By the second hour, Andy felt entirely coated in bus, slick, infectious bus. He could not avoid overhearing multiple conversations about what someone reckoned was a good idea for starting up a business, and what They said about this, and what They were now saying about that. If he heard a single adjective, it was different, and invariably it was used approvingly for some junk you could buy. Although the ride there always felt longer than the trip home, he knew that nothing would be as biblically interminable as the wait in Dr. Khan’s excessively bright waiting room. The hands on the beige clock wouldn’t move any faster than the orange squares and green cones of the office’s huge, ugly painting. Each year, a few ambitious weeds grew among the tar and pebbles on the rooftops beneath the one (sealed) window.
Mid-route, the highway blurring along beside them, Stan dropped his magazine to the gummy bus floor, and Andy knew they had a rush on their hands. “Let’s go,” Stan said, meaning piss crisis.
First Andy had to get him up. He stepped over Stan’s sharp knees and into the aisle. Surging with the pitch and roll of the bus, Andy steadied his legs and reached down for Stan’s hands, finally looking into his face. A drawstring of alarm had tightened around each eye.
It would be another few years — not until Andrew regularly rode trail with the swelling balloon of his bladder folded palpably into the sack of his insides, bobbing there above the saddle’s wedge — before he understood his father’s binary bladder. Not until he himself pissed off a tilted bike frame did he realize that Stan and his pissing were inseparable from his body’s other warps and retreats. Here at thirteen, Andy did know that Stan’s sense of touch was diminishing radically. The burns from a stove element. The way he’d consensually let his shoulder fall into a door frame to break a fall. Shadowing this body day in and day out, Andy was beginning to understand that for Stan, standing upright was a largely visual operation. He had to glance around just to stay in place. And what difference did understanding a degenerative condition make to living with it? Thursday’s epiphany did nothing to Friday’s chores, to the recurrent challenge of pulling up pants. What was theory compared to the necessity of a sandwich? The internal body, inside was a foreign, unpronounceable worry, each organ a continent away. So many shop windows were smashed nightly that neither of them fully attended to the disease’s backroom legislation that was quietly seizing all of Stan’s assets. Really, Stan was only feeling extremes, inside or out. A half-full bladder wasn’t even noticed. Three-quarters was a nag he couldn’t quite place.
Stan’s arms seemed to fade a millimetre or two each time Andy hauled him up. Halfway between sitting and standing upright, Stan’s hands and arms began to pull away from his chest. In their living room or here in the bus aisle, Andy had to arc his spine, bend his knees, step back if he could to take up the slack, Stan’s hands coming at his shoulders like the paws of a huge but aging dog. Stan’s too-vertical arms looked as if he hoped to fly out of his seat.
Upright and semi-evolved again, Stan exhaled victoriously before proceeding to battle-test his legs and knees, leaning from one foot to the other. The brown scrubland adjacent to the 401 rushed past on either side. The bus droned.
Andy had pulled Stan up in the only direction he could, toward the driver. The washroom, of course, was in the rear. The long march back could not begin until they managed a complete about-face. Two children began to stare. A pale woman with a scarf over her head averted her eyes. A man in a plaid bush jacket clenched his jaw.
Unnecessarily, Stan looked into Andy’s eyes and nodded. Okay, round two. Twisting and tugging Stan while propping him upright, plucking one leg, guiding the other, Andy waved his ass in all their neighbours’ faces. Excuse me. Sorry. Just be a minute. Successfully reversed, all hands locked, Andy checked once behind his feet while Stan said, “Damn.”
Andy followed Stan’s gaze to see the washroom’s red Occupied sign light up. A preschool girl stood on her seat in yellow rubber boots and looked from the sealed door to Stan and Andy then back again. She wore a green dinosaur T-shirt. Eventually, her mother pulled her down.
“Just keep stretching.” Andy had his own knees slightly bent for the roll. While Stan’s gaze never left the Occupied sign, Andy’s alternated between it and the driver’s wide mirror. Visorlike sunglasses. Walrus cheeks. Ginger moustache.
The intercom coughed awake. “I’m sorry, sir; there can be no riding in the aisles.”
