I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) (4 page)

I stop running. Someone hands me a Styrofoam cup. I take a sip of red Powerade, then lean forward and vomit.

A golf cart pulls up alongside of me. “Finished?” the driver asks.

“I need a counselor,” I say.

“Last tent was two miles back,” the staffer says. “You'll have to make it on your own from here.”

A woman in a purple cancer-survivor shirt jogs up to me. She looks fresh. “You okay?” she asks.

“Fighting,” I say.

“Hang in there,” she says. “Take it easy, don't push. Walk the rest of the way, if you need to.”

“It's not fair,” I say. “You guys shouldn't have to carry
statues.”

“We find that type of thinking offensive,” she says.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“Just make it to twenty-three,” she says. Then she reaches out and grasps my forearm. “And listen,” she says. “Don't cheat. Rumor is they've changed the way they're handling it, to send a message to the running community-at-large.”

“What the hell
happens
at twenty-three?” But the woman is already pressing on.

I walk a few steps. My knees aren't bending right and I can't feel my quads. I loosen the bungee cords on my backpack, shake my shoulders until the statue tips over and rests, horizontally, along the small of my back.

One shoulder strap, I think. I let the strap slide down my arm. I could take the statue off just long enough to reposition.

Behind me, I hear the
scree
of the Whistler's approach.

“Whistler,” I say when he's close enough. “I have to tell you something.”

The Whistler stops, hands on his hips, panting. A breeze has picked up; skinny as he is, you could almost believe the sound he's making is the wind whistling
through
him.

“I lied,” I say. “I've never made it this far before.”

“Figured as much,” he says. His breath smells like cheese. Sweat is streaming down his cheeks and catching in his wrinkles. “Follow me.”

“I can't,” I say. “My legs are done. Next time I'll train with sandbags.”

The Whistler turns around so that his back is to me. With one arm he reaches behind him. He unzips his Camelbak and leaves the flap open. “Take a look,” he says.

I peer into his pack. Beside the clear plastic water pouch, surrounded by bubble wrap and secured with bungee cords, is a tiny statue carved from a luminous blue-white marble. It's the figure of an adolescent girl, no more than six inches tall. She's standing on tiptoe, looking into a mirror. She seems to be on the cusp of something. Her face is serene and anguished, full of ignorance and knowledge, purity and depravity. As if all of Heaven and all of Hell were condensed into six inches of stone.

“My God,” I say, starting to cry. “I could spend the rest of my life looking at this.”

“It's only an adjective,” the Whistler says. “Points to a much bigger noun.”

“How can I keep running,” I say, “knowing such a thing exists? Knowing I will never earn such a thing?”

The Whistler's form is wavering like heat. I reach out to him. I'm afraid he's going to disappear. On all sides, runners are stumbling, retching, signaling for golf carts like they're hailing cabs.

“I want you to run behind me, a little to my right,” the Whistler says. “Keep your eyes on my statue. We call it drafting.”

It occurs to me that at this moment the Whistler is all I have.

I jog behind him. I know he's taking it slow on my account. At mile twenty-two the pacer drops his sign and we turn into the woods, moving into single file along a narrow trail—first the Whistler, then the pacer, then me. I'm grateful for the shade. Men and women in orange T-shirts line the path, standing at attention in the shadows. Patches of blue sky are visible between the dark branches and shifting leaves. I swipe at my eyes, feeling as if there is some meaning in all of this I'm failing to understand, something I've been missing all along—as if I've been running this entire race with my head turned in the wrong direction.

“There's no secret,” I blurt out. “Is there?”

“Another half-mile, I think,” the Whistler says to the pacer, who nods.

We come out into a sunlit clearing. In front of us, beneath a tarp tied to tree branches, a man in a dark suit sits behind a long rectangular table. He's wearing glasses. On the ground around the table and in the woods behind him—as far into the forest as I can see—are hundreds of statues. Some are standing upright; others are lying on their sides as if flung down. The clearing around me looks like a ransacked sculpture garden.

“Didn't think you'd go through with it,” the man says to the Whistler. “Famous as you are.”

“It's time,” the Whistler says, jogging in place.

The businessman looks at me and frowns. White crumbs shiver in the corners of his lips. A half-eaten blueberry muffin, still in its wrapper, sits on the table in front of him. Beside the muffin are a stack of forms and a wire basket holding what look like fat black crayons.

