The Push & the Pull (5 page)

With this tour, he has biked into his fourth distinct mode as a cyclist, progressing from the independent travel of childhood to the high-adrenalin, whole-body workout of mountain biking to the leg and lung work of road riding and here to the least popular: touring. Now he is both road rider and pack horse.

On narrow mountain bike trails in Kingston, he had learned to dip his chest and steer with his oarsman's abs. His shoulders and arms shoved down against the force of calves and thighs. Pinballing down
a switchback hill, rear tire practically brushing his ear, he discovered the secret tool of the bike frame: those alloyed angles were designed to split his body in two, to pit north against south in a wrestling match between arms and legs. He learned all of that one muddy spring, riding day after day alone or with his riding friend Mark, who introduced him to new trails and more.

Now, hanging upside down from a fire tower, Andrew can only dwell on the past so long. He is inverted and exerting, head to the distant ground, legs pushing above him. Setting the soles of both shoes onto the hatch door, he makes a light diagnostic push of steady force. To kick or to shove? That is the question. A shove would be far more powerful, both legs, and he could use the glutes and thighs, the body's biggest muscles. But that could also be too much force, a squat and heave strong enough to send him hurtling down. Perhaps a single, knee-to-toe whip would be enough.

He shoves his way into a sweaty epiphany. The curved metal in his hands, and the controlled shove of the legs, this isn't just strength, but new strength — the leg strength of this trip, of its training and daily annihilation. Holding metal and himself, he rediscovers one of the dumbly profound lessons of exercise: the body can be changed.

The door and his shoulders begin to burst. As the door pops open, his back straightens completely and his forgotten jackknife, which had been tenaciously hanging in the lip of a jersey pocket, falls away. Fully inverted, he's able to watch the red knife plummet down the tube of ladder and cage, then finally bounce off a rung and land somewhere beyond his bike.

Uncurling and climbing up into the tower's panoramic brain, he has much to contemplate along with the view of rolling green hills. That he chose to smash his way in to get this view. That the survival knife has always been on his body and never consigned to a pannier; that he has felt it there as he walked into every restaurant, every men's room. That knife, which was once, briefly, Betty's, is now missing. And the search for it will be a self-inflicted delay. Better enjoy the view.

Shelves run down two sides of the panoramic windows. Pennies, paperclips and tiny scraps of paper litter the unclean and graffitied shelves. Only in a dusty corner of the floor does he find half a pencil. The slips of paper are about the size of a cinema ticket. He has just
enough space to print
sorry
and draw an arrow beneath it, but stops himself before he lays it on the floor beside the popped door. The useless word. The wordy word.

Up here, as at a campsite, as anywhere, really, there is no garbage can. He tucks the tiny note into a jersey pocket before lowering himself back onto the ladder. Climbing down,
sorry
at his back, he begins looking around, hoping to find the knife without undertaking a full forensic spiral.
Self-inflicted delay
implies there's a rush, a schedule even, as if the remainder of his MA isn't on indefinite hold back in Halifax (and his ownership of the Kingston house along with it), as if he even knows whether Betty is flying back on her original ticket or flying back at all.

In high school, Andrew started arriving early to Stan's bedroom to catch the late-night news on television. He'd wind up there to do Stan's trache tube and the hand splint anyway. By his final year, electrodes added to the nightly routine, Andrew had grown to feel both independently and vicariously lazy just lying there on one side of the bed watching the news.

“Do you need to see this or just hear it?” he asked, knowing that on the weekends Stan routinely glanced at a newspaper while the TV news droned.

“I can usually get by with just listening. Why?”

“Gotcha. Get your butt down and your arm up. Nightly reps.”

“Whoopee.”

Andrew's smooth arm, still bronze from summer, raised a crooked, pallid one. Circles for the shoulders — guide them, stretch them, resist them.

A few weeks later, the news circus found another euthanasia case to salivate over, legal cases, not policy or debate, being the only way North Americans contemplate euthanasia. When a woman's husband and parents spoke through different lawyers at different times into the same microphones from the same networks, Andrew once again stood at the intersection of Stan's slow body and his quick mind.

