Runner

By David Boyd

Zaki’s journal is a fascinating account of adolescent friendships, the struggle for individuality, and tragic loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781609840099

David Boyd

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the winner of the 2017/2018 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature for his translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017). With Sam Bett, he is currently co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.

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RUNNER

David Boyd

© 2010

All Rights Reserved

Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photcopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?

The father it is, with his infant so dear;

He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm,

He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

 - From The Erl-King by Goethe

One

The Start

Now that you’re here, having written all this makes more sense, I guess. Because this is the start and I’ve never written anything as long as I think this is going to be. This is my story about what happened at St. Pete’s and how Deon died. It’s the truth as I remember it and I was there for almost all of it. Except the part at the end, when I really should have been there…and I wasn’t.

Which is why I run.

Which is why I’m here with Dr. Shannon.

Before I started this today, I got up early-early. Four o’clock maybe. And I dunked my head under the shower, put on my running stuff and took off. I ran lean and mean for an hour and then I cranked it up in spurts. When I felt my brain relaxing, I worked on pace. When I felt ethereal, I called ahead to Deon, smiling as he fell in step beside me…

-       Hey.

-       Hey.

-       Running on empty…no breakfast…

-       Breakfast later…get the lead out…come on and run!

-       You’re too much for me, man! Slow down…

-       In your face! Come on and race!

But Deon can never ever break a mile and I just put my head down and pretend not to notice when he breaks off the trail, wheezing and gasping. I keep going, I know he’ll be waiting when I come around again in eighteen minutes. He does five or six miles like this but he could do the whole thing if he’d look after his lungs.

By which I mean blazing. All smoking is bad and so what if you don’t agree but the facts are on my side. I did a whole speech about it in Mrs. Traynor’s Life Management Skills class. I called it, If you smoke, you must be brain dead!!!

If you blaze, well, it’s basically the same thing, right? But Deon didn’t see it that way. I figured, at least he doesn’t smoke cigarettes so that helps. I think he was pretty careful just to do it by himself. I got in his face about blazing a lot but it got less and less because…well, because of other stuff that I’m going to tell you about pretty soon.

So before I started pounding on this laptop, I ran until my chest was on fire and my legs were melting muscles. I light-jogged for twenty minutes to cool down. I got back to here and then I turned on the laptop that Dr. Shannon loaned me. I was still thinking about Deon.

In your face. Come on and race!

I want to say ‘thanks’ to Vincent for the idea of writing stuff down. He was my English teacher at St. Pete’s. He said that putting inner thoughts on paper helps us to understand who we are. So this is all Vincent’s idea, even though Dr. Shannon thinks that it’s his. It isn’t.

If you’re reading this, Mr. Carr, I guess you know now that you taught me some stuff, even if I didn’t appreciate it all right away. Like, that you have to spell Reader with a capital ‘R,’ because it’s a sign of respect. You have to be brief and get to the point without a lot of snazzy stuff…but it’s okay to use a metaphor or maybe something more subtle like foreshadowing. I’m not sure that I remember how to do all of that stuff the right way but I’ll try to remember to try some out. Anyway, the last thing about good writing is you have to build a relationship with every Reader so they know who you are.

I almost forgot…I’m Zaki, which is short for Zachary Benjamin Bryan. Zaki Bryan is how most people know me. We’re probably never ever going to meet, so you can call me what you want, I guess. Just don’t call me late for dinner. Which is to prove I can tell a joke whenever I feel like it. Like just then. Not funny, I know. But I’m getting nervous, like I’m at the start of a race that’s going to last for a long, long time. I want to run it. I know I have to run it.

Just you, Reader, try to keep in mind that telling the truth isn’t always easy.

Especially to yourself.

Could you do it if it was you?

Two

The Erl-King Freak-Out: I

It happened the first time when I was six. That’s when I first knew about the Erl-King. My mom picked it out at the library. It was one of those supersized books for little kids and it had big vivid drawings on every page. It was The Erl-King by a German writer named Goethe. (You have to say his name like you’re clearing your throat.)

Goethe is this German writer who was in the last century. He’s like an icon in Germany. He wrote a lot of poetry and I checked him out on the web a lot of years after what I’m going to tell you about happened. And he was cool. He was really popular and had lots of respect. But he wrote some stuff that was what Vincent calls dark. Like The Erl-King. That was a very scary book. Not Walt Disney stuff, I can tell you.

I was in the bathtub at our old place in Greenwich. Mom was sitting on the toilet with the seat and cover down, using it as a chair while she read The Erl-King out loud to me and showed me the pictures. I was old enough that she didn’t have to wash me anymore; she’d figured that out when I kept my duck sponge over my lap and wouldn’t move it until I was sure she wasn’t looking. Still, she must have worried that it was still a good possibility that I was a candidate for drowning in the tub if she wasn’t close by; that’s when she started reading to me while she sat on the toilet.

There was thunder and lightning outside, the heavy booming kind split by forks of intense white light. I know that I was glad that my mom was close by because the pictures in the book looked like they were moving on the page with each flash. The Erl-King rode a massive horse and his armour was black. On top of his helmet was fastened the largest set of antlers you’ve every seen. So big they should have fallen over. But he wore them like they weighed nothing. You could see his eyes, deep in their sockets, blazing red fury.

Turn the page! Turn the page, mommy!

The phone rang downstairs and by the fifth ring it was clear that somebody wasn’t going to give up. Dad? Probably, but I can’t remember now. Before mom left, she reached into the tub, parted the mountain of bubbles that I’d made, and pulled the plug. She wasn’t going to take any chances. When the power went off in the middle of a boom that shook our house, I was practically beside myself. Mom had left the book open and it revealed the Erl-King in all his glory in one incredible flash after another. His horse was moving, jittery and skittish..

My son, wherefore seek'st thou thy face thus to hide?

"Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!

Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?"

My son, 'tis the mist rising over the plain.

The Erl-King leapt off the page and sent me, whimpering, as far back in the tub as I could manage. He became mist in the same moment that I saw this. I watched as it joined my bubble mountain, disappearing in an ever-widening swirl. Down the drain. Down deep into darkness. Suddenly my knees were visible, my skinny legs, my wrinkled toes. A little cry popped out of my mouth. Like a punctuation mark.

I felt danger close by. In the drain? I leaned forward and peeked. Between the bubbles fizzing