The Brooklyn Rail

Here is the journal of Victoria Stevens, biohuckster whose purported cure for cancer catalyzes the action of Ryan Chapman’s new novel, The Audacity. She has fled to the desert amid impending charges of fraud and remains pathologically defiant. If the goal of fiction is to capture thought in action, the unique synaptic firings of inscrutable individuals particular to a moment in time, few will best Chapman’s contribution of the self-important, hypomanic capitalist. The content and tone of Victoria’s musings may prove invaluable to future historians puzzling over how we empowered our tech monsters.

 

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When Neil Armstrong placed his hand on the door lock of the lunar module and looked to Buzz Aldrin with a “here goes nothing” expression, while that third guy, the backbencher whose name nobody remembers, lolled in the orbiting shuttle— at that moment ProPublica would get the mission canceled.

PrevYou is finished. And a mere three months from the breakthrough. Six at most.

Millions will die of cancer—that’s on ProPublica. The blood is on their hands, on their home pages. All I ever wanted to do was help people.

Jeremy will know what to do. Keep the wolves at the door. Free up cash for the legal defense fund. The old smoke, the old mirrors.

Maybe offload the Bessies to J&J? They’d love the revenue stream. Selling the dip will hurt, but optionality is compromised.

The cabin will suffice. Its back porch abuts the park. Might even be within its borders. What’s the word—grandfathered.

Grandfathered into the public land, like those resettlement fetishists outside Jackson Hole. The back-to-the-landers in Central Maine.

I could look it up, but no. No phone or laptop until the next eureka.

How likely is another one? Answer: as likely as I determine. I have the tools and the ability. This, whatever it is, it’s a setback. Eureka waits on the other side of a fixed number of thoughts. Within the Zone of Utmost Throb.

Commit your energies, Stevens. You are sharp of mind and fantastically anabolic. Focused in a land of focus. A land for “cathexis,” as Big Mike would say.

Can’t they see the work was for them? That it was all an immense act of generosity?

I will be pilloried in the commons. A humbling. Something to be wrenched for pathos in the biopic.

And yet. An opportunity. The opportunity.

There is nothing Victoria Stevens cannot bear.

The a.m. run was passable. Sunrise two minutes later than the almanac said, so I waited on the porch for the sky to lighten enough to see the road. It’s a vista of open nothing.

Two minutes was not enough to review yesterday’s Post-its, so I drank another sixteen ounces of magnesium water and loosened my ankles. Wrote my name in the air with my big toe. Something about the air affects the joints, though that could be age.

The sunrise took forever. Once that yellow band crested the ridgeline I set off. The cold dissipated by mile three. My right outstep needs work. Plus there are fewer than a hundred miles left in the shoes. Get the boy to order a new pair.

The road is still unforgiving. Like running on hardpack— no bounce at all. But I stay between the ruts of the tire tracks. I can guarantee an efficient line. Plus the ruts force me to pay attention. A sprain would be lethal.

And if I did die? Everyone would claim suicide, given the eleven-figure write-down and the imminent dissolution of a company once called “a unicorn’s unicorn” by Kara Swisher. But that is what objective observers do. They speculate while others accomplish.

The line between the ruts creates a nominal buffer from the humped earth on either side. The boy said rattlers hide there. He also said to avoid any snakes with diamonds on their heads.

The boy’s a Joshua Tree native. He loitered after the grocery delivery enumerating all the tourist deaths over the years. Watch out for the flash floods, he said. A sudden wall of water, strong enough to carry boulders in the current. Get to high ground or you’re fucked.

The most common cause is the simplest: people get lost. The desert swallowed hikers with a primitive regularity. The park service’s much-touted Lost Person Behavior algorithms only go so far. It’s a scalability problem. You try locating a delirious and dehydrated pin in a haystack the size of Rhode Island.

While the boy ticked off other dangers—he fixated on the varieties of scorpion—I thought of the Quick Shop at the end of the road. Its corkboard near the carts festooned with missing persons flyers. Plus a few hand-drawn invites to jam sessions and “second-wave” ayahuasca ceremonies.

