IN THE STILLEST hour of a clear, cold Saturday in December 2009, Nataki gave up on sleep, threw back the bedcovers, and crept out of her sister Tayna’s apartment in Antioch, where she’d been encamped for the past nine months. Eight hours later, she walked into the two-bedroom condominium in San Diego’s Mira Mesa neighborhood that I’d been moldering in since her dramatic departure in the spring. Nataki’s arrival, though early, was not unexpected. In the weeks after our weekend rendezvous in Las Vegas, our nightly phone conversations had been drama-free—no dark suspicions in her words, no lingering bitterness in mine—and the better we got along at five hundred miles’ distance, the more we both yearned to live again like a normal married couple. It was time.
To celebrate our latest fresh start, we dressed up and made a reservation at one of our favorite downtown eateries. As always on such occasions, we took the better car, Glamour Puss, and I drove. We were cruising south on Interstate 5, listening to the local old-school R&B station Nataki had left the radio tuned to, when the DJ spun Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” and I found myself listening to the familiar lyrics with new ears, glancing sidelong at Nataki’s profile once or twice to see if the relevance of the Reverend’s musical message to our present situation had registered with her. She seemed lost in thought.
“‘Let’s Stay Together,’” I prompted. “How appropriate.”
“Yeah,” Nataki replied dreamily. “Al Green.”
We listened to the second verse.
“I just remembered something,” Nataki said. “Didn’t his wife come after him with a frying pan?”
“I think it was his girlfriend,” I said. “Caught him in the bathtub.”
We lapsed back into silence, but then a single pulse of laughter, a rogue guffaw, burst through my lips.
“Hit him upside the head with an iron skillet!” Nataki said, the words tumbling from her.
I cracked up. Nataki lost it. We howled together with cathartic abandon, our blended hysterics (my shrieking falsetto layered atop her percussive “Ha! Ha! Ha!”) communicating many things: remembrance, forgiveness, solidarity, hope. It was the kind of laughing jag you give yourself over to, whole minutes passing as our noisemaking tapered slowly from wails to chuckles to sighs. But the tickle soon came back, one stray giggle from me setting off another round of tearful merriment.
We parked in a public garage and walked two blocks to the restaurant, holding hands. A well-dressed cat daddy driving an immaculately detailed Cadillac Escalade slowed to a crawl alongside us and leaned toward the passenger window, ogling Nataki.
“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” he rapped. “You want a real man to take you out tonight, baby girl?”
“You’ve still got it, Kitty,” I said, squeezing her.
Over appetizers, our conversation turned serious, as it was bound to have done sooner or later. We revisited the choking incident that had precipitated our separation, and for the first time I told Nataki about Queenie’s and my night of near homelessness and the risky Spiderman stunt I’d had to pull to rescue us from our predicament.
“I had no idea,” Nataki said, dropping her eyes to her lap. “I’m sorry that happened. I’m embarrassed and ashamed. I promise, I’ll never do nothing like that again.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I grumbled.
“This time it’s different,” she insisted. “I know I’m bipolar. I know I need my medicine. I’m not going to be stupid no more.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said, softening.
“I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been away,” Nataki said. “At first I was all broken up inside, but now I feel much stronger. I realized all my life I’ve been trying to find happiness in a man. I was always looking for someone to take care of me, maybe because I didn’t get everything I needed from my dad. I even tried to do that with God. But now I realize I have to be happy in myself, because I love myself. No man can do that. Not even you. I want to be with you, Matthew, but I don’t need you no more. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m really glad to hear you say that,” I said.
Our entrees appeared: sea bass for Nataki, scallops for me.
“What about you?” Nataki asked. “Have you learned anything?”
“Not really,” I said. “I knew before you left that things would probably be okay if you got on track with your medication, and that’s still what I believe.”
A shadow passed across Nataki’s face.
“But don’t you think you could’ve done something different?” she asked.
“Sure, I could have done some things differently,” I said, “but let’s not kid ourselves—you would have had those episodes regardless.”
“I know I wasn’t myself,” Nataki said. “But I think it was also more than that. There was a communication issue. I felt like you wasn’t listening to me.”
“I didn’t drive you to attack me, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” I said.
“No, I shouldn’t have ever done that. But I was frustrated. You were so impatient. I felt as though you was always watching me and saying, ‘I see the signs! You’re going to get sick again!’ But I was taking my medication. You put so much pressure on me. Maybe if you wasn’t so impatient…”
I stopped chewing. With sudden, brutal clarity I saw the truth, a truth now so glaringly obvious that my prior blindness to it was as shaming as the thing itself. I had been impatient with Nataki, and for no other reason than pure selfishness. Eight years too late, I realized I really was that poor narcissistic bastard whose girlfriend made him saw his bike in half on national television. It was as if my soul had been dragged in front of a mirror, forced to see the reflected reality that the thing I hated most about Nataki’s illness was not that it tormented her, nor even that it put my life at risk, but that it stole my attention away from its favorite object: me. Just be quiet, take your medicine, and don’t do anything disruptive so I can go back to focusing on myself. This was the message my style of supporting Nataki—heavy on advice, light on encouragement—had sent her. People (her family, mine, the few friends I confided in) gave me credit for hanging in there with Nataki, but was hanging in there enough? Casting my mind back over the years, I saw so many moments when the word of encouragement I hadn’t spoken would have helped the woman I loved more than the word of advice I had.
