Race Across The Sky Part 6

"Sorry, I didn't eat today."

"It's an engineered stew," Mack explained from across the circle, "for people who run thirty miles a day. You don't need any more."

"Cool," he said, sitting back down.

"Good deal."

When everyone finished, Shane spotted a bookshelf by a closed door near the stairs and went to it. It was filled with some well-thumbed books about meditation, vegan diets, reiki. And numerous copies of You Can Run 100 Miles!

Shane took a copy; his left knee cracked worrisomely as he shifted his weight. The back cover was a shot of a much younger Mack, smiling triumphantly against a mountain background, wearing yellow running shorts. His wrinkles were shallower, and his skin looked better. His eyes were just as mesmerizing. Under the photograph Shane read, "Ultrarunning is the sport for our times. Now Ultrarunning's premier trainer shares his methods for taking your body-and your life-past all limits."

He thumbed through the book with a grin.

"Prefer chick lit?" Mack asked jauntily from just behind him.

There was an awkward silence, not helped by Shane's near complete mental and physical depletion.

"It's amazing"-Shane's face spread into his most salesy smile-"what you do with people."

"s.h.i.t." Mack pushed a hand through his thick black hair. "It's amazing what you do. Selling biotechnology. Tell me, how does it work?"

"Basically, we help the body heal itself."

"How do you do that?"

"Instead of adding man-made chemicals, we use proteins that our bodies already make to cause a reaction it already knows how to. Just hasn't been doing."

Mack pointed excitedly, his finger barely missing Shane's chest. "See? That's exactly what we do. We help the body heal itself and do things it already knows how to, with a substance it already makes. You call it proteins. I call it kinetic energy. We believe in the same things."

"You think so?"

Mack raised his bearded chin. "You guys make a cure for the cold yet?"

"Nope." Shane replaced the book.

"We do. No one here's needed antibiotics for years."

"But our patients are free to leave and visit their families."

Mack locked eyes with him, nodding. So, here it was.

"Caleb has a job up in Boulder. If he wanted to leave, he'd hop a cab to the airport. He's living here because he wants to."

"He thinks he wants to. You have him running all day, sleeping four hours a night, eating twice a day. That's not a recipe for clear thinking."

Mack smiled, much more pleasantly than Shane would have supposed. "You think if Caleb was eating steak and sleeping in, he'd wake up and think, what am I doing, I want to be a consultant, and move back to New York City?"

Shane did not break eye contact; he felt like a fighter before the bell.

But Mack's face burst into a wild grin. "Come on, brother. He's happy. He's not sleep or food deprived, he's sleep and food heightened. His body is functioning in a near-perfect state, rid of the toxins of oversleeping, overeating, over-Tylenoling. You have to understand the compulsion of feeling this good. Of course he avoids anything that might try and pull him away. Once you get your body to this point, you don't stop. Trips home, different food, people telling you you're crazy, it's not the way to stay in the flow. It's great you're here. He needs you to be supportive."

"Oh, don't worry about that."

Mack looked as if he was trying to determine the extent of Shane's sarcasm. "It's great to meet you, Shane. I'll tap the keg in an hour." He opened a door beside the bookshelf, and shut it behind him.

Caleb means too much to these people, Shane realized, standing there. They would never let him out of here. He had found a home, of that there was no doubt. Whether it was a healthy home, that was the question. He looked through the back window out at the field. The older military man, John, and a large-boned woman with star tattoos stood on the gra.s.s in some kind of yogic pose, their arms raised toward heaven. Behind them the base of the mountain was cast in amethyst shadow.

And then he saw a slender silhouette walking calmly toward the house, thin amber hair slipping over his ears. And like healthy cells mutating into cancer, Shane's good feelings transformed into a thunderous resentment. He opened the back door, ran down the steps, and charged him. He felt he might be flying. When he met the yellow-shirted figure of his brother, bone thin and of sour smell, Shane shoved him with both hands.

"I've been waiting for you for hours."

Caleb looked surprised.

"You asked me to come here. You wrote to me."

"I was meditating. If I came to see you, I wouldn't be angry if you went to meditate."

"If you came to see me," Shane spat back sarcastically. "When exactly is that happening?" His voice rose into the bruised sky. "It's so incredibly now, isn't it Caleb? To do this extreme running lifestyle thing? In the fifties you'd have been riding trains and talking about individuality. In the sixties, you'd have moved to a commune. Every generation has its way to rebel against society. But it's all as conformist as working at any consulting company."

Caleb's voice came oddly even. "This isn't about conforming or not. I don't care what anyone else is doing."

"We know that, Caleb." Shane looked up to the thin branches. The summer mountain air was breathless around them. He felt so tired he could hardly believe he was still moving. He heard his words coming out of him too fast, as if whole sentences were simply syllables. "But you care about Mack. He tells you what to eat, how long you can sleep, and you do it. And you care about that girl, June."

Something in Caleb's face noticeably changed, and Shane straightened. It came to him now. The way Caleb had looked when he'd walked in and seen them talking. The way she'd looked back at him.

"Is that why you wrote to me? Because of June?"

Caleb paled. "I call her Bluebird."

"Because of her eyes."

Caleb's eyes swelled. It moved him beyond words, that Shane could see her that way.

And Shane watched the old Caleb materialize out of the blackness like a ghost. It was in the muscles around his mouth, the relaxing of his shoulders. He touched Caleb's shoulder. "What do you need? You want to get in the car? With her? Just tell me."

"I need to help her."

