Breaking down Stan’s bed for this long night’s shell and pee game of beds and rooms, he suddenly saw the dinginess of Stan’s room. Stains ran through the worn carpet in broad channels and bore down in concentrated circles. A thick vinyl blind sat slack-jawed in a dirty window. The paint appeared to be quilted with dull patches.
His list for yet another trip to the hardware store kept growing. Paint, 2 gal. Turquoise? A wheaty green? Flooring: laminate? laminating? Curtains. Curtain rod. Normally he was aware of the cost of buying drinks for women, yet here he was dropping hundreds on reno supplies he’d be hard-pressed to find time to use. T minus thirty-two hours until her possible arrival.
Through his roles as both ex-nurse and a student who grew up in a university town, he already knew that no drug creates energy. Drugs simply spend energy the body has tried to keep in savings. Caffeine unlocks banked sugars. Pot, for him, for now, retreats from his body with an insomnious flame. But to really keep the home fires burning, to borrow time, he needed to climb a toadstool. None of the renovation books he had taken out of the library, and none of the DIY websites recommended taking hallucinogenic mushrooms to accelerate a home makeover project.
By 4:17 on Saturday morning, he was convinced he wasn’t simply painting the walls; he was a tanner, stretching skins. The superfine plaster dust coating every single hair on his head, as well as those on his arms and legs, and even his eyelids, made him feel like a powdered doughnut filled with he-didn’t-know-what. While these preoccupations came and went, the reach and claw of other rooms, other floors, was constant. One floor down, the pantry/bathroom lay cut open but unsutured, moaning in its post-op corner. Down the hall, a long plaster gash threatened to slip off the wall then fly through the dusty air and garrotte him. High on shrooms, he suffered no risk of falling asleep on the job, not that he really understood what the job was any more. Peeling up the carpet in Stan’s room felt like he was skinning an animal, a long-dead and very aged animal. Ripped from jaws of small black teeth, pried and scraped from patches of mysterious tenacity in the middle of the room, the rough carpet and its clammy underpad were shockingly heavy. Pushing from one end did nothing. Pulling from the other moved the top layer but not the entire roll. Only by bowing his chest completely and wrapping the carpet in a bear hug, a hug that sealed his averted cheek to the pasty underpad, could he waddle it out, inch by infectious inch.
He saw individual rooms, or even single surfaces — a wall, a floor — when he should have been thinking of the whole house. He had painted one room a dark, autumnal orange for her without knowing if she would stay, if there were more kisses to come, or even if she’d arrive at all. He flitted from room to room, painting here, dismantling there, to make the house seem healthy, not sick, the house of a bright future, not a near-invalid past. All the while he did this, he ignored the fact that not two days ago, on the ferry, he’d given everything — this house, their kiss and his own future — a rotten foundation. He’d lied about how long Stan had been dead, giving himself thirteen months of mourning in fiction when life had only given him one. Worse, and unbeknownst to him, his was not the first significant house in Betty’s life that had been built on a contentious foundation. He tried to see ahead to her in these rooms but could not see ahead to the other rooms, a restaurant dining room and a lawyer’s office, that would send her packing again.
Enough. Enough. The house already had all the doubt it needed. It was time to sand some of the spackling compound. He’d be thirsty with all that sanding. When you’re up all night, a beer at six a.m. isn’t really beer for breakfast.
21
The exploding car, the croaking bicycle. When you drive, how often do you think of explosions? We pump liquid fuel into cars but don’t see the four mechanical strokes that turn that liquid into a vapour and then explode it to roll the beast forward. Tens of thousands of tiny explosions race past Andrew’s left elbow and side, fierce combustion tucked beneath a leering hood. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow the cannons again. Fire on past your need for water. At least a hundred kilometres between gas stations out here. An hour’s drive. A day’s ride.
His passage from Nova Scotia into New Brunswick moves him from ocean to rivers. Nova and New — new lands to pollute. If his map and memory are correct, rivers should soon begin to snake through these valleys. For the vast majority of this country’s history, rivers fed industry and body both, floated all appetites. Choked now with the runoff of agricultural fertilizers, these Maritime rivers are hardly suitable for bathing, let alone slaking endless thirst.
