The Jogger

When you do something consistently and for a time, you can become a part of the scenery. It’s not that no one pays attention, but it’s usually only the outsiders who might notice. They might say, “What’s with the jogging lady?” to which a local might say back, “That’s just the Jogger,” and then, hopefully, everyone will forget about it; it’s not like I’m wearing a dog costume when I run and even if I did, eventually that’d blend in too. 

            This is just some wishful thinking on my part. Nobody thinks of me as “just the Jogger” and a prodigal daughter who showed up out of nowhere. People know I killed a man and no amount of running can make me outrun that part of my story. Even if I were to wear a dog costume, that wouldn’t make them forget it.

            It’s only me and the occasional outsider who jogs here. Woodstock is not a jogging kind of town; it’s a town that drives an electric scooter to the convenience store to pick up smokes. It is bracketed by corn and tobacco fields and in between, the woods. I almost always run in the woods. Rarely do I jog by the man-made reservoir, which is the only place where I might bump into an outsider.

            But this is how you learned where to find me exactly; I remember you from my run that foggy 5 a.m. morning by the reservoir when I thought I was alone. I suppose I left the safety of the woods because I was still distracted by witnessing earlier my father’s wet breathing, and how every few minutes he’d cough up a thread of blood into a napkin and glance at it like it owed him an explanation.

            You and I locked eyes and a thought flashed in my head. I wonder which one of us will have to die? 

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            When I jog, I wear an airbrushed tank and black high-waisted seamless leggings built for speed, no excess anywhere. An Our Legacy black ball cap, shadowing my face. In the winter, a black Nike Tech Fleece that moves when I do, hood up. On my feet, the latest generation of anthracite Vaporfly runners. 

            When I don’t jog, I wear the same outfit. I wear it in case I have a sudden urge to jog, which is often, whenever I feel the animal stir inside me. 

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            As a child, I used to think I had two hearts, one under each side of the ribcage. I would feel an immense pressure inside me, its itchiness running down my arms, my palms, my thighs, all the way to my feet. I used to believe the feeling was due to having two cardiac organs pumping too much blood. 

            It wasn’t my father who told me that about the hearts—he had a different explanation for the feeling. It was just one of those childhood beliefs, like being convinced that gravity is a suggestion we all agree to obey. 

            My father’s name for the feeling was simply “the itch.” He was not a poet nor a murderer like me, he was just an alcoholic. Many alcoholics confuse drinking with poetry but he wasn’t even that kind of alcoholic, he just picked alcohol at an early age when he first tried to quell “the itch,” and—despite his almost constant drunkenness—he had had enough self-awareness to admit it and have a conversation with me about all of that before I had a similar idea. 

            He said, It's the kind of urge shared by all the problematic creatures of the night – vampires, werewolves, strzygi, wendigos, aswangs. Even mosquitoes.

            He had a sense of humour. 

            And drunks like you, I said. I had a sense of humour too. 

            Yes, and drunks like me, he said. 

            He wasn’t entirely sure how else to explain the itch, but he knew I would understand supernatural urges with the kind of melancholic sensibilities I had. 

            Because unlike him, I was a poet. Not that I ever wrote any poetry. As with alcohol, I had been warned about it early on in life too, by my mother, who tried to channel the strange feeling into poetry and who learned the hard way that poetry wasn’t fast enough to soothe it. Sometimes there would be lines, even verses, but most of the time she’d have to sit with it for evenings on end at our small kitchen table, staring out the window, elbows wearing the red out of the plastic checkered cloth, trying to conjure inspiration from the woods. I imagine the feeling inside her would swell and swell but not a word would be produced. One evening she got up from the kitchen table, walked out the door and never came back. It was particularly windy that day and on the radio, they kept talking about a tornado that destroyed Woodstock in 1979.

            I liked to  imagine her walking toward the woods, her gray dress clinging to her backside while the wind whipped the front of it and her hair almost horizontal, until the gusts grew strong enough to lift her off the ground and carry her away.

            She left a stack of paper, the top page reading,

            …“If I vanish, let it be into something older than language.”

            The rest of the pages were blank, curled slightly at the corners from the heat of too many nights when she’d produce nothing, just wore the paper down with her fingers. I found them in the drawer with the plates, as if the failure to write had to be kept close to the place where hunger lived. 