“Not to sound too eager here,” Andrew asked, “but have you thought of a living will?”

“Living will?” Stan replied. “What do you think you are?”

“Seriously. Ol' Hamlet Senior could have spared a heap of bodies if he'd had a better will.”

“Hamlet Junior could have spared a heap of bodies if he'd been clear on what he wanted. If
he'd
had a better will.”

“Just think about it, okay? A living will.”

“I have thought about it,” Stan said conclusively. “I'm saving all my fire for my
dead
will.”

Near Sackville, New Brunswick, bike and body smashed by cross-winds, Andrew tries to keep Betty's postcards from the devil's hand. Here, finally, is the cluster of radio towers that throw CBC Radio around the world. This anticipated landmark, this thrusting metal hand, marks his passage into a second province much more than did the flags and fake lighthouses of the official Nova Scotia – New Brunswick border one valley behind him. Here, at dusk the towers already glow with red lights. A dozen ruby rings flash from this reaching metal hand. What wired analogue technology of expansions and contractions transforms that metal into a radio transmitter while his bike frame rides by mutely? Betty, cock an ear, and I'll crank the miles, spin this buzz into song.

Read, fingered and sniffed as they arrived over the winter at his drafty Halifax apartment, and now read, fingered, shuffled, flipped and rotated at each nightly camp, Betty's European postcards have stowed away in his innermost pockets of memory. Their very inclusion here in the panniers, despite their useless mass, attests to his obsession for them, and yet that obsession makes the artifacts themselves less and less necessary as they become flashcards of memory. Paris: here I go. Turkey: you're an idiot. Amsterdam: something about fucking, either
Let's fuck
or
Why aren't we fucking?
or
I need a fuck
or
Where the fuck are you?
Copenhagen: who am I?

Originally grateful for his one novel's reliable escape, for the flights of nightly fancy off his dull Therm-a-Rest, he is now routinely dumb with fatigue within minutes of leaving the bike, eyes fluttering then not so much shutting as rolling back into his skull. The novel he tries to raise above his prone chest feels as heavy as a tombstone. Fingers, wrists and elbows launch labour grievances against after-hours work, for work beyond job description. Still, he can't understand the people who ride without a novel. There are numerous blogs by riders who
tour with video cameras but nothing to read. Enervated daily, he needs to find a story, not try to make one.

Compared to the heavy brick of the novel, the postcards are oblong fleas, little more than air and ink held in a rectangle. The cards have become his gospel, his tarot. This
homme pendu
, hung from the frame or tacked out on the Therm-a-Rest, sorts and resorts the cards each night, as if one spread or another, one new formation of image or text will spell out some message other than
You made the wrong decision
.

Even the address and postmarks are indicting. Dodging Stan's will, he tried to keep the Kingston house by doing a graduate degree, but three provinces away. Betty, and every smug European man she has met, knows that his studying in Halifax is an absurd way to try to maintain ownership of a house three provinces away. Her cards are mailed from every corner of Europe and are addressed to a Halifax apartment he has now vacated. He's carrying them back to Kingston and a house abandoned by everyone he has ever loved.

The briefest of cards, Barcelona, Gaudi's basilica, took no will to memorize, could not, in fact, be unmemorized.

We didn't break up.
We broke down.
— B.

One September Friday, when Betty and Andrew were still only classmates and campus acquaintances, Betty arrived at class in the wrong clothes. The short tweed skirt was both attractive and ironic, simultaneously swish and marm, but the chocolate-coloured tights — delicate and flagrant with every wound — weren't right for the battlefield that had become her apartment. Thin tights weren't armour enough against her roommate Sara or her boyfriend Dave. Her ex-boyfriend Dave. Thankfully, Professor Klonk was even more late than usual, no doubt held up by a late-breaking Beowulf news flash. Somehow Betty sat there, books on desk, nostrils ostensibly pumping air.