“You've got two options,” the man says to me, “for how you want to finish.” He pushes a form and pen toward me. “Check one.”

I lean over to read the words on the paper. Letters and numbers swirl.

“I can't read this,” I say, pushing it back.

The man sighs. “Option one, you take off your statue and leave it here. You get your medal, your name goes into the database, you go home. You'll get a new statue in the mail.”

“But I'm three miles short,” I say.

“That's the point,” he says. “It's a freebie.”

“But I haven't earned it.”

“You get over
that,
” he says.

I hear spitting, panting, the sound of feet jogging in place. Runners are forming a line behind me. “Just dump your pack already,” one of them says.

“How can any of us call ourselves runners,” I say, “if we don't even finish?”

Above us the wind sifts through the big-leafed maples. Papers blow off the table and sway to the ground. Sunlight and shade ripple across the businessman's face. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, which are puffy with dark blue dents underneath.

“Option two,” the businessman says, “you swap your statue for Authentic Art and keep running to the finish. But you have to find someone willing to give up their Art.” He glances at the Whistler, who's grinning. “Finish this way, you go into the database. But you have to sign, here”—he points to the form—“stating that the next time you race you'll give up your Art on behalf of another failing runner. Then you're finished for good. No more statues, no more marathons.”

“What about just continuing on with what I've got?” I ask the businessman.

“You
will not finish
,” he says.

“There's got to be another way.”

“There isn't,” he says.

“Just pick one,” a woman says.

The Whistler is holding out his Camelbak, still jogging in place, knees high.

“What about the elite runners?” I ask.

“They came through hours ago,” the businessman says, nodding toward a pile of tiny ivory sculptures in a basket on the table.

“So that's it?” I say. “We put in all this work, and in the end we cheat?”

“Cheaters,” the businessman says, his voice low, “finish their own way.”

“Just take the goddamn Art,” the woman behind me says.

“The question is,” the businessman says, “would you rather receive a reward for your struggles, or enjoy a reward you never expected to receive?”

The Whistler moves toward me. “Offer's good,” he says. “But if I was you I'd take the first option. You're too young to sign on for Art.”

The Whistler's Camelbak hangs open. Alone in her agonizing beauty, the tiny girl stands on tiptoe before the mirror.

I sprint away from the table, leaving the Whistler, the pacer, the businessman, and the other runners behind me.

The path comes out of the woods at mile twenty-four.

Collapsed runners line the sides of the pavement. Staffers are collecting backpacks and piling them into golf carts. The sun is high; it must be close to noon. The wind, really blowing now, sends empty Styrofoam cups scraping along the street, among broken glass, pieces of statue, empty gel packs, gum wrappers.

A woman in a pink cap runs up beside me. “Almost there,” she says. She's wearing a small backpack. Written on her thighs and calves, in black body crayon, is the letter “A.”

The woman looks down at my legs.

“You don't have a mark,” she says.

“I'm doing my own thing,” I say.

She drops behind me.

The fields on either side of the road are crammed with spectators. But they're no longer holding up signs or cheering. No one is clapping. The silence is profound.

Then I hear a marching band. Off-key trumpets carried by the wind, drums and oddly smeared trombones. I get a surge of adrenaline. I run past the marker at mile twenty-five. Ahead of me, in front of the crowd, I see an enormous musical outfit: fifes, drums, snares, trumpets. The crash and shimmer of the cymbals, the muted lowing of a French horn. They're playing Tchaikovsky. Playing us on to the finish!

Before I reach the band, I see something else: a twenty-yard-long vanguard of soldiers in gray, rifles at ready position.

“They've got Spencers!” someone in the crowd yells.

In front of me, a man carrying a statue—something in granite, with folded wings—collapses. The man falls backward, on top of his statue.

Then another runner goes down. And another.

None of them have “A”s on their legs.

The unmarked runners go down clean, with hardly a tremor in their bodies. The sharpshooters are masters of accuracy and calculation, compensating for the slant of the wind, the individual pace, the bounce of the stride, the precise tilt of each head.

I see a woman on the ground frozen in a lotus pose; another with her arms flung above her head, knees wrapped around the long neck of a giraffe in the posture of someone swinging from a trapeze.

Now I understand what the spectators—men, women, and children—are going to see. What they have been seeing. It's not the spectacle of failure.

