After the fourth consecutive time Leon missed practice, Coach Snick pulled a cruel joke and signed him up for the 1600. Leon was a sprinter, the one hundred and the two hundred. Long jump if they were short a guy and 300 hurdles if he trained hard enough, which he hadn’t since high school. Snick called him at 8:40 a.m, when he would normally be exfoliating with a Himalayan salt scrub in the locker room shower or, if he hadn’t done an extra superset at the end of his lift, scrunching curl cream into his hair to achieve his signature ringlets.
Leon declined the call from bed. He had been awake for hours.
“Abraaaaamovich. Earth to Abraaaamovich,” Snick said in the voicemail. “You make me crazy. Nuts. Kookoo bananas. If you’re not walking to my office yet, you are now.” A shuffle of papers, a faint oy, and he hung up.
Leon slid out of bed and picked clothes out of the hamper. As he walked across campus to the track, he thought about what he’d tell his teammates. He wouldn’t lie about the breakup, but he’d lie about his inability to leave his room. His first daylight in seven days. He’d say the breakup was a bitch but it’s calm. He’d say something vague that suggested he was already fucking a sophomore on the tennis team.
He picked up an iced coffee and listened to a podcast about the future of AI, but then he got bored and just listened to Future. The weather was warm like it always was. He looked at the palm trees and people’s outfits. A pack of artsy guys on the radio club passed by him in tiny shorts exposing their wispy thigh hairs.
“You look sallow,” Snick said, when Leon arrived at his office.
Leon raised his hands by his sides.
“I’m sorry. Forreal.”
Snick waited for Leon to continue. Leon massaged the back of his neck with his right hand, stalling.
“Things have just been pretty tough for me recently,” he said. “Like, family stuff, school stuff, mental health.” He took a sip of iced coffee. “Plus everything going on in the news. You know.” He made a circle with his free hand like a very slow tornado.
Snick smiled slightly and shook his head. When the old man sighed, Leon thought of his granddad, similarly bald and strange. Trophies lined the front edge of Snick’s desk. Framed photos of him and his former athletes, back when the coach only had a bald spot the size of a tennis ball, hung haphazardly around the small room. Throughout his four decades at the school, Snick had coached a dozen league champions and two Olympic trialists.
“Look, you’re a fast kid, good head on your shoulders,” he said. “But do you know how many fast good-humored kids I’ve coached? You’re not one in a million.” His chair squeaked. “Know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I do,” Leon said.
“Glad we’re on the same page,” Snick said.
He held up a clipboard on his desk with FEBRUARY 10 MEET scrawled at the top in smudged blue ink, a telltale sign of a lefty. 1600: Abramovich, Barry, Watson.
“If I were you I’d go out now and take a nice long run,” Snick said. “Dig dig dig dig dig.”
***
Leon sat on the bleachers with an energy drink. He tried not to think about anything except the chronology of his workout: five-minute warmup, one timed mile, and an easy thirty-minute jog. The coffee and energy drink sloshed in his stomach. His legs were sore from inactivity. He figured he could do an easy 5:30.
One lap into the mile and he should have leveled his pace. Each stride was meant to be rhythmic and buoyant, but every movement felt discrete, as if his goal wasn’t four laps around the track, but an infinity of individual steps. But he knew he could evade the endless pounding if he just thought about Gabriela.
The relationship, technically, wasn’t long. Freshman fall to freshman spring. They met scrubbing toilets the week before college started while rich kids shat in Yosemite National Park and vowed not to have sex with the nine other freshmen in their camping troupe. Leon would’ve been shitting in Yosemite too if he hadn’t forgotten to register (he had also forgotten to register for classes until his dad got an email that said his son wasn’t enrolled in school).
Gabriela was from Mobile, Alabama, where Leon’s grandfather was born. They bonded over the seafood, Leon saying he had always wanted to go to learn about his roots, Gabriela laughing at the thought of this sheltered kid from Santa Monica driving down the narrow highway by the Gulf with some curated blues playlist blasting through his dad’s puke green Prius. She was scrubbing the mouth of the toilet on her hands and knees and he was spraying down the sink mirror when Gabriela looked up at him, her eyelashes long and fake, and said she’d take him to Mobile sometime. Leon felt his whole body blush.