Stan would have ignored him fifteen minutes ago. His feet were shifting too frequently. His eyes saw little. “C’mon. C’mon.”
“Sir, absolutely no riding in the aisles.”
Andy stopped looking forward. Land, brown and grey, rolled past.
Finally the washroom door opened. Stan jerked Andy’s arms like a horse’s reins, not noticing that Andy was already stepping back. Part owl, part minesweeper, Andy craned his neck from side to side as he pre-checked each step and gauged the stability of Stan’s feet with each passing glance. My left, your right. Fred and Ginger in the small aisle.
Stan’s every movement was propelled by a high buzzing note at the back of his throat. The dinosaur girl’s hair was unbelievably, pastorally blonde.
Flattening himself between Stan and the unfortunate passenger tucked into the seat beside the washroom, Andy held back the spring-loaded door with first a hand and then the raised toes of one foot as he guided Stan in ahead of him. Stepping as far as he could, Andy steadied his uneasy father with both hands and didn’t watch as he permitted the door to shut against his own outstretched leg. Wrapping Stan’s fingers around a knurled safety rail, Andy pressed himself into a corner before reaching back for the tiny bolt of the token lock.
“C’mon. C’mon.”
Reaching under Stan’s arms, Andy tried to ferry him across the few remaining inches to the stainless-steel hole of a toilet. A sudden turn threatened Stan’s besieged balance and shifted his whimpering into overdrive. “In the sink. In the sink.” The rectangular mirror showed him nodding his head between crotch and metal bowl.
“That’s where people wash their hands.”
“The zipper. Hurry. Pull it out. Pull it out.”
Andy had to turn his head and press one cheek into Stan’s left shoulder blade in order to reach. Glancing around, Andy saw them half-reflected in the steel walls, toilet and seat. Only Stan could have seen the actual mirror, precise reproductions of buttons, belt, zipper and meat, and his eyes were closed, beatific. Andy looked from the many versions of their humped, greasy reflection to the blue floor’s coin-sized circles of raised rubber. Traction was improved. Spills contained. Collected near the neglected toilet were multiple hairs and aging, viscous stains. What to listen to other than the urine sliding over the smooth steel of the sink? Chat on the other side of the door. The steady growl of the bus engine.
The sharp bones and thin muscles of Stan’s back relaxed steadily against Andy’s cramped cheek.
“Sorry, Andrew. I won’t forget this.”
“Makes two of us. Finished?”
“Yeah, all done.”
Andy packed his father away.
“Better hit the water.”
“I’m not stupid.”
The tap opened to nothing. Again and again Andy unscrewed the single metal tap. Nothing. Should the walls have cast accurate reflections, Andy’s disapproving eyes would have met Stan’s for just one second before the bus took a severe bump. Instead, two pink orbs traded vague stares before the big hit, when Andy shot his hands out reflexively. One hand grabbed Stan’s chest and the other the nearest good grip. His right still held Stan after the tremor faded from the bus. He slowly withdrew his dripping left from the pissy edge of the sink.
“Oh, Andrew —”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Twice, Andy scraped his nose over Stan’s back while holding him up and searching for paper towel, Handi Wipes, anything. Voices from the other side of the door floated back. He wiped hands, counter, sink and hands again with thin scraps of quickly dissolving to
ilet paper, then flushed the whole mess in a blue swirl.
32
As a Visual Culture major, Betty shouldn’t have underestimated the power of Andrew’s cycling shorts. That fall, she didn’t consciously tally all of the pheromonal math that found her an only child of divorce underexposed to a noseful of testosterone. In the programmatic self-design of an education, in which one was both volunteer and conscript, she was currently devoted to the eye, and so didn’t anticipate a surprise attack by smell. At first she had tried to deny that the fragrant cloak he wore home after a ride, with its baseline of musky sweat, its rub of cedar, that brief squirt of oil, was an attraction for nose not eye. Her reluctance to admit that arousal could bubble up so strongly outside of her daily trade of eye and mind, that shifting see-saw of image and word, of colour felt then indexed, found her trying to rewrite her own perceptions and memories, to push away an alluring smell in hopes of pulling in an image. Sitting in classrooms, ostensibly listening to lectures, she was also performing daily autopsies on yesterday’s lust.