What strikes me, when the bullet hits, is the absence of sound. Or maybe it's the fact that the sound of the bullet hitting its mark—the soft concave center of my temple—is a sound
like
silence. I'm stunned there isn't some kind of an explosion.

Do you see the beauty in this? I yell to the spectators as I go down. Here's your high Art, brothers and sisters! Here's your hallelujah, here's your amen!

My body is on the pavement, the music is swelling, and already I've swelled beyond it, beyond the white flash.

Spectators probably think my race is over.

But I'm pressing on to the finish. I'm surging past the crowd.

Here

Neil Corley was driving his children to the lake cottage. He'd decided someplace familiar would be reassuring. In the back of the Suburban, all four kids wore headphones with large cushioned earpieces. They were watching
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
for the third time in four hours. They'd left the hotel in Cedar Rapids at eight that morning; Neil told his in-laws they'd arrive in time for lunch. Now he was going too fast up Iowa 71.

Had Jocelyn been sitting next to him, she would have quoted her mother: “Better ‘The Corleys were late' than ‘The Late Corleys.'”

A bird darted in front of the windshield, then sheared off into the corn. Stands of dark trees—windbreaks for farmhouses—rose at mile intervals from the flat yellow-green fields. The sun glinted off the rounded silver tips of silos. It was a still day in early July.

The car bucketed over a pothole. “Frozen!” Myra yelled from the third row backseat. She was thirteen.

Neil pulled the overhead screen toward the front. He glanced up—John Cleese in a chain-mail hood—the wedding massacre.

“I said to skip this scene, Grady,” Neil said, pushing the
forward
button.

“It's fake blood,” Grady said. He was ten; Monty Python had been his suggestion.

Neil slowed to forty-five when they entered Spencer.

“Hey, guys—it's the big chicken.” He waved his arm to get their attention, and Myra pushed back an earphone. “We're in Spencer,” Neil said, watching her face in the rearview. She loved spotting the landmarks. “Remember
Boy Holding Cheeseburger
at the A&W? Wake up, Effie.”

In the middle row, Effie was slumped over an armrest. Myra kicked the back of her chair and Effie jerked awake. “Where we?” she said.

Ben, Effie's twin, looked out his window, then turned back. “Push
play
now?” he said.

Twenty minutes later Effie screamed. “
Giant Silver Lollipop!
”

This time the kids flung their headphones onto the floor. The Wahpeton water tower was the last landmark before the turnoff. It did look like a Tootsie Pop for a giant; Jocelyn had made up the name. Three summers back she'd asked Neil to pull over so they could take a picture in front of it. He hadn't stopped. He'd figured they'd get around to it.

The road bent, and now he could see the sliding surface of Lake Okoboji behind the houses and trees. The water was the color of lapis, spotted pewter with cloud shadow.

They pulled up to Jocelyn's parents' house. Neil's father-in-law was a retired physician; now he and Ruth were snowbirds. Iowa in the summer, Phoenix in the winter. The Perrys' Craftsman bungalow overlooked Miller's Bay. It was shingled in slate blue with white trim work, low-slung rooflines, and a wall of French doors facing the lake.

Ruth was waiting on the front porch. Neil stayed in the car and watched the kids pile into her arms. He could tell his mother-in-law was crying when she picked up Effie. Neil smoothed his hair and looked past the house, along the grassy slope of the backyard to the trio of bur oaks at the edge of the embankment. Below the trees—though from where he sat he couldn't see them—were eight wooden steps leading to the dock and sand beach. Last summer Jocelyn and Myra had painted them to match the bungalow's shingles.

The bay was quiet: one white sail, children on a water trampoline, a WaveRunner cutting west. Over the water hung a cloud, flat and gray on its underside, rising into a crisp white peak.
Soft-serve ice cream.

After lunch, they all walked down the street to the cottage Neil and Jocelyn bought when Grady was born. It was a tiny stone structure—620 square feet. The front door was paned in leaded glass and still had the original crystal doorknob. The toilet and shower had been installed in what used to be broom closets.

Myra and Grady unpacked and checked their room for spiders while Ruth helped the twins put on life vests and took them down to the dock.

