The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  “Did he ever talk to you about funeral arrangements or discuss what he wanted done with his body?” Pat repeated.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  But apparently he had talked to someone. Not twenty minutes after he was off the phone with Pat, a very polite and efficient member of the university’s anatomy lab and museum called and addressed Andrew by name. He, too, wondered if Andrew knew of any plans for Stan’s body.

  “Is there a time we could meet? I see you’re very close to campus. I’d be happy to walk over.”

  Typical of their ages and generations, Andrew had been more environmentally conscious than his father. He’d steered them away from fast food with equal arguments about health and waste. Stan had taken out the household trash for decades of his life, so he still thought of that job as something he should at least manage, if not do. Yet their recycling blue box came to the house long after Stan was still actually making trips to the curb. Andrew, not his dad, had clipped out the magazine article which showed that in the long run synthetic oil was cheaper, cleaner and better for the family car. But then in death, Stan had himself completely recycled. His kidneys and liver weren’t affected by spinal disease, so out they went. Naturally, his bones were the big prize.

  Unlike the funeral home staff, who used euphemisms one minute and invented new fees the next, the anatomy lab representative was honest, gratefully honest. “Andrew, we appreciate any offer of donation. But your dad came to us because he knew he was unique. Ours is the largest human anatomy museum in the country. I’m sure you already know how rare your father’s condition is. His will be the first preserved syringomyelic skeleton in Canada.”

  “Where do I sign?” Andrew asked the lab rep, more himself than he’d been since he biked home the night before. This first string that Stan pulled from beyond the grave helped immediately.

  “You don’t. He already did.”

  The representative reached out to shake Andrew’s hand.

  121

  The bike trip home was conceived in part as an antidote to school, however belated. He’d gone off to UNS thinking of the references he’d heard or read of September blues, that autumnal regret at not being back in school learning again, turning pages as the leaves fall. When he actually got to UNS, though, another consecutive degree felt more like homework than personal growth. Yes, he was learning; yes, he was challenged. The pace of the MA was harder, but in ways it was just more of the same. Biking, biking home, that would be the opposite of life in a library carrel.

  Now here he is pulling another all-nighter to make a Kingston deadline. The deadline is his own, absolutely. Why sleep on the ground when he has a house seventy kilometres in the distance? Still, he’s aware of how often he has pushed himself late into the night past mental and physical acuity with the Grant Hall clock tower pointing into the nearby night sky or Lake Ontario gurgling in the darkness.

  Now that he has taken to sleeping in the open air, he’s even more likely to sleep anywhere than he was when he still had a tent. After twenty more kilometres, this hyper-mobility of sleep begins to threaten his resolve to make it home tonight. Turning onto the lakeshore-hugging Thousand Islands Parkway renews his energy for another fifteen kilometres, though the road isn’t called a parkway by chance. Mini parks hang off one roadside or the other, sometimes both. He could be asleep on a soft lawn in minutes. His new plan for the house can wait a few more hours. It’s two in the morning. You’d really only be taking a nap. The sunlight will wake you up early.

  A thousand kilometres behind him, before the cigarette mustang, before Rivière-du-Loup, when he had briefly chased the other touring cyclist, he’d stopped because he didn’t want to be reduced to just racing. He had wanted more options than leader and led. That early trip, a ride but not a hunt, is barely memorable. Where was Nova Scotia?

  Now he’s finally sick of the limited role he has here as well. He hasn’t changed his clothes in days. Yesterday he ate four submarine sandwiches. Life is either on the bike or waiting to get back on the bike. He needs a bath.

  Because he is overtired and has biked into a nutritional red zone of low fuel and high energy expenditure, he’s convinced that riding has become a state of fear. Originally, he biked and looked, rolled and saw. For the last three provinces, he’s been checking his mirror constantly. His shoulders have been hunched for 850 kilometres.

  He doesn’t stop. Only home will get him off the bike.

