“I did what had to be done, that’s all.”
“You did more, and you should admit that. What, it’s a coincidence his body was falling apart and you went vedge?”
Reaching home, they made a bowl of their pelvises, spilt milk worth crying over.
58
The cafeteria of the botanical gardens is about to close so he loads up before leaving. Sick of the tasteless bagels, he settles for multiple bananas, peanut butter and mildly bilious orange juice. Only when the clerk bends beneath the counter for another handful of peanut-butter packets does Andrew notice a pink highlighter jutting out of a Styrofoam cup beside the cash register. “Actually, could I get a few more?” By the time the clerk rises again with a double handful, the pink highlighter has leapt into one of Andrew’s deep jersey pockets. “What about a spoon?”
Ostensibly racing or fleeing the Mustang crew, Andrew doesn’t last more than an hour on the darkening cycling trail before he stops at a picnic table (oh, the civility) to dig out postcards, novel and highlighter.
Austria:
A,
If you’re lugging any brain at all along with your pack, travel will make you a Marxist, though Groucho’s your man, not Karl. Vienna is a conveyor belt. Starfucks on one side, DickFondles on the other. I want to see architecture. Instead I see fatties looking up from their guidebooks.
I hear rumours of an annual summer convention / competition for pickpockets. They choose a city, descend en masse, and pluck away. No wonder. Another day here and I’d pick my own pockets.
Heading to Turkey to skip class,
You Betcha
What, he only now wonders, is he doing on this ridiculous bike?
Prague,
Even I love Czech beer, you idiot.
That’s a chandelier made of human bones. Very huge. Very thrilling. From an ossuary outside the city. S’posedly there’s at least one of every bone in the human body. Short ones connected to the long ones.
What’s that bike of yours made of?
—Plan B
Here and now, riding what should be a cyclist’s dream, an unhilly, carless trail of more than one hundred kilometres punctuated by hand pumps of potable water, he wants Betty more than he wants rolling speed and the aggregate pleasure of the kilometres rolling on by. Opening his half-novel and turning it sideways, he writes perpendicularly across the type with the pink highlighter.
YOU ARE
MY PUSH &
MY PULL
Conserving paper for fires yet bursting on with telegrammatic brevity, he flips onto the next pair of hinged pages and continues. In the moonlight he can just make out how the translucent fuchsia ink of the highlighter picks up random black letters from the novel, like stray iron filings plucked from the sand.
His cyclist’s half-gloves could be the hand protection of a tombstone engraver. In this privately lapidary mode he is finally wise or honest or both.
MISS YOU
LIKE CRAZY.
LIVE W / ME.
Or I’ll live with you. The bike is now a stockade. Clipping back in is punching at the cancerous factory, crewing up on the low-riding fishing boat. Something like 115 kilometres left to Rivière-du-Loup. Until now, his credit card has been useless mass, a precautionary rectangle. He could book a flight at the nearest ’net café and ship the bike to K-town. Train to Montreal. Flight to Madrid. Clothes somehow, somewhere.
Home may well be where the heart is, and biking to Kingston in the dark of night, halfway there, he realizes that his heart’s no longer in Kingston. In one of their winter arguments she’d asked him why, only then, was he ignoring Stan’s wishes and pressing on with what he wanted despite Stan’s plan that he sell the house.
“Aren’t you defying the father a little late?” she partly asked and partly taunted.
“Every time I shave, I rinse his whiskers from the sink. If I bend my wrist, like on the bike, I see his hand in the back of mine. I’ve had to leave his body behind. I’m not ready to leave our house.”
Nine months ago he was utterly certain of those feelings, yet now, cheeks and neck covered in a beard drenched with sweat, he finds his father with him wherever he goes. He gets back on the bike.
59
Only as wide as the muscular legs that have carved it, a single-track bike trail can start on nearly any run of land. Beside an arena. Behind a medical centre. The unassuming, unannounced brown trail at the rear of a neglected municipal park could be one thread of a gigantic network spreading across the city into the bordering scrub and distant forest. Heterogeneous terrain and topography are pulled together by the hard-packed trail. Chalky limestone and low, tight trees give way to tall grasses then clusters of pine, seams of maple. Soon enough these thickets yield again to littered urban scrub. Car tires dumped in the night. A washing machine rusting on its back. The narrow trails wear no signs, endure no bylaws and easily go unnoticed.
