Few positions are as conducive to honesty as sitting up in a hospital bed. Cranked up, sipping beer, Stan told Larry of how surprised he had been by the neurologist’s questions about his balance as a child. “In six minutes he reshuffled my entire childhood. I could ride a bike, but couldn’t walk the rails. The bad dancing was more than WASP repression. Something’s really wrong.”
Growing up, Andrew heard these stories more than once, but Larry had actually been there. After Stan’s death, Larry was a little more than professional with Andrew. Each of them held different fractions of Stan, and like all partial owners, they admired, needed and condescended to each other.
When Andrew was with Stan, his body had a second language. By the summer before Andrew started university, remaining at home to care for his dad, Stan’s body stayed with Andrew nearly everywhere he went, even alone. Leaving a cinema and stepping onto an escalator, Andrew could turn his body into Stan’s. Lock the left leg, collapse the right hand then drop it onto the moving rubber handrail. Riding an escalator, Andrew could see Stan’s body in his own hands and legs riding the folding stairs, knowing all the while that this body could not make the final roll off. Food packaging was opened for Stan, with Stan, or evaluating whether Stan could handle it even if he weren’t there. Only in sex or on a riding trail was Andrew’s body exclusively his own. Yet, just when Andrew thought Stan was so thoroughly in his own body and mind, he’d get a glimpse of Stan’s past before the bankruptcy of disease, an anecdote from Paul, a reminder from Larry.
Once, when Andrew had chauffeured them home from another round of domestic errands, Stan spoke before Andrew could reach across his dad’s chest to undo his seat belt. They were parked in the driveway and staring up at the house. On this dully busy afternoon, when Andrew was eighteen, Stan spoke revealingly of the divorce that had occurred ten years earlier.
“Larry told me I was getting off lucky, that the deal she took would have meant resisting her own lawyer. We were in his office. He had a pen set on his desk. He paid different people to clean his house and office. We sat there, talking about a love he had seen bloom and fade, and all the while we could remember each other when we were twenty-two.”
Andrew got Stan’s seat belt undone and reached for his door handle.
Stan wasn’t quite finished. “Hey, how many divorced men does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither does anyone else. The man never gets the house.”
Andrew unloaded his dad and then their groceries into the house.
52
Last February, a card of Betty’s taught him about admission prices. Now, making camp while fleeing the hobbled Mustang, he certainly agrees that all admission is paid admission. If you want to go somewhere, you have to pay to get there. Balancing paranoia and protection, he slogs uphill on a side road to hide his campfire.
Wisps of smoke climb off his small fire. He can feel both the smoke in front of him and also the rush of fetid air from the slashed tires of four hours and seventy-eight hilly kilometres ago. That rushing air is one of two sense-memories he cannot shake. The dwindling of his water bag is the other.
The map he finished burning two days ago was his traveller’s visa for the country of lean. The pages of fire starter he now tears out of his novel are his application for full citizenship. Even when he first started to burn the map, that post-swim chill had been a hypothermic Iago urging him to burn all available paper. You’ve read the novel before! At least burn the pages you’ve read on the trip. Now, bad wind and unknown furies at his back, he agrees.
Because he has been reading a cheap paperback whose paper is essentially an unbleached, unquilted version of the toilet paper he carries in another pannier, he’s able to rip out his first stack of pages without disturbing the gluestick spine. The suddenly gap-toothed novel looks like the sadistic smile of a purging despot, the smug grin of Stalin or Pol Pot slaughtering the intelligentsia. But burning a book is so easy, so effective. Fire starter couldn’t be packaged more conveniently. Sheet after burnable sheet lie tucked together between the burnable covers of this box of tissues, this sedimentary, flammable brick. This combination of compact efficiency and weight management will unquestionably make book-burning Andrew’s contribution to touring websites. Fear of being labelled a fascist has apparently kept anyone else from thinking of (or sharing) this most sensible of ideas, as if torching print one night would have you clipping in jackboots the next morning. “Burn your read,” 250 Touring Tips should say, burn whatever you can. Lighten always. (But don’t burn your crotch. Tonight he undertakes his first non-sexual powdering of his tackle, spreading the medicated powder solely to relieve his growing rash.)
