It’s the click of metal sliding into metal, a door closed, locked at night. Silk organza wrapped around a narrow piece of cardboard. It’s the desire when I feel trapped, a worker in a cubitat, coffee mugs and day-old Danish and office jokes and Xerox and chitchat. It’s Zeus in the clouds with his hands full, raining down vengeance on his subjects. But for me it’s mostly a feeling of wanting to go from here to there, quickly. The same feeling that prompted me to buy my first set of track spikes when I turned 30.
To bolt.
My wife timed me with a stopwatch. We jumped the gate at Iowa City High’s home-of-the-Little Hawks track. I slid sockless into the spikes and sprinted for 100 meters, hoping to find that somehow, despite the years, I had preserved my speed.
To bolt, intransitive: to make a sudden, swift dash, run, flight, or escape; spring away suddenly. Ever since the Beijing Olympics, my two-year-old daughter will crouch down into a three-point stance. She recites the words I’ve taught her: On your marks, get set, go! We do this on grass berms, along cracked and tilting sidewalks, over tufts of weeds on our driveway, or on vertiginous sprints through our mazy house littered with toys. I always stay a stride behind her, clomping my feet. I’m the long-legged adversary making up for my slower start out of the blocks, a Carl Lewis coming up on his Ben Johnson. My footfalls cause bouts of glee, I’m gonna get you! and my daughter giggles so hard while she’s running that she almost topples over. Sometimes she does fall, skins her knee or face-plants so her laughs transform into tears.
At night after dinner we watch videos I’ve downloaded of Usain Bolt’s races on my laptop. I’m studying the videos for an essay I want to write. There is part of me that wants to be like this man, this lightning bolt, this bolt from the blue, insane Usain tearing up the track. To Bolt. The essay will be a collage, a maundering trail of those two words. A friend of mine, a writer of essays, says that present tense is too affected, since the action always happens in the past. But there’s an immediacy about the present tense that fits the sprinting: the breathless word after word that matches what I see on the screen.
The first video, the video of Usain’s 100m final, is in Swedish. The racers line up and Bolt stands, his hands palm down like he’s shaking out a dance move. Then he runs his finger on the outside of his ear. My daughter stands beside me on the couch, watching. The other runners line up. Trinidad and Tobago’s Richard Thompson points to his chest when they announce his name. Darvis Patton looks still and calm at the track, slowly nods his head like it’s a mental game. Walter Dix jumps up and down, flinging his beaded hair, his face unreadable behind his Oakley shades. And Churandy Martina from the Dutch Antilles smiles wide enough to reveal a gold tooth, then shakes his finger like he’s admonishing a child before bringing up his arm in a wave.
When the runners get into the blocks I recite the words with my daughter: On your marks: they put their fingers on the line. Get set: their backs arch up and their muscles tense. Go! A gun goes off and the runners cleave the air with their limbs. It’s a close race for the first 50 meters, but then Bolt’s long strides extend his lead. Just before the end he looks around to see what happened to the men on either side of him. Seeing no one, he puts out his arms, slowing him down like a boat unfurling a sail. He opens his mouth and he slaps his chest. I watch my daughter to gauge her reaction. This is the umpteenth time we’ve watched it, the Swedish announcer’s voice saying what sounds like “a-lee-a-ka,” a record, a record. Does she feel the energy from these short 10 seconds? Is that why she asks to see it again and again?
I click and drag the videos and file them on my computer under “Professional Development.”
Once I bolted during a game of touch football and a man tackled me and my knee bent unnaturally and then snapped. Now a four-ounce plastic cup with a screw-top lid sits on my desk. My knee surgeon gave it to me after he removed a piece of cartilage the size of a cashew. The cartilage sits inside, bathed in a saline solution. I take the piece out, hold it in my hand, feel its obsidian smoothness.
Before the surgery, Dr. Don Shelbourne ’72 named the parts of the knee: patella, femoral condyles, patellar groove, medial meniscus, lateral meniscus. It’s in there somewhere, he said, only so many places to hide. There was something sanguine and confident about his naming. The man had knees on the brain.
In our first meeting, he described his career path, the moment when he tore his ACL. As evidence, he hiked up his pant leg and wobbled his patella forward and back. The skin loosened and puckered like a denture-less mouth. It was a circus sideshow: Dr. Shelbourne and his trick knee. Two weeks later, he intubated and sedated me and cut two holes in my knee for a fiber-optic camera and a pair of tweezers. He sutured the hole where he cut the skin larger to make way for the piece of cartilage and the tweezers that yanked it out.
