What Can't Be Counted
Kees is heading to the gym to take a class with Vinny, who never texted him back. Kees looks at the unanswered text on his phone, considers sending another one, and decides it is better to say nothing. He doesn’t want to seem desperate. He walks into the gym with his head down, so he doesn’t see the woman coming into the gym at the same time as him, and she jumps back to avoid him. As he signs in, the girls at the front desk don’t greet him, so he says, “Good morning,” but they don’t answer. Just like Vinny hasn’t answered. Everyone is waiting for the 6:45am class to begin and no one is speaking and every time the doors open, wind blows the lobby chillier. The city has been wet for weeks, and today the wind is whipping water into anything it can find. While Kees sits waiting for class to begin, he holds his phone close to his face and winces before he opens an email. It is the details of his grade-school friend’s memorial service: two weeks away. He will not think about how his friend died. He swipes forward to an email ad for flower-patterned short-sleeve button-ups. A news story forwarded by his boyfriend Jay about the quantified self.
Then another regular whispers it in his ear. She heard it from her friend, who’s friends with the manager. Vinny is dead.
Kees gets up as if to go to the bathroom but stops in front of the photo of Vinny in the hallway, in a row of photos of all the coaches. Vinny is grinning joyfully, his hair just barely long enough to curl on top of his head. In the photo it’s hard to see how his eyes are like Puget Sound, gray and green and always changing. Vinny wears a tank top, the photo just barely showing the tops of his shoulders, pale and freckled against the black fabric of the shirt. Outside, the city tumbles to Puget Sound along the hills that were cut by settlers to mitigate their sharpness and make it easier to build. Settling sounds soft and light. There is no light this rainy winter. The water and wind move without pause along metal and plastic and concrete. The trees and ridges were converted from life into money and power. Power: it’s a power day at the gym. The gym’s head coach, Mel, is announcing it behind him.
Kees’ heart has beat 321 times since he found out that Vinny died.
He’s gotten bad news before. He’s gotten a lot of bad news lately. When he got the email from his grade-school classmate, he thought it would be about a reunion, but instead it was about how their graduating class would be one fewer, forever. When he got an unscheduled phone call from his father, it wasn’t to chat but to tell Kees that his cousin was dead; while his father slowly counted aloud from the list of family members he still had to call, Kees realized that his father, sixty-four, had already lived twice as long as his cousin. When Kees gets bad news, Jay always googles it and finds out exactly how bad it really is. Jay always says he won’t tell Kees what happened if it’s really gruesome, but he always does.
Jay tracks everything he does and yet is the freest person that Kees knows: sure of himself and his place in the world. The company he works at is the biggest company in the city or maybe the country or maybe the world, selling what they call tracking. Kees tracks too, but he is convinced that if he breathes right, steps right, eats right, sleeps right, gets the numbers just right, then he will finally get it all right: navigating this country that baffled his immigrant parents but where doors open for him without his asking; learning not to care that he makes money by analyzing how to sell unnecessary things; being in a couple without losing himself; flirting with men; separating the recycling; grieving. Three days ago when Vinny gave Kees his phone number, it had seemed like a reward for how carefully Kees had been keeping his numbers right.
* * *
Kees enters the gym, and he runs. When Mel speaks commands into the mic clipped to her head, he hits buttons on the treadmill accordingly, clicking up to higher and higher speeds. With each step he slams all 152 pounds of his body into the rubber belt, and the shock reverberates through his ankles, knees, and hips. He whips his elbows back and forth. The muscles in his legs, back, and arms flex and release as he takes step after step. Harder and harder he runs until he can’t tell if he’s out of breath from exercise or panic. One treadmill over, the woman who he bumped into at the door to the gym struggles as she increases her speed. They both sweat. He smells like tea tree and SSRIs, and she smells like lavender and one-day shipping. She keeps looking over at the numbers on his treadmill.
By the time Mel tells the runners to go the hardest they’ve gone all workout, Kees is sweating so hard it’s dripping into his eyes. So when Mel tells them to stop running, he doesn’t see what happens with the woman next to him until she is holding onto the handles of the treadmill, scrambling uselessly to stand back up as her legs drag and her body bends backwards, pulled by the treadmill, still at top speed. Mel is already running over and leaping onto the rails at the side of the treadmill, grabbing the woman around the waist, and hitting STOP on the machine all at the same time.
