There's a rule here in the summer. You go out before six in the morning or after eight at night, and if you're out in the middle you'd better have a good reason and a lot of water.
It was six forty in the evening and a hundred and four degrees. My good reason was that I didn't think I could sit in that house another fourteen hours without coming apart.
So. Basketball shorts. Running shoes with the tread going bald on the outside edge of both heels. A t-shirt I should have thrown out two years ago, which is exactly why I still have it. And the big steel bottle, thirty-two ounces, filled to the neck and then topped off with ice until it sweated in my hand.
The bottle isn't optional. Every summer this city loses somebody who thought it was.
I did my legs in the driveway. Quad stretch first, stand on one leg, heel up to the back of your thigh, count thirty, switch. Then the one my dad called the old man stretch, toes up and heel down and lean forward into it until the back of your calf lights up. Thirty a side.
He used to do that one right there on that patch of concrete with his hand on the garage door for balance, complaining the whole time about his hamstrings.
I didn't think about that. I counted instead. Thirty's a good number for not thinking.
Jumping jacks, high knees, and I went.
Our neighborhood is a loop. Call it a mile if you take the outside streets. Older houses, gravel yards, oleander hedges gone leggy, a basketball hoop at the Kims' that's had no net on it since I was twelve.
I got half a mile before my body started filing complaints.
Which was fine, that was the plan, or the closest thing I had to one. Run till it hurts, walk till it stops, run again. I read that in a paperback in the school library when I was fifteen and I have no idea if it's still considered good advice. That was going to turn into a theme.
Run half a mile. Walk a quarter. Run again.
The heat here at dusk doesn't come out of the sky, the sky's done for the day. It comes up. Out of the asphalt and the driveways and the block walls and the gravel, everything that spent eleven hours soaking it up and now wants to give it back. You run through it in waves. Cool patch under a palo verde, then a wall of it coming off somebody's driveway like you opened an oven.
Second running leg my shirt was soaked through and my mouth had gone to that metal taste.
By the third one I'd stopped thinking about my parents, or the crystal, or the principal's dry hand, or the number nine thousand.
That's the part nobody tells you about running, and it's the real reason I'd been doing it for two years. It doesn't make you feel better. It makes you too stupid to feel anything. Your whole brain gets down to the next mailbox. That's it. Next mailbox.
A mile and a half running and half a mile walking and I came up my own driveway breathing like a dog, bottle empty, everything going a little grey at the edges.
Mrs. Ferreira was out front of her place with the hose, watering a bougainvillea that's been dying since the Obama administration.
"You're gonna kill yourself out here, mijo," she said, not looking up.
"Probably."
"Your mother used to say that too."
I walked slow circles in my driveway with my hands on top of my head, the way you're supposed to, until the grey went away and I could breathe like a person again.
She went inside. I went around back.
* * *
I got the exercise mat out of the garage. Mom's, purple, with a chunk torn out of one corner. Put it down on the patio where the block wall had finally thrown some shade.
Here's what I'd decided about the how.
I wasn't chasing weight. If I get really good at moving something heavy one time, then I'm a guy who can move something heavy one time, and something with claws kills me in the second minute of a fight. What I need is a body that can do a hard thing and then do it again and then keep doing it after it's stopped wanting to. High reps, not much weight, almost no rest. The kind of circuit the internet says to do before you ship out to basic.
Three rounds. Thirty push-ups, thirty sit-ups, twenty lunges a leg.
Round one was almost fun, which should have been a warning.
Round two the push-ups went sloppy around twenty-two and I had to stop and reset my hands on the mat.
I'll tell you about the last lunge of round three and you can figure out the rest.
By then my legs had gone past burning into something more like a hum, this high constant note running hip to ankle, and the sweat had my eyes stinging bad enough that I was mostly working with them shut. Stepped out with my right foot. Down, knee to about a hair off the concrete, which was still warm coming up through the mat. And then there's the part where you have to come back up.
And for a second and a half I didn't.
I just hung there at the bottom of it with one knee off the ground and both arms out for balance like a guy on a wire, leg screaming, that dying bougainvillea smell coming over the wall from next door. And some part of my brain said, very reasonably, you could just kneel down. Nobody's watching. There's nobody in that house. There is no one who will ever know.
Which was true. That's the thing about it. It was completely true.
I came up anyway.
Then I fell over sideways onto the mat and lay there face down with my cheek on the concrete and stayed like that.
And the screen came up.
─────────────────────────────
Exercise session complete.
Sustained strength and stamina training registered.
Strength +0.1
Stamina +0.1
─────────────────────────────
I laughed. Face down on the patio, dead-legged, light going purple over the block wall. It came out cracked and wrong and I didn't care.
It worked.
A tenth of a point. Two tenths altogether. You could not design a smaller number than that. Apparently that's the smallest amount of progress the universe sells.
But the number moved.
There are eight billion people on this planet and for every single one of them the day they touch that crystal is the last day their body ever changes on its own. The door shuts. Everybody knows the door shuts. It's a fact like gravity.
Mine's open. I just leaned on it and felt it give.
I let myself have that for about a minute. Then I did the math, because I'm my mother's kid and I can't leave a number alone.
Ten in everything. That's the target. Ten across the board is where I stop being a liability and start being somebody who might live through an F-rank portal.
Strength 8, so two points. Stamina 7, three points. Agility 6, four points. At a tenth a session that's forty sessions for agility by itself.
I don't know how many I can do in a day yet. Tomorrow I'll find out.
I sat up on the mat and looked at it straight, and I'll be honest, what I felt wasn't triumph.
Forty sessions. Thirty. Twenty. In this heat, in this body, by myself, on an account that's draining every month, just to get to ten. To get to the number where I'd be allowed to walk into the most boring hole in the ground in Maricopa County and probably not die in the first twenty minutes.
And then what, a hundred more? A thousand? To get anywhere that matters.
People say the hard part of something like this is that the road's long.
That's not what it is. Long roads are fine, I've got nothing but time and nobody waiting up for me.
The hard part is there's no road. Nobody's ever done this. There's no forum thread, no training program, no guy who went first and wrote down what worked and what didn't. Every tenth of a point I ever get, I'm going to have to find by being wrong about it first.
I got up off the mat.
* * *
Took a shower long enough that the water went cold, which in July around here takes some doing.
Then I made dinner and I made it carefully. Chicken in the oven, rice, carrots and broccoli. Nothing fancy, just a lot of protein.
My reasoning, for whatever it's worth: I have no idea if food does anything here. For a normal diver it can't, because their stats are locked and a cheeseburger is just a cheeseburger. But mine aren't locked. Mine respond to what I do with my body. And I'm not going to be the guy who figures out in four months that he left points on the table because he ate garbage while running an experiment nobody's ever run before.
Unknown variable. Control it. Cheap insurance.
I ate at the kitchen table under the legal pad on the fridge, and crossed out number one, and wrote the answer next to it.
0.1 per session. Limit unknown.
Eight o'clock and I was tired enough that my hand was shaking on the fork.
I did one more thing before bed. Set an alarm for four forty-five, before the heat and before the sun and before there was any possible excuse, and then put the phone on the dresser across the room so I'd have to stand up to turn it off.
Then I went to sleep, and I slept all the way through the night for the first time in about a year and a half, which I didn't notice until the morning.