Ashes and Entropy Read online

  “Yeah. Just a sec.” Trevor rolled over onto his stomach and pushed himself up. His hand brushed against something cool, smooth. “Move out of the light. There’s something here.”

  Sun trickled into the dirt-floored crawl space, pale dust-blurred beams of light that fell on the ground and the thing half-buried there.

  Trevor moaned, the air forced out like a blow to the gut. There was a pale rounded mass curving up from the ground. A skull. Small, unbroken, clearly a child. And beneath it two bird-boned hands laid across the cage of the skeleton’s chest. A torn dress, ruffled and stained brown with age was folded around the remains. He knew who she was. One last missing, laid to rest under her mother’s funeral pyre.

  FLESH WITHOUT BLOOD

  by Nadia Bulkin

  When all this is over, there are going to be stories printed about Claire. Somebody’s going to find out that she set a state high school record for the 3,200 meters and got a full ride to Rosewood and ran into traffic in her sophomore year. Somebody’s going to find the hospital records – medical and psych – and they’re going to paint a picture. She’ll be just another girl-runner who couldn’t handle the realization that she could no longer keep up with the best no matter how hard she trained or how thin she got; who decided it was better to die than to fail.

  I’m sure they’ll take a long look at our parents – stoic dad, high-strung mom – and write some mumbo-jumbo about sky-high expectations and pressure to be perfect. Never mind that our parents weren’t athletes, that they never understood the look on Claire’s face when she ran. They always thought she looked driven by an invisible whip, and I’m sure they’ll quickly clarify for any journalist that asks them: “a whip of her own making.” Because sure, they were proud of us – we were the Kessler kids, known for collecting those plastic trophies that you can buy for two dollars but mean so goddamn much because it’s about the fact that you placed, you rated, your name was going down as having risen above the rest, even for just one Saturday afternoon – but they didn’t make Claire the way she was.

  Claire was born like that. Claire didn’t need to be taught to never give up or be the best you can be. She just knew there was no other way to exist. I wrestled in high school, so I knew it too – knew life was all about domination, all about winning. I never gave up my position on the mat, and Claire ran hard, vacant, brutal, and definitely not driven by any whip. She ran in hunger, because she was always starving. Proteins. Lean meats. Sweetbreads. That didn’t change once we were adults. Our parents made me go grocery shopping with her once and I remember those eyes glazed over at the butcher’s counter, hands twisting every yogurt carton in the dairy aisle to find the nutritional content. I told our parents Claire was fine. At least she was eating, I figured. In college – when she had her “accident” – she was running on celery sticks and coffee.

  “Is she running again?” they whispered. That’s how they put it: not depressed or suicidal or even in trouble. Just running again. As if running, the thing that had made Claire “Claire” since she won her first little plastic trophy at age twelve, was the monster here.

  I could tell she was indeed running again – the shoes were a dead give-away, even though she hid her tracksuit under layers of sweats – but I decided not to tell our parents. Two weeks later they called again, because Claire had stopped answering her phone. “It’s not like her to go dark,” they whined, and I thought of her sneaking out of the house at 4 a.m. to run around the quarry before school. I went with her a few times – felt like it was the right thing to do, as her big brother – but she was so much faster than me. She would just vanish, weightless, into the night.

  Her office said she’d taken a leave of absence, so I went over to Claire’s locked apartment on Saturday and got the building manager to let me in after convincing him the Barons were going to win that night and Marcus Hayes was going to have a forty-point game. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. Claire in one of her gloomy squalls, probably, or possibly – a small, shriveled possibility that sat rotting in my brain like a smashed squirrel on a highway – I would find dead Claire, tucked under the covers to bury herself, a smear of medicinal vomit on her lips.

  The bedroom was empty, and the entire apartment felt lifeless. Just a carton of expired skim milk in the fridge. Bed made, toothbrush gone. I checked the hall closet – no running shoes. Even though we shared a city, I hadn’t been to Claire’s apartment since I helped her move in. I know how that sounds, can already guess what they’re going to write about me: absent older brother Chris. But Claire wasn’t much of a hostess, and I might have bailed on her a few times – nothing I could do about midnight deadlines, or the fact that the last thing I wanted to do after getting out from under a midnight deadline was sit on a futon and listen to my sister breathe.

