The Push & the Pull (18 page)

“Anything wrong?”

“No. Just form X by date Y.”

“God, it's taken a year and a half to settle your dad's estate?”

“Mmm? Yeah.”

In the late 1960s, the undergraduate Stan zipped through no exams more quickly than he did those of a baffled campus physician, then one specialist, then another as he complained of an inability to breathe in his sleep. Almost overnight he seemed unable to sleep in a bed. Suddenly, his lumber-mill snoring deepened into abrupt jolts in his throat. “It's like I hiccup myself awake,” he told one doctor, then another. Finally, he was admitted to a neuro-psych ward for tests and observation. For loved ones who come to know the sweep of hospital doors and the sharp smell of their bright corridors, admittance is very much an admission, a confession of seriousness.

Lying in a hospital bed, not even twenty-five, Stan then had no trouble getting in or out of bed or dressing himself, save for his lack of anywhere to go. Unknowingly protected from pain by the same neurological failure that was expanding its paralytic reach through his body, Stan was relieved one evening to hear his friend Larry's voice down the hall, long after visiting hours had ended. He inflated a little with each approaching footfall.

“Mr. Day,” a nurse announced from her starch and whites, “your lawyer is here to see you.”

Suit. Hardback briefcase. Confidence. Even Stan agreed that Larry the law student looked like a genuine lawyer. “Thank you,” Larry said to the nurse, turning to her with the complete expectation that she would draw the curtain closed before leaving.

“Well, Lar, thanks for stopping by.”

“Stopping by? Thank me for the beer.” Setting his briefcase onto the bed beside Stan's already skinny legs, Larry snapped it open to reveal six shining cans of cold beer.

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.

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?

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. Frankly, 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.”

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.