His father-in-law opened the refrigerator and held the door wide, displaying the contents like a girl on a game show. “We bought you groceries,” he said. “Just the basics.” James Perry had the smooth white hair of a towheaded toddler; Neil noticed it had yellowed from the sun.

Neil looked into the refrigerator. Milk, eggs, butter, yogurt. Cheddar and sliced American cheese, sandwich meat in plastic containers, bread. Orange juice, Juicy Juice, all kinds of fruit. Condiments, jelly. On top of the refrigerator were boxes of cereal, potato chips, granola bars.

“How'd you know Naked Juice is a basic?” Myra asked him. She'd changed into a bikini with little ties at the hips. Now she was lying on the futon in the living room/kitchenette with her head propped on a pile of throw pillows, sipping from a bottle of Green Machine. What Jocelyn had started drinking when she was diagnosed.

Neil stood on the small square of linoleum in front of the refrigerator, conscious of having nothing to do with his hands.

“I'm paid to know these things,” James said. “Surely you knew.”

“I didn't, and don't call me Shirley,” Myra said, from a movie they'd watched together.

“Did you notice the tree?” James asked Neil, closing the refrigerator. The bur oak in the small yard between their cottage and the lake had fallen that winter after an ice storm. James had the stump removed, the hole covered over with new sod, and a few feet away had planted a small emerald maple. “Give it a few years, it'll be almost as big as the old one.”

“It's a really nice tree,” Neil said. He wondered what they'd done with Jocelyn's hammock.

“I'm glad that tree's gone,” Myra said later that night. Neil had found the hammock under the bunk beds and hung it between the shed and gazebo. Now he and his children were lying there, a jumble of naked limbs and bare feet. “We can see more of the sky.”

The horizon had pinked up across the lake; behind the cottage was a silvery twilight. A slow firefly pulsed against the side of the screened gazebo.

“First star,” Ben said, pointing to Venus.

“That's a planet,” Grady said, but Ben's lips were already moving.

“I know what you're wishing,” Effie said.

“We all know what he's wishing.” Myra was sitting on the edge of the hammock, pushing it back and forth with the balls of her feet. She was sucking on a clump of her hair.

Ben opened his eyes. “I wished for a dog,” he said.

“He wasted it!” Effie said. “He's supposed to wish about Mommy!”

“It wouldn't work,” Myra said, standing.

“Wishing's a personal thing, Myra,” Neil said, but she was already headed inside.

At bedtime, Myra sat on the counter next to the kitchen sink, shaving her legs. She'd started this in January, after the funeral.

“Why don't you do that in the shower?” Neil asked.

“Because that stall is tiny,” Myra said, “and I'm a beginner. I need room for error.”

He looked at Myra from behind. With her free hand she was eating from a bag of Lay's. She'd pulled her hair up into a clamp. He remembered supporting her neck, the feel of her plush newborn skull arcing backward into his palm.

Neil sat down on the couch to look at a real estate magazine. He wanted to know the going price per square foot in the area this year.

“Just once,” Myra said, turning around to face him, “I'd like to open a bag, eat one, and throw the rest away.” She held up the bag. “It's, like, a challenge they give you.”

Grady came in from the shed holding two wooden tennis rackets and a stack of bright Frisbees. “Only two sports here, folks,” he said. “One: courts around the corner, but rackets are no good. Two: Frisbees are good, but no place to throw them. No place without water.”

Ben took bread and a jar of grape Smucker's out of the refrigerator and slid them up onto the counter. “I know how you make jelly,” he said to Myra. “Get a jellyfish and squeeze it into a jar.”

“That's right,” Myra said. “That's just how you do it.” Ben's head was level with the counter.

“I think it smells good in here,” Effie said. She was on the floor, tapping on a small electronic keyboard. She'd said the same thing last year. The cottage smelled like natural gas and ant spray.

Me too, Eff,
Jocelyn had said last summer.
When I get better let's come here, just the two of us. Let's come here and lie on the floor and sniff for hours.

Neil stood up and began opening windows.

The summer they'd closed on the cottage, Neil and Jocelyn bought things at yard sales. They found an unopened box of silverware for a dollar, a stainless steel microwave for ten, a table and three mismatched chairs for twenty. And for no money at all, someone gave them a frayed wicker headboard, which Jocelyn spray-painted white and propped up behind their queen-sized mattress. The headboard creaked when they made love. Sometimes it bumped against the thin wall between their room and the kitchen. When Myra grew old enough to ask questions, Neil stored the headboard in the shed.

