Day 13. Strength 10.3. Stamina 9.3. Agility 8.2. Intelligence 8.4.
The AC died on a Thursday at about two in the afternoon.
It didn't make a noise. The car makes a noise, the water heater makes a noise. The AC just stops, and you don't notice for twenty minutes, and then you look up from what you're doing because the house has started to feel like a held breath.
I went and stood in front of the vent with my hand up. Air was moving. It was just the same air.
By four it was ninety-one inside. By seven it was ninety-eight. That was my living room, at night, with all the blinds down, and the couch cushions were warm to sit on like somebody had just got up.
The guy came out Friday at ten. I was home by then. He was there forty minutes and he was decent about it, which I appreciated and which did not help.
Compressor. Twenty-two years old, which is older than me. He walked me out to the pad behind the house and showed me the unit and said the thing repairmen say, which is that he could try a couple of things but he'd be taking my money to maybe buy me a month.
"Full replacement, with the coil, I can do twenty-four hundred," he said. "That's me being decent to you. A chain's gonna tell you thirty-two."
Twenty-four hundred.
I had seven thousand seven hundred dollars.
I did the arithmetic standing on the pad in the sun and it took about a second and a half and I wished very much that it had taken longer.
* * *
Money out is three thousand a month. Money in from Grindstone is about nineteen hundred after tax and after they take out whatever they take out. So I lose roughly eleven hundred a month standing still.
Seven thousand seven hundred, minus twenty-four hundred for the AC, leaves fifty-three hundred.
Fifty-three hundred divided by eleven hundred is four point eight.
Four months and three weeks.
I'd been telling myself since Day 2 that the job bought me a longer hallway. Eight months, I'd said, in the car outside Grindstone, feeling clever about it.
One compressor. That's all it took. One part older than I am, in a metal box behind the house, and two months of hallway are gone.
And there's no version where you skip it. You cannot live in a house in Phoenix in July with no air conditioning, and you cannot train four stats a day in a house that's ninety-eight degrees at night, and you cannot sleep, and if you can't sleep you can't do any of the rest of it, and the whole thing comes down.
"Let me call you back this afternoon," I said.
* * *
The truck had been under a cover in the garage for two years and one month.
A 2011 Tundra, white, dented on the right rear quarter from something my dad refused to ever explain. They hauled gear in it. Every dive they ever did went out of this driveway in that truck.
I'd kept it insured. Two years. About ninety a month, for a vehicle I have never once driven, and if you'd asked me why I'd have told you something about resale value and I'd have been lying, and I think I knew I was lying every single month when the payment went out.
I pulled the cover off.
It smelled like them. Not in a big way. Just that a car holds onto whatever's been sitting in it, and what had been sitting in that one was my dad's coffee and the canvas of a gear bag and the specific cheap vanilla thing my mother clipped to the vent because she thought the canvas smell was disgusting. It was still on the vent. It hasn't smelled like anything in years and it was still clipped to the vent.
I sat in the driver's seat with the door open and my feet on the concrete, and kept my hands off the wheel.
Then I cleaned it out, because you have to clean a thing out before you sell it.
Most of it was nothing. Two flashlights, dead. A folding chair. Nine dollars in quarters. A map of the state with no marks on it. A first aid kit that had expired.
In the glovebox, under the manual, there was a punch card.
Small, orange, printed on the kind of cardstock nobody uses anymore. A grid of twenty circles, twelve of them punched out with a hole punch.
GRINDSTONE — STRENGTH & CONDITIONING. The address. The hours, in the same hand-lettering that's taped inside the front window right now.
And across the top, in ballpoint, in handwriting I have known my entire life:
RAY + ELENA — 2 PPL
* * *
I sat down on the garage floor.
The first thing I thought was: she knew them.
The second thing was: she said "Ray and Elena's kid" and then went and got a clipboard off the wall.
The third thing was: twelve punches. Twelve. Out of twenty. Nobody buys a twenty-visit card and comes twelve times unless they were going to come the other eight.
Twelve visits is a person you know by name. Twelve visits is a person who knows how you take your coffee.
Coach Reyes trained my parents. For months. And I walked into her gym off a Google Maps list on the tenth stop of the worst day of my life, and she looked at me and said, "You've got the face," and hired me, and never said a word.
I sat on that floor for a long time with the card in my hand and about forty questions and no way to ask any of them without lighting something on fire.
* * *
I sold the truck Saturday morning to a landscaping guy in Mesa for fifty-one hundred, which was under what it's worth. He came with cash and a friend and he was polite and he walked around it twice and he asked what it had been used for.
