The roads I take become more treacherous- narrow and gravelly or too wide altogether and so busy with other vehicles that I am sure I will be crushed between two well-meaning commuters. I go out of my way going out of my way, often losing myself on dead-end service roads when I could be cruising smoothly down the interstate, wondering what music radiates from towers in the distance. I lose myself trying to lose her.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the woman that seems to be following me. I thought, maybe, I would be brave enough to face her. She has it all wrong, of course. She writes about the burning of beloved roadside attractions (the strangers, remember?), and the extinction of a species of fern (I am not convinced it did not survive the destruction of the Boone radio station). She writes about the body of a man in a rest stop (I tried to save him) and the near-death of a self-proclaimed witch hunter (who nearly killed me, if memory serves). She mentions a run-in with a predatory shadow (as though cut from dark cloth, crumpled, torn, and stretched) and I admit that it might be my carelessness that let it loose on the world. I had assumed the Black Tailor’s false shadow had died long before it tore free from my socks.
What I mean is that everything could be excused in one way or another if I were to just stop and wait a while and prepare for her to speak her piece. That’s what I intended to do at the next comfortable town: spend a little extra time writing a particularly polished entry while she catches up. But Alice has been acting strange, her pick in the speedometer swinging erratically, taking me in wide circles sometimes, leading me down an off-ramp and then back onto the highway.
“What a shame,” I whispered to myself, “This will make me difficult to follow.”
And, with the thought of her further behind me than ever, there came a great sense of relief.
And then I knew I was running.
‘On a planet inhabited by creatures that can fly, swim, climb, and jump, humanity has historically risen above its terrestrial kin in one physical domain: running. We are not the fastest runners, by any means, but we are certainly the most dedicated, capable of wearing down prey and losing predators over distances their own bodies refuse to endure.
‘The Retrospective on the Human Runner’ should be a celebration of this accomplishment, and it does begin that way, providing peer-reviewed back-pats to the men and women who arrive at the building, dressed in athleisure that reveals the rigid definition of their calves. ‘The Retrospective’ takes a sudden turn at its midpoint, however, and becomes a venue for the owner to air their concerns about the current state of humanity.
‘We are still running,’ he writes under an exhibit featuring a man sitting at a desk, filing his taxes, ‘What are we running from? We cannot outrun the inevitable.’
‘This is running!’ he claims of a scene in a strip club.
‘This is running!’ he claims of a woman paying for coffee.
‘We were not meant to go this far- not yet!’ he says of the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth, ‘It isn’t ready!’
‘The Retrospective on the Human Runner’ should be a short museum and, like many things that go on too long, it leaves the visitor feeling tired and hurt and hardly more capable than they felt when they began.’
It strikes me, upon leaving the ‘The Retrospective,’ that I cannot picture the woman behind me in a car. I cannot see her on a bike, like mine, or with a vehicle of any sort. I have a clear picture in my head of what she might look like, and when I hold that image in my mind, I see her running as well.
-traveler
