The damp cycling clothes they'd left in the hot sun had nearly dried. As Mark dug his arms into his blue sleeveless jersey, Andrew nodded once more at the gorilla.
“What do you want now that you're done wrestling?”
“We're always wrestling something.”
Riding in the dark, he can smell the rain coming for miles. Despite a bodysuit of cold and sleeves and pant legs of sweat, despite racing stripes of blood, he feels wetness growing in the night, feels a slight smothering of the wind down his naked back. This dampness brushing cheek and knee is a piano's tinkling prelude. First he expects a single poking finger of rain on his neck or a few potshots at his back to precede a machine-gun wave. No. The clouds crack open severely enough to dissolve earth from sky. Instantly he wears a skullcap, jacket and gaiters of frigid water. Cold expands across his back, growing from strips to bands to plates before reaching around for rib and nipple. The rain falls hard enough to bounce off the pavement, creating a second rain for his spinning shoes. Cold water squirms between his toes. Water gloves each finger, flies up his baggy shorts, straddles each hip. However temporarily, however speciously, the curtains of cold rain douse his burning crotch and draw attention away from his growling stomach. Cold replaces the inside of his body then expands its cavern of hunger with a frigid chisel.
Thunder cracks through the valleys frequently enough that its waves and echoes combine to overwrite each valley and cut a new landscape of boom and roar. Lightning tears the sky left and right to seam a new, vertical world. Still pedalling within this wet avalanche, he worries that he might be a horizontal lightning rod, a ripe fin of conductivity. Metal wedges up his middle. He holds a metal bar in the rain and repeatedly throws one circuit switch after another with feet clamped into metal pedals that ride metal crank arms. Supposedly the rubber tires on a car protect it from lightning. A car contains much more metal, but it also lays much more rubber across the ground. Do his bike tires meet the necessary minimum in the rubber-to-metal ratio? Is
grounding
really a function of having rubber on the ground or a deceptively tempting verb? Once again he sees how this entire trip rides on two thin sleeves of air.
Heavy, endless drops of rain flick his cheeks. This veil of driven rain and his defensive squinting hide the road. He pushes blindly into a road more felt than seen, relying on his legs to keep the hard road beneath him. A single lane of the highway is 120 times wider than his tires. For longer than ever before, he rides with his eyes closed, finding balance without seeing it. More than anything else, this blind balance would have been impossible for Stan. Daily, they had concentrated on keeping Stan's arms moving, keeping him feeding himself and dressing himself as much as possible. His sense of touch, that inner terrain, eroded steadily but invisibly. With his feet internally numbed, Stan stood upright more by sight than by touch.
Each time Andrew opens his eyes he checks for headlights raking this wet valley. There are none. The cars have pulled off. You can't see the road. I don't need to.
Pat endured nearly a year between her desktop defection and her supervision of Gordon's mounting the two dimes that he had used to undo her boot into the front door frame of their new Ottawa house. Drill a shallow hole into each side of the door frame, then use the strongest glue you can find to hold up those two dimes. I will walk through this gamble every day.
Leaving her job as a teacher to become what was essentially Gordon's Ottawa secretary scared her senseless. She had plenty to resent about teaching â the neglected parenting she was expected to redress thanklessly, the annual repetition of adjective lessons, pioneer lessons, the life among small minds. As a teacher she had felt under-stimulated and underappreciated. Once, when her mother had shown Andy a composite photo of Pat's graduating high-school class, Pat had taken the department store frame in her hands and counted off the women. Teacher. Nurse. Secretary. Teacher. Nurse. Secretary. How she had hated that crudely piercing trident. At least teaching meant university, although each of her parents (mother, how could you?) implicitly and explicitly clarified that finishing her degree was not the primary objective.
Beneath the fatigue of the first few years of teaching there was genuine challenge and interest. The near-total independence, the steady performance. She had discovered depths of strength, discipline and humanity she had never so thoroughly plumbed. After a few caffeinated years, though, she wondered if she'd been confusing career satisfaction with trench survival. Unquestionably, teaching was the most complex, varied and sustained challenge she had ever met. Having met it, though, she had to ask how much it could change, evolve; how much could she? Teachers are field soldiers, not parade soldiers: fit but tired, malnourished but battle-tough. Where was the retraining? The fresh assignment? Sparring with ten-year-olds brought her into shape, but what then? A lifetime of small teeth and
secreting hormones? There were no promotions to strive for, no awards to covet. A teacher she began; a teacher she'd remain. Thanks, but no (never enough) thanks.
