Day 76. Strength 27.5. Stamina 26.3. Agility 15.8. Intelligence 19.3.
She was on the bench at 4:52.
I'd been watching the door since 4:40, when I let myself in and did the switches in order. One, two, three, four, five, six. I'd made the coffee. Six scoops. I'd stood behind the desk for twelve minutes with nothing to do and my hands flat on the counter. The coffee machine ticked as it cooled. I counted the ticks up to forty and made myself stop, and when her truck pulled in I watched her get out of it, slow, the cane first and then the bad leg and then the rest of her, with the streetlight throwing her shadow long across the asphalt in front of her, and I thought, you could still not.
She came in. She didn't look at me. She took her coffee off the machine and walked to the end of the bench by the squat racks and sat down and put the cane across her knees.
I came out from behind the desk and sat down on the bench next to her. Not in front of her. Next to her, the way you'd sit next to somebody at a bus stop.
Neither of us said anything. Out in the lot a car went past with its windows down.
"Intelligence," I said.
* * *
I told her the whole thing, in order, because that's the only way I've found that works.
Day 2, the boxed question on the legal pad. Days 2 through 10, everything I tried that didn't count. Books, chess, Spanish, sudoku, a periodic table, the crossword in the paper that's three days old by the time it gets to Grindstone. None of it registered, not once, because none of it was something I couldn't do.
Day 11. Four-digit by four-digit multiplication, in my head, no paper for the partial products. Held until the numbers slid off each other and I couldn't keep the carries straight and I felt sick. That one counted. The first notification for Intelligence I'd ever had came in at the kitchen table and I sat there looking at it until the screen went dark.
"Day eleven," she said.
"Yes."
"That's July."
"Yes."
That was all. She drank some coffee. I kept going.
Two sessions a day since, almost every day, the same as every other stat. Two tenths. One at four ten, which is why it was four ten, and one in the evening if I had anything left. Never more than two. I'd never had anybody to tell me how to make it cheaper, because I'd never told anybody it existed.
"What is it now?"
"Nineteen point three."
She turned her head and looked at me for the first time.
"From?"
"Eight."
She looked away again. Out across the gym, at the racks, at the six light switches by the door that I'd done in order.
"Eight," she said, quietly, "to nineteen."
Her thumb was moving on the handle of the cane, back and forth over a worn place in the rubber, and I don't think she knew it was.
* * *
I'd been afraid of something for forty-five days, and it turned out to be the wrong thing.
I'd been afraid of her face when she worked out what it meant for her. On Day 31 she'd asked does it work on me, in the voice she uses for heels down, and answered herself before I could, and moved on in two seconds, and I'd never forgotten those two seconds. Strength was the stat she'd spent her whole career on. Intelligence was the one nobody spends anything on, the one everybody's stuck with. I'd thought telling her that one moved too would be like telling a woman who'd lost her leg that I'd found a way to grow back a finger.
That isn't what happened.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she said.
I gave her the real reason, because I'd decided on the bike that I would. I'd said it out loud to nobody most of the way in, in the dark, past the sprinklers.
"Because you asked if it worked on you, and answered yourself," I said. "And I thought this one would be worse. So I decided not to."
"You decided."
"Yes."
"On your own. At eleven at night."
"At about nine thirty," I said. "But yes."
She put her coffee down on the floor by her foot, carefully.
"You decided what I could stand," she said. "You didn't ask me. You did the arithmetic on me in your head and you got an answer and you acted on it, and I've been building a program around a hole for six weeks." She never raised her voice. "That's the part, Miles. The thing itself, I don't care what it is. I said that, and I meant it. The part is that."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Tom said the same thing. About Bell Road. And Laveen. And a text." I looked at the floor. "It's the same thing. It's just smaller."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Guzmán's a smart man," she said. She picked the coffee back up off the floor and held it in both hands without drinking any.
* * *
Priya came in at 5:17.
She said good morning to both of us, and stopped, because Coach and I were sitting side by side on a bench at quarter past five, and that had never happened.
"Row, Priya," said Coach, without looking at her.
Priya rowed. She put her earbuds in first, both of them, and turned the rower a few inches so her back was to us, and pulled the first stroke hard enough that the chain banged.
* * *
"Show me what you do," said Coach. "Not do it. Tell me. When does it stop?"
"When the numbers slide."
"Slide how?"
I tried to explain. You're holding the partial products, four of them, and adding them, and somewhere past the second or third problem they stop holding still. A seven in the hundreds place turns into a one. It's like reading a sign through the window of a moving car. You had it, and it's gone, and the next one's already coming. You know it's wrong and you can't see what it should be. Then you go back and start that problem again and the same thing happens sooner, and your head goes hot at the back, and you start to feel sick.
"And then you stop."
"Then I keep going," I said. "Till I can't get one right at all. Till I'm sick. That's the edge."
She looked at me over her glasses.
"How long between the first slide and the sick?"
I'd never timed it. I had it anyway, from a hundred mornings at the kitchen table. "Eight minutes. Ten."
"And it pays you a tenth."
"Yes."
"And then you're no good for an hour."
"About."
"Hm." She picked her coffee up again. "What's the fifth rule?"
It took me a second.
"First shake, I put it down."
"So what's the first slide?"
I sat there on the bench. It's the old vinyl kind, split at one end and patched with duct tape, and I had my thumb on the edge of the tape. Out in the lot a car door shut, and Hector's voice said something to Wendell, and the gym was very quiet apart from the rower.
I put my hands on my knees. They were cold, from the AC or from something else.
"It's a shake," I said.
"It's a shake," she said. "You've been holding through the shake for sixty-five days. Every session. Eight minutes of grinding past the edge for nothing, and an hour of being stupid after, which is why you only ever get two." She tapped the cane on the concrete. "You stop at the first slide. You put it down. You rest ten minutes. You go again."
"Will that count?"
"I don't know," she said. "It's yours. You tell me on Monday." She stood up, slowly, cane first. "Tomorrow's nothing. Day before a dive. No sets at all, not even that one, I don't care how small it is. Saturday you go and do your thing with Guzmán. Monday morning at three forty you do it my way, and you write down every time, and you bring me the times."
"Okay."
She stood over me with the cane planted.
"Does Guzmán know?"
"He guessed something. He doesn't know what."
"Then he knows." She tucked her coffee into the crook of the arm that held the cane. "Tell him before you tell anybody else. Before that woman in the cardigan, before Okafor, before anybody with a form. He earned it at the bottom of Bell Road."
"I will."
"And Miles."
"Yes."
"Next time you decide what I can stand," she said, "ask me first. I'm fifty-six. I've stood a lot."
She walked off toward her office. Halfway there she stopped and stood still for a moment, with her back to me, and I thought she was going to say something else. Then she said "Eight to nineteen," to nobody, very quietly, and went in and shut the door.