  122

  Death makes you reconsider the telephone. As if extremely high or newly arrived from Mars, you marvel at the compact plastic rectangle in your hand. You press numbers, string a simple code, then slide into someone’s mind. Later that same day, your past will begin calling you up, friends, relations, obligations. For the end of so much that you know, Press 1.

  With Stan alive, the phone had been a palpable lifeline. There just in case, an ambulance just three digits away. Only in his year with Betty did the phone become something he learned to avoid. Let the machine get it. I prefer the company I have to the company which might be calling.

  With Stan dead and the house suddenly empty, the phone brought him back to the world. Somewhere in the line of police, coroner, morgue, anatomy lab and funeral home, there had been a news leak. Neighbours told friends. Ex-colleagues told friends. Nurses told physiotherapists.

  Just a few months later, living with Betty, he’d look back to answering those condolence calls of August as the last childish thing he did. Polite. Obedient. Trained. Thank you for your call. Thank you for your call. This is really happening. Finally, late in day two, he began doing more than just returning calls and used the phone for more than just making appointments or requesting forms. He reached Paul Tucker at his home in Ottawa.

  “Paul, it’s Andrew.”

  “Well, how are you, Andrew?” Paul asked. They had once shared those first dives of the morning, the lake as smooth as glass. The spill of mist.

  “Breathing, apparently. I wonder if you’d like to do Dad’s eulogy.”

  “I’m honoured. Of course I’ll do it. This is big of you.”

  “Yeah, well, hatred is a burden,” Andrew replied.

  He turned the ringer off for the next two hours while he ripped up the stained entranceway carpet.

  123

  Just a year later, Betty and Andrew knew she was flying to Paris at the end of August, and he to Halifax a few days later, knew this rationally and financially, mentioned it at least once a week. But only after the start of August did it start to become physical: the anticipatory aches, a house they would miss, sex elegiac or admittedly exploitive. And her (reconciled) mother calling all the time.

  “Now she couldn’t be happier,” Betty described. “She wants to meet me somewhere. Florence probably. What do you think?”

  “A nice hotel in an expensive city. Warm food. I’d say do it despite a parent.”

  “I mean you too, asshole. You won’t have bike school over Christmas.”

  “Probably not and I’ll probably come. But I may need to do a little research jaunt at Christmas.”

  “I forgot. Riding in Utah is research.”

  “I’ll probably come. I’d also like to drive you to the airport.”

  The night before her flight they did try to sleep before the four a.m. drive to Toronto, but where was sleep in laughter and tears, in your body and mine? Rosy-fingered dawn found them in the thick of the 401. They had lanes to watch, terminals to check.

  Security regulations would have demanded her freshly purchased Swiss Army knife travel in checked baggage, not carry-on. Because Paris was the destination least likely to require screwdriver or knife blade, he knew as her bag was hoisted onto the check-in conveyor belt that she could be days before discovering he had switched her knife for a nearly identical one. When she had showered that last morning, he had unpacked her knife, wrapped its replacement in a paper note (For cheese and bastards), then zipped her pack. A week earlier he’d had a shorter note engraved on the handle: Again. S
ee Again every day you travel.

  At the security check, he sewed this same word into each kiss. “I’ll see you again, I will. Again. Again. Again.”

  Her speech wasn’t much longer. Crying a little she pulled back, looked him in the eye and said, “Get it together.” As she turned, her shoulders were starting to shake, but she marched them down a bright corridor into a crowded lineup without glancing back.

  124

  Even by car, let alone bike, the westward approach to Kingston is anticlimactic. A discrepancy between legal and actual borders significantly distorts the posted distance from empty highway into actual city. In its last zoning land grab, Kingston doubled or tripled its circumference, so the well-lit Welcome to Kingston signs only welcome you to more wooded highway. So known are these false claims of distance that he refuses to become excited. He keeps the necessary slog going with guarded skepticism for so long that his private landmarks finally catch him in near disbelief. Here was a parking-lot pee with Stan. Here the turnaround point on his one bike ride with Betty. Finally, the city’s spill of light grows closer and closer. Then there are the familiar exits announcing the city’s prisons, colleges and the military base. Home. Halfway home.

