Casper

“She’s like a ghost,” Clara said, watching the stray greyhound eat grass in their backyard.

Dexter slid a cardboard moving box out of the way with his foot and stepped closer to the small, shoulder-height window so he could see. The dog was worryingly thin, brindled white and tan, with seams of black like veins in marble.

“Spooky,” he said. “But she looks kind of nice.” Despite her thin frame and ragged fur, she moved delicately, like a horse that knew the fragility of its own legs, her black nose at the end of her pointy face sniffing each patch of ground before taking a step. He almost felt he could hear the papery whisper of her breath.

Clara and Dexter relocated a month before the pandemic. They picked the area for a nearby state park and its proximity to the hospital where Clara was starting a residency, not knowing it was notorious for a pack of stray dogs who lived in the medians and ditches of the subdivision, evading capture for so long they became mascots of a sort. They were greyhounds mainly, wandering the neighborhood in groups, barking at cars and chasing plastic shopping bags caught in the wind. There was something otherworldly about them, their bike-seat-shaped heads, tails long and straight as pool cues. It probably didn’t hurt that everyone was staying inside so much more, isolating due to the pandemic, keeping grocery trips to a minimum. The dogs roamed the lawns of the neighborhood like free-range cattle.

Dexter tried to move to get a better angle. The room was small, cut out of the kitchen right next to the back door. Like a laundry room, but without laundry machines or plumbing hookups. His legs knocked against another box and he stumbled.

“Careful,” Clara said, throwing out an arm for support. Out the window, as if she could hear him, the dog elegantly vaulted their six-foot fence topped in a rash of splinters. Spread out like that, legs against the sky, he could see how large she was, tip to tail almost as tall as the fence.

“See,” she said. “Ghostly. Let’s call her Casper.”

“I like that,” Dexter said. “A friendly ghost.” He navigated his way back out between the boxes.

“God, there’s nothing this room is good for. We should call it the ‘nothing room.’”

They both laughed. And the names stuck. Casper and the nothing room. New words for their new life. They’d spent their twenties in the city, much of it together in a second-floor apartment in the west, across the street from a laundromat that left its open light blinking all night. Now, instead of the laundromat, they lived by huge parking lots and labyrinthine cul-de-sacs, the heavy blanket of the pandemic dampening an already quiet life.

“Maybe it’s good to have a nothing room,” Clara said. “Then, when I get sick, I can isolate.”

“Like that makes me feel better.”

Clara kissed his cheek. “Or you could stay out with the dogs.”

#

It was the dogs, in a way, that brought Anya into Dexter’s life, or back into it. He’d seen her on the running app, where she had the fastest times for most of the segments in the area. The two-mile stretch around the artificial lake, the sprint down the big hill, the long run through the forest. He’d never clicked on her profile, assumed surely it was another Anya. And then one day he saw her on the trail. He’d stopped for a group of dogs in the path. A woman was taking a picture of them with her phone. Fifteen years out of high school, he still recognized her face. The sight of her almost started something inside him, like an engine that didn’t want to turn over. He thought of passing by her, but that seemed more strange than just saying hello.

“Anya?” he said. She turned towards him. Her mouth stretched flat, somewhere between a smirk and a laugh. She’d always been good at that, balancing between laughing with someone and at them.

“Dex.”

“Still running?” he asked, feeling stupid the second he spoke.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. He could see her small nose and deep-set eyes under the brim of her fluorescent yellow running cap. “You?”

“Some,” Dexter lied. It was basically all he did. He’d run over forty miles the week before.

She nodded in the direction she’d been going. They started walking and then eased into a jog. He felt tense as they neared the ghost dogs, but the hounds simply moved into the grass as they approached. Anya ran like she always had, an even, almost soundless stride, shoulders back and relaxed, legs reaching out to pull the ground closer to her, as if she were standing in place and the world was spinning under her. In a time when everything else in his life was unfamiliar, there was something comforting about that.

“Wild running into you here of all places,” she said.

“That’s the wild thing,” he said. “Not these dogs.”

She laughed. “We have to have something wild out here in Stepford.”

They weren’t far from Dexter’s street, but it was long enough for the basics. She went first. Married and divorced. “An architect,” she said. “Liked to cook, perfect for someone who is rich and doesn’t have any neuroses.” They separated and she’d moved out here six months before he and Clara had. Her job seemed important. Political advocacy at a national nonprofit. She worked remotely.