And yet, even though this paperback edition is not the actual courtship memento then spoil-of-war of his parents’ marriage, simply a squat mass-market reprint with endless blocks of manically tight leading that cost less than a glass of good Scotch, this graduate, this teacher’s son with an MA near completion, can’t help but feel that these are a monster’s fingers digging down to the novel’s glutinous spine. The novel’s unspooling voice, this nightly transport, is also just paper.
Another message emerges from the flames. The book remains a densely efficient piece of tech. Andrew’s only visit to his undergraduate campus radio station had included a stroll by an archaeological strata of obsolete audio technology — LPs stacked between larger 78s and a top pile of various tapes: quarter-inch reel-to-reel, the ubiquitous cassettes of the 1980s and some recent, indeterminate DAT. Books last. One century of recorded music has mutated through at least ten different media. Cervantes’s Don Quixote is still riding across the same pages while Mozart’s Don Giovanni has been pushed into wax, shellac and vinyl, then pulled from metallic tape and polycarbonate plastic.
One chase or another possibly behind him, he’s suddenly unable to read the book he’s burning. Old pieties had prompted him to rip out the first pages but to leave the paperback’s cover intact. As the fire beneath him grows, and a small amount of creek water begins its very slow boil, he pulls off the book’s front cover and burns it too. He already knows what he’s carrying. At least in the panniers. He scratches his crotch again. What is he carrying down there?
Inside the dome of the tent, when he once again piles the cleansing snow of the medicated powder onto his crotch, he finds a third heat in the grip, admits that his fingers are scratching as much as they’re stroking, finds himself rubbing beside his unit. What is this, a Celibately Transmitted Disease?
53
Although there certainly aren’t any actual mountains in Kingston, the nominal distinction of mountain bike and mountain biking helped Andrew roll away from the biking of his young past. The bicycle is the machine of childhood, balancing dependence (what child buys his own bike?) with independence (even a child can bike more kilometres than she would ordinarily walk). Children progress through a mammalian crawl to the uncertain walk of a toddler and then, finally, to the transposed feet of a bike’s rubber tires. Just when many mutate fully into lifelong drivers, sacrificing their lives to one more cushy chair, they could be reaching for a mountain bike, a bike designed specifically to go where cars do not. Like many new mountain bikers, Andrew biked away from habit. A new bike made him an immigrant in his native city. More than just new trails were opened up.
In February of his year with Betty, when Larry’s incriminating phone calls to the house prompted Andrew to finally make an appointment, he biked downtown to Larry’s office, despite the snow and cold. Nearly two decades of cycling and he’d never ridden in winter. A mountain bike changed the city he thought he already knew. He held his helmet in the crook of his arm when he was finally ushered into Larry’s office.
Larry half-rose from his chair. “Andrew, good to see you. Still bringing home the A’s?”
“Trying to. So, what are we up to today?”
“Just wanted to talk. See how things are going, off the record and off the meter. F
rankly, I’m curious about your plans for next year.”
“I haven’t really thought past next month.”
“What about development work? Maybe ESL in Asia?”
“Maybe in the future, yeah.”
“Andrew, I wonder if you’ve read your father’s will very carefully.”
“After ‘all to my son’ I kind of glossed the rest. Why?”
“You’ll want to look a little more closely. You get everything, but not forever. He didn’t want you to hold on to the house. Don’t dwell, Andrew. Take this as an opportunity to move on.”
“Sure, absolutely. I realize I’ve got certain options once I’m ready.”
Larry tapped his desk. “Your dad took steps to help you get ready. Take a look at Item Twelve. You have to sell the house within a year of graduating.”
“What?”
“He wanted you to move on. This is kind of the opposite of an old move of the Catholic Church. Mortmain, it was called. Hand of the dead. This is a nudge, Andrew. Take it for what it is.”
“But I don’t want to sell the house.”