  The only thing that carried a pulse in that apartment was an uncomfortably large print in the living room – a painting of a smiling girl-gymnast with silk angel wings, arms outstretched on a balance beam, rainbow colors bleeding off her and then melting into a dark expanse. I guess it was supposed to be inspirational – Through Me All Things Are Possible, it said in flamingo pink script – but the glow in the girl, the pitch-blackness of her eyes, gave me vertigo. Like looking down through a bridge of glass onto the Milky Way.

  Someone started coughing behind me. The building manager, the anxious Barons fan.

  “I saw her leave with a duffel bag on Tuesday,” he said, which would have been helpful to know before climbing up three flights of stairs. “I thought she was going on vacation.”

  “Claire doesn’t go on vacation.” I texted her again: You out of town?

  “So you’re sure we’re gonna win tonight, huh?”

  “The Bobcats are the worst team in the division,” I said, scrolling up through our texting history for Claire’s last message: ran 5 miles, felt like dogshit. “No way we don’t win. No way.”

  But we didn’t win, because life doesn’t work that way. Marcus Hayes, the guy we paid a hundred million for last year, the hottest draft pick of his generation, our hometown hero, had a thirty-point game in front of his own crowd. Every time Marcus missed a three-pointer, screams of anguish ricocheted through the poor insulation of my building; when Marcus turned the ball over the third time, I threw the remote against the wall so hard the batteries popped out. With two minutes left, I was standing there screaming at the television – me and everyone else in the city, I could see lights flickering in the apartments across the alley – “Level up! Level up!”

  Before you ask, only once did I scream “Level up” at Claire. It was the state championships, her senior year of high school. She was a half-step behind the leader, a girl she had beaten before, and I knew she would have regretted it if she didn’t give it her all. And here’s the difference between my sister and Marcus Hayes: Claire got it done. Claire leveled up.

  ~

  I was hardly ever the most talented wrestler on the mat. I wasn’t like Claire or Marcus Hayes – I wasn’t born with an athletic physique or perfect hand-eye coordination or great balance or boundless stamina. But I always tried. I showed up at practice early, I put in double the work. I never complained about binging or purging to stay in the right weight class. I may not have had the most impressive win-loss record but I made the varsity team, Coach said, because I had the biggest heart: I was Mr. Overachiever, the one he could count on to put his body on the line every time, to play every match like it was life or death. One of these days you’re going to hit the wall, my father said, but I never met a wall I couldn’t breach. When Coach yelled level up, Kessler when my stance slipped or my lift faltered, I always tried to push my muscles into a louder scream. Because unless you’re actively bleeding, and sometimes even then, you’ve probably got something more to give.

  ~

  Claire had never been good at making friends, only competitors – the girls on the high school track team were always thinking of ways to slip each other laxatives right before a race,
steal each other’s salt tablets. Claire was too single-minded even for that; she ran inside a dark tunnel, blind to anyone else’s jealousies and fears, deaf to their whispers. The sort of self-centeredness that all true champions have. But she had marked herself as “Going” to a bunch of get-togethers hosted by a group called Roughshodders (Serious Runners Only), so I figured those were the snakes she’d decided to slither with for now.

  Of course none of those long, lean, gamey bastards in their aerodynamic track suits claimed to know where Claire was. They sneered and snorted and shook their heads, hands on their hips, slick polycarbonate eyes looking through me to some invisible finish line. “Nah, man. I have no idea.” “Nah, man. She never really talked much.” Bunch of bullshit. Claire was a champion, could outrun a lot of men even, and they were probably just happy she was gone. People aren’t there for each other. That’s something you learn, before the end.