Leon drove her to the pier after the first week of classes, where they spent most of their night at the arcade, competing earnestly as an outlet for their nerves. Neither of them had ever been challenged in DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION!, which they agreed was the superior arcade game. Stomping right left right diagonal, faster and faster until the dance was less dance and more convulsion, Gabriela and Leon fell in sync with one another. As she watched the video game screen flash to the rhythm of her feet, she wondered if she would ever grow jaded by this place. Before starting college, she had never seen the Pacific Ocean. Leon had had four birthday parties at this pier, which he described as lowkey raggedy, but she thought was idyllic.
Gabriela was determined not to appear wide-eyed by any of it – the manicured professor houses neighboring campus, the nonchalant entitlement of her sunkissed classmates, or the attention of this pharaoh-looking sprinter, gentle and kind against all odds. She didn’t think she had low self-esteem, but admittedly she was surprised that within two weeks of college, she was barreling toward a relationship with someone she assumed could have anyone he wanted. Maybe even a famous person, she thought to herself. Leon and Gabriela’s limbs kept moving wildly, as they broke the arcade’s DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION! records, but a strange sense of ease washed over both of them.
When the pier closed, they walked back to the parking lot and Leon put his arm around Gabriela. Her skin was slick with sweat from dancing. He squeezed her shoulder and her spaghetti strap fell down onto his fingers. He was twelve years old again, awestruck, even though they had already had sex by this point. He was turned on, yes, but nervous more. Gabriela seemed to him like a new and expansive world. When she explained the significance of, say, the fall of Reconstruction, she traced the failures of Northern Republicans to constrain the Southern Democrats to the exodus of the aspiring Black middle class in Mobile and the subsequent acceptance of poverty, poor health, and premature death. She’d seen history rippling against her own life, and this made her a worthy narrator. Leon feared that his life was too small or too bordered to satiate Gabriela.
Lost in his worries, he missed the WRONG WAY DO NOT EXIT SIGN as he left the lot and pulled out onto PCH. All four tires popped like gunshots. The seats lowered with the tire’s deflation, slowly, sitcom-esque. When the AAA guys came with their tow-truck, Leon begged them to drop him and Gabriela back on campus.
“We could even sit in the car as it’s towed,” he said. “Only ten minutes to Westwood I swear.”
The older AAA guy flared his nostrils like Leon was crazy.
“You’re crazy. That’s illegal as fuck,” the older guy said.
“And Westwood’s opposite from where we gotta go,” the younger guy, his black hair half-dyed blonde, added.
Leon looked at Gabriela, and then stepped closer to the AAA guys.
“It’s just…I’ve just never met a girl like this,” he said, quiet enough to make it seem like he didn’t want Gabriela to hear, but loud enough so that she did. “I don’t wanna blow my chances with her. You know?”
The older guy sighed and motioned Leon and Gabriela toward the tow truck.
“You’ll be up here with us,” he nodded in the direction of the dispassionate fake blonde. “We’re not supposed to do this, but I don’t want to ruin the young lady’s night.” He scanned Gabriela’s open face as he spoke.
“Thanks man,” Leon said with hands in prayer. The older guy shook his head like he had no choice but to be moved by Leon’s pleading.
As they jostled between the AAA guys on the ride back to campus, Gabriela looked through the windshield at the most starless night sky she’d ever seen, the least enchanting part of her new city.
Before she and Leon got out of the truck, she gave the guys a cash tip, which made the older guy give Leon shit for not carrying cash around and making a lady pay for anything on any date whatsoever — “even the 100th date.” But then he said he was just playing. He dapped Leon up and wished him a good track season.
“I’ll be watching out for you,” he said, smiling. “Screw SC!”
