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It starts young, so young that the memories are thin and hazy. His dad goes away for the weekends, leaves him with a hug and a sad smile. Carlos watches the clock, counts hours upon hours until he can hear the front door and bound down the stairs to see his father in one piece. In the meantime, he stays up late in his room, gets up every few minutes to make sure he hits the lightswitch just right. He sends a silent message, this is for you, papa, because just the thought of having to sit powerless in bed is enough to make him cry. He isn’t meant to cry.
His father brings home a trophy and he cradles it to his chest as though he won it too.
⁂
Every driver is superstitious. Every driver has rituals. His friends do jumping jacks before races, or brush their teeth, or have pep talks with their managers, little rituals that temporarily transform them from children into racecar drivers.
Carlos makes a list before he goes to bed, even though he's never been capable of forgetting. Pray, shower, breakfast, brush his teeth, damn, did he remember to pray, might as well do it again to be safe. He asks his engineer for tire pressures, asks again and weathers the strange look he gets. The adults milling around call him diligent, a little adult. Just like his father. With a name like that no one asks difficult questions.
He checks his helmet, checks his gloves, checks that his boots are tied. Checks that his dad looks proud when he steps out of the garage. Checks that he loves his parents, which he’s sure he does but he can’t remember for sure. Why is he thinking about this right before a race? He takes his gloves off and on until they feel right. What was the tire pressure again?
He gets in the kart and he wins and that just means that everything is working the way it’s meant to.
Single seaters are their own form of hell. There are so many buttons to push, so many knobs that don’t feel right until he’s touched them on every side, but the setup is particular and he’s not allowed to. He tells himself it’s stupid and unprofessional, digs his nails into his palm when that’s not enough to make it stop. The team sends him on an outlap and there’s no way he can tell his engineer that he’s going to crash because he touched the multi-function button wrong, but he can feel disaster hot on his heels.
He makes a deal: as long as he can get through the fast lap intact, he’ll touch the buttons correctly when he gets back, as many times as he needs to. Someone up there must take pity on him, because he gets enough clarity to pull out a blistering time. The team is so happy that they don’t even notice him fiddling with the steering wheel afterward.
⁂
He knows that he worries, but who doesn’t? It’s natural to worry about your family when you’re spending half the year in other countries, to worry about feeling right in the car when noticing something’s wrong could save your life. He doesn’t feel weird otherwise. Sometimes he thinks he's going to blurt out obscenities to the nearest reporter, but there are also brief, blissful moments when the thinking stops and he thinks he might see himself like other people see him: youthful, confident, well-liked by the media and his fellow drivers. As long as he keeps that version of Carlos separate from the one who keeps a personal encyclopedia of safe and unsafe numbers, then nothing needs to change.
Besides, the team is always praising his attention to detail, his commitment to making sure that everything is exactly right. His trainer calls him a quick study at visualization exercises, but that’s just because he’s used to going around in circles in his head.
For years it doesn’t register as a problem. Then it gets weird.
⁂
He’s sure that he’s guilty. He thinks about it so much, there’s no other explanation. He starts systematically avoiding out the things that remind him of the guilt. He plays Perseus, studiously doesn’t look at the thing that could paralyze him. He holds up all the training and traveling like a polished shield. No matter how hard he works, he can’t turn the fear to stone.
Carlos turns eighteen. He decides that if God gave humans thoughts like this, then it was only fair he gave them alcohol as well.
After the last race of the season, Dany sneaks a bottle of vodka into their room and they drink as much as they dare. Two shots is liberation, the tight coiled grip he has on his own thoughts relaxing a bit. Two more and it’s all wrong, he’s scrambling to put the blinders back on, but his mind is just as uncoordinated as his gangly limbs and so the thoughts hook him deep in his flesh.
Dany looks up from his phone and frowns. “Man, are you okay? Maybe you should have some water.”
It’s the barest kindness, but he doesn’t deserve it. Carlos realizes he’s crying too late to stop it. The disgust churns hot and painful in his chest, searing through him, making him taste bile. He’s amazed it doesn’t cleave him in two. Dany, for his part, looks a little frightened. If they were sober he would probably deadpan something stupid and make a quick exit, go find one of the other guys and tell him that Carlos is being weird. Carlos wouldn’t even be insulted; he knows how vulnerability can feel like an infectious miasma. He’s shut down his fair share honest, jetlagged, 2 a.m. conversations out of fear.