Kees sees that, as Mel puts her hand on the small of the woman’s back to lead her out into the lobby, she stares at the photo of Vinny until she notices the front desk girls giving her pitying looks. When Vinny coached, he would give professional, encouraging suggestions to Kees, like making an adjustment in his rowing form or handing him a heavier weight. He would talk to Kees afterwards until he had to coach the next class. There are fifteen minutes between classes and, once, Vinny talked to Kees for fourteen minutes. Three days ago, Vinny gave Kees his phone number. Two days ago, Kees texted Vinny. Yesterday, he thought of Vinny’s smile. Kees loves to watch Vinny smile. Kees loved to watch Vinny smile.
When Mel comes back in, Kees is standing next to his station of dumbbells and a bench. While she does a demonstration, explaining where to place each limb of the body, which muscles to contract, and how to stack the spine, Kees watches the woman in the lobby. She’s standing still as the front desk girls put a bandage onto the scrapes across her knee. The door to the street opens; a gust of wind blows her hair into her face.
A man enters. He’s chubby with perfect posture and wearing a jean jacket with a flower-patterned button-up underneath, holding the leashes of two big dogs, a husky mix and a German shepherd mix. When the dogs pause to shake themselves drier, they get water on the woman, and she startles.
Kees keeps watching and he doesn’t pick up the dumbbells. Nothing changes, but the scene rearranges. The man is Jay, the dogs are Jay’s, and Kees wishes he knew how many seconds there were between seeing Jay and recognizing him. Kees doesn’t want to know why Jay is there, but Jay makes eye contact and beckons, and so Kees walks to him.
Kees has taken 4140 steps since he found out that Vinny died.
The woman with the scrapes on her legs looks one by one at Kees’s old 5k T-shirt and basketball shorts and tall white socks and the enticing flicker of little muscles that Kees used to look at on Vinny—in his forearms and calves and shoulders. Kees misses the dumbbells which should, right now, be in his hands, weighing him down.
Jay takes Kees by the hand in a way that is soft and light.
He says, “I didn’t want you to see it on the news so I came over here right away.” Then, he says how Vinny died.
On Kees’s phone is the unanswered text message, an unanswered question. It will never be answered. Instead, more emails, more memorial services.
The girls at the front desk are trying to get Jay to take the dogs out of the lobby. They have come around the desk and have given up vocally asking and are now tentatively touching Jay on the shoulder, putting out a hand to the dogs. This gym is filled with numbers that track the exact amount of life in a body: heart rates, stopwatches, body fat scales, rep counts. The members of the gym are used to deaths that no one is afraid to describe aloud. They die from cancer or old age. The members of this gym die softly in hospice, where they are made comfortable and have their families surrounding them. Sirens sound in the distance. The dogs are jumping on the front desk girls, one dog for each girl, and the dogs are just as tall as them and the dogs don’t pay rent and the dogs don’t make minimum wage but they eat organic and they sleep in a newly built apartment that Jay pays for with his salary from the company that stores data out in the middle of a prairie where the wind always blows, and somewhere in the labyrinth of servers is a line of code describing how much Kees’s heart rate spiked when he texted Vinny.
Kees has burned 189 calories since he found out that Vinny died.
When he arrived at the gym, Kees thought he would see Vinny, see his smile, shiver with possibility. What does it even mean, another loss? Mel lost a coworker. Jay lost his morning. The woman with the scrapes lost some skin. Kees will never know what he could have lost. Everything continues. Now Kees’s heart slows. Everyone in this city will die. The door to the gym is blown open by the wind and the sirens stretch and the dogs buck against their harnesses.
Katie Kalahan (she/they) (@katiekalahan) lives in Massachusetts and has roots in Seattle, Washington, and St. Louis, Missouri. Katie holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing and English Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis. Their work is published in Crosscut, Thin Air Magazine, Witness Magazine, and The Good Life Review.