My half-chewed shellfish turned to ashes on my tongue. It was a struggle to speak.
“I will try to be more patient with you,” I said.
“Thank you,” Nataki whispered.
If only it was so simple. Despite Nataki’s continuing compliance with her treatment, the next year was up and down, putting a final nail in the coffin of my slow-to-die belief that all she had to do to remain stable was obey the doctor. It was evident now that her mental state was governed not so much by what she took or didn’t take but by the vagaries of her disease. At each low point, her psychiatrist (a new one—number six since her initial diagnosis) tweaked her meds in search of the magic formula that would put the suffering behind us once and for all. If a few good weeks followed an adjustment, our hopes rose, only to be dashed by another downswing.
Then, in the spring of 2011, it appeared we might have found the magic at last. Nataki had a good day, which became a good week, a good month, two good months. Almost before we knew it she was in a groove, walking a thin line high above the Pit of Mania on one side and the Abyss of Side Effects on the other. Energetic, happy, and forward facing, she codesigned a collection of handbags and sold them online under names like Furlicious and Urban Safari. We hooked back up with our old musician friend Alejandro and wrote and recorded a bunch of new songs together, including our consensus favorite, “Heaven Can Wait”:
Heaven can wait
I’m gonna enjoy my life
Heaven can wait
I’m gonna make the most of my time
Heaven can wait while I do God’s work
He had to have a reason to put me on earth
It’s gonna be great, but heaven can wait for now.
Three good months, six, eleven. I began to think we were home free. But then Nataki started getting into altercations on the roadways and bringing vagrants home to bathe and eat—classic red-flag behaviors. In January 2012, she took another go at throttling me and earned her fifth stay in a mental hospital.
Running was a lifeline for me during this period. More than just an escape from the messy reality of my life, more than stress-relieving time alone, running fundamentally altered my perspective on bad days and hard times. When I had a big race in front of me and I felt my body growing stronger in response to training, I was equal to life’s struggles in a way I just wasn’t otherwise. By some strange psychobiological alchemy, this stoic form of play steeled me for tests that bore no resemblance whatsoever to a track workout.
Nataki seemed to recognize this and was more accepting of my devotion to exercise than she’d been in the past. There were still occasions when she wanted us to go for a picnic and I wanted to run twenty miles, but she understood that running made me strong not just for myself but also for her, and more often than not she gave me permission to run. At the same time, I had become more inclined to postpone the run and do the picnic, having reached the conclusion that The Person I Want to Be was brave, yes, but also not an egocentric prick.
Nataki’s permission would have done me little good, of course, if I was injured and physically unable to run twenty miles. But the Achilles tendon injury that had thwarted my preparations for Ironman Arizona in 2009 had finally healed up (more or less), and, now forty years old, I hungered for one last opportunity to achieve a marathon performance that fulfilled my true potential before the aging process diminished my potential any further. I set my sights on the Los Angeles Marathon, in preparing for which I applied every lesson I had learned from my many past failures. For starters, I greatly reduced my running mileage and spent more time doing low-impact activities like steep uphill treadmill walking. To further reduce the risk of injury, I waited until six weeks before the race to add speed work to my training. And, perhaps most important, I rested instead of plowing ahead whenever the wrong kind of pain announced itself in a muscle, bone, or joint.
When the big day arrived, I felt confident and ready, though troubled somewhat by a new sore spot on the right side of my pelvis. At the usual ungodly hour, I left a mouth-breathing Nataki in the Sheraton Grand Los Angeles and boarded a chartered bus that transported me and a few dozen other runners to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium, where I set about my well-practiced routine of stretching, using the bathroom, popping caffeine pills, and warming up.
My projected finish time put me in Corral A, reserved for the fastest 1,000 runners in the field of 23,000. Access to this prime bit of real estate was managed like the entrance to a trendy Beverly Hills nightspot, burly Teamsters checking race numbers and admitting participants one by one from a line that was so long it had a turn in it. At half past six, a full thirty minutes before the official start time, admission was cut off with scores of runners still waiting, myself among them. A wave of groans passed from the head of the queue to the tail as news of our exclusion spread. When it got to me I flipped out, crashing the gate and pleading with the head gorilla to make an exception for me on the bullshit grounds that I had potential prize money on the line.
“Not my decision, bro,” the gorilla said.
“So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked.
“Go to the back,” he said, pointing in the direction of Corral E, where the slowest runners stood packed together like cattle.
My mouth fell open. I had nightmares just like this, dreams of absurd race-day fiascos that I always woke up from smiling, knowing they could never happen in real life. Now here I was, very much awake and not chuckling. What to do? The best runner in the world couldn’t run a sub-2:40 marathon, as I hoped to do, if he started behind 23,000 slower runners. There was no point in even trying. I might as well just salvage the day by jogging back to the hotel and enjoying a relaxing Sunday in the city with Nataki.
But then I thought of something. My timing chip would not activate until I crossed the start line. If I waited until everyone else had cleared out, I could begin alone, and by the time I caught up with the masses they would be sufficiently spread out that I could pass through them like a slalom skier swishing between gates, and just maybe still achieve my goal.