If present, smell is the fastest conduit to memory, the most teleportational of senses. But an absent smell, a past smell, is not recalled as easily as something visible, and for a while Betty was able to sit in class or meet a friend for coffee and see in memory the mud or blood on Andrew’s calf, could precisely recall the crisp, finite shapes of torso, tush and thighs packed into their jersey and shorts.
The shorts. The word lingerie didn’t quite apply to his cycling shorts, what with its curves and soft edges, its complicit consonants concealing and revealing its trio of arousing vowel sounds. Lingerie — each consonant is an offering. The upright l, the plunging g dragging the action down low. Naughty little n and r bent and rolled over. For Betty to even say the word, spilling it down her tongue then briefly munching the g, offered more cunnilingus than most so-called men on campus.
Andrew’s tight cycling shorts were the male equivalent of lingerie. The thin black Lycra, simultaneously pliant and snug, collared the cascading muscles of his thighs. At their top, they made his hips into a neat black tray eager to serve. And of course, there was the plucked black tush. More than just her eyes drove her to unwrap that Lycra present. The smell of his post-ride, pre-shower body, like tin rubbed with grass, brought her fingers and more to the thin border of jersey and shorts. Her hands and eyes loved the Murphy bed of the tight cycling shorts and their jack-in-the-box spring. The shorts revealed plenty but also covered a massive area, eclipsing roughly twenty per cent of his body in blackness. She would peel that warm layer to climb into caves of smell hidden from the sun above. Here was the pure animal waft of him, the hibernating bear, the spraying tomcat. This musk she had become addicted to further marked in from out.
Sated and elated at home, she tried to tell one half-envious, half-disapproving friend or another that no man offers a woman the visual, tactile and ritualistic pleasures of lingerie like a cyclist does.
“He buys the gear. He loves wearing it. He even washes it,” Betty told Jenn over coffee.
“Just as long as he knows where the runway ends in this little fashion show,” Jenn warned. “Homoerotic’s one thing; homoneurotic’s another.”
“Oh no. Andrew’s not gay. No way.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“Really,” Betty added.
33
You never forget how to ride a bike because memory sits deepest in muscle.
Marathon runners speak of The Wall, that border of endurance and pain beyond which the sensations are unknown, shocking, incommunicable. Your body is inescapable yet also not quite yours. Andrew’s wall is made from red Maritime mud. Past it, he is amazed to feel the addiction deepen and widen. Here is the alcoholic’s terrible relief at a full bottle, the junkie’s last stop pulled. Healthy or unhealthy, of an exercise or an exorcism, these distinctions are too heavy for a climb, too cumbersome for a screaming descent.
A star of pain burns brightly in the back of his neck, stretches into his skull and dips between his shoulder blades. Knees, bottom lip and cheeks have all been branded by the daily sun, have burnt past red to freckles. By the time he hits Quebec he should see the sun written more forcibly on his left side than his right, see his passage on the East-West Trans-Can mapped onto his skin. Salt scurries from his eyes into his tawny whiskers.
Each discomfort is a toll gladly paid. Time has finally become binary: on the bike or off the bike, spinning or still. More than just understanding Tom Simpson — the British cyclist who died climbing the Tour de France’s Mont Ventoux — Andrew repeatedly hears his dying, amphetaminal words: “Put me back on the bike. Put me back on the bike.”
Dissolution with a chain. The rolling rapture. The spinning annulment. Here is absorption, totality, metal breath. Today, the desert fathers would be a riding club.
When a cluster of New Brunswick houses finally emerges in the near distance and a few billboards appear in the fields adjacent to the highway, Andrew instantly sees himself riding into the post office of this village he is approaching. Now that each kilometre is hauled through sweat and he has become a nylon nomad, a post office, even a small one, is empowering infrastructure. He’ll mail home some gear to dam some of this sweat, to lower the flame of each climb. Any desire is a weight, and he’s willing to cull. He’ll further minimize his minimal gear to reduce the pull of gravity. No matter how carefully he had packed back in Halifax, he has pushed beyond those theoretical expectations of the trip and bikes here in pure practice. It’s time to lighten his load.
