The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  Asking a car to be fridge or pantry, he might find a protein bar and maybe even a bottle of water in some urban car, but such a car would be locked. Instead, here are two rural pepperoni sticks for the taking. For the brief walk back to his bike, they are arrows in the quiver of his hand. By the time he reaches the bike, before he even mounts or rides, the first arrow flies at his stomach.

  Just as you never forget how to ride a bike, you also never forget the sensation of chewing meat, no matter how long you might be a vegetarian. This Herculean mouth-work is unforgettable. Betty and Andrew liked to joke that vegetarians are made, not born. Meatless living is their chosen country, not their native one. In this second country there are inevitable translations and comparisons, even unwelcome ones. Kalamata olives are the seared beef of vedge kitchens. If frozen first, firm tofu crumbles into shepherd’s pie and chili to forge the protein and texture of ground beef if not its (dyed) colour. Phyllo pastry basted with soy sauce can be baked into the skin of a kinder, less toxic chicken. But no food other than multi-processed red meat has this tenacious elasticity, and not only in texture but also in its density of taste.

  From years of distance if not disdain, Andrew knows that meat is the food of the long haul, a haul few of us actually take. To him, to date, the energy one’s body spends breaking down meat’s ropy strands doesn’t seem profitable for daily life. Given our mouth full of flat teeth that grind well but tear poorly, red meat seems like the food of emergency savings, yet North Americans use it for daily chequing. Eating meat is the hard-rock mining of digestion.

  Shiela, a friend of Stan’s, taught ESL for decades and so met a changing cultural mirror of both Canada and the world in that meeting point of those who needed to emigrate to Canada and those whom Canada needed to attract. The initial contact with Italian and Chinese communities of Shiela’s predecessor gave way to a shifting map of Southeast Asia and a brief spike of Eastern Europeans for her. As so many writing assignments involve photographs, Shiela saw glossy print after glossy print of one post-Soviet student after another smiling incredulously in front of an entire wall of meat at the grocery store. Juris proudly held a steak across the majority of his chest. Smiling, Vlad cradled a basketball-sized ham.

  When disgust does finally squirt into Andrew’s mouth (after joy and relief and a deep-burning pleasure), it’s not for the death, the absent piggy squeal, or because of the cannibalism glimpsed in this unforgettable chewiness, this mouth-leather; it’s for the tenacious oil spill. Here in his mouth is the exact taste of his bile below, and it lingers far past the lengthy grind of molars or the forced cram of the epiglottis. His repugnance is not that of the abattoir, but of the ingredients list. His years hoping that clean food coming into mouth then body will clean and clarify his life are here not disproved. His molars and tongue are slopped with chemical waste.

  Back on the bike, he injects the second stick as well, but not so easily. A series of wet belches temporarily level stomach and mouth and physically remind him again and again that he is eating bile. The final cylindrical morsel is practically a bulimic finger going down his throat. He quickly loads the tablet of stolen gum into his mouth, although this, too, is an entirely predictable failure. This cloying squirt of sugar in his mouth is a purely synthetic taste, some saccharine tang, and its cheery pink burst is no antidote for the bilious spiced pork. The new taste of the gum simply layers onto that of the meat. The fake sweetness of the gum’s syntho-berry taste hangs over the rank, vomitous smell of the pepperoni stick like some counterfeit floral spray spritzed over the jagged smellscape of a horrific shit in some cramped bathroom. His naked chest heaves.

  92

  Pat should have known that Stan would get her back through the mail. Her letter to Stan had been, she’d hoped, mercifully brief. His reply, mailed to Gordon’s new Ottawa office, wasn’t even a letter. It was a list, and a short one at that.

  Divorce, with its unwelcome comparisons and radioactive knowledge, suddenly made Pat into a forensic typing expert. Sorting through the office mail in Ottawa a week after she had written Stan, she found a slim envelope with a typed address but no name. Every other envelope to cross her new desk was addressed with the crispness of an electric typewriter. In her hands she saw the old wispy hammer strokes of the portable typewriter Stan had used throughout university. Now he’d used the typewriter to conceal his doubly shaking hand. But of course she could still see everything, the dust riding the case of the old typewriter, paper in the third drawer, the cranked arms of machine and machinist. She could even hear the brief, one-fingered pecking climb up the stairs to Andy’s room.