So what is floating on by? Back at the University of Nova Scotia, he’d read that the Nobel Prize–winning German chemist Fritz Haber is remembered for two major discoveries: mustard gas and synthetic agricultural fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch synthetic production of ammonia for fertilizer changed the planet. For the first time in the history of farming, fertilizer was cooked, was made with fossil fuels. Few people alive have ever eaten bread that doesn’t arrive on a trickle of oil. Terrorists understand sowing and reaping: their bombs are made with agricultural fertilizer. The lawns Andrew has left behind or glimpses infrequently from the highway are sprayed to an artificial, monospecial green with pesticides that cause breast cancer, demanding single breasts, the most valuable of coins, for their toll. The major ingredient used to make the asphalt beneath him is oil.
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Hydration is as important a balance as the rolling tires. Blood, muscle and all of their messengers are mostly water, and Andrew tugs a steady contrail of perspiration. The push of muscle. The pull of thirst.
When he was still checking his face in the disc mirror, he was amazed at the pair of white lines crawling nightly into the thickening caramel of his beard. Beneath these scrawls of dried sweat and his curved yellow glasses hangs the plastic toggle for his water bag. Swatting the salty nub into his mouth, he draws a mouthful of warm water. He has read that metal hand pumps await him on Quebec’s converted rail-to-trail Le Petit Témis, that the water, though drinkable, tastes of iron there beneath small cliffs of auburn rock. Again and again he imagines the unseen pump’s curved handle, draws a slosh of water into the plastic hydration sack he’s suspended over his rear pannier rack, pumps a goût du terroir into this latest evolutionary advancement for the cyclist.
Three major mutations fused the body to today’s bike — clipless pedals, shocks and the water bag. Pedals you can snap a shoe into, not set one on, held more of the body’s force, burned the waste, tightened the circle. Shocks eased the slide and returned a little vertical action, gave the mammal back its leap. And long, narrow knapsacks were needed to hold litres of the life juice. The water bag, that tall, slender piece of cycling luggage, has itself migrated onto other bodies, impressing gardeners and park rangers with its roaming efficiency, its freedom from the leash of thirst. Not wanting the weight or heat of the swollen, black hump on his back, Andrew has added enough hose to park it in the rear atop his back panniers, above tent and sleeping bag.
It’ll easily be another five days in the Maritimes before he rounds Rivière-du-Loup and slips into the busy concrete chute for a straight run at Kingston. Amid the noise and the increasing flak of truck tires, there’ll at least be the Prochaine Stationette/Next Service Centre signs to regulate his thirst. That is, if he remains on the increasingly busy Trans-Can. For now, he’s still riding crapshoot. Every time a distant gas station swells into view, he clamps his molars around the dusty toggle and sucks his fill.
During the coursework of his MA on bicycle culture, he’d read of the multi-century quest to invent a “feedless horse” and eventually came across a description of the horse as the “most naked of animals.” Yes, and surely the bicycle is the most naked of machines, an X-ray of itself. Or a living skeleton, all exposed bones and bared teeth. Teeth. In Kingston, when he’d begun riding trails five or even six days a week with Mark, Mark the quietly proselytizing vegetarian once gave him the dental argument for vegetarianism.
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bsp; “Look at a dog’s mouth. Those are meat-eating teeth. Every tooth’s designed to rip and shear. What do we have? Grinders.” As they’d finished their break and remounted their bikes, Mark displayed a rare poetic streak as his cleats snapped audibly into the pedals. “On a bike, we’ve just got these two big fangs,” he said, referring to the tough, sharp metal cleats mounted into the bottoms of their shoes.
Biking now, roughly one-third of the distance back to Kingston, these memories rise on one knee and are taken away by the other. Bikes with two fangs. Bi-cycle. Bi-cuspid. Some would say he should add bi-sexual to the list.
22
Blinking awake, alone in the Kingston house, Andrew could feel plaster dust on his face. The pounding in his head was actually audible. After two and a half days of renovations and narcotic ups and downs, he wasn’t expecting human speech. He thought the distant “Hello? Hello?” he heard was sobriety or rational thought knocking at his door. That sobriety called with a woman’s voice didn’t surprise him. Wait, shit, it was Betty.