After the guys drove off, Gabriela and Leon stood in the courtyard of her dorm, pretending that Leon was simply dropping her off, like they were prudes or grown-ups. That he wasn’t going to spend the night and the morning, and then blow off a 1pm talk he’d signed up for at the politics center between some history professor and the president of a small country.
“It’s funny watching you talk to people,” she said, standing in front of her door. “You have the Ferris Bueller effect.”
“I love that movie.” Leon laughed through his nose. “What’s that?”
“Like an attitude that things could never get that bad for you that prevents things from ever getting that bad for you. Obviously it’s close to charisma or male privilege or whatever, but I think it’s something else,” she said. “You have good luck because you act like someone who’s supposed to be lucky.”
Leon didn’t know if he was flattered or offended. He hated when people made declarations about his character. He had good luck because he was nice to people. Other things, like track, went well for him because he practiced. I work hard, he said aloud, as he strained through the last lap.
He was arms and legs and motion, a body suffering. For the first time in the past seven days, he couldn’t think about Gabriela. Sprinting was all force, there was no time to think or to not think. This kind of pain demanded thinking or acceptance.
He finished, heaving, and checked the time. He couldn’t remember ever running this slow of a mile. Fuck a long run. He filled up a tub with ice, took off shirt and his shoes, and submerged.
***
A week before the mile race, Leon met his dad and granddad at a Persian restaurant near campus. It was funny seeing them together, his dad and his mom’s dad, who’d become a strange duo after his dad stopped working. They’d see movies in the middle of the day and play basketball in the park before dinner.
Leon told them he signed up for the mile at the next meet. He wanted to push himself, he said.
“Huh,” his dad said through a mouthful of biryani. “That’s new for you.”
“What do you mean it’s new for me?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? You sprint. Jump. I’ve never seen you run more than thirty seconds.” His dad dropped his fork in the rice and raised his hands up in mock surrender.
“It’s cause he’s got those calves, Al,” Leon’s granddad said, grabbing a fistful of Leon’s leg from across the table. “Those fast-twitch muscles run in our family. He’s a natural sprinter, like me.”
Leon nodded, waiting for his granddad to continue.
“But the sixteen’s a motherfucker. You can’t wing it,” he said. He leaned over the table, his white mustache only a few inches from his grandson’s face. “Stra-te-gy. Disc-i-pline. Strength.” He counted each tenet on his fingers.
“That’ll be good for you. A mental challenge,” his dad said. “You could strengthen those grades too.”
His granddad acted like this was the best one-liner he’d ever heard. He slapped the table and Dr. Pepper dribbled down the can. Leon thought about the photos he’d seen of his granddad when he was his age. Everyone said they looked like twins. Tall and broad, two different shades of brown.
“School’s never been his thing,” his granddad said to his dad. “It didn’t come easy to him like track did.”
“But track didn’t always come easy to you, Bill,” Al said, looking from father-in-law to son, then back.
“Mmm that’s true. Do you know the story?” granddad asked. Leon couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known the story. “Never forget that I didn’t even make the team my first year at Hampton, but by senior year, I was captain,” granddad said.
“I promise. I could never forget,” Leon said.
“Some people would’ve been embarrassed,” granddad said. “They think talent isn’t talent if you’re trying too hard.” He shook his head. “Of course, what you have with track is talent. The real kind. You’re lucky you don’t need to do everything I did.” He shrugged. “But with school?” He laughed.
They had all cleaned their plates. Leon and Bill got lamb, Al got a vegetable trio. Leon said he would pay for the meal by the counter. He still owed his dad $200 for the popped tires. Now, minus $47 from the lunch. But it was a principle thing. His dad still gave him $252 for his birthday last month.
“I’m not giving you a hard time,” Al said after Leon sat back down. “Please just go to class, look at road signs, and use a calendar.” He stood from the table and picked up a Styrofoam cup of cucumber salad. “We’ll see you at your meet next week.”
