Chapter 37: Into The Next Century

Lydia

We actually went to Berlin ourselves, just a week too late for Jenny’s great triumph. The Berlin marathon was on the menu, and I knew I had a mountain to climb, figuratively speaking. Mark had done his utmost to massage my tortured muscles back into shape, but three hard cycling races in just a month had taken their toll on me.

I knew I was fucked pretty much from the start of the race. I found my pace, but it didn’t take a high precision instrument to tell I was too slow. Nadja Fedorova, the African contingent, Mari Tanigawa from Japan and two Romanian women left me in the dust. I caught the two Romanians and one of the Africans late in the race, but a fifth place finish was all I could manage that day. Nadja had finished second, sandwiched between an Ethiopian and a Kenyan athlete.

The most surprising moment came when I had a blanket put over my shoulders by an older version of Mark’s old identity – Frank. Both he and ‘new’ Mark grinned, inordinately pleased with themselves.

It ended up being a rather pleasant visit after all. We spent the next day with Frank’s family where his two daughters got to learn they had an ‘auntie’ in America. Of course they didn’t get to know that they also had a half-brother, but for the 5 and 8 year olds, knowing they had an ‘auntie’ in America was exciting enough news.

I had always dreaded seeing Frank again, but it turned out quite well. We would probably never become close friends again, too much water had run down the Rhine for that to happen, but I was happy to be able to make peace with the last sorry remnants of my early life experiences. And I knew I had a proper fan club in Germany now.

Mark

The Chicago marathon went a whole lot better than the Berlin edition. For starters there had been nearly four weeks between Berlin and Chicago. Enough time to get my better half massaged into shape again, although I ended up kneading her boobs more often than her legs – sue me.

She won Chicago, plain and simple, no fuzz. Some of the usual favorites weren’t running, like Nadja Fedorova and some of the Africans. They had set their sights on the big prize – the New York marathon, just 10 days later. That gave her basically an easy win, well, if there is a way in which a marathon can be easy. It was close to the end of the season and many athletes were getting knackered, which was why Lydia never had to run at full capacity.

Two days after her Chicago win, I found myself in John’s office, at the request of the big cheese himself.

“Mark, look, we got this here offer from Germany: Surprise, they want to do a nude photo session with Lydia, but my media team can’t for the life of them find out who or what that magazine is.”

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“Das Magazin,” John read out in mangled German.

“No wonder your media guys couldn’t find anything,” I said and chuckled. “You asked the wrong people. You should have asked the resident GDR expert, what’s his name, the Scottish bloke. I bet he knows exactly what it is.”

“Then I take it, you know it too?” John asked.

“Yep, it is a less gaudy East German equivalent to the Playboy. It was as close as anything came to being a lifestyle magazine. Of course these days it’s just another lifestyle magazine, but they retained their unique flavor, which is why they’re still around and widely read in the five new states, as the former GDR is called these days.”

“They must be doing exceptionally well if they can offer more than the actual Playboy,” John noted. “I read such offers every day, but 8 million bucks is higher than anything I’ve seen, even after conversion to dollars.”

“A copy costs three quid fifty these days, yet their readership is so loyal, they shift millions of copies every month. For the next twenty to thirty years, while people are still around who grew up in the GDR, that magazine is a license to print money.”

“So you think it is a good idea?” John asked, with audible doubts in his voice.

“I know you’re worried that her nude appearances might put off other female athletes from signing with you, but this is a non-issue. That magazine is only available in Germany, and one of the big differences to here is the media landscape. Most papers in Germany belong to one of the big media corporations. Privately owned, independent ones like this are rare. That means, no other paper will even run a story about her having done a nude photo shoot, as that would mean free advertising for a competitor.”

“So you’re saying, she’ll pocket 8 million and over here no one will be any the wiser,” John summarized.

“Exactly. You know Lydia, she would have done it for eight quid, but we don’t need to tell them that.”

John shook his head and chuckled.

Lydia

The offer from Germany had been a pleasant surprise, but I was not in a mood to think about that now. I still had this last marathon of the year to finish. Having run Chicago just 10 days before, I was under no illusion that I was anywhere near in contention for the win. Nadja, and some of the Africans had skipped Chicago to prepare for New York, which paid a lot more prize money. Even the sixth place finisher in New York would still get more than what I had pocketed for the win ten days ago.

I had other plans. I wanted to riddle the living daylights out of my competitors. My ‘donkey mode’ had served me well all year, but being a one-trick pony never works for very long. People were getting wise to my antics and were developing strategies against it, as Nadja had so aptly demonstrated when she had beaten me in St. Petersburg.

True to my expectations, the other runners had analyzed my races during the year. Expecting that I would establish my pace and stick to it, I found my self with a gaggle of opponents running behind me.