When he was certain the children were asleep, Neil went outside. A steady breeze was coming in off the lake. From across the bay he heard the churn of a Baja motor; when it faded he could hear muted laughter, the bass line of a song, and, closer, the low calls of a bullfrog. Next door someone was grilling fish.

He found the headboard in the shed behind the lawn mower, resting on its side. He pulled it out and examined it in the light of the single bulb above the door. Cobwebs breathed against the latticework. He carried it inside and wiped it with a gray kitchen rag. White paint chips flecked the towel like snowflakes on cement. Then he took it into the bedroom and slid it back into place.

That night, in their bed, Neil dreamed he made love to his wife. He dreamed he made love to her from behind, fast and aggressive. She arched into him, reached between his legs and pressed up, hard, the way she knew he liked.

When it was over, she rolled to face him, her nipples just grazing his chest. “I thought you were a stranger,” she said. “It was incredibly exciting.”

It wasn't the dreams, Neil thought, when he woke to the sound of a night bird in the maple, its notes a major triad sung in reverse. It wasn't even waking up alone that was so hard. It was waking up alone, for the first time, here.

“I think I killed one,” Grady said the next morning. He came into the cottage and took a wide stance in front of the breakfast table, hands on his hips. He was wearing just his swim trunks. “I think I had it out of the water too long.” His chin shook.

Neil went down to the dock with him. Grady pointed to a white fish struggling on its side in the shallow water beneath the dock.

“Well, that happens,” Neil said.

“I couldn't find the rag,” Grady said. “I was afraid I'd get cut if I didn't hold it with a rag.” He started to cry.

“Hey,” Neil said. He put an arm around Grady's thin shoulders. “It's just a fish.”

“A stupid sheephead,” Grady said. “You can't even eat them.” He tossed his head so that his bangs fell over his eyes.

Neil squatted beside him to help clean up his tackle. He noticed the dirt under Grady's toenails, the scrapes on his shins, the way he turned the lures around in his fingers, fitting each one into its compartment like a puzzle piece. Grady walked up to the shed, pole over his shoulder. The tip caught in a branch of the maple, and, using more force than was necessary, he yanked it from the tree. Neil watched the torn leaves twirl and settle onto the grass.

He'd had this idea, when Myra was born, then Grady and, six years later, the twins (their miracle year, the cancer gone into remission but really only on pause, gathering itself), that he would guide them. He taught Management, Organizational Behavior, and Leadership Theory at Westminster College in Georgia. At home, he thought, he would be the CEO of his own little company. He would set directions, be there to problem-solve, be a servant-leader. And in return, they would need him. It would be enough.

But the kids seemed only to need Jocelyn—milk, comfort, the lilt of her voice. Fine—Jocelyn would need him. But over the years this hadn't turned out to be the case either. She was brilliant, beautiful, and self-contained. She came from money and love.

Neil's own father was on his fourth marriage. His mother died when he was three. He had no full-blood siblings, only half-brothers and half-sisters he didn't keep track of. Jocelyn's family, the kids, their life together, summers at the lake—he'd grown dependent on all of it. He'd created the family he never had. He was the needy one.

And when she started pulling away after the final diagnosis, having panic attacks and bouts of depression where she refused to get out of bed, he thought,
Now she'll need me
. And she did. He would bring the kids in to see her when she wanted them, take them out when she started to cry.

One evening, before he hired a part-time nanny, Neil came home from work and found Grady marching on top of the coffee table. He was singing. Ben and Effie, two years old then, were naked; Myra was sitting upright on the couch. “Where's Mommy?” he asked.

“In the bathroom,” Myra said. “She said to take turns singing till you got home.”

The bathroom door was locked. Neil fumbled at the doorknob with a screwdriver; then he kicked in the door.

He found Jocelyn curled in the empty bathtub. “Did you hear them out there?” she said.

The next day, she told the doctor, “My children are angels and I can't be in the same room with them.”

That evening, James took them all out on the boat. Grady wanted to try his new kneeboard. “Check this out, Dad,” Grady had said that afternoon, showing him the board his grandfather bought him—streaks of red and orange flames, cartoon boys with wild hair and threatening facial expressions. “No fins. I can do
three-sixties
on this thing.”