"With what?"

Caleb started to tremble, looking around at the aspens. "She can't breathe. Her lungs don't work. Her feet are all swollen."

"Okay. We'll take her to a doctor."

"I did that." Caleb looked up, as if pleading with the sky. "They did a blood test. There's something wrong with her genes. Mack is doing energy healing but I don't think it's working. This is . . ."

"This," Shane said respectfully, "is beyond him."

Caleb looked spectral. Shane had thought it was the physical stress he put on his body that had aged his brother so drastically, but now he saw there was more than that.

"You work with doctors," Caleb whispered. "You know about new drugs. Can you find out what we should do?"

"I . . ."

Caleb bent his forehead to his brother's. "I'll leave here to help her." He pulled back, blinking, as if shocked at having said these words out loud.

Shane stared at him, his mouth dry.

Caleb walked past him to the deck, opened the back door, and Shane followed him through the kitchen, into the main room, where some of the Happy Trails members sat by a fire drinking black beer. Together they ascended the creaking stairs.

At the landing, instead of going left for his room, Caleb turned right. At the very far end of the hall was a door. The old floors creaked underneath them as they moved toward it. Caleb hesitated, his face narrowed in concentration.

He reached for the doork.n.o.b, quietly turned it, pushed the door open. Shane took in a pale light. On the left side of the room he saw June, standing over something he recognized. She looked up, smiled shyly, waved him over. A sweet, familiar smell rose around him. He realized now that he'd caught traces of it in the air downstairs, that it had been there the whole time.

A wooden crib had been pushed against the left wall. Shane walked over slowly and peered down. Inside, a baby was sleeping. Wisps of reddish hair shimmered in the starlight through the window. She seemed very thin, and pale. She wore a yellow sleeper that was too big for her, her tiny milk white arm curved above her head as if performing an arabesque. She was, Shane guessed, maybe ten weeks old.

A sound came to him then. It stopped him. A sharp, high-pitched wheeze that pierced the air like a kettle, coming from the baby's breaths.

"This is Lily," Caleb smiled.

Shane gripped the crib's railing, watching, listening, confused.

Outside, a breeze tumbled down from the mountain, gaining speed as it headed for them, as if it intended to rattle the wooden cabin and everyone in it and strip them down to their basic cells.

PART TWO.

Orphans.

1.

On Monday morning, Shane began his first day at Helixia.

He was greeted unexpectedly at the second-floor elevator by a short, Sicilian-looking brunette wearing oblong maroon gla.s.ses over a punchy nose.

"I'm Stacey," she told him. Shane started to shake her hand. Instead, she tossed him a baseball. "You're Janelle's husband?"

"It's amazing, I know."

As they walked down the hall she waved at a few people.

"Dennis says you were a star at Orco."

"That seems overstated."

"I can see why you left," Stacey frowned. "Any company where frat boys make two hundred grand a year has to be full of a.s.sholes."

He felt unsure how to respond. She dropped him at a cubicle with a wave.

"I'm on your team. There's a weekly sales review with Dennis in half an hour. I'll pick you up."

Shane stood in his empty cube, staring at a note from IT about his computer. Leaves from a plant spiraled down the right side of the part.i.tion from the adjacent desk.

His flight home had been difficult. He had spent Sat.u.r.day night watching the Happy Trails house fill with guests. Many of them looked like other runners; some were clearly locals there for free beer. He had drunk moderately, his eyes lifting frequently toward the second floor, where he knew the baby to be sleeping. Although Caleb had spoken of going up to Boulder to see a band, he had not had time alone with him again.

"I'll leave here to help her."

The words had burned through Shane's body as he drove back to Denver. During the flight he lost himself looking out at the Rockies. They seemed alive to him, rippling and flowing with some inner force. He could make out small roads along their slopes. He imagined the overwhelming awe of the first settlers who encountered them. Which of them had dared dream that they could scale these sharp, infinite peaks? What kind of person had laid down these roads? He thought of his brother.

By the time he had landed, his exhaustion had turned into a thick syrup behind his sinuses. Janelle greeted him with jasmine tea, and they sat on their old white sofa. She had put some Internet radio on, and sleepy ambient music soothed his head. Outside their bay window, a streetlight battled with the fog.

"Is it his baby?" Janelle asked right away.

Shane watched her; the intensity behind her eyes might, he thought, be the thing that made her most beautiful. "He says no."

"What's June like?"

"Kind of mousey. But she runs these ultramarathons, so how mousey can she be?"

Janelle placed his hand on top of her belly and pressed down, and he felt their baby push back. It filled him with something like magic.

"What are the others like? Super weird?"

"A little weird, for sure. But they're nice, you'd like them. There's twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, forty-year-olds. One guy, John, is in his, like, late fifties. You know, they all work in local towns, or even up in Boulder like Caleb. They see a lot of regular people. They're not trapped in some compound." He nodded to himself, as if just realizing something. "They could leave there anytime they want to."

"They're brainwashed," Janelle p.r.o.nounced, sipping her tea. "Four hours of sleep a night? Two meals a day? Eight hours of running a day? They're all exhausted, dependent physically and emotionally, on this Mack guy. He can give them some leash, they're not going anywhere."

"Just to play devil's advocate, it seems to work."

Janelle frowned. "How do you mean?"

"They kick a.s.s in these ultramarathons."

"Well, I guess their lives are great then."

"This is good," Shane yawned, finishing his mug. "What did you put in it?"

"Tell me about the baby."