This Is Running for Your Life (36 page)

Among other things, the deeply personal motivation behind what could be one of the first major medical developments of the new century is also a clear affirmation of the enigma of subjective response, and the immensurate value of a single emotional investment.

“We do the neuromarketing because it's fun, it's kind of hip,” Carlsen told me. “And then the MS just … makes us feel like decent people.” He laughed. “We could use the karma.” I asked him to explain, but Carlsen was still smiling to himself: “Well, Devin and I were college roommates…”

They'd need two weeks to analyze my scans, which were clear at least. For a moment the familiar dread that one will be unveiled as a fraud—in this case a brain-dead or possibly tumor-eaten one—returned. Heading for MindSign's exit I saw my tech leaning over the red scooter and decorously inquiring about his next subject's bra.

*   *   *

I felt like walking after my time in the Tesla bore and wound up on Pomerado Road, a thoroughfare lined high with eucalyptus on either side. A sign posted near Thurgood Marshall Middle School warns against drinking the recycled irrigation water, though I didn't see any around. The sun rode high and crisp in a Microsoft-blue sky; its consistent show of purpose is the pride of San Diego. When it rains the next day, lightly and briefly, strangers offer the kind of mortified, self-doubting apology usually reserved for the accidental injury of a small child.

The E. W. Scripps Company, headquartered in Ohio, runs fifteen remaining papers, including the
Abilene Reporter-News
,
The Henderson Gleaner
, the
Kitsap Sun
, the
Naples Daily News
, and the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
. A few years ago, the company divided in two, separating new cable and interactive properties like the Food Network and
Shopzilla.com
from the dead weight of “slow growth” print operations. The company's hometown pride,
The Cincinnati Post
, was closed in 2007.

Stomach purling, I humped a mile or so down Interstate 15, toward what turned out to be a Carl's Jr. I've seen the commercials for years but never had the pleasure. I saw another Carl's Jr. commercial inside Carl's Jr., on the television mounted right above my table. The screen was fractured into five miniscreens, so that ads for Carl's Jr. competed with ads for the American Heart Association, and vignettes about Hurricane Katrina relief alternated with footage from a press junket for
The Hangover: Part II
. Carl's Jr.'s cable package has only one channel—Indoor Direct, a “restaurant entertainment network” self-billed as the country's fastest-growing “place-based” media. Slogan: “We entertain Americans while they eat.”

In the time it took me to get to Carl's Jr., Philip Carlsen had found and followed my Twitter account. I liked the idea of having been googled among the eucalypti, of wandering the freeway insensible to e-transactions made in my name. I'm sure someday we'll know such things—we'll develop data-collecting, clip-on senses to remove all doubt from the inkling that one is being thought of, vetted, conspired against. Someday soon, it only gets sooner. We will think with our fingers and kiss with our brains. For a moment the morning's bleak augur was overtaken by the news that I was judged not to be a total doof. Ping! I followed back. I wondered which me he'd found out there, and what she might have to do with the one over here.

After wedging my salad's enormous clamshell container through the flap of a Carl's Jr. trash can, I flagged a cab at the nearest intersection, in front of one of the car dealerships clustered at the corners. We headed southwest to San Diego proper, bisecting the military twins of the old naval air station on the left and the operational marines base to the right. Much of
Top Gun
was shot in San Diego, then home to the elite naval program that inspired the film. Top Gun was moved to Nevada in 1996, though the navy's amphibious base remains on Coronado Island, off San Diego's downtown coast, where every few minutes a fighter jet eases down over the water like a tired woman into a tub.

There's a statistic, often quoted, that
Top Gun
boosted naval aviator enlistment by 500 percent. The Pentagon declined the studio's offer to add a recruiting video to the VHS release. Sounds kind of redundant, they said. They had cooperated extensively with the film's production, lending planes and airspace and expertise to inscribe the much-desired mark of the real, and everyone agreed it worked out pretty well.

