“We’re just getting older,” Andy said. “All that training can’t make us twenty-seven again.”
“It’s not that. How about Matt Parker?”
Andy sighed. Parker was a year older than he was. He ran the mile, and unlike Andy, his times had gotten faster in the past year, improving at an almost unheard-of rate.
Mitch reached into his backpack and pulled out a stainless-steel tube, the kind they sold toothpaste and hand cream in . . . except this tube had no label, no writing. It was perfectly blank.
“What is it?” Andy asked.
“What do you think it is?”
They stared at each other in silence. Mitch looked exasperated. Andy had no idea what was showing up on his face. He felt shocked, and then he felt stupid for being shocked. He’d always known about doping. There’d always been talk about this team or that guy, and, even among his own teammates, conversations that ended abruptly when he walked into the showers or the trainers’ room. He’d heard talk about certain trainers, whispers about doctors who’d hook you up with anything you needed. Andy had never listened, because he had never needed anything. But now . . .
“Everyone’s doing it,” said Mitch. Andy recognized the speech for what it was: the same talk boys in junior high gave to get each other to sneak beers or try cigarettes.
“The French, the Finns, the Kenyans. Not to mention our own so-called teammates. If we don’t keep up we’re going to be standing at the starting line looking like our legs are tied together.”
So there it was. Right out in the open. In his apartment. In his friend’s hand.
“Where’d you get this?” Andy’s voice sounded hoarse. “Who’s handing it out?”
“John Mahoney, for one. Les Carter.” Andy got to his feet and started pacing. John Mahoney was the team manager, a man he’d known since college. Les was one of the trainers, always with a smile and a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke, who’d sit with you while you were in the ice baths or the whirlpool and ask about your girlfriend or wife or kids. “Other guys, but John’s the one you want to talk to about the rest of it.”
“There’s more?” Of course there was more, Mitch told him. Creams and pills and shots, transfusions of your own stored blood. Everyone’s doing it, he said again, and then went home, leaving the tube behind him.
Andy had carried it to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He understood that if he went along with this, if he chose to do what Mitch and, ostensibly, most of the other runners were doing, his life would be divided by a bright line—before and after. The races he’d won, the times he’d put up honestly, and what he’d do with this stuff in his system. It was cheating . . . but was it really something he could refuse and still hope to compete? And was it really unfair if he did it to even the playing field, so that he wasn’t starting his races half a lap behind everyone else?
He’d pulled his pants down to his ankles and stood in his briefs, feeling undignified and welcoming the feeling. There was nothing dignified, nothing honorable or admirable about this. Uncapping the bottle, he squirted some of the clear ointment into his hands and rubbed it first on his left quad, then on his right, as if it were the arnica gel some of the trainers used. His thighs ached. Everything ached. It used to be that he was in pain only while he was running, and then immediately after, when the acid would flood his muscles, making everything burn. Now there was something hurting almost all the time. He was stiff when he got out of bed, he walked to the bathroom as if his bones were made of glass, and it took a solid ten minutes of stretching and foam rolling before things loosened up. With all the pounding he’d given his limbs and his joints, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Once this new phase of his career had begun, he had hoped that the injections and the creams and the spun blood would help him feel better, stronger; and for a while he imagined that they did. He’d tied his personal best at the Penn Relays, then run a 5K in Central Park just for fun and creamed it, beating the second-place finisher by almost a minute. At the Middle Distance Classic in Pasadena, he’d come within four-tenths of a second of the winner, and then, back in Oregon, at the Nike Prefontaine Classic, he’d honored his hero by winning not only the 5000 but the 10,000, prompting ESPN to do a feature on him and other mid-career runners getting a surprising second wind.
He could see his body changing, his thighs getting bigger, his shoulders broader. He could hear his voice deepening and could feel the acne on his back. “You’re fine,” Maisie would tell him, going through his closet and pulling out his suit jackets to have them altered. “You just look like you’ve been lifting.” Maisie knew what he was doing. Some of the stuff had to be kept on hand and refrigerated. In their place in New York, where, often, the only things in her refrigerator were Champagne and fancy mustard, they stored it in the crisper drawer, and Maisie started calling it the lettuce, as in “Are we out of lettuce yet?” A few times, she’d even rendezvoused with whichever intern or trainee John Mahoney was using as a delivery boy, and she’d booked his appointments with the doctor in Miami who wrote his prescriptions and Mitch’s. They’d fly down together, play some golf, then drive their rented car to an office in a grimy strip mall and sit in the scuffed plastic chairs in the waiting room before the receptionist called their names—first names only, Andy noticed. There was a mirror on the back door of the doctor’s exam rooms. Andy wondered about that. Did the doctor want his patients to see themselves, to see what they were doing to their bodies? Were he and Mitch meant to look with approval and gratitude? By then, Andy had gotten good at avoiding his own face in the mirror. He was used to scrutinizing his body, always looking out for any injury, any change. Since the night that Mitch had come over, though, he found that he couldn’t look at his own reflection, couldn’t stand to meet his own eyes.