In my spin cycle class, you pedal until you die. Do not rescue me.

I never liked working out until I knew it would kill me.

The sign was a simple, yet eye-catching neon yellow.

“Spin Class, Tuesday, Room 505”

It stood out like a festered wound on the gym’s dark cinderblock walls. I considered buying a membership. I was fat, you see. Or, at least I thought I was. A rim of loose skin and soft tissue encircled my gut like an inner tube. Sometimes, I would squeeze it with my fingers, making little fingernail bruises like a pox.

The poster for the spin class stirred something in me. I felt an urge to go up and put a finger or two on the creamy paper, stroke it, caress it like something living. My gut trembled, like it knew that I considered its absolute annihilation.

I took a picture of it with my phone, and went to the front desk to fill out the paperwork.
Tuesday, I showed up. The poster didn’t have a time listed, so I just came early. Six am. I had to wander around to find room 505. There were only three floors to the gym, and to my knowledge, they only numbered up to the 300’s. I must have circled around that top floor four times, glancing in the window of every small beige door. 

I almost gave up. But then I saw the little elevator in the corner. 

It was old, rickety, and hidden behind a pillar. The door was already open. Inside was a man, dressed in some getup out of an 80’s home workout video. He wore a crop top, and his stomach was flat, cragged with abdominal definition. A mountain range in miniature. But under his mop of bleached hair, I thought he looked sad.

“505?” His voice cracked low.

I looked inside. The box smelled of rubbed steel. I stepped in, and nodded.

He pulled a little lever to his left and we moved upwards.

The elevator opened directly onto the spin class floor. The place was enormous. A glass vaulted ceiling pulsed above me with the light of the rising sun. I hadn’t seen this atrium from the outside. It was made from panes as large as cars joined up by a spidery metal framework. Underneath it, and surrounding me on all sides, was a field of spin bikes. Rows upon rows of purposeless metal wheels and pedals, people huffing, puffing, bobbing, straining, red in the face, drenched in sweat, half-naked, never moving an inch forward or backward. The bikes were occupied in pockets around the room, like cliques in a lunchroom
“Hey, get yourself on a bike!” A voice came like that of God’s. It took me a minute to find where it was coming from. A shorter person at the front of the room, swallowed up by all the other bikers, pumped on his own bike. He was dressed like the elevator man, a tight jumpsuit clinging to his body. He was far away, but he didn’t look like he was sweating. The more I stared at him, the more I realized I couldn’t tell if “he” was a man or a woman. His hair was long, straight, pulsing and trembling around his face like a chaotic halo. “You hear me?”

I blushed, then moved up the aisle and jumped on the first bike I could find.

I moved my legs, and oh, it hurt. My muscles were coddled infants. For years I had sat all day at a desk, only ever utilizing them to shuffle to my bosses office, to the fridge, then to my car at the end of the workday. There was that surge of pain that comes from the sinews being pulled tight, the beginning of muscle death. But I pressed on. I thrust my legs against that resistance.

A woman to my left was gasping in little huffs. She looked at me and nodded. I nodded back. Her gym clothes were unusually baggy, her top slipping off her shoulder at times. I kept my eyes averted to be polite.

The first fifteen minutes went by fine. After that initial complaint from my legs, the pedals moved smoothly, endorphins kicking in. I was actually using my body, putting it through its paces. For the first time in a while I felt…good.

I turned to the woman. “I’m Tommy.”

“Grace.” I almost lost her name in between breaths.

“When did class start? The poster didn’t say.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Start. We do this day and night.”

I was confused, so I focused on pedaling. I’d never heard of a never ending spin class before. My legs were getting sore, and a question came with the ache. “So do we just…leave when we’re done?”

Grace didn’t respond. She pressed harder on the pedals, and I struggled to do the same.
The person at the front would call out occasionally over the next hour. “There’s a hill ahead, get your glutes ready,” or “alright, let’s cool down for five,” and “you’re all rockstars, you know that? Let’s get that burn in!” It was annoying, especially when I expected him to start wrapping up the lesson soon. I felt my little fat inner tube start to pull at my abs, and I tried to pedal a bit faster.

“Slow down.” Grace looked over at me, cold fear in her eyes. “Don’t go hard unless he tells you to.”