Although the film is dedicated to him, the fate of stunt pilot Art Scholl is lesser known. He was sent up to shoot subjective, point-of-view stuff for a dogfight scene, extreme footage designed to show us how it feels to enter an inverted flat spin, what a death spiral looks like from the cockpit. The only theory to emerge about what happened next is that the cameras threw off the plane's balance, sending Scholl into a centrifugal dive. Scholl took pains, in his last transmission, to make a certain distinction. “I have a problem,” he said. “I have a
real problem
.” Neither the plane nor Scholl were recovered; both were last seen spiraling into the Pacific, just off the Carlsbad coast.

*   *   *

Over the following weeks and months I would elicit and re-elicit Carlsen's word to send on the scan results. He'd always say they were coming, and I'd always believe him. I needed an ending, something to make sense of it all, something revealed. How footage of my brain in action might accomplish that was unclear, but still I waited. What could it tell me that I didn't already know? What couldn't it? Surely there was something beyond the facts: that I left some garbage and part of my mind in San Diego, neither to be seen again. Anyway I waited. I watched more bad movies and wrote more exasperated reviews. Eventually Carlsen stopped replying to my e-mails, though our Twitter bond remained intact.

Nine months later it seems clear the images will not arrive. I suppose some part of me will continue waiting. Part of me knows it's coming. In what I've come to think of as the meantime, there is little to be done. For now the future is a foreign country, and I really feel okay about that.

 

Ways of Escape

Only one receives the prize

So run, that ye may obtain.

—Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:24

Two years in, slouched at the kitchen table with bloody feet and aching shoulders, I told my father that it sometimes felt like God was punishing me. There was a brief, exasperated pause before his reply:
For what?

I didn't answer because I didn't know, except that it was obvious.

The basic problem was that I could not seem to stop running. Specific to the basic problem was the extreme seasonal battery involved in daily, outdoor, three-hour expeditions. The Ontario winters were thick with snow hazards and ablative winds; in the edible smog of summer I ended twenty-mile runs dizzy and crusted with salt; all-year-round, sudden, Sisyphean storms washed the buds from my ears and the shoes from my feet. For seven years I showed the elements the top of my skull, giving no ground. Some days, though, it's true that I was mortified by the January headwinds that seemed to pivot their direction with mine, or the stray plastic binding that caught my feet up and sent me flying, or the horizontal rain that pounded at peak force for two full hours, daring me to forfeit. It's true that at these moments I fancied myself God's lonely runner.

*   *   *

When I try to think what started me running, I remember first the urge to swallow time. There seemed to be, as I recall, too much of it in a given day. I first set out in the months before university, after returning from a stint out West distantly apprehensive about beginning my life and sluggish from a diet of beer and machine-vended meals. Historically I had considered running an aberrant form of activity. After a particularly gruesome wipeout during a fourth-grade cross-country practice, I thought it better suited to genetic freaks and the generally insensible. The truth is I tended to resent things I found difficult, and few things felt as unconscionably
hard
as long-distance running.

It started slowly. I'd canter around the block after my shift line-cooking at a downtown lunch counter. Just to see if I could. The thing to remember, perhaps, is that I was easy in the summer before I left for school. If most of what we experience as happiness amounts to invention, I can only explain the bliss of those months of flipping eggs for office drones, bird-dogging dudes, and careless nights with friends as some of my best work. After failing to prevent the dissolution of my first, I had built a second family—one that felt more controllable, or in any case the source of more consistent rewards. Part of the corrosive disappointment of the years that followed was discovering how fragile that feeling is—that each day I was exactly where and as I should be—and mistaking fragility for fraudulence. What I can say more certainly is that time was in its proper place and proportion, and this brought me immense comfort.

The other thing to know is that a creature of discipline lurks inside me, an inconstant companion who acts as often out of solidarity as self-interest, rarely missing the chance to seize full dominion of a fundamentally dreamy soul. Though I am not the creature, the creature, for better and worse, has been me. As a kid, cycling through the day's intake of knowledge and assessing my grasp of tomorrow's rigors was my idea of a soothing bedtime ritual. Intense determination wasn't stressful; exerting control over my abilities had an almost opiate satisfaction. Discipline made the world feel more constant and carved a spot for me in it.