In Kingston, Andrew had been guided to the trailhead of what would become his favourite ride by a vague rumour from a half-acquaintance met at a grocery store. Been riding? Yeah, up behind the base, the north side. To hunt for a rumoured trail was an exercise in patience. Chasing the promise of a new route, his legs would chomp at the bit to ride quickly, when in fact he had to ride painfully slowly, eyes peeled for any break in the shrubs or for muddy incisions in the grass. Trails were often purposefully hidden, entrances cut between two slim trees or behind a boulder. Hidden from hunters, landowners, even other riders. Some people ride for the adrenal and aerobic rushes or the self-propulsion or the changing land. Others, Andrew grew to suspect, ride for the isolation, the removal from daily life. Aside from the Prairies and southern Ontario, most Canadian cities still have patches of forest around them. Judging from the hidden trails he has seen and the riders who prefer to ride on rather than stop and chat, Andrew concluded that some riders were trying to bike away from useless small talk and a life of just working and shopping. Other riders, he also discovered, were already half your friend. If this is how you like to spend your time, you’re okay by me.
Picking his way along one stretch of Kingston’s Fort Henry trails, looking for a rumoured extension, he once heard the telltale zip of another rider snaking through the trees. Andrew looked up to see a rider about his age in a sleeveless blue jersey racing along the trail atop a yellow bike. Forests crawled and reached with their greens and browns, while riders shot through them in the brightest of test-tube colours.
Here, at an intersection of new trail, Andrew paused as the other rider approached. He did some sustained drinking and spitting as the other became audible, visible, then finally close enough to chat.
“Nice curves, eh?”
“Yeah. Total roller coaster.” The other rider stopped, clipped out and straddled the frame, the cyclists’ equivalent of idling his pickup or drawing up a barroom chair. He was a few inches shorter than Andrew, but beefier. Chiselled, tanned arms sprang out of his sleeveless jersey. A vaccination scar rode low on a shoulder rounded with muscle.
“What’s your usual route?”
“I’m up and down off that double-track ridge most of the time. String of pockets on the right. Two left near the end.”
“That’s it?”
“Hey, lead on if you’ve got more.”
They were off.
“Andrew, by the way,” he said to that bright blue back.
“Mark.”
They traded maps with clicks and snorts, ground a little borrowed land.
60
Everybody begins with just one jersey. After the bike, after helmet and pump and tools, usually after the cushioning gloves (function before fashion), certainly after the padded shorts comes the breathable, synthetic jersey with its sweat-wicking tech, its tall pockets for the low back, its zippered Nehru collar. This is another migration. You ride away from your densely packed closet, your bulging drawers, into slick singularity. For life, you have one or two dozen shirts; as a new rider you have just one. Absorbent cotton is inad
equate for the new land, the new machine and its new body.
When, sick of wearing yesterday’s reek, you graduate to a second jersey, you search store racks and catalogue pages riotous with colour. Fear of cars driven by people who only notice other cars, or fellow riders cutting around with night lamps, or deer hunters who shoot first and look later pours only the brightest colours into cycling jerseys. The uniformly black cycling shorts are offset with canary yellow shirts straining for flight. Magenta spills from test tube to shirt back. Yves Klein has gone cycling. Here, at last, women’s sport clothes are spared the infuriatingly condescending pastels.
The centuries-long international race between inventors of all kinds — blacksmiths, wheelwrights, even coopers — to perfect the “feedless horse” was a race to wed the human skeleton to a constructed one, to replace the expensive horse and the fixed route of the train with a self-propelled machine devoted to individual whim. Now, today’s sweat-clever jerseys emblazon the logos and icons of contemporary bike manufacturers onto the chests of riders willing to pay a company to do their marketing for them. Chemical brightness and syntheticness continue along the shop racks of jerseys to emblazon cartoon characters across adult chests. Even in his cycling apprenticeship, Andrew disapproved of this garish arrested development. More than just immature, these cartoon mascots are also mutinous, a bright agreement with those drivers who think of the bicycle as the tool of children, those Westerners who let their bike chains dry and rust, their tires deflate and crack with the acquisition of a driver’s licence. Opposed to this frat boy consumerism, and clearly speaking from the side of the road, are the message jerseys. World Peace springs from a kelly green jersey atop yellow chevrons. Choice, choice, choice stacks into a downward pointing red delta on the women’s rack. In cycling, gay pride’s rainbow banner is a jersey.