I watched the start of the race from the sidelines, unsure if my plan was daffy or brilliant. It took a full forty minutes for the last few participants, most of them walkers, to pass over the timing mat that put them officially on the clock. I continued to wait until every last one of them had disappeared from sight, and then I started running, baffling the few non-runners still lingering about.
Before I’d even left the stadium grounds, I ran smack into an impenetrable jam of creeping humanity. Not the way I’d imagined it. I tried everything I could think of to force my way through the gridlock—juking like a tailback, using the sidewalk, calling out warnings—but the juking cost energy, the sidewalk was a minefield, and my warnings had a tendency to startle people into my path rather than out of it.
Worse, my sore groin did not approve of the unfamiliar gridiron running style I’d adopted, making its objections known through a slow crescendo of discomfort that intensified from an ominous warm feeling in the first mile to an alarming shredding sensation at mile seven. At this point, I realized two things: (1) I had absolutely no hope of surviving all the way to the finish line in Santa Monica, and (2) every step I took from here on would take me one step farther away from the hotel where Nataki, now probably enjoying a nice room-service breakfast, as I’d encouraged her to do, awaited me.
At the next intersection, I made an abrupt left turn, again baffling spectators, and winced my way to the Sheraton by dead reckoning, returning to find Nataki nibbling the last bites of her meal.
“You’re back early,” she said. “How did it go?”
“Add it to the pile,” I said.
In May 2012, Nataki and I moved back to Oakdale. There were two reasons for this relocation, our eleventh as a couple. One was the loss of my job at Competitor Group, which left us needing to reduce our overhead. Reoccupying the home we’d been renting out at a loss for four years was the obvious way to achieve this objective. The other reason was Nataki’s declaration, made around the same time, that San Diego was cursed.
Maybe so. But if San Diego was cursed, Oakdale was too. After the move, Nataki entered a lengthy period of being consistently not quite right—able to function in the world but caught in a fixed mood of sour aggrievedness. She spoke often about “cutting ties” and did so in a variety of ways—closing her Facebook account, changing her cell phone number, shutting herself inside the house. Even the church became a source of vexation, Nataki often complaining that it was now “all about money.” The big problems of the world—war, poverty, disease—weighed on her personally, as though God had quit the throne and handed her his staff, saying, “Here, you deal with it.”
This fraught equilibrium was in some ways even worse than Nataki’s many past nosedives toward full-blown psychosis, for, as awful as these were, the crash landings they led to at least brought about legal and medical interventions that created an opportunity to try something different. I began to think that any change in her current so-so mental state, either for better or for worse, was preferable to more of the same.
As they say, be careful what you wish for. On a Friday morning in the autumn of 2013, apropos of nothing, Nataki stood up from our living room sofa, raised her computer overhead, and hurled it to the floor, destroying it. I had a clear view of this random act of self-victimizing vandalism from my office. Never wholly surprised by anything anymore, I didn’t flinch. Behind my poker face and unchanged posture, however, neuronal sirens wailed and hormonal first responders mobilized, readying the muscular defenses for flight or battle.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said.
Since the move, Nataki and I had taken up the habit of walking two miles together (with Queenie) every morning. This daily ritual was one of the little ways I was trying to do better, and it had the side benefit of teaching me that a little exertion sometimes took the edge off Nataki’s agitation—and also that if violence did occur, I was safer outdoors than in. Nataki accepted my invitation to take some fresh air, but within minutes of our setting out on the bike path that encircles our development she was raining fists to the sides of my head. Using my forearms as shields, I stood my ground, hoping she would tire herself out before she knocked me silly. A cracking blow to my left cheekbone caused me to rethink this strategy. I took off like a buckshot stag, zigzagging through the neighborhood to frustrate pursuit while summoning Oakdale’s Finest with my phone.
The dispatcher asked for Nataki’s current whereabouts. To ascertain them, I made my way to a gap in a border wall at the end of our cul-de-sac that afforded an oblique view of the house. I hadn’t been there ten seconds when the garage door slid open and our beleaguered Meep Meep backed out. I reported this information to the dispatcher and then continued to narrate as Nataki drove off with such ferocity that the car itself seemed angry. I began to look around for a hiding place. Finding none, I hustled in the direction that help would most likely come from, a broad road that intersected with our block’s main cross street at a traffic circle.
Nataki came screeching into the roundabout, spotted me easily, and took aim. I froze in disbelief as the car crossed into the oncoming traffic lane, hit the curb, and continued its deadly approach on the sidewalk. I leaped behind the only protection available, a wispy sapling whose trunk was scarcely thicker than my wrist. Behind me stood a wall too high to scale. The car roared to within inches of my navel before skidding to a halt. Through the windshield I saw a familiar stranger, her face molten with hate. The car reversed hard, gashing deep divots into the grass verge, and came at me again. A passing motorist slowed to rubberneck but did not stop to render aid.