I tell this story at the Manor Café in Edmonton. I’m there with a friend from high school, an ex-sprinter who now works at the
university hospital. I haven’t seen him for seven years. I’m now a professor at a college in the States and I’ve come back to Alberta for a Canadian literature conference. My knee feels great now, I say. I’m like the bionic man. My friend ran the 100m in just over 11 seconds when he was 16 years old. I always ran second, two steps behind. My friend never trained, and our town was small enough that we didn’t have a track team. Once, one of the basketball coaches brought in a university track star from Lethbridge. He wore those flimsy track shorts that showed off every striation in his legs. He told my friend Chris that he could go far, that he was a natural. But Chris excelled in school, wanted to become a doctor like his father, like generations of Smiths before him. Now he has Crohn’s disease, and he works at the clinic, and he is emaciated and weak. He bought a condo at the height of the real estate boom and now can’t sell it. I say, I could probably beat you now. You probably could, he says. When we’re walking out, I go down like I’m in the blocks, ready for my bionic knee to snap into action. But it’s a joke. We are both afraid of the outcome, to see who might win.
The first time Chris and I ran against each other was in the fall of 1987. I had just moved back to southern Alberta after living for three years in Oregon. The summer before grade eight, Ben Johnson broke the world record for the 100m in Rome, Italy. I still have a newspaper clipping of Johnson as he finished the race, and I’ve kept it these 20 years because it embodies so many things about me at that age. At the time, I was an outsider, a newly returned Canadian who had been living in the States. The photo held something of the newcomer eager to impress. At recess, kids would go down to the track and race just to feel for a second what it might be like to be Ben Johnson. To win. Fastest man in the world. I can remember queuing up. I French-rolled my pants and hadn’t recovered my diphthongs or expressions from my previous three years in the States. But on the track outrunning a western tailwind, I flew, bested only by my friend Chris and the high schoolers who showed up when we’d hit the last heat, our pubescent bodies still not fully versed in the language of adulthood.
Bolt: another memory. In Saskatoon at a hardware store on a shelf of wire boxes was a pile of loose bolts and nuts with holes big as my thumb. I picked up a nut and screwed it onto my pinky so the threads left little white marks in my flesh when I removed it. Then I hefted a bolt. I wrapped my fingers around it and I felt like my hand was heavy as a club. It is a memory, one of my first, and the nuts and bolts and that bottom shelf are Polaroid-clear in my mind.
So I’m surprised when my mother tells me that my brother Robert stole the bolt, that he cried for an hour when we made him give it back to the man at the hardware store and apologize. No, I say, I remember. I can feel the ridges in my hand. I can see its nickel-plated sheen. It was a big one, the Godzilla of bolts. Did I lift one of my own? Pocket it while my brother cried to the shopkeeper? Or there’s a chance—though I’m not willing to admit it—that I’ve folded myself into my brother’s memory. That I watched him pick it up and somehow imagined it was me, my own interest leading to one of my first life lessons: thou shalt not steal.
On your marks, get set, go. Once my friend the drug pusher, as he called himself, ran a six-minute mile in a suit. He was a college track star. Now he sells pharmaceuticals. He was on his way back from a golf game with a group of urologists. During the run, he split a seam in his pants and his Florsheims blistered his feet. I used to run it in four, he says. Now he weighs 50 pounds more. He has a Midwesterner’s proclivity for fatty food. He gets his feel for speed from cars with paddle shifters and winding shortcuts through the hills and hollers of southeastern Ohio. One day in his mid-30s, he saw an empty high school track, newly rubberized, a burnt umber sending loops and whorls through his intestines. He zipped over in his car, got out, stretched, squared up to the line, set his chrome watch, ran until he couldn’t anymore. I did it in six, he tells me. As though the time, 50 percent slower, were the harbinger of things to come: shin splints, torn hamstrings, diabetes, knee replacements, a long string of ailments until the only way he could get around the track was on a motorized wheelchair.
I bolted. As a Mormon missionary in the south of France, I had other words for it: to pull a Joseph, a reference to Joseph of Egypt and Potiphar’s wife. Missionaries were celibate, had to be for two years. Once a woman in her 40s asked to meet with me and my missionary companion at a café. She had dyed-blond hair and wore lip liner a couple shades darker than her lipstick. She was coiffed, immaculate, high-heeled. Her calves were slender and muscled and she wore form-fitting skirts shaped like inverted tulips that broke at her knees. The first time we met we gave her a Book of Mormon. She asked, “What do you do in your free time?” We talked about our one day off, our “preparation” day where we did laundry. We played pick- up soccer on Saturdays. We listened to music and played the guitar. Truth was, we weren’t supposed to have a lot of free time, but we did. And we were eager to show that we had somewhat normal pursuits. When we asked if she would like to meet again, she said yes.
