Running Read online

  Each day when Milo got to his office he made tea with an electric kettle, opened his laptop, and put on Joy Division or the Smiths. Read and deleted sentences he’d written the day before. Opened the window and let in the sounds of the street.

  His students wore pajamas to class, emailed things he pretended not to receive. They were groomed and articulate and used to hearing themselves speak. All but four of them were white.

  The shocking tranquillity of his life often left him dumb. And though it had yet to produce any results, he spent a good part of each day at his desk looking up Bridey’s name and various guesses; sifting through the digital detritus, trying to piece together what had happened between then and now.

  Bridey Sullivan

  Bridey Sullivan fire

  Bridey Sullivan hospital records, birth records, warrants

  When he exhausted his search for her, he would occasionally look for himself, fascinated and disturbed by the violation of his private life and that, by virtue of writing and speaking and taking jobs, he’d lost the ability to be lost. The fact that his personal information was updated regularly enough to account for a position he’d accepted little more than a month ago shocked him. But the entries were not malign; instead, his life had been sanitized entirely, distilled into a product description. Wikipedia was the worst:

  Milo Rollock

  * * *

  Milo Rollock (b. 1972) is an English writer and the author of two collections of poetry. He is currently Poet in Residence at the New School for Social Research in New York City.[1][3][6]

  LIFE

  Early years

  * * *

  Rollock grew up in Salford near the Irish Sea, the only child of Colleen Rollock, a garment worker.[3] His first collection, In the Shadow of Machines, is dedicated to his mother and contains several poems about working-class life. He has attributed his literary success to having “no television, no father, no money, nothing to do but read and fight.”[1]

  Education

  * * *

  Rollock dropped out of school at fourteen, began his training as a boxer at Longsight and Urmston and had a lackluster string of matches in Manchester and London in the mid-80s. Won 12 (KO 5) + lost 18 (KO 0) + draw 0 = 127 rounds boxed KO% 1.5.[5] In 1990, he received a full scholarship to University of Manchester on a special dispensation, where he studied metaphysical poetry, with a concentration in John Donne.

  Career

  * * *

  In the Shadow of Machines won a Witter Bynner Poetry Prize in 1992 while Rollock was a sophomore in college.[12] The London Review of Books called it “transcendent” and “lucidly brutal.” The collection deals with themes of institutional violence, class, race, and gender. Despite these topics, it is apolitical in presentation.

  The American publisher City Lights released his second volume, Running, the year of his graduation. It was translated into Portuguese, French, Turkish, and Greek.[7] After university, Rollock moved back to his hometown, worked in a shipyard, and returned to boxing, winning six matches over the course of a year. During this time he published only three poems, which ran in the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books, respectively. Critics of Rollock’s work have called him a token,[12,16] claiming his successes, particularly the Witter Bynner, were politically motivated and due to race.[11,12,16,43]

  Running

  * * *

  Critically polarizing and more raw in form than In the Shadow of Machines, the long poem Running appears to be an account of Rollock’s life on the street before he attended university. Told through the eyes of a teenage girl, clearly a stand-in for Rollock, the piece has been described as an ode and an indictment of the heroic tradition.[7]

  Personal life

  * * *

  Rollock was the longtime partner of American painter Marc Lepson[23] and the subject of Lepson’s well-known portrait series Flight.

  If Milo was to believe the things he read, he’d had a full life. He’d written books and was once someone’s “longtime partner.” Was currently employed. The reality of his existence was footnoted, proven by articles in French and English and in newspapers of record. What he was afraid of, what compelled him to type his own name into the search engine, was finding details of the years between his lackluster career as teenage punching bag and the gracious dispensation that afforded him an education. The simple word Milo was afraid of reading was Athens.

  The train jostled through the wasted landscape between cities. Scrub brush and spare rocky inclines visible in the distance, hills tufted with scorched grasses, and low mastic pines. I had stood in the aisle and held on to the seat Murat was facing, trying to get his attention.

  I’d been running for Olympos for more than a month; had fallen into the routine of reading and riding trains and drinking, wandering the city with Jasper and Milo. I was already versed in the rivalries between hotels, in the bloody fights between taxi drivers and runners. Knew how to fold bills so it looked like I had more money in my hand, slip into the gates of the Parthenon unseen, to roam the ruins.

  All along the train, people had pulled their windows down; trying to get some air, they were fanning themselves with leaflets other runners had given them. Murat, though, seemed unaware of the heat or the noise of conversations; his feet were propped on a large duffel bag and he was reading a thin English translation of The Clouds by Aristophanes.

  “Hi,” I said for the second time.

  He looked up and smiled, then his eyes went back to scanning the page, and soon he was lost again in reading. It made me want more than the book.

  “Did you get to the part where they measure distances by how far a flea jumps?” I asked.

  Murat was a shabbier version of the tourists who passed through every hour; had dark razor stubble, thick shiny hair flattened on one side from sleeping. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt with a frayed collar, looked like he’d been traveling a long way.

