“Selling crack would also get you to Europe.”
“You started a career with his fear of commitment. Why can't I do the same with his mid-life crisis?”
Andrew could see that one sink into Elaine's face. A long moment inflated before she turned away from Betty to face him.
“Andrew, thank you for the lovely meal. The favour is gladly returned.”
Round Two â “Are you sure you're all right to drive?” â was dislodged by the noisy arrival of the mover.
“Your fella there's going to have to give me a hand.”
Andrew implored Elaine to stay, offering coffee or a walk while changing his shoes en route to the door. By the time he was backing up the porch steps with the first terrifyingly heavy wall-case, both hands lost entirely to the weight, Elaine had started her car. Andrew nodded his farewell just like Stan used to, dipping one eyebrow as if stamping the air.
Rolling back into Ontario, he's ready to shed his stolen clothes. Tonight the sky's mixing bowl spoons out heat â damp, inescapable heat. Free from kaffiyeh and cape for nearly two days, he has also clocked nearly sixty kilometres tonight with the sweatshirt tied superfluously to the pannier rack. Finally, he is warm on his own pushed heat again.
As the countdown to Gananoque and Brockville lessens, he becomes certain he'll never need the sweatshirt again. A fungal pretzel, the filthy sweatshirt has drawn moisture in both directions, absorbing his sweat from one dark side and sucking humidity from the air with the other.
Just untie the knot. Let it slip into the night. Don't even look back. Given the rubber flak and the flung sacks of fast-food litter, what's one rag? Cotton, even. If he rolled back into the woods and left it beneath a tree, wouldn't some creature use it for a nest? No, this reek is pure human.
Neither justice nor paranoia prevents him from dropping the sweatshirt in a garbage bin at the next road stop. Utility, if not sentiment, endears him to the damp rag. If nothing else, it is a good pillow, an auxiliary bandage. And, should he have occasion to, it'd be something to show Betty, a tangible relic for his story. Look at it, try it on. It was tight to my chest. See where I cut the sleeves off? He'll have to wash it. Maybe he'll just keep it for a rag, not sacrament. He'll soon have plenty of painting to do.
Maybe she'll understand. Let her pull the sweatshirt over her head. Take her out riding and show her the hatred you have to inhale on the side of the road, how you see what a bully does with opportunity. Betty, I wore this for five days straight to get back to you.
Andrew, she would say, you never had to leave me.
My father fell. My father has died. My father is dead.
He had to first think the words and then consent to say them into the plastic rectangle of a telephone, then practise saying them, then press numbers and say them aloud. All with Stan's bloody body beside him in the hallway. He still doesn't know if he kneeled down to check Stan's vital signs or fell down. This sequence of memory is a slide show, not a movie. Rushing through the door. All the blood on the carpet. Then Andrew was at Stan's head, trying rudimentary first aid when Stan was so clearly beyond final aid. Neither his nose, nor mouth, nor his trache tube released air because of the pulpy dent in his head. Bald men can't hide a head wound. The finality of that wound was accepted just as the skin of Andrew's legs, already damp with sweat from riding, began to feel the wetness of Stan's blood seeping through his tights. He did not seem to stand up but was nonetheless running for the bathroom, puking and crying and puking.
When Betty finally heard Andrew describe this, she immediately understood why he then got blood all over the telephone. “You didn't wash your hands in the washroom after you were sick because, subconsciously, you knew that would have put you in front of the mirror.”
Alone with Stan's body, Andrew had simply found himself on the phone, rational enough to try rehearsing his phrases first â
My father fell. My father has died. My father is dead. â
but not rational enough to understand that the blood on the telephone receiver had come off his hands. Maybe the paramedics would need to see this.
Pat would want to know, deserve to know, no matter the late hour. He could have called Larry, thought of calling Mark. No, no more phone calls, not yet. “Don't move the body,” the emergency dispatcher had told him, unnecessarily.
He wouldn't move Stan's body, but he couldn't keep his still. What, should he have walked up the stairs? Had a shower while his father lay
dead? Should he have watched TV while he waited for the ambulance? He had stepped back out the door, wanting fresh air. His bike still lay on the step where he had dropped it. He picked it up. He moved away from the doorway and Stan's body beyond it. He didn't lock the door. One leg climbed onto the bike. His cleats bit into the pedals. The crank arms still went around. He biked up and down the street, just like he'd done as a seven-year-old.
By the time the police arrived, he was rational enough to recognize they weren't using their sirens. When he rode up to the house and dismounted, the cruiser's window showed him he was still wearing his helmet. He took it off as he ushered two police officers inside. One tried to sit him down and ask him whom he could call, who might come over, to whom could he go?
In the morning, the phone started ringing. The funeral process felt like socially imposed denial. The errands, the paperwork and the shopping of death would keep him distracted. Pat had tried to catch him with one of these supposedly necessary questions before driving to see him.
“Did he ever talk to you about funeral arrangements or discuss what he wanted done with his body?”
No. Stan and Andrew had talked about oral sex, poor voter turnout in Canada, programmable thermostats, a bowel movement of Stan's that made him feel like he'd been splitting wood for an hour, mortgage paydowns versus RRSP contributions, seventeenth-century English poetry, short-suiting yourself on the deal in euchre, Churchill, engine braking, Tolkien and trench war, knee socks versus thigh-highs, trigonometry, the siege of Leningrad, curry, snow tires, chop saws and mitre boxes, Trudeau, Faulkner versus Hemingway and John versus Paul, customer service, desirable and undesirable assignments in the Second World War, how to shave up, Macbeth and Hamlet as opposites, loss and fear, Enigma machines,
connaître
and
savoir
, Switzerland,
The Waste Land,
nuclear winters, global warming,
The Black Stallion
, the importance of a woman's jaw, charcoal versus propane, Russian oligarchies, marine locks, pancreatic cancer, Louis Riel, affirmative action, asparagus and urine, CSIS, brown dress shoes,
Godfather I
versus
II,
plaster walls, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, gun control, the Arctic, fuel injection, atheism, Genghis Khan, porridge, Khrushchev's shoe,
Newfoundland, pulling the goalie, a deaf Beethoven weeping at the premiere of his
Ninth Symphony
, Interpol, Catherine Zeta-Jones, cherry tomatoes, early Jaguars,
Lucky Jim
, Modigliani not getting the tits right, bullfighting, Turgenev, seamless eavestroughing, poached eggs, Stan Rogers, how to use white bread when plumbing, Castro, seppuku, border collies, Boswell and Johnson, Israel, wool, the Euro, caribou, AIDS, Ella Fitzgerald in the day and Billie Holiday at night, the Halifax explosion,
The Lord of the Flies,
Bosnia, frozen yogurt, the marathon, Gretzky, the Pope, overpopulation, field goals versus running it in, Hitchcock, whether Kristin Scott Thomas really eroticizes intelligence, Paris, the full Windsor knot, provincial school exams, the burning of the White House, tipping, Salman Rushdie, fog, how to use your cheeks when smoking a cigar, hot-air balloons,
Cue for Treason,
zebra mussels, Pelé and speeding. But they'd never once talked about how Andrew should deal with Stan's death.
“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.
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.
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.