“Andrew, they’re not called wills by accident. This is what Stan wanted, to see you move on. Graduate and go.”
54
Above a campfire, on the second night of his possible pursuit, science and magic swirl together in the wispy smoke. He burns more of the novel, burns more than just what he needs to start a fire. He’s proudly committed to this efficiency, lightening his load, starting a fire and sterilizing water all in one stroke. Rationally, he has equated warmth and hydration with the diminishment of the novel and its reduction of mass. Yet he also stands above this warm efficient fire wondering if he adds the right number of pages or the right chapters and squeezes hope hard enough, will the map he burned days ago somehow reappear unharmed, as if tonight he could bake what he destroyed three days ago. Fantasy is a sure sign of fatigue.
Now he wants the obscure back roads he has thus far avoided, those storeless, restaurantless strings of potholes haphazardly flung between Maritime ghost towns that half-support the resentful grandchildren of miners or those reared on stories of the good old days when the mill was running and the fishing nets were full. Yesterday’s roads may be best for him to avoid the Mustang, and yet to run out there would be to run without witnesses. On the old or new TransCan, telephones and maybe even heroes might protect him a little from a roadside beating. On a crumbling country road, a road he can’t find reliably without a map, only mercy would save him, and he cut mercy away with a knife.
Before his counterattack with his camping knife, he had essentially stopped reading. Lobotomized with fatigue each night, he’d really become too lazy to read, as well as suddenly, profoundly disinterested. Until the novel became fire starter, its urbane emotions had become too effete for him, too alien, fine china on the Titanic. Now, fear sharpening his mind, he reads again, reacclimatizing to the novel’s adult emotions of envy, ambition and guilt in less than two pages. Its well-dressed lust is welcome. Despite his possible chase, he now steals a few minutes reading in the morning. When he finds a restaurant for lunch, he once again takes the book in with him, freeing up the night’s fire starter with one hand while clearing his mind a little with the other.
In the panniers, the novel is given the most dramatic of seat upgrades, summoned from the economy class of pannier bottom to the executive class of pannier top. The novel finally wears the robes of highest aristocracy in this land, a plastic bag.
Burning print nightly, reducing his load, what of her postcards?
Andrew,
Arcachon — unbelievable corner of France. Ocean and lakes. Heart of the Bordeaux region. Bike trails galore. Best is the 3 km long sand dune. I’m at the top — 3, 4, 5? — storeys up. Rolling ocean in front, sweeping pine forest behind. (The sand/pine looks like G. Bay). The dune advances every year, quietly claiming a few more pines.
This is what I wanted, beauty that doesn’t give a damn.
— B.
55
Running scared but also a little elated, more self-reliant than he has ever been, Andrew finally has to wonder if Betty was the first or the second woman he let go. When his parents had divorced, they each told him repeatedly that he could choose whether to continue living in Kingston with his dad — same house, same school — or he could move to Ottawa with his mom. Just as frequently as they told him that the choice was his to make, they also told him that he’d still have two parents, no matter what, still be loved by each of them, that things wouldn’t be so different. “If everything was really going to be the same, I wouldn’t have to decide where to live!” he yelled back at them on one of the rare occasions when he had them both within earshot.
Given the way he’d been told about the divorce, he didn’t take the schoolyard advice and sobbingly ask for a dog as a consolation prize. Nonetheless, some of the schoolyard wisdom did prove accurate. You’ll definitely get a video game upgrade. Ask for a new Superbox. Check. The first Christmas, you won’t be able to count the toys. True. Your Mom’s new guy will give you money. Not stepmoms; they’re too cheap. They’ll feed you and try to hug you, but any new guy’s an easy touch for money.
When he chose to stay with his dad, Andy could not have said then how much of the decision was to stay with friends, how much to stand by his dad and how much to avoid Gordon Gamlin, the man he’d seen drive his mother home more than once. For all the honesty he did meet during the divorce, he now wishes that someone had assured him adults generally don’t know why they do what they do any more than kids do. Pat came closest, telling her son, “Sometimes you want what you want, regardless of why,” but instead of listening he used a glittering piece of fresh injustice to pry himself away from her. He definitely couldn’t bear to hear her talk about want.