***
At night, Leon tried masturbating to thoughts of Gabriela, but even the hottest memories were tainted with longing. As soon as he started getting into a rhythm, he remembered the Tracy Chapman poster above her bed, the sex jokes she’d tell during sex, or the sound of her laugh. All of it made him sad, then soft. The relationship wasn’t only sex, but sex was the start of it. They fucked for the first time in the ensuite bathroom of a dorm room they were cleaning. He was standing, holding her up by the crease below the hip bones, her knees to his ribs, his palms against the flesh that rounds from the front on girls with nice big asses.
After that first time, Leon’s desire was so debilitating that he assumed Gabriela felt the same. The air around her felt thick, though the weather was dry, and buzzing, though they were alone. He was certain this desire, love, yearning, lust, whatever he called it as his mind clung to her, was as much of a fact as his 200-meter record. The question of mutuality did not occur to him. No. What existed between him and Gabriela was not a feeling but a tangible thing. A truth.
When his 6:00 a.m. alarm woke him up five days before the mile race, Leon knew he would not be able to walk thirty minutes across campus. The heaviness of his limbs scared him. In the shower, he did not touch his assortment of oil cleansers and water-based cleansers, his blue loofah or even his washcloth. He lifted his face to the water, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. The streams of hot water let him believe that he was barely crying.
He got back into bed without moisturizing and opened his laptop. He scrolled through the Abramovich Family Facebook page where, as of a few months ago, a distant relative in Minsk, Rosa Abramovich, had convened all the Abramoviches she could find on the internet for a permanent digital family reunion. Last week, Rosa had posted a mini biography of Leon to the group, which detailed his track records under his high school yearbook photo. 34 relatives he did not know loved the message. Aleksandr Abramovich, whose profile photo was a shih tzu wearing sunglasses, commented, “Nice. He resembles the portraits I’ve found of Yehuda Abrabanel, Moroccan rabbi of the 13th century and indubitably a common ancestor of us all.”
In the two weeks since Gabriela broke up with him, Leon spent a few hours each day scrolling through the Abramovich Family Facebook. Leon felt decently close to his immediate family, but lacked a connection to – and most of the time, an interest in – the plights of his ancestors, “his peoples.” He envied how Gabriela saw herself as intimately bound up in the history of her family, her ancestors, the land, the South, the country, Black people past present future, everything. She would talk about the hauntings of the past, like ghosts grasping soil, and it didn’t sound woo woo. He believed her. How meaningful that must feel, Leon thought. How never lonely that must be.
Leon didn’t find transcendence in the Abramovich Family Facebook group, but it did give him a ritual. Foregoing practice, regular showers, class attendance, and friends, the page was his only post-break up habit. While he scrolled, he felt a familiar low-level curiosity, a glimpse into his eventual emergence from the grief of the breakup. Maybe he would be himself again soon.
After checking the page for new members – a surgeon in Boston, a researcher in Moscow, a teacher in London – he would inevitably return to the profile of his third or fourth cousin, Chaia, an archaeologist from Mexico City. She was a social archaeologist (like a friendly dentist or an irritable professor, Leon thought), interested in unsettling contemporary conceptions of ancient civilizations, according to her university bio. A few months ago, she won an international prize for unearthing the tombstones of an ancient matriarchal society in Costa Rica. Rosa, of course, immediately posted this accomplishment.
Leon was drawn to Chaia’s blog, which read more like a diary chronicling her digs. All the entries Leon read – and Leon had gone back years – came back to this idea that the past is nothing like we think it is. “Look at this calendar, cuts on stone, look at this jewel, look at this luscious tomb,” she wrote.
“Life in the ancient world was more brutal, more beautiful, and much stranger than we could possibly imagine,” she wrote the summer after graduating university, when she was still an assistant to an older archaeologist. “I will probably never truly get it, not even after decades of digging, but I want to hold more proof of it in my hands.”
In a couple days, she would be embarking on a dig in Portugal alongside a group of “starchaeologists” she’d admired for as long as she could remember. The group was looking for ancient objects that indicated leisure – things like games, toys, and crafts.