Turning off the highway, thinking of his gear and what he can do without, he becomes a Minister of War, captain of a sinking ship, an alpha wolf in lean times. Who goes and who stays? What has pride of place in the panniers? The useful must be separated from the potentially useful, the daily from the possible. Street signs and a stop light nominate the moss-coloured vest he hasn’t worn in days (back left pannier; but it’s my pillow) and the warmer SmartWool socks (back rear). By the time he stops to ask for directions, he has rolled into divisive speculations. Warmer already, not too long before I turn south; do I still need the Wick Dry gloves? I could use mud instead of soap. I have read the novel before.
This mental culling skips past the sacred postcards in more ways than one. He’s biking to a post office. Although Betty’s trip is “entirely fluid” and “open to chance,” they had at least mentioned embassies and postes restante to give themselves the illusion that he could mail her too. With a squat brick post office rolling into view, flag unfurling languidly in a slack breeze, he finally becomes more than just a postcard reader.
My Good Bet,
Sweat is clear.
You wrote of Greek men moving worry beads between their fingers. So’s my chain. Worry uphill and down. Worry past, worry future. Worry us.
Just noticed ‘worry’ is almost ‘sorry.’
— A
He writes care of an embassy in Madrid she may not visit or may have already visited or may no longer want to visit.
Next he writes out his own Kingston address. Already, a pen in his hand is a strange tool, writing an effete game. This gear will fly ahead of him to Kingston, then sit in a post office, more of his stuff packed and stored. By now the house should be empty of tenants, home, now, to just memories. Daily and hourly he wants progress, distance, speed and kilometres, yet he’ll arrive to an empty house. He may be going home, but he may also just be going.
The large padded envelope into which he stuffs vest and socks is its own little pannier. Wait, the cold-weather gloves too.
34
After a relationship, which do you remember more, the sex or the arguing? Sure, the sex is sex, unforgettable in general, but the details do fade. Actions are memorable. But tastes? Textures? Whereas the arguments were words and remain words: if you remember them, you think them.
Andrew and Betty didn’t fight until January, and then they did, endlessly, about one thing and everything.
The Argument of
Timing
“This MA in Halifax,” Betty asked, “you’re going to study travel literature instead of travelling? That’s like going to a lecture on the symbolism of gardens but refusing to water houseplants. Try life.”
“Before travelling, not instead of.”
“Backpacking isn’t an exam.”
“Anything worth doing is an exam.”
“Okay, sure, but you can read all summer. You can read while we travel.”
“Read, yes. Write, maybe. I churn out essays for this travel lit guy, he could set me up with someone in the biz. Then I could sell pieces. Think of what a difference that would make.”
“Yeah, two years.”
“Year and a half, tops. What’s fourteen months?” he asked. More than twice as long as we’ve been together, she didn’t say.
35
Teaching inside a prison, Stan was mostly voice. In his first few years with Correctional Services, his disease still not announcing how far it would descend down its staircase of paralysis, he had circulated between Kingston’s dozen prisons, sometimes even changing institutions for morning and afternoon classes. Seniority and the expected occupational fatigue of the Correctional Services teachers were the acknowledged factors that finally reduced his teaching to only the Allenville Transitional Facility. Stan’s rogue bones and mutinous muscles were the unacknowledged.
Procedurally, Allenville Transitional combined the gender isolation of a private school with the latent ferocity of a military academy. Inmates there were counting down sentences of less than a year, either the end of a long stretch served mostly elsewhere or the full duration of a token sentence. Six months for a tax cheat. One year less a day for the marijuana kid’s first bust. Among the teachers, at least those sober enough for conversation, this arrangement was known as “lions and lambs.” Here was a final check on the lions before they re-entered civilian life, this stroll among so many fluffy, little lambs. As for the lambs, this was designed as a nasty scare. Clean up your life or next time it could be the infamous Collins Bay, better known as Gladiator School. Stan herded lions and lambs both with a red pen and a voice.
The Push & the Pull Page 9