  When he said nothing, I coughed. It was early, and I was drunk. I reached forward to touch the book, then put my hands in my pockets. I imagined he’d dozens more in his bag and felt capable of stealing all of them if he came back to the hotel with me.

  “The part where they put Strepsiades under the blanket is good too,” I tried.

  This time he looked up and laughed. He had a contented, confident face; olive skin, long, thick eyelashes, darkest brown eyes.

  “Are you studying classics?” he asked. The accent was jarring. Dutch, maybe German or Swedish; a mixed lilting sound, with round vowels and clipped consonants.

  “No,” I said, and handed him a leaflet. “Have you got somewhere to stay in Athens yet? Olympos is good, a few blocks from the station, and there’s a view of the Acropolis.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said.

  “Essentially,” I said. “More or less.”

  He looked at the leaflet. “Can you really stay here for two dollars?”

  “That part’s true,” I said.

  “I’ll come, then.”

  For a moment I thought of sitting beside him for the rest of the trip, but I continued on into another car, crushed past people in the corridor, made my way to the bar and ordered an Amstel, which I drank in several long gulps, thinking about The Clouds and watching the countryside slip by. I thought about staying on the train when it reached Athens, so that I could keep going, so that I could see that new landscape that can only appear fully to you when you’re alone. Stow on a boat, hitchhike a thousand miles, slide through customs and out the door into sunshine and some unintelligible culture. Not be able to ask for the time. Not know the word for water.

  * * *

  The door between cars jerked roughly, then slid open, and several more runners pressed into the space. Someone threw their leaflets into the air and they rained down upon us. Candy and Stephan, runners for a hotel called San Remo a few blocks fro
m Olympos, looked around the car, leering in pleasure, all teeth, their pupils dilated nearly black. Candy was English, had short red hair, a gaunt acne-scarred face, and fat beautiful lips. Stephan might have been Dutch. He’d been traveling and sleeping out for years, had a flat tan face and bleached-blond hair, wore loose strands of beads around his neck, a Rod Stewart T-shirt, tight jeans and Greek sandals. They were ten years older than the rest of us, and vastly more accomplished at being gone.

  “We killed the train!” Stephan yelled.

  “Killed it,” Candy said. “There’s no one going home with you. There’s no one ever going home with you again. This train goes directly to San Remo.”

  They stood kissing by the bar, holding cold bottles of Amstel against one another’s necks.

  Candy had told me once she had not killed her husband. That’s not why she was in Athens, she said. Probably I’d heard different, but that’s not what it was. She’d set his car on fire, she said. She’d cut his clothes to shreds, she’d given him a quarter of what he deserved. An eighth. But he was alive.

  A tall German runner with moles on his face came to stand beside me, leaned against the wall. He wore a T-shirt that had a hole directly over his right nipple, tight black shorts, and ruined pointed shoes. He had knuckle tattoos, held a sweating bottle of beer.

  “Where’s the boys?” he asked.

  I lit a cigarette, then shook my head, exhaling. “Sleeping.”

  “You’re running this train all alone, then? How many you got?”

  I didn’t answer. “Who you running for now?”

  “Argos,” he said.

  It was nicer than Olympos. The front was painted and it had a sign.

  “You making money there?” I asked.

  “A bit,” he said. “This is my last run. I was hoping to see your boys before Friday.”

  “What’s today?” I asked.

  “Thursday.”

  It amazed me he knew something like that.

  When I didn’t ask him anything else, he said, “I’m going to Turkey.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Just going to check it out before I head to a kibbutz for work, then down to Africa; I have some friends in Nairobi.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Living,” he said.

  We clinked bottles. Drank.

  “If you’re headed back through Europe,” he said, “and want to stay in Berlin, there is a very good squat on Lychener Strasse. You can say I sent you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good shows in the neighborhood. No cops. I got a letter from a friend there—says it’s like its own village now. There’s under-the-table stuff in an antenna factory nearby. Maybe pub or kitchen work.” He waded through the crowd to set his bottle on the bar instead of throwing it out the window, as was the custom, then returned with two more. When he passed me the Amstel I looked at his knuckle tattoos: an X, an eye, an infinity sign, a triangle inside a circle.

  “To leaving,” he said, raising the bottle.

  “Always.”

  The train stopped in Athens, and he kept talking while he gathered a small crowd to take back to Argos. I paced along the tracks, looking for Murat, watching each little knot of tourists disembark, exhausted or excited. Bouzouki music played over the speakers mounted on the corners of the building. And people walked out into the heat, going separate places, headed on.

  Candy and Stephan had amassed the largest crowd, college students on holiday: a group of drunken beefy teenagers, many of them Americans, wearing baseball hats.

  Finally, Murat stepped down, adjusted his glasses, and scanned the crowd.

  I walked over and held out my hand for his book bag.

  “I’m Bridey,” I told him. “Let me take your things.”

  No one had come home to make dinner.

