audio     library     gallery     development     cozmikast     contact     home

Flex by Jeremy Benjamin CONTENTS Chapter 1: Bench Press Blues Chapter 2: The Beginning Chapter 3: Strange Phenomena Chapter 4: Shattered Chapter 5: Walking Chapter 6: Marlena Chapter 7: A Warm Welcome Chapter 8: Causing Trouble Chapter 9: Highways Chapter 10: Homecoming Chapter 11: A Window to Infinity           Epilogue Chapter 1: Bench Press Blues      Harmon Flekzor had everything under control, or so he thought. The sky had its own will, as unfathomable as the enigma who called herself Marlena, and within a week, he would succumb to the fact that even his body had a will of its own. At the culmination of months of training, months of sweating, months of inundating his body with hormones and protein drinks, the idea of control over the external world became a tangible object he could run his hands over. He found it at the weight-benches at Powell's, he found it in the classroom, he found it in amalgamations of shards of glass under a yard-sale-quality fluorescent lamp in his basement, he found it in the arms of Sarah Madison, and he lost it on an unremarkable autumn afternoon while jogging in the woods.      He was on his third sweat (it may have been unscientific to think in terms of successive levels of perspiration, but it wasn't un-Harmon) when he stopped to take his first break. It was warm out, and he had decided it was worth the ten-mile drive to go running at Hunter's Point. The track offered little solitude (not to mention little incline), and the treadmill offered little inspiration.      He breathed slowly and deeply, relishing all the outdoor scents which he wasn't knowledgeable enough to differentiate between but associated the net effect with good times. Looking up through fractals of leaves at a spray of sunlight, his back against a tree, he let his mind wander. He held his hand over his diaphragm, feeling the frantic undulations of his heartbeat like waves breaking on the ocean. His body was a red-hot malleable piece of steel ready to be forged by the steady, sometimes impulsive hammer of his steady, often impulsive ambition. He slid down against the base of the tree, down to a sitting position, sadistically relishing the feel of the rough bark scraping his back and ripping his shirt.      He was barely aware that he held a rock in his hand. It was an unremarkable rock, and he didn't happen to glance at it until it left his hand. That's when he lost it.      Focus.      "Come on, H, let's do it."      He lurched his upper body as if doing an abdominal crunch, only to slam his back and head against the padded bench. He did this three times, holding onto the racked barbell above him. He wasn't looking in the mirrors that covered all the walls, and he hadn't just caught the eye of an attractive well-toned blonde, and hadn't perceived a cluster of slim, likewise-toned female bodies surrounding him with an air of casual reverence. He was . . .      "Get focused, H."      "Call me Flex. Everyone calls me Flex."      His hands slid dexterously across the rough treads of the barbell (approximating the distance from the smooth surface in the middle) and settled into an appropriate grip. Harmon breathed deeply, feeling the surge of adrenalin twist and invert his stomach. The bar gripped firmly in his calloused hands, anchoring him to the bench, he planted his feet on the floor and slid his body back and forth, letting it find the ideal position under the bar (close enough so the spotter could access it, but far enough so the bar wouldn't bang the rack on its way up). He thumped his head once more on the bench, and nodded to his impromptu spotter.      "One."      He felt the weight of the blonde's eyes hanging from the ends of the barbell, next to the ten-pound plates.      "Two."      She wanted a spectacle. Let's give her a spectacle. He fidgeted with the bar, readjusting his grip, and then clasped it, squeezing it till his knuckles turned red, so that his flesh was in effect welded to the steel, and his blood flowed through the cold barbell.      "THREE!!!"      In a burst of energy he locked his arms out and held the load high above him for a moment, arms fully extended, acquainting himself with the feel of the weight, like a wrestler staring down his opponent before the ref says go.      "Come on, H, here we go, six reps, easy."      I wish he'd shut up.      "Let's break that record, come on."      If he says come on one more time I'm gonna punch him.      He lowered it down until it was nearly touching his chest. The artillery of his pectoral apparatus was triggered by some outside force and the weight was fired up into the air like a mass-less object on a spring.      "Solid."      He brought it down slowly and fired again. Two. Easy. And then a third. Three more to go. It was always at that midpoint that he became aware of his surroundings. He could hear murmurs from the . . . audience? Was that what they were, his audience? He could only guess what they were saying (and that wasn't too hard). He might as well have been underwater. His state of concentration (what he termed 'lifting mode') had a damping effect on sensory input equivalent to that of a viscous fluid on sound waves. But he heard them, and he knew they- she, was watching. By rep number four, he was performing. On the fifth rep he started to slow down. The hindrance prompted an immediate reversion to the sheer focus and resoluteness of the first rep.      Tunnel vision activated. Tap all resources. Push, damn it, push!!      On the other side of that bar were not iron plates, but hands pushing down, the hands of his enemies, the hands of all the people who'd tried to hold him down (the hands of Art Merkle). Now it was time to push back. Right here and now. Although it was perhaps the most commonly used word at the weight benches, Harmon knew better than anyone else who had a membership to Powell's Gym what it meant to push, to really push. At the unassisted completion of the fifth rep, he held it at bay, arms fully extended for a brief moment (a microsecond perhaps; his perception of time was always warped at this point in a set) of reflection. His goal was six. As any and every mentor would tell him, the last rep was crucial. It was the only one of importance; if you don't go all out on the last rep, you're wasting your time. The 'failure' principal - perhaps the second most widely used word in the gym. This was it, the final showdown between good and evil - that last lull in an action movie before the climactic battle scene. His mind was clear as he lowered the bar to his chest for the final time. As he inhaled strategically, he sensed the spotter's uneasiness. His hands were held about two inches beneath the bar, ready and eager to assist. Now he was quiet. The whole room was quiet.      This was the moment of truth. It was time to push. On rep number six, Harmon began to get emotional. His vocalization was no longer the typical lifter's 'growl' but something more akin to a scream.      The spotter broke his silence as soon as Harmon broke his. "Push it! Bring it home! Set the record, H, you got it!" His hands followed the bar's ascent, respectfully keeping their distance from it, but ready to be called promptly into action should the weight come to a complete stop. But it didn't stop. It inched upward increasingly slowly in the course of five seconds, through which Harmon's yell was perpetual. He pushed, and he overcame. There was applause as he racked the weight. He sat up, catching his breath. His heart was pumping furiously. His signature vein pulsed visibly in his forehead.      "You're an animal, Flex . . ." Some girl's hand was on his breast, feeling his musculature with rapt, unabashed fascination. That was the last day Harmon felt in control.      It was inevitable. Dave had seen it coming. Even Harmon could have foreseen it. It was bound to happen. He'd hit his plateau, and he hit it hard. The only person to turn to was Dave Powell of Powell's Gym.      "Yo Dave, you got a minute?"      "Sure, whaddya need?"      Harmon was silent for a moment, and then said sincerely, with a note of desperation in his voice, "I need help."      Dave nodded. Someone once told him that seventy percent of human conversation consists of body language and facial expressions. Seeing Dave nod his head, he believed it. It was a nod of comprehension, one that not only said he understood Harmon's feelings of frustration and vexation, but that he knew exactly what his problem was.      "You've hit a standstill, eh?"      "I'm stuck. I've been stuck at the same weights for way too long, and I don't like it."      "You haven't gone down, have you?"      "No, but-"      "I know how you feel. Everyone goes through it. Everyone who's serious, that is."      "I don't get it, I mean I started off so good, I was making progress every week. Now I'm not getting any stronger. It's like I'm just going through the motions. I mean I'm taking sets to failure, I'm using good form, I don't know what I'm . . ."      Dave put a hand on his shoulder, led him into his office and sat him down.      "I've watched you since you first came in here a flabby insecure science nerd with a bad haircut and a nervous twitch. In eight short months, I've seen what you've become. Your dedication astounds me. Stick with this and you'll go far, believe me. I've watched you surpass all your lifting buddies, I've watched your name creep up there on those charts, I've seen you showing off for the girlies, looking like a damned pimp, and I see what you're going through now. You've hit your first plateau. It's nothing to worry about. It's an important part of the process. Think of it as your first trial on the road to muscular bliss."      Harmon's eyes lit up as if he had just glimpsed the solution to a perplexing equation.      "This is the point where most people get discouraged and quit. Up till now there's been no binding contract between you and your body, but if you stick it through, you will be making a commitment to yourself. Are you prepared to make that commitment?"      "Yes. Tell me how."      "By listening, and I don't mean just to me. By watching. By keeping an open mind, and never letting yourself get too comfortable. Do you understand what I'm saying?"      "Could you elaborate?"      "Of course I'll elaborate. You didn't think I'd let you go without a lecture, did you? It's all about establishing a relationship with your body. An antagonistic one can only go so far. Don't be mad at yourself. Be optimistic.      "When you first begin lifting, your body isn't suited to the lifestyle, so it produces more muscle mass to accommodate the demands that you impose on it here. After a while the novelty wears off and your body adapts to the stress and just doesn't get the level of stimulation needed to make gains. That's what happens if you let your workout bore you. Everyone's searching for the best routine, the perfect workout, the last one they'll ever need, but there's no such thing. That very mentality is anathema to what we're doing here. When you start thinking in terms of a routine, that's telling your body that you've stopped caring. You have to be emotionally involved. Always. A routine is like a fashion trend; it only yields results for the transient time that it happens to be en vogue. They're disposable.      "My advice? Read magazines, talk to people, see what kind of methods they're using and discover what works for you. Try doing concentration curls with a dumbbell, try incline presses instead of flat presses, try increasing your repetitions, try decreasing your reps, try working chest and back on the same day, change your whole schedule, do whatever you got to do. Allow your workout to evolve, and you'll evolve. Don't let it become a habit. I want you to be excited and full of anticipation when you walk through that door, and I want you to walk through it habitually."      "That's vague."      "You ever had a girlfriend? What's the key to a successful relationship? You could tell me it's communication and that bullshit, but that's a girl's answer. You've got to surprise her, do something unexpected once in a while; just when she thinks she's got you figured out, throw her a curve ball, keep that spark of passion burning. Lifting's about passion too. Passion. And hunger. Be consistent, but never hesitate to be spontaneous. And most importantly, never, ever neglect it for more than a week, or you can consider yourself through. You're looking at me like you're unsatisfied. What do you want, a personal trainer?"      "I don't know, I thought maybe- no, forget it."      "You thought maybe what?"      "Well, I was talking to a dude the other day, he just started taking Mega-"      "You know how I feel about supplements."      "But there must be some that are legitimate. You know I trust your judgment more than anyone's. Is there anything you could recommend?"      "I recommend you get your head out of your ass and start listening. I've offered you pearls of wisdom. I served you a gourmet meal and you're asking me directions to the nearest Macdonald's! If you're not getting what I'm saying, I'll try paraphrasing it for you in other terms."      "No, I understand perfectly. You're saying I should make little changes here and there, try different things, learn from my resources, and always continually be making little changes so that my workout is never exactly the same from one month to the next."      