Training Max: Chapter 14

 

What she lacked in both talent and execution, she made up for by being frighteningly efficient, and therefore was quick but consistently flawed in whatever she does. She took fifteen-minute showers. She rinsed a dish under the tap with one hand while the other puts away a fork, so as to save water. She leapt through lines of transcribed sentences to find errors before the audio recording reaches them, so as to save time. She did not, therefore, waste her energy on useless things such as regret, nostalgia, breakfast, or just plain ol’ bitchin’ about the state of the world. It was, one had to admit, the perfection of the already mentioned path of least resistance.

Now, however, Chris was afraid, and thus had to be careful. This one’s just as dangerous as you, albeit in the opposite direction. Max’s boredom in attained perfection is his fodder, as her frustration in consistent failure is hers.

It was on Max’s eighth day of training when he finally noticed that he was on the brink of running out of internet credit. He took this realization in stride: he was in training, after all. No time or place or thought for deep and long words.

Chris had been sending him snippets of the things she had finished writing, or beautiful details that she read about from the audio files she was working on (when not writing). Within those eight days she would send him entire chapters of the story she was currently working on, ever afraid that he would not be able to read them anymore for sudden lack of connectivity.

He did request, one time, for a chapter in her previous short story, featuring him singing in a karaoke bar. He was proctoring exams for new recruits, he was bored; he wanted something to feed him. It made for an incongruous picture, though: a soldier reading unpublished literature. Nonetheless, she sent the chapter to him, as she always did.

She did again this eighth day, and waited for the appearance of the two ticks in WhatsApp indicating that he had read the new chapters. The story was nearly done; she was stuck, though, as to how to end it. She asked him, amidst the flurry of the chapter messages, whether he would prefer living in a forest, alone, or in the city, with someone so antithetical to him it can only make perfect sense.

It was four hours later when those double ticks appeared. He replied, without preamble or context, or, indeed, any indication that he had even read the newest chapters she had sent hours before. Their exchange was filled with terse but meaningful messages:

So. I nearly kneed our musado instructor in the nuts.

Oh, my god. Why?

And he kicked me back in punishment.

Where?

It was an accident. My partner was exhausted from my blows to the pad. It was like the twentieth strike.

Gassed-out legs?

I wasn’y [sic] gassed out I was just tryna get the right technique. I don’t gas out.

Ah. Haha. Sorry. You’re full of dopamine and testosterone today, aren’t you.

Yes. Already a legend for all the wrong reasons haha.

Barely noticing his lack of direct responses or comments about her writing, her brain, as always, saw the trauma from three hundred meters away and thus avoided it by relegating the mere possibility of it into her unconscious. Consciously, she was just overwhelmed with joy that he still had internet.

That was the last she ever heard from him.