The Last Lap

Before the first lap, everything is ahead of you. That is the whole feeling, and it never comes back. The grid is full. The engines are up and the noise gets into your chest and does your breathing for you. You are twenty-something and you are going to live forever, which you know for a fact, because nothing has yet happened to suggest otherwise. The flag has not dropped. Nothing is decided. Every place on the board is still yours to take.

Lap. It is the same word for the fold where a child is first held and the circuit that finally passes you. The lap of a mother. The lap that puts you a full circuit down. The place you begin and the thing that ends you, and the language never bothered to give them separate names. You could race for fifty years and never think about it.

Then the flag drops and it stops being a feeling and starts being work. Nobody writes about the middle of a race. There is nothing to write. You hold your line, you find your pace, you spend the machine carefully, because it is a long way to the end. Lap after lap, head down, doing the thing you came to do. That is most of it. That is most of everything. The years go by exactly like that, in the part nobody remembers, and then one day you look up and they are showing you the board.

Last lap.

It comes as a small shock every time, even when you have been counting. Especially when you have been counting. I am eighty. They have shown me the board.

You are held in a lap before you can hold up your own head. You are lapped before you are done. Same word, closing on itself. It takes a lifetime to notice.

I went off once at Bridgehampton at a hundred and fifty. The ground came up slow, the way it does when there is nothing left to do about it, and I had time for exactly one clear thought. It was not fear. I have spent the years since trying to remember what it was, and I think now it was simply attention. The whole of me pointed at the one thing, for one second, with nothing held back. You do not get many seconds like that. There are no mirrors on a race bike. You never see the thing that is coming for you. You find out when it comes past, or you do not find out at all.

The United States is on its last lap and it is not counting. It called itself the leader of the free world so long that it forgot leading was a thing you had to keep doing, lap after lap, or stop being. They built the alliance to make sure the last war stayed the last one. Seventy-five years it held. Now a man calls it a bad deal, the way you would call a fence you never wanted to pay for a bad deal, and the fence comes down, and on the far side of it PrumpTutin is standing exactly where he always said he would stand, having wanted the fence gone all along, having announced it, having been believed by no one with the power to stop him. The country is being lapped. Passed so completely that the thing it was built to hold back is coming round again to where it stands. There is no shock on that board. Everyone was counting. Nobody looked up.

Here is the part they leave out about the last lap. It is a relief. The excitement is gone and you do not miss it. When you are winning you do not want it to end. When you are losing you want it over. Either way it ends, and either way it is the same lap. First or last, the flag is the same color. The grandstand cannot tell the difference by then, and neither can you, and it turns out that not being able to tell the difference is the closest thing to peace the whole business offers.

I have loved almost all of it.

There is one corner left, and then the straight, and then the flag. You come out of the corner and you do not lift. You never lift on the last lap. Whatever you have got left you spend all of it on the way to the line, because there is no lap after this one to save it for. The flag is up ahead, black and white, and it does not care what place you are in.

You go and meet it.