Dave smiled. "I couldn't have put it better myself. I've been looking into competitions for you, you know. I think you're ready."      "Really?"      "I wouldn't say it if I didn't think so."      "I know you're into natural bodybuilding and stuff, but there must be something-"      "If you even think about using steroids, you can start looking for a new gym. I have a very strict zero tolerance policy on that." He sighed. "Your concern is perfectly valid. You're bothered by this, and I applaud you for your distress. I say the solution to a genuine problem does not lie in a bottle or in a syringe. It's up here." He pointed to his head. "And here." He poked Harmon in the chest.      "Come on, everyone's using lifting supplements these days."      "Not in my gym." He crossed his arms sternly, and shook his head. "Not in my gym."      "What's the big deal?"      "What's the big deal?" Dave stood up. "Your body needs stimulation. You could give it cheap stimulation, the kind you get over the counter, but how long will that last? A couple months and you'll be right back where you are now. Granted you'll have a little more size, but you won't have gained anything. Your body adapts. Once again, surprise, you're at a standstill! Why? Because you didn't listen to me! So now you've got to go back to your sports-nutrition store and get a more powerful, more expensive supplement. Before you know it you'll be pissing radioactive blue shmegma and you'll still be stuck, you'll still be crawling to me with that naive look on your face saying Daaaave, I don't get it, Daaaave, help me . . . People in search of that myth of the perfect supplement are the same people who seek the perfect routine that I was talking about. Do you want to be addicted?"      "Addicted? Surely you're overreacting."      "I'm a purist, you should know that by now. The correct answer is, I am addicted. Lifting is an addiction - the last addiction you'll ever need."      "I got to go. Thanks for the pep-talk." Harmon got up and walked out defiantly.      "Anytime."      "And by the way, no, I've never had a girlfriend."      That's when he began looking elsewhere for answers.            Focus . . .      While everyone around him had come here to lose all concentration, Harmon's inner voice was telling him focus, but on his third beer that was becoming rather difficult. Fortunately, as could be easily ascertained from looking in his opponent's eyes, this guy had had a trifle more than that. Drunk or not, this was important.      The flashing strobe lights from the next room beckoned him like an ethereal finger lewdly gesturing to the corner of his eye. In the same room, couples made out and danced obscenely to the pulsing bass of the stereo as guys dressed to impress spilled alcohol on themselves. There was an occasional howl followed by bouts of cheering coming from upstairs, or perhaps the roof. He wondered what that was about. At eleven fifteen on a Saturday night, this was the teenage livelihood of the town.      Harmon sat with his elbow on the kitchen table, his hand holding that of an overzealous partygoer he didn't know, wearing their high school's football jersey. He clasped the stranger's hand in a grip that could only imply one thing; there was about to be a contest of strength, and somebody was going to lose.      "One. Two!" Already, substantial attention was drawn to the table. "Three!"      Harmon didn't growl or moan or even grit his teeth. This guy had nothing on him. His arm went down like a sinking ship. When it came to drunken arm-wrestling, Harmon was the divine embodiment of gravity itself, an undisputed champion. That match led to another match with another opponent, another victory, which led to a third. The crowd grew larger and more enthralled with each successive battle. Harmon could see that he was fast becoming the focal point of this party. He felt a smile surface from deep within his chest and grow to fruition on his face, and then fade as an all too familiar voice broke through the crowd like a crazed prophet shuffling to the forefront of a convocation to voice his rant in an epic movie, tearing through Harmon's perfect moment like a bad memory.      "Hey, Flex! You da man!"      Art Merkle. The name alone was enough to make him cringe. He had the exact same sarcastic, malevolently devious tone as in the third and fourth grade wherein he had adopted the role of Harmon's primary childhood tormentor. Art Merkle. The word bully didn't quite befit him, for he was too pathetic. But he was mean, he was popular, and he had power. He had the power of crowd control. Art sauntered over to him and sat down in the other chair, but didn't put his arm on the table.      "Who here thinks I could beat Flekzor?"      The response was laughter, but Harmon wasn't smiling anymore. Demeaning laughter was exactly what he had intended, in accordance with whatever he had up his sleeve. He may as well have been conducting them.      "Who's willing to bet money that I'll lose?" Everyone raised a hand. Art pretended to count hands, and then pulled a five-dollar-bill out of his pocket and laid it on the table. "I'm not stupid. It would be over in a second. Would that prove anything? You all think Flekzor here is a strong man, is that so?" He put his arm around him.      Harmon tensed up and crossed his arms, shaking with trepidation.      "Who here would like to see him prove it?"      "Why don't you just fuck off?" Harmon whispered in his ear, over the perfectly orchestrated cheers of "Yeah!" Art wasn't the least bit deflected.      "Do you think Flekzor could lift my car? Who'd like to see him try?" He pictured Art waving a baton wildly in the air procuring the crescendo of hollering that that received. Art raised his own hand. The next thing he knew, Harmon was whisked away from the table, outside into the driveway in the ocean-current of partygoers. This was where the party was at, not upstairs in some dark bedroom, not on the roof, but in the driveway centered about Art Merkle's Mustang.      "Flex, Flex, Flex," everyone chanted in unison.      Adrenalin surged through his veins. He told himself to focus on his breathing, for that was what he had to do. He inhaled deeply and powerfully and let it out slowly through his mouth, just as he did at the gym. Planting his feet, he knelt down and let his hands find a secure grip on the front-end bumper. This would be just like a dead-lift, except without the alternating grip, and without the treads on the barbell.      "Wait," someone interrupted. "Why don't we get a couple big guys to sit on the edge of the trunk to balance out the force." Harmon recognized the kid from his advanced physics class. It struck him as a good idea, but Art's response was "Fuck that, I don't want nobody's dirty ass on my Mustang," and thus was the consensus. The kid sank back into the masses and they revived their chant.      Harmon closed his eyes and summoned all his strength. Had he been a religious man, he would have prayed to his deity or deities at this time.      "Flex! Flex! FLEX!!! FLEX!!! FLEX!!!" Silence. An abrupt unified silence stole over them, giving voice to the wind rustling the trees, singing over the vestigial rumble of bass drums from the far off rock-and-roll music, a last remnant of the party's indoor incarnation.      This was it. It was time to work some magic. Harmon breathed in a mammoth breath and squeezed his facial muscles tightly. Beads of sweat were already forming above his brow. It was time-      No. Something didn't feel right. He stood up, confused and nervous, his heart pounding, and then it hit him why. There was one more thing he felt he must do to consecrate this performance. He grabbed a hold of the collar of his t-shirt with one hand and gracefully ripped it off, tossing it blindly to his onlookers. He flexed. The crowd went wild. He knelt down and assumed the position once again. The next interruption was a female voice accompanied by a hand on his shoulder.      "Harmon. Talk to me for a moment." Sarah Madison - a pretty face he recognized from period five study hall. Sarah Madison - a voice from out of the shadows, comfortingly familiar yet enticingly foreign. It took him a few seconds to attach a name to this girl whom he'd talked to once or twice in passing, and in the state he was in, a few seconds was a considerable amount of time. He hadn't even been aware of her presence at this party.      "Why are you doing this, Harmon? Why?"      This was absurd. He laughed, but already he was too engaged to be genuinely annoyed at the question.      "What are you talking about?" he asked coldly.      "You could get seriously injured. You're not Arnold Schwarz-"      "Haven't you ever been challenged?"      "This is how people get hurt. They go to parties, get tanked up and do stupid things, then you see them on the nightly news and you wonder what they were thinking. Tell me what you're thinking. Who are you doing this for?"      Harmon sarcastically spread out his hands, indicating the assembled crowd.      "You think these people give a damn about you? You're just here for their amusement - free entertainment. They don't care if you break your back-"      "What are you saying, I should wimp out right now? Drag them all out here just to say screw you and walk off?"      "Who dragged who?"      "Or are you saying . . . you don't think I can do it. Well that gives me all the more reason to prove that I can. If you're trying to talk me out of it, then you don't know much about human psychology. What am I saying, you don't even know me, why . . ."      "Because I care. I see what they're doing to you, and I think it's rotten. Why do you want to impress them so bad? If you crave attention so much that you're willing to risk your neck for it, that doesn't impress me. Wait, I know. You've been instilled with this chauvinistic notion that if you win, you'll succeed in taking one of these girls home. Is that what this is, a desperate attempt to get laid?" She looked around in one sweeping glance and shook her head. "Don't be deceived."      "That's bullshit. It's just a challenge, nothing more."      "I'll tell you how you can impress me, if it means anything. Walk away right now and we can find a quiet place to chat, but if you lift that car, I'll be gone when you turn around."      "You think I'm just doing this out of peer pressure, but you're wrong. I want to do this. I'm doing it for myself."      "Then do it. I'll disappear and go flirt with other guys, I'll have a good time and so will you. I'll be disappointed, but it won't ruin my night. It's your choice."      "There's honor in meeting a challenge, even if there is some stupidity involved."      "Sometimes it takes more courage to back down."      There was a mutual reflective pause.      "I do have friends. It's not like you think."      "These people are getting antsy. You'd better make your choice."      Harmon looked around. She was right; he hadn't noticed it while they were talking, but the crowd's attention had been dwindling. People were having their own conversations, some drifting back into the house. He turned back to Sarah, but she was gone. He surveyed the crowd and found her eyes. She had retreated stealthily, but hadn't gone far. Her absence magically resuscitated the gathering.      "Are you gonna do it or not?!" Art taunted. He looked at his watch in a drawn-out gesture of boredom. "Show us what you're made of, Flekzor, come on!"      A new chant arose from the reassembling horde. Instead of "Flex," now they were chanting "Har-mihn, Har-mihn, Har-mihn, Har-mihn . . .," and getting louder and louder. His eyes were locked with Sarah's. What do I do, What do I do? The tension mounted.      "HARMON, HARMON, HARMON . . ."      He began to feel intensely ill. He suddenly knew that he had to get away from this scene or he'd vomit all over Art's Mustang. He made a dash for it. He blitzed through the throng, knocking a few people over, and once he was past them he broke into a sprint. He ran for several minutes, not knowing where he was going, only what he was leaving. As soon as he entered the dark woods, he felt better. He sat down against a tree trunk and caught his breath, allowing his dizziness to subside. The pulsing bass was no longer audible. The crickets were all he could hear, along with the internal ringing in his eardrums, but that would soon fade away. He breathed deeply. There were footsteps approaching. He froze for a second, and then he remembered. Sarah had followed him, as promised. She sat down beside him. He didn't say anything.      "How do you feel?"      "I don't know."      "I'm amazed you listened to me. Nobody ever takes my advice."      "The more I think about it, I think I could have lifted that car. I really do."      She put her arm around him and they sat in silence for a while.      "I watched you doing pushups in the school gym."      "I do that sometimes."      "At night."      "You watched me?"      "You seemed . . . I don't know, you just seemed so driven, I couldn't stop watching."      "I was pissed off that night."      "It was more like . . . sad. I wanted to talk to you, console you, get to know you, but I didn't want to break your concentration, and you didn't stop, you just kept going, like-"      "I was pissed off."      "Like a machine."      "I heard you breathing. I didn't see you, but I knew someone was standing over me. I just didn't care. When I got up, they were gone - you were gone."      "I'm sorry. That must have spooked you."      "Don't be."      "You seem like a nice guy. You're very mystifying, I'd love to . . . figure you out."      "That won't be too hard. I'm motivated by two things; muscles and - well, okay, one thing."      She laughed. "liar. I think you're very complex."      "Thanks."      She laughed some more and then waxed serious.      "Have you ever had a girlfriend?"      His heart skipped a beat. "Excuse me?"      "It's a yes or no question."      "I do better with true and false."      "Okay, how's this; I'm making a pass at you right now, true or false?"      Harmon smiled for the first time that night since the arm-wrestling championship.      As he sat against a tree in daylight on his jogging expedition, his posture made him think of that haunting night, of how they had kissed under the stars, of how she had known and he had known that she knew that it was his first time. It was hard to believe that was less than two weeks ago. They kissed, and then after that night she disappeared from his life as swiftly as she had stolen away in the middle of the crowd around Art's Mustang, in the same way she had come and gone while he was punishing himself for a bad test grade with relentless calisthenics in the deserted high-school gym. When he passed her in the halls she ignored and avoided him. In just one week, she had solidified for him the cliché that women were a complete mystery.      He was situated in a spot he had visited countless times, about fifteen feet away from a certain childhood relic which had fascinated him albeit he was scarce to admit it frightened him, but which he had never messed with. When he first realized where he was, it seemed coincidental, but he had to wonder if he had selected this spot out of a subconscious force of habit. He believed the subconscious mind was more active while he ran, as the repetition of the motion and the mental focus - and not to mention the lack of oxygen to the brain - dampened his typical neurotic thought processes, allowing him to temporarily forget his worries, and leading to a harmonious resolution, a sort of peace of mind presiding over the end of the workout like a clear sky after a storm. Had he been a psychologist, he would have written his thesis on the therapeutic value of exercise.      He turned his attention from his love-sick musings to the enigma before him.      It was a window.      A window without glass.      A window without a wall to contain it, a nonexistent wall which lacked a house, a nonexistent house lacking a foundation, which lacked a clearing. It was just a window hanging from two oak trees by frayed, fungus-ridden ropes stiffened by years, perhaps by generations. Nobody knew how long it had been there, who put it there, or how or why it had come to be the subject of such childhood mythos, but there were stories. Legends regarding it were told around campfires. He didn't recall how the various stories went, but there was one thing he remembered, something about it being a portal through which the dead could cross over, through which spirits could be invoked. It was rumored that local satanic cults held séances around it where they summoned demons and so forth. Just then another memory came to him as he sat and examined it from his vantage point of post-adolescence. They said that if you came out here late at night alone under a full moon, and you stood in front of it, closed your eyes and counted to ten, and as you counted you extended your hand into the window frame, when you got to ten a cold hand would grab hold of yours and lead you away. Nobody ever specified who or what the 'cold hand' belonged to, although for the brave kids who went and tried it for initiatory purposes, the hand usually belonged to a prankster wearing white face make-up, or so Harmon had surmised.      The window was about four and a half feet tall and half as wide, and hung a few feet off the ground suspended by four ropes, the top two tied around tree branches and the bottom two staked to the ground. It consisted of a rotting wooden frame caked with mildewed remnants of white paint, but no remnants of glass panes. Perhaps it was somebody's attempt at modern art. Or perhaps it was a monument to a house that once stood there long ago, but burned down and the window was all that remained. It was a conundrum, and what better way to deal with a conundrum then to tell ghost stories? Harmon had never taken the stories seriously - his father wouldn't permit him to - but nevertheless to this day he felt a chill whenever he came to Hunter's Point and stopped to look at it.      He was fiddling with some pebbles on the ground as he wandered about the great landscape of his thoughts. He was barely aware of the rock he held in his hand. It was an unremarkable rock, and he glanced at it arbitrarily only as it left his hand. He nonchalantly chucked it through the window, and that's when he lost it.      The rock didn't hit the ground. It passed through the window and seemed to disappear as it did so. Harmon perked up and rose to his feet at this observation. There had to be an explanation for what he'd just seen. It struck him not so much as frightening, but rather humorous. He hadn't had any alcohol, and he had never been prone to hallucinations, which meant there had to be a rational explanation. He picked up another pebble and watched it carefully as he tossed it through the window frame. It ceased to exist as it crossed the plane of the window, where the glass should have been. There was no deflection, no slowing down, and no sound as it happened. It just disappeared. He bent down, picked up two more rocks and threw one of them to the left of the window. It flew past the frame and bounced off the ground with a hollow clink. He then threw the second rock into the frame, and it vanished just as the first two had. Harmon pondered this phenomenon with an objective scientific eye for a moment, and then burst into a frenzy of laughter. There was simply no other way to react, and there was no sense in searching for an explanation, rational or irrational. There was no mortal terror. There was no enlightenment. His breakdown, if he could call it that, was nothing more than a casual matter-of-fact realization that the world he lived in did not obey the laws he was force-fed in physics class, and he found this hysterically funny. He'd lost it. He'd lost it on a Wednesday afternoon at Hunter's Point in the middle of a jog. The more he thought about it, the funnier it was. Is this what going insane feels like?      When he calmed down, he gathered a handful of rocks and began pitching fastballs through the window and watching them vanish. He threw one after another.      "Strike one! Strike two! Strike three!"      He was having fun. When he depleted his handful of rocks, he immediately scavenged for more and went right back at it. There was something wholly irresistible about the act of throwing rocks through an impossible hole in space-time. He spent twenty minutes, perhaps longer pitching rocks, and then stopped and approached the window slowly.      He held up his hands, palms facing the windowless window. He intended to pantomime running his hands across the glass, but he froze. He wouldn't allow himself to bring his hands any closer, and they trembled when he attempted to. The humor that had overwhelmed him was now souring over to fear, pure fear saturated with nervous energy. His whole body shook violently at the thought of putting his hand through it. There was no hilarity in it now, just fear, cold, heavy, numbing fear that seemed to radiate from the window. He backed up slowly, keeping his eyes on it. He thought of the moment at the party when, with his hands on the Mustang's bumper, he had felt overwhelmingly ill. There was no Sarah Madison here to comfort him now.      He picked up one last rock, chucked it through and started jogging without looking back. As he jogged, he contemplated dragging Brock out here and showing him his discovery, but decided to keep it his own little secret, for reasons he felt quite strongly but couldn't identify right then. But he would be back. For the sake of science, for the sake of whatever, he knew intuitively that he would have to come back some day.      Harmon finished his jog, got back in his car and drove back to his mundane home. The next day he went to school, and everything was normal. But nothing could have prepared him for what he saw on the following night.      Focus.      He tweaked the little knob on the laser apparatus on his workbench in the darkened basement. He was projecting a test-image onto a sheet of photographic paper taped to the wall. Mounted in front of the laser was a convex lens, and in front of that he had carefully positioned a playing card on which he had carved a simple pattern with an Exacto knife. The effect was a magnified smiley face stenciled out of a red beam. He moved the components back and forth along the strip of masking tape that aligned them, searching for the clearest image so that he could mark the spots with cross-strips of tape. He had no interest in calculating the focal point of the lens or the optimum image distance. His interests were purely aesthetic. Just as he almost had it, the door opened, casting artificial light on the wall, squandering the image.      "Dad, would you please knock first?"      "Brock's on the phone."      "Tell him I'll call him back in a few minutes."      "He said it's urgent."      Harmon rolled his eyes, went up stairs and picked up the phone.      "What's up?" He tried his best to sound irritated.      "Flex, oh my God, have you seen it, have you seen it?!"      "I'd prefer you didn't call me Flex, and have I seen what?"      "Everyone calls you that."      "We've been friends since fourth grade, you're not everyone."      "Whatever. Have you seen the news? Haven't you heard?"      "What the hell are you blabbering about?"      "Harmon, I think you'd better step outside."      "I'm setting up a laser diffraction projector."      "This is better." His sentence was punctuated by the dial tone.      Harmon went outside and didn't come in for a long time. Chapter 2: The Beginning      At the age of sixteen, Harmon's life - and Brock's alike - revolved around two things, neither of which were girls, cars or booze, and they both were perfectly aware that it was the lack of those interests which set them apart from their peers. The first thing was found at newsstands whereas the second took place in darkened basements. For Harmon at least, creating phantasmagoric images from arrangements of prisms and other collected glass formations was a hobby. Photon-Man was a passion.      Photon-Man was more than a comic book. It was a comic book soon to be made into a feature film by Harmon Flekzor, as he announced to Brock.      "That's ambitious." Brock laughed. "Are you crazy? To make a movie you need actors, you need a budget, you need a crew, you need sets and back-lots, you need a screenwriter capable of writing a tenable comic-book adaptation - and you know nobody could possibly ever do Photon-Man justice - you need special effects artists, you need a fucking catering service, you need-"      "A camera?" Harmon smiled. It was the beginning of summer and anything was possible. "I think it's time we took our optical experiments to the next level," he explained. His new goal was to buy a good quality video camera before the summer was used up, and he was prepared to earn it by any means necessary.      "You were just kidding about Photon-Man, right? 'Cause making a no-budget home-movie spoof on it would be grounds for going to hell, you know that, right?"      "I'm getting a camera. A nice camera."      "And how do you intend to do that?" Brock's enthusiasm was held at bay by a skepticism rooted in the countless times Harmon had flaked on his impulsive goals after proudly declaring them.      "I got a job stacking hay. I start tomorrow."      Brock laughed.      "What?"      "I have trouble picturing you as a farmer."      "Yeah, well, soon you won't have to picture anything, we'll have a camera to do it for us."      "You're really serious, huh?"      "Damn right I am."      "Have you ever hayed before?"      "What, you don't think I can handle it? You think that just because I read comic books, I wear glasses, I do well in school and I'm socially and athletically inept, that I can't handle a man's job?"      "You don't wear glasses, Harmon."      "Fuck you. You've never seen me really motivated."      "Why don't you work retail or fast food or something?"      "And be bored eight hours a day?"      "That's what people do."      "Since when do we compare ourselves to other people?"      "You won't last a day. I'm sorry, but you won't."      You won't last a day, his mind whispered as he held on to the wooden railings to steady himself on the rickety hay-wagon. The tractor trudged on, hauling the wagon down a bumpy path leading to the field. Ahead of them was a beautiful landscape of rolling hills and farmland that he squinted to behold in the bright sunshine. Then his eyes fell - literally fell - upon the immediate view; rows of neatly lined up bales of hay receding for what looked to be miles.      