They drove. The trunk was clean and large, and he rolled about in it, feeling them go around corners and up hills and down hills, and then along long stretches of plain, even road. And then the car swerved left and he was being bounced along some uneven surface and then the car stopped.
For a while, three minutes—he counted—nothing happened, and he listened and listened but he could hear nothing, just his own breaths, his own heart.
The trunk opened, and Dr. Traylor helped him out, plucking his shirt, and shoved him to the front of the car with the fire poker. “Stay there,” he said, and he did, shivering, watching the doctor get back into the car, roll down the window, lean out at him. “Run,” the doctor said, and when he stood there, frozen, “you like running so much, right? So run.” And Dr. Traylor started the engine and finally, he woke and ran.
They were in a field, a large barren square of dirt where there would in a few weeks be grass but now there was nothing, just patches of shallow ice that broke under his bare feet like pottery, and small white pebbles that glowed like stars. The field dipped in the middle, just slightly, and on his right was the road. He couldn’t see how big the road was, only that there was one, but there were no cars passing. To his left the field was fenced with wire, but it was farther away, and he couldn’t see what lay beyond the wire.
He ran, the car just behind him. At first it actually felt good to be running, to be outdoors, to be away from that house: even this, the ice under his feet like glass, the wind smacking against his face, the tap of the fender as it nudged against the back of his legs, even all this was better than that house, that room with its cinder-block walls and window so small it was no window at all.
He ran. Dr. Traylor followed him, and sometimes he would accelerate, and he would run faster. But he couldn’t run like he used to run, and he fell, and fell again. Each time he fell, the car would slow, and Dr. Traylor would call out—not angrily, not even loudly—“Get up. Get up and run; get up and run or we’re going back to the house,” and he would make himself stand and run again.
He ran. He didn’t know then that this was the last time in his life that he would ever run, and much later he would wonder: If I had known that, would I have been able to run faster? But of course it was an impossible question, a non-question, an axiom with no solution. He fell again and again, and on the twelfth time, he was moving his mouth, trying to say something, but nothing would come out. “Get up,” he heard the man say. “Get up. The next time you fall will be the last,” and he got up again.
By this time he was no longer running, he was walking and stumbling, he was crawling from the car and the car was bumping against him harder and harder. Make this stop, he thought, make this stop. He remembered—who had told him this? one of the brothers, but which one?—a story of a piteous little boy, a boy, he had been told, in much worse circumstances than he was in, who after being so good for so long (another way in which he and the boy had been different), prayed one night to God to take him: I’m ready, the boy said in the story, I’m ready, and an angel, terrible and golden-winged, with eyes that burned with fire, appeared and wrapped his wings around the boy and the boy turned to cinders and was gone, released from this world.
I’m ready, he said, I’m ready, and he waited for the angel with his awful, fearsome beauty to come save him.
The last time he fell, he couldn’t get up again. “Get up!” he heard Dr. Traylor yell. “Get up!” But he couldn’t. And then he heard the engine start again, and he felt the headlights coming toward him, two streams of fire like the angel’s eyes, and he turned his head to the side and waited, and the car came toward him and then over him and it was done.