Nine

“You didn’t tell me that Remington almost drowned.” Serenata said this gently, lest it seem an accusation of betrayal. Already punished beyond reason, Tommy hardly needed to be dumped on for the deficiencies of a marriage older by half than she was.

“So he told you.” Tommy flopped her cheek phlegmatically on the flat hospital pillow. “I didn’t want to rat him out.”

If the girl had converted overnight from superwoman to slug, it was the kind someone had poured salt on. She looked as if she were melting. Even constrained by compression stockings, all four limbs had expanded, and her fingers were sausages—so tight and plump that they’d split in a frying pan. In losing its angles, her newly broad, bland face had lost its intelligence, too.

“You’re very loyal,” Serenata said. “It’s okay to be loyal to someone besides me.”

“For a while, we thought he was actually going to snuff it. Even when he started breathing again, seemed like he’d cough, and cough, till his lungs came out.” Her mouth might have been full of pudding. The sloppy enunciation wasn’t from a physical inability to form the words. Her whole person was bathed in apathy, reflected in the colorlessness of the hospital room. She didn’t speak clearly because she didn’t care—about what she was saying, or anything else.

“I’ve watched him swim. He’s a sinker. I didn’t want to mention this when I was teaching you the crawl, but there are such people. It’s body density more than technique. But don’t worry. You’re not a sinker.” She hoped the designation carried metaphorically to Tommy’s larger life, which the young woman seemed to believe was over.

“Not now!” Tommy said, with no gaiety. “I’d float like a beach ball now.”

“The fluid’s started to drain, hasn’t it?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” she said glumly. “Feels like it’s only gotten worse. This IV keeps pumping me full of more water—”

“They have to flush out the myoglobin. They did warn you that getting back to normal size could take a while.”

“They said it could take weeks. And my whole body hurts. I just lie here all day while every muscle turns to mush. I can practically hear it.”

“What does it sound like?”

“Like when there’s an air pocket in our kitchen drain. The dirty water backs up, and then a big, fat, greasy bubble burps up through the scum: blu-blub.”

“I’ve read that you can go two whole weeks without exercise before the muscles weaken.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Serenata didn’t believe it, either. “All that matters is you get well. Your kidneys are finally kicking in. You can always get fit again when this is over.”

“Uh-huh.” Tommy’s eyes were squeezed from the edema, and her glare was slitty. “Would that ‘just get well’ crap make you feel any better?”

“Of course not. Hey, what’s that?” Serenata asked. “I never noticed it before.”

Tommy flipped her wrist over, but her friend had already spotted the bumblebee. Its workmanship wasn’t quite up to the same standard—Serenata’s had been inked by a master—but the newer image was more vivid.

“I was gonna show you,” Tommy said, “but then I worried you’d think I was copying you.”

“Let’s not think of it as imitation, but as homage. I take it as a compliment.”

“Really? You’re not mad?”

“Really. I’m touched.”

Tommy pulled herself up on the pillow. “So the half Mettle is in three weeks, and if I can only get back on the road—”

“Forget it,” Serenata said. “In three weeks, you’ll count yourself lucky if you can walk to the bathroom by yourself. Forget MettleMan, and that includes June, too. Because in your shoes, here’s what would make me feel better: MettleMan is a franchise. It can trademark the name, but it can’t trademark running, swimming, and cycling—any more than I can, which is why you’re always ridiculing me, and rightly so. You don’t need the organization, or its imprimatur—”

“Imprimatur?” Tommy said with disdain.

“Its seal of approval.”

“I want the tattoo.”

“You don’t need the tattoo. You have our bumblebee.”

“I’m gonna lose all my friends.”

“Not me,” Serenata said. “And if the other members of the tri club care about you, too, they’re not going to drop you because you got sick.”

“Don’t pretend to be an idiot. If you’re not doing tri, you don’t count. You’ve been around those guys enough to know the drill. You’re in or you’re out. Now I’ll be one more slacker they make fun of.”

“But that’s creepy, isn’t it? If it’s true? And that includes me, too. In their terms, I’m a slacker.”

“I know.”

Confirmation of what she knew already still smarted. “Have any other club members been to visit?”

“Only Cherry,” Tommy said. “And even she couldn’t wait to leave. It’s like they’re afraid they’re gonna catch something.”

“They’re afraid of what they’ve got already: the capacity to join the rest of us jerk offs with one trip on a curb.”

“I feel disgusting. I can’t stand looking in the mirror—”

“Then don’t.”

“I’ve got nothing to live for,” Tommy slurred. “I wish I was dead.”

“Oh, you do not.”

“This rhabdo-whatever is all my fault. I’ve never been good enough, and I’m still not. If my thighs had been stronger to begin with, this would never have happened. It’s all because I wasn’t in good enough shape. That’s what they’ll say behind my back, too. They’ll say the problem was I was never in their league.”

“If your thighs had been any stronger, then you’d have pushed yourself to cycle even faster and longer, all to impress Sloan Wallace—and you’d still have nuked your quadriceps into toxic waste. Your only weakness was for a pretty face. Though that’s a big weakness, in my experience. Fatal.”

“But Remington was hot-looking. You said.”

“Yes. Not especially to his credit of course, but he’s nicely formed. Also, from the start, I was drawn to how contained he was—how steady he was, how focused. Concentrated, held within himself. Though this same distilled quality seems to have morphed slightly. There’s something in his face right now that I don’t like.”

“What’s that?”

“Fanaticism.” The word lingered.

“Well, you have to be a little crackers to go for a full Mettle, right?” Tommy said. “It’s like going on, you know, jihad. But unless you slob out, the only other choice is to be all medium and plain. To say grandma things like ‘Everything in moderation.’ To not go for a real run, but go jogging. To have a personality like the temperature of a baby’s bottle.”

“No, the alternative is to get a grip, my dear,” Serenata said briskly. “You got caught up in a fad, and you may not be through with the fad, but the fad is through with you. We can go back to reading scripts together. You’ve got a strong voice, and you only need to learn how to use it. You don’t need a degree for my kind of work; you just need to be good at it. MettleMan was costing you time and money. Let’s learn to make money, and at something more satisfying than swabbing floors. Then if you happen to have the spare time to do a few push-ups, fine. You think completing a MettleMan would make you special, but lots of people have completed one by now, and it’s not special. Let’s work on making you something special for real.”