A nice shorthand for this place: find yourself, or wander off and die.

The boy’s name is Juan. Probably twenty.

The run. I kept to the plan, turning back after expending two-thirds of my energy. But I’m still gauging my levels at this elevation. Ideally I would strain myself in the last mile and nearly die making the cabin. Ideally very nearly die. I will learn the signals of near-death, and then ignore them. Remember what Coach Adams said: physical limits are actually mental limits. The brain’s governor tells the body to stop well before it should. An act of self-preservation. And nothing more than the mind getting in its own way. Push past it.

(Father hated this philosophy. Said a Calvinist shouldn’t be teaching high school students cross-country. But he overindulged all of his governors, so what did he know.)

The lactic acid and the wobblies hit around mile fourteen. Pace slowed—I won’t break my PR out here. Remember the goal is distance, not speed. Or, not distance: exhaustion.

Difficulty around mile fifteen—reverted to ball-to-heel. Coach Adams wouldn’t approve. Invoked a visualization exercise: the ground as lake surface, dipping my forefoot, finding it too cold and retracting quickly.

Positive results.

I always liked the name “cross-country.” Marking fresh dominion, step by step.

Legs gave out thirty yards from porch. Crawled to the outdoor shower. Acceptable nipple chafing. The thermometer read ninety-one.

Exhaustion is only part of the goal. The goal is attaining the Zone of Utmost Throb. Where all constraints fall away. The considerations of everyday life, everymonth life, everyyear life—they fall away too. Only then will eureka occur.

Drank the recovery drink. Ate the toast. Wrote out daily list of fears. Added “iatrogenesis,” crossed it out. The unforeseen long-term problems of the breakthrough are no longer a concern.

Habits persist. Without Mai Ling’s a.m. readout of the overnight social posts—the waterfall of “cunt” and “bitch” and other first thought/best thought ripostes to my latest public statements—there was a noticeable 8 a.m. sluggishness. Additional matcha required.

This diary seems to help. I will keep at it until eureka. At the close of day I will burn the index cards. A record of the present, then, and only a record of the present.

A.M. session: 6 in clarity
5 in productivity
8 in focus
No migraines

Stacked the tchotchkes and the armchairs and Jeremy’s family photos in the indoor shower. I should perform another sweep and clear out any objects that might distract from eureka. Jeremy framed my first TIME cover, the one with that terrible headline—joan of salk. People should know better. Sainthood dooms.

Also: hide the board games. The Navajo blanket. Keep the dartboard and the sudoku book.

Don’t falter. You don’t need consultants. You don’t need blue flame thinkers, or new white papers, or adaptive methodologies.

During a.m. break I browsed an old issue of NatGeo. Surreal to see advertisements—when was the last time I encountered one.

Learned of stotting gazelles, who jump high when they sense predators nearby. The predators were not identified— maybe leopards—and the jumping stumped evolutionary biologists. Why advertise your presence to your enemies.

a.m. break included twenty minutes of calisthenics and pelvic floor stretches. The upper back needs work. Send the boy to get a foam roller.

Forgot to mark today’s turnaround point: a pile of lichencovered boulders ten yards east of the road. Maybe a half mile past the teddy bear cholla. (The Deep Time aspect of the desert is a little unnerving, but the lack of change makes for handy markers.)

The boy dropped off groceries before p.m. session. Still feels odd to handle cash. Juan needs no encouragement to talk: he shared local gossip while he filled the pantry. He says his income derives from managing vacation properties; I imagine it’s drug dealing. (Declined offers of DMT.)

He is a lonely person, but he doesn’t realize it. His friends went to UC schools or found employment in Palm Springs. When I mentioned the Foundation’s scholarship program for BIPOC youth he parroted some Bax line about the “the multilevel marketing of postsecondary ed.”

I haven’t recorded how we met. He stands out in his cowboy getup. So unlike the tank-topped hoi polloi who’d pull up stakes if they could afford the Greyhound. He appears to spend his evenings doing circuits of the neighborhood and performing lasso tricks while heavily stoned. An ideal gopher.