Leon wasn’t particularly interested in the details of the dig or Chaia’s awards, but he liked the idea of archaeology. Digging, that was real work. Straining the body in the service of history. What the hell is running, in circles, as fast as you can?
At 9, Leon texted Snick. Coach I’m so sorry, I completely overslept, but I think I needed the rest. My body’s not used to all this distance training. Can still come to your office to check in/ice/cross-train today if you think I should?
Then he walked to the campus café to get an iced coffee. From the back of the line, he saw Gabriela at the front, ordering a caramel latte with whole milk. She had changed her hair since the last time they spoke, three days after she ended things, when he texted her to come over maybe and she did. She had changed her hair since then, from knotless braids to blowout. He wondered if the aesthetic shift signified an emotional one, but then he considered the chicken-or-the-egg of it all. Did she change her hair to reflect a new post-break up embodiment (freedom? grief? fatigue?) or did she change her hair to trigger some new feeling?
He ached for her to walk toward him from the counter where she stood adjusting her drink – syrup, creamer, extra baggie of sugar. Instead, he ordered a cold brew and joined her. She said hi with a smile and a raise of the eyebrows, as if it was his responsibility – because he had a dick? because he was a hot guy on the track team? because of some social formula he thought they had renounced when she said I love you, first, while they were eating bagels on the bleachers – to calmly approach her like she wasn’t the source of his anguish.
“What’s up,” Leon said.
Gabriela shrugged.
“Just class, 9:30 medieval feminist folklore,” she said. “Why aren’t you at practice?”
“I’m running the mile at the next race actually,” he said without hesitating. “So I basically just do distance training on my own.”
Her eyes widened.
“Really?”
“What?”
“You’re running the mile? I didn’t know you could run a whole mile.”
He smiled. “I could probably work on my stamina.”
“Funny,” she said.
The barista called his name and he picked up his drink. She handed him a straw. He looked at her barely-coffee concoction.
“I think you’re the only one who drinks cow’s milk at this school,” he said. “I respect the anti-assimilationist sentiment.”
“Dairy as an act of resistance against big oat,” she said, tipping her head down and raising her free hand like an Alabama cowboy. Leon was annoyed that she seemed calm so, resentfully, he didn’t laugh or respond.
She took a sip and pulled out her phone. “I’ve gotta go though. I’ll see you.”
“See you later?” he said, almost out of habit, but mostly like a test.
She looked at him quizzically. She was an expert at exuding grace and aggression at once.
“Bye,” she said, and walked out of the coffee shop.
Slurping, he sat on a bench outside and watched people pass by. No one was wearing long pants, even though it was February. He’d never lived in another city and he couldn’t imagine it. Both of his parents were born here too, and all four of his grandparents spent at least half of their lives here, even though his dad’s parents fled the antisemitism of Stalin’s regime and his mom’s parents fled segregated Alabama, facts that usually felt distant and outside of him, until he’d read some line in a book or a kid in class would say something stupid, and then suddenly, a heaviness or an alertness would seize him.
He felt guilty sharing these thoughts with Gabriela. His life was pleasant and easy. Nothing his parents or grandparents endured was his business. He refused to hold up their suffering like a trophy of his own. But Gabriela didn’t get his guilt. One night in bed, Leon told her a few of the family stories that had scared him as a child, stories of burned homes, raided homes, uncles found on trees. After speaking, he felt ashamed.
“But I’m fine,” he said. “I’m lucky.”
Curled in a ball, she countered his despondence with a memory. Leon closed his eyes as Gabriela spoke and imagined her stories on a screen. In his head, he added his own details about her life, filling in the gaps she didn’t share.
Every weekend from age thirteen to when she went off to college, Gabriela worked at a stable thirty minutes outside Mobile. She was an only child and the family didn’t have much money. Any day Gabriela could get away from the house gave her mom a few hours to lie down, read a magazine, and fuss around with the dried-out garden on the porch. Leon pictured the stable: bare-boned, Black and country, dusty horses. Gabriela would teach little kids – practically toddlers – how to bridle and trot around the dirt track. As she got older, she taught the middle school girls and then the high school girls. In addition to mall money and here-and-there-help-mom-with-groceries money, Gabriela got to ride Pigeon, the moodiest horse of the bunch, under the instruction of the stable owner, old Ms. Bette who could make a horse listen with a feather tap of the heel.