“What? I’m just pushing myself.”

Grace opened her mouth, but got trapped in a gasp, so she went back to pedaling.
I looked around the room to take my mind off the burn. There were a lot of young people here, full heads of hair going up and down, smooth angled arms taut with effort. But among them were a few older people, pushing away at the pedals with a cornered ferociousness. They were strange. Their clothes were rotting, shorts, shirts, and bras pulling apart at the seams. One man was practically naked, a shredded pair of tighty-whities the only thing maintaining his modesty.

All of them were bone thin, loose skin fluttering with their effort.

The second hour passed, and I turned to Grace. “When does the class end?”

She still didn’t answer.

I decided it was okay for me to step out early. I was already planning my treat for working out: breakfast at McDonalds. A sausage biscuit washed down with a Sprite. But try as I might to slow down,  my legs kept pressing on the pedals. I worked my feet against the straps, but they clung tighter to my shoes. My legs pumped as if they knew what I was trying to do, and were using every ounce of effort to keep me from doing it.

“Keep it up, people. Keep it up!” The voice came again from the overhead speakers.

Hour three passed, then four, then five. All of us cycling, pressing on those pedals like death was chasing just behind the wheels. The sun rose up in the sky and it burned my shoulders. I could feel it, my sweat stinging my blistering skin. My head went woozy and my weak arms felt like they would slip off the handles.

There was a plastic tap on my arm. Grace held out a purple water bottle. I had forgotten to bring my own. I reached over and grasped it, then guzzled it down. I handed it back. “Thanks. I needed that. When do we get a break?”

“When Jess decides.” Grace nodded to the front of the room. She passed the bottle along to a rider behind her, a teenager with shaggy hair and shaking arms. “Thanks, Chuck.”

Chuck nodded, and passed the bottle behind him.

“Why did you do that?” My mouth was already starting to get dry again.

“Got to fill it up.” Grace kept her eyes forward, licked her lips.

“Why can’t you just step off and do it?”

She shot me a look and kept pedaling. I realized what she was trying to tell me, but I didn’t want to say it out loud. Speaking it would make it more true, more horrifying.

My eyes kept focused on the sun as it lowered to the horizon. The entire room fell dark. We pedaled through the night. I was exhausted, but not tired. My eyes didn’t need to close. It frightened me. I pressed down on the pedals harder, until Grace tapped me again with that water bottle, and we shared drinks until it was empty. All the while our legs pressed at those pedals.

It was like that for the first few weeks. I stopped asking if we were ever going to leave.
The first person that fell off the bike, I didn’t see. It was night, there was a crash, and then some murmurs three aisles over. In the morning, three gym employees in white coats and pants came and took up what looked like a pile of bones and skin from off the floor and into a pair of double doors at the back. I had been pedaling for a month. My little innertube of fat was gone at that point. Protein pouches and water was what we lived on.

“What’s behind those doors?” I leaned towards Grace.

She didn’t know.

With nothing else to do, Chuck, Grace, and I got to talking. Grace had worked in finance before this. She had struggled with her weight her entire life. Saw the spin class and wanted to lose twenty pounds. She guessed she had lost twice that by now, and lamented she could never get on a scale to check. Chuck had come because he wanted to get muscular, but hadn’t realized cycling wasn’t the way to do it. He had been skinny before, and lost almost thirty pounds. His arms and legs shook to keep the pedals going, but he still found a way to keep us entertained. He would quote entire movies, and keep us laughing by doing his best impression of all the voices.

Three months in, he keeled over onto the ground. The men in white came and took him away. Grace and I kept going in silence.

It was tough to survive. Chuck was our link to the water fountain. There were rumors that Jess had called a water break ten years ago, but I doubted they were true. The only way to get water was to pass the container down the line until the person next to the fountain could fill it. We had to be creative getting Grace’s water bottle to the man behind Chuck. His name was Leon. He was fifty, and a health nut. He was good enough to catch any lob thrown his way. Grace and I were stingy with our water source, making that bottle last one, or even two days. We stretched the time between refills. It was always horrifying, yet glorious when that purple bottle arced overhead, catching the glint of the sun in its trajectory like an errant piece of kaleidoscope. It made my heart stop to watch it fall toward the ground, but Grace’s hand would swoop down like some bird of prey and snatch it up. Then, we would allow ourselves a sip of victory.