Alas, it was too early for a pep talk, and it fell on deaf ears.

 

After Tommy had been home for a week, she was able to join her next-door neighbor in slow, shuffling walks that gradually lengthened to reach downtown. Getting her out of the house at least meant she put on real clothes, even if much of her wardrobe still wouldn’t fit; frumping around in shapeless nightgowns made her only more depressed. She’d managed to progress from truly desolate, to dejected, to merely forlorn. Now the resilient young woman was well on her way to a healthy disgruntlement. Preparing for the five-day video-game gig in Manhattan, Serenata felt more regretful about abandoning Tommy to potential emotional backsliding than she did about leaving Remington to fend for himself in Syracuse—which he detected.

“Did you go shopping for a job that would give you a schedule conflict for just the right day?” he inquired, packing.

“You know I didn’t, and we’ve been through this. We need the money.”

“Still—you’re glad that now you don’t have to go.”

She discounted a range of more equivocal responses before answering, “Yes.”

Putting a load of laundry away, Serenata stored three boxer shorts in his top drawer. Remington removed the three boxer shorts and placed them in his luggage.

“On the swimming segment,” she said. “Will there be lifeguards?”

His glance was flinty. “Onondaga Lake will be buoyed, with fully crewed boats at regular intervals.”

“I was expressing concern, not condescension.”

“Naturally.” Ah, the Remington dryness.

“Tommy said you almost died.”

“At many points in our lives we almost die, and pull back from the brink. I had a close call yesterday crossing the street. I wouldn’t expect you to hold that against me.”

“I would if you got run over by tempting fate.”

“Can I infer that you’ll skip the full Mettle in June as well?” His tone was pleasant.

“I told you, I’ll be there. I promised.”

“But what if something comes up? And we still ‘need the money’?”

“I said I’d be there. But as for Syracuse, Valeria is coming, so you’ll have your cheering section. I might remind you that over the years I have run, cycled, and swum many thousands of miles. Not once can I remember insisting that you go out and watch.”

Tomorrow, planning on an extra day to prepare for his penultimate feat of stamina, Remington would drive to Syracuse for three nights at the Courtyard. The hotel’s room charges would ravage the earnings of her first day’s recording, which so tragically coincided with the half Mettle. They’d sacrifice the proceeds of her second day’s work to cover the hefty entry fee for the race. Were she ever on the lookout for an investment opportunity, MettleMan would be a growth stock.

But she didn’t want to waste the evening before they were parted stewing in fiscal resentment, so when Remington raised a theoretical scenario over dinner, out of the blue, she was eager to seem game.

“Thought experiment,” he proposed. “Let’s say you’re walking alone at night in a largely deserted urban area that’s a little sketchy. A figure following behind you is making you anxious. You glance over your shoulder. It’s a man, all right, but it turns out he’s white. How do you feel?”

“Relieved.”

“Why is that?”

“I could be unlucky, but my default assumption is that he’s harmless.”

“Is that because you feel a sense of solidarity with ‘your people’? Because white folks will stick together, and would never hurt one another?”

“Hardly. I feel no sense of solidarity with white people. But blacks have higher rates of incarceration . . . Which is partly because of a rigged justice system, but still . . . I’ve heard blacks admit their fellow brothers on the street can make them edgy, too.”

“What else do you assume about our nameless white guy, absent any additional information?”

“How old is he?”

“Say, twenties.”

“And we’re talking middle class or above?”

“Sure. You’re not in South Boston. Say he’s wearing a Yale sweatshirt.”

“Which doesn’t mean he went there.”

“Which means he at least wants you to think he did. Not a big ghetto pretension.”

“Unless he’s conspicuously buff, I’d assume he’s weak.” Serenata surprised herself, but it was true. “In every sense, come to think of it.”

“And if you were to imaginatively project yourself into the mind of a person of color—another young man who regards this street as his turf—what does a representative of a marginalized community think when he spots our white guy?”

Serenata was starting to get the feel of the exercise. “That the interloper is naive. That he shouldn’t be here, and doesn’t know where he’s going. That he’s credulous and doesn’t watch his back. He might be capable of braggadocio if flanked by flunkies—”

“All men are more daunting when running in packs.”

“But on his own? He’s probably a coward. I don’t like to stereotype, but in the hypothetical instance that this POC is inclined to be the tiniest bit predatory? Open season. A white guy won’t stick up for himself. He’s easy to steal from, and easy to push around.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“White guy is risk averse. Any trouble, and all he’ll care about is scraping through it in one piece. He won’t make a stand to preserve his pride; he’ll accept any humiliation to save his skin. He may really have gone to Yale, but he’s under-confident in a street sense. He’s extremely frightened of other men who are black or Latino—though maybe not of Asians, but that just makes him ignorant. So, yeah, he might be technically well educated, but as for being up to speed in a self-preservational sense, he’s illiterate. He’s timid and desperate to avoid conflict. Careless of his valuables—which he regards as replaceable. Gullible. Probably lives with his parents.”

“I submit,” Remington said, raising his fork, “that men in their teens and twenties are the most dangerous creatures on earth. They’re competing for mates, and trying to establish dominance in the male pecking order. The world over, these are the terrorists, the gang members, the perpetrators of most nonstate murders. But the backstop presumption runs that young white men of any means have effectively been taking testosterone blockers. They may be brilliant at coding or semiotics; as animals, they’ve been disabled. They can’t take care of themselves in unfamiliar situations. They can’t think on their feet. They’ve been raised around their own kind, and by women, and by men who are controlled by women. As a group, they’re perceived as incompetent even as social animals. They’re bad at badinage; they suck at quick comebacks; they aren’t witty. They’re helpless without money.”

Serenata drummed the table. “I’ve met a few exceptions. I like to think I married one. But broadly—your witness statement sounds about right.”

