Kristin glanced down at the treadmill’s timer. About nine minutes left. She increased her speed by one tenth of a mile per hour. This would place her ahead of her previous best time by under ten seconds. The distracting clank of free weights shuttling in and out of their cradles echoed from across the gym. The noise was accompanied by the pleading grunts of the young consular officer as he began his workout. Kristin wondered if he would make a habit of exercising early on Sunday mornings and if the solitude she had found in the gym would be forever compromised by his arrival. How much of her life, she thought—or at least the portions of her life she prized most—existed in a delicate, interruptible balance. These Sunday mornings existed only for her. She hurt no one by taking this time. Her daughter and husband had been asleep in their beds when she left. They would be asleep in their beds when she returned. If later in the day she felt tired—in the afternoon at her desk, for instance, or in the evening if she was meeting with one of her many contacts, like Murat—she would embrace that feeling, satisfied by the knowledge that on this one day, as opposed to all of the others, her exhaustion served as a reminder that she had done something for herself.
She could feel the young consular officer lurking behind her, unwittingly robbing her of that solitude. He approached the stereo bolted on the side of the gym’s wall. He asked to turn it on. She ignored him and he substituted her silence on the matter for her consent, tuning the radio to a techno-pop station. The music blared and the sound of Kristin’s steps—the heel-to-toe percussion of each foot meeting the treadmill’s belt, which she had followed hypnotically all through her run—suddenly disappeared. And her thoughts dissolved amid the woofing thump of bass line that emanated from the stereo.
Kristin’s concentration lagged until she felt herself lulling toward the back of the treadmill. She then shot a glance at the display, which flashed up her remaining time: less than six minutes. With the last of her energy she corrected her stride, which had become pigeon-toed and sloppy. She did her best to tune out the young consular officer’s music, the rhythm of his grunts and the sense of loss and imbalance she felt when considering that every Sunday morning he would now, unavoidably, be in the gym with her.
Then everything shut down. The lights. The music. And the treadmill.
Kristin stumbled forward, taking a full step in the darkness so her ribs crashed into the treadmill’s crossbar. Across the gym she heard a breathy curse as the young officer dropped his dumbbells on the rubberized flooring, where they landed with a dull thud. Kristin shot her hand up to the treadmill’s control console. She tapped at the buttons, trying to restart the machine—nothing. The power was out. She glanced at her digital watch. The seconds bled away from her. The record she was chasing would soon be lost.
The young officer asked if she knew where the light switch was.
Kristin crossed the gym, feeling her way toward the switch on the wall. She maneuvered blindly through the pieces of equipment, whose positions she had memorized after countless workouts. The young officer sat on his weight bench in the darkness, not moving, although Kristin could hear his labored breaths mixing with her own. Her fingertips found the switch, which she toggled on and off to no effect.
“Does the power often go out?” asked the young officer.
The power had never gone out before, at least not at this time on a Sunday.
“It usually cuts out about now,” Kristin lied.
The young officer stumbled forward, navigating toward Kristin’s voice and what he thought was the door. When he spoke again, he was much closer to her. “Do you know what time the power comes back on?”
“In the afternoon.” Again she lied to him; she didn’t know about the power.
“I guess I’ll have to work out later,” he said. His hands groped around the door, clutching after the knob, which he couldn’t find, so Kristin reached out and opened it for him. The threshold passed into a darker corridor, which led to a locker room lined with a few windows, whose light would help the young officer find his way out.
Kristin felt no guilt about the lie that she had told. This was her time. These Sunday mornings kept her level through the week. It would’ve been far worse for her to pretend otherwise. Although she had not beaten her record, standing in the darkness, she considered the morning to have been a success. She had figured out how to preserve her relationship with Murat. Like the protected space around her morning workout, it required the creation and maintenance of a well-calibrated equilibrium. She would have to lie, or to at least fashion a few mistruths, which in her mind were less malicious than lies and more akin to the factual error she had offered the young consular officer, who would now likely change his gym hours, leaving her alone.
Kristin stood calmly in the dark. She heard the gym’s front door slam shut. Two or three minutes had passed, perhaps slightly longer. She had caught her breath. Her muscles had begun to cool. Then the power came back on. The stereo picked up. The treadmill revved into gear. Kristin glanced at the display, which held the remaining time and distance. The machine hadn’t reset itself, and according to its clock she had lost only seconds. She crossed the gym and turned off the stereo. She then leapt back onto the treadmill, rejoining her race at nearly the exact spot where she had left it. She doubted the young consular officer would return. She also doubted that Catherine would ever be able to leave. As she drew these two conclusions, she noticed that despite the prior interruption she was still on track to achieve a personal best. And minutes later, in the silence of the morning, she did.
Five o’clock on that afternoon
William glances down the hallway toward the creaking stairs. Standing at their top is the woman from the consulate, the one who had made the speech at the exhibit the night before. The boy knows that, like her, he is an American. His mother had occasionally emphasized this part of his identity, although his father never did. His mother had even once shown him his first passport, a blue book with empty, unstamped pages that had a photo of him when he was little more than an infant. When this woman emerges at the landing, William can feel his mother’s grip on him tighten. With both of her hands placed over his shoulders, she pins him to her front in the way she sometimes did when they stood waiting to cross the street, the merciless traffic zipping past so close that the air would stir at their faces.
“What are you doing here, Kristin?” his mother asks. The hallway channels her words, changing the timbre of her voice so that it sounds as hollow as an echo.
“I had a hunch this is where you’d show up.” A grin pinches upward from one corner of Kristin’s mouth. “We need to have a talk,” she adds, and her eyes wander toward the door. As Kristin closes the distance between them, William can feel his mother pressing him ever more forcefully toward her. Kristin stands next to Catherine but won’t enter the apartment before she does.