I cleaved to the scholastic model of success until my heart went out of it—which is to say until high school, where I swapped out métiers to play one long game of social chess. It was a new system to master. Even in latency, discipline anchored me through some pretty sloppy years. At times I resented my own sense of self-preservation; it was obviously more romantic not to care, to let go of your life, cross that one bridge further, take that second hit, get that ridiculous tattoo, move to that subtropical country with that silly guy. The risks I took were all on my own terms, and after pushing those terms as far as they would go, I was left with the fact of a divided nature, one that sought both total freedom and a reliable rhythm to the days.

Until some more stable sense of self could be the source of that reliability, I looked to discipline. Unsure of what lay ahead, I imposed a small measure of order on the day. Running—a little more all the time—set down a preemptive cornerstone, something to build around. When school began, I was out every morning, thirty or so minutes looping around Queen's Park in downtown Toronto.

A few classes into a film intro course, I knew I would double my major to pair cinema studies with the default choice of English. So little thought had gone into my accession to the University of Toronto—where my parents had met as students in the 1960s—that I was only vaguely aware of my guidance counselor's having placed me in the school's Catholic college, St. Michael's, and an all-girls dorm run by the Sisters of Loretto. That men were not allowed past the lobby was a complete surprise; by November my out-of-town boyfriend was out of the picture. In the mornings I ran; in the afternoons I watched scratched-up prints of
Citizen Kane
,
The 400 Blows
, and
8½
; at night I read Brontë, Fielding, and Plath; and on weekends I drove my mother's old '84 Celica down the 401, back to my father's house in London.

I had refused all of the school's orientation activities and never once—it became a point of pride—partook of the meal plan. Though my poor roommate pressed on, I went to terrific lengths to make sure no one got a piece of me. I maintained an attitude that was new to me then but proved tough to shake: that I was only passing through and needed to stay light on my feet. I wasn't interested in the university “experience” and resented the idea of social groups arranged by random administrative selection; I had spent years cultivating my clan and took new attempts at friendship as an affront to them. I developed a morbid sensitivity to fakery and enforced revelry, which felt like unfortunate timing even then. I wouldn't decorate my side of the room, which was bare except for a single, magazine-torn image of Kurt Cobain, his exquisite left hand poised over the strings of an acoustic guitar. As though in the grip of a nerd reawakening, I hit my Charlie Brown–sheeted bed early and had my papers triple-drafted and typed up weeks in advance. In short I was unbearable. Returning to the dorm on a midautumn Sunday evening, I found my entire wall artfully plastered with litter—ads, balloons, pinups, pie plates, the odd condom wrapper.

I have two strong memories of that fall. One is an unhurried walk to class on Halloween, the first in my life to pass without a plan for candy, costumes, or mischief. The evening had a mulch-scented coolness, and the campus, with its orange-tinted floodlights and Victoria-bred, limestone-bricked buildings, seemed to sigh in the peak of its campus-ness. As the moment rose into something more, I tried to calibrate the feeling—a combination of lush melancholy and pleasant but lonely purpose—as it rushed past. I'd hoped it meant I would be all right, though I felt foremost the certainty that there was no way to know.

Shortly after that night I attended my film class's evening screening of
Tokyo Story
, Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 Shinto disappointment piece. As those long, pellucid scenes of familial drift wore on, I felt myself lifting out of the room, passing through and then outside of time. I had never seen a film that felt so long ago and far away, yet so present; my response to its lunar rhythm was itself a revelation. As cinema reached its centenary, and one could watch midcentury masterworks with the awareness that not a single person involved in their making still walked the earth, its resurrections came into a new fullness. By the end I was so moved I found it hard to actually move. Cutting through Queen's Park in the darkness, I was overwhelmed by grief and the strange succor of its delivery, the promise of human precedence. I wept all the way, punctured in some hidden place by the feeling that I would not be all right. Not at all.