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He used to love swimming. His body was built for it after all. Long shoulders, narrow hips, a build made to divide the water. In the pool there was only distance, time, the black line beneath him and the wall waiting at the end. The clean snap of the starting gun, the muffled roar beneath the surface, the burn in his lungs in the final laps. The repetitive clear motion that sent him steadily forward.
The disappointment wasn’t there until the end.
So Jerome swam.
He swam until his shoulders ached, until his eyes stung from the chlorine. Swam before school and after school and whenever he could persuade himself that another hour in the pool made his future more certain. He was meant for it after all.
People began to notice. He won races. Then more races. Then races that mattered. Someone put his photo in the newspaper. People called him extraordinary. His name began to appear beside words like bright future and prospect olympian.
He believed them and that might have been the cruelest part.
The first places stopped coming in. And in the world of competitive sport, the world remembered. After all, a second place finish could become a question of whether he was really worth it after all. His genes were perfect. He didn’t have the excuse of parents who wouldn’t fork over the money for a perfect kid. He didn’t have an excuse for not keeping the word champion next to his name.
So he walked. Away from his home. Away from his life. And to the road.
The silver medal weighed heavy in his pocket, he thumbed the edge, turning it over again and again. Second.
Always second.
The cars blurred past him on the road, tearing down the street.
He closed his eyes.
Black water. White tiles. His body moving cleanly beneath the surface. How peaceful it had felt to surrender to something larger than himself.
For one terrible moment he wanted that peace again.
The accident was quick. Painfully quick. One instant he was moving and then next the world had become a collection of sensations he couldn’t organize.
Doctor’s spoke around him, blurred out words that didn’t filter through. Words like spinal cord, permanent, and unlikely floated above him.
Jerome blinked up at the distant hospital ceiling tiles.
He thought, of course. Of course this was how it ended. Of course his body would find one final way to betray him.
Afterward there was no revelation, no sudden miraculous will to live. No waking up and thinking that he could turn things around and this time he’d make the most of it.
There was only embarrassment. And then anger. And then a terrible exhausted shame. After all, wasn’t it just typical that his body would fail him in this too.
People told him he was lucky to be alive.
He hated that sentence. Lucky. As though survival was automatically a gift. As though it was a consolation prize he should accept.
At least his body matches his failures now. He could no longer be expected to be golden, when he was only half a man.
The lower floor became his universe and the staircase became his horizon.
There were small humiliations that came with dependence. Dragging himself into his wheelchair. Having doors opened for him. Having people speak above him as if the paralysis had reached his brain as well. The pity made him feel smaller than the pain did.
So he became difficult.
He smoked.
He drank.
He watched old footage of his races and stared at the body on the screen. The man on the television looked impossible.
Jerome wanted to reach through the screen and strangle him.
But there was only so long he could wallow in his misery before life threw something at him.
At first, Jerome thought Vincent was ridiculous. He was an impossibility. Someone with the wrong body carrying himself like the world had never told him he wouldn’t make it.
He wasn’t supposed to make it. He wasn’t supposed to stay. Not in Jerome’s house and not in his life.
And yet somehow he kept showing up. There was something infuriating about him.
And when Vincent lay on the floor in agony after the surgery, he was more infuriated than ever. What gave this invalid the drive to reach for gold when those built for perfection could not reach it?
Vincent would ask for simple things to be fetched from across the room. And of course Jerome could retrieve them but he wouldn’t do it like a servant. A glass of water, a book, a pen. Wheeling back and forth across the room to grab meaningless little things.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Jerome glared at Vincent, cursing his incessant requests. “I may need a moment, I appear to be suffering from a rather severe case of being paralyzed.” He let the vitriol spill from his tongue, hoping this time Vincent would give up and accept that he would not make friends here.
Vincent blinked at him. “I noticed.”
Jerome stopped. And against his will he laughed.
It was almost nothing, but it was the beginning.
Vincent needed him and that mattered more than he wanted to admit. And Vincent in turn brought something into Jerome’s life that Jerome hadn’t realized was missing. Motion.
Not physical motion, though that was also missing to an extent, but momentum. Vincent was going somewhere. Always reaching. Always pushing against the invisible wall that tried to constrain his life and refusing to acknowledge that it was meant to stop him.
Jerome found himself watching him. At first with contempt, and then curiosity. And then something dangerously close to admiration.
Vincent would come home exhausted and in pain and still talk about tomorrow. Jerome had stopped believing it would ever come but Vincent treated it as inevitable. You put in the effort and you reach the bigger brighter future. He wonders if that ideology could have saved him.
Vincent would gasp for air and squint at the words he couldn’t see and still his body performed to his goals. Exceeded them even. Lean, and toned, and tall and everything that Jerome was once. He’d look at Vincent and the bitter harshness of jealousy would make itself none.
How could he be so perfect, when Jerome was practically designed to be superior? How could he reach everything that Jerome could not.
“You really think you can do it?” Jerome asked him once while preparing samples for the next week.
Vincent looked up from his book. “Do what?”
“Everything.”
Vincent smiled. “No. But I’m going to try.”
The answer stayed with him. Maybe Vincent didn’t make him feel better because he convinced him that life was good. Maybe he made him feel better because Vincent didn’t require life to be good, just to keep on continuing on.
There were nights when they sat together. Jerome in his chair, Vincent nearby. Silence wasn’t always comfortable but it wasn’t unbearable anymore. And sometimes Vincent would tell him about space. About the stars. About what it would be like to leave Earth behind.
Jerome would listen with a disinterested look, struggling to hide how enormously he cared. So he held on tighter to the bitter anger that he had begun to rely on.
There was a particular cruelty about hearing Vincent talk about space. Because he knew his body could take him anywhere. Jerome’s body couldn’t even take him across the room.
He kept his old silver medal. He would hold the weight of it in his palm and think about his failure. Vincent might say it represented that he had once done something extraordinary. He was wrong.
For a while it was enough. Jerome helped Vincent and Vincent helped Jerome. Neither of them would have said it that way, but it was clear.
Things couldn’t stay the same forever. Vincent stood at the edge of space while Jerome stayed behind. Still confined to the chair. Vincent became a bright point in the sky and there Jerome was. Still in the exact same place he had been before.
His hands rested quietly in his lap.
For one strange moment, he remembered being underwater.
The sensation of pressure.
The muffled world.
The certainty of forward motion.
He could hear the machinery, the faint hum of the house, his own breathing catching in his throat.
He thought about the stars.
He thought about the pool.
He thought about cars passing and the world blurring by.
Somewhere beyond his prison of a house Vincent was moving further and further away.
He wondered whether he would look back. Whether from somewhere impossibly distant he would try to look back for Jerome.
The pool.
The water closing over his head.
The strange freedom he once felt in it.
Vincent disappears into the sky.
Forward.
Always forward.
The same impossible direction Vincent had chosen.
And looking forward, the furnace.
And maybe that is the answer.
So hauling himself into the furnace.
Leaving his chair behind.
His silver medal finally gleamed gold.
Maybe Vincent would be proud.