“But here’s another question,” Remington said. “If we were in company, and you and I repeated all these slanderous generalizations about young ‘privileged’ white men, would our set piece be considered inflammatory, or provocative? Even if the gathering were diverse, would anyone call us racists? At a dinner party, would anyone of any color or persuasion flounce from the table in consternation?”

“If anything, we’d get a round of applause.” She sat back. “What does all this mean to you?”

“I’m not sure.”

The peculiar conversation was strangely bonding.

As they lay reading in bed—Remington a book called Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, she a recent New Yorker—Serenata took advantage of the genial mood. “You know, the concept of this short story might interest you.”

“Okay.” Perhaps also grateful for the rare softening of the domestic atmosphere, he laid his book politely on the spread right away.

“In the future, you can hook yourself up to a machine called the Morphatron. It works out every muscle in your body while you sleep—like plugging in an electric car and letting it charge. So everyone’s in perfect condition. You can set it to burn any extra calories, so nobody is fat, either. In fact, after going through a phase of gorging, people get bored with eating and have to force themselves to finish meals. This Morphatron has custom settings: some guys go for the Schwarzenegger look or prefer a swimmer build; women will choose to look like ballerinas, or Michelle Obama. It has an aerobic program, so heart disease has gone way down, and so has cancer. There are still heritable diseases, but otherwise the whole global population is in impeccable health. Except—you saw this coming—there’s one guy who insists on working out the old-fashioned way. There aren’t any gyms anymore, and they don’t manufacture weights or Nautiluses, so he jury-rigs his gear with cans of food and backpacks. He runs until he’s shattered, and he has the paths to himself, because all the other pre-fit people have more interesting things to do. Everyone thinks he’s crazy. If he’d only plug his body in, he’d be in way better shape than he can ever get grunting and ‘feeling the burn.’”

“Brave New World, with one noble savage.”

“Agreed, the premise is straight-up Twilight Zone. But here’s my question: If you could skip all the torment, and all the expenditure of time, and still get the same or even better results, would you plug in?”

“Of course not. I assume that’s the moral of the story. Fitness without effort would be empty. Tri is all mind over matter, force of will. It’s about reaching—but, ironically, never quite attaining—total self-domination . . . Excuse me, am I boring you?”

Serenata had grabbed her phone and was punching figures into its calculator app. “No, no—sorry. It’s just, I’ve wanted to add this up for ages. Say I’ve exercised for an hour and a half, every day, since I was about eight . . . That’s just over 29,000 hours . . . Divided by 24 is . . . 1,209 days, or . . . Three and a third years. Since when you subtract eating, sleeping, cooking, shopping, and shitting, at most you have maybe twelve hours out of any twenty-four that’s discretionary, exercise has occupied six or seven years of my life. And that’s not including biking, which in my book counts only as transport.”

“I’ve always gotten the impression you consider that time well spent.”

“I’m sick up to my eyeballs of doing burpees. I’d hit the Morphatron in a heartbeat.”

 

To catch the 6:17 a.m. train to Penn Station, Serenata arose about the same time as Remington in Syracuse, where the race started at the typically barbaric hour of seven sharp. Taking her bicycle to Manhattan was more trouble than it was worth, but having commuted by bike for years in the city before they moved to Albany, she couldn’t bear the prospect of squeezing onto the subway like all the other suckers.

Trusty steed stashed in the baggage car, she assumed her window seat with a view of the Hudson. Nagging awareness that Remington was at this moment climbing into his wet suit interfered with her ability to read. Staring out the window as the sun rose, she gave over to an underrated entertainment: thinking.

She’d characterized MettleMan to Griff as a cult, so maybe it was worth considering what about this vogue for extreme endurance sport slaked a religious thirst, even for secular types like her husband. Repudiation of the flesh was a near constant across the faiths, whose fundamentalist strains encouraged fasting, flagellation, celibacy, and self-denial; during Lent, you renounced something you especially liked. Religion had always been hostile to pleasure. Like many more formal theologies, MettleMan elevated suffering, sacrifice, and the conquest of the spirit over the petty, demeaning desires and complaints of the mortal coil. It was replete with saints (the pros) and ecclesiastical raiments (finisher T-shirts). It offered rites of initiation—today’s half Mettle was one—and christenings, like the baptismal inking of mountainous orange double-M tattoos on Sloan Wallace’s arm. MettleMan invited the faithful into a fellowship of like-minded souls, and so fostered a sense of belonging. More importantly, it also offered un-belonging—the exclusion on which religions often relied even more than on community. So just as traditional creeds shunned the unbeliever, the heretic, the kaffir, the cult of tri elevated a select elite over the flabby, the flaccid, the inactive. It dangled the prospect of redemption, resurrection, and rebirth, even to serial sinners like Hank Timmerman—since Bambi may have cast her disciples as uniquely sanctified, her chosen people, but she also hocked the commercially convenient notion that any sluggard could gestate into a champion within nine months.

MettleMan erected a ladder of ascending enlightenment—from layman to penitent to aspirant to the full beatification that Remington had his eye on in June—though the ladder foreshortened skyward and vanished into the firmament. For throughout this infinite process of purification, you could always go on another pilgrimage, and always better your time. As Remington noted, you forever approached yet never attained the athletic ideal, so there was always something to do. Better still, unlike most sacred journeys, these increments of greater sanctity were quantifiable: four minutes and eleven seconds, say, off the 2.6-mile swim.

For the church of exercise delivered clarity. That is, it laid out an unambiguous set of virtues—exertion, exhaustion, the neglect of pain, the defiance of perceived limits, any distance that was longer than the one before, any speed that was swifter—which cleared up all confusion about what qualified as a productive use of your day. Likewise, it defined evil: sloth. Most of all, apropos of Remington’s testimonial about the ameliorative powers of a raised heart rate on Parkinson’s, insomnia, diabetes, dementia, and depression: only through exercise could you forestall disease, degeneration, and mental decline. Taken to the nth, then, the church of exercise promised not only the end if not reversal of all aging and infirmity, but eternal life.

It was the oldest scam in the world.