On the wagon with him were two high-schoolers who he didn't know and didn't care to know, and a middle-aged farmer who introduced himself as Jim. The four of them and Boss-Man driving the tractor comprised the crew. The high-schoolers' role was to walk behind them picking up bales of hay and tossing them on to the back of the wagon where Jim and his "protégé," as he wittily referred to him, would proceed to stack them from front to back, layer upon layer until the wagon was full. There was a simple pattern that was strictly adhered to in stacking them, a formation yielding the greatest geometric efficiency given the dimensions of the average bale and the dimensions of the wagon, so for the first ten minutes Harmon had a lot to learn. The ride was so shaky he had to put most of his intention into keeping his balance at first, which made it difficult to pay attention to the job. The goal was to pack as many bales as possible into a given space. At one point Harmon got to the end of his row and found he couldn't stuff the last one in. Jim stepped on top of it and started jumping, pounding it into place in just a few jumps.      "Use your brains, kid."      They laid out bales to the very edge, and the hay became their floor. Harmon zealously grabbed the next bale by the two loops of yarn that served as handles, ready to shove it into the corner and begin building the second layer when Jim grabbed it from him and threw it aside gruffly.      "You're not stacking like I showed you." He led him to a spot around the middle and pointed out a gap in the lattice of hay bales large enough to bounce a basketball off the wooden floor. "We can't have that. A hole like that could cause the whole load to collapse. Now I got to fix what you done." He went about rearranging it while Harmon started on the second level. Now he had to keep up with incoming bales from two loaders by himself. He worked so fast he had to stop and catch his breath. It was then that he noticed how beaten up he was. There was a stinging sensation all over his hands and the base of his neck. He looked at his arms and saw that they were covered in fibrous scratches all the way down his forearms. He was sweating and would soon be extremely thirsty. The sun beating down on him made him wince just sitting there.      "What're you stopping for, kid? We ain't done yet."      In his brief moment of respite, he saw what he'd be dealing with all day, he knew exactly what muscles would be aching by the end of it, and he knew that he didn't like it, in fact he fervently hated the work, which was all the more reason to stick with it. They stacked until they were sitting atop a mountain of hay looking down at the Boss-Man, putting effort into not falling off. After the wagon was hauled off, the tractor would return with a second wagon, and after that a third.      On the final stretch of the field, Harmon began to understand what it felt like to enjoy pain, to crave it. As the work became agonizingly desensitizing, he remembered why he was putting himself through it, and focused on that for the rest of the day. He held out his hand, gripping a phantom video camera with one eye closed and the other looking through the vista of the imaginary viewfinder. The camera belonged to him. The more he suffered, the more it became a part of him. At the culmination of all this labor, he would hold the glorious shining implement like a trophy, the magical tool that would give him power, that would make him the director of his world. He wanted it badly. His aching, slightly sunburned arms went through the motion a thousand times only to hold it. His heart pounded with exhaustion only to see that day. The sweat flowed from his pores and drenched his t-shirt only to cleanse him, absolving him of his passivity, his nerdiness, and all the qualities that made him hesitate to pursue his dreams or even realize them. For the first time ever, Harmon had a purpose, and he loved it. If pain and harassment happened to be associated with that purpose, the more pain the better. At the end of the day, as he lay down in the driver's seat of his car with a headache and more aches and pains than he had energy left to count, he couldn't wait to come back early in the morning and take on the next field. The masochism by which he would later come to be identified undoubtedly had its origins here, in his first workday.      By his fourth day, the crew became depleted. Boss-Man assigned Harmon the task of stacking an entire wagon by himself. He met this challenge with delight and a subtle cockiness. Not having Jim on his case was a huge relief. He stacked according to the layout that had been drilled into him, managing by a great effort to keep up with the rate of incoming bales. He stacked rapidly, darting about the moving wagon with the dexterity and agility of an athlete. Keeping his balance no longer required any attention. He worked as fast as he could, eager to stand on a solid foundation of hay built by his hands, eager to sit in the shade chugging water and watch Boss-Man's tractor tow a mammoth load of hay into the distance and to think that he assembled it without any help. And that was just what he did.      But something wasn't right. The feeling nagged at him like a pesky mosquito that he just couldn't kill. Something had been forgotten or neglected, something just plain didn't feel right. He kept his eye on the wagon as it was driven off. It was the hay. It seemed to be swaying a little more than usual. It wasn't just swaying; it was shifting. It looked unstable, as if it were about to-      And then it did. All hell broke loose in an explosion of entropy from some interstitial nucleus of disaster, or maybe several within the ostensibly tightly packed load. The wagon suddenly became a dump truck, spilling more than half the load on the ground, leaving a scattered mess of bales, many of which burst on contact. If anyone had happened to be walking behind it, they would have been buried alive. The wagon hadn't lurched or pitched in any direction; the spill was purely horizontal. It was clear to see what happened was not the fault of the wagon. He had packed too hastily, that's what his premonition had been. Jim had warned him, and he was right.      The tractor halted. Boss-Man was too far ahead for Harmon to hear his cursing, but he didn't need to. He jumped off the tractor and walked around to the back surveying the mishap. He then turned toward Harmon. The distance between them was too great to see the look on his face, much less his pupils, but for a moment Harmon could have sworn they made eye contact. His glare from a quarter of a mile away conveyed it all; it said, 'get the hell off my farm you goddamn good-for-nothing useless klutz, and don't come back.' In person twenty minutes later he would say it a little more discreetly than that, but the message was already clear; he was through. He had worked hard, but he screwed up, and he wasn't wanted anymore.      After being promptly fired, he walked along the edge of the field where there was shade, toward the path that led to the barn by which his car was parked, cursing himself out loud. "You stupid moron, how could you let that happen, you piece of shit? Why'd you have to fuck this up?" Voices from his past swarmed in on him, degrading, heckling, abusive voices. Time to grow up, Harmon. You sit around reading those comic books of yours all day, why don't you go out there and make yourself productive for once . . . Harmon sucks! Harmon sucks! . . . Flekzor! What's the matter with you, you let that ball go right by you. Show me some hustle out there! . . . He started running, thereby eluding the voices. Still they hovered right behind him like insects. He picked up the pace, and then his foot caught on something and he tripped, hitting the ground with a thud.      He lay on his stomach sprawled out on the hard ground, the sun beating down on his back, rivulets of sweat dripping from the back of his neck, his face scratched raw and dirty, his ragged jeans and long sleeve shirt baking him alive. Tears welled up in his eyes. Don't just lie there, I said give me twenty! What was that? You call that a pushup? Make it forty. Don't roll your eyes at me . . . He brought his hands to his shoulders and pressed his palms against the dirt intending to stand up, and then paused. That was it; he was in the position, why not? As a kid, the most familiar form of punishment for screwing up was pushups, and occasionally sit-ups. It seemed like a logical thing to do.      He started doing pushups slowly with perfect form. He cranked out ten and kept on going. He got to twenty and didn't stop. He just kept on going. He wasn't counting anymore. As he approached the threshold of torture the voices subsided, and his dismay along with them. He cried out through gritted teeth on the last one, his arms shaking, his chest on fire, and then collapsed on the ground panting, feeling remarkably better. A lone breeze blew by, entering his body like an apparition, filling him with a gust of renewed vigor. He sprang back into the pushup position and cranked out more reps as fast as he could. This was the moment he would look back on as The Epiphany. He was discovering something, and each time his nose touched the grass, he became more aware of it. Later in the week, that self-discovery would take him to a place in town he had heard about in passing countless times but heretofore had no desire to venture to.      With his arms fully extended and his body arched upward, he leapt into a standing position and sprinted the rest of the way to his car. On the way home, he thought about his goals and where he was headed, and what he would do about his new predicament.      He saw Brock that afternoon. He told him about the hay collapsing, and about getting fired, and in doing so, he remembered what made him such a good friend; Brock was the only person in his immediate world he could tell that story to without being laughed at.      "I'm impressed."      "Shut up."      "No, I mean it. I doubted you, but now I stand corrected."      "I got one hundred and ninety dollars. Now I just need to find a new job."      "I've been getting ideas."      "About jobs?"      "About the camera. We could make a documentary of . . ." Harmon zoned out as he rambled on, and nearly fell asleep. He let Brock - and to some extent himself - believe that his lack of excitement was due merely to fatigue, exhaustion, a sore back and a sorer ego.      His next job was at a construction site. He spent the day unloading trucks, digging trenches, breaking up gravel with a sledgehammer, picking up rubbish on the ground, taking commands in a subdued, obedient manner, and performing menial tasks. He didn't talk much all day, didn't draw any attention to himself, and he didn't screw up once. He had one thing on his mind while he worked, and it didn't involve words like "cut" or "action". When released after nine hours of labor, he didn't go straight home. He drove into town, past the main drag, past the shopping district, past the city park, and on into unfamiliar territory. The road was nondescript; a few houses and a few stores, a gas station, and then there it was. The building stood on its own, flanked by trees with bare branches, greeting him with a flashy red and white sign with the words POWELL'S GYM inscribed on a cartoon of oversized dumbbells in the hands of an exaggerated caricature of a bodybuilder with bulging muscles and spiked hair, dwarfed by the dumbbells he held up over his head, on which the name of the gym was displayed. In a smaller font to the side, it read;      Free weights      Nautilus      Pool      Aerobics      Sauna      Open daily 7am-10pm      Harmon slowed down to take this in as he turned into the driveway and made his way to the parking lot. As he parked his car, a feeling came over him. It was an unpleasant feeling, familiar yet new. In the past week he had gone through many cataclysmic emotions, but none that could be compared to this one; he was nervous. It was the kind of nervousness one felt before one's first day at a new school, before trying out for a varsity team, before a job interview, before delivering a speech, before a date, although Harmon had done none of those things. He sat numbly in the driver's seat and watched other people get out of their cars, men and women wearing tank tops and sweatpants, long hair hanging out the back of bandanas, snazzy water-resistant yellow headphones that went with specialized sports walkmans, casual succinct conversation and swift high-fives as they walked to the entrance with determination, ready to pump some iron or whatever it was they did in there. They looked serious. They looked focused. They looked confident, and Harmon wanted desperately to emulate those qualities.      He took a deep breath and got out of his car, still wearing his orange construction vest and filthy torn-up jeans. He walked inconspicuously along the side of the brick building and paused to peer in the window. What he saw was enough to deter him from going inside, and enough to lure him back the following afternoon.      The first word that came to his mind was factory. It was like a factory in there; a rectangular floor the size of two basketball courts with gray square rubber tiles, a slanted navy-green ceiling with a row of fans in the middle, and giant mirrors covering all the walls, giving the illusion that the gym was three times as large as it actually was, a never ending expanse of equipment. In one corner there was a dumbbell rack that extended along the wall and an array of weight benches, some flat, some with adjustable inclines, some with fixed vertical back-supports, all uniformly blue with black pads. The rest of what he saw was an assembly line of myriad machines where people seemed to be progressing from one to the next successively, like factory parts. Except for the ones people were using at the moment, he had no idea what all the machines were for, but a part of him desperately wanted to.      