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now, and I remember staggering after them, gasping, drowning, my chest, my legs, my throat filling with lead and looking up through a fog of pain just in time to see the kid with the headband, halfway down the backstretch, accelerating into a sustained, powerful sprint.
    I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. By the end of the third lap I was barely moving, clawing at the air, oblivious to everything except the dirt unfolding endlessly in front of me. “Let him go,” I heard somebody say. They’d all finished by then, recovered, and now stood watching as I staggered past them like something shot. “C’mon …” I heard someone start to call out uneasily, and then, “What’s his name?” and then, louder, “C’mon, Jefferson.” A small crowd, I found out later, sensing something going on, had gathered by the fence to the parking lot. The last of the newcomers had passed me long ago.
    I remember seeing him appear in front of me like I was coming up from underwater and trying to swerve but I was barely standing and I walked right into him and he caught me as I fell, his one good arm around my back, saying over and over, “All right, easy now, easy, you’re done, keep walking, walk it off,” like he was gentling a horse. I threw up on the infield grass. I could barely see. “Fuckin’ Sloppy Joes, man,” I heard someone say, almost respectfully.
    “They look better now.”
    “Shit, I think I see the bun.”
    “Somebody go help Coach.”
    “Fuck you, I’m not gettin’ that shit on my shoes.”
    “That was like On the Waterfront , man.”
    “You see him on that last hundred? Jesus!”
    “Hey, Terry don’t work, we don’t work.” A couple of people laughed.
    “Keep walking, Mosher,” Falvo was saying, “if you lie down it’ll be twice as bad.” I could feel him holding me around my waist, his arm like a steel belt above my hip. I didn’t want it there. I couldn’t see. I could hear myself sobbing, trying to rake air into my chest. My head felt like it was cracking from inside. I didn’t know that I’d put my arm around his shoulders.
    “What we have here,” he was saying, “is a failure to communicate. Stay within yourself, I said. Don’t drain the well, I said.”
    “What did I get?” I couldn’t seem to hold my head up, or open my eyes—the pain kept coming in waves.
    “What?”
    “Time. What time did I get?”
    He laughed—that bitter Falvo laugh—ha!—like he’d just been vindicated. “He wants to know what he got,” he said, like there was somebody with us. “You want to know what you got? I’ll tell you what you got: proof you could beat yourself senseless—something I very much doubt you needed. If I was a better man I’d report you for assault. OK, turn. And for what? Nothing. Tiny Tim could have tiptoed a faster mile. Tiny Tim, Mosher. With his ukulele. Singing.”
    I could feel the wind now, chilling the sweat. He was walking me back and forth like a drunk in the movies.
    “Two more. No, you’re an idiot, Mosher, there’s no point denying it. Unfortunately for me, you may also be a miler. This won’t mean anything to you, but you ran the first six hundred yards, before you died like a dog, at sixty-seven-second pace; truth is, you shouldn’t have finished at all.”
    T HE NEXT DAY my calves, my thighs, my shins—my shins most of all—felt like they’d been replaced with steel plates. I winced my way up the stairs, lowered myself to my desk with my arms. Even my father noticed. “ Was ist los ?—You have a problem with the shoes?” he said.
    “You’re going to be very unhappy with yourself, my boy,” Falvo had told me. “I mean more than usual. You’ve paid the piper—you know the piper I’m talking about, the piper of pain, Mosher—and now he’s going to play whether you like it or not.”
    Two days later he gave me my paper back—an A–.
    “Seems you’re only selectively stupid,” he said, and walked back to his desk, cowlick bobbing,