Sitting in M-world, sitting in an M-world café with his neat mound of pastries before him, M. can't help but notice his country's foremost long-distance runner. He also sits alone, but unlike M. who stares over at him while raising and lowering an arm to lift pastries, the athlete stares down at his untouched food his mind seemingly elsewhere. Indeed the café habitués are all of them looking over at the runner, for he is known throughout the world (and of course they are not).
When M. does look down just for a moment no more than that, in that short time the runner has already covered the distance between them and is now arranging himself at M.'s table and wears the anxious expression of a man who can't help but talk of his worry to a complete stranger sitting in a public café on a troubled late-afternoon. Yes, M. knows that many of you would dearly love to meet somebody famous, particularly a sporting hero, and talk the tat of talk with him, but M. is not of you and wishes the runner nothing but ill. He is going to disturb M's self-delusions and there will be no benefit in it for either of them.
And yet the runner surprises M. When he has sat down and told M. of the nature of a race, M. finds himself slightly interested. And that is rare for him. The world knows the runner of course from the Olympic Games. He is the athlete who has, ever since his adolescent running days, shot off right from the start at suicidal speed and, though he has of course tired and slowed over the distance, as yet he has never been caught. Always finishing a distance ahead of the pack, he is thought of, M.guesses, as a biological wonder or a biological freak according to your disposition. For some years now the only betting has been on who will vie for second place.
And now at the table he interrupts M.'s quiet pastry-eating, rubs his eyes, and desires to tell someone of his rushing ahead of the pack, the herd, the others, as soon as his races begin. He tells M. of how he always flees the others because the others repulse him. He laments that never has he found a fellow human-being without some form of unacceptable fault, an objectively measurable fault, be it a selfishness, an inadequacy, or a dullness, which most of us choose to tolerate in the interests of a quiet life and of they themselves being liked. Something which he won't do. The failings in others are unbearable to him. They disgust him. The Wolf in M. momentarily surfaces and growls its agreement.
But the runner has had a dream the night before. When you are permanently a front-runner, your sense of what is 'behind' is over-developed (he says) for it's there that lies your only danger. In the real races he has never sensed any presence that has succeeded in struggling to a position close enough to even mildly trouble him. But last night in his dream, that is exactly what he did sense. A pounding of the track, stronger than his own despite every effort he could make to leave it behind. A figure that inevitably ran him down, stayed alongside just long enough for him to glance sideways and see the face, and which then surged forward into a bend which it took at an astonishing and unnatural angle.
Of course this contemptuous figure who was not remotely impressed with the famous runner's performance in the race, and indeed would not even dignify him with a reciprocal glance, of course that figure was himself in the form of a faster copy. He had been run down (dream-like) by a part of himself (so he thought) that was unimpressed with his own person. Well (he was wondering) where exactly was his fault? Must he like all the others also have an unacceptable fault? He looked pleadingly at M. although he must have known full well that M. could not answer the question. M. could not bear the tears welling up in the Olympian's eyes.
Between dainty fingers he dumbly picked up a morsel of Madeira cake he'd had his eye on for the whole duration of the athlete's monologue, and he looked to one side.
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