2
Dan Howard didn’t want to be tiptoeing through a flood of shit first thing on a Monday morning in the middle of a heat wave.
Keane Reid didn’t want to be cleaning up shit, period. He was tired of cleaning up shit. It was what he did for a living, though, and when the boss called him at 6:24 a.m. precisely (according to Keane’s digital clock), he answered politely enough on the telephone by the bed. Then he hung up the telephone, swore clean, turned to his wife. Then? Then he swore dirty, because his wife was seven years dead and there was no one and nothing there but a Teresa Reid–shaped hole.
He pushed himself out of bed.
Downstairs in his simple kitchen in his simple house, Keane ate breakfast. He always ate a big breakfast, a big lunch, and a small dinner. It was just the way he did it and it worked for him just fine. He didn’t put weight on, or lose weight. His weight, by and large, took care of itself. Forty-five years old, with the metabolism of a teenager, pretty much.
Muesli, two rounds of toast with one egg (poached—he wasn’t an idiot), and an apple, which he ate with a knife, dissecting it slowly and chewing each slice while thinking about the day ahead. Work, eat, work, eat, sit, run, shower, sleep…repeat.
“I’m bored,” he said to no one, through a half-chewed slice of green apple.
That was the problem, he figured. That was why he didn’t want to do anything much. The only joy in his life was running. Six nights a week. The weather didn’t matter, nor coughs and colds (which for Keane were rare anyway). He didn’t have a social life. Didn’t want one. He wasn’t interested in television, or dating, or reading. Sometimes, when the quiet in the house became unbearable, or if he couldn’t sleep at all, he listened to the radio. But very little else.
There was nothing but miles and miles ahead for Keane. His kind of running didn’t have an end, or a finish line. He didn’t time his runs. It wasn’t training. There wasn’t a marathon at the end of it, a shiny blanket to warm him up. Nothing could do that.
He ran so he could sleep. If he didn’t run, he worried he might just sit. Sit, endlessly, forgetting to eat and work and sleep, staring out at the garden and the birds, watching the seasons go by, his hair and beard growing and his limbs turning to stone.
That’s what you’re doing anyway, said a voice from his past. He wanted to tell that voice to get fucked and leave him to his thoughts. But the voice was his thoughts, and it was right.
He was turning to stone.
He was dying. Not so anyone would notice. Maybe he’d keep on running until he was fifty, or seventy, or a hundred. But somewhere out on the city roads, he’d died inside. There was no way back.
Maybe that’s what you’re running for. What you’re searching for…? The way back?
“Maybe,” he told the voice in his head.
Keane took a deep, easy breath through his nose and got out of the kitchen chair. He turned away from the garden and the early birds chirruping and eating cheap seeds on the feeder.
With a dull kind of resignation, he rinsed the bowl, plate and utensils, then left them on the draining board to put away later.
He took a good look at himself in the mirror in the hallway. The gray and the deep lines in his skin didn’t bother him. But the emptiness in his eyes caused him to look away.
He still hadn’t found the way back.
Keane Reid closed the door behind him and got in the company van on his short driveway and headed off to work.
3
Keane stepped into the pool of sewage that covered the floor of The King’s Arms, light into dark, and thought, Who you gonna call? Shitbusters!
He wasn’t wearing flip-flops, but heavy boots that made his feet sweat and stink. He wasn’t sure he was any better off than the poor lad who’d met him at the door to complain about his reeking feet.
The entire floor, it
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