Non fiction

The Heart, The Centre

I never ran outside: didn't like the traffic, having to stop at intersections, always having to look away, avoiding people's eyes.

Much preferred the machines. Strip everything away to a treadmill. Just you, the controls, water bottle and flat screen ahead. A programme that never failed: time, distance or calories, it would always finish without knowing how much air my lungs needed or when my legs had had enough. I would do it. And if there was a real world emergency––cramp, panic, fire alarm––then there was the emergency button. Big, red and never once pressed. No emergencies, not in my time. Week in, week out: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The rest of the day planned around it. No excuses, no mistakes. That was why I never ran in the real world: the gym was my routine, it made me reliable. You know what everyone else is up to. It's not like that outside. Too many people, too many cars, too many speeds.

I much preferred the screens at the gym. Listening to an mp3 player and watching the screens, four of them, large flat-screens in front of a room full of treadmills. It didn't matter that I couldn't hear what was going on. I usually worked it out and when I couldn't, I made up what the people were saying. I needed my mp3 player more than I needed dialogue. The beat helped me push speed. Sometimes I ran so fast I'd wonder how I didn't forget to put one leg after the other. But my body always knew. There was something mechanistic about the experience. Mechanic and masochistic. Three times a week, without fail, I would push myself further and further into the same metre of air until one day––a Monday, Wednesday or Friday––I found myself running, without much warning, into the heart of the gym, connected, seemingly, to everything.

On Screen One, just to my left, there was a slow replay of two boxers fighting. The sweat was glistening on their bodies as they punched each other. I was running. Screen Two, almost directly in front of my treadmill, was showing a music video. A dancer was moving to a beat, the shot centred on her bouncing breasts. As my eyes moved across to the other two screens I thought about the similarity between the first two. On Screen Four there was a representation of the stock market; a graph showing money rising and falling over time. I was running and I saw violence, sex and the market. Screen Three was showing an episode of Junior Masterchef. Small children, dressed in perfect white chef's uniforms, were coating steaks with olive oil. The camera focused on their faces––concentrating––then cut to glistening red meat.

Violence, sex, the market and children cooking oversized steaks on Junior Masterchef. I can remember feeling so exhilarated that I laughed out loud. A whole room of treadmills in line, everyone running in suspended space before the four screens, towards this perfect balance of desire. A situation so strange and mundane, real and unreal, so obvious and ridiculous, that I couldn't understand why no one else was smiling.

We'd just run through the heart, the centre.

And the absence of any recognition here, ultimately, unnerved me. We went through it. No one noticed. Boxing became football. The song changed. The treadmills were full of people running towards the same old screens. It had been so obvious, I thought, such a moment, that one couldn't help but respect it. There was no choice to be made.

Matthew Cheeseman