 

At eight fifteen, she retrieved the bike (whose name, unbeknownst to anyone but his master, was Carlisle), hooked on her pannier, wheeled through the concourse, and hoisted the crossbar onto her shoulder to climb the station stairs—a practiced maneuver to which an ominous twang in her right knee was an unwelcome addition. Outside, the sun was shockingly hot, after air-conditioning on the train had driven her to a sweatshirt. This was shaping up to be another of those weird springs in the Northeast, with sudden heat waves worthy of August; weather.com predicted a high in Central Park of 91°F. Damn. She should also have checked the weather in Syracuse.

After walking Carlisle north on Seventh Avenue, she saddled up and sailed down West Thirty-Fourth Street toward the West Side bikeway, only to be immediately engulfed by two dozen other cyclists. It was rush hour, and they were rude, of course, churning feverishly past the older woman and her antiquated men’s road bike. But the crazed pedal pushers were also foolhardy, cutting it much too close on the light at the bottom of the hill and streaking across the West Side Highway on a dead red. Serenata had a job to do, whose execution being flattened by a quick-off-the-mark Uber driver wasn’t likely to improve, and she alone stopped to wait for the next green.

Running the length of the island alongside the Hudson was the busiest bike lane in the United States. Once a sumptuously capacious two-lane cycling superhighway, the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway now suffered from an invasion of electric scooters, Segways, in-line skates, illegal mopeds, battery-powered skateboards, runners with an infernal affection for the meridian, and baby strollers the size of a double-decker tour bus. And that was in addition to the explosion of actual bicycles, whose number, by Serenata’s seat-of-the-pants calculation, had multiplied in the last two decades by ten to twenty times.

Swarmed by converts to a form of transportation for most of her life widely derided as geeky, as ever she resolved to rise above. She would remain calm. She would cultivate a Zen obliviousness to passing slights such as being brazenly cut off or overtaken dangerously on the inside. She would employ the maturity of her advancing years to serenely accommodate the rising popularity of pedal power—which was, after all, in the larger public interest, leading to improved air quality, lower carbon emissions, less obesity, reduced health-care costs, and a happier, more energetic population.

As ever? She failed.

She despised them. Every single one. Hot-shit skinnies in Lycra covered in loud branding on fixed-gear track bikes with no brakes that were conspicuously infelicitous for urban stop-and-start. Wall Streeters with laptop panniers and prissy Velcro straps around the ankles of their suit pants. Whole tourist families on matching rentals riding five abreast and weaving mindlessly out of lane. Underpaid Central American food app deliverymen doing thirty-five whose English was at least good enough to understand no e-bikes in foot-high illuminated red letters on park service notice boards. Teenagers texting on smart phones juddering blindly onto adjacent bark cover. Haughty twenty-somethings in designer gymwear who never registered that they didn’t need to pass you because you were going the same pace they were, if not a little faster. Gangs of kids on BMXs popping wheelies in the wrong direction. She hated them all. They had invaded her turf, and they were in her way.

Worst of all were the Citibikes, heavy, municipally provided dray horses that could be rented for a pittance. Half the traffic on this path comprised these navy-blue clunkers. Negotiating the free-for-all entailed ceaselessly overtaking this semistationary flotsam—in addition to squeezing around the hulking cement barriers plunked every fifty yards squarely in the middle of the path, the would-be preventive fruits of a vehicular terrorist attack whose obstruction amounted to yet more terrorism.

Perhaps a particular vanity was to be found in making wicked tracks on a piece of junk. In that case, before overtaking a particular Citibiker along the straightaway approach to Canal Street, she should have noted the cyclist’s frantic RPM—the signature of the sort who regards being overtaken by anyone at all as a personal affront, and being overtaken by a woman as tantamount to open-air castration. Within seconds of her slipping past the young man—a nondescript white guy in his twenties—he had poured it on furiously, knees jutting at cockamamie angles, and pulled back out in front.

She should let it go. She was a grown-up. She’d cycled the equivalent of the circumference of the Earth multiple times, and had nothing to prove. If anything, she’d arrive at the studio before the building was open, and would have to get coffee. She could ease up, and savor the glint of the sun in the skyscrapers across the river in New Jersey. Yet like most people’s, her inner twelve-year-old was forever battling to get out. It got out.

When she geared down and then back up, Carlisle responded like the stallion she had always privately imagined him to be. Nearly clipping an oncoming commuter in the opposite lane—this encounter was turning her into an idiot—she surged past the impertinent Citibiker, with every intention of maxing out all the way to Vesey Street, since a lunatic like this loser wasn’t likely to give up.

Pop.

The blaze of agony in her right knee immediately installed the sense of perspective that she was always pushing on Remington. Barely able to breathe or even see, she coasted to the side. The milquetoast shot past.

People who felt fine were rarely mindful of the fact that their whole state of being—their ostensible personality, what mattered to them, what they thought about, and especially what they didn’t think about—was predicated on this feeling-fineness. In an instant, Serenata became a different person. She didn’t care about the Citibiker, she didn’t care about which point Remington had reached in his stupid half Mettle, and horribly, at this very moment, she didn’t care about the fate of her marriage. Least of all did she mind about the accelerating popularity of cycling, as the other bikes whizzed by like meteors in a shower. She was no longer a fit, well-kept woman powering to a lucrative job at a Gold Street studio, but an object of pity—although the piteous in big cities often failed to extract the emotion specified and simply vanished. Professionalism died hard, so she couldn’t put altogether from her mind the necessity of arriving at the studio on time, but the means by which she would achieve this punctuality was profoundly in doubt. The faithful Carlisle had converted from steed to yoke; he complicated hailing a taxi.

The pain was disconcertingly private. It seemed inconceivable that she was experiencing something so enormous yet invisible to the hundreds of recreationists coursing this artery. Pain put you in a lonely place, for if you weren’t feeling it you didn’t believe in it, and if you were feeling it you couldn’t really believe in anything else. The state was so separating that it amounted to a form of solitary confinement. No one else cared what she was going through, and she was sympathetic with this obliviousness, too, because she had become a useless person, an even greater burden than Carlisle.