He’s unintelligent, but observant. When I proposed the compact he asked if I was important. I told him about PrevYou and our mission.

He gave the standard reply: his aunt died of breast cancer. I waited for him to connect the dots, but had to tell him yes, everyone has an aunt who died of breast cancer. That’s why I’m important.

He narrates his life. Storing the foodstuffs, he’d say, “This bulgur’s the best,” or “These strawberries have been tasting great lately.” (I explained he meant flavor, not taste. It’s their scent he was remarking upon. He asked about the bananas, but I changed the subject.)

We sat on the porch afterward. When I remarked on the welcome quietude, he said low-flying planes used to buzz the town and annoy everyone. Military flight paths, since redrawn.

He asked to Bluetooth his DJ mix, but I declined. The silence is generative.

He indicated the columns of Post-its and asked what I was working on. I asked if he knew the name of the man who broke the sound barrier. He ID’d Chuck Yeager. Then I asked him if he knew who the first commercial pilot was. He said he didn’t know. I said, “Exactly.” Unsure if he understood.

Few people seek the nexus of high ambition and higher risk, and even fewer have the competency. It’s not about flying a plane. People had been flying for half a century before Yeager. It’s about being the first to exceed what had been previously thought the limit of human potential.

Juan talked about his future plans, none of which are worth transcribing. Seems happy to continue as a human ellipsis.

He asked where I was born, so I told him the map story.

At ten years old I pulled the local Rand McNally from our meager home library and did what everyone does: I looked up my house. There was a moiré red dot over Tacoma’s north end, almost exactly over our address. The map legend didn’t explain it, so I asked Mother. She informed me this was an intentional printing error by the publisher: If the dot appeared in competitors’ maps, they could sue for plagiarism. (She meant copyright infringement, but the point stands.)

A giant corporation decided my neighborhood could be completely obscured. A nondestination. Certainly a place worth leaving for a young girl who felt capable of more.

The boy gave a suitably mind-blown response. I didn’t tell him Big Mike’s reply to the story, from our first coaching session. He said I was misreading the anecdote. Think of it as a gloss on the Napoleon myth. Where the future emperor was birthed on a rug depicting the conquests of Caesar, Rand McNally had selected my childhood home—of all of the streets in the US—as the site of their bona fide.

I wish Big Mike was here. I was fortunate to receive his counsel at all, after his hot streak coaching Jack, Sheryl, and Reed. Put off retirement just for me. Sure, he dressed like a nine-hole duffer, charged an unconscionable block of shares, didn’t say shit for the first session apart from “Go on” and “Why.”

That one session, just working on posture: “Keep your head immobile. Project assurance. Project finality.” Something about West Point cadets not being allowed to look down while they ate. Or was that Annapolis.

The weekend intensives. “Narrativizing” random episodes from my past into a coherent upward arc. Repeating the arc like a prayer. Memorizing it. This was the first success brick in the PrevYou foundation.

(And not without cost. On my annual visit to Truckee, Daniel said he caught my 60 Minutes segment. The parasailing anecdote had happened to him; Father thought I was too small for the harness. What other parts of my biography are not my own.)

Daniel always extolled the off-grid life.

Guy would hate this. I wonder what he’s doing at this moment. Reeling, yes. Wallowing, yes. He’ll take all this much too personally. Treating the end of his world like the end of the world.

That’s fine. Complacency weakens the spirit. He could use getting his bell rung. I don’t expect heroics—he’s not the type. Anything other than his usual resignation.

Just being alive in America, every day you have a one in a million chance of dying from unnatural causes. My runs increase the chances tenfold. Still fractional and easily dismissed. Then add in the other factors. Heat. Exhaustion. Lack of emergency services.

If you’re going to push forward and travel where nobody else will, you have to ignore these thoughts. Knowing what to ignore was an underrated success brick. And it’s key to entering the Zone of Utmost Throb.