  As for the envelope’s lack of a name — not even just Pat — she immediately had two theories, each of which she knew he wanted her to have. Whatever distance they still had to travel to a legal divorce, she certainly wasn’t Pat Day any longer. He could have used Patricia Thompson, her maiden name, but they both knew she had outgrown that name as well. She was no one’s son. What ridiculous phrases. Maiden name. Keep her name. What century was this? Of course these too familiar, too simple thoughts simply meant she was stalling, her brain slipping into its indignant neutral, not opening the envelope that, in ways, she had mailed to herself.

  One page. An unintroduced list, not even a title. Not “Four Conditions.” Certainly not the inarticulate “Four Things.” Not even “Consider.” Without the numbers, it would have been the worst poem she had ever read.

  1. He decides.

  2. The house.

  3. Never speak to me.

  4. St. Urbain’s.

  As her eyes clouded with tears, she understood the second reason why Stan had addressed the envelope without a name. He didn’t care if Gordon saw her letter. Consider everything Gordon got to see.

  93

  Contrary to expectation, Andrew was not hurt when Mark’s helmet butted into his beside the deer bed. This fundamental lack in what was still a delivery of force, this jerk from abs to crown, destabilized more than just his feet but injected no significant pain. Mark stepped forward as Andrew stumbled back into the tall grass. Thoughts stopped coming in lines and now pulsed irregularly. The grounding of Andrew’s heel and his leg’s redirection of Mark’s next shove was like the fluid loading and unloading of his bike’s rear shocks. The load and transfer of force rose from inarticulate sensation but didn’t quite become thought by the time that force had passed Andrew’s hips and swum into his arms to grab the advancing Mark and pull him over a braced thigh. Seeing the brief arc of Mark’s head and chest toward the grass, Andrew definitely had the thought — spun a small roulette wheel of ifs — that he must now retreat from or advance onto Mark’s briefly prone body. But Mark wasted no time calculating ifs and whats. When his arms met the ground, he loaded his body weight into them while hooking Andrew behind the knees with one leg. Mark sprang back and pulled Andrew down simultaneously. Turning his head slightly, Andrew took the fall on the brow of his helmet and was again briefly amused at the absence of expected pain. Then a knee found the back of one of his, then a mouth the other.

  He could never forget the helmets. When Mark’s lick and nibble leapt from the back of Andrew’s knee to the low of his back, he expected and wanted the curve of a forehead, not a helmet, to hang above the munching lips and flicking tongue. In the logic of appetite that sex stretches over the flesh, the mouth leapt from the unexpected to the inevitable, yet that same expectation couldn’t quite compute the hard, bulbous crescent of a helmet wheeling in the low of his back. Lines hard and soft were drawn and redrawn in the tall grass.

  94

  In the middle of the night, riding on a dark highway, the rolling belches of spicy pepperoni aren’t as worrisome as the sloshing at the other end of his stomach. Recurrent rehearsals of vomit help him to ignore the wet mutiny hatching even deeper in his intestines. Fear, cold, exhaustion, shame, pepperoni and the ditchwater he drank have been percolating in his empty stomach for hours. Given this intestinal cramping, the angles of the bike frame, with th
eir levelling of ass and head, feel like the most vilely attentive scatological demons of Hieronymus Bosch hunched there with their numerous teeth and dutiful scoops. When the diarrheal sneak-attack finally makes its intestinal putsch, voluntary defecation is only its first casualty.

  In a bid to save his shorts, Andrew locks his brakes and drops to the road as quickly as possible. His years of contentedly urinating from astride a bike make this sudden, quick lowering of it feel much like the lowering of a toilet seat. This comparison occurs just before the sight, sound and stench of his bottom-spray causes or permits the pepperoni’s rise back out his mouth. Few human bodies will travel life’s years without at least once suffering this simultaneously bi-directional revolt of the intestines, this viral flossing, but many can hope for the helpful porcelain furniture of toilet and sink, not a cold, hard road. Out-wrestled by the deepest muscles of the body, he is quickly dropped to hands and naked knees. Cold sweat smears his dirty brow. Last to join this prison break of internal liquids are the hot tears that pump out with slightly different abdominal heaves.