She slipped off the seat enough to verify that the putting of any appreciable weight on her right leg was simply not going to happen. That was the other interesting thing, or it would have been interesting had it been possible to become interested in anything, which it wasn’t: Remington and his tri friends were always talking up “pushing through the pain,” but in that case the pain was of a penultimate sort that perhaps deserved a different word. This pain-pain, if you will, was not a barrier through which one pushed. One could as well “push through” the Grand Coulee Dam.

Whiffling as Remington did when his foot muscles seized in the middle of the night—had she been compassionate enough? Oh, probably not—Serenata mounted the seat again while tilted to the left. Treating Carlisle like a Razor scooter, she could feebly propel the machine—which no longer felt like a horse—by pushing off with her left foot. Keeping humbly to the very edge of the bike path to stay out of the way of all that hectic feeling-fineness, she eked her way down to Vesey Street.

By the time she propelled herself in this shuffling manner across Vesey and then Ann Street to Gold, preferring the sidewalk and suffering glares, coffee was out of the question. She was late. Locking up was the usual nightmare; these days it was as hard to park a bike in New York as a car. The full-on blast of agony seemed to have subsided somewhat, so that it was just possible to limp, if still at great cost, to the buzzer. Serenata Terpsichore Totally Different Person didn’t take the stairs.

Greeting Jon and Coca, a director and engineer she’d worked with before, she worried that her grimace made her appear averse to the workday ahead. She negotiated the outer studio by leaning on the top of a soft chair and then on the desk of the digital soundboard as inconspicuously as possible.

Jon was stringy and undernourished, with the complexion of a man who hadn’t been out of doors for ten years. “You okay?” he asked.

Her lurching between furniture had been conspicuous, all right. “Oh, sure,” she said. “I mean, I had a little incident on the West Side bike path on the way here is all.” Even the director was half her age. The word arthritis would not pass her lips.

“Ever since they dumped all those concrete girders everywhere,” Coca said, “I won’t take it. It’s not just the pinch points. It’s the reminder—that some douchebag plowed his truck through all those people just trying to have a nice time on a nice day. I’d rather take Tenth Avenue and think about something else.”

Maybe twenty-five, Coca was distractingly attractive. He appeared mixed race, like Brazilian but with a hint of Filipino or Thai and possibly some Italian. The combination had worked out stunningly, like those casual recipes you invented on the fly, and by accident or instinct the unmeasured ingredients struck a perfect balance that you’d never replicate no matter how many times you tried.

The morning’s recording was straight dubbing in the sound booth, which Serenata would traditionally perform standing up. Suddenly preferring to sit would call only more attention to her infirmity, so she kept her weight on her left leg and steadied herself with a hand on the desk. Kill Joy had the rather perverse premise that the player was aiming to murder the very character whom the script built up as sympathetically intrepid. Though the graphic of her character looked about sixteen, she’d been cast to read Joy because the protagonist was a fashionably “strong woman” who’d seem more formidable with an older voice. Besides, Serenata could dial up any age they liked.

“Fierce, but vulnerable,” Jon instructed in her earphones, after his young female assistant arrived to read the opposing character’s dialogue on the other side of the glass.

Her computer screen displayed the dialogue spreadsheet. It never helped to allow into her head that most of the lines were dumb. The assistant’s lifeless delivery of the yet-to-be-recorded male lead made them sound even dumber.

“More frightened,” Jon said after the read-through. “How long was that, Coca?”

“Forty-two seconds.”

“Tighten it up. A little faster.” To keep the video modifications to a minimum, the timings of the audio and animation had to roughly match up.

She gave them what they wanted: “more sparkle of life,” “a few years younger,” “horrified—a little improv, just sounds, maybe a little, you know, ‘Wha . . . ?’ or ‘What the . . . !’” She repeated the same line three or four times with different modulations, so that the producer, who was listening on Skype from Chicago, could choose his preferred coloration. Still, the morning’s output lacked her distinctive flair. They did unusually numerous retakes for an old pro. The knee pain was sullen, glowering, like a disruptive activist who’d been asked to leave a lecture and had instead retreated resentfully to a back row. When she tried too hard to move around the booth as if nothing were the matter, the knee rebuked her with flashes of the original anguish on the bike path. She couldn’t seem to rest in the pocket of the lines, but was forever focused a trace ahead of the words in her mouth.

Assuming a nonchalant slump in the exterior studio on a break, Serenata lengthened both legs and crossed her ankles, covering for the fact that she couldn’t bend the right knee. “I was glad this gig came in,” she said, after the assistant left to fetch coffees. “For some reason, the audiobook work has dried up.”

“Well, that’s hardly surprising,” Jon said.

“How’s that? I thought audio was a growth market. Going up more than print.”

“You have something of a reputation.”

“After thirty-five years of this stuff, I’d think so. And this morning may have been a little pro forma, but I hope my reputation is for doing pretty good work.”

“Yeah,” the director said. “Kind of too good.”

“You’ll have to explain to me how one can ever be ‘too good.’”

“The accents,” he announced, as if no more needed to be said.

“What about them?”

“You’re known for them, aren’t you? And that whole thing’s gone toxic.”

Serenata frowned, scrounging for what Tommy had told her a year or two ago. “Is it this ‘mimicry’ issue?”

“That’s the buzzword,” Coca said. “Touché.”

The director said, “The audio companies have gotten so much grief on social media for using white performers to read, you know, black, Chinese, whatever dialogue that it’s not worth the hassle. A few producers have brought in special, you know, people of color to read those lines, but that makes the project way more expensive. So if there’s racial or ethnic stuff in the book, it’s easier to hire a POC to read the whole thing.”

“Hold it,” Serenata said. “Including the white parts.”

“May be hard on veterans like you,” Coca said. “Still, the reasoning goes that the privileged have had their day.”

“It’s not my day?” Who was she kidding. Today was definitely not her day.

“Anybody’s ever had a day,” Jon said airily, “I guess that makes them lucky.”

“These minority readers,” Serenata said. “Do they do white accents? Like, some drawling cracker from the Deep South? Or the flat nasality of Nebraska?”

“Mm . . .” Jon hummed. “Some do, some don’t.”