He told her about Clara, the townhouse, their first shocked sighting of the dogs. Losing his job at a concert venue in a way that had first seemed temporary and now increasingly permanent.

“Your wife’s a doctor?” she said. “Damn hard time to be in medicine.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But she’s just a resident.”

“Is that different?”

“It is to them. She’s not just a resident, though.,” He explained how she had been in a musical conservatory for a few years before med school, a promising clarinetist. About how she would order any dish that included eggplant. The bass clef tattoo behind her ear. The fact that she for no clear reason hated the color purple.

“The play?”

“No,” he said. “The color.”

“It sounds like you’re in love,” she said, and her words made him feel both proud and a little cruel.

They ran on, leaving the quiet of the park and the lake behind as the trail followed a four-lane road a few blocks to his neighborhood. The sky, the big box stores across the street, the pavement and the cars rumbling over it. Everything seemed a shade of brownish gray, a smoker’s lung of a day. Winter was still in the air, it seemed, even though it wasn’t very cold. It hadn’t gotten cold all winter, and spring hadn’t yet become warm. But next to her, drinking in the exhaust-laden air, he felt strong and fast. He lost track of the cars and their horns, the stoplights, the sky that lay flat and dull over them like a headache. He just ran. It was what his body was meant to do.

#

He was unpacking boxes in the nothing room when Clara came home. He thought about kissing her, saying they should order take out or drive into the city. But he’d already prepped dinner, cut the onions and bell peppers, thawed a package of veggie sausage. It wasn’t the same as the sausage and peppers from the street stall by his old job, one of the things he missed. One of many things: the sound of the bus lowering at the corner by their apartment, the way Clara would play the clarinet to calm herself down whenever she had an exam. Now she was too busy to really play. But even without the city around them, the meal was filling.

While they did the dishes, they watched Casper in the window over the sink. She was pulling up grass with her teeth.

“I ran into someone today from high school,” Dex said, feeling that if he didn’t tell her now he was in danger of not telling her at all.

She turned off the faucet and looked at him. She was still in her scrubs and there were marks on her cheeks from the medical mask. “You met someone? You know the rules.”

“Outside,” he said. “Unplanned. I ran into them. Literally. On a run.”

“Okay.”

“We might run again, if you think it’s okay.”

“I guess,” she said. “Just stay outside, keep separated.”

“Course. I can finish up.”

He scrubbed the lasagna off their new ceramic plates and watched Casper carefully lie down, tucking all four of her legs beneath her. She reached her neck back and gave a raspy howl. It was a little funny, how small and silly it sounded out here in all this quiet. Upstairs, Clara ran water in the bathroom and flushed the toilet. He opened the backdoor slowly and threw the leftover veggie sausages into the yard. He hoped maybe Casper would jump up and catch them, but she just watched each land in the thin grass before getting up, approaching one, and taking a small bite.

#

“You better have kept in shape,” Anya said when she texted him to plan a long run. “I’m not slowing down for you!”

The day they met, Anya was already out front stretching when Dexter woke up. He slurped some coffee, pulled on his running shoes. He should’ve eaten, brushed his teeth, gone to the bathroom, but he didn’t want to make Anya wait. Outside, she was wearing matching pastel running gear. To someone else, the outfit might have looked vain, but Dexter knew the brand, the way they held up to fifteen-mile runs. He was wearing a pair of their shorts, sky blue and just the right amount of almost too short.

The morning was chilly in a pleasant way, breath just barely fogging and the sun still hazy in the sky. They started out through the subdivision, towards the lake.

“So,” Dexter said.

“So,” she replied, drawing out the word. A neighbor passed, feet slapping, and they smiled and waved. The sound made Dexter realize how quiet they both were, shoes brushing the ground rather than stomping. Quiet feet were quick feet.

“Sorry for the things I said the other day,” he said.

“What things?”

“About Clara.”

“No need to apologize for loving your partner.”

He wondered if bringing it back up was a bad idea, but he continued anyway. They had plenty of miles ahead of them to talk it through. “I felt bad about the divorce, I mean. That must’ve sucked.”

“Well,” she said. “You lose friends. Or find out who never really liked you in the first place. It’s shockingly expensive. Overall, honestly, I don’t recommend it.”

They continued along the trail, curving between tall maples. Even without leaves, the branches were thick enough over the path to form a kind of roof, like they were running through a tunnel.

“For a long time,” she said, “I felt my life was moving forward, that I was checking things off the to-do list. And then I realized, shit, this is it.”