Go with Gamlin was definitely Patricia Day’s slogan, the catch-phrase that moved her front and centre in Gordon Gamlin’s esteem and election campaign. In hindsight, Go with Gamlin was also her resumé, calling card, battle cry and prophecy. Gordon, a man with an MA in the 1970s and an undefined job with the school board, was a distant colleague of Pat, a woman with a BA, a palpably higher IQ, a lower salary and less career mobility. When Gordon won the nomination for a federal political party with vaguely centrist policies and unprecedentedly deep pockets, Pat followed him, dropping to part-time teaching at Foulton Elementary to manage his spring election campaign, for starters.
Pat’s going with Gamlin found Andy and Stan in the kitchen working their way through a limited repertoire of fish sticks, bacon sandwiches and omelettes draped in processed cheese slices. For two. Andy earned praise by learning to make coffee. Pat shoved things in the nearest drawer or cupboard on Tuesday nights before the new cleaning lady arrived on Wednesday mornings. She didn’t ever quite show her grade four class the draining math in which two “part-time” jobs were more consuming than one full-time job.
For an election campaign before computers, Pat often drove typed press releases to the mail slots of the papers (at ten p.m., eleven p.m., twelve a.m. or later). She quickly learned that the Whig building was only dark and silent at the front. Around back, men in caps and greasy coveralls smoked in nearly flammable air and steadily went deaf among the clattering presses. The noisy oily press room became an oasis for Pat. Last night, before the pamphlet catastrophe, she had wanted to lay on the horn until someone opened up and she could charm her way in for a drink from one of the many bottles she knew were secreted in desks and cabinets. When she did leave, she sped home close to prayer, the bed ahead of her just a shelf to set an overused tool.
Then morning. Alarm. Coffee. Muffin and banana for the drive. The high brown boots. Lesson plan? Lesson plan? (The teacher who fails to plan plans to fail.)
Still in his pyjamas, Andy radiated a gauzy kind of heat. She looked into his face in the mirror while she slid in an earring.
“Are you still taking me biking after school?”
“I said I would.”
She con
tinued to discuss her life at the school with Stan. She never stopped wanting to talk to him. Stan, not Gordon, was the perfect audience to hear about how Nancy, the school’s youngest secretary, lorded the intercom over Pat. “Mrs. Day,” Nancy was now saying regularly over the crackling intercom, “you have a phone call.” Mrs. Day, the intercom wanted to know, are you going to leave these children unsupervised, again, as you tend to your moonlighting? Striding down to the office — yikes, one boot is going — Pat saw a teacher’s face in every doorway, correctly inferring that Nancy had paged the entire school rather than just her classroom.
With or without the principal hanging beyond his door, Pat fired at Nancy from the doorway, “Nancy, I don’t hear it when other teachers get phone calls. Surely I’m not that special.”
“I can’t keep track of your running around, now can I?” Nancy launched the swift carriage return of her electric typewriter, eyes tightened by that high school diploma she’d missed by half a year, by the bus she took to work, by her unpaid summers.
“Three-twelve, Nancy. I run around room three-twelve.” At that, Pat picked up the blinking phone to the breathless, irate, pleading Gordon whose voice she’d been waiting to hear.
Two hours later she had a coffee stain on one thigh of her skirt (and possibly a mild burn beneath), a kink in her neck from endlessly cradling a phone and Gamlin’s son Ben drawing in blue ink on parliamentary reports. A glitch at the printer’s, some inconsiderate bastard’s mangled arm or burst hernia, some traffic jam non-delivery, meant another delay on the pamphlet or running without proofs. She’d argued for the delay and would be returning tonight to recheck the pamphlet and prepare questions for tomorrow morning’s visit to the aluminum plant. Returning, she’d been adamant, after a meeting with her son (and a change out of these boots).
The Push & the Pull Page 14