After a third aborted attempt to pin me to the wall, Nataki executed a savage 180 and roared back to the roundabout, where she raced around and around like a clown-car driver negotiating a tiny circus track, nearly T-boning a neighbor who rolled through on an errand for milk or tampons or whatever. Not a moment too soon, a police SUV came into view. I leapt and waved like a man on the roof of a burning building. Having gained the officer’s attention, I pointed frantically at the revolving Honda, which just then was breaking its orbit of the traffic circle and finding a new target in the police vehicle itself, screaming down the center of the road with one pair of wheels on either side of the double yellow.
Fifty feet from collision, the cop slammed his brakes. Nataki, thank God, did the same. The cop scrambled out of his SUV and took a few cautious steps in the suspect’s direction. Nataki, meanwhile, exploded out of the Meep Meep and charged the cop, screaming, “Shoot me! Go ahead!”
You don’t know for sure that you would give your life for a person until you have the opportunity. I rushed at the policeman from his right flank, whether intending to tackle him or to get between him and Nataki, I couldn’t say; there was no thought involved.
“No!” I screamed, my voice cracking.
Under attack from two sides, the officer gripped his sidearm with his right hand as a warning to me while extending his left palm toward Nataki.
“Stop!” he bellowed at both of us.
Something about the stentorian authority with which this command was uttered seemed to reach Nataki, and she gave up her kamikaze advance, permitting me to do the same.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” the cop added in a different tone. “I don’t like shooting people.”
Nataki submitted docilely to being cuffed and stuffed while several more of our neighbors, their motorized transit from one side of the roundabout to the other stalled by our salacious performance, looked on with undisguised schadenfreude. The policeman transferred Nataki’s keys to me, and I drove the Meep Meep home, feeling sorry for the poor thing, which had seen too much.
The county psychiatric hospital, our old haunt, had acquired new owners and management during our time away. Alas, it had not acquired a new standard of care. As before, Nataki was little more than warehoused there—fed, sheltered, and kept occupied for the legally mandated seventy-two hours and then released with no meaningful change in her treatment, hence no hope for change in her life outside.
And so it was that, a few weeks after her release, Nataki went off again, and at the worst possible time, when I was stark naked, drawing a warm bath after a chilly December bike ride. She accused me of plotting against her with our neighbors in some ill-defined way, discerning a malign secret code in a couple of my behavioral ticks.
“You be playing games,” she snarled, jabbing a finger at my pink bare chest. “I know what you be up to with your [here she sniffed the first and second fingers of her left hand, as I often do after eating] and your [here she pulled at an eyebrow with the same digits, as is my habit when concentrating], but it ain’t gonna work.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said with forced breeziness. “That’s just the puppet master spirit trying to control my body. You’re not the only one he’s after, you know.”
This was a lie (as far as I knew), but tactically adroit. Deprived of the expected cue to escalate, Nataki cooled down a few degrees. Having gained an inch, I went for a mile. Using the same jocular tone, I ordered her to take off her own clothes and join me in the tub. To my great relief, she complied. We stepped into the steaming froth and sat down facing each other from opposite ends, our bent legs intertwined. A second later, Nataki’s hands were around my neck.
I’d seen this movie so many times before that I made no immediate effort to pry Nataki’s talons from my throat. Instead I passively observed the situation from an upper balcony of my mind and wondered whether my wife really would kill me if I let her. When I felt the two sides of my esophagus come into contact with each other, I had my answer.
Instinct took over. I ripped Nataki’s hands away from my bruised larynx and burst out of the bath, grabbing the cell phone I had prudently positioned on the tub’s lip. Even with my life at stake, I just couldn’t bring myself to streak cock-flapping through the neighborhood for help, so instead of dashing toward the staircase and escape I scrambled inside the water closet, slamming the door behind me and pasting my body against it. Then suddenly, Nataki’s shoulders and fists were thundering against the flimsy rectangle of low-density composite wood, forcing it open an alarming inch or two with each manly blow.
My defensive efforts were compromised by the unavailability of my right arm, which was employed in the task of making my umpteenth 9-1-1 call. I was on the verge of success when an especially powerful thump to the door sent the phone flying out of my hand and tumbling in slow motion (it seemed) toward the toilet bowl. My heart stopped as I watched the device clank against the seat and rattle to the floor. I scooped it up, completed the call, and, like a quarterback barking out signals to his teammates amid the roar of a hostile stadium crowd, described the pickle I’d gotten myself into, every third word drowned out by Nataki’s banging.
“Sir, you’re going to have to speak more clearly,” the dispatcher said.
“For fuck’s sake!” I raved. “Just send the police! Is that clear enough?”
The pounding ceased abruptly. Wagering that Nataki had gone away only to fetch some form of battering instrument, I kept my full weight on the door. Soon I sensed her return. Then I smelled smoke. My body went cold with terror.
“Nataki!” I shouted. “Don’t do it! This is your house too! Don’t do it!”
“What’s she doing?” the dispatcher asked.
“She’s started a fire!” I yelled.
Nataki said nothing in response to my continued pleading. The stench (why did it smell like singed hair?) grew stronger. The dispatcher kept asking me what was going on.
“I don’t know!” I said.
Again I sensed that Nataki was no longer outside the door. Perhaps she had fled the burning house. If so, I prayed she had at least taken Queenie.
“The police are there,” the dispatcher said.
“They’re inside?”
“They have your wife in custody. You’re safe.”