“What do you mean?”  Their breaths were starting to come in heavier rhythms, so that each sentence took longer to get out.

“I mean,” she said, breathing, “I’m not waiting for anything. There’s no next grade or award or promotion. Life isn’t building towards something, it just is. And I’d like to be happy, you know?

“It’s like — I used to smoke. Not the greatest for you and I’m a runner, right? But it happens.” A cool thread of breeze came along the path. “Anyway, I stopped. But sometimes I’d get these little hits from people. I wouldn’t actually smoke my own, but I’d go past someone outside a restaurant or a bar, walking down the sidewalk, and I’d kind of linger in it. It was the best in winter. The cold air and that smell. One time, I was on my way back from lunch break, and I was walking behind this person who was smoking. And it was like I left my body. I stopped paying attention to everything except the smell and walking, the rhythm of people’s strides around me, the crossing signs, the feel of the weight in my bag shifting with each step. And the smoke, coming back to me little by little, breathing it in, just a little, couldn’t hurt me, right? And next thing I knew, I’d gone blocks in the wrong direction. I was going to be late to a meeting and for a moment I thought, screw it. What if I followed the smoke wherever it went all day, if I just said fuck it. I think that’s the closest I’ve ever come to running away.”

“Was that when you decided to get divorced?”

“No. He decided, really. And it was years later.”

They came out of the trees to a long valley, gently sloping downwards. In the larger space, they could hear a sound, rhythmic as a steady rain. It deepened and grew closer until a pack of ghost dogs was right behind them. Dexter wondered if they should stop, pull aside, but then the dogs were among them. For a moment they ran together, Anya and Dexter reaching out with their legs, the dogs opening to let them in. Dexter looked at their eyes, black and wet, their pink gums and limp tongues. The dogs moved around them like a school of fish, gently shifting to make room, and for a moment they were part of the school. The sound of their paws beating the concrete drove him. Dexter pushed his legs faster to keep up with them, his muscles stretching and snapping. But the dogs left them as easily as they’d caught them, running on through the valley and out the other side, back into the forest.

Dexter and Anya kept up the faster pace. They took slow sips of air in and quick snorts of air out, tucked their elbows in, and lengthened each stride. This was one of Dexter’s favorite feelings in the world, the combination of speed and exhaustion that made him feel like he was about to fall, but each time his legs would snap out fast enough to catch him and throw him, catch him and throw him. “Running is a one-legged sport,” their high school coach had said, because running, by definition, means having only one foot on the ground at a time. An unstable act that humans just know how to do.

The motion shook loose memories. The fall of their senior year, they were the fastest runners on the team, the fastest in their town. Both tall, both mistaken for adults by people who didn’t know them. Buying beer at seventeen without getting carded. It fed the illusion that they were adults, that this was real life. They’d run out ahead of the group, rangy with teenage muscle and energy, hangers-on sticking with them for the first half mile or so and then everyone else so far behind it was like they ceased to exist. Just four feet, two sets of lungs, one steady, blistering pace.

One day, the coach assigned them a seven-mile run, and the second-best runners were only running four. They stopped to catch their breath and stretch at the turnaround point. They started with what their coach called the baseball stretch. Legs apart and bend over to touch the right foot, first base, forward between the legs, second base, left foot, third base. There was no home plate, which was a running joke on the team. “Where’s home coach? Where do I go next?”

“None of you are allowed to round third and head for home yet,” coach would say. “That’s for college.”

They had been facing each other, close enough that on their second run through the stretch, Dex reached out and tapped Anya’s feet. “First base,” he said, straining to tap her toes before he touched his own. “Second!” she yelled, throwing her arms out towards him, and their heads thunked together.

“Ow,” they both said and stood up. Dex pretended to swoon and grabbed Anya’s arm. She grabbed his other arm and stood him upright. They stood there, not letting go, not stepping away. That was all it took.

It lasted one season. From sweaty, humid August jogs through damp and chilly morning long runs in November. They’d turn their paces up, speeding towards the run’s apex, the turnaround point a mile or two, or sometimes three further than anyone else on the team was going, finding places where they could slip into forest or grass or a single-user bathroom and slide their shorts down. The huge ex-urban park where they had practice had miles and miles of trails and forest, prairies, streams. They could run a marathon in there without stepping foot in the same place twice. Mainly, they’d hold each other tightly, while they kissed and rubbed and groped and felt, pinioned and wrestled and scooped and weighed and cupped. It was always fast and always hurried. As necessary as food or water.

