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common, at least the runners did: we believed in time, pledged allegiance to it—one nation, utterly fair, under the second-hand god on Falvo’s watch. You couldn’t lie or talk or cheat your way in. It didn’t matter if you were cool, if you looked good in a pair of jeans, if you were popular. You could be all of those or none—it didn’t matter. You either covered ground or you didn’t.
    We’d be running quarters, he announced—what he called bread and butter—twelve quarter-mile runs with a quarter walk between each to recover. He introduced me to the group. One or two, stretching on the mats, mumbled hello, a few nodded, most didn’t hear him or didn’t care. McCann kept talking to the guy next to him. I went back to trying to touch my toes. I was as loose as a brick.
    “What’s his name again?” It was the kid with the headband—Kennedy. A dozen faces looked up, then over at me.
    When Falvo told him, he nodded like he had to think about this information now that he had it, and went back to stretching.
    I remember that first day. The fifth group was a sickly-looking bunch of nerds—when I walked up they were standing around awkwardly, their skinny white legs sticking out of their oversized shorts, hugging themselves in the wind and arguing about old episodes of Time Tunnel . They seemed nice enough. They talked to me a bit after the first interval as we walked around the outside of the track, then went back to arguing about whether by rescuing Dr. Newman from being killed at Pearl Harbor the show had broken something called the Novikov self-consistency principle. I couldn’t believe it. By the time we’d finished the third interval I had bigger problems.
    By the sixth I was hurting. They were still arguing. They’d run the quarter, then pick up where they’d left off. “So the Novikov self-consistency principle means you’re changing recorded history.” “Yeah, so?” “So ‘Time Tunnel’ means the past, present and future are all happening at the same time—duh!”
    By the time I’d done eight I was wondering if I’d make it at all. I could still hear them, like static in my head: “They have to get a fix on the past.” “No they don’t.” “Yes they do. If he’s killed, you moron, then the adult Tony can’t exist.” “Sure he can.” “Don’t you remember what Dr. Swain says to Senator Clark when he’s looking at the Titanic ?” “Yeah? So?” “So he’s seeing the living past , dufus. Ready?”
    I finished last, dragging in five yards after the others. As I stood there with my hands on my knees, trying to keep my legs from buckling, a pasty-looking kid with a caved-in chest and a feathery mustache came up and patted me on the back. “Nice job,” he said.
    It was my answer for a while, the combination to whatever it was I’d locked inside. I liked the details, the rituals, the numbers; I liked the hot smell of the weeds in the infield, the six-mile runs in the rain around the Middle Branch Reservoir, the peepers in the muddy woods a hundred yards behind the track screaming in the spring. You could be who you were, would be who you were, whether you liked it or not. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win. I’d climb the chain, link by link. I’d show them all.
    I wasn’t the only one who brought to it more than it could bear. It had a way of doing that, of convincing you it was more than it was—not a stage but the world, not war by other means but war itself. That it mattered.
    I N JANUARY 1968, just three months after I joined the team, we climbed into a bus and got out at the 168th Street Armory in New York—a great cavernous hall with a flat wooden indoor track at the center of it. I’d never been before. Down below in the huge cave-like basement where the food venders were, you could hear the runners pounding by over your head, then the roar of the crowd, and making your way through the mass of runners shoving up the