            After my mother left, I had only one heart. For a short while I thought I was cured. Later, when the feeling came over me again, I understood that this was something else—there was an animal inside us, me and my father and my mother. This was not the sort of animal we could ever get rid of; it was as vital to us as our hearts. 

            Good riddance about my mother though with her pathetic poems.  

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            Scratch that. I am not as cynical as I want you to think I am. Regarding my mother, I mean. I was sad about my mother leaving. And I’ve understood for a while now why she walked out and was unable to stop. The animal is blind and it doesn’t know it’s locked inside our skin. When it starts to scratch trying to get out, one way to quiet it again is to outrun it. 

            There are other ways, of course. 

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            My father will die soon. When he’s awake he spends all of his time reading the Internet. He has become obsessed with old, grim stories from our town as if he is trying to solve a mystery about it being haunted. His skin has gone yellow, his stomach is distended, and his hands tremble even in sleep. There is no point in doing tests. Our blood is not like your blood. As the days pass, his breath gets more shallow. I feel the woods press in closer, the silence lining up at the door. I cannot tell what kind of silence it is yet. 

            I will be completely alone, forever, once he goes. 

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            I have tried to share my life with a man. And I learned there are probably only two ways I can be with a man. One: I will have to betray myself completely for him. Or two: I will kill him. That’s what I mean by there being other ways to quiet the animal. 

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            The man I’m talking about was like my mother, a poet. But before he published a very important poem about me—about how my devotion was helium for his ego, the one that won him an award—he blindfolded me and fed me foie gras. He said to trust him. That was the first test of my devotion, before he introduced me to other tests that would arrest my body into states that almost killed the animal inside me. On the night of the foie gras I had been a vegetarian for 14 years up until that point. We were at a masquerade ball in a bass-trembling-UV-A-light-lit-walls kind of a place called The Lobby, near the big museum back in the city. Inside the slick bathroom stalls, there were narrow shelves installed specifically so that you could do cocaine off of their surfaces. I’m telling you these details so that you understand that I had tried to be a part of the world, a part of a city, a part of people who sparkled and tumbled out of taxis in suits, or furs and heels. I wasn’t always the town weirdo called the Jogger, a former convict who lived with her dying alcoholic father at the edge of the woods. 

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            Am I surprised to see you at my door with a camera bag slung across your body? No. You have followed me on my morning run. When I sensed a presence behind me in the woods, I knew it was you, instantly. I didn’t increase my pace; there was no point. I have expected someone like you sooner or later, I was just hoping it would be later, after my father’s passing. I don’t know how many days he has left. The afternoon you show up, he has only woken up once to read the Internet for a few minutes and take in some soup, which he throws up minutes later. I am not trying to prolong his suffering, the feeding is just a gesture. He is asleep most of the time, which is the last stage, and when he sleeps he looks peaceful and far away, like a man floating just beneath the surface of a frozen lake, untouchable and already dead. 

            He hasn’t told me everything, I know that, but it is too late now. Perhaps for you, too, and I can see something like an acknowledgment in your eyes when you introduce yourself. No, not acknowledgment—just watchfulness.  Most likely, this is not because you can sense the animal but because you know about me. Everyone does. 

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            E.L., 29, was convicted of manslaughter in the death of her boyfriend, R.K., whom she killed during an intimate encounter. At trial, she claimed she experienced a dissociative episode brought on by past trauma and emotional coercion within the relationship. Her defense argued that R.K. had groomed and psychologically manipulated her, triggering a state of fear and detachment. “I wasn’t in control,” she said on the stand. “I thought something bad was happening—I didn’t know where I was.” Medical experts provided testimony about complex trauma and dissociation. The court accepted a plea to manslaughter, citing diminished capacity. E.L. was sentenced to seven years, with parole eligibility in three and a half.

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            I will learn later that we are both reciting a version of this text in our heads as we size each other up and out-loud exchange information where you explain about the article you’re writing and try to convince me to let you in and where I tell you this is not a good time because my father is dying.

            This surprises you. 

            You will ask me later—you are only a man—what I thought of you in those first moments and I know you mean appearance; you are proud of your appearance and there is an instant honesty between us that happens only with people who are both equally beautiful. So, in short, this is what I thought about your appearance. 