Gabriela loved when the wind loosened her ponytail holder at the nape of her neck. Her braids slashed down her back at the rhythm of Pigeon’s canter. After a day of riding, she felt lighter. Back at home, mom seemed sweeter.
Her story soothed Leon, even though he had added his own bits and pieces. Is that theft? Cheating? Or just the mind behaving naturally? The more she shared the more unfamiliar she became – the truth that they had only known each other for a few months superseded the truth of his boundless attachment to her. He dismissed the possibility that he didn’t understand her, and asked if she missed home. She nodded.
“And between the two of us, I think I’m the lucky one,” she whispered to Leon.
They fell asleep, knees and foreheads meeting, a lopsided oval.
As he finished his cold brew, he thought of Rosa, Aleksandr, Yehuda Abrablahblah, Chaia. Al, Granddad, his mom. Gabriela breaking up with him was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. He did not care about this mile, his future, the wonder of ancient civilizations, the suffering of his ancestors. This was the greatest injustice he had endured: coffee shop pleasantries with the love of his life.
Snick texted him back. Tsk tsk tsk Abramovich. Rest …. or sloth?
***
Leon got to the track ten minutes late on the day of the race. He saw the distance guys on his team warming up by the locker room. The Texas team’s guys were doing high knees by the bleachers. None of them looked like him. From across the field, they looked like a rattling of bones.
During warm up with his team, he kept noticing the other guys’ bodies. What was it like to move around in those small things? Vulnerable, probably, barely a cushion between the self and the world. His body was hard but padded. He reached six feet in seventh grade, then kept on going. In middle school, his friends, mostly white, mostly jealous, said he looked like a bouncer. You’re gonna be a bouncer when you grow up, they said.
He saw his dad and granddad walk from the parking lot and sit in the bleachers. He waved from the field. Leon always ran better when friends or family were in the crowd. It had little to do with their love and support, and more to do with a fear of embarrassment. This anxiety wouldn’t push him from fifth to first but it could make the difference between third and second.
After warming up, Leon went to do his series of good luck stretches on the field. He knew he was supposed to stretch before warm-ups, but that never felt right to him. Lying on his back, his left leg pretzeled over his right thigh, he opened his phone and scrolled through the Abramovich Family Facebook page. Rosa had added a new member, a twenty-something in New York named Ray. She wrote fervently about all the good Ray was going to do in private equity. Leon briefly caught up on the new posts before checking Chaia’s blog. It was the fourth day of her Portgual dig, but she had already shared hundreds of words about the trip.
The weather was hotter than forecasted and the starchaeologists worked with a discipline she hadn’t seen before. Digs were supposed to be fun, the culmination of months or years of research and mapping behind a screen. On the handful of other digs Chaia had gone on before, including those with senior archaeologists, speakers blared the Top 40 songs in Greece, Turkey, or Mexico, and the team took beer breaks before returning to the site. Chaia considered herself studious as a researcher. The drudge of work at her desk made the dirt sweeter, like holding cake in her bare hands or smelling distant coffee grounds. The digs themselves were always the best part of her job, perhaps the most rewarding thing in her life.
But the mood on the Portugal site was unlike anything she’d ever seen. The head archaeologist was going through a divorce. His wife, an English professor at the university, had had a yearslong affair with his colleague, the number two starchaeologist on the team. The group still had to follow through with the trip, but the love triangle created a tense and awkward mood. The head archaeologist was committed to proving his dominance, particularly in relation to his wife’s lover, and his insecurity bled into his treatment of everyone else. The environment was competitive and stifling. There were no speakers. Anyone who wanted to listen to music wore individual headphones.