  Betty, you’re right. I can’t keep it together.

  Dropped to all fours on an asphalt so cold it feels hot, heaving and weeping, a tiny bit of his brain still knows this is temporary. He is palsied by a total lack of warmth, by fatigue, hunger and bacteria, but still he eludes the obvious permanency of Stan’s disease, that chromosomal tick, that glitch in DNA or chemical bond, in ring or strand ruinously bent, in enzyme over- or under-secreted. Two wet and busy tear tracks run down his cheeks as he climbs back onto the frame to roll one foot, then the other. A single thought keeps him going, has, in ways, always kept him going. Better him than you.

  95

  After Andrew watched Betty flee their restaurant dinner with his mother, he walked home alone to the fallout of his lie, knowing fully how wrong he had been, how singularly hurtful he had been to Betty. They were bright enough and had read enough to conceive of a life beyond the cheap psychology that related all adult shortcomings to childhood pain, yet no illuminating novel or dollop of cultural theory or memorable lecture offered an actual alternative. Everything that had brought them together, and not just together but together as them — the failed marriages, vegetarianism as a quiet revolt, remaking themselves with the right stack of books — also taught them how to wound each other uniquely.

  The first night alone he left the door unlocked, didn’t drink and wrote her self-reproaching emails late into his nearly sleepless night. The next morning, when she blocked his emails, he cut class to wait by the phone, knowing she wouldn’t respect that but doing it all the same. He didn’t let her prolonged silence shift him into defensive indignation about his being left to worry in complete ignorance of where she was or how she was doing. Finally, on the third day, he began packing her a bag: clothes, textbooks, saline solution and a three-word note that wasn’t wise to send. He’d catch her on her way into Film. Tonight he’d lock the doors again.

  He winced most with her first dresser drawer. He should have started with sweaters, not underwear. Job commenced, shame and idiocy acknowledged, he tried to ignore the swell of desire and keep on diplomatic schedule. The taunting thong, less offering so much more, had no place in a peacemaking bag. Reaching for cotton panties and non-black bras, his plan met its first doubt. How long? Two nights would seem too hopeful, even controlling, an underwear leash. At four pairs of panties he might as well throw in a list of available apartments. Three pairs in (still folded — how? — into her neat little squares) he worried about seeming too prudish, too protective down under, and in seconds he was standing in front of her closet holding up cleavage shirts and ass pants. Also inappropriate were his favourite clothes of hers. The blue corduroy bell bottoms would be smeared with unwelcome affection. The French cuffs he so admired would become handcuffs. The simple task of filling a bag with her clothes suddenly found him auditioning outfits, holding shirts at arm’s length then up to his chest. Skirts and sweaters were laid out on the bed, mixed and matched, combined and discarded. Holding a shirt up to his own chest, then checking it in the mirror, he found his first smile in three days.

  She had moved the full-length mirror in with her, but they had never mounted it properly. For the past five months it had just leaned against the wall of what they had called the dressing room. Now, as it appeared that she was moving out, he found himself cross-dressing vicariously. Chuckling at this, chuckling in part because he knew it would make her chuckle, at least the old her, he crossed the room to the notepaper he had left on her dresser top. He’d bought the flaxen notepaper specially, though his message was short enough to fit on a matchbook. It gets worse.

  96

  At dawn, soaking wet and spastic with cold, Andrew attempts to cut himself another bed of pine boughs. His jersey remains knotted about his wounded leg, so his back takes countless scratches as he bends beneath the tree that will be his inadequate shelter. Although the bleeding in his leg has stopped, he waits until his bed is made and he can stretch his leg out before he gingerly removes the jersey-and-booklet bandage. Blood has drained through the paper dressing to create scabs of type. Fortunately the blood appears to be dry.

  The rain has also ceased, but by now the ground and leaves around him are saturated. His putting on of a soaking wet, bloody shirt is as desperate as his opening of the emergency blanket’s cheap packaging. Without the shirt, the pine boughs would scratch and pick at him ceaselessly. Even with the shirt, his back feels perpetually stung by the hundreds of pine needles. The foil blanket is so thin he can’t risk wrapping it beneath his back and having it punctured.