With the pounding bass from the radio inside resounding in his chest, he was more nervous than ever. He didn't know how long he had been standing there staring in the window, but he knew it was time to go when a burly man hostilely made eye contact with him from across the weight room. He ran to his car and took off, his heart beating fast.      The next day he was taking orders from a different foreman, but the work was the same. When it was over, Harmon went into one of the malodorous portable bathrooms and held his breath while he changed into a pair of soccer shorts and an old t-shirt. There was no question where he was going. He drove to the gym, parked, got out and walked to the entrance without hesitation. When he went inside, the man who had caught him looking in the window the other day was sitting at the front desk wearing an official looking gray shirt with the Powell's Gym logo in the right hand corner, and a nametag that said Dave Powell.      "Can I help you?"      Dave was a middle-aged man with short brown hair and a mustache. He had the broadest shoulders Harmon had ever seen. His frame suggested he had been a heavyweight wrestler in his youth. He had the demeanor of a man in charge. Even had it not been for the nametag, it would be clear that this guy owned the place. Harmon hoped that he would never have to see Dave Powell get angry.      "Can I help you?"      "Oh, yeah, uh, I was, uh-"      "Speak up, kid. I don't bite. Would you like someone to show you around?"      "Yeah. I mean, I've never been to a gym before . . . but I want to start working out."      "The first session is free. I'll have one of our trainers give you a tour and briefly show you how to use some key machines, then you can stay and play, or you can leave. But before you go, I'll take you into my office and give you a sales pitch about memberships and what not. Should you choose to join, we'll arrange a one-on-one meeting to assess your goals and start you off on a program, and for your first week you'll receive personal training from myself or a member of my staff. As I said, the first workout is free of charge. I just need you to sign a liability form. How old are you?"      The nervousness went away as he was shown around and introduced to pieces of equipment with weight stacks and pins to set the resistance and fancy mechanisms involving cables and pulleys and stainless steel bars to work various muscles, but sitting in Dave's office with the door closed and three other guys listening attentively, it came back. Ironically, the heaviness descended on him after he was finished lifting weights. From the small taste he got, he knew wholeheartedly that his life was about to change, and from listening to Dave's sales pitch, he knew that there'd be a literal price to pay; one hundred dollars per month, or five hundred for a year's membership. To join meant, inevitably, the camera would have to wait till another summer. That was his dilemma, and that was his only dilemma. He didn't care if his parents insisted that he save the money he earned for something more practical. He had never brought up or even hinted to them his aspirations of taking up weightlifting, and he honestly didn't know how they'd react, but it didn't matter. Support or no support, it was his initiative, it was his choice, and it was a choice between a gym membership and a camera, and he was losing sleep over it.      Usually when he had important decisions to make, Brock was the one friend he consulted, but this time he couldn't bring himself to tell him of his ambivalence. He wanted that camera badly, but he wanted the gym membership more, there was no use denying it. His stalemate wasn't really about the camera. It was about Brock's reaction. On the surface he was debating where to spend his money, but it was a deeper conflict of interests that kept him awake at night; it was a choice between friendship and self-respect.      Harmon had signed on with a temp agency that provided manpower to local contractors, landscapists, carpenters and the like. Jobs weren't permanent; they lasted anywhere from one day to a week, but the agency was committed to finding their clients some form of work every day. It was grunt work, and the transience of the jobs was the only thing that made it tolerable. There was variety, and there was surprise; he often couldn't predict what he'd be doing, whom he'd be answering to or what godforsaken place he'd be driving to the following day; one day he'd be on a roof hammering nails, and the next he'd be in a sewer operating a jackhammer. But lurking beneath the variation was an all-encompassing consistency, a unifying nature of work, a certain attitude of the workers, a certain structure to the day which made him want to simultaneously vomit and scream at the top of his lungs.      Each morning when he got in his car and put on his hardhat, he would pick up an envelope or receipt off the dashboard, on which he'd taken down the directions to the next job sight from a pleasant female voice at a phone booth. Beneath the directions would be the name of the boss he was to report to. As soon as a job ended, he was to call the agency and find out what to wear to his next gig, what time to be there, and how to get there. On those mornings when he groggily followed a new set of directions, he didn't know what to expect, but still it felt like he was marching off to the same regimen. The location changed, the activity changed, occasionally the climate changed, but it was the same job. The face changed, but it was the same boss, the boss that controlled how much sleep he got, who his "friends" were, when he ate and when he took his fifteen-minute break, what time he got to work and what time he was released.      He couldn't take it anymore. He had to make a decision, and after one particularly long and arduous workday, he did. This time he didn't bother to change in a PortaPotty at the end of the day. He fled the site and drove straight to Powell's with five twenty-dollar bills folded up in a zip-lock bag in his pocket.      When he walked in, Dave wasn't at his desk. Ignoring the other employees there, he sauntered over to Dave's office. The door was closed. He crossed his arms and waited, and while he was waiting he overheard the conversation inside.      "Why are you here?" he heard Dave say intensely.      "Wh-why am I here? Huh?" It sounded like a teenaged male.      "What's your aim? What kind of body do you want? Are you training for an athletic team? What's your inspiration for coming in here?"      "Oh, I see what you mean. Well, this is kind of personal, but I just broke up with my girlfriend."      There was a pause.      "I don't see the connection."      "She dumped me for a football player. I was thinking if I get all like buff, I'll have all the girlies hanging off me, y'know, make her jealous?"      There was a long silence. Harmon could feel the tension building from outside the room. He backed up from the door and just barely heard Dave half-whisper the words "Get out."      Another pause. Then he said it louder; "Get out. Don't waste my time."      "Huh? Aw, come on, man, I don't know what I said to offend you, but I just wanna get some pussy-"      Dave banged his fist on the table. The floor shook. Harmon jumped.      "Don't you ever - EVER - use that word in my office, do you understand?"      "Hey, chill out, dude-"      "This is a gym. Respect it or leave. I suggest you leave."      Now Harmon understood the real purpose of the one-on-one conference; in as much as it was for the benefit of the customer, it was a screening process. The door opened and a boy about Harmon's age with long hair, wearing a Motley Crew t-shirt sulked out of the office, banished. Harmon waited a minute and then walked in timidly. Dave's composure was solidly calm, with no sign of the vehement rage he had just expressed. His face brightened up a little when he saw Harmon come in.      "I didn't think you'd come back."      "I got the money." He fished the zip-lock bag out of his pocket and laid it on the table. "I want to join."      Without blinking, Dave opened a drawer and produced a manila envelope with some forms stapled together and handed it to Harmon.      "Since you're under eighteen, you'll have to have a parent or legal guardian sign these documents before you can officially begin, but we're informal here, as you'll find out. I'm free for the next ninety minutes. We can do your one-on-one right now, and then I can take you through orientation, brief you on our rules and policies. As I said, we're pretty informal, so don't be intimidated. Just be aware that - and I'll say this once - Powell's Gym maintains the right to refuse admittance to our facility to any person at any time, in other words, this is my gym, if I don't like you, I can kick your ass out. That being said, welcome aboard, I'm Dave."      He extended his hand. Harmon shook it without hesitation and introduced himself. Dave had a painfully solid grip, as he'd expected.      "Take a seat. Relax. This is my chance to get to know you, and your chance to tell me what you hope to get out of your membership here so that I can tailor a workout to your bodily goals, to your hopes and dreams. Keep in mind this is just to get you started. In the future, you'll pioneer your own workout autonomously. My staff and I will always be here to answer questions and provide guidance, but your success is ultimately up to you. So I ask you this; why are you here?"      "I . . ."      "Why are you here, Harmon?"      "I want to better myself."      "That's a generic answer. Be specific."      "I want to build up my arms and my chest. And I want a six-pack."      "Why?"      "For self-confidence, respect, I don't know."      "You don't know?"      "I want to lift. I want to feel pain every day of the week. I want to walk into school without fear. I want to approach people without feeling inferior to them. I want to walk onto a construction site and be the best damn workhorse they got. I want to work towards something, I want to be able to look in the mirror and like what I see. I want to flex and be the center of attention, and never be laughed at again, I want to tackle the world!"      There was a long pause. Dave was nodding his head slowly.      "Are you willing to devote four to five hours a week to this?"      "Yes."      "Congratulations, you can pick up your academy award on the way out."      There was another pause. Harmon started laughing, and then Dave started laughing, and they laughed hysterically together. Out of the lesson that proceeded, the word that stuck out in Harmon's mind was "failure," the most important principle in weightlifting. "Taking it to failure" meant pushing the limits, it meant finding out who you were in relation to the weight you were lifting. It meant not quitting until your body flat out gives in, it meant that you don't decide when a set is over, the weight decides that for you; if you set out to do eight repetitions and you do eight reps, you ain't finished. "Don't you dare put that weight down if you can possibly crank out another one, or if you can still move it at all," Dave would say. The running definition of 'failure' was 'you lift until you simply can't lift it anymore no matter how hard you try, no matter how loud you shout.' But it meant more than that. Taking it to failure was what determined if you were ready to increase the weight by another increment the next time you used that machine. Failure meant progress. Failure meant self-discovery. A word that had had only negative connotations prior to the day he stepped into Powell's Gym would soon become an integral part of his vocabulary for four to five hours a week. Wasn't there a proverb that said it's only through identifying with failure that one can come to know success? If not, then there should have been.      He was on a high when he left the gym. He blasted heavy metal music on the car ride home and sang along.      That night Brock paid him a visit.      "You're gonna hate me," he told Brock as they walked along the docks in the moonlight. "I have a confession to make."      "What, did you cheat off me in that history test last year?"      Harmon shook his head. "I made a decision that's irrevocable. You won't understand my reasons right now, but try to understand that it's something I had to do."      "Did you take up drinking?"      "It's about the camera."      Brock had no quick response. The word hung in the air like a rifle shot.      "You couldn't have bought it already without my input in picking one out, you've only been working a few weeks."      "I'm not getting a camera. I'm buying a membership to Powell's instead."      "What the fuck is Powell's?"      "The fitness center."      "Whoah, whoah. Tell me you're kidding. That's the most random thing you've ever pulled . . . you've never exercised, why . . . I don't get it. Why do you suddenly want to do this so strongly that you're giving up the chance to make movies to . . . to pump iron?"      "I can't explain it. I know how absurd it sounds."      Brock turned away and waived his hand dismissively. Harmon walked after him.      "This is just like you. You have a plan, a good one, and then you throw it away for some crazy whim that pops up, something completely irrelevant, and then you apologize for your insipid shenanigans, you fucking apologize. Have I told you how much I hate when you do that? I could punch you right now."      "I'm sorry."      "Don't apologize to me. Just-" He stopped suddenly. "Wait, what am I saying? You still have at least another month to change your mind before you have enough money to do either, you're just talking out of your-"      "I've already bought the membership."      "What?"      "And I feel great! See, they have this cumulative deal where you buy a month, or several months, then-"      "Shut up. I don't get it, why can't you do both? You're making good money, aren't you? Christ, you work so many hours, I never see you."      "I have to put half of it away for college, besides, I have-"      "Look, fine. Whatever. Go and lift weights. Do your thing."      "Next summer, next summer I swear, man, we'll get a camera."      "You're an idiot. Don't give me this 'I can't explain it' crap. You're just an idiot."      "Fuck you."      "What made you want to join a gym, anyway?"      "Look at me-"      "Good answer."      Harmon punched him in the shoulder. "Could you be a little more insensitive, dick?"      "Could you be a little more flaky?" Brock punched him back.      "Why don't you buy your own damn camera?"      That shut him up and ended the exchange of punches, but it ended something else as well.      The next few weeks were a blur. Visual results were slow, but he could feel his body tightening, hardening and forging itself into an image of perfection. He began to pay attention to what he ate. Junk food implied extraneous matter to carry around inside him. Everything he did had a purpose. The mentality was not confined within the walls of Powell's. When he walked outside, if an impulse told him to run, he'd break into a sprint. If he walked by a playground, he'd do pull-ups on the jungle gym. Whenever he walked by a hill, he was possessed by a sudden urge to run to the top. His environment no longer presented itself as static, transcending his existence. It was challenging him. That hill is laughing at you, it thinks it's bigger than you. Forty seconds later he would stand at the top of it breathless and yell out "Who's in control now, huh!"      He didn't build the city (although that wasn't necessarily true these days), he didn't tell the trees where to grow, he didn't affect the weather, but at least he could be the master of his own body. During the day he was everybody's bitch, whoring himself all over the site, bouncing from foreman to foreman and doing as he was told like a good little construction worker. From eight to five or seven to five or seven to seven or whatever hours they set for the crew, they owned him. Then he'd go to the gym. There he controlled what he lifted. There nobody told him to haul these beams up a ladder, stack these cement blocks, unload this trailer . . . there he was the boss of Harmon, and the demand was even greater. The best way to get a hard-ass coach off one's back was to create an even more demanding one in one's immediate psyche. Nobody would push him around anymore; he would take care of that himself. Pain tasted better than candy. When he pushed himself, really pushed himself, when his muscles screamed to him audibly to relent, his heart about to explode and burst out of his chest, his whole body throbbing, baking in the summer heat, he couldn't distinguish the sweat running down his forehead from tears and all he could think was faster, faster, only in those moments was he truly free.      Harmon was undergoing a shape-shifting transformation, a transformation of body and mind, and Brock noticed it. He noticed it when they were walking through the woods and Harmon suddenly sprinted up a hill without warning, and rolled down.      "What the hell, man?"      "I felt like climbing a hill, what's wrong with that?"      "You're crazy."      "I'm free."      "I mean it, Harmon, you've changed. All those weights have gone to your head."      "You should come with me sometime." He squeezed Brock's arm. "You could use a little-"      Brock yanked his arm away and said "No" so forcefully and resolutely that Harmon recoiled. He never suggested it to him again.      Harmon grew bigger and bigger and leaner and leaner. The summer bled into the school year, and he continued to get bigger. Eyes turned when he strutted through the halls wearing tight t-shirts and a don't-fuck-with-me expression. Girls began to take notice. And then he hit his plateau. And then he met Sarah Madison. Chapter 3: Strange Phenomena      "No, I do not take steroids."      "We'll need a urine sample." The nurse handed him a cup. "You understand, don't you?"      "Understand what?"      "Every competitor gets drug tested, federation rules. You looked at me like I was accusing you. It's my job to-"      "No, no, I understand."      "It's for your own safety, and for the integrity of the sport. Will this be a problem for you?"      "No."      There was no problem, no problems at all. Dave had booked him for a contest, and would prepare him in due time. Meanwhile, he drove to the gym every other day after school diligently and sweated just as he'd been doing since the summer. In the beginning he'd carried around a chart on a clipboard to keep track of what machines he used and record his weight and reps at each of them, but now he had discarded the chart, and kept it all in his head, which was somewhat liberating. But it wasn't liberating enough. One day when he got off the bench press, a young man slightly bigger than Harmon was standing with his arms folded observing him.      "You think you're hot stuff, huh?" The man shook his head derisively. "Bench press is for sissies."      "Yeah? Why's that?"      "You only use seventy percent of your chest. The first third of the motion just strains your shoulders."      "You're full of shit."      "Flies are where it's at."      "What, you mean the Butterfly Chest machine?"      "No, I ain't talking 'bout no sissy-ass machine. I'm talking flat bench, dumbbells. That's how you get the full range of motion." Harmon looked confused. "Come here."      He led Him over to the dumbbell area and showed him how to do flies. After an excruciating set of eight, Harmon sat up with the weights resting on his knees, breathing heavily.      "You feel it?"      "That's intense. I'm definitely gonna start doing those."      "Still think I'm full of shit?"      "I'm Harmon. Most people call me Flex." He extended his hand, but the man just stood there.      "I know who you are. Don't thank me yet. I got something else to show you, something I know you'll like. Meet me in the locker room when you're finished with your workout, and we'll talk about it."      It didn't even occur to him that most people he knew would have immediately misconstrued that invitation as a proposition of anal sex, so with blissful ignorance he went ahead and sought the man out when he was done and accompanied him to the locker room. The man craned his neck to look around the room and then spoke very quietly.      "I got to keep a low profile, so keep your voice to a whisper if you would."      "Is this about Mega-Mass?"      He expression was more than taken aback; he looked frightened. "How'd you know I take Mega-Mass?"      "Word gets around."      "Well it's not supposed to, so don't tell anyone else. Dave would have a fit if he found out. Can I trust you?"      "Are you a distributor or something?"      "You want some, I'll get you some for less than retail price. You want in?"      Harmon thought about it for a moment.      "Absolutely. How much?" After doing business and shaking hands, he left the gym guiltily without looking at Dave on his way out.      Harmon kept a half-gallon container of powdered Mega-Mass under his bed and mixed one scoop of it with half a liter of water in a soda bottle that he'd take with him to school on lifting days. He'd down it in the parking lot before going inside, as the instructions on the container said to do. It tasted bitter so he had to hold his nose and chug it. But that wasn't a problem.      There was no problem at all.      His defiance began to manifest itself in subtle ways. Dave began paying him more attention than usual. He didn't seem suspicious, but he did seem uneasy.      "So, do I have to do that thing you see in the Olympics where you thrust the barbell up to your shoulders, do a standing press, and then put it back down?"      Dave laughed. "Sure, if you want to have back surgery by age thirty. Those are called cleans, and no, I would never advise you to do them. Power lifting consists of three events; dead-lift, squat, and the most overrated staple of the modern American workout, your forte, the flat press, also known as the bench press. But you don't have to do all three. At the professional level you're scored based on your total weight for the three lifts, but here they'll be judged separately."      "So you win by out-lifting everyone in your weight category?"      "It's not how much weight you lift, it's your formula."      "Huh?"      "They take your body weight, your age and your max, plug it into an equation and get out a number. That's called your Formula."      "And you only have to do one rep?"      "That's the definition of a max; how much you can lift just once, effectively."      "I don't even know what my max is."      "Of course you don't. Training that way would be a waste of time. You only start maxing out three weeks before a contest. Don't worry, I'll train you. Don't even think about trying it without me. Oh, and we'll have to get you fitted for a one-piece suit."      It was less than a week before the competition when Brock called him, interrupting his laser experiment, and told him to go outside. On his way out, he glanced through the window. No apocalyptic hailstorm or tornado or surging flood that he could see. He opened the door, turned on the porch light and stepped into the yard, expecting to have a cursory look around and then go back inside, call Brock and say, "I give up, what am I looking for?" It was dark. Looking straight ahead, that was his only observation. And then a flash of brightness grazed the top of his field of vision and he looked up. His life would never be the same again.      It was a clear night. He could see constellations, and even recognized a few. Just beyond the North Star something was happening. Concentric bands of distinct bright colors expanded and disintegrated as they dispersed, like Newton's Rings. It was about twice the size of a full moon, and just as noticeable. The spectacle reminded him of psychedelic animated features he had seen in music videos, and of black light posters.      "Mom! Dad! Come out here, you got to see this!"      His father came outside with his arms behind his back.      "What's all the fuss?"      "Where's mom?"      "She went to sleep early. She's tired."      "Look. In the sky."      He looked, but didn't react.      "So? It's probably just the after-blast from some missile they're testing at the base-"      "Dad, you don't know what you're talking about."      "Then it's some kind of outstanding pyrotechnics."      "That doesn't look like fireworks to me, Dad."      "What's your point? Don't let this be fuel for your wild imagination. I'm sure we'll hear about it on the news."      "Shut up, Dad. Just shut up. It's beautiful."      His expression didn't change.      "What did you say?"      "I said it's beautiful. Just acknowledge it."      He wasn't looking at the sky anymore. He was looking at Harmon. His hands were still behind his back.      "Have you been taking steroids?"      "Why does everyone think that?"      "Answer me."      "Do you think I'm stupid? Of course not."      "Then what the hell is this?" He held up the orange plastic bottle with the Mega-Mass logo, which he'd been concealing behind his back.      "It's a protein supplement, and it's perfectly natural."      "Why didn't you talk to me before using a . . . enhancer, or whatever you call this?"      "Why'd you go snooping under my bed?"      "Look, son. I'm proud of you. You're doing good work, and you're on the right path. As long as you're keeping your grades up, I won't interfere. But your behavior's starting to worry me. Just tell me you'll take it easy, would you?"      "Sure, Dad." Could you be a little more vague?      His dad went inside. A few minutes later a car pulled into the driveway. Brock got out carrying something. It was Harmon's homemade telescope apparatus he had left at Brock's house.      "Aw, you're the best, dude!"      They started setting it up together on the grass.      Brock sighed. "Now if only we had a camera."      Harmon dropped what he was doing. "Brock-"      "This is a historical event. Whatever it is that's causing this, twenty years from now everyone will remember where they were tonight. Imagine if we had a home movie of it to show our kids. They'd see us as teenagers - that in itself would be a kick - and then the camera scrolls up and . . ."      "Must you bring this up every time I see you?"      "I guess they'll have to settle for news clips. Speaking of which, astronomers at the observatory are saying-"      "Don't tell me. I'd rather not hear any explanations till tomorrow. I just want to enjoy this now."      "-are saying that they're completely baffled."      