Only at UNS would he learn that more colour in a garment generally equals more pollution. Find a shirt, any shirt, that hasn’t been dyed in Asia. T-shirt, dress shirt and cycling jersey all make their dip where the labour’s cheap and the environmental laws are non-existent, unenforced or dissolved with cheap bribes. The Tirupur region of India exports nearly half of that country’s T-shirts, and more than ten per cent of the toxic dyes are dumped directly into local rivers. Every year the colour of river water changes depending on the latest Western fashions. Yet no ride is possible without drinking water. Eventually, the pull of thirst will beat the push of the legs.
Early last spring, when Betty rushed upstairs with a package from the day’s mail to change into a new Girls Love Dirt jersey, a jersey she had presumably ordered from one of Andrew’s catalogues, her grin was as uncontainable as it was enigmatic. This olive green jersey combined slogan and image, so the phrase and a faux hand-drawn female stick figure (complete with bulbous helmet, stringy hair, double-scoop boobs and a determined grimace) rode Betty’s breasts together, snugly. This terrain and her irrepressible grin made the jersey’s baptism of fire a short one. She walked down the stairs, they traded smiles, then walked back up together. For ventilation, jersey zippers generally go to the solar plexus or even the navel. They took hers down slowly. Inaccurately, he had thought that her new jersey marked an increased interest in cycling, that Tuesday’s private fashion show of the snug Girls Love Dirt jersey would be followed by a weekend ride together. Thursday morning, however, she came downstairs riding dirt to class.
“You’re serious?” he asked, pointing one of the fingers he had wrappedaround a juice glass at the jersey. If she hadn’t been loading a knapsack she would have noticed that his finger was quite specifically aimed at the jersey’s low-riding zipper.
“I can’t let the BFA students hog all the synthetic clothes,” she finally replied, crossing the room to squeeze his outstretched finger and steal his juice.
“Clothes? Off-trail that’s not a shirt; it’s a tit-delivery system. Have you seen you?” He cupped evidence.
“Easy . . .”
“No, it’s not easy. Not easy to keep my eyes off you, hands off you — off them, this.” He pinched the dirty shirt.
“Eyes are not hands, are they?” She disengaged then crossed to another cupboard. “Relax,” she finally said, “I know where I ride.”
61
As an architect, Elaine had showed Andrew how older homes such as his don’t always hide their renovations. A square of paler hardwood floor announces some later desire, a duct replaced, a chimney removed. Incised mouldings say new wall. A thoughtlessly severed joist confesses that the basement predates its staircase. The same is true of roads and trails, but who sees this from a rushing car? Surely much of the fun in the speed of driving is its immunity to distraction, its totality, its blinding absorption. This captivation is monotonal, though, unidimensional. Tour on a bike and you will occasionally miss that speed, will marvel at its kilometre-devouring efficacy and recognize the allure of its Prozac vapidity.
Riding on the old Petit Témis railway after reading illustrated displays about it just two hours ago, Andrew constantly sees the old rail in Le Petit Témis’s new trail. When his skinny bike slides through the first pass blasted out of solid rock, he can feel the evolution of transportation on either side of him. With its paradigm-shifting movement to two in-line wheels, not two or more pairs of wheels, the bicycle is so uniquely a machine of the two-legged human body. Yet the curve and grade of land beneath him hold memories of rail. He pauses between sheer rock walls of two to five metres, walls blasted and cut with nineteenth-century dynamite and muscle.
