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Page 35.
 Across deserted fields that made the city lights seem distant, he and Stella walked briskly and with purpose.
The smell of grass, wind-blown in these vacant lots, brought back a memory. Jared remembered Lethe, the green summer planet at the fringe of the man-galaxy. Sit all day smoking tuma leaves in perfect tranquility and wooded grove became stained-glass cathedral, bird-and-insect choir, sheeps’ dirty pelts like a creamy fragrance…
Far from this place…
They came to a bench in Victory Park in the heart of the City. Above soared the Arch of Triumph, out of darkness near the earth like a delicate wire thing, crossing the stars with five thousand flashing air-lights, in a ten-mile arc from which Jared had once descended crowned with victory and lifted on the people’s shoulders and carried over the crossroads of the galaxy, Victory and Olympic Avenues, in a glory that had gone but lived on somewhere…
Somewhere…
“Lelli calls,” Stella said.
Jared and rested for a moment side by side on the stone bench.
“Lelli says that Lyxa awaits us.”
Jared nodded. “Tell them we are coming.”
They walked again among decaying brick buildings, unkempt grasses and wild scrubby trees. Trash littered the park that had once been so proudly kept. Back in the days when humans still ran in the races, and carried the Torch. He’d been the last.
They came to a small metal gate unevenly closed upon an entrance in a long brick wall.
Jared banged on the steel with his fist, and listened for signs of life.
Soon enough, the gate opened on rusty hinges. A confused, bedraggled figure peered out cautiously.
“Do you remember who I am?” Jared called out.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’m Jared Fallon. I ran the Arch once. You handed me the torch. Remember?”
“Hm. So you did. Ran the Arch? Hm. Can’t say that I remember your face. Course, we both wore uniforms then.” The elderly man squinted at Jared. “When did you run?”
“Just a few years ago.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are you sure you ain’t from the police? I ain’t done a thing!”
“No, I’m not from the police. But let me in. Please? I’d like very much to see the inside of the Arch again.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“No one cares anymore.”
“No, I’m not supposed to.”
“Who gave you your orders?”
“Olympia House.”
“They don’t exist anymore. It’s just an empty, flooded hulk. The guards don’t exist anymore. And I’m…I was…” Jared didn’t finish the thought. “Tell me, how many years has it been since anyone ran the Arch?”
“Umh…let’s see—now, of course, only those goddamn machines run the victory lap.” He glared defiantly: “I don’t talk to them, and they don’t talk to me. It’s all just lights and music and drama for stupid people hanging in bars, who’ll cheer at anything.”
Jared said, “I feel the same way.”
The old man reflected. His eyes seemed to be looking through the Arch and into the past. “The Torch, now, it seems a long time since any of you fellows has come to run the Arch…”
“Not so many years.”
“And moving fast. I’ll be gone, and this thing will fall down or…”
Jared quickened. “The Torch? You still have it?”
“What? Oh, the Torch. Yes, of course. The Torch…” he chuckled. His smile was illumined by the remaining lights still lit along the bottom of the Arch. Half the lights were out now, shattered and dark. The night was icy cold, especially high up in the thin air.
Jared elbowed his way past the man, into the little courtyard, where the Arch loomed close and massive overhead. Its end pillars were concrete, while its slender curve was metallic.
Jared patted his bony arm, feeling loose flesh. “Do you think I might see the Torch?”
“The Torch? My old legs…won’t let me fetch things the way I used to.”
“No, no! Let me get it! You just wait here.” Jared walked briskly to the old man’s shack. It was a little wood-frame house. The paint was all gone; gray, dry wood hung sadly, stirring but not stirring in the night air, as bones might seem to because of the memory of the life they had once held, but certainly the wind is like the breathlessness of a corpse on these nights, a face as though asleep not dead and hardly able to stir bones. Desolation.
The old man had probably long been forgotten. Probably lived by begging on Olympic Avenue. This was his home, amid the ghost of what had once seemed a glamorous position.
Inside was the smell of sweat and dirty clothes and burning wood. Jared’s eyes roved in search of the Torch. He saw a bed, a shelf, a night table, a sprawl of clothes on the floor, a wood-burning stove.
Ah—there!
The Torch lay on a dusty, tiny wooden shelf over a bed of rumpled yellow flannel sheets. The Torch shone golden, probably polished once a day by its addled old keeper.