“So why isn’t that ‘mimicry’?”

“Turn about,” Coca said. “Guess you find out what it feels like, on the other foot.”

The right leg stiffening, Serenata slipped her own other foot atop the opposite ankle. “Is that the way we’re going to fix things?” she wondered aloud. “By swapping who treats whom like shit?”

“Got a better idea?” Coca said.

This whole area was Remington’s bailiwick, and she felt at sea. She’d no desire to offend the engineer. “Maybe. Like, we all quit bruising for a fight. An authentically rendered accent pays tribute to the fact that there are lots of ways to speak English, right? And some vernaculars are especially affecting or expressive.”

“Yeah, but those ‘vernaculars’ don’t belong to you,” Coca said.

“Does my own vernacular belong to me?”

“Far as I can tell, you don’t have one.”

“Of course I do. There’s no such thing as neutral English.”

“If that’s what you call an accent, then yeah, you can have it.” The two seemed to find the whole idea of Serenata speaking in an “accent” hilarious.

“All these new rules . . .” Serenata said wistfully.

“There’s always been rules,” Coca said. “Now there’s just different ones.”

Fortunately, Jon ordered sandwiches, so she didn’t have to be seen lurching off to lunch.

The afternoon’s recording was motion capture. High-powered pure action scenes would be recorded using gaming stuntmen, who could do rolls, down-and-dirty fights, and leaps from a height. But the less demanding physical stuff integrated with dialogue used the actor playing the part, and today’s ructions would have been easily within her gift—on most days. Yet even getting into the mo-cap suit in the changing room was painful. Working the form-fitting black neoprene over her right leg entailed bending it, and even the suit failed to disguise that the joint had blown up. As Jon’s assistant affixed some sixty shiny round sensors on Velcro pads across her limbs, over her torso, down her back, and on the cap on the top of her head, simply standing squarely with her arms out required the gritty resolve on which she commonly drew for interval training.

The mo-cap studio was large, open-air, and dotted along its perimeter with cameras to record the motions of her figure, later translated to Joy, her avatar. The set was typically primitive: two lashed-together straight-back chairs and a round wooden disk mounted on a pole, meant to approximate the front seat of a car and a steering wheel. Mo-cap sets recalled the minimalist modernism often employed to stage Samuel Beckett; all the lushness and detail would be left to the animators. In this scene, Joy was to have a ferocious argument with the male lead on her cell phone. As the difference of opinion heated up, she’d grow inattentive, and lose control of the car. Serenata would be obliged to roll violently around the two chairs and end up on the floor, as the car tumbled down a ravine and she was thrown out the door. All in a day’s work—ordinarily.

Her first version was destined to be her best—and it was a pity they weren’t using facial capture as well, since her expressions of fear, alarm, and agony were oh, so very true to life. The problem came when she had to get up and do it again.

“Serenata,” Jon said in her earphones after calling a halt to the second take. “You’re not supposed to sound like you’re dying before the car runs off the road.” Frustrated, he cut the session short at four.

Back out on the baking sidewalk, she requested a large capacity Uber, whose driver loaded Carlisle into his minivan for the ride to Penn Station. The disgrace of resorting to a car dovetailed with disappointment in herself over the day’s performance. She was always persnickety about her work, critical, convinced particular lines had come out dead, or she’d curse herself for letting a subtle fluff on a consonant go by when she should have insisted on reading the line again, but this more encompassing shame was new. It was a brown feeling.

Unfamiliar with whatever route the disabled were meant to take, she wheeled Carlisle to the top of the station stairs and leaned on the frame, looking helpless, until a strapping young man volunteered to hoist the bike to the concourse. Unaccustomed to the kindness of strangers, she wasn’t 100 percent sure that Carlisle hadn’t been stolen until the boy waited for her to hop the stairs one at a time while groping the railing. “I’m not meaning any insult or anything,” he said, “but it seems like you might do better with a cane than a bike.”

“It’s a cane on wheels,” she said (Carlisle would be offended). Though she’d have been mistaken for younger than sixty-two not long ago—like, early this morning—her rescuer clearly regarded her as an old lady. A glance in the studio’s restroom mirror that afternoon had confirmed that her pain-makeover personality came replete with a new face: gray, drawn, lined, and asymmetric.

Scootering along as she had down Vesey Street would still qualify as riding in the station, which was banned, so she supported her right side by clutching the handlebars with her left hand while leaning the right one heavily on the crossbar.

Now feeling responsible for her, the Samaritan seemed reluctant to walk off. “You going to be okay?”

Since a truthful answer was probably not, she volunteered instead, “My husband is doing a half triathlon today, while I can barely walk.”

“You mean, one of the Mettles?” When she nodded, he lifted his T-shirt sleeve. A jag of orange tattoos disappeared around his bicep. The smile glinted with a gold front tooth as he punched the air in farewell. “Hell, yeah, good for him! I done five.”

Good grief, was this what it was like in Berlin in the 1930s? First you’d see one, and then a bit later you’d see two, until before you knew it these men in dun shirts were everywhere.

After handing off Carlisle at the baggage car, she accepted an engineer’s offer of a helping hand into the carriage and lunged to her seat by holding onto headrests. Once the train got underway, she checked her messages again. Even at his slowest, Remington had to have completed the course by now. His nose was out of joint about her absence in Syracuse, but his not even sending a text seemed churlish. She shouldn’t expect him to telepathically intuit while larking about Onondaga Lake that something dreadful had happened to his wife. Yet they both dwelled in bodies, notoriously hazardous housing that couldn’t possibly have met modern health-and-safety standards. An occasional solicitation of how she was doing didn’t seem too much to ask.

did you finish? she texted. are you okay? buy yourself a new york strip at delmonico’s! i bet you’ve earned it. please call when you’ve settled. No reply. Maybe, as after the marathon, he was sleeping at his hotel. Finally by six o’clock, she texted Valeria, how’s dad? Immediately, the phone rang.

“I’ll tell you how’s Dad,” Valeria said in a shouty voice. “He’s in Saint Joseph’s Hospital.”