Andrew stole regular glances at her from across the mid-sized classroom. It wasn't that he had never seen her tired or irritable before. He knew from staring at her four thousand times that her left eyebrow was frequently a sickle sharpened on the whetstone of contempt. The plump bow of Betty's top lip would regularly flatten with rage as Professor Klonk tried to jump-start her biblically interminable lectures with some inappropriate, half-remembered example before stumbling along to an inconclusive end. From over her shoulder, he had watched her ignore the so-called lecture and read on, public and private life fenced with a turning page. Glancing at her reading in the library, he once saw tired fascination split into a silent chuckle. Pretending to browse the paperbacks and used CDs outside Of Things Past Antiques, where she worked, he had watched her enduring customers behind the counter and had occasionally gone in with a joke. Never, though, had he seen anything like this grey retreat around her eye sockets, this charcoal smudging around eyes that remained sharp and darting.

He switched seats conspicuously to move beside her and leaned in just a little before he spoke, “Betty, you should skip class and let me buy you a coffee.”

“Should I now?”

“Yes, right now. Maybe ol' Klonk is late just so we can go. C'mon, Chez Piggy.”

She reached for her books.

Walking downtown alongside him, looking at him obliquely in the mid-morning sun, she wondered. This wasn't the first time she had checked him out. In shorts, his tanned legs had a hundred facets of tight muscle. One look at the neat little box of his hips and ass and she could already feel the flatness of his stomach, the smooth line it gave to everything above and below. Forced out of her apartment by Sara and Dave, maybe she could cling to this Andrew for a while, anchor herself to his long back until the next disaster sent her spinning.

Something had mauled her and still her shoulders rolled back as she walked, hung off her spine like sailors high in the rig. She was in mid-fight, not defeat. Clouded eyes and gemstone cheekbones alike were raised to the late September sun.

Only when they finally sat for their cereal bowls of milky coffee did doubt draw a bead on her. Seeing fatigue, or worry, scurry across her face, Andrew leapt into a surprising but accurate British falsetto to superbly imitate the poisonous moth that was Professor Klonk's trademark voice. Aspirating viciously, enunciating perfectly while being dismissively inaudible, he forcibly recalled a chalky voice from a memory lane of now inaccessible British libraries, a youth traded for a trio of dead languages and a Merrie Englande free of the lager louts and footie of today's living isle.

“Bet-
TEA,
should you
FEE
-al your ed-jew-
KAY
-shun in lit-err-a-
CHURE
in
PEAR
-el, revisit Don JEWan before finDING me during my pos-
TED
office hours.”

“Thank you.” Suddenly she wanted to nibble him. His bottom lip. His cheek. She pushed a biscuit around her plate twice before she brushed a few crumbs into the bowl and erupted. “If you were to stop and ask me if a boyfriend was more or less likely to cheat with my roommate, I'd have to say more. That possibility grows with every shared bottle of wine, every thong hanging in the shower. I came home from a cancelled class and walked right into that . . . possibility, that possible life. I hate that they got to choose, that I got slotted. I knew in the entranceway, that crashing car kind of knowing. Even
the question was slow, naive. What's that noise? They're fucking, fucking.”

“You're not crying, not even close.”

“No. No. Housebreak, not heartbreak. I knew Dave was a dork. He's got more hair products than I do and walks around campus outfitted like he's going trekking for three weeks in Nepal. This degree, what, forty grand over four years? Like most people here, Dave treats it like a very expensive passport stamp. Stand in line. Pay. Welcome to the middle class.”

“And your roommate, this —”

“Sara. Friends since late high school. Maybe that's the problem. I don't know. Well, look, fourth year, I do my work, okay. Every day my bag's got enough books to crush a pony. I'm practically on shift at the library. With my degree, the puzzle's finally coming together: what I'm capable of, what I'm still reaching for, even a bit of the why. Somehow, sometime, Sara chose TV, design magazines and drinks instead of homework. I encouraged her a little, pointed a few things out, but hey, it's her life. When I work at home, though, I get this vibe like opening a book somehow criticizes her. I thought only mothers are this egocentric . . . We had vague plans of going to Europe together this summer. I'm not upset because that's not going to happen or that Fucko's out of my life; I'm upset because neither of these things should have been in my life in the first place. They're right, they really are. They're the ones who should be together.”