The Push & the Pull (29 page)

After another hour on the road, gravity waits for his eyelids to flutter with sleep before snatching the front fork with a quick hand. He wakes just in time to see he is about to fall. Free of the panniers, he's able to counter with a hip toss, and rights the bike before his knee goes down.

His heart pumps waves. The cold is the panic, the panic the cold. Now that he's awake, his teeth begin chattering beneath his chin strap. His stomach, that abandoned old man, steadily moans.

Pat and Gordon leapt for each other at the last moment when North Americans admitted that work was arousing, that time spent together workday after workday exchanged more than memos. When cars were the size of islands and neckties were as wide as tree trunks, a man — even a politician — could still leave one woman for another and be just an individual monster, not the willing extender of monstrous and historic systems of oppression that victimized and blinded the feeble, impressionable Pat with power and cock. They found pleasure in his underwear, not hegemony. Here was the last possible moment in North America when they could be a simple philanderer and home wrecker, cut by friends but not newspapers, from dinner party lists but not the national party.

Happiness is not a crime. Please, Andrew. Eventually, if you

let yourself, you'll understand.

For more than a year after she left, Pat kept a journal. Divorce was a new country with new ways. She didn't question that suddenly she was writing in bed, not reading, hushing Gordon when he was there and better enduring his absence when he wasn't. Yes, she needed some talk with Gordon, and she got a passable version of it. But the old chats with Stan, even with Andy, these chats did not and would not stop. So she kept them going, privately but not futilely. Paradoxically, in leaving Stan she wanted to talk to him even more, to talk about what hadn't worked, who she was becoming, even what she missed. But that would've been unfair, reopening old wounds she had hoped to cauterize with the bluntness of her departure. If she could no longer talk with Stan, she'd talk at him.

A few years later, her journal put aside but not thrown away, she'd advise any friend who was divorcing to do the same. “Write it down first. That way you get it out and then you can decide whether to share
it.” A decade after that, she'd recommend a similar kind of journal to those early widows who began to appear in her circle. By then, she had resumed her own journal, writing to an even more absent Stan and an errant Andrew.

Only between four and five a.m., deep into a stupor of frigid fatigue, does he realize that the postcards and the partial novel he had parked behind him on the empty pannier rack have been in the pouring rain for hours. His first reaction to this recollection is not to worry about the fate of the book or cards, but to wonder if they could somehow warm his naked chest. If he had thread, could he sew together a paper shirt? Of course he has no thread. He doesn't even have dental floss any more, not to mention a toothbrush. A wet paper shirt wouldn't be very warm, but it might blunt the wind a little.

He doesn't turn around to look back at the stack of soggy postcards. Instead he simply reaches back with one finger to blindly touch a wet corner.

Notice how the word travel is very close to the French travail, to work? Lug the pack to Hostel 1. Wait until it opens. Find out it's booked. Slink on to No. 2. Find out 2 is full then watch later arrivals get rooms. Be insulted to your face. Starve. Bathe rarely. Race for trains. Wait for trains. Always carry too much of the wrong currency. Master the Italian phrases Bathroom? How much? Hello? Please, Thank you and Excuse me just as you move into Germany.

—
Working Girl

Riding with Mark he was always behind. The younger brother. A shadow stretched out. At the start of a summer ride with Mark, Andrew was grateful for the company, grinned at the protracted stereo of shaking zippers and clicking gears. By the time his swollen lungs had melted from his spine, though, the very air was merciless, indicting. Fifteen rides together, twenty, and he could feel a harder body emerge within him, could feel his heart annex more hot space. The last three rides, he had shot through the stump field perfectly. Now he too accelerated toward a dirt jump built up alongside a tree, loaded his shocks on the fly to clear a log on the other side before splashing through a stream and rambling up its bank.

Mark waited until Andrew finished the fast climb before announcing, “Never going to get your girlfriend to ride that section” and then sprinted on ahead.

Long past Fort Henry, a string of metal power line towers cut the forest as far as the eye could see. The wide strip of cleared land beneath the towers was divided into short and tall grass, with uncut green cover beneath their tires and two-metre-high brown stalks swaying in the breeze to one side. This rider's expressway served multiple pockets of single track, each carved by the unseen riders of yesterday.