Gordon, I'm smarter than the shoppers and breeders in the staff room. I'm smarter than your wife. Damn it, we both know I'm smarter than you.
Leaving husband, child, home and job, Pat literally drove away from her life to go work with Gordon, and she treated the three hundred kilometres between Ottawa and Kingston like an ocean. At first she wished they could have been farther away from Kingston. Be the MP for a Prairie wind patch or a Maritime ghost town. Drive from the fowl suppers to our foul bed.
She spent less than a month lying to Stan (until after the election: who was she any more?), while Gordon took six months to leave Sandra and Ben. If education is indeed change, what's more educational than divorce? Love should be courageous, not safe. Gordon, your son will survive your leaving if you let him. Mine must.
On those early, interminable weekends Gordon spent “home with his family” (that land mine of a phrase), she hated that she could be with him in under three hours, be with that skin she couldn't stop feeling, that body he was sharing with another woman. There were a few impulsive nights with him in her car in a Kingston parking lot, all this before cellphones or email. Sandra's icy voice on their home phone. Gordon's back-seat oscillation between passion and distance. He'd be in someone else's bed while she wound back to Ottawa with the smell of him, of them, still thick in the car.
He would joke about Sandra's equine stupidity, her blunders at dinner, her garish taste. And then he'd pack bags for Kingston, load shirts she had ferried to the cleaners.
“What do I do here, Gordon? Leave another job? Another man? I've given you time enough. What you call difficulty, I call one in every port. Her or me. If you don't choose, I will.”
On her weekends alone she could not dwell on the fact that in Kingston, Gordon was sleeping with another woman while across the same city, Stan now slept alone. She was alone in bed two nights a week, while Stan was alone seven, alone with that mutinous body. She couldn't tell him, couldn't tell anyone, that instead of running
off with another man, she had simply run off. Stan, my real selfishness here is leaving now so I can remember you at your best, so I can remember you, not your disease. If it's any consolation, I don't want children with Gordon.
While she was drinking gin and guilt in Ottawa, Stan wanted to jam his mitten fists into his mouth and scream while biting his knuckles. But his had been a long study of the possible and the impossible. He wore a straitjacket of impossibility, an armour of impossibility.
During her time as The Other Woman, the Ottawa touch, Pat tried to live off more than guilt, longing and fear. Night-class pottery. A little toe-wetting French. In her month of Tai Chi classes she had learned that the bones of her body had already set by the age of twenty-four. Twenty-four. Waving Hands Like Clouds, she looked back to herself at the altar at just twenty-three. All those troubled bones.
Twenty-three. She could easily have been swept out to sea by the cultural pressures to marry, pressures that would eventually see couples in their mid-thirties undoing all of the matrimonial work of their twenties. During her engagement, sensibly neither too short nor too long, her mother concentrated on Stan's Montreal suits and the report of his keen intelligence rather than on the crimped hand, the slight bow to his shoulders. Her house was small, her dresses too frequently mended. Her carpenter father simply asked, “Any debts?”
Only Lois, friend and, because of her question, maid of honour, dared to ask, “This disease, how bad does it get?”
“It's like a staircase going down. How far, we don't know. This could be as bad as it gets.”
“But children. Is it â”
“No. A one-shot thing.”
“So you're sure?”
“What is sure? I know he expands me, he makes life different, better. And I know I want smart kids.”
Although she was able to use the word
bravery
with Lois, she couldn't quite share her image of Stan as a knight. Precisely because his armour was dented and bent, she saw past cliché to see genuine bravery riding for her through the banal mists of engagement. She knew without being told that she could marry a boy or a man, a fun boy or a slightly ruined man, this was another of life's deals. As courtship
neared engagement, he gave her a copy of Mordecai Richler's sensational new
St. Urbain's Horseman
. The cover image was indeed a mounted knight (again, he silently fingered her thoughts, put noun or image to her instinct, shook coals when she smelled smoke). Inside, he had taped a one-word cover note over his brief inscription, requesting
After
. Only read the full inscription after you have read the book. Yes, dear.