He tried to scramble out of bed, not recalling that “bed” was just a mattress he’d thrown here on the floor of the freshly painted orange bedroom. Losing his balance before he ever found it, he stumbled into a pile of empty beer bottles. His only possible recovery was a kind of jackknife dive for the stairwell. When the clatter of beer bottles finally subsided above, so, too, did the knocking below. With some noises unwelcome and others fading, and mental and physical balance so precarious, he was halfway down the stairs before he saw and felt that he wasn’t wearing any pants.
Someone was visible through the front door’s stained-glass window, and she was turning away.
“Betty. Betty.” His black boxer briefs weren’t that revealing. He wouldn’t make her wait any longer. “I’m here.” From now on, he’d be honest.
The leaded window was divided into panels of stained glass of varied opacity. Half a dozen panels showed the halt, return and pause of her shoulders. Translucent red, yellow and green brought him clarity and relief. He had fallen asleep during the boozy-druggy renos. She had indeed arrived on the Sunday evening train. His lateral move for the lock carried him past a clear column of window glass. The multiple panels of glass simultaneously revealed her climbing eyebrows and a reflection of drool hanging off his chin.
She was wearing a V-neck sweater, a skirt, tights and boots, was incredibly clean. She was also laughing. “You’re drooling and have no pants on. Should I take this as a compliment?”
Fortunately, the arm he raised to his chin wore a long gash of orange paint.
She touched it. “Hey. Do tell.”
“Come in. Will show.” He gestured to the stairs. “First room on your right.”
On the climb up, her ass swept everything from his mind. Finally awake and rational again, he prepared a disclaimer, rolled “I needed to paint anyway, so don’t feel obligated to stay” to the tip of his tongue, when he saw a charge surge up from the base of her spine. She turned one way then another in the orange room, checking light and layout, appraising the colours first with her eyes wide open then with them half-shut. Looking at the floor, which he had painted a milky blue, she had every excuse to stare at his legs and the collar of black cotton stretched around each of his muscular thighs.
Ostensibly he was lifting a lamp off the floor to shed more light when she turned back and made his brightly lit forearm the longest erogenous zone on his body. She scraped two fingers down the outside of his arm so lightly that mostly the fine hairs were touched, not the skin. A small sheet of plaster dust slipped from his arm to hang briefly in the air between them.
“Divorce dust, people call it,” she said, cutting one finger through the dispersing white cloud.
“Divorce? Already? Aren’t we doing things a little backwards?”
“Yeah,” she said, lowering to the mattress and turning, “we can do backwards.”
23
On the bike, any desire is a weight. Twenty-seven postcards. The well-folded map. Even a tiny bag of fine white powder.
Andrew has never done anything close to cycling one hundred kilometres a day, day after day, so he can’t say whether it’s the drain of constant exertion or the prison camp of cycling shorts and saddle that has suddenly plucked sex from his thoughts. Six, seven, eight hours with nothing to think about, and for the first time since he was twelve, sex is not the steady hum beneath each thought, not the rising crescendo of every half-hour. He’s worried, absolutely. Before setting out, he considered, but did not buy, an expensive anti-impotency saddle with an accommodating trough running up its middle. If Betty’s flying back, and if he makes it home on schedule, he should still have a week or two to heal. Heal for what, he doesn’t know.
Alongside the worry, though, there’s also novelty. Is this what life is like at fifty-nine, just three flaccid inches? Without his semi-hourly half-erection he realizes he can barely feel the thing. More than once he has reached down to his damp, warm crotch for a confirming probe.
At night — bone-ratchet, carbo-loading night — he peels off the snug Lycra shorts as soon as he can. If he camps near the road, he’ll slip into hiking shorts or, in a chill, the rain pants. But if his campsite is secluded, he delights in a southern jailbreak, working pantless as he sets up the tent, his pouch swaying as he stoops to stir dinner or tend the fire. His isolation is measured here not just by his naked crotch but also by the socks, fleece jacket and toque he keeps on. Pantless but wearing socks — here is the official uniform of isolation.