"Hauling," I said.
"Hauling what?"
And I stood in my driveway and heard myself say, "My parents were divers."
He stopped. He got it immediately. Everybody does, when you say it in that tense.
"Ah, hell," he said. "I'm sorry, kid."
He gave me fifty-four. He didn't make a thing of it, he just counted out three hundred more onto the hood and said the tires were better than he'd thought, which they were not.
AC went in Saturday afternoon, about four hours after a stranger drove my father's truck off down the street. Twenty-four hundred out, fifty-four hundred in. Ten thousand seven hundred dollars in the account, which at eleven hundred a month is nine months and change, and no truck.
Nine months. That's more time than I've had since this started. On paper it's the best my situation has looked since the day my parents didn't come home.
And there is nothing else to sell. That was the last thing in this house worth more than a few hundred dollars, and I've converted it into nine months and a compressor. Whatever happens between here and the end of those nine months, I handle it on thirteen dollars an hour.
I'd been thinking of the truck as something I was refusing to deal with. It was a floor. And I just sold the floor.
I slept in a sixty-eight degree house that Saturday night and it was the best I'd slept since the crystal, and I felt sick about how good it felt.
* * *
The other thing that was happening that week I couldn't see at all.
By Day 13 I was doing eight sessions a day. Six until Intelligence, eight since.
Four stats, two sessions each, every day including Sundays, on top of a shift that starts at four forty in the morning and Coach's hour after it. Up at four fifteen. Bed at ten if I was lucky, eleven most nights, because the Intelligence work has to go last. You can't hold four partial products after a leg session. I tried it twice.
Five hours of sleep. Sometimes less. For thirteen days.
And it was working. Every single day, six notifications and then eight, and the numbers went up on schedule, and every night I wrote them on the legal pad and felt the machine running.
What I noticed, and dismissed:
My hands had started shaking in the mornings. Not badly. Enough that I was careful with the coffee pot.
I'd stopped being hungry, which I decided was fine and actually convenient.
Twice that week I got to the end of a sentence at the front desk and couldn't find the word at the end of it, just stood there with my mouth open, and Priya covered for me both times without making anything of it.
And on the Thursday night, in a house that was ninety-eight degrees, on the second Intelligence session, I couldn't hold two partial products. I didn't lose them at ninety seconds. I couldn't hold two. A thing I'd been doing since I was nine.
No screen. Nothing registered. I did it three more times and got nothing and went to bed at half past midnight furious and told myself I'd just had a long day.
* * *
Coach caught it on Day 14.
I was on the bench doing floor press, light, and she stopped me at rep six, which she has never done.
"Put it down."
"I'm fine."
"Put it down."
I put it down. She crouched, with the knee, which costs her something, and she took my wrist and turned my hand over and we both looked at it shaking.
"How much are you sleeping."
"Five. Five and a half."
"How long."
"A couple weeks."
She let go of my wrist and stayed down there at my eye level, and she didn't look angry, which I'd have preferred.
"Listen to me, because I'm only going to say it once and then I'm going to watch to see if you heard it." She said: "Training is the part where you damage yourself on purpose. You get stronger afterward, while you're asleep, and only then, and only if you left enough in the tank to pay for it."
"I don't have time to—"
"You are spending money you don't have and calling it discipline," she said. "I watched a very good D-rank do exactly this in 2009 and she did not get better. She got hurt, and then she got hurt again, and then she was thirty-one and selling insurance."
She got up, slowly, with a hand on the bench.
"Recovery isn't the part where you stop training. It's the part where the training happens. Everything you did this week, you only actually get to keep the parts you slept through."
She went and got her coffee.
"Go home," she said. "Sleep. Come back Monday."
* * *
I went home. I did not sleep.
That night I sat at the kitchen table in a ninety-four degree house with the legal pad and a punch card with twelve holes in it, and did the one thing I'm good at, which is arithmetic I don't want the answer to.
If recovery is where the gains happen, then recovery is part of the machine, and I'd been treating it as the gap between the parts that matter. Eight sessions a day is however many of them I can pay for. The rest is damage I'm taking for free, which is forty sloppy push-ups all over again. Same mistake. Twice. In nine days.
Days are the currency. I'd written that down. I'd underlined it. And the fastest possible way to lose twenty days is to try to do twenty-five days of work in fourteen.
I got the pen.
Sleep is a stat.
It's not on the screen. It's still a stat.
And then, because I'd been staring at the orange card for an hour and there's a limit:
Ask her about the punch card. Not yet. When you can afford the answer.