            I cannot yet tell what sort of character you have but you seem both relaxed and too eager, the first one possibly a personality trait, the second because you are here on a job. It’s the relaxed that intrigues me; it is the reason why I am a bit unnerved despite, at first, feeling in control. I don’t know if you do what you do because you pick up on that, but when I announce I’m about to go for a run, you kneel down and place your hand on my shin—“Hold on,” you say—and you retie my shoelace. 

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            Five years away is a long time and it’s not a long time at all. Especially these past five years, which the entire world can measure as easily as only a collective prolonged experience can be measured, like a war. For the first two years of the five, we were all in lockdown and there was something about the whole world being imprisoned that made me feel like I was finally a part of it—more so than when I tried to live in the city. 

            The animal was trapped and I was trapped but we were all trapped. The itch of it trying to claw out didn’t come back for a long time so I could just sit with my thoughts and feelings. It did not turn into anything bigger, like a wendigo, a creature whose hunger begets hunger. That was my fear but whenever I’d get quiet within myself there was calm instead of dread. And when it did come back, upon my release from prison, it felt contained. I started running again. 

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            As I run through the forest now, I rehearse what I will tell you when I tell you about what happened with R.K. I know you will ask me about my motive and I will have to decide whether I want to repeat what I said on trial or what I came up with in those five years I was put away. 

            I didn’t plan it. I just got tired. Tired of having to jog in circles to keep the animal down. Quite literally; I ran around a soccer field near my lover’s ice-box condo and only during the times he deemed appropriate—although that wasn’t even on him, in cities people did things according to absurd rules: wake up at six, commute by nine, eat by seven, lights out by eleven, live in a box built to code, die quietly in your sleep—preferably after paying your taxes.

            And he had already started cracking me open—first with the meat, later with the drugs, and then the sex, when he’d desecrate our union by sharing me or by sharing himself. Little violations he called love, or devotion, what inspired him to write the famous poem about me. But, paradoxically, the more he broke me down, the more obvious he became, and the less worth saving. He was ordinary. A vampire without a bite. Cruel in the usual ways. Forgettable in the usual ways.

            Anyway, that night, when the itch came over me, the claws scratching from within, and pressure built too high, I didn’t fight it. It wasn’t even that I was out of my Vaporfly runners and that I got surprised by the sudden intensity of the feeling; I just made a decision to wait, curious to see what would happen if I were to fully yield into it. I knew there would be consequences—after all, I lost a mother to it when she let it take over—but at some point the itchiness turned into a build-up similar to the ascent that happens right before an orgasm, all painfully sweet, demanding a release. There was no way to stop it. I let it push through my skin, my veins snapping open, unfurling like a comet’s tail ripping the sky—and out of the comet, the animal came, loose at last. 

            My lover was on top of me, sweaty, half-drunk, whispering things he thought I wanted to hear, parts of the poem, actually. In the dark we are gods, in the light we are nothing, I let my hand slide up the back of his neck pulling him closer. I was gentle, tender. I am a gentle, tender lover, I have always offered him my neck. I loved his hand around it, I was that easily pleased. Maybe not that easily, as I had also always hoped he would look at me while inside me and he never did. That night he didn’t either, his mouth wet next to my ear, his chest sticking to mine, crushing the only heart I have in my ribcage. 

            If you want an easy explanation, it was a reaction to that because things suddenly stopped being gentle and tender and a thumb started pressing hard against the base of his skull, just above the spine, the soft spot. Pushing until he made a noise I had never heard before. The animal covered my eyes firmly with one of its black wings and when I came to, my lover’s body was bucking once, then twice, then it went still. 

            At the trial one of the prosecutors argued that it was all done in a fit of rage. 

            It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t even personal. It was a kind of mercy.

            He wasn’t worth saving, I told you. 

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            My father dies in the morning. There are no last-minute insights about my mother’s disappearance. His last words are mostly nonsense: “Don’t leave the garden hose out, never trust a man who whistles through his teeth, keep a jar of pennies by the door in case you need to throw them at a wild cat.” Then finally something that sounds somewhat relevant: “Maybe not like wendigo,” as if we were still in the conversation from my childhood when he acknowledged our condition or as if he heard me all those nights in prison when I worried whether I got a taste for more hunger. This is the last thing he says. It brings me relief. I know I will have to try to believe it is indeed a message meant for me and that what happened with R.K. was just one necessary rupture and that I am not hollow. 