Then one day, Grace didn’t catch it.

It clattered on the ground, three feet away. We reached until our shoulder muscles tore.
Our arms weren’t long enough. “Shit.” I hoped that Jeff would call for a cooldown. Maybe then we could risk leaning forward and reaching the lid. But Grace knew better than me. It was too far, jiggling slightly back and forth as the water inside sloshed with the tremor of the floor.

It had been a year since I had arrived. We were in an isolated area, just me and Grace. Leon was too far away to help, and he couldn’t risk his own bottle. So Grace and I kept pedaling. There was nothing else to do.

The second day of no water, Grace looked at me, eyes dry and bright. Her voice rasped. “I’m going to die, Tom.”

“Don’t say that. Maybe I can–”

“Tom. No. I’m going to die.”

I swallowed back the lump in my throat, the dry inner skin sticking together and making me gag. My eyes burned from the salt that gathered in their corners. “We can hold on. Just a bit longer.”

“When I do…don’t let me be alone.”

I didn’t say anything. The sun dipped below the horizon, and the room was plunged into darkness. I couldn’t see. I was half-delirious with thirst. I felt a waving about my fingers, and I felt dry flesh brush up against me. I leaned out and grasped the waving digits. I pressed them into my palm, and felt our hands awkwardly hold on until our bobbing rhythms came in sync.

We stayed like that. Halfway through the night, I felt her fingers grow weak, then begin to slip. In another moment, I was holding nothing but air. Jess’ voice came over the loudspeaker. “Another hill! Get those legs moving!”

The white coats came for her in the morning. I couldn’t bear to look as Grace was carted off. I stared at that little purple water bottle, sitting just too far away. I wanted to smash it until it was nothing but a puddle of water and plastic shards.

That third day I waited to die. I waited for my body to droop, my legs to stop, and the pedals momentum to carry me off my seat and onto the floor. I imagined I saw Grace and Chuck again on the seats next to me, pedaling and laughing while Chuck went through Borat again. My lungs were heavy, and my bones felt like they were splintering with each push. My mouth was sand. I leaned forward onto the bars.

There was a tap on my shoulder. A plastic tap.

I looked up. Jess was off his bike. He was standing next to me, holding something out. The purple plastic water bottle. His voice, for the first time, was unmagnified. His words were soft. “You dropped this.”

I took it in a limp hand. He bent toward me, kissed my cheek, and then went back to the front of the room.

My body did my thinking for me. I pulled off the cap, and drank it all. I risked my life twice throwing it to Leon for refills. I drank until I vomited water. 

Then I tucked it into the cupholder and sobbed. 

Then I drank again.

It’s been five years now. I don’t know how I keep pushing. People come and go. I make friends, tell them to stop pedaling so hard. Sometimes they listen. I share the water bottle with them. A few take it, most don’t. No one lasts long.

At night, I think about Grace. I feel her fingers on mine.

Last week, I finally got my phone charged. It was on ten percent when I got in. The wi-fi’s good here, though no one ever comes for anyone. For those on the outside, it’s as if we’ve never left. My mom tells me every year how she loved seeing me at Christmas.

Writing gives me something to do. And I’ve had a realization.

It happened when Jess was calling out one of his little encouragements. I think it was  “Pedal down!” or “Keep it tight!” I think it was less about the words, but what was underneath them. I understood something. I will die here. I’ll keep pedaling until my skin wrinkles, my hair grays, and my muscles wear down to nubs. My body will literally fall apart around me. I will fall, and the white coats will come for me, pull me to whatever is in that backroom.

I’ve always known this to be true, to be my destiny. But this time, I felt it. I believed it.

After these thoughts, I pedaled harder, like I had somewhere to be.

I’m not in the room anymore. I’m in the mountains that Jess talks about, pedaling over those green and rolling hills. There’s trees and running water so fresh you could dip in your head and drink it straight. I know where I’m going. Grace will be there. And Chuck. And all the others that have gone on before.

And for the first time, the burn is sweet.