Free The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove by Paul Zimmer

nervous.
    Sitting up makes my back hurt. Mostly I stay in bed—like Proust, Oblomov, Don Juan, and Casanova, I spend a lot of time in the sack. But what bothers me most is that my mind seems buggered, too, so I fight hard to keep things straight. I can’t let things start to slip. I figure if I lose control of the lives, they might start running together, sliding over into each other, and I’ll be deep in the wallow.
    What will happen to me then? I’ll become a black hole. I try to think good thoughts. Maybe if all the lives come washing and mixing together they’ll become one perfect life—or maybe even one very bad life? How would things stack up? This is too serious for me to think about in my weakened state.
    Cyril, get your ass in gear! Shake it out! Hang on to what you’ve got.
    Three times a week they haul me off with a bunch of lurching elder residents to a physical therapy class in the medical center. Each of us is given a special exercise assignment. It’s all figured out by computers as near as I can tell. Many of the other patients have wracked up their backs or legs in farm accidents. Others are cursed with arthritis or gout. Everyone does a separate task. I’m the only iceman in the class.
    The exercise attendants are all staring into computers behind the counter when our group arrives. There are a half dozen of them. The screens somehow tell these folks what exercise programs to assign to each of us. The attendants rarely look up, and the lights from their computer screens give their faces a sinister glow. “Cyril,” one of them says without looking up. “You start with five minutes on limbering machine number two, then move to rolling track number five and do ten minutes at .05 speed.”
    “Point zero five!” I say to him, acting like I’m in shock, trying to liven this joint up a bit. “Who do you think I am—Paavo Nurmi?”
    “Who’s Paavo Nurmi?” one of them asks. Oh-oh—I can see it on all their faces—their sudden realization that they’ve accidentally tripped my mechanism again.
    I lean forward on the administration desk. They lower their heads and descend more deeply into their computer screens. “Paavo Nurmi. It’s amazing how a guy that great can be forgotten. In 1924 he won five gold medals in the Paris Olympics. Five! The Flying Finn, they called him. The French went nuts over him. Everybody did. He’d run with a stopwatch in his hand to pace himself. Once on the same day he won the 1,500- and 5,000-meter races. Same day! That was in the time before antiaging foods and drinks and performance enhancement drugs. In those days you had to pull a race on just your own breakfast eggs.
    “Nobody’d ever seen anyone like Paavo Nurmi. He had wheels! In 1928 when he was thirty-one he came back to the Olympics in Amsterdam and won the 10,000-meter race and pulled second in the 5,000 and the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
    “At one point he held the world records for 1,500, 5,000, and 10,000 meters and one, three, six, and ten miles— all at one time. That is chugging, brother! That’s like Sugar Ray Robinson winning the middleweight title five times after he’d held the welterweight title for years. Do you know who Sugar Ray Robinson was?” I figure all these physical therapists might know some lives of athletes.
    But, “Naw, Cyril,” one of them says abruptly without looking up from his screen. “ You ’ve got to get chugging though. Get yourself up on that machine.” All of them are totally unimpressed that I am able to hold this stuff in my mind. They just want me to do painful exercises.
    I heard one of them mutter an aside to another when I was in the gym last time. “Watch out, here comes the Google Man.”
    Google Man! It’s true, they really don’t need to have me blathering at them. Anything I hold in my head could be brought up by a couple of clicks on their keyboards. Their faces are lined up and staring at the screens like a crate of blighted lemons in their