The telescope apparatus consisted of some lenses held in place by a line of toilet-paper rolls and some tape, a flashlight and a series of mirrors that, when arranged perfectly, projected the image onto a sheet of paper. Harmon rendered it so they could see the phenomenon in the sky reenacted on the paper screen with impressive clarity.      "Got any popcorn?"      "Popcorn's bad for you."      "No it's not."      "With all the crap you put on it-"      "I forgot, you're a health nut too."      "Get a hobby, man."      "I have plenty of hobbies. But our hobbies weren't good enough for you."      Harmon punched his fist through the paper and ripped it out of the wooden frame that held the device together.      "Look, damn it. You've got no reason to resent me and I'm sick and tired of your little underhanded comments." He took a deep breath. "But let's not spoil this night by being bitter. There's something going on up there, something special."      They both lay down on the grass and looked up at the entertainment.      "Doesn't this kind of remind you of-"      "Photon-Man, issue 38," Harmon finished for him. "I was thinking the same thing."      "When they're on the planet Lepton and he synchronizes that vortex with the magnetic drive field and leaps dimensions to fight the evil what's-his-name . . ."      They spent a long time in silence watching the sky.      "Harmon? You're not on steroids, are you?"      He lazily held up his arm and gave him the finger.      The first explanation he heard was in Mr. Nolte's advanced physics class.      "Many of you, all of you I hope, saw something in the sky Tuesday night. I've heard a lot of talk about it in the halls this morning. It's on everyone's mind. Some people are preaching it's the end of the world. Others say it's a signal from some extraterrestrial intelligence. What are astronomers saying? Does anyone know? Naturally, people will jump to conclusions at a time like this, but what's really scary is when the most rational explanation offered has to do with black holes and extra-dimensional-"      The class was in an uproar.      "Black holes don't emit any light!" someone shouted over the pandemonium.      "Of course they don't. That's the trouble in postulating their existence. But the gravitation enacted on distant bodies disrupts the whole continuum of the universe. It bends adjacent beams of light resulting in dispersion, much like a prism. Think of the gravitational field as a refracting medium. If you looked closely, you would have seen that the very center was dark. Did anyone notice the progression of colors?"      A soft-spoken girl named Linda answered.      "It was purple, then blue, then green, all the colors of the rainbow in a wave, an outward wave . . . like it was swallowing the sky." People laughed good-humoredly.      "A full spectrum of visible wavelengths, all in perfect circles moving like rings in the water. Rings in the water are caused by some disturbance. The geometry of this disturbance resembles the theoretical model of a black hole."      A student raised his hand and asked, "So you're saying that light traveling past the black hole but far away from it was bent by it's gravitational field and dispersed. Where did such an intense light come from in the first place?"      "Well, according to theory, a black hole releases a certain kind of radiation in proportion to the mass it ingests, resulting in an astronomically explosive emission of energy traveling through the universe faster than light, a sort of optical sonic boom."      "But wouldn't that imply that the blast travels backwards in time, meaning that what we saw last night hasn't happened yet?"      "According to the equations, the component traveling faster than c is in the infrared, which accounts for the wave effect that Linda described, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion. But what we actually saw was standard photon emission, and it was very far away, about a hundred and fifty light-years - that's nine times ten to the thirteenth miles - meaning, what we observed last night actually happened a hundred and fifty years ago. Would anybody care to venture a guess as to how they arrived at that?"      "Something to do with the gradient of the time lapses between the color rings, and their position relative to the stars?"      "I like it, but no. Anyone else?"      "By analyzing the color changes and calculating the relativistic Doppler shifts?"      "That would tell us how fast distant galaxies are receding from us (or us from them), but not necessarily the distance to them. Nice try."      "Maybe they're all full of shit. They had to tell the media something to save face, but they're still working on it, and as of now they have no idea."      "All excellent answers, but you're all wrong." Mr. Nolte picked up a jar full of a sample of Lumac that he kept behind the demonstration table. "No telescopes and no high-tech equipment were used in the investigation of last night's phenomenon, just this that I hold in my hand, and the naked eye, and a room full of the world's brightest theoretical physicists." He paused for reactions. There were a few gasps, and silence. "Now can you guess?      "In the year eighteen forty eight, it was coincidentally reported by several sources all over the world that Lumac deposits were deviating from their preconceived behavior. Not only did these events happen at the exact same time, but the Lumac's behavior was exactly the same everywhere it was observed, and furthermore, nowhere in the world was it found to act differently. This uniformity lent validity to old ridiculed theories that had been disregarded as mere superstition. But more importantly, these sudden deviations which came to light in the eighteen hundreds correspond perfectly with the parameters of the newly theorized gravitational upset which manifested itself last night, which suggests that it occurred not last night, not in the future, not eons ago, but precisely in the year eighteen forty eight, which means it occurred at a distance of approximately a hundred and fifty light-years-"      "What if it's a coincidence?" a student interjected.      "I said 'suggests.' However if you looked at the equations, the proposition of it being a coincidence would seem highly unlikely. Science asks not 'is this coincidence?' The scientist looks at data and asks, could there be a relation here, something significant?" He paused. "Is anyone here not familiar with the history and the mystique behind Lumac?"      "What was this controversial theory you speak of?"      "That's another digression for another time. I could spend an entire lecture on that. Basically it says that Lumac exists at the earth's core, and not only that, but it was present in the nucleus of our universe before the Big Bang, and still pervades our universe, and is somehow responsible for evolution, and ties together the forces behind astrology, mysticism and so forth. The mathematics behind all this eludes even me, however if any of you've read the popular comic book Photon-Man, you may be familiar with the theory, and could probably explain it better than I could."      A boy in the back row timidly raised his hand and asked, "What's Lumac?"      "I'm glad somebody asked. Who'd like to come up here and explain it in a nutshell?" His eyes circumnavigated the classroom like a fly and landed on Harmon. "Harmon?"      The rowdy class cheered and yelled, "Flex!" Enjoying the spotlight, Harmon swaggered up to the blackboard and crossed his arms. As he opened his mouth to launch into an explanation, he thought of the issue of Photon-Man where the professor/mad scientist had the exact same question posed to him. Under normal conditions it behaves ostensibly like matter, but under certain - not necessarily extreme - conditions it behaves like nothing the world has ever known in fantasy or reality. I tell you this only in the strictest of confidence. The government knows this, I know this, and you will use it someday, that is your destiny; under certain un-reproducible conditions, it can convert matter into tachyons. Young Photon-Man; Two questions; what conditions, and what in the hell are you talking about? Professor; Cosmic conditions that are vastly out of our control, and I'm talking about time travel, I'm talking interstellar transportation, I'm talking mass-transference, I'm talking about things beyond your wildest imagination . . . I'm talking, about being a hero. That was wildly farfetched, but it was what Harmon had grown up on, and now he was about to take on that role of explaining what Lumac was.      "Lumac is something scientists keep in the closet, or try to. It's the greatest mystery of our time. It's a substance with a reflective surface, like a randomly shaped mirror. In its solid state it resembles a crystalline metal compound, although it's not a composite of anything. It's been known about for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and it's not even on the periodic table. It's elemental, yet as far as we can tell with even the world's most powerful microscopes, the stuff is continuous! It looks and feels like matter, although it's not quantized, the result being it's tougher than diamond, and it can't be molded. It cannot be cut, chipped or shattered, and nor can it be forged by heating. You could drop a bomb on it and it would stay intact. It has confounded metallurgists and alchemists for ages, and we still don't know anything about it. Sometimes it's found in a liquid state, sometimes as a solid, and everything in between, although temperature has no effect whatsoever on these phase changes. The phase changes are a function of one thing and one thing only, and that is they're uncannily correlated with lunar cycles. Experimenters have subjected solid-state Lumac to temperatures that would melt steel, and still it maintains its integrity, yet in the presence of a full moon, it becomes liquid. This fact has been known since ancient times, and no exceptions have ever been documented, until eighteen forty eight that is.      "Going back further, in the fifteen hundreds indigenous peoples of South Africa discovered that when liquid Lumac was absorbed in the soil, it caused crops to grow hugely out of proportion. This knowledge quickly spread to Europe where it was exploited for agricultural enterprise. When it came harvest time, everyone who ate of the produce became ill, and the practice ended immediately, and was strictly outlawed. The thing is, the history books are very vague about the illness. It was a cover-up. Nobody knows what really happened to those people. That's the real mystery."      Harmon sat down and Mr. Nolte took over.      "As you may have noticed, scientists like to project themselves as all-knowing. They like you to think that they have everything under control, that in the tradition of Adam and Eve, they rule the world by way of nomenclature. The truth is, we don't have all the answers. There are many natural phenomena that we're still baffled by. Now that I've shattered your trust in science, we may proceed with my scheduled lecture for today."      Linda raised her hand.      "I have one more question about this. You said that the phase of Lumac is uniform everywhere at any given time, but Harmon told us that it corresponds to lunar cycles. Wouldn't that mean that when it's solid in the northern hemisphere it would be liquid in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa?"      "That's an excellent question, and I don't know. You caught me, I didn't do my homework for today." There were a few laughs, and then lecture proceeded.      The contest was held at a gym two towns away. That was when he openly defied Dave for the first time. What exactly drove him to do it was ambiguous. It was a combination of the results he'd been seeing which he attributed to Mega-Mass, the image of the strange lights in the sky still fresh in his mind, and the adrenalin rush spurred by the contest atmosphere that empowered him and made him overconfident. As they arrived together, they were greeted with a banner that said POWERLIFTING COMPETITION adorning the entrance. The atmosphere was festive. There were photographers and people wearing suits. There were lights. There was an audience. There were weightlifters of all ages and sizes, from beastly longhaired barrel-chested behemoths slipping into their gear and pounding their chests, to slim athletic-looking teenagers wearing striped wind-pants and backwards baseball caps trying to impress their girlfriends. There was pandemonium. There were hot-dog vendors. There was rock and roll music playing on the radio. Dave seemed to have rapport with everyone they encountered as he led him through the sign-in process and made their way to the scale to weigh in.      "Relax." Dave patted him on the back. "Have fun."      He was too tense to even think about relaxing. Every fifteen minutes he went to the bathroom to pee, until the contest began. The master of ceremonies made a welcome address over a microphone, followed by the national anthem, and then the games began.      Harmon watched intently, trying to grasp the structure of the contest. For each of the three events, there were three rounds. At the end of the event, you'd be evaluated based on your best successful lift out of the three attempts. The announcer would say the lifter's name and a few words about them, and then they'd step up and tell the spotter when they were ready. The lifter then brought the barbell down to their chest and waited for the command to lift, at which time they would press the weight and wait for the command to rack it, and then from the judges' table, three red lights would come on and the announcer would say "Sorry, no lift," or three yellow lights would come on and the announcer would say "That was a good lift," and there'd be applause. The judges' votes were always unanimous.      