Good, they had taken the bait, and I did exactly what they expected me to do. Now all I had to do was wait and see how they reacted. And they ended up not reacting at all. This marathon started to resemble a bike race, with all competitors together in a large main bunch. Since nobody was willing to make a break for it, I did so at kilometer fifteen, clearly hearing Femke’s voice in my head.

“Look for something on the roadside, a tree or a car, prepare, and when you pass it, floor it.”

What my dear competitors didn’t know, was that I had not spent the four weeks between Berlin and Chicago only relaxing and endlessly being fondled by my lover boy. Meri and Femke had made it their mission to teach me how to initiate fast pace changes and how to react to them.

It was still early days in my schooling, but I had learned enough to open up a small gap by kilometer seventeen. The others behind me had been so stunned by my sudden move they needed another two km to catch up to me again.

Nadja, no longer knowing what to expect of me, sped off into the distance, and despite my muscles screaming bloody murder at me I set off in pursuit. Knowing that I was about to overcook it, I forced myself nonetheless to catch her. I could see the confusion in her face. She had expected me anywhere, just not right beside her.

Everybody realized that their strategic plans had been for nothing and pandemonium ensued. It had become a free-for-all now. There were attacks left, right and center. I discreetly dropped back and settled into ‘donkey mode’, a little slower than usual since I had dipped too deep into my reserves.

I ended up finishing eighth, which was rather low for my standards, but I had achieved my main goal. All my main competitors would now be left with a whole off-season to rack their brains why I had suddenly changed my tactics.

Mark

Lydia had done the trip to New York on her own. I simply hated the place and didn’t feel like tagging along for three days, which had given me enough time to implement my grand master plan. This place was going to be upgraded.

I had had my mobile phone for two years now and it was time to upgrade to a newer model, especially since newer ones were significantly smaller and lighter. I would no longer walk around with a bag that had a two-ton brick in it.

While in the shop I got a demonstration of something new, something called the internet. Jonjo had waxed lyrical about it, telling me he could do much of his work from the university and then just send something called an Email, some sort of instantly delivered letter in electronic form. He had explained most of it, but since I wasn’t an engineer, most of it had gone way over my head.

The guy in the shop was much better at describing it in a way that even a dork like me could understand. So basically, it was a global network to which any computer could be hooked up and you could instantly communicate with people around the world – let’s say people in Pasadena could communicate with people in Emden, Germany or Groningen, Netherlands.

It was a no-brainer, really.

Lydia

I came home to a house full of empty boxes, with Mark whizzing about with lots of cables. The first thing I spotted was a new desk with a computer on it, pretty much like the one Regina had. They had used a program on it that played music with lots of text scrolling across the screen.

“Are you going into writing silly Country music now?” I asked him.

“We are going into the twenty-first century, my love,” he said and kissed me. “We’re getting ourselves an internet.”

“Isn’t that, like, for universities? Regina mentioned something about internet at her college,” I replied.

“Not anymore, completely overdressed Lady,” he announced. “Now even we mere mortals can connect to it. Remember that winner’s photo with Jenny? Regina could have sent that from her computer and we would have received it a few seconds later, instead of days later by airmail.”

Taking the hint, I peeled myself out of my clothes and chucked them in the laundry basket.

“That’s better,” he diagnosed and grinned while fondling my breasts.

“You’re just going to use it to look at tits,” I accused him in jest, which made him chuckle.

“Looking at tits on the internet would be like reading a butcher’s magazine while sitting in Bachlmayer’s restaurant, or having a supermodel in bed and sleeping on the sofa, or...”

“I get the hint, darling,” I interrupted him. “Now see to it that this chaos here gets tidied up. There’s a rear-end waiting for some attention, and I don’t want it to be a desperate shag in a skip.”

Regina

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea much - Mark’s idea to install internet in our house. First of all, that meant more money being spent on us, something I still didn’t like much. And secondly, I wasn’t sure Jenny needed any more distractions from her school work. She had enrolled in September and the first grades looked good, but I wanted to keep it like that.

On the upside, it would massively save us on telephone costs. Throughout the year we had spent so much money on overseas telephone calls, I was sure we would be getting a Christmas card from the telephone company this year.

And then there were the added difficulties of actually getting a proper connection. Dial-up modems were pretty useless for anything but pure text, and as far as broadband connections were concerned Germany lagged significantly behind. The only glimmer of hope was that we had a college in town, which meant, since all colleges and university had backbone connections, usually local providers had some offers for mere mortals in such towns and cities. Rural Germany was a wasteland in that regard.

Mark

That new internet thing turned out to be great. The web pages, as they were called, were something of an acquired taste, they basically looked like badly formatted text documents, but the amount of information you could suddenly access was overwhelming – if you could find them.