to the Olympics, and of what he had done there. Most of all, though,
she thought of how far he must have had to come in order to wake up, so that he could
return to her. What mattered was that he came back to her; indeed, she dared think that
he had come back for her.

She looked up at Mary and breathed a sigh of relief, a sigh of hope. She smiled at Mary
with the sweetness of an angel. “Of course he did.”

THE END

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