  I’d almost given up – the race through Centennial Park was about to start, and I know how runners get when they’re waiting for the whistle, like a bull that’s seen a flag – when finally, one lady-Roughshodder about Claire’s age with a suspiciously cheerful grin tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was the guy looking for Claire Kessler.

  “Claire’s on a spiritual quest,” she said, popping the cap of her water bottle. “I don’t think she wants to be found.”

  As she drank I thought of Claire, ten years old, running her thumbnail between her teeth during Christmas Eve service at Second Presbyterian as if thumbing her nose at the pastor, whispering to me that “if there is a God, I bet He hates us.” I thought for a long time that she meant our family, but now I realize she probably meant the human race.

  “Claire doesn’t go on spiritual quests,” I muttered.

  The lady-Roughshodder pursed her lips mischievously. “Depends on what’s at the end of the rainbow, doesn’t it?”

  Out of nowhere, the after-image of that girl-gymnast in Claire’s apartment started to pulse in my vision – arms outstretched like a crucifix, leaking color. Like a prism. A rainbow.

  “She found some radical detox program,” the girl was saying, “Supposedly they have some way to squeeze every drop of potential out of you. Purge everything that doesn’t matter. Total body transformation. Got a weird name: Holy Star, something like that.” She shrugged. “I told her it was probably bullshit. They don’t even have a web site. But she said Lee Sheridan joined it three years ago and… do you know who Lee Sheridan is?”

  Suddenly I saw myself as she probably saw me – an out-of-shape worker drone slouching toward middle age, pasty and pallid and an embarrassment to his high-performance sneakers, an unworthy, a weakling – and the urge to grab her by her elastic shoulder straps and scream at her that I had made the varsity wrestling team, I had once been rated a superior physical specimen just like her, washed over me like a wave.

  “Yeah, I know who Lee fucking Sheridan is,” I said, because who doesn’t? Local IT nobody who suddenly turned into a nationally-ranked triathlete, got written up in a bunch of regional press, competed at the World Championships last year. A bit of a weirdo, but hard to mistake the look of punch-drunk ecstasy and disbelief in his photo finishes. Hard not to envy it. He went from spending his life chained to a desk to suddenly being a motherfucking doer, the apex of what a human body can be.

  “Then you can guess how excited Claire was to have found the people who made him over.” The lady-Roughshodder swiveled away – she had a race to run, after all, and who the fuck was I? – but not before throwing me another smart-ass remark over her shoulder: “Hey, if that Holy Star detox worked for Claire, will you let me know? Name’s Emma.”

  Under my breath, I hissed “no.”

  Emma was right that they didn’t have a web site, although the phrase did pop up on a few fitness forums, mostly desperate people looking for information that nobody had. But one local bodybuilding nutjob did swear that there was a Church of the Holy Star on the shitty side of the city, so I drove over while listening to the guys on Metro Sports Talk swear that the Barons were going to turn the season around and His Royal Highness Marcus Hayes was going to pull his head out of his ass and start delivering. The Prince that was Promised was just having some growing pains, they said. By the time I parked next to a basketball court adorned with a Christ-like mural of Marcus Hayes holding a basketball like a divine lamb, I was muttering – to myself, to Marcus, to the whole city – “Level up. Level up.”

  It took me a while to find it in the half-light, but eventually, on a door to what looked like a basement apartment in a run-down walk-up, I saw a white star. The paint was faded but I knew just by laying eyes on it that this was the place. I leaned my ear against the door and heard a sea of nothing, so I was surprised when my knock was immediately answered by a little old woman, as if she’d been waiting on the other side for me.

  “Ah – hello – is this the Church of the Holy Star?”

  Her face showed no reaction. Barely a breath. Certainly no blinks.

  “I’m looking for Claire Kessler. I’m her brother, we haven’t heard from her in two weeks…”

  “You aren’t ready,” she said, and shut the door. And I was locked out, left out, eighteen years old and hearing that St. Sebastian’s University regrets to inform you that we will not be able to offer you an athletic scholarship this year.