For Chaia, the most junior of the group, the dig was supposed to give her the opportunity to learn from glamorous archaeologists who could teach and mentor her. Instead, she felt like a nuisance slowing everyone down. She tried to quiet her disappointment. After all, she was searching for objects of leisure, she reminded herself. She should embody a playful spirit, even if some butthurt starchaeologist got cheated on. Leon wondered whether Chaia should be airing all this faculty drama on her public blog, but dismissed the thought as he kept reading.
On the third day of the dig, after hours of social unease and a dearth of findings, Chaia herself unearthed an important object: a collection of jewelry and other adornment crafted by young children. These wristbands, hairpins, and ankle bracelets were made of worthless materials compared to the jewelry found in the tombs of the upper-class. These were the equivalent of friendship bracelets or knick-knacks made at summer camp. But they were important discoveries because they documented how children – no longer glued to the mother’s breast, but not yet expected to labor as productive members of society – spent their idle time. On her blog, Chaia wrote how happy the finding made her. Not only because it meant the starchaeologists had to respect her, at least a little bit, and the calluses on her palms weren’t a waste, but because of the things themselves. The thought of tiny dirty ancient fingers making these societally useless objects filled her with excitement and curiosity. What else had these ancient children done?
Leon still did not particularly care about ancient anklets or the romantic turmoil of Chaia’s colleagues, but the way she wrote about her discovery captivated him. For Chaia, this distant relative he had never met, these buried relics were a kind of absolution. A thing – a real solid bounded thing, not an idea or a feeling or a hope – that melted the disappointment of the trip and soothed the strain of digging. He wanted to know how it would feel to be Chaia and hold these objects in her hands.
After the men’s 800, it was time for the mile. Leon and his bony competitors each got in their lane. He was still thinking about his body. He was so much bigger than these guys, but they had a fortitude he would never understand. He was in the middle lane. He bent down, right footed. Leon heard the starting gun and he was up.
He started too fast, but he expected that. His body associated the gun with uncomplicated power, the force of energy that would only be energy for another ten seconds. He led for the first 200 meters, the least indicative fraction of the race. Halfway through the first lap, he noticed his breathing. He wasn’t tired yet, but he felt the kind of awareness that preceded fatigue. He tried to focus his mental attention on his arms instead, the movement of them from back to front. Two guys passed him.
As he finished the first lap, he noticed his dad and granddad in the audience through his peripheral vision. He extended his stride and closed the distance between the guy right in front of him. At this point in the race, the ordering meant nothing. If he could stop adjusting his pace, his form, his lungs, his legs, and just stay next to this guy two lanes to his right, at least for this lap, he’d be fine. His granddad shouted that’s it Leon. He heard two claps from his dad.
As he matched pace with the right lane guy, he imagined how the conversation at the coffee shop would’ve gone if he told Gabriela that he’d ditched practice and barely left his bed since she broke up with him. That no part of him wanted to do this race that only showed that he was physically and mentally insufficient. He was only thinking, I hate this. What if he had told Gabriela that too?
Mid-way through the race, he entered a state of delirium. He replayed the breakup from a state of remove, watching it from a birds eye view. Gabriela was clear during the conversation. She said that, a few weeks prior, something switched in her. They had been sleeping in the same bed every night for months, and then one day, she woke up and no longer felt like it. That was the phrase she used: felt like it. She kept waiting for the feeling to reverse itself, but it didn’t. She broke up with him as if the whole thing had nothing to do with her. It was the switch, which flipped, and she had no choice but to respond accordingly.
“I mean, we’re not even 20,” she said. “Did you really think we were gonna get married and have babies?”
“Yes,” Leon said.
The option of pride hadn’t occurred to him. Why wouldn’t he cry, plead, beg? The sexual rabidity of their earliest days had waned, but his certainty for her had not. His love, desire, devotion, whatever, still seemed too grand to just be something inside of him. Wasn’t the intensity he felt proof of her care towards him? She shook her head as he tried to explain this.