“Do you ever,” Carlos starts, then cuts out with a sob. He stares at the ceiling so he doesn’t have to see Dany watching him. “Do you ever worry that you’re—“
Dany snorts uncomfortably. “Hey man, if you’re gay I really don’t care.”
Carlos barely makes it to the bathroom in time to vomit.
⁂
More and more parts of his life get swallowed up by it. No longer satisfied with avoidance, he trains himself to ████ over words and thoughts and memories that trigger the bone-deep fear. Swaths of conversations go dark in his memory. He’s too busy playing defense, making sure he doesn’t ████████████████. The cordoned off thoughts lurk in one threatening, formless mass at the edge of his thoughts.
The gaps make it worse. He doesn’t even trust his memory on the better days. What he can’t remember must be ████████ █████ ███████████████.
It starts creeping up on him during sex as well, and for some reason that feels the most unfair of all. He wants to scream. There’s no hiding from it now, not even when he’s out of his mind with desire. He must not show it though, because his partners never say anything, even though the ████████████ ████████████ feels like it’s coming out of every pore. Good looks have always been a blessing, but now they’re a survival strategy as well. One easy smile and no one notices ██████████████████ ███████.
⁂
Love is the hardest thing he’s ever done. Lando puts his heart in Carlos’s hands and just trusts him not to drop it. Carlos feels filthy, feels himself contaminating Lando with every day he doesn’t say something. He wants to shake Lando’s shoulders: can’t you see what I am?
Carlos worries that he’s hurting him, then he worries that he wants to hurt him. Then he worries that he doesn’t even love him at all, even though he wants to, even though he probably does. He watches Lando frown at the live timings from across the garage and wonders if either of them ever loved each other at all. It would be easier to break up. It would be easier to be dead.
Isn’t love meant to be easy? To be freeing? All-encompassing?
Carlos loves Lando but he can’t be sure about it and nothing feels real and maybe he’s just broken and maybe that means everything he’s thought about himself is true.
He slides back into old habits, stops inviting people over so they don’t see how he navigates around the house like it’s some kind of tactile puzzle that only he knows the answer to. Only Lando comes around, and Carlos actually wants him to stay, because every time he leaves Carlos has to pray that it will feel right or he’ll have to spend the rest of the day looking for a certainty he’ll never find. He prays but whoever’s up there seems to have stopped listening. He does a couple hours on the simulator. There’s not enough room in his head for anything else.
Lando is slipping into the void of things he can’t let himself think about. Every little memory sends parallel shocks of joy and nausea through him. He wants to hold onto those golden early moments, cherish them, but he thinks he might be poisoning them: their first kiss, their first I love you, the time they ███████ ████████████████ ████ █████████ ██████.
⁂
He supposes he’s lucky to be racing at a time when sports psychology and mental training are no longer hushed, dirty words, the domain of weak, broken drivers who have cracked under pressure. Still, the team sent him to this doctor to get performance. They’re only paying the bill as long as it takes milliseconds off his lap times.
“So why are you here today?” the doctor asks, smiling gently. A block of ice forms in his stomach. It would be so much easier if this were just another stop on the driver assembly line, a standardized die-cutter that would indiscriminately trim off his unwanted, ragged edges.
The office is smaller than the ones he’s seen in movies. If he opens his mouth it’s all going to come pouring out, filling up the room, drowning them both. Can’t she just talk at him and fix him that way? He’s a good learner, it wouldn’t be that hard.
Carlos stares at the worn Persian carpet on the floor. The doctor seems more than happy to wait.
He’s done scarier things than this. He’s driven a rally car at max speed over loose gravel, whipped it around in the sheer faith that the back end will bite in enough to stop him tumbling down the side of the mountain. He’s risked his career on a stupid crush. How dangerous could a few words be in comparison?
“I, um, I have weird thoughts sometimes. And I can’t stop them. It’s been very distracting.” Now that doesn’t sound so bad does it? Plenty of people have anxiety. They just meditate or take a pill or something and they can get back to work. He can be one of those people. Normality can be a few concrete steps away. He pictures Lando, beaming at him from across the pillows, his hair a mess. He imagines what freedom would feel like, and he thinks it would be kissing Lando like he’s always wanted to: without feeling like a liar.
“Weird how?”
Carlos steels himself with a deep breath and turns to face the black mass that hangs over his shoulder.