Dave had warned him that they were strict; the bar had to be touching your chest before they told you to lift, touch-and-go style, and your arms had to be completely extended before they said "Rack." Dave had worked with him and prepared him thoroughly, they had a game plan, and he was right with him on the sidelines as his coach. "First you do a weight you know you could lift on a bad day, something you're good for four reps with. On the second attempt, challenge yourself but don't take any risks. If you succeed, now you're secure and you can go all out on your third one," he had explained. His first attempt would be for two hundred and twenty pounds. His max was two-fifty-five, so his second attempt would be two-fifty to be safe, and the third one was left open. They had talked it through, and that was their plan.      "All right my man, you're on deck, get focused," said Dave.      "Oh God."      "This is two-twenty, nothing to worry about. Just do what we practiced."      Harmon bounced around on his feet, shaking his arms out.      "Harmon Flexor." The voice resonated from five speakers placed throughout the gym. "This seventeen-year-old weighs in at one hundred and sixty pounds, and he is attempting to lift two hundred and twenty pounds."      As he sat down on the bench, his mom and dad cheered for him. He looked out into the audience and nodded to them, and then lay down. When his hands touched the cold iron of the barbell and found their grip, his fear was sucked out through his hands and he felt pumped. He performed his first lift quickly and with ease, and then watched all the other lifters in round one, slowly nodded his head and turned to Dave.      "I'm feeling good. I think I'll do two-sixty for my second-"      "Whoah, whoah, hey, time out. I know how you feel. It's your first contest, you're psyched up, you feel invincible, believe me, I know. You can't let your emotions get the better of you. You got to lift smart."      "I can do it, Dave-"      "You may be right, but don't be stupid. If you overshoot and fail your second attempt, you can't drop down for your third, they'll make you repeat the same weight, and then you'll be stuck with two-twenty. I see it happen all the time. Don't make that mistake, not on your first time. On your third lift, I won't tell you what to do, but this one's too important. You've never pressed two-sixty. I've been coaching people for years, and I'm telling you, I'm ordering you, do not go above two-fifty, you hear me?"      "Fuck two-fifty. I can do it, I just know I can."      Dave gripped his jaw like an angry parent reprimanding a child.      "Look at me. Look at me, Harmon. Remember everything I've taught you. You've worked hard on this. We've worked hard on this. Listen to what I'm saying. Don't you dare go out there and make a fool of yourself. You're representing Powell's Gym, now don't embarrass me, make me proud. Your competition has nothing on you. If you get two-fifty, I guarantee you'll bring home a trophy."      Harmon was silent. Neither of them spoke until the officials came around with the clipboard recording everyone's attempts.      "What will you be lifting for your second attempt, sir?"      Dave glared at him. Harmon looked back and forth from Dave to the proctor. The tension was mounting.      "Do you need some more time?"      Dave spoke up. "He'll be lifting two-"      "Two seventy."      And she was gone. Dave crossed his arms and didn't look at or speak to him until it was time for him to go up.      "Harmon Flekzor." The name shot out from the speakers like a curse. "Will now attempt to lift two hundred and seventy pounds."      "You're making a mistake," Dave said softly. "Just do your best. This will be a learning experience."      He was jumping up and down and smacking himself in the head to get psyched up. Just before he ran to the bench press - actually ran - he stopped and turned around one last time.      "No, Dave. You watch me, I'm gonna put that weight through the roof!!"      He didn't pause to look at the audience. He jumped onto the bench and scrambled into position, frightening even the spotters. His arms were shaking. He was ready. They lifted it off to him, made sure he was secure and let go. He usually held it above him for a second before bringing it down to his chest, but now he found he couldn't hold it up. It fell to his chest and stayed there immovably, pinning him to the bench like a prison bar. He pushed. He gritted his teeth and twisted his face into contortions and growled, but it wouldn't budge no matter how hard he fought it. As he struggled to lift it off his chest in a panic, he thought of the hay-wagon vomiting its load all over the grass. You're fired. And then it was off his chest. The spotters were raising it back up to the rack.      He sat up, feeling lightheaded. He was still shaking. First there was silence, and then there were murmurs of sympathy from the audience, which gave way to normal audience noise - static. He stood up and started walking briskly, keeping his eyes on the floor. For a moment he was sure he heard something in the static, something directed at him. It was laughter. Somebody was laughing at him. He didn't hear it clearly enough to recreate the sound in his head and submit it to his subconscious archives of shame, so his mind filled in with stock footage of people laughing at him. But he heard it, and he didn't stop and look, but he didn't forget it.      "No lift for Harmon Flekzor."      No lift for Harmon Flekzor . . . no lift . . . no lift . . . This was what failure really was. Failure was sitting in a deserted locker room with your head in your hands. He could hear the announcer and the cheering beyond the walls. When it came around to round three, they would announce his name and put two hundred and seventy pounds on the bar for him, but he would be gone. He would be in his car doing ninety miles per hour, or in the bushes somewhere doing pushups till he could no longer feel his hands. They'd repeat his name a couple times, and then they'd reset the bar and the contest would move on without him. Failure was looking for a back exit so that he didn't have to face Dave, his parents, his rival competitors, the fans, the hotdog vendors or the room itself. Soon Dave would come into the locker room looking for him. He gathered his stuff and hustled out of the building.      He was starting up his car when there was a knock on the window. It was his dad.      "What the hell were you doing out there? You could have easily taken first place."      Harmon looked down and didn't say anything while the car idled. Without looking at him, he waved goodbye apologetically and sped off.      He drove fast, and didn't put on any music. When he got home, he didn't go inside, but went straight to the backyard.      There was a plastic cup hidden away in a corner, an experiment he had done a few years ago for his own amusement. In the cup was a potato that had begun sprouting those green stems before he began the experiment. He had stuck four toothpicks into the potato and rested it on the rim of the cup so that the bottom half of the potato was submerged in a sample of Lumac diluted in water. For the first two months he had made daily observations, but when he didn't see any striking results, he lost interest and forgot about it. He left it sitting there until about a month ago when he had stumbled across it and an idea hit him. What was I thinking leaving it to rot in a dark crevice collecting cobwebs? It needs sunlight, how could I have been so stupid? So he had relocated it to the backyard, in a spot under the porch that wasn't too conspicuous.      For one thing, the Lumac had preserved it remarkably. Although there was no light and not much heat in the basement, it was damp, and a few years had elapsed. When he first began the experiment, he had put an identical potato in another cup with just water and no Lumac, and placed this control group next to the one with the Lumac. For those first two months, they had both sprouted at the same rate - or lack thereof - with no noticeable differences, which had greatly disappointed him. But later on that year an abominable stench had wafted up into the house from the basement and when he investigated it, he found that the control potato was crawling with maggots and fuzzy mold. He discarded it with disgust and was about to dispense with the experiment along with it when it struck him that although it had undergone no remarkable growth spurts or patterns, it was not rotting at all. So he left it there. When he came back to it years later and moved it outside, the preservation wasn't the only result to take effect. He didn't have a control now - and he didn't have the gusto to start the experiment over - so technically it was no longer a science experiment, but what resulted was by no means subtle. The stems had grown tortuously to lengths of well over a foot, and it had sprouted more of them; they had more than doubled. But the tentacles didn't just go off in their own directions. They all eventually snaked up to the top where every single one of them was fused together in a bulbous mass of shiny black mucus the size of a chicken's egg.      Harmon knelt down before it with the words 'no lift for Harmon Flekzor' echoing in his mind. He gently stroked it with his finger. It was like touching a resilient mass of melted cheddar cheese, and it left a residue on his finger. He held his finger in front of his face and examined it. It looked just like machine-shop grease and it had no smell. He licked it off his finger. It tasted metallic and bitter, in the way that soil tastes bitter when you get accidentally get some in your mouth. He spit it out and coughed so hard he thought he would vomit, bent over with his elbows on the grass. He stood up, walked slowly back into the house and poured himself a glass of water to wash down the taste. As he tilted his head back to drink from the glass, a sudden dizziness seized him. The room spun around him and he felt like he was falling but knew he was standing up. The feeling was cadenced with a sharp tingling surge of the metallic taste in the back of his throat. A shiver ran through his body. He staggered over to the couch holding onto furniture to steady himself, plopped himself down and lay his head back.      In the next moment he was on his feet and wasn't sure how he had gotten there. His hands were made into fists at his side, trembling with vigor. He knew the feeling well, but knew not from whence it came. It was the same vehemence that had gotten the better of him at the contest, that which had gripped him while loading that hay-wagon, that which drove him to go to the gym on days when external motivations were naught. There was no more dizziness, only rage. He tore off his shirt and stood there in the living room, his head throbbing. He could feel his heartbeat in his chest, he could feel it in his arms and all throughout his body. If he didn't put his energy into volatile random action in the next instant, his body would probably explode.      He bolted out of the living room knocking the screen door off its hinges, crossed the yard, ran up the base of a tree as far as he could get and grabbed onto a branch to save himself from falling on his head. He hung there for a moment and then, as if it was the most natural thing, started doing chin-ups. His punishment had been decided for him. For getting fired he did pushups, for doing poorly on a history test he did pushups, but for making an ass of himself and forfeiting his first weightlifting competition, he was going to do pull-ups and chin-ups until his palms bled. He did ten one way then switched his grip and did ten the other way and kept switching until he couldn't do anymore, at which point he let go and dropped to the ground, but when his feet hit the ground, he continued to fall so that he landed in pushup position and started doing clapping pushups so that the motion was continuous between his last pull-up and his first pushup.      After pushups came sit-ups, and after that came jumping jacks interspersed with one-legged squats, ending with sprints back and forth across the yard. When he finally felt he'd had enough, he went back into the house, took a plastic zip-lock bag out of the dispenser in the kitchen drawer and went back into the yard. He knelt down before the Lumac experiment, opened the bag and placed it over the ball of black mucus. He squeezed and managed to get most of it in the bag. He sealed it, wiped off the remaining residue with a napkin, folded the bag and stuffed it into an empty mayonnaise jar he found in the trash. He took the jar out to his car and placed it in the glove compartment, next to where he kept his bottles of Mega-Mass solution.      The next time he went to the gym, he brought with him a box of Wheat Thin crackers and a can of apple juice. He sat in the parking lot with the music blasting, where he normally drank his serving of Mega-Mass, and took out the mayonnaise container. He opened the zip-lock bag with trepidation and dipped a cracker into the black slime. He had the apple juice already opened in the ot