I opened the door and peered out cautiously. Nothing. I passed through the bathroom and saw the charred remains of a lambskin rug that normally rested before the fireplace in the master retreat, now soaking face-down in bathwater. Nataki had put out the very fire she’d started. I died a little then, as I did each time I caught another flashing glimpse of the real Nataki resisting with all she had the insurgent forces that sought to control her.
I slipped on a pair of pajama pants and crept downstairs, where I found a policeman standing in the kitchen, scribbling calmly on a notepad, his partner having already led Nataki outside. Turning in the direction he faced, I was jolted by the sight of a lurid orange stain covering nearly half the family room carpet in a wild snaking pattern. Observing my reaction, the cop silently pointed toward the kitchen island, upon which sat an empty bottle of Sriracha.
This one was a real head-scratcher.
Christmas must be peak season for incidents of this sort, for the county psychiatric hospital had no free beds—an inconvenience that, in retrospect, I consider a blessing in disguise, possibly more. After some calling around, Nataki was transported to a facility in Fremont, some ninety minutes away, where we’d lived briefly after her first involuntary confinement. Per routine, I drove there the next evening for visiting hours. Both outside and inside, this institution had the same depressingly Soviet look and feel as every other psychiatric hospital I’d had the misfortune to inspect. There are cancer treatment centers as comfortable and lavish as a beachside resort, addiction-recovery clinics so posh they make you almost wish you were addicted to something. But mental wards are universally low budget and dismal.
I checked in, made my way to D Ward, where adult patients were kept, and announced myself at the reception desk.
“Your wife is in Room 215,” said the smiling young Indian woman who sat behind it.
I found Nataki’s quarters at the end of a long hall. Empty. I returned to the front desk.
“She’s not there,” I said.
“Oh, she may be with Dr. Khan,” the receptionist said.
This was another bit of luck. I had come in the hope of gaining an audience with whoever was put in charge of Nataki’s treatment.
“Perfect! Nataki wanted me to sit in on that,” I lied. “Which office is Dr. Khan’s?”
The receptionist gestured. I hastened to the door indicated, gave it two quick raps with a knuckle, and opened it uninvited. Nataki was there, seated in a plastic chair against the near wall, facing the interior. The doctor, a jowly man in his midsixties, sat in a reclining desk chair on wheels, facing Nataki—and me. His basset-hound eyes widened as I entered.
“Sorry to barge in like this,” I said. “I’m Nataki’s husband.” (The doctor’s eyes widened further.) “I was hoping I could maybe join you.”
“I don’t want him here,” Nataki said. “He’s the enemy.”
“Listen,” I said, still addressing Dr. Khan. “Let me just say one thing. Nataki has been hospitalized seven times since 2004. Seven. Something’s got to change. We’re chasing our tails. There must be a different option we can try—a stronger drug, a combination of drugs, I don’t know. All I know is I was almost burned alive last night. Nataki nearly got herself shot—and not for the first time. You have no idea what we’ve lived through. Please help us. Please. We’re losing hope.”
My voice quavered as I spoke these last words. In the ensuing silence, Dr. Khan sat as still and silent as a statue. But there was a subtle slackening of his features, a glint in those hangdog eyes, that I very much wanted to interpret as a sign I had reached him. When he did speak, he said what he had to—that, naturally, any treatment he recommended would have to be based on a full evaluation, which had not yet been completed, yadda yadda. But I left the hospital feeling encouraged, thinking that, just maybe, somebody was finally listening.
Three days later, Nataki came home with a collection of new medications, stuff that had never been mentioned by any of the psychiatrists we’d dealt with previously. It didn’t take long to discover why. Nataki’s appetite became ferocious. She ate almost nonstop, packing so many meals and snacks into her waking hours that we often ran the dishwasher twice a day. And she craved all the worst crap: pork rinds, egg McMuffins, honeybuns, ramen noodles. It was as if her new medicines had been formulated for the express purpose of making her gain weight and they just happened to stabilize her mood and her thoughts as collateral outcomes.
Suddenly Nataki’s past ten-pound medicine-induced bulk-ups seemed quaint. Her taut, athletic body expanded so rapidly under the caloric onslaught that the process was almost observable in real time, like watching a rubber raft inflate. Her weight literally doubled over the course of several months. But the drugs did in fact stabilize her mood and thoughts. Not every day was a good day, but her bad days weren’t so bad anymore and she no longer had bad weeks and months. As vain as the next person, Nataki hated getting fat, but as she told me after stepping off the scale one day, “It’s better to be fat and in your right mind than skinny and out of it.”
Amen.
Around the same time Nataki achieved lasting mental stability, the groin injury that had taken me out of the LA Marathon in 2012 and that dogged me for two years afterward finally went away on its own, for no clear reason, like every other chronic injury I’d ever had. As usual, I took advantage of my restored health by stepping up my training and looking for races to do. But this time was different. With my hair graying and my testosterone levels declining, I had given up on chasing the perfect race, accepting the hard fact that it was just too late.
Far from triggering a midlife crisis, my abandonment of the quest that had defined the second act of my life as an endurance athlete freed me to experience running in different ways. Instead of numbers I chased adventure and discovery. I ran a marathon in a wildlife preserve in Kenya, sharing a racecourse with giraffes and zebras and African wild dogs. I participated in a couple of multiday team relay races, finding unexpected joy in the mixing of running and sleep deprivation. I even broke a vow and jumped aboard the ultramarathon bandwagon, running the American River 50-Miler in northern California (and getting lost one mile from the finish line, true to form).
