still shaking in some deep basement of the self. I thought of the starkness of Joan’s room, the lamp on top of the washing machine, extension cords snaking along the floor. It wasn’t right that she was living like that. I kept telling her she deserved better. She deserved the second bedroom, but she wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t even hear of it. She claimed she liked the room just as it was. She was with us temporarily, only until she could get herself back on her feet. It was time to kick her out, she’d insisted, once she started sanding the floor, rubbing herself into its surfaces.
I lay back again. This time the bar struck me as heavier, much heavier, though certainly within the bounds of another ten reps. If I opened my mind, if I thought of it as a glass stage absolutely open to everything around me, I knew I could harness the energy in the atmosphere, the elements. I knew there was enough energy in the pea on last night’s dinner plate to explode my limits. I lifted the bar. And there was Joan’s low, throaty voice: preposterous, embarrassing, and marvelous all at once. Just the thought of speaking to the dead, even if it was only speaking to the air, spit into everything that was my life. I pushed back against the roar, against doubt, stupidity, the stubbornness, you name it—anything that wanted to do me in. Ten more reps. And another for good measure. The muscles in my arms saturated and burned. The pain shredded away, as if it had left me for someone else.
The Russian stepped to the water fountain, back curled as if he were protecting it from a blow. He bent over the faucet, made clean, sipping sounds like a sparrow. Then a peculiar temptation seized me: the desire to speak. Certainly not anything profound or remotely intimate, just ... the sky tonight: isn’t it beautiful? To let him know that I hadn’t been undone by his silence, his steady work to shut me out. When I thought of the shock on his superior face!
And maybe we’d actually carry on a conversation like decent men.
I laughed louder than I’d expected, a soft bark that burred the base of my throat. I put on another forty-five for the hell of it. Oh, the weight this time: I was a column, fluted and bleached, holding up the great marbles of the Parthenon. Or better yet, the belly of heaven itself: all the souls born, died, and yet to come. But they weren’t flying around up there; I refused that. None of that ever made any sense to me. If they were anywhere, they were below us, dark and dry, stacked up side by side, like glowing rods. If there was anything like a Heaven, it was somewhere in the center of the earth, in a moist, vast envelope.
But an afterlife? Really. Every time I thought about such matters I felt insubstantial, dandelion fuzz knocked about by the wind. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about God. It just seemed self-defeating to put too much investment into something that seemed beyond, incomprehensible, infinitely larger than myself. Wouldn’t the world be in better shape if people ignored what was on the other side? As for me, every time I looked up at the sky, it brought me more trouble than not. I tried to think about hope, and my deep, deep desire to bless life, to love every living thing from apple branch to pigeon, but the harder I tried, I couldn’t push through the sludge in my head. All the while a piece of me shriveled like a freeze-burned plant, as if I sensed that my uglier thoughts were heard, if not by God, then by the soil underneath my shoes, and I was already paying in ways I couldn’t yet see.
The bar pressed deeper into my clavicle. It resisted all my efforts to push it skyward.
The Russian was gone. No one in that part of the gym, not even the guy with the handlebar mustache, who wiped down the machines, buzzing from bench to bench like some tanned, muscular bee. Even if I humbled myself to yell out for help, I wouldn’t have been heard.
If I was lucky, I’d only come away with a band of bruises on my chest. If I was less so, I’d spend the night in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder.
The sleek white blades of the fan turned on the ceiling above, a good six inches toward the windows. Its rotation calmed me, cooling the sweat on my brows. I stared at them with such fixation that I saw a face. The face of God? I almost laughed at the grandiosity of it, in spite of my pain. It was something less expected than that, though: a woman’s face. And before I named the eyes, nose, and mouth, I knew it was Joan seeing me through, Joan pulling me up the side of a building, away from the fuel leaking inside, away from the windows blowing out, one after the next. I pushed the bar as if it weighed twenty-five, not two hundred twenty-five pounds, and lay there, spent, absolutely motionless, as the Russian walked back into the room, stepped to the water fountain for another brisk sip.
“Thanks for the help, big fuck,” I said to myself.
But the buds of his iPod saved me this time.
I stood before the urinal in the locker room. I sprayed an especially deep stream of yellow against the moth cake. Two guys wandered in from the pool, stepped one leg at a time out of their royal blue bathing suits, squeezed them out at the sink. Neither would have guessed the extremity of my position but five minutes before, and there was no reason to tell them that, in spite of winning, I’d died a little death. The air smelled fetid, humid, of crusty towels and bacteria. I tasted iron in my mouth. I stepped out of my pants, certain I should have felt overjoyed at my good fortune, but I only sat on the bench. I stared at the grout lines in the floor tile until I recovered myself.
I wanted to clean them with a brush until they were white as teeth.
If there was a difference between how Joan and I looked at things, it was something like this: think of the difference between sitting on a train backward and sitting on a train forward. If you were sitting backward, by the time your eye caught on something, say, the honey locust by the fire tower, it was already in your past; it was already sucking away from you, never to be recovered. I preferred to see what was ahead. Unlike Joan, I wanted to see my future coming toward me.
I still had an hour. A whole container of an hour to use exactly how I wanted. It might have been the gift of a year, handed over to me from my Russian ancestors, wrapped like a present. I drove with impressive composure to the back of the shopping center, where I parked beside a dumpster under a mimosa (messy tree: little pink wisps on my windshield) and started walking two blocks to the east, past the other houses. Something calmed me about other lives in action: the snap of green beans broken over a bowl, a downy black spaniel rolling on her back against the grass. I was shocked and silently pleased that my mouth wasn’t dry, that my deodorant hadn’t given out, souring my shirt, making me nasty.
“The baby’s in bed,” she said, upon opening the door.
“And hello to you too,” I said, laughing, too happy to be stung.
She looked directly at me, flyaway pieces of blonde, waist-length hair sticking to her lips. She looked ready to taste it, the hard tang of its minerals, but she blew it away, a wicked smile on her face. That was all it took, and I pushed her backward inside her house (one step, two), nudged the door shut with my shoe, and covered her. At once I felt myself melt, a pat of butter in a frying pan. The top of my head crackled; I laughed, and I knew I was home.
How long had it been since I felt so large?
We fucked. Crude as it sounds, we fucked away the hour. There really wasn’t any other word for it. We moved from the hallway, upstairs to the bed, rolling and rocking, until she was sitting on my lap, and I was pushing inside her with such force that I worried she’d bleed and think I was cruel by tomorrow. Though she seemed to be entirely into it and want it that way. She kept nodding yes and yes, and we never said a word the whole time, nothing about family or friends, or any life beyond this nine by ten-foot room with the little jalousie window overlooking the lagoon.
Her
