Treadmill Read Free Page A

laughter. It reminded him of his former job, his marriage, his past. Parrish would stay on and watch the games, his eyes glazed with disinterest. As hard as Cooper tried to repress his speculation about Parrish, he found his mind drifting towards curiosity without his own consent.
    Parrish’s routine mirrored Cooper’s. Often they were the only ones in the sauna and the communal shower, but they rarely looked at each other. Actually, Cooper did sneak glances at Parrish’s naked body, but only to inspect the man’s musculature, in comparison to his own. Parrish was a fine specimen, with excellent definition, a slim waist, well-delineated pectorals, muscular calves, and rippling abdominals. With a sense of embarrassment, Cooper also observed that Parrish’s genitals were well formed and without blemish. He wondered if Parrish had ever inspected him in such detail.
    ****
    Cooper thought about Parrish as he walked toward his tiny efficiency apartment on Bradley Boulevard, about three miles from the club. What is Parrish’s life like? Is he in the same no-man ’ s land as me? Had he also lost control over his own fate? But by the time he let himself into his apartment building, he forced himself to dismiss any thought of Parrish.
    The building was a mid-rise made of red brick. It was old, but well-maintained. He had furnished it sparsely with cast-off furniture that he had bought at the Salvation Army, including a queen size bed, a dresser, a couch, an upholstered chair, a Formica table, and two chrome chairs. Cooper had no intention of ever inviting anyone inside.
    He did not own a television set and he no longer subscribed to the Washington Post . Once he had been a news junkie, but what happened in the world no longer mattered to him. Politics, wars, scandals, sports, and the stock market were of no consequence to him. News meant confronting the reality of the past and the future. It meant movement and potential. It was not part of the present, which was static and immobile.
    Every two weeks, he went to Safeway and stocked up on fourteen Healthy Choice dinners, dividing them evenly between meal categories. He also bought a box of plastic eating utensils and a box of napkins, and carefully rolled fourteen sets, which he stowed neatly in the top drawer of his kitchen cabinet. In the small freezer compartment of his refrigerator he stacked the Healthy Choice dinners, one of which he microwaved every evening. He ate alone without relish, merely out of the necessity to provide nourishment.
    He stopped seeing so-called friends and acquiantances, many of them former colleagues at the now defunct advertising agency. Because he was an only child, he had learned how to handle aloneness. He had begun to avoid the people from his old life, purge them from his memory. In his present mindset, living in the now, he did not miss the past. It had not been kind to him.
    Cooper had been an English major in college, and about the only thing he had kept from his college years were the novels he had loved as a student, mostly cheap editions of Modern Library. Once he had entertained the idea of becoming a writer, but he had given that up on the grounds that he did not have the discipline, nor the fire in his belly to write extended works of the imagination like the greats. Cooper owned about two hundred volumes, mostly English novels and European works in translation, including a beat-up edition of the entire set of Balzac’s The Human Comedy , which he had purchased for thirty dollars at an auction in Georgetown. The only Balzacs he had ever read from the set were Eugenie Grandet and Pere Goriot , and he contemplated reading the entire fifty-five volumes, one after the other, when he had finished reading every other book in his library.
    In the six months since he had given up his job search, Cooper had re-read completely, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past , Tolstoy’s War and Peace , Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Gogol’s