At the end of the season, that was it. They’d never seen each other outside of practice. Never gone to a movie or each other’s houses. While they were hooking up, there was a feeling of potential disaster. One of their teammates seeing them together, maybe even being kicked off the team or expelled. In a way, he almost wished they’d been caught, told they were doing something wrong, that this secret had turned into something useful, a story, a scandal, a relationship, a reason to change schools or sports or something, but it was just part of his life. Just a small, secret thing that happened and somehow that was harder to deal with.

#

“Really, I worry,” Anya said, ending their silence, hardly getting more than a word out at a time. “That we got divorced because I’m bi.”

Dexter looked at her. Her set mouth, eyes focused only on the path. He was surprised. Not that she was queer, but that he hadn’t known this about her, a person who he felt, despite their years apart, he was close to.

“It was never really an issue in our relationship,” she explained as she ran, getting the sentence out without needing a breath. “Or at least it didn’t come up that much. But around the time we got divorced, he brought it up again. Asked if I’d be happier with a woman or if maybe we’d, you know, opened our relationship if it would’ve worked out.”

“That’s awful,” Dexter said, barely able to get the words out.

“It was kind of low-key devastating.” She paused and took a few cycles of breath. “This part of me,” she began. “Worries now that everyone thinks that’s what it was about. That I want to be with a woman or I need more sex or something, but really it’s just like sometimes it doesn’t work out, sometimes it’s not anyone’s fault. But I think if he hadn’t said that, we might’ve worked it out. I’ve never felt so disappointed in someone.”

She let the story go, left it in the air between them as they ran.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For telling me.” The act of telling had felt generous. She’d shared something with him that he didn’t need to know. He’d never thought of coming out like this. As a kind of gift you could give someone. Or yourself.

“Well,” she said. “You’re welcome.”

He matched his speed alongside hers. He loved to run and knew that Anya did, too. It wasn’t even the obvious parts, the tingling runners high along his bare skin, the way his lungs felt twice as large when he finished. It was simpler than that. It was the movement. The repetition. The feeling that his body was actually good at something. And there was something about running with other people that heightened the sensation. He could never truly explain that to Clara the way that she could never explain to him what it was like to play the clarinet or work a busy hospital shift, to insert a needle into human flesh, to read numbers on a monitor while someone a few feet away was dying. The way it felt to know something in your own body. He knew, by the way she ran, this was something he shared with Anya. Maybe it was that shared understanding that made him think about sharing something else.

“I’ve wondered, sometimes, if I am.” Trying to tell Anya something he didn’t have the words for. Just saying those words brought a panic that he felt everywhere, his stomach, his intestines, his lungs, his skin.

“You are what?”

“Queer, bi, pan, something.”

Their feet carried them a few more meters.

“Do go on,” she said.

“In college,” he started. “I thought I was gay.”

He had told people he was, at first, he explained. But really, all he knew was that he liked men, slept with some. And then when that stopped feeling totally right, when he realized he was attracted to other people, too, and he had a few relationships with women, it was like he’d fallen off the wagon. His old partners and friends had still been nice to him, but wary, their conversations forced.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “How to talk about it in a way that people would understand, so I just became, well, kind of straight.”

Anya laughed.

“What?”

“I’m bi and I just got out of a long-term relationship with a man. Trust me, I understand. And you’re not straight.”

They ran beneath a highway overpass and stopped talking until they left the roar of the cars behind them.

“Does Clara know?”

“In a way. She knows about the men. But I’m not out. I don’t know what I’d come out as.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“It’s kind of funny.”

Dexter, on top of the gravelly burn in his lungs, the tired weight in his muscles, felt shame hot on his neck and cheeks.

“But it’s kind of a big deal,” he said, his voice thin with emotion.

“Course,” Anya said. “Sorry. I don’t want to sound all mystical, but I wonder if that was part of what we saw in each other. You know, before.”

Dexter thought about it, the way their bodies seemed to just want to be together, the exquisite despair and desire that thinking about her face had sunk in his chest.

“That, and we were two teenagers left alone,” she said. They laughed.

They talked about other things they shared. The strange, bodily issues that arose from running. Chafed nipples and thighs, bleeding toes, raw skin at the join of leg and crotch where the lining of running shorts dug in, the watery feeling that crept into their legs and sometimes threatened to capsize them onto the pavement as they ran along, like infants still learning how to walk.