  As the prison capital of Canada, Kingston has a density of halfway houses for the recently paroled that is disproportionate to its population. Re-immersion into society is there buffered with a few programs and rules, similar company and cheap living. An observable and proximate concentration of temptations (young flesh, house after house with inadequate protection and portable electronics, walking distance to rivers of alcohol) and absentee landlords unconcerned with neighbourhoods have placed several of these halfway houses in the city’s student ghetto. Halfway house. Returning, Andrew is caught again by this phrase. Halfway house. Twelve kilometres away and he’s still only halfway home.

  125

  We are each alone at funerals. Andrew’s friends were there, the older ones slightly less awkward. More recent friends from campus hadn’t even met Stan. Not yet knowing the death of parents (those ambassadors of death), these friends and classmates generally reverted into well-dressed silence. All fine by Andrew. Huddling with them he was spared too many okays. Are you okay? Is everything okay? Heather, an ex-girlfriend eclipsed by just a few years, was lovely and bright. Until meeting Betty, Andrew didn’t yet know that he would have preferred a girl who called him on the extended length of his hug, who resisted his cheap press into her breasts. Mark was lithe and fit even in a suit.

  Hushed drapes swallowed all the low funeral sounds. Just as Andrew realized where his internal voice was going — Who’s the chrome dome beside Dave Westfall? Do you need to go now before it starts? — he saw Paul’s calm briefly break. In seconds, his middle-aged face ran through the gamut of grief: disbelief, pleading, anger, then fear. Looking away, looking anywhere, Andrew met the prompting nod of the funeral director.

  With quiet voices and light fingers, the staff directed Andrew and the efficient Pat into a side chamber. With friends nearby but now only half-visible, Andrew could partially feel Stan’s legs inside the suit pants he was now wearing. In the past few years he had fully grown into the suits Stan himself would have now been swimming in. Perhaps there was a little vanity, not just altruism, in Stan’s decision to leave his body to the anatomy museum. This way, his body wasn’t tucked inelegantly into one of his old suits. The knee that started bobbing in the charcoal trousers wasn’t sharply pointy like Stan’s, yet in the jacket his shoulders filled out a worn stretch in the fabric. Even the suit had a memory.

  A minister began to speak.

  126

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” Paul Tucker began his eulogy. “We’re here to honour and mourn our friend, Stan Day. To do so at all fairly, I’ll need to be funny and incisive. Can everyone else hear him? Okay, Paul, he’s saying, make it good. I’m honoured that Andrew has asked me to speak of Stan and hope that I can rise to the challenge.

  “Stan was one of the funniest, most charming people I have ever met. Once at a steak dinner, which ended a conference we were at together, I witnessed Stan win over an entire table of strangers in ten seconds. ‘Which one of you heartless bastards is going to cut this for me?’ was his request for help, and we were powerless to refuse.

  “Standing here, I know Stan wouldn’t let me off by just saying he was funny. Dig deeper, he’d say, keep going. All right, his humour was the intersection of his intelligence and his generosity. We could never forget the mind lurking beneath that body. Here was a man never without a book, the friend who would call your answering machine to recommend novels, who would lend you his and never ask for them back, though don’t for a second think he didn’t know where each one was.

  “It is both fitting and — I’m sure he knows — unfair that I begin today by speaking of challenge when challenge was so fundamental to every one of our thoughts about Stan. More on this later. Back to the laughs for now.

  “I’m not quite sure, but I think Stan got funnier as he got — what do I say here? — more ill? That’s not quite right. He’d been without pain for decades. His mind never had a cloudy day. I don’t need to search for a word to describe his sense of humour; I just have to admit to one. (Stan chose to call a spade a spade, and I can’t send him off with anything less than that kind of honesty.) Stan became funnier as he became more dependent. He wasn’t desperately funny, although he certainly had his share of gallows humour. Nor was his the scheming humour of an aging or ailing man trying to salvage waning attention. Stan was funny for two very Stanlike reasons: he was generous, and he was demanding. He’d make you laugh, even if you were a stranger, even at the expense of his own vanity, but he also didn’t hide the fact that he’d appreciate the favour returned.