  ~

  Marcus Hayes lived in a mansion outside the city, for tax reasons. He also had a penthouse downtown, for “entertaining.” Everything he wore – everything that touched his skin – cost at least a grand. He traveled either first class or by private jet, decked his family in diamonds. Hundred million dollar contract, remember, and that’s not counting the endorsement deals: sneakers, soda, headphones, cars, computer chips, pizza. He spent more time filming commercials than he did training. And this isn’t jealousy. I was a jock in high school; I know that there are perks to being a hero, because nothing brings a community together like a championship. None of this would be a problem if he just won his games, if he made his shots and led the team. If he did his fucking job. And yes, I know, I know: one man can’t do everything. But for a hundred million dollars – for two dozen murals across the city, for the beating hearts of two million people – can you blame me for expecting just a little bit more?

  ~

  For the next month I went to every race in the greater metropolitan area and waited for Claire to cross the finish line. She never showed up on entry lists, but I figured she wasn’t competing under her own name. Even when Claire didn’t show, I got to watch other self-imposed catastrophes: at the Race to Beat Cancer, someone got heat stroke; at the Rock ‘n Roll Marathon, someone fractured their leg; at the Spartan Invitational, the leader collapsed five hundred feet from the finish line and was nearly stampeded by everyone else.

  “Heard that’s what happened to Lee Sheridan,” the guy next to me said as they carried the fallen runner away, and I realized I hadn’t heard anything about that lucky IT motherfucker since he placed third at Worlds. I figured he peaked, but maybe he joined senior management at the Church of the Holy Star. Maybe he took up recruiting. “Overtraining. It’s a killer.”

  “He retired?”

  “More like went dark. Disappeared. Nobody knows.”

  Something else kept popping up, too: the white star on the door of the church that ate Claire. It was on track vests and water bottles and protein bars being handed out by men and women who seemed to be part of an unofficial cheering squad for a few of the very best runners. I thought they were Scientologists at first – they had that creepy, unblinking, plastic look – but I once got close enough to hear them urgently whisper about glory and the astral divine and Saint Sasha the Star to a victorious runner. Before they noticed me and shut up, that is, then proceeded to watch me from the trees until I pulled out of the parking lot.

  It wasn’t until the Sioux River Run that I found Claire. She still braided her hair the way she did in sixth grade, but I could immed
iately tell that everything else had changed – that her body had been taken apart and remade into something at the very upper limit of muscle-to-fat content. Having broken away from the rest of the pack, she came into focus first, looking like she had enough in the tank to keep going for another 5,000 meters. The Kessler inside me wanted to start hollering, because Claire hadn’t won any race since sophomore year of college, and for a second I imagined our parents standing with me at the finish line, our mother squeezing my shoulder and our father holding up his fist in triumph. I saw us happy again. Claire’s Comeback.

  Instead she was immediately greeted by a Holy Star contingent, and I remembered that all of that was gone. All of us were gone. Her church friends gave Claire a bottle that she guzzled and lovingly patted her shoulders, her biceps, her quads – had she ever been that well-sculpted? – and Claire was shaking her head, grinning, saying, “I can’t believe this.”

  I couldn’t believe it either. I shoved aside two Holy Star missionaries, intent on scolding Claire for a lot of things: joining a New Age cult, making our parents panic, sending me on a wild goose chase when I had my own fucking problems that she couldn’t even imagine because she had refused to grow up and accept that she wasn’t good enough to win anymore. But all that anger melted away when it was just me and her, the Kessler kids, with nothing else between us. Claire’s aura knocked me back. You have to understand: she was infused with strength. Even after that 5k she stood so straight, so powerful. As another human being you can’t help but crumble in front of something so perfect. Just looking at her made my muscles wither.

  It worked. Whatever that church was doing, it worked.

  “Chris, I won,” she giggled. It was like she was fourteen again and getting her first taste of the ambrosia that is winning, although I had to admit there was a hollowness in her laughter. A hunger that was even stronger than before. Something about her was still starving, despite all that muscle, despite her energy reserves, despite her finally-perfect runner’s body. “I did it!”