Between these chutes of solid rock, the surrounding land develops unevenly around the former railway. For stretches of three to five kilometres at a time, cross streets intersect the trail regularly, adding one or two shops and making cafés out of old train stations. Farther ahead, new homes abut the long-abandoned railway. Free from much light pollution and rolling quietly, he can smell lake water just before it appears alongside him. Lac Témiscouata sparkles and gurgles in the moonlight. If he had biked south instead of west after hobbling the Mustang he would eventually have hit upstate New York’s Finger Lakes. Here in Quebec, riding alongside the moonlit Lac Témiscouata, he sees both its inky water and the maps of it he’d been staring at in the garden hours ago. Like New York’s Finger Lakes, Lac Témiscouata is long and skinny, but unlike its New York cousins, this finger is long, skinny and sharply bent. On a map, Lac Témiscouata looks like one of Stan’s unamputated fingers, crimped into its lock of bone.
When Andrew reaches the middle knuckle of the lake, water, trail and a secondary highway are all yoked alongside one another. A quaint lakeside inn is ready for the traffic. Braking for a historical plaque, digging out his flashlight, Andrew acknowledges that he has read more local history in the past three hours than he has in the past decade. This one’s written in French only, so his legs get a longer break as he dredges his translation out of the plaque’s heavily embossed brass letters. On this, ye olde merry spot, a rich man kept his mistress. Enjoy your stay.
There’s probably a dock around back of this tiny inn. He’s tempted to dive in for a brief swim to soothe his rashy crotch. This finger lake could give him a good scratch. No, still too public.
Finally the trail is swallowed in total darkness, its gravel line almost lost to sprawling, unlit black. This immunity from surrounding traffic questions the days he spent dodging trucks on the side of the highway. He relaxes into the evenness of the trail’s steady grade and the privacy of his ride, finding them perfect for this first and unplanned night ride. He should have switched from highway to trail long ago, as soon as he could have. This is a different league, not a minor one. Soon it’s also absurd.
Just one metre before he will roll onto what he swears is an endless lawn, he spots bilingual signs announcing that he is about to bike across a golf course. No locked gate bars his ride through the links. Motion sensor lights do not fire on and off as he slips onto lawns even more manicured and carcinogenic than those he normally passes. Utterly skeptical of this green
intersection, he passes into even greater absurdity at a fairway traffic light. Negotiations, land deals and bylaws combine to spread today’s golf course around yesterday’s rail line. A small traffic light attempts to spare runners or cyclists from drives sliced or hooked. Protected as he is by the cloak of deep night, he nonetheless obeys, then more than obeys, the traffic light.
He doesn’t just stop; he dismounts. He gets off the bike and stretches his tired body out on the smooth lawn.
Poisoned though it is, the soft, endless lawn is irresistible. Stooping to stroke its choked greenery, he can’t help but drop his bare knees into its cool, damp, agri-chem softness. Stretching his hands out here on the world’s largest yoga mat he isn’t two minutes before he empties his jersey pockets so he can loll and uncurl. Neither clammy skin, nor knotted muscle, nor burning crotch (What is going on down there?) can feel the herbicides that skin frogs en masse and drip tumours into the drinking water. A golf course, that realtor’s jousting field, is also a sore back’s dream, a masseur’s table. Here in the dark, the lawn is felt more than seen and the feeling is good. Oh, to tack out his shoulders. The back of his skull becomes a pestle to the lawn’s green mortar. Spread-eagled on the indecently soft lawn, he wonders at the stars and the unknown black around him. Simultaneously, though, he is crushed by an exhaustion built of more than just the ride. He was right a few days ago in thinking we wouldn’t be the culture we are, maybe even the species we are, without our masochism. But that masochism is part of an equation, and pleasure, possibly even wisdom, hangs on the other side. His bike frame has become an unbalanced equation.
62
Why did Stan feel the cold more than the heat? If he could burn a finger without even noticing, what, in fact, was cold? Andrew would continue this autopsy for years after Stan’s death, slowly understanding that crumpled body that during Stan’s life constantly had him doing damage control. Cold on his night ride, Andrew finally understands his father’s fickle body. Numbed, Stan was even less coordinated, felt even less. He wasn’t grimacing and snarky out of pain, but fear.
The Push & the Pull Page 16