“What?” Whatever had gone down, Valeria had a remarkable ability to imply in few words that it was all her mother’s fault.

“You might have noticed that it’s hot!” Perhaps the temperature was Serenata’s fault as well. “Way too hot, and Papa’s not used to it.”

“No, he doesn’t do well when it’s warm.” He didn’t do well when it was not warm, either. “Did he stop, then? Bow out?”

“No, he was totally amazing! Like, he finally found the God in himself, the way Bambi said—”

“Valeria, would you please can all that praise-the-Lord guff for now and tell me what happened to your father.”

“I’m trying if you’d be a little patient. I managed to be right there at the finish line, because, you know, there were sort of hardly any runners left—”

“You mean he was last.”

“I guess so. Maybe. Yeah. But there’s a heroism in that, isn’t there?” Valeria said defiantly. “I mean, sure, he was going slow. I could probably have walked faster, if you want to know the truth. But it was hot! When the people still watching saw him coming around the final bend, they all went crazy! Cheering, and clapping, and banging these inflatable bat things against the barriers! As he trudged closer I noticed his face was a funny color, and his gait was unsteady, like he was having trouble keeping his balance. His eyes were all glassy, like he wasn’t actually seeing anything. Still, he didn’t stop. I’ve never seen anything so brave in all my life. I’ve never been so proud. I’ve never felt so strongly that the Lord was on Papa’s side—”

“Enough,” her mother said. “Why is your father in the hospital?” (A better question might have been, Why is everyone in the hospital?)

“When you tell a story, you expect everyone to be riveted by every detail. When anyone else tells a story, you’re all, shut up and get to the point.”

This was utter torture. “Go on. Detail away.”

“At the end—if you care, and I have to wonder, since you weren’t there—he was all, like, floppy, and staggering, and not running quite in a straight line. So the staff and medical people were all, like, hovering, but I guess they’re not supposed to help you or you might not get your medal or whatever . . . So he’s weaving, and we’re all rooting for him, but also starting to get nervous that he’s so close but even now he might not make it . . . And you wouldn’t believe this, because, you know, right over the finish line there’s this bar overhead, and I guess if you don’t do that last chin-up then technically you don’t finish. And you know what a stickler Papa is, like, you did it or you didn’t do it. So he slaps at the air, and has trouble even finding the bar, but then he grabs it, and man oh man, he was so shaky, and we’re all like, oh Lordy, is this astonishing man going to get this far and still stumble at the very last hurdle . . . And then he barely, barely, like, both arms trembling, gets his chin just on top of the bar, and the little crowd of us went completely bananas and I burst into tears. I’ve never been so moved . . . so touched . . . so overwhelmed in all my born days.”

“That’s nice,” Serenata said tightly. “And?”

“Well. Then he collapsed. Down in the dirt, passed clean out. The medical team went whoosh, and draped him with cold wet towels, and someone got ice and someone else brought orange juice while they took his pulse—I was trying to get over to him, so I heard a medic say his heart rate was uneven and way too fast. And I know you’ve got some weird problem with her, but Bambi was right in there, and you should be glad she was. She laid Papa out with his feet elevated, and fanned him with newspapers, and sprayed him with mist, while one of the medics on call stuck a thermometer under his arm. Before the ambulance got there, he started coming to, but it was sort of creepy because, though he seemed to recognize Bambi, he didn’t seem to know who I was, or even where he was, or that he’d just finished a whole half MettleMan.”

“Valeria, do I need to get up there tonight? I’m on the train to Hudson, but I could stay on to Albany, where I could pick up a train to Syracuse—”

“There’s no need for all the dramatics,” Valeria said. “He’s going to be okay. His temperature’s already come way down. They’re keeping him in overnight just to be extra careful, but they seem to think he’ll be totally fine to drive home tomorrow.”

“This sounds like heatstroke.”

“Heat-something. Yeah.”

“If you’re absolutely certain he doesn’t want me to meet him there . . .”

“Depending on the train schedule, you’d get here at eleven, maybe even after midnight. Papa would be asleep; you’d see him in the morning, only to drive back to Hudson. It would be a big Florence Nightingale song and dance serving no earthly purpose but to make you look good.”

Valeria was right for once. Given that Syracuse was hardly en route to her second day of recording tomorrow, the fact that Serenata was still drawn toward the empty gesture was a bad sign. In times past, neither she nor her husband would have entertained grand flights to one another’s side of no practical utility, and “looking good” in the other’s eyes would have been a foreign consideration for two people who looked good to each other already.

“Fair enough,” she said. “But—I’m sorry if this sounds trivial—could you make sure to pick up his finisher coffee mug? You know he’s going to want it. Also”—it was embarrassing to have to ask her daughter this—“would you ask him to call me? If he’s feeling up to it.”

“Oh, sure, I guess. But at the moment to be on the safe side they’re running some tests. Besides, you’re not exactly Papa’s favorite person in the world right now.”

Serenata neglected to point out that your “favorite person in the world” should have been the very definition of the person you were married to.

 

“No, technically it was heat exhaustion. It’s only heatstroke when your temperature rises above a hundred and four.”

Remington was just a few minutes in the door, but beyond a ritual embrace she didn’t see the point of pussyfooting. “And yours rose to . . . ?”

“Only a hundred and three.” Aside from a pinkening from strong sun the previous afternoon, his color looked normal, though she detected a new precariousness. He wouldn’t ordinarily have sunk into a chair at the dining table immediately after a three-hour drive.

“Only a hundred and three,” she repeated. “If I recall correctly, a hundred and four is right around the point you’re in danger of brain damage.”

“With ice packs and rehydration, my core temperature came right back down.”

“Have you ever considered that you might not be cut out for this stuff?”

“Triathlon isn’t something you are or aren’t ‘cut out for.’ It’s a challenge you decide to rise to.”

Fetching him seltzer from the fridge, she managed the short distance by leaning on the kitchen island. He didn’t notice.

“Yesterday hit a historic high for New York State on that date,” Remington said at her back. “I don’t see hyperthermia as something to be ashamed of.”

“Did I say it was?”

“You have a chiding quality.”