Originally, the chilly May air may have prompted the mild slapping and whacking that now marks the end of supper. Whatever took his large, open hands to the crate of his hips and pike soldier quads, they return largely out of amazement at the perpetual hardening of glute, quad and calf. Whose body is this?
The bike frame usurps bone. All naked tubes and gracile strength, it is a second skeleton, and it stirs a sexual revolution in his. For seven, eight, sometimes nine hours, his nose rides closer to the ground as he de-evolves into a prowling mammal. The crotch is the fulcrum of this transforming body.
With the legs constantly pumping under the rock overhang of stomach, the forest of pubic hair has quickly eroded into a saltwater marsh. Each night, he attempts to undo the day’s swampy erosion with a dose of soothing, arid powder.
Obviously he didn’t buy baby powder. That’s the last thing this youth wants on his crotch. Just add water and . . . He stood in a brightly lit pharmacy, perfectly dry down south but thinking forward to the Petri dish that would soon be his crotch. There it was: Gold Bond Triple Action Medicated Body Powder. He had no idea that killing bacteria could feel so good.
Of course, in the crucible of weight and space that is the bike, he didn’t pack the whole Gold Bond canister. Pouring the medicated powder into three tiny sealable bags, he thought equally of cocaine and of seventeenth-century flour, explorers with their precious burlap sacks of flour threatened by every river-crossing and storm. Out here on the road, he wonders if Cabot, Cartier or Champlain also became addicted to dusting his pole.
Slapping his wide hands into his pillared thighs or the cliff of a buttock, hefting, whacking, Andrew climbs into the tent and stretches out in the narrow sleeping bag. Unable to spread his legs significantly in the sleeping bag, he rolls his heels together and apart. Each long leg rolls in then out, folding and unfolding the raccoon mask of his pelvis. His right hand, the more eager of two brothers, sweeps down stomach to thigh, while the calculating left reaches for the bag of magic powder.
Refining this new, dry sensation, he has taken to sprinkling the powder onto the top of each thigh then driving inward. Starting from the stomach loses too much to the tree line. Approaching from each side he’s quickly at sack and pole with the slick chalk. It is the sack that prompted this conversion from wet to dry. Ploughing the smooth snow, he dusts this incomparable scoop of anatomy, this island fruit, this slack-furred butt of a tailless rodent. Plucking one testicle with a jeweller’s care, he
strokes the seam of his scrotum with a single fingertip, amazed again at the mobility of dry lubrication. The oils of the past now seem dulling and interfering, thick intrusions into these minute fissures of skin unzipped by the thin powder. Where oil dulls, powder intensifies, unravelling his skin into long scarves, fluttering prayers. Each ashen stroke removes him from years of wet. Porn is built on wet, anatomy glistening from hot tub to lagoon. Lipstick and nail polish are all about wet, whereas Andrew has found nirvana, and it’s bone dry.
Just as his own heat rises, the nimble hoop of his chalky fist begins to constrict with the powder’s medicinal burn. Sack, too, goes up in antibacterial flame, steadily nibbled by heat. A gossamer hood falls on and off his end. Inner and outer heat stabilize on his final approach until the orgasm — looser, almost vaporous — slips out of him, a wiry leap that eases into the still air then splatters onto his papery stomach.
24
When Paul Tucker’s hair was still red and plentiful, he was as slim as a cedar plank and Andy called him Uncle. At least twice a summer, Pat, Stan and Andy would drive to Paul’s cottage on the Canadian Shield. The small wooden cottage, thoughtlessly painted brown, roasted in a pan of hot, pink rock. The cottage sat on cement blocks directly on top of the sloping bedrock. Andy found this naked foundation amazing. Back in the city, houses had submerged basements and lawns you could dig into. Here, the worn old rock sloped and rolled. A few patches of soil collected here and there, like dust in the corners of a room. Unbelievably, cedar bushes or blueberry plants rooted and anchored in these thin patches. Still, almost nothing but a wooden dock and a small rock face separated the cottage from the dark, lapping lake. Paul referred to the expanse of bedrock as his “rock garden” and teased Andy, saying if he wasn’t good he’d have to weed the garden before he’d be allowed to go swimming.
The Push & the Pull Page 6
