Day 2. Strength 8.1. Stamina 7.1. Agility 6.2.
Agility was already maxed out for the day by six in the morning and I had the rest of it free, so I put on the one collared shirt I own and went to go find somebody who'd pay me.
There are thirty-one gyms within twenty minutes of my house, according to my phone.
I went to nine of them.
The chains were fastest. You don't even talk to a person at a chain. There's a tablet bolted to the counter and a kid at the desk who points at it without looking up, and the application runs nineteen screens.
Screen four is Awakened Trait (if applicable), with a dropdown.
I tried leaving it blank at the first one. The form wouldn't submit. Red text: this field is required.
At the second one I went to select Not Awakened, which is a lie, and backed out of it. Partly because lying to the Association about your registration is an actual crime, and partly because it turned out I didn't want to.
So at the third one I picked F, and typed Exercise, and watched the little wheel spin.
It came back in under two seconds. Nobody read it. Nobody was ever going to read it.
Thank you for your interest. We have decided to move forward with other candidates at this time.
Two seconds. It's almost polite how fast it is. Nobody has to look at you.
At the fourth place I got past the tablet and actually talked to the manager, a genuinely nice guy in a branded polo who spent ten minutes asking me about my running. Then it came up, and he said, "Oh — huh. F-Class." And then right away, because he could hear himself say it, "Which doesn't matter. That doesn't matter for this."
And it doesn't. It's a front desk job. You scan membership cards.
He didn't call.
By the seventh I had the rhythm of it down. The pause, then the recovery, then we'll keep your application on file. By the ninth I was doing it on autopilot. It was two in the afternoon and the car's AC had picked that week to start blowing warm instead of cold, and I sat in a strip mall parking lot in Glendale at a hundred and thirteen degrees and felt the whole thing start to go.
Three months of money. Twenty days of training. Nine rejections before lunch.
I had my hand on the gearshift to go home.
And then I thought about the last lunge, on the mat, in the dark, with nobody watching and nobody who would ever know.
I pulled the map back up. There was a tenth place four miles east that I'd skipped over because it had eleven reviews and the only photo was of a parking lot.
GRINDSTONE — Strength & Conditioning.
Fine. Ten.
* * *
It was in the back half of an old shopping center between a tax place and a unit with butcher paper taped over the windows. No sign except the hours, hand-lettered, taped inside the glass. The door stuck and then gave all at once.
Inside: concrete floor, rubber matting, chalk dust in the air, and that smell. Iron and old sweat and the ammonia thing off a rag bucket. Racks along one wall, a rower, a sled, a pile of medicine balls that had obviously been a pile of medicine balls since about 2009.
No mirrors on the long wall. I noticed that and didn't know yet why it mattered.
Four people training. All of them at least thirty. None of them looking at me.
And a woman behind the counter with reading glasses pushed up into grey-black hair, doing paperwork, a cane hooked over the edge of the desk.
"We're not hiring," she said, before I'd got the door shut.
"Okay," I said.
And then I didn't leave. I couldn't tell you why. I just stood there on the mat by the door with my collared shirt sticking to my back.
She kept writing for a second. Then she put the pen down and looked at me over the top of the glasses.
"You've got the face," she said. "How many today?"
"Sorry?"
"How many places before this one."
"Nine."
She made a noise that wasn't quite a laugh. "Nine. In July." She looked at me a beat longer. "What's the class."
Now, after nine of those I had a whole routine built for this question. Get out in front of it. Say it first, say it light, make the joke before they have to, so nobody has to do the pause and the recovery part.
I was tired enough that I forgot to do any of it.
"F," I said. "Exercise."
And she didn't do it.
No pause. No huh. No warm over-correction right after. Her face didn't move at all and she said, "Exercise. Never heard of that one," in exactly the tone you'd use if I'd told her my last job was at a Chili's.
I had to look at the medicine balls for a second.
"Yeah," I said. "It's new."
"Come here." She swung the cane down off the desk and stood up on it. "Show me a push-up."
"What?"
"You came into a gym asking for a job. Show me a push-up."
So I got down on the mat by the front desk in my collared shirt, in front of four strangers, and did ten push-ups.
"Stop. Stand up." She hadn't even been looking at my arms. "How long have you been doing them like that?"
"...Two years?"
"Then you've wasted a considerable amount of two years." She tapped the mat with the cane. "Down. Stay at the bottom."
