Day 55. Strength 22.3. Stamina 21.2. Agility 14.1. Intelligence 16.1.
The phone said 5:21.
I lay there until it said 5:22, and then I was up and in the same shorts from last night and out the door with one boot on, and I put the other one on at the first red light on Cave Creek with the car in park. It was already ninety outside. The sky over the mountains had gone the grey it goes before it goes anything else, and there was nobody on the road but me and a water truck.
The alarm had gone off at 4:10. It's right there in the history. I turned it off. I have no memory of doing it, and I'd always assumed people who said that were lying.
* * *
The evening block is the stacked carry, at home, on my own. Thirteen pounds of steel at the ribs, walked around the backyard until the arm goes, ninety seconds, then walked again until the lungs go. On Day 43 when I brought the shield home the arm went at twenty-six minutes. On Wednesday it went at fifty-eight.
That's the rule I wrote down myself a month ago. The stronger the arm, the longer the walk to the edge of it. I knew it was coming. Knowing it was coming turns out to do nothing at all about the hour it takes.
And it doesn't start till the yard drops under a hundred, which in August is nine at night if you're lucky. Wednesday the arm went at two minutes to ten. The lungs at half past. Then the second Intelligence set at the kitchen table, then a shower, and I lay down at twenty-five past eleven.
Monday it had been ten fifty. Tuesday, five past eleven.
Around ten-fifteen on Wednesday Mrs. Ferreira's screen door banged.
"Mijo. The dog."
Her dog is a little white thing that has never once in its life been quiet. The rim of a steel shield makes a sound on a block wall if you clip it on the turn, and I'd been clipping it on the turn.
"Sorry."
"He thinks it's a person." She didn't go back in right away. "It's late for this."
"I know."
She went in. I did eleven more laps, and I didn't clip the wall again, and the dog barked anyway.
* * *
So why not stop at ten? There's a rule on a fun-run flyer in Coach's handwriting that says to, and I'd said it back to her out loud.
Because I'd done the sum. Monday night, on the end of the bed, alone.
The evening block is what makes it four tenths. Without it Strength and Stamina come in at three, most days. A tenth a day is six tenths a week in each of them, and six tenths is a lot of steel.
Bed at ten doesn't show up on any screen. It never has.
I also knew what five hours of sleep does, because I spent three days flat on my back learning it in July. But that was thirteen nights in a row. This was three. I decided three was different. I decided it by myself, at eleven at night, the same hour Coach once made me admit my hardest set never registered.
* * *
I pulled into the lot at 5:34.
All six of them were there. Hector sitting on the curb under the one streetlight with his western and his gallon jug. The Vogel brothers standing next to each other by the door like they'd been installed. Wendell talking to the Vogel brothers. Annette asleep in her car with the engine running and her head against the window, still in scrubs.
Priya, walking up and down the length of the building with her phone, turned when my headlights hit her and just stopped where she was.
I got my keys out. The front door sticks, and you have to pull it toward you while you turn, and I know that, I have done it every morning since the first week of July. I turned it without pulling. It didn't open. Six people watched me do it again.
Inside I went down the switches fast. One, two. Then I hit four before three, which you cannot do, and the whole back half of the gym went dark with a noise like a stapler.
Hector walked past me without a word to the panel in the hallway, opened it, did something, and the back half came on again.
"Three before four," he said.
"I know."
"Hm."
* * *
Priya was on the rower at 5:39.
She has three kids and she's there at five because it's the only hour of the day that's hers, and at six on the dot she has to be out the door to get them up, which I know, because she's told me, and which I had not once thought about in the car.
At 6:01 she got off and wiped the handles down and came past the desk with her bag.
"Twenty-two minutes," she said.
"I'm sorry."
"I know you're sorry. You look terrible." She put her sunglasses on, inside, at six in the morning. "Tomorrow you're here or you give me a key."
Annette came in at quarter to six with her eyes still half shut and put a coffee on the counter from the place on the corner. It was stone cold.
"It was hot at five," she said, and went to go sit on the leg press without pressing anything.
I drank the coffee anyway, standing at the desk. It tasted like the cup. It was the first thing I'd put in my mouth since the night before, and I felt it land in my stomach and sit there like a stone in a sock.
* * *
At seven Coach walked in and said "Good morning" to the room, which she doesn't, and then "Carry" to me, which she does.
She didn't ask about the door or the breaker or Priya. That's how I knew she'd been told about all three.
So I walked the steel. Rim at the ribs, elbow soft, round the floor past the racks and the rower and the heavy bag and back. She sat on the bench with her coffee and her cane across her knees and watched me go round five times without saying anything.
On the sixth she put the cane out, hooked the crook under the bottom rim as I went past, and lifted.
It came up about an inch. That's all it took. The whole weight of the thing landed in my arm at once, and my arm had apparently not been holding it.
"How long has that been sitting on your hip," Coach said.
I didn't know. That was the honest answer. On the turns, where the path goes round the end of the rack, the bottom of the rim had found the top of my hip bone and set down on it. Half a second a turn. Maybe forty turns an hour. My body had built itself a shelf and never mentioned it to me.
She let the shield back down onto my arm and took the cane away. My forearm was shaking a little, a fine fast shake like a phone on a table, and I watched it do that and couldn't make it stop.
"Walk," she said.
I walked. Without the shelf the arm went at thirty-one minutes, with Coach calling "Hip" every time the rim so much as thought about dropping. Then ninety seconds. Then the lungs, at forty-four.
Two notifications. On her floor, at a quarter to eight in the morning, in forty-four minutes instead of an hour and a half.
* * *
She let me sit on the floor with my back against the rack before she said anything else. The concrete was the only cool thing in the building and I put both palms flat on it.
"That buys you a week," Coach said. "Maybe two. Then it's a heavier shield or a slower number, and we'll talk about which, and you won't like either of them."
"Okay."
"What time'd you go to bed last night."
She knew. She asks questions she already knows the answer to so you have to hear yourself say it.
"Eleven twenty-five."
"Monday."
"Ten fifty."
"And you did that sum on your own, and you decided three nights was fine because it isn't thirteen." She blew on the coffee and didn't drink it. "Next time the walk gets long, you come and tell me it got long. You don't take it out of the bed. The bed was never yours to spend."
"Okay."
"Say it back."
"The bed's not mine to spend."
She nodded and got her cane under her and stood up, slow, with the knee. Then she stopped halfway to the office.
"What goes at four ten," she said.
I didn't answer, which was an answer.
"The thing that goes first. That you don't need to tell me the name of." She didn't turn round. "Did it go this morning."
"No."
"Then that's two things you lost today," Coach Reyes said. "Priya's twenty minutes, and the thing. I can help you get one of them back."