A month later she sent me a photograph of her in a bikini. There was a long letter. Her husband treated her poorly. They hadn’t had sex in several years. Il me touche jamais, she said: He never touches me. She said she understood our values, that she could wait until I was done with my mission, but that she was tired of being alone. I’m a woman, she said, who is not afraid to try new things.
We met the next day at the church in Montpellier.
I told her, “You are a wonderful person. You have years of happiness ahead of you. You deserve better.”
She cried. She said, “I just want to hold you. Could you hold me now? Is that so against your rules?”
I told her, “God loves you. Not me, not in that way.”
She sat in front of me on a melamine chair with metal legs. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, still crying and she reached with her right arm and touched my knee so that her wrist bangles clunked together and I could see down her blouse to her gauzy white brassiere.
Then, in shame, I bolted.
I bolted at a friend’s house when I overheard her complaining that I’d overextended my stay. I bolted when a job at a restaurant got the better of me. I bolted when a drunk man grabbed my jacket and waved a thin pocketknife, said, “Give me your money.” I bolted over and over after spinning Frisbees, soccer balls, pop flies, and pigskins. I bolted doors in strange locations. Bolted bolts to their nuts on cribs and appliances and cars. Bolted to something, I was staying put, immovable. Bolting away, I was gone in a moment, free. Vectors of magnitude and direction.
In a parking lot at Home Depot, I put my painting supplies into the car. My daughter bolts. My hands are full and I’m trying to prop up our hatchback when she says, “Go”—no “marks, get set” this time—and she sprints into the open lot. She’s only two-and-a-half but she’s raced enough to know that if she lifts her knees she’s less likely to fall. This gives her the toddler version of strides. The lot is near empty and I can see where she’s headed, to the back of a Papa Murphy’s. But I dump the supplies anyway, leaving the hatchback yawning open to sprint after her. She is my only child and I’m cursing myself for letting go of her while I opened up the car. So many things to blame: the battery in my key going out so I couldn’t unlock the car more easily, the sprinting videos I’d been watching that morning with her, not buying that child leash because it wasn’t on sale.
Narratives of causality compete in my brain. The first one goes something like this: A man obsessed with sprinting indoctrinates his two-year-old daughter with clip after clip of Usain Bolt obliterating world records at the Beijing Olympics. She learns to say “on your marks, get set, go” and run like her life depends on it. The man encourages her by running right behind her like they’re in a race. One day, the girl goes into a three-point stance when the man isn’t looking and she darts off into a parking lot. The man notices and sprints after her and she runs heedless into traffic and is hit by a car.
Or this: A man obsessed with sprinting watches clips of the Olympics researching an essay. His daughter is transfixed by the moving images. She sees the open space of the track and how the sprinters move from here to there as quickly as possible, crossing the finish line in seconds. She sees their smiles, their fingers raised in number ones, their garrulous dances. She relishes the times when she and her father go out on the sidewalk and race. The pavement extends as far as she can see, a gray ribbon of track just wide enough for a two-lane race, and this fills her with a feeling of limitless possibility. All this space! she thinks. But her father is always right there, so close. Until once, at a parking lot, her father is bound down with boxes and supplies, encumbered, like his feet are bolted to the ground. She knows she can beat him, here, right now. A lane opens between a dusky Suburban and a low-slung Caprice. And there, beyond, pebbled pavement extends as far as she can see. It’s a great asphalt expanse, flat and rectilinear as a landing strip. On your marks, get set, go, and she is gone, running with a tailwind, her arms flapping at her sides in sync with her legs. She doesn’t hear her father’s footfalls, doesn’t hear the honks of vehicles or the calls and curses. No, instead, she bolts. She flies, sprints, darts, takes off, hurtles, escapes, flees. Bolts as though the world were without obstacles, as though a lane will always present itself.
Eric Freeze is assistant professor of English at Wabash and the author of Dominant Traits, a collection of short stories published last fall. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including Boston Review, The Southern Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and in Chamber Four’s 2010 Best of the Web. “Bolt” was previously published in The Normal School.
Contact Professor Freeze at freeze@wabash.edu