            I don’t tell you this part, I will never tell you about my fears. If you are reading this then you know but otherwise you will not. 

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            We are sitting across from each other in a little diner a few towns over, where we agreed to meet, the day before. It is gloomy outside, bare trees like bones picked clean, the month of April behind on its green. I have just finished telling you about that night and you are quiet. I reach for your notebook and hold your eyes as I open it, daring you to stop me but you don’t, you lean back in your seat and although you don’t smile there is a smile there. I want to ask if you look into a woman’s eyes when you make love. But I don’t know how to ask this and instead I flip through the pages and try to focus on words, see if I can decode your real desire behind wanting to write this story. In the middle, there is a ribbon, dividing the notebook into the second part where there are names of other women you probably think are like me. I recognize some of these names, some of them are famous, Lizzie, Mary Ann, Erzsebet. I wonder if telling you that probably none of them are like me will make me sound jealous. And I wonder if I were to tell you that maybe it isn’t that deep and that some of us just become poets or alcoholics or simply joggers—would that make you get up and leave? But I don’t believe I even believe myself. And then, suddenly, I feel it, that first zap inside my arms. It’s instantly recognizable.  I don’t know the woods near this diner we’re in. I imagine you getting up, trying to run after me and that makes me smile.

            Did you read something funny in there? 

            Not at all, I say and scratch up and down my arms. I look out the window to the almost empty parking lot with only your car, a lone dark shape in the dimming light. I lay the notebook back on the table. I think of my mother. Did she find something older than language or stronger than the wind to vanish into, in the end?

            Will you take off your cap, you say and I obey. A strand of hair falls into my eye and you reach and tuck it behind my ear. You pick up your camera and snap a photo. You hold your breath when you do. I hold my breath too, mostly out of surprise at the intimate gesture. You’ve told me earlier the photos are not a part of the article; you are just taking them for your own private portfolio. 

            Am I disappointed in myself, a little disgusted with my lack of resolve, how quickly I’m letting you in or that I’m letting you in at all? 

            I am not afraid of the silence, or of being alone; it is not about that. I was looking forward to it. I pictured myself moving like a streak of black between the trees, in the early hours of the day or at dusk. At night, distinguished only by the barely-there rhythmic sound of my runners. I could see myself running forever until one day I would get swallowed whole by the darkness, no trace left behind. In the end one final flicker of motion, the faintest pulse of sound, and then nothing. Just me, merging with the silence, as if I had never been.

            But. Remember when I said I was a poet? I was close but I had it wrong—I am actually just a romantic. Because sitting here with you, I already feel that this is the beginning of a different story. Too early to know if it’s a doomed one or not and I wish I could tell you how much this might cost me—and you—if you ever ask me to betray myself. Will you make me eat meat? Will you try to feed me to the wolves? Or will you do something completely unexpected still—some horror I don’t know about yet—that will make me regret trading the silence in for you? 

            My father died this morning, I say as casually as I can and watch your face twist in shock. 

            I want to tell you it’s none of your problem, that it’s not a problem at all, and that I’m supposed to be alone forever now. But I am vulnerable—my father died this morning—and you have tied my shoelace yesterday, and you have moved a strand of hair from my eye, and in your notebook there are names of women who you think are like me but now that I think about it, these aren’t just notes of a journalist—they’re incantations, a trail leading to me. And that, somehow, feels like a warning. But of what? It doesn’t matter. You could be my hunter, my saviour, or simply someone who knows exactly how to hold me. All three options excite me. I haven’t been excited in so long; I have tried to outrun boredom itself. 

            God, I’m so sorry, you say and you slide out of the booth and walk around the chipped table, Come here, you say. 

            And when I stand up, you pull me close, pressing your lips to my forehead, but it’s not quite a lover’s kiss. It feels like something that isn’t about love; but about control, about pulling me into your orbit. Instinctively, I try to get closer, but you pull back slightly, just enough to watch me for a moment, to see how I'll react. 

            Inside me there is howling and an outraged flutter of wings, massive and expanding under my skin, and I tear myself away from your embrace, my body charged as if electrocuted. There are many outcomes of what will happen next but I won’t know until I run; all I know is that I hope you will not stay standing.

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