When they had sex three days later, he tried to show her this truth without words, and only then, moving as one body, did he understand the reality of their separateness. That he could feel so much for another person, but this feeling couldn’t be shared.
The guy in the right lane passed him and he hadn’t even noticed. As he struggled to overtake him, his right leg wobbled. But Leon’s physical deterioration – and he was struggling, he did not look good – only exacerbated his dreamlike state. The pain Gabriela had inflicted on him drifted farther from him. He drifted farther from himself, both the body and the incessant narration of the mind. As he ran, formlessly, exerting energy in all the wrong directions, he passed his dad and granddad again. The last lap. Two claps. That’s right Leon.
He caught eyes with his dad, then his granddad, for only an instant. His dad looked worried, anxious not only for the results of the race but Leon’s fate altogether. Al had been so careful with his son, making sure the child played all the right sports and had all the right tutors, went to the schools where he might turn out well-adjusted and good. But what if this carefulness and attentiveness cloistered Leon? Would his son depend on him forever? What is that strange look in his kid’s eyes, eyes that looked like his own eyes, but strained and startled and somewhere else?
Granddad saw something else as he watched Leon stride past the stands. The near-heaving of his grandson reinvigorated a dormant envy in the old man – he is going to beat all these skinny bastards and this isn’t even his race, he doesn’t even try, he doesn’t know he has everything – that prompted a streak of shame. But then, in the fraction of a second as the man looked at his grandson, and his grandson saw him, pride washed away the bitterness. He was watching himself run by, nothing separate, one body trying, hurting, straining.
On the other side of the world, Chaia dug her spade into brown dirt. No more crafts that day, only small rocks and scratches on her ankles. Sweat pooled between her breasts as she kept digging, finding nothing. She was lonely. She would have nothing to say to the other archaeologists that night. They would talk over her, and she would think about the fabulous ancient people, making ugly bracelets and dying with jewels. She hit her spade against a large rock, lost her balance and fell. Blood spurted from her calf. What the hell is digging? She wanted to scream.
The distance between Leon and the right lane guy narrowed, but his run was uneven and choppy. 300 meters left. His mind came back to him. Now, he was third of seven. The pace of the first guy seemed unconscionable, but it was 200 meters. He could do 200 meters. He focused on his arms. He said to himself, “When this is over, I will swim in the ocean. I will eat a cold pear.”
Right lane guy was losing speed. He heard his granddad, faintly, from across the field. Come on Leon. A distant clap from his dad. He relaxed his jaw and focused his gaze. He listened to the rhythm of his feet until the beat quickened. He was not fluid motion, but he was pretty fast. Not one in a million, but a little special. Right lane guy was by his side, but he wouldn’t turn to look at him. Never look at your opponents in a race, granddad said in his head.
Leon focused his gaze ahead. Rounding the curve, he could hear the sharp breaths of the first guy, maybe fifteen feet ahead of him. Now run a 100, Leon instructed himself. Sprint down the line. He was even with right lane guy. Every stride, between the two of them, felt like a dance. The stomp of Leon’s foot ahead, the other guy’s foot behind, Leon’s foot behind, the other guy’s foot ahead. But he was fluid motion, finally, after 1550 meters of stomping, his legs were a wheel, rolling rolling rolling.
Leon lost the first guy ahead of him, then he lost right lane guy in his peripheral, then he lost his vision altogether. He cleared the race, not knowing if he was first or second or third or fourth because he was on his knees. He didn’t know he was vomiting in the middle of the track until he heard his voice gasping. He didn’t see Snick shake his head across the field, or hear the rushed steps of his dad and granddad, but he felt their hands on the top of his back. Their steady palms coaxed the sight back into him. He saw flecks of green and brown flutter around the puddle of bile: the remains of his sandwich, too much coffee, but also bits of dust and dirt, stuff from the belly of the earth.
Contributor Notes
Josie Abugov is a fiction writer and journalist living in New Orleans. A recent graduate of Harvard University, her writing has appeared in The Sewanee Review and elsewhere. She won the 2024 PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for debut fiction. She is from Los Angeles.