  The rug was gritty, the electricity was on. I’d gotten through all the books in my room and started on theirs, took things home from the library. I lay on my back reading and eating crackers, distracted occasionally by the light of passing cars sliding across the ceiling and down the wall. They would be back later tonight, or in another couple of days. They would be back.

  I should have been able to last longer, because there was enough food in the house; but I broke down after some weeks, panicked instead of taking care of it myself. I called him from the pay phone outside the library, and stared at a painted sign on the library window. It said AUGUST BOOKS and had a painting of a boat sailing over waves made of books. The phone rang and rang until the quarter dropped and I put it back in the slot and called again. All I said when he answered was “Hello.” I couldn’t say the rest.

  When he got there I was sitting in the backyard, reading and watching my shadow stretch long on the grass. He would have come sooner, he said, but there was a fire burning and it couldn’t be put out. They needed everyone, he told me, and even still it spread into the valley, down into the neighborhoods. Dare said I must have seen it on TV. I shook my head. The TV didn’t work anymore.

  I hadn’t yet figured out we were leaving, so I went up to my room to read, but somehow he’d been up there before me. My things were put away in boxes and my dresser drawers were open.

  “Ready?” He leaned his head through the doorway and smiled. “You got your stuff, Bone? Got all your books?” His voice sounded like he didn’t use it much. “I’m sorry I left you waiting for so long,” he said again.

  I grabbed a carton of cigarettes off the empty bookcase. There was still a whole other carton in my parents’ room but I didn’t bother with it.

  “How ’bout if you change out of your pajamas and put on some real shoes?” he asked.

  “These are real shoes,” I told him. They were the kind you used for walking in the water. My mother had bought them at the drugstore and they smelled bad if you took them off.

  He picked me up and looked into my face. “Those are nice shoes, but how ’bout you put on some jeans and sneakers in case we want to stop and play somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “A park, maybe. Swings at the park or monkey bars.”

  He turned my dresser drawers upside down into the empty duffel he’d brought while I changed my clothes. We walked through the house together carrying my things. The screen door swung shut on its spring and we never went back there though my mother’s dresses were still in the closet. And pictures of people we knew were stuck to the fridge with magnets shaped like letters, and a handful of change still sat on a table near their record player.

  Dare had short hair and big arms, a scar on the bridge of his nose. His face looked pink in the light through the windshield.

  “How old are you?” I asked him.

  “Twenty-two,” he said.

  He said he’d already registered me for school. “We got a real nice place in Winthrop,” he said. “We got the woods right close by; we got a pond. I’ll be home when you get outta school, unless there’s a jump I gotta do. It’s a real good place, Bride, a real safe place. You’re gonna like it there.”

  I wondered what had happened that made Dare so nice.

  “Hell, you’ll probably be the smartest kid in town, whatta you think? You’re probably the smartest kid in whatever town this here one is we’re driving through right now. You listening to me, Bridey?” He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Bridey?”

  In the car he talked about how fire breathes and eats, how he got caught in a tree and had to cut his chute away and beneath him he could see smoke rising from the forest bed like the fire had gotten inside the earth. He told me about looking down and seeing animals running fast through the trees, and fire spreading across the top branches like waves. He told me about finding an old cabin in a place that was burning; a man came out with a gun and said he would rather die in the blaze than leave the woods.

  I couldn’t env
ision the forest or the mountainside yet or the ocean. I’d lived in a town beside a highway with a shopping mall half an hour away and I’d never seen beautiful things. Dare asked if I remembered when he stayed with us to put plastic siding on the house. I didn’t remember about the siding but remembered him coming for a visit and sitting in the yard with my mother; she was wearing a shirt the color of gray water with pictures of green apples on it, sitting in a folding chair. He told her jokes until she got a bellyache. I remember that he ordered Chinese food to be delivered and threw me up in the air and caught me, but apart from that I didn’t remember anything at all and really I couldn’t even remember what he looked like if I turned my head for a minute.

  I smoked and tried to read.

  Dare bummed a cigarette and clicked on the radio. The sun was shining. We turned off the highway and headed along a dirt road, and he said he was sorry again.

  Then he hit the steering wheel with his fist, threw his cigarette out the window, grabbed mine and did the same.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “What ten-year-old smokes?”

  “I’m eleven.”

  “You do not smoke anymore, do you hear me? Bridey? How long you been in that house alone? Why didn’t nobody come from school to check on you?”

  “There’s no school in summer,” I told him.

  “Why didn’t you call nobody else? Why didn’t you go to the neighbors or tell someone you needed help till I got there? Huh, Bridey? Answer me, Bridey.”

  “Because I didn’t,” I said.

  Before she moved in, Declan stayed at Olympos often. Liked Jasper’s wit, Milo’s class. He would come by every week when he was in the city. Sometimes he’d disappear for months. Declan brought over packages of Papadop­oulos cookies from the kiosk on Nissouru, and photos of places he’d visited: Nicaragua, Biafra, South Africa, Gaza.