Jared hefted it. Its feel brought back the past. Jared weighed its lightness, gauged its thinness, its half-meter length, its ornature. It fit easily into his hand, and rested against his shoulder as if he’d never handed it back years ago.
Back outside, the old man tore it from his hands and held it to his chest. “You can’t have it!”
Jared held out money. “For a little while?”
“No!”
Jared tugged at the Torch. He pulled out of the man’s grasp and the old one flailed at him. “Give it to me! It’s mine!”
Stella, veiled and mysterious, stood nearby with her garments fluttering slowly, like a ghost.
“Old man, it belongs to the city. It belongs to the victorious. You can’t sit here in the darkness and hold it to you like your only comfort. Always someone new has to have it.”
“But,” the old one wailed, “let them have their own Torches!”
Jared shoved him away angrily. “Damn you, old leper. You handed it to me once, you’ll hand it to me again! I’m still winning! I’m taking it over the Arch with me!”
“But bring it back!” Tears in his eyes, the old man implored: “I beg you. Bring it back!”
“I will,” Jared said. But his mind said, Perhaps…but even that was a lie, because he knew he would never return.
“Come back! Bring me my Torch!” the old man cried loudly as Jared climbed into the Arch through a broken window. “It’s forbidden!” he cried out.
“Meet me on the other side,” Jared said. “I’ll hand it back to you for safekeeping. Nobody will probably ever come to bother you again.”
Jared’s mind was filled with the cheering of millions.
“There’s no turning back,” he told Stella.
“Take me with you,” she said in her lilting Samba voice.
As if he would go without her. He reached out, and she put her hand in his.
Together, carrying the glorious eagle and light, they began to alternately walk and jog up the slope of the Victory Arch in its glassy tube that rose hundreds of meters over the city skyline.
The plastic-concrete floor was still intact.
Stella stayed with him, running a meter behind to leave him in front with his glory.
Tiny grains of matter crackled under his feet as he ran.
Drape-like ghosts of memory whispered and faintly cheered him on from the shadow-hung braces running around the tube-like Arch. Smiles followed him in the drifting water-shadows of warps in the transparent upper hemisphere of the tube, and from puddles in the cracked floor.
Slowly the Torch made its ascent, unlit but glinting with a million borrowed lights.
Wind tattered softly all around him.
Stella kept up silently behind.
Tides of the great atmosphere sea rolled around him. The wind’s great power made the streamlined body of the Arch tremble, creak, and groan.
He ran upward on the narrow thread, high and higher, over the air and to the stars.
Jared stumbled a few times, but always caught himself. He was a bit out of shape, and breathless as the curve brought him close to the stars amid thinner and colder air.
He paused at the top to rest and regard the city one last time. Stella stood nearby, enigmatic and silent in her wind-stirred veils.
He felt phantoms of his past strength return. He recalled the men and women who had run, jumped, hurled discus, swum, wrestled, a hundred great sports. He’d been the showpiece, the kilometer man, talk of the tabloids and master of the media in his brief moment of fame.
Always, the popular hunger moved on to the next sensation, and he’d been forgotten a day or two later. Then the media had picked him up again as the dashing, dark-haired companion of the extinct monarchy’s last glamorous queen in waiting. Soon, that also had passed into history and forgetfulness.
“Ready. Let’s move on.” He resumed his run, with the Torch resting imperiously against one shoulder. He couldn’t see the bottom yet, but it would be in sight soon.
There were no way signs, no distance markers, just a few delinquent rock fragments.
Silence.
Wind blew against the sides of the Arch.
“Are you with me?”
Jared’s voice was lost in vastness. Wind and sky absorbed his tiny sound.
“I am always with you.” Stella’s voice was calm and flat, but she added: “Forever.”
He did not descend into that waiting night with joy. His mind, wishing to be free, lost itself in a dream. He left behind the memory of cheering millions and light-banners crawling in the sky. His hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and the cold got to him suddenly…
As he trotted on erratically, he mind-wandered…He would roll himself in a ball and roll and bounce pastel-happy and drift into the waiting arms…
For a few minutes he was a being in space, a commander of his own ship, and finally realizing his childhood dream. He sat in the cockpit, comfortable in his bulky pressure suit with bubble helmet, and managed the controls as his ship sailed among stars and nebulae. There was no happier place than this. Lights winked in erratic musical rhythms and assorted dimly glowing colors. The display screens showed stars, stars, and more stars…
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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