Trails are communal veins pumping through the muscle of a landscape. No trail is ever built in a day, so when Andrew saw a passing, skinny stretch of broken grass he thought it could be a possible trail start, the recent exploratory work of just one or two riders. Andrew called, “Head on left,” then turned into the half-track of broken grass. He slowed down to start a recon in the man-high grass. What was Mark doing riding so quickly behind him? A nudging front tire was inferred, if not actually felt.

While the numerous blades of bent and dog-eared long grass in front of Andrew clearly recorded some passage, the ground itself had barely been touched. Andrew was not following a burgeoning trail
but an abandoned one-off. “I don't think this is anything,” he said. Tall grass swayed above them.

No brakes squeezed behind him. No indecision slowed their rolling pace. Why bent grass but not cut mud? Mud will hold tire tracks until the next big rain. “Seriously. Nothing. Wait, wait, stop.”

The line of grass broken at mid-height ended abruptly in a flattened circle. Andrew and Mark stopped and dismounted, bewildered at a one-metre circle of flattened grass.

“Deer bed,” Andrew finally concluded, extrapolating a deer's body from a large teardrop of toppled grass. The eerily stamped patch had them standing still in awe. Mark was the first to release his bike from his hand to let it drop into the tall grass beside him. Two-metre tall grasses swayed above their heads or drooped alongside them, sweeping and clattering in a thick August breeze. With no traffic audible in the distance, with a deer's absent body stamped here in front of them, Andrew recited, “But charm and face were in vain / Because the mountain grass / Cannot but keep the form / where the mountain hare has lain.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It's Yeats,” Andrew replied.

“That's what you do, memorize other people's words?”

Andrew would always wonder if Mark's stepping toward him at this moment, if the challenge in his jaw and step would've made “Fuck you” a better response than the “What words don't belong to someone else?” he chose, and what difference, if any, that would have made.

“That's the trouble with words,” Mark said, standing directly in front of Andrew's chest. “They're unclear.” He punctuated this last word by gently setting the knuckles of one fist against Andrew's damp, hard stomach then dragging them
un-
left and
clear-
right across his buzzing hips.

When Andrew set, but did not punch, his own fist against the hot wall of Mark's stomach, he felt none of the relief he had hoped for. Mark immediately set his second fist against Andrew's other hip. Each fist felt and looked ready to turn screws into Andrew's hips. To set his own remaining fist to Mark's free hip would exhaust this brief arms race. Then what? Each of them stared from tinted plastic glasses, flexed their jaws against the chinstraps of their helmets.

Rather than square off all of their arms, uncertain but not uninterested, Andrew used his free hand to smack his padded glove against the side of Mark's hip. And ass. Because his hand sought Mark's hip, he habitually expected it to meet some give and curve, the harps of his heterosexual past. Instead, Mark's hip practically slapped him back. His sedimentary layers of muscle grinned at their Newtonian return of force, their palpable rewriting of
ass
. First to leave the swaying grass was the slap's echo, then the sting in Andrew's hand, then his control.

Mark smiled as he reared back to knock the brow of his helmet into Andrew's.

If he finds what he's looking for within this string of rural houses, he might get in as many as twenty more kilometres before he pukes.

Elaine could tell him that the houses strung loosely along this rural Quebec highway rarely go on the real-estate market. When they are sold, legally and nominally sold, they are sold to children or nieces or nephews. When you see your great-aunt several times a month, you live in the country of house transfers, not house-selling. You live in deep country, family country. And you may not lock your car.

Food does get left in cars. Food of a kind.

If you were starving in the woods, friends, acquaintances and strangers love to ask a vegetarian, wouldn't you eat meat? If I were starving in the woods, Andrew invariably replies, I'd eat you. Rarely does he add, We're not starving in the woods, though. We're in kitchens, supermarkets and restaurants; we're in lineups, and never far from the bank.

The growing depths of hunger and fatigue have him so delirious he feels as if he steps away from the bike into an afterlife. One minute he is leaning against a tree, clipped into the bike's strong metal frame. Two steps away from the bike he is a ghost, shimmering with each squirt from his empty stomach.

And squirt his stomach does. The gurgling pancreas and dripping duodenum squelch on his approach to the first parked car. The parched liver thumps its tub in disappointment when the car is locked. By the third house he does find an unlocked car, a Chevette, but no food save for one hard little brick of gum in a waxy wrapper. A barking dog redirects him from the fifth house. There is food of a sort at the seventh.

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.