She couldn’t imagine marshaling the wherewithal to chide. When she’d awoken early that morning, inflammation in the right knee had spread, and was at this moment traveling wildly up and down the leg—the length of her shin, through the ankle to the top of her foot, up the back of her thigh, and deep into the muscles of the buttock. Over-the-counter anti-inflammatories hadn’t touched it. When the fluctuations of fire hit peaks like the one right now, she could feel the pain in her eyes, where the pupils were constricting to pinpricks.

“You’re projecting,” she said, pouring the water while storking on her left leg. “You imagine I’m chiding, when really you’re chiding yourself.”

“Excuse me, I inferred from your remarks that you think my getting overheated should teach me a lesson: I’m ‘not cut out for this stuff.’ But this nay-saying of yours is all in my head? You’re not trying to get me to quit. No, you’re bolstering my confidence: ‘Go, team! So you got a little flushed, now hit the trail!’”

“You already have a cheerleader who’s utterly oblivious to the risks you’re taking, and who’s now saved your life twice that I know of. Isn’t that supposed to create some special lifelong bond?”

“As my beloved wife and helpmate, you might easily have been the one to fan and mist me, feed me sips of orange juice, and cover me in cold wet towels. But you’d have had to be present. You can’t object to my intimacy with someone else and at the same time boycott any opportunities to boost ours.”

Sliding on her right hand around the island, she delivered the seltzer.

“For example, don’t you think you’re forgetting something?” he asked.

“Lemon?”

“Congratulations. If with some difficulty, I finished the course.”

“You mean, ‘Congratulations for almost killing yourself again.’ I didn’t realize that was standard social etiquette.”

“It’s certainly standard etiquette after your husband has completed a feat as demanding as even a half Mettle, or anything close. Lots of people get hugs, flowers, and slaps on the back for finishing a five-K fun run.”

“Congratulations,” she said stonily.

“Well, that was quite the empty exercise.”

“You asked for it.”

“No, I asked for something else.”

“All these years when I’ve gone out for a run, or a swim, or a long bike ride, have I ever come back demanding that you congratulate me?”

“I’m sorry if I sound insulting, but the scale of your sporting achievements has never been in a realm that would deserve exceptional recognition.”

“Got it right there: you do sound insulting.” It wasn’t in the interest of putting her case forcefully, but she’d soon have to sit down. One of the many unsolicited revelations of the last day and a half: pain was tiring. It even seemed to entail a form of athleticism.

“You’re doing your very best to deprive me of any sense of accomplishment, after I’ve exerted myself to the very limits of my ability—in fact, beyond those limits—”

“If you get this fucked-up finishing a half Mettle, what makes you think you can get through a whole one? In only two months’ time? In June, when it could be even hotter.”

“It’s true, I did face—and overcame—a medical crisis. I get home, and my only reward is seltzer. Try as I might, I can’t remember ever having snidely dismissed something you set your sights on, strived for, and finally succeeded at. I can’t remember ever having pissed all over anything that was so important to you.”

“What you want from me is patently unavailable,” she said, finally plopping into a chair. “It’s never been available, from the start of this thing, and you knew it wouldn’t be. So if you wanted my admiration, you should have set about achieving something else. It’s not fair to say, ‘I’m doing this dumb thing. But you’re never, ever allowed to observe how dumb it is. I won’t accept your merely pretending it’s not dumb, either. You have to believe it’s not dumb, in your very soul.’ In demanding some passionate, prostrate congratulations, you’re asking me to completely relinquish my independent judgment—to relinquish myself. Suddenly just because you’re my husband, I’m expected to wholeheartedly get on board whatever goofball notion takes your fancy.”

“You’re expected,” he said quietly, “to be a little less selfish.”

“Check this out for being selfless,” she said. “How’s your hamstring?”

It was dreadful to watch his face and actually see in it the indecision about whether to lie to her. “It aches.” He’d settled on farcical understatement.

“It’s been, what, nine months?”

“Something like that.”

“And it’s never healed.”

She should have been asking about that damned hamstring nonstop, but only her short course in the astonishing existence of agony the day before had brought out the suffering of others in relief. She might have been looking at the world through infrared glasses—and when she turned the viewfinder on her husband, his entire figure lit up crimson.

“That means,” she went on, “each time you go for a run, every second step hurts. So you’re not leaping hill and dale in a state of transcendent bliss. You’re gritting your teeth through an ordeal you can’t wait to be over. This whole venture—it’s so joyless! What’s the point?”

“The point is obviously not joy.” He pronounced the word with the disdain that Tommy had lent to imprimatur.

“Then I repeat: What is the point?”

“If you don’t understand by now—and I think you do; I think your incomprehension is disingenuous—then we’re not going to improve your grasp of my purpose with more talk. So let’s wrap this conversation up, shall we?”

As a gesture of conclusion, he took his bag upstairs.

“Hey, I’m surprised to find you home,” he said on return. “I’d have thought you’d still be recording in Manhattan.”

Old Remington would have remarked on her unanticipated presence first thing. It took some nerve to ride her for being selfish, because New Remington’s world stopped at his skin, and the exigencies of other people’s lives dawned dimly if at all, and on delay. The note-in-a-bottle message “Your wife isn’t supposed to be here” might have just dropped in their backyard from an Amazon drone.

“I was fired,” she said.

“Whose desk did you slam?”

“For once, I was sent packing for good reason. I did take the train down, but my concentration was poor, and my delivery was subpar. And there’s a physical aspect to gaming VO that I don’t appear to be up to. They’re recasting my character. They’ll have to rerecord the work I did yesterday, but the director didn’t have any choice. I agreed with him, actually. So I took the train right back up.”

Remington’s eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?” He seemed to be seeing her for the first time this afternoon, though from far away.

“My right knee exploded. There’s a hard knot at the back the size of an egg, and now the whole leg is inflamed, ass to toe. I am no longer functional. And yes, of course I’ve made an appointment, though I know what he’ll say. Churchwell told me that at the outside I had a year and a half. That was a year and a half ago.”

“Knee replacement.”

“I can’t put it off anymore. I can’t exercise.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.”