Next up was the 2016 Lake Chabot Trail Run, a laid-back event in the San Francisco Bay Area that I did as a low-expectations lark, sort of like my first date with Nataki. My mind-set going into it was the harder, the better, and so I chose the longest option from a smorgasbord of distance offerings that ranged from five miles to fifty kilometers. The day before the race, Nataki and I boarded Queenie, drove seventy miles west to Castro Valley, checked in to a Holiday Inn, and went out for Thai food. In the morning, I kissed Nataki’s untroubled brow and drove a short distance to Lake Chabot Regional Park, where at eight thirty a hatted gentleman with a passing resemblance to Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame raised an air horn overhead as 299 pairs of eyes watched him.
I felt utterly calm, my once-crippling prerace anxiety a fading memory. The thing that cured me, it turned out, was not any particular technique but simple repetition. Like an actor with extreme stage fright who finds a remedy in his five-hundredth performance, I just kept doing the thing I feared until it was too damn familiar to be scary anymore. Also, by this point in my life, I had survived worse traumas than the pain of endurance racing. And, again, I had my new attitude—I was racing for thrills, not to purge ancient regrets.
The horn blared, and I set off at about the same pace I might have chosen for an easy solo run on any old Wednesday at home. After some initial jockeying I found myself behind fifteen or twenty faster starters. (Okay, it was seventeen—I counted.) Some of these runners, surely, were contesting the lesser distances, but it was impossible to know for sure. All of that would sort itself out in due time. Sticking to my plan, I made no effort to move forward, covering the relatively flat, paved first mile of what was advertised as a mostly off road and murderously hilly course in a nose-breathing 7:44. A few hundred meters farther on, we veered right and plunged into the woods, kicking up dust on a wide dirt path that canted steeply upward. I found a happy medium between slowing down to keep my effort steady and keeping my pace steady at the cost of greater effort, and the result was that I picked off a handful of the seventeen on the way to the top.
A jarring descent down the hill’s precipitous backside brought us to a split. A lead group of six runners, who’d evidently chosen the five-mile distance, stayed on the Cameron Loop, which curved to the left, back in the direction we’d come from, as the rest of us made a hard right and rattled over a narrow wooden footbridge that dumped us onto the Live Oak Trail. Almost immediately, we began another ascent. Up and up we went on a rutted track that afforded no view of a summit that just had to be around the next bend but never was. A handful of the runners still ahead of me were reduced to a walk. Among those who kept running was a wiry man close to sixty who spoke as I glided past his left shoulder.
“This is a lot harder than last year!” he said almost cheerfully. I laughed politely, unsure what he meant. Had the course changed or had he?
At last I reached the top, where I came upon a small drink station staffed by a couple of volunteers who seemed mildly put out by my failure to pause and partake, but I had plenty of raspberry flavored Tailwind left in my hand flask and a target in front of me, a tall figure running shirtless in long-sleeve weather. My eyes were still on this runner’s exposed back when, about a mile farther on, a runner who looked almost young enough to be my son came prancing toward me with the grace of a gazelle, having already reached the turnaround point at 6.55 miles (or one half of a half marathon) and begun the inbound portion of lap one. I acknowledged him with a small wave and was ignored so utterly that I ran on half-doubting he’d even seen me.
Shirtless Guy proved far more sociable when I caught him shortly after he and I circled the traffic cone that marked the turnaround.
“Are you in the half or the fifty?” he asked.
“The fifty,” I said, wondering how he knew I wasn’t entered in the 30K or the marathon. Then again, I was equally certain the gazelle ahead of us was also running the 50K. Call it a runner’s sixth sense.
Running down the big hill was as challenging as coming up it had been, but in an entirely different way. If ascending it was a grind (lungs clawing for air, calves straining against gravity), descending it just plain hurt (toes jamming into the fronts of my shoes, thighs clenching like fingers gripping armrests on a nose-diving passenger plane to keep my knees from buckling). By the time I reached the bottom, I had arrived at the conclusion that running downhill was in fact worse than going up, only to change my mind after I crossed the footbridge and started up the hill that led back to the bike path.
I met the gazelle a second time on my approach to the start/finish area, his lead having expanded to more than two minutes. Once again he displayed an almost superstitious-seeming refusal to acknowledge my existence, which did not bother me. Some runners just turn into cyborgs when the gun goes off.
The big hill was both taller and steeper the second time around—I was sure of it. I understood now what that older guy had meant when he said the race was harder this year. About halfway up I encountered a photographer crouching behind a bulky Nikon, who informed me as he snapped my picture that the leader was only thirty seconds ahead and struggling. I had my doubts, given how he’d looked just fifteen minutes earlier, but when I came around the next bend, there he was. The now inevitable dethroning occurred just before the turnaround, where I mumbled a word of encouragement as I claimed first place. Expecting no response, I got none.