They only slowed when they reached the turnaround, headed back towards home. The past few months the world had seemed both terrifying and boring, down to this running path near his house. He realized he’d hardly noticed what was right around him, the grit and texture of this place, just run watching the gray path pass under his feet. Now, with Anya next to him, his phone at home, the world seemed so full. He heard the wind sieving through tree limbs, car wheels spinning on pavement, the flapping of crows. The forceful rhythm of Anya’s breathing. He could feel her presence next to him, warm and alive. Terrifying, but not boring.

#

“You know,” Anya said, a few miles into the return. “After we crossed paths the other day, I thought, why meet up again? I just wasn’t sure I saw the point. We don’t talk. We’re strangers. What’s there to gain?”

“I’m glad you came.”

She nodded, kept her gaze out in front at where they were headed.

“High school was not a good time for me, honestly,” she said. “I had an anxiety disorder and was sleeping with a boy who never hung out with me or took me to a dance. I was worried about UTIs and if I was doing sex right and I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends about it. I didn’t tell anyone, I just turned it all into running, that was all I could control. When I saw you the other day, part of me kind of hated you.”

Dexter was surprised. Somehow, he’d never thought of their encounter this way, as an experience that was different for each of them.

“I guess that’s fair. God, I’m sorry. I was so, so dumb.”

Another version of high school came back to him, one he’d almost forgotten, the discomfort and awkwardness of their encounters, the way his desire felt almost like an alien thing controlling him, the smell of porta potties and sweat and teenager, the looks they’d shared, the looks he’d tried not to let them share, across a classroom or the cafeteria or the floor of a school dance.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” He couldn’t stop repeating it. He was sorry, sadder than he’d ever felt, and he didn’t know why, what his body had been waiting for to release this wrenching, heavy grief. Dexter wasn’t a crier, but he started now, hot and wet and breathy, he could feel the skin on his face like he had a sunburn.

“Come on,” Anya said. Crying now, too, although she didn’t slow her pace. “Don’t do that. It’s not fair. It’ll be okay.”

But he was crying like he’d lost a parent or a child, like his life was ending, he cried so much that what he started to feel was no longer sadness but relief, like he’d let go of something heavy he didn’t know he’d been holding. Anya started to pull away. A few feet ahead and then ten, twenty. She put quick distance between them. Dexter tried to shout but he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t breathe around the tears. Even crying, Anya had an even, quiet stride. But he could see her shoulders shaking. She could keep this up, Dexter realized. She’d been holding back for him this whole time. He pushed himself on towards her, but even as he swung his arms faster he could feel himself slowing down, feeling gravity pull him back to the earth, each molecule of air pushing against him until he lost his legs and smeared across the pavement, landing on his palms and elbows and knees. He tried to get up and the muscles in his lower back spasmed, so he just turned over on his back and lay there.

#

Of course Anya came back, told him it would be okay until he almost believed her. She helped him up. His knees were bloody, his muscles felt like they’d snapped, but they started to jog.

“Now I’m sorry,” she said. “But if you weren’t such a jerk we wouldn’t have to go through this.” She slapped him in the ribs lightly.

The forest passed around them, much slower than it had before, but still passing, each step moving them closer to home.

“Are you going to talk to Clara?” Anya asked.

“Maybe.”

The forest ended, and they ran by the lake. Even if it was human-made, it still reflected the sky, the water still slipped against its shore, it still felt good to run past.

Much later than he’d thought, they got back to his house.

“Do you think it’d be okay if I came in and used the bathroom?” Anya asked.

“Sure,” Dexter said. “Of course.” Clara wouldn’t need to know, it would just be for a moment. Sometimes an action leads to another and sometimes it is just an action by itself.

He stood in the kitchen while Anya went to the bathroom, trying not to listen to her peeing against the new, white toilet. But in the quiet house, the sound was clear and unavoidable, a reminder there was another human in here with him, a body with all its vulgarities, all its sounds and smells. Part of him didn’t want Anya to finish, wipe, flush, wash her hands, walk out the door and leave him. As long as the sound went on, she was here, in his house, a few feet away.

But she left, giving him a firm nod and a one-armed hug. He showered, washed the blood off, applied large fabric bandages the size of postcards to his knees and elbows.

Before Clara came home, he went into the nothing room and unpacked boxes. He cooked a simple eggplant pasta. He went into the backyard and fed Casper a bit of leftover pizza, watching her ribs below her fur as she ate. He opened the gate and she took off through it like a champion, like something finally freed.