What enormous private wheels turn in love. Those last few months she had known her feelings were deepening, had used the word
love
to herself and then to him, but had been unable to specify or itemize this growing respect until she spent hours behind Richler's corny image of a knight, until, three-quarters of the way through the novel, she read the line “I can be your wife or nurse, not both” and realized plenty. She thought of that line all through the next day's teaching then raced home to uncover Stan's inscription.
I agree, wife or nurse. I may need both, but I'll only want one.
Test everything, especially my courage.
Reading this novel he adored, talking with him a thousand times, she grew to see that the sparkling intelligence driving every one Stan's articulate sentences, that mogul skier's descending bounce off felicitous adjectives and judicious verbs, was itself driven by will and bravery as much as talent. Target first your own assumptions, your own vanities. Once, after she thanked him for finishing a thought she wasn't quite getting out, for switching tracks in a political disagreement they'd been having, he winked and said, “Hold nothing.” How often she would later wish that he could conclude his adult life, not just begin it, with that motto. Hold nothing.
Tene nil.
First to surrender to the cold night rain are his hands. Although the hands are not as distant from the core of his body as are his feet, the hands are completely exposed to the dual wind of the storm and his ride. Unlike on a mountain bike, where sometimes even your toes are needed to help you corner, on a touring bike the feet are basically stumps wedged into shoes. However cold, the feet are at least by now used to their reduction into mere blocks. But the proud hands prefer the individuated labour of thumb or forefinger changing gears or their synchronized curl around the handlebars. The cold, wet night undoes the evolution of his hands and chops off his opposable thumbs. For hours he has not gripped the handlebars, but simply rested clenched fists upon them. Gears no longer shift by finger or thumb. Pressing corners are found on fists squared by cold. His naked knuckles alternate between shades of white and purple. Even his wrists have gone numb.
Victorious in its coup, the rain has relaxed into steady totalitarianism. Sheets of cold rain oppress the dark kilometres. His frigid crotch no longer burns with itch, but he can feel it marinating anew in the constant wet of his soggy, ill-fitting hiking shorts. Any warmth his body finds will cause this freshly watered rash to grow. Water soaks him from tip to toe, and yet he hasn't swallowed half a litre in hours. Whatever heat he has comes from the endless pedalling, but what is he burning? The knees, knees, knees slosh a thinning blood through aching muscles and sprawling hunger. He regularly opens his mouth to the rain. Held up to the sky, his mouth is an aching funnel. Lowered back down, jaw dropped, it is a tiny net swept through cloud after cloud of rain. He trolls so long that his jaw aches, and still he rarely collects enough to swallow. After thirteen foodless hours, even his hunger has grown weak.
Thirst, hunger and fatigue, those mewling triplets of inescapable need, force him off the road in search of water. Cracking open his fists to slow and turn onto a side road, he is tackled by a numb dizziness
and finds a cold, naked shoulder hammered into the pavement. Neither hand nor foot breaks his fall. One entire side of his body â a spurred ankle, a stalled knee, a blind hip â falls heavily to the wet asphalt. He tries to crawl under the shelf of pain, mines the bright minerals of it glowing on knee and elbow. Perhaps he will stay here, spoon his machine into sleep.
Headlights pour into this bowl. He crawls out from the frame and limps into deeper shadow.
All water falls, and in this endless run of valleys besieged by rain, his is an unnecessary thirst. Water, water everywhere. Despite the steady trickle in either ditch of this hilly side road, he steps over one brimming ditch to momentarily forage in the woods, briefly deluding himself that minimally higher ground could yield cleaner water, or that this forest of slick branches is actually penetrable. He manages four zombie steps up a treed incline before stumbling. A conscious turn of the heel converts his near fall into his descent back to the flowing ditchwater. What sweet trickling music. At first, he doesn't plan on dipping his face into the ditch, but his brief search for a small dam in the flood soon has him kneeling in front of a tiny mud bowl. The first handful does little more than splash his beard and disturb the bowl. Small stones poke out from the mud beneath his knees as he lets the bowl clear. Finally, he simply lowers his mouth into the water. Rain splatters his back and slides down his sopping shorts while he camels away at the passing stream. A faint taste of salted mushrooms passes his wet lips as the sucked millilitres swell to litres. Christ, he'd love some cheese, a fat bomb of melted cheddar soaking into some greased vegetable. A zucchini heart attack. An eggplant aneurysm. Sitting back, he turns and looks down at the still bike and beyond to the dull stripe of the highway. He could piss here, now, shrouded in rain. He gets up.