At the big hill I made the unhappy discovery that my legs were destroyed—so damaged by prior descents that I could no longer control my speed, rumbling down the fissured trail like a runaway eighteen-wheeler, brakes shot, one false foot-plant away from a high ankle sprain. At the bottom I hazarded a look back, hoping to not see the gazelle but unsurprised that I did. Cyborgs don’t go down easy.
I crossed the footbridge a fourth time and began to ascend the wooded Cameron Loop hill. A miniature devil appeared on my left shoulder (at least that’s how I remember it) and whispered in my ear, tempting me to walk. Even champion ultrarunners take tactical walk breaks on tough climbs, but this was only my second ultra and I remained steeped in the norms of road racing, where walking is surrender. To avoid this embarrassment, I slowed my running pace to the point where it would have been faster to swallow my pride and walk. Realizing this, I went ahead and walked, but walking felt so wrong, so close to cheating, little different from turning around before the turnaround cone just because nobody’s looking, that after a few dozen hurried paces and another fearful glance backward (no sign of the gazelle, but I was in the trees now and couldn’t see far) I resumed running.
The ensuing descent deposited me once more on the paved path—the part of the course most conducive to fast running. My brain told my legs to speed up, and my legs did nothing. It was like turning the key in the ignition switch of a car with a bad alternator. Suddenly I felt as if I had neither slept nor eaten in two days. The devil appeared again on my left shoulder, pitching a new idea. I was one mile away from the start/finish area, and also a mile away from completing a full marathon. To finish out the fifty-kilometer distance I had signed up for, I would have to turn around and run the five-mile loop that others had chosen as their full race distance. But if I crossed the finish line instead (the devil pointed out), I would be the winner of the marathon and I would also be out of my misery. Not a bad bargain. Sure, I would hate myself a little for doing less than I’d planned to, but I was miserable, and (the devil reminded me) I wasn’t running to prove anything anymore but for giggles. The decision was made: I would bail out.
It was now past eleven o’clock in the morning. The day had warmed and the path was crowded with joggers and hikers and dog walkers and capering kids. I threaded my way between them, calling out the occasional feeble heads-up, drawing curious second looks from those who noticed the race number pinned to my shirt. I came around a curve and spied my destination. My deliverance.
Suddenly my vision turned inward. A series of images flashed before my mind’s eye, reeling backward in time. I saw myself abandoning the 2012 Los Angeles Marathon with a groin injury, quitting the 2009 Magic Mountain Man Triathlon after getting lost a mile from the finish line, abandoning the same year’s Orange County Marathon at the halfway point, walking at mile twenty-three of the same year’s Boston Marathon, scratching from the 2002 Boston Marathon with a knee injury, walking parts of the 2000 Long Beach Marathon, tearing off my race number in disgust at mile nineteen of the 1999 California International Marathon, and finally, but also firstly, intentionally missing the start of the 1988 Hanover Invitational boys’ 3200 meters.
My vision swung outward again. Fifty feet ahead of me stood a ramshackle finish arch hanging over a grassy area to the left of the path and linked to it via a makeshift chute fashioned from metal stakes and plastic rope flags. Twenty feet closer, in the center of the path, sat the traffic cone that marked the turnaround.
This is the second and final call…
I circled the cone and kept running.
Despite the spontaneity of my decision to continue, I had the presence of mind to glance at my watch when I made the turn: 3:28:51. When the gazelle passed me coming the other way, grimacing, looking as though he were running in prison shackles, I checked it again: 3:29:35. I had ninety seconds on him.
Five miles to go.
In training, I regarded this distance as so trivial that it wasn’t even worth the bother of lacing up my running shoes for; seven miles was my minimum. Now the same distance seemed galactic, unfathomable. I checked my watch obsessively, convinced by the Jupiter-gravity heaviness of my body and my glacially slow approach toward the joggers and hikers and dog walkers and capering kids before me that I was losing speed, but in fact I wasn’t. Yet.
One last hill: 0.64 miles long, 240 feet high. It might as well have been El Capitan for all the hope I had of getting over it. But, as I began to slog my way up, I felt an unexpected unburdening, a slight but difference-making buoying, like a weight-room spotter’s gentle assistive push on that last rep, and it was then I knew I was going to make it.
The final mile of the Lake Chabot Trail Run 50K was as hard as any mile I have ever run, but I relished it, because at long last I was conquering hard—not coasting to easy victory or succumbing to my suffering as I had so many times in the past but suffering with the certainty of victory, and it felt as good as I had always believed it would, good in a way there’s no word for, a secret-menu joy that many people don’t even know exists: the sublime pleasure of defeating pain—of mastering self.
When I crossed the finish line, not a soul was present. A few race-related persons milled about the general vicinity, but no clapping spectators lined the chute, no local journalist jotted down my name and hometown, no smiling race volunteer greeted me with a bottle of water or a finisher’s medal. The moment I stopped, I experienced an urgent need to vomit, but nothing came up. I wandered about dazedly, not sure what to do with myself. When the gazelle finished he shook my hand graciously and we had a nice friendly chat.
Eager to get back to Nataki, I dragged my erstwhile adversary to the popup tent where we had received our number bibs in the dark several hours earlier to see about our awards. I got a coffee mug for winning the 50K and a medal for winning the men’s forty-five to forty-nine age group. Mitch (as I now knew him) got a medal for winning the men’s thirty to thirty-four age group. We shook hands again and I hobbled toward the parking lot.