I went down and stayed at the bottom. Arms shaking inside of four seconds, because I'd already done two rounds of this at five in the morning.
"Your hips are chasing the floor. Your ribs are flared out like a drawer somebody left open. What that means is your spine is doing the job your middle is supposed to be doing, so about a third of everything you're producing is bleeding out sideways into the ground and doing nothing for you." The cane touched my lower back, not hard. "Squeeze there like I'm about to hit you. There. Now bring the elbows in. Forty-five degrees, you're not a seagull. Now push up."
I pushed up.
It was so much harder that I genuinely thought she'd put a foot on my back.
"That," she said, "is one push-up. The other thing was a push-up-flavored activity."
I stayed down on all fours for a second, breathing, with something going very loud in the back of my head.
Because: a tenth of a point per session. And: a third of what you're producing bleeding out sideways into the ground.
I'd been assuming the ceiling was the ceiling. Two tenths a day, hard stop, nothing to do about it. Which is true, I can't beat the cap with volume, I proved that in the sun yesterday like an idiot.
But the cap is on what I get. It's not a promise that everything I do earns it.
What if a sloppy session and a clean session aren't the same session? What if half of what I did this week didn't count and I never knew, because I've got no baseline and no control and nobody on this planet to compare notes with?
Nobody's ever needed to know how well an exercise was done, because for everybody else exercise is a hobby. For me it's the only machine I've got.
I looked up at her. Grey-black hair, reading glasses, cane. A gym in the back of a shopping center that doesn't advertise and isn't hiring.
"Who are you?" I said.
* * *
Her name's Salomé Reyes. Everybody calls her Coach.
She was C-rank for eleven years. She showed me the license, still in her wallet, photo about twenty years younger and unsmiling in the same way she is now. She ran with a mid-tier guild clearing oranges out past Wickenburg until something in a portal took her right knee apart at an angle knees don't go, and the Association's medical board wrote unfit for licensed descent, and that was the end of the only thing she'd ever done.
"Stats don't come back," she said. "Not one point, not ever. I was a 31 in Strength the day I went in. I'm a 31 in Strength sitting here right now. It's all still in me and there's nowhere to take it." She shrugged. "So now I teach people to do push-ups."
"Does that—"
"Does that suck?" she said. "Yes."
She put the wallet away.
"North," she said. "Your name's North."
"Yeah."
"Ray and Elena's kid."
I didn't say anything.
She looked at me for a second with an expression I couldn't read at all, and then went and got a clipboard off the wall like nothing had happened. I let her. Whatever that was, it wasn't going to open up today no matter how hard I pushed at it.
"I'm not hiring," she said, "because I can't afford to. Here's what I've got. I open at five. I hate opening at five. Nobody wants five, because whoever takes it is here at four forty to turn the lights on and mop the floor and sign in the six people in this city crazy enough to deadlift before sunrise." She clicked the pen. "Thirteen an hour, six days, five to noon. It is not enough money to live on."
"Okay."
"And you train here free whenever you want, which is the only real reason anybody ever takes that job." She looked up. "And I'll coach you. That part's not in the wage. That's because if you did nine gyms in July you'll do eleven in August, and I'd rather you were here."
I did the arithmetic fast, the way I can't help doing.
Thirteen an hour, thirty-five hours. Call it nineteen hundred a month before taxes, against three thousand going out.
It doesn't fix it. It's not close to fixing it. It turns three months of savings into about five and a half, and five and a half months isn't a future, it's a longer hallway.
But it's a longer hallway.
And it comes with a room full of equipment and six hours a day inside it, and the first person in eighteen months who heard F-Class and didn't change her face.
"Yes," I said.
Coach Reyes took a key off the ring on her belt, worked it loose, and set it on the counter between us.
"Four forty," she said. "Don't be cute about it."
* * *
I let myself out into the heat with the key in my fist.
Day 2. Nineteen hundred a month. Eighteen days to ten across the board.
And a question I didn't have that morning, which I wrote on the legal pad on the fridge that night, underneath the boxed-in one about Intelligence:
Does it care HOW WELL I do it?
Test: same exercise, sloppy vs. clean. Different days. See what registers.
I set the alarm for four fifteen. Then I lay there for a while thinking about how she'd said their names. Ray and Elena. Not the way people say them to me, careful, in that voice. Just two people she used to know.