  A need for warmth, regardless of cause, is exactly the reason he bought and carried this assembly-line emergency blanket. These little foil wonders are so popular they are available at dollar stores. And yet surely they stay unopened in their crowded first-aid kits or get forgotten in glove compartments crammed with tire warranties, pamphlets and maps. Unfolding the emergency blanket, he’s relieved and hopeful, but also dubious and worried. Blanket. Blanket. According to whom? Cut the legs off a chair, the philosophy cliché asks, and at what point does it cease being a chair? What is the essence of a thing, of a blanket? Heat retention, sure. Yes, this crinkling metallic film, which can fold into the space of a handkerchief (and weighs even less), holds a heat he hasn’t felt in days. Despite his being thoroughly soaked, the reflective foil traps whatever heat he has. His teeth stop chattering within minutes. Where, though, is the comforting thickness? The private insulation against the world? And the sprawl? When it covers his shoulders, the millimetre-thin foil barely reaches his knees.

  Cold feet and a fear of punctures in the back are not his only concerns. There’s also the admission. Emergency blanket. How do you keep breathing calmly after you have broken the in-case-of-emergency glass?

  He is warmer but far from warm enough. He cannot remain both cold and hungry, so he digs the knife out of his pocket and cuts a rectangle of the blanket off one corner. Removing the bungee cord from his leg dressing, he secures the scrap of blanket about his head to form a small, crinkling kaffiyeh. Tired enough to sleep on a picket fence yet too hungry for an easy sleep, warming finally, he remembers an email of Betty’s. This past year, while he studied and she travelled, he’d emailed her when he discovered that before Lawrence of Arabia rode camels across the desert he had ridden a bicycle across France as an undergraduate.

  You’ll hear people say he died in a motorcycle accident, Andrew wrote, but no one tells you the cause of his accident was avoiding two boys on bicycles.

  He’d been thinking motorcycle versus bicycle and experience versus innocence. She’d titled her reply Lawrence of Suburbia, teasing him once more, but the body of the message wasn’t so jovial. I can understand wanting to avoid two boys on bicycles.

  Now, hunting sleep as dawn breaks, perspiration clouding up his metallic kaffiyeh, Andrew remembers the opening of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom with shameful recognition. Some of the evil of my tal
e may have been inherent in our circumstances. Yes, Andrew admits as he drifts off, some.

  97

  In Andrew’s restless sleep beneath a half-denuded tree and a foil blanket, he is invaded by the strangest memories and images. Not just Betty, or Mark, or Pat and Stan, but old jokes, TV memories (those copies of copies), T.E. Lawrence and, the second-last time he wakes, of Stan’s professional rise and fall with Correctional Services Canada.

  Paul and Stan had been friends since teachers’ college. Fed up with a bloated, self-serving Ministry of Education, yet devoted to the Kingston sailing, Paul left the traditional classroom and colleagues complaining above chipped coffee mugs for Correctional Services work in this, the country’s prison capital. Surprised at the speed of his own promotion (and ignoring the rate of burnout), Paul quickly moved from applying for work to interviewing potential employees. One night, he came by Stan and Andy’s house for some after-hours recruiting. Andy poured them beer and snuck a sip from each glass before delivering them.

  “All right,” Stan said, palpably intrigued by Paul’s offer, “when do you finger the horseflesh?”

  “Now. This is it. Just me and a pen. And we actually have an office staff. Call this number and they’ll type your résumé.”

  “You do realize my billy club will need Sure Grips.”

  “We leave the billy clubs to the officers. Somebody has to hire wrestling fans.”

  When Paul — no longer a Kingstonian but another Ottawa bureaucrat — returned to the same kitchen a dozen years later, Andrew sat on the floor of an upstairs hallway to listen. Of course he couldn’t see through walls and floors, but he felt Paul down there in a kitchen so unchanged from the night of the job offer to this, its opposite. Paul’s even, timbrous voice floated past tired wallpaper and glasses gone cloudy in an aging dishwasher. The kitchens of Paul’s other friends had, no doubt, gone through this decade with more redecorating than pullout shelves, long-tab sink taps and photoelectric light switches.