  “Many of us here have had some experience with prison life. Everyone who’s been inside a prison knows something that in polite life we often forget: our bodies make statements. The body language in prison may not be nice, but it’s usually clear. Someone else in Stan’s body might have walked around with a posture or a face that asked for help or scowled in bitterness. Not Stan. When he needed your help, he asked for it. The statement his body made was much more demanding than Help me. Amuse me, his look liked to say.

  “And, of course, he didn’t just talk with his body. I’m not the only teacher or former teacher in the room. In honour of Stan, I’ll share a trade secret. At workshops and conferences you’ll see that many otherwise strict teachers suddenly become bad students: fidgety, disruptive and talkative. I once saw Stan interrupted repeatedly while he was trying to lead a workshop. He silenced his heckler with one choice word. ‘You can be lippy on your time,’ he told a guy half his age, ‘not mine.’ Lippy. What a word.

  “Stan was usually too courteous to be lippy himself, but several of his comments have stuck with me over the years (and by years I mean decades). When we were undergraduates, Stan sought me out one day to tell me he had invented a Latin motto for himself. (Forgive us: we had beards; we smoked pipes.) Tene nil, he told me proudly, Hold nothing. We now know that all of this bravery was to be required.

  “One more story. Just before he turned thirty, when his body showed a little, but not much, of the path it would take, he came knocking on my door late one night. His parents had died while he was still young, and he had carefully saved his inheritance, at least until that night. He knocked on my door saying, ‘I’ve bet their wad, gambled it all.’ He wouldn’t explain, just hustled me into the car. Soon enough we were holding bottles of beer on the front lawn of what he already referred to as ‘our house.’ His speech was brief and totally unforgettable. ‘I’ve never missed them so much,’ he said of his parents, ‘and yet the second most adult emotion I have ever felt is the recognition that I wouldn’t be who I am without having lost them, lost them when I did. To want them back is to not want me.’ There was Stan: ‘second most adult emotion.’ Second-most. I played my scripted part. ‘And the first?’ I asked. ‘Fear of failure,’ he replied. �
��I didn’t buy the house; we did. Pat and I. I proposed to her right here. Gambled it all. She said yes.’

  “I hope everyone agrees that all of Stan is in that speech. It is my honour today to chart that gamble. No, it did not run as he planned, not as he then would have hoped. But I also know from my countless conversations with him that he would not have changed his fate for anything. He paid heavily for his satisfactions, but never unnecessarily. I am absolutely certain, certain because of the shine he could not keep from eye or voice, from a visible relaxation I saw enter that body we all snuck our worried glances at, that life had no joy greater, more sustained or more complete for him than the son we all admire.

  “Andrew, your father had one word for you, one word that he used above all others, and certainly the one he used most naturally, most affectionately, and, I’ll concur, the most accurately. Quite simply he called you his prince. How multiply right he was. Is.

  “We all know that this father of a prince did not have an easy reign as king. Stan knew we want to be challenged in life, knew this and taught it. We want to be challenged and we think we’d like to be able to choose our challenges. And yet, as Stan knew, we must also be ready for those challenges forced upon us.

  “In closing, I’ll go back to that old brick house on Collingwood Street once more. I was there when the population of the house decreased. I finally knew that Stan had righted himself in a new life, had begun to meet a challenge he did not seek, when he took alittle of Shakespeare’s Richard the Second along with a glass of my Scotch. This, too, I shall never forget him saying: ‘You may my kingdom and my state depose, / but not my grieves, still am I, king of those.’ Although his kingdom would shrink and wane, he remained its king, never its prisoner.”