# Going Into Something Dark

When the meninges cancer tied him to bed, my dad had been having seizures and photophobia episodes for months. My mom and my sisters gave up on his illness. They sent me with chicken broth and horchata water to the shack we had adapted for him. I connected my laptop to an old Zenith and we watched Haile Gebrselassie's finishes and Eliud Kipchoge's world record.

While we watched the videos, he told me that, coming out of kilometer twenty-five, he had passed Mamo Wolde's team at Mexico 68, that he had trained in Kenya for a few months and that a black woman from Iten had taught him to tilt his heel right. My mom said what bullshit, that the only time he left the country were those six months on the other side. I liked my dad's stories; they distracted me from his cancer.

He only had one passion in his life: running. Even before retiring, his life was a pendulum between eight hours of work and six of training, three in the morning and three at night. My mom told me that's how he came back from the gringo; that back then they had about five years married and my middle sister on the way.

"He came back touched," she'd say. "He never liked exercise and now, fucking crazy, he'd wake up at dawn to run."

One day, while we watched Beata Naigambo's collapse with oatmeal and milk, he went very still.

"Did you know," he started, "that we're the champions at endurance running? We're made for it. Yes, us, humans. The tendons here and here"—he tapped with his palm on his ankle and the back of his neck—"only exist to run and run. And walking on two legs to keep cooler in the sun and having thin ankles so we don't tire as much. Besides, today is August 14th, right? And we're the best long-distance runner in the world."

"You okay, pa?" I touched his forehead.

He didn't feel hot. I put a thermometer in his armpit: 37.5 degrees. Low-grade fever. All calm. He kept talking while the videos played on the television like background noise.

"The marathon is returning. You know? Because running is first. Before the head, before these"—he raised his thumbs—"before was standing up and running. No sprints, pure endurance, pure patience. A deer or a panther, after twenty minutes, either stops or dies. It's too much exhaustion; waste of power. What we did was track animals and run and run until we reached a half-dead mammoth or zebra. And we went together, with our star killer at the center to land the final blow. We've always moved in groups. Running made us human, you know?"

The thermometer rose to 38.5. I called his doctor. He told me it was a bit high, but normal for a sick person. I told him what he was saying. He answered that maybe he just wanted to talk and that, if the temperature rose, we'd bring it down with 400 ibuprofen. Unless it went above 40 in the next hour, he could stay home without problem.

We finished our oatmeal. It was time to bathe him. I filled the tub with warm water and carried my dad to it; he weighed no more than fifty kilos. He trembled a little when I put him in. He kept at it, like talking to himself.

"Today makes forty years, if I remember right. Because today is August 14th, right? When your sister was about to be born, I had already been a year without chamba; they didn't even want me as a dishwasher. I went over there with a tourist visa and took advantage that I learned English as a kid. I crossed by bus; I only knew the desert and the Bravo from a little bus window. I got to Chicago with a relative's acquaintance. I worked months at a meatpacking plant. I met other mojados. One of them, Juan de Dios, came from Durango, young guy, seventeen years old, ten less than me, and was saving up to go to Dallas to work at his uncle's furniture store.

"Juan de Dios was real skinny and had a shaved head, like one of those skinheads or punks, whatever they're called. He told me he did track in high school. His dream was to go to some Pan American Games and break the two-hour mark in the marathon. For him, the desert had just been days of hard practice.

"While we bled cattle, he told me that being shaved was an advantage for running: the less hair, the better temperature regulation, more surface contact for sweat; little scientific details that make the difference. Once, he shaved even his eyebrows to gain a few seconds. He also told me how you run a marathon properly, that you have to work with your team, protect the best so the air doesn't slow him down, like geese. The first twenty kilometers are a team race; the last five, a very personal thing.

"A week later, Juan de Dios got a room for twenty dollars a month. He invited me to live with him. Every day, he'd wake up at four and come back at seven, prepare something to eat for breakfast and shower. He told me that running was like going into something dark, that you don't think anything when you run or that you repeat and repeat words. Mantras, he called them. His was 'ar-thri-tis,' but he said it real weird: art-rri-tis, art-rri-tis, art-rri-tis. The word helped him tame his pace.