Inside Glamour Puss 2 (Nataki’s year-old Tesla), I stared vacantly out the windshield for a minute or two before dropping my forehead to the steering wheel, as though I were the lone survivor of some terrible disaster and the initial shock had just worn off. So this was what redemption felt like: Relief. A great big spiritual exhalation. An invisible load set down and left behind. The sweet emancipation of letting go. For once my body, my mind, and my luck had held up on the same day, and the experience changed everything, redefining all that came before. Every failure, every mishap now seemed necessary to this final outcome, all stepping-stones to here.
Perhaps I could have lived the second half of my life in perfect peace without this experience, but I am immeasurably grateful that I won’t have to. They say it’s the journey that matters, not the destination, and that’s mostly true. My long pursuit of full and final athletic redemption served the purpose of making me a stronger person even without delivering a single race performance that I was wholly satisfied with. But there is something to be said for actually getting where you want to go. I am confident now that for the rest of my days I will not recall the shame of the 1988 Hanover Invitational without also remembering its bookend, the 2016 Lake Chabot Trail Run.
Book end.
Indeed, if the story of my life begins on the day I discovered I was a coward, it concludes here, on the day I put a final dagger in that inner coward. We tell our stories—all of us, in one way or another—to make sense of our lives. Nataki says everything happens for a reason, but I say we find reasons for everything that happens. It is our nature to narrativize. And yet, as I unstuck my forehead from the steering wheel of Glamour Puss 2 and began the short drive back to the hotel, my life sure seemed to make sense in a way that was foreordained, not contrived in hindsight.
When I was nineteen years old and not running I read a novel by John Irving about a New Hampshire boy, Owen Meany, whose obsessive rehearsal of an odd sequence of basketball moves turned out much later to have been unconscious preparation for his heroic thwarting of a terroristic bombing (at the cost of his own life). It was a pretty good book overall, but as I read it I had a hard time suspending disbelief. And yet how different is my own story, about a New Hampshire boy, pet-named Booby, whose personal quest to “conquer hard” on the racecourse turned out to be just the sort of training he needed to not quit on the woman he loved, even if it meant going down with her?
The precise official distance of the marathon—twenty-six miles, 385 yards—converted to decimal form and rounded to the nearest hundredth, is 26.22 miles. My precise age when I met Nataki—twenty-six years, eighty-two days—converted to decimal form and rounded to the nearest hundredth, is 26.22 years. You can’t make this shit up!
For a long time I thought I needed to find courage through running for my own sake. And I did. But what I really needed courage for, I discovered, was life, and for Nataki especially. The part of my story that seems uncanny to me even today is this last part—that only after I let go of the dream of the perfect race and began to do the little things for Nataki, not just the One Big Thing, was I rewarded with the athletic experience I had desired for so long. How else can this almost-too-perfect denouement be interpreted but as a kind of fate-authored lesson, a providential reinforcement of the life priorities I had arrived at by encountering, exploring, and becoming The Person I Want to Be—through running?
But if the story of my life does end here, what about the rest of my actual life? Nataki and I are not old. God willing, we have many years ahead of us. As I arrived back at the hotel, pulling into the same parking space I had pulled out of before dawn, I found myself looking to the future in a way I hadn’t dared to do for a very long time. I saw a new story beginning, for me and for us, a story where we got to choose what happened a little more than we had the first time.
In our room I found Nataki sitting placidly on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a plush bathrobe and watching a local morning show. Seeing her, I shivered with déjà vu, not because this moment seemed to have happened before but because it had happened before, so many times.
“How did it go?” Nataki asked.
“I won,” I said.
“Really? Did you get any money?”
Two years earlier, I had come home from a local 5K with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill—the only cash prize I had ever claimed at a race. Ever since then, Nataki, to whom I’d handed over that prize, had lived in perennial hope of a second lucky strike.
“I got a coffee mug and a medal,” I said.
I showered and dressed, and we checked out of the hotel. We had plans for a night on the town in San Francisco with friends, so instead of heading east toward Oakdale we went farther west on Highway 580. Approaching the Bay Bridge, I broke a companionable silence.
“You know how we’ve always talked about driving cross-country together?” I asked.
We had. Early in our relationship, I regaled Nataki with stories of the month-long journey from Pennsylvania to California my brothers and I had undertaken in 1995, straining to convey the exquisite freedom I had felt throughout it—and not again since. Nataki liked the sound of this, of breaking out and hitting the open road, and as our lives merged it became our shared dream to bust loose one day and see America together, a dream we foretasted by visiting RV sales lots to shop for the perfect vehicle. But the thing itself was always deferred, never actively planned for. Any traveling we did, save for the occasional family gathering, centered on my racing or my work (or both). As the years went by, the dream’s symbolism evolved—what began as an exciting promise of adventure morphing over time into a desperate hope for escape. And by 2016, it was on the brink of passing over from dream to fantasy. Our RV sales lot visits continued, but they had become an empty ritual, a “Next year in Jerusalem” kind of thing.
“Yes, of course,” Nataki answered.
“Well,” I said, “I think I’ve figured out a way to make it happen.”
“Let me guess. You’re going to run a bunch of marathons.”