"We were fed up with the meatpacking plant, walking around stinking of grease and pus. We hadn't come to the other side for crumbs; we wanted to make it big. Juan de Dios told me that, if I wanted, I could go with him to Dallas, that there was better chamba there. I didn't think twice: the plant was disgusting. He told me we'd arrive running. I made an idiot face, I think. He put his arm on my shoulders, laughed and, with his young kid voice that was just dropping, told me we'd go at the end of the month. We got the tickets super cheap because the bus route ended at a terminal in Arlington, forty-two kilometers from Dallas: 'Almost a marathon,' he told me. 'There, we'll do it running.'

"The fifteen hours on the bus we spent between sleeping and talking about plans in Dallas. Juan de Dios told me his uncle had a loft in the furniture store, that, if I wanted, we could sleep there until we got established.

"We got to Arlington in the morning; we were the last to get off the bus. We asked the driver, an Indian guy with a mustache, about the highway to Dallas. The driver told us, in English, to follow two kilometers down an avenue; there we'd see the signs. 'I was joking about running,' Juan de Dios smiled. 'Let's hitchhike.'

"For an hour no car picked us up, until a big old Fairmont, one of those, well, stopped; it was coming so slow it barely braked. A worn-out old man opened the door, like seventy, with a real red beard and blue eyes. He was pale, pale and toothless. In Spanish, he asked us if we were going to Dallas. In English, we told him obviously. He let out a little laugh and invited us to get in; he warned us the car had a carburetor problem and it would take us forever to get there because he couldn't accelerate above fifteen miles; to me, much better than walking eight hours.

"Every pothole on the highway made us jump and from the trunk came noises, like, weird; like they reminded me of the sound of meat at the plant: like very dense; like loose things. I thought, well what does he have there that he didn't tie down or what. We kept talking about the weather and that nonsense. We congratulated him on his Spanish; he spoke it well, just with those little gringo things, you know, the pour favorrr and the amigou. He told us his ex was Guatemalan, that's why he knew Spanish, and also that it was the second official language of Texas. We really laughed at that one.

"The old man ('Donovan McCallister,' a pleasure, that's how he introduced himself) had lived in Arlington since he was born. He was going to Dallas to visit some relatives. He asked us what business we had there. Juan de Dios told him about the furniture store. The old man knew the place and promised to drop us right at the door. He also recommended some carnitas and chilli frijoules restaurants. Who knows, but cheap places to eat. He told us where the bar area was and that his ranch in Arlington was our ranch for whatever we needed.

"An hour later, we passed a diner, Rosita's Grill; I still remember the name, I have it right here engraved in my head. Donovan invited us to breakfast. We had more than twenty-four hours with nothing in our stomachs. The old man parked the Fairmont and we went in. Juan de Dios and I ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and Donovan a steak with fries. Halfway through the first American, Donovan remembered he left his wallet in the car. I offered to go get it. He told me it was in the glove compartment.

"He gave me the keys, I got in the car and took the money. Before leaving, I remembered those noises. I remembered the pasty sound of meat at the plant and how slow we were going. I thought, well I'll fix his things; a favor at least I can do so he doesn't go around sounding and sounding with the potholes.

"Right outside the diner I saw a ribbon and grabbed it to do him the favor of tying down the things that sounded; the ribbon was just lying there, wasn't anyone's or anything. I pressed one of those little buttons in the glove compartments. I got out and stood at the back of the car. I opened the trunk. I moved some blankets and found some bundles wrapped in clear plastic. If I have the name of the diner right here in my head, that I have it like well tattooed: they were some hands—both left ones, because well I stood looking a while—and a ribcage or whatever it's called. They were wrapped like the pork or beef we packaged, vacuum-sealed, and cut with machine and bled. I'm telling you they looked like they came from a plant and, just like that, they'd fit in any supermarket fridge. I closed the trunk real slow so not to make noise. I put Donovan's dollars in my pocket and threw his wallet. And I started walking down the highway and then, running, like without hurry, steady and constant, like Juan de Dios did every morning. I never looked back. I never stopped. I never have."

I took him out of the bath and laid him down. I put the thermometer on him again and it started beeping: he had 41. I yelled at my mom that we had to go to the hospital. I dried him and put a jacket on him while she started the car. I went with my dad in the back seat, holding him.

He went into a coma when we got to the hospital. The doctors couldn't wake him and he died three days later from dehydration; the tumor in his head was as big as a tennis ball.

During the funeral, I sat alone at the edge of the wake and remembered my dad in his last awake moments: while we went to the hospital, he had his gaze fixed forward, concentrated; the same as when running. I was left with the urge to ask him if, like Juan de Dios, he had gone into something dark that day while running through the highways of Texas.