The students, their grandparents die. Betty and Andrew hadn't been together for six weeks when her father, Jim, phoned unexpectedly one night, early in the fall term, to say that her grandfather had died. Betty had tried to return the phone to its cradle, had planned on shutting a bedroom door or catching some air in the backyard, but there was Andrew, his arms enshrouding hers. He said something, but she just concentrated on the feel of his voice, the deep buzz of it against her cheek. He was kissing her hairline and temple, kissing beside those small tears. Neither of them could have predicted that, at least temporarily, he'd appreciate the death.
“My dad's all alone out there,” she said. “At least, I think he is. Even at the best of times he'll go two weeks without even going in for groceries.”
“So let's go,” Andrew said, proposing that they drive immediately to her dad's isolated and distant lake house.
Her tears shifted gears, the last few stumbling out with a kind of relief. By the time they had piled into his car with their sweaters and loose pants, with their quiet CDs and their Thermos of heavily milked coffee, death rolled around like an unseen marble, small but hard, knocking in the corners. The smile they traded in the dashboard light stretched for miles, allowed them to share the dark night like a blanket. If they hadn't had to stop for earplugs, he would surely have kept his hands on the wheel.
Thirty minutes into the intended three-hour drive, he'd been thinking that a long night drive was the emotional equivalent of alcohol, fuelling not just lust but love, when some part of the muffler dissolved or tore away and loosed the car's latent snarl. In a stroke, the compact sedan became a pack of Harleys, a laden B-52. Their music was lost to the engine's roar. The singer, not their muffler, seemed to fall off behind them.
Eyebrows shot up and chins dipped in alarm. He had to raise his
voice, “I was literally about to say, if only we could drive like this all night.”
“Yeah,” she yelled back, “me too. . . . Are we going to explode?”
“Any minute now.”
The roar was constant, inescapable, an oil spill. Music was stripped to faint, insectile percussion. “This is what a car really is,” he tried to say, meaning
the true machine
or
shouldn't we admit to this
, but his yell carried only data, beat him back into a mute cave. Twenty minutes ago, they'd been a bubble, a speeding island of grin and stroke. Now, each minute in the roar pushed them further apart, raised a Berlin Wall between them, tolled the bell for Grandpa.
“We'll pass Peterborough soon,” he announced. “I think we should look for earplugs.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Earplugs and a snack?”
New to death and how reliable the body's hungers can be, Betty replied, “Yes, surprisingly. Yes.”
Leaving the highway, hunting out a late-night pharmacy and then an open restaurant, they were almost an hour before they returned to the rebellious car.
“In ways, I don't feel like we're going anywhere,” she said, turning to survey the strange dark town around them. “Just driving.”
Back in the car, both chins tilted toward the outside shoulder, then the inner, for a shy insertion of the pharmacy's foam plug. As the plugs began their conical expansion, he was hit with a feeling of intrusion that quickly flipped into a palpable bond with her. They were smiling as the engine threw its muffled roar. Foot bottoms, buttocks, backs of thighs and tailbones felt a roar their ears heard only distantly. Half-deaf, they slipped back onto the black highway.
Twenty, thirty minutes into the mute, buzzing drive, darkness wrapped around them, they were raked by vibrations, two spines and all limbs sprouting from the same crossbar of felt sound. The right half of the back of his pelvis was indivisible from the inside of her left knee because of movement, metal and a sound buried in touch. As soon as he reached fingers to her knee, another circuit opened from his shoulder blade to that stretch beneath her ear. This stir possibly his alone, Grandpa Death and his rickety bones still riding in the back
seat, Andrew kept his eyes tunnelling into the road as he raised his hand. Betting this brief farm, he planted his fingertips in a crescent around her ear and dipped his thumb to stroke her neck. Down and up again, a fat swimmer doing three-inch laps, kick-turning off her earlobe. When two became five, when thumb became a whole hand clasping the back of her skull, he finally risked a glance, sending his eyes, but not his face, in two shotgun passes. Her eyelids were fully dropped, but there was no disapproving scrunch around the sockets. The visible nostril had sharpened into an arc. So, up went the whole hand, each fingertip a salon wash, the palm a tilting crown. Nearly deaf, he could now feel each hair, swept worlds with a scouring nail. Provinces of her body sent or received fibre-optic flashes of greeting, challenge and need. Did he tend, or light, the fire in her far hip? Was her solar plexus pulsing before, or after, he plucked its central jewel?
Nothing was said as he took a dark exit, finally moved his head in search of an isolated lane. She slid her seat back, lowered it. When he climbed the Pyrenees of the handbrake, she reached first for his ears and thumbed the plugs in deeper while dragging his mouth into neck, chest. After just six weeks, this wordlessness was already strange. Here in the deaf blackness there were no requests or proposals, no worded bait given or chased, not a single joke. Only after, her last kiss cooling on his neck, as the night's chill air reasserted itself along fogged windows, was speech risked. “It's called the euphoria of survival,” he said, his mouth to her full ear.
In the climb out of one valley there is always a distinct point at which curiosity about the next valley is abandoned. These recurrent, successive Maritime climbs are, and are not, his bike trip. As the burn of a climb lengthens and deepens, he is exiled from his past. He starts each climb as an individual ego with unique memories, specific hopes and a destination. But then, legs aflame, he bikes out of subjectivity and into pure pain. In ways, every onerous half-metre of inclined asphalt is a mirror. He chose this suffering. He wants it. But he can't want this. Eventually, he is only a sweaty binary of more or less pain. The bike is a switch on the wall of the hill, inching its passage from
climbing
to
climbed
.
His switch flicks just before the apex of a hill. The triumph of a climb. Memory and rationality return to him as he surveys the next valley. Already, just three days into this trip, he has developed a habitual gaze for each new valley. First, he checks out the next climb, appraises the next hill from atop the current one to get his pain forecast. Then, his eyes glance along the middle of the valley, not actually looking at what's there, just sweeping through to check for a restaurant. Can I get more water? Time for eggs? What are the odds of a milkshake? Only then does he finally examine the descent he's rolling into, weighs his conqueror's spoils. Descending, he is washed by speed. His eyes avoid lingering on any single point, as if staring too closely at house, farm or derelict store might slow his accelerated speed, might diminish the cleansing wind. Too elated to pay attention as he enters a valley and too consumed to do so as he leaves, he only becomes fully attentive at some point just before the drop levels out. Some valleys are long and invite observation, contemplation, even social reflection. Two different Protestant churches in a single valley, us and them behind nearly identical white clapboard buildings. Other valleys are more fickle. The inviting drop. The spurning climb.
The longer a valley is, the more likely he is to look left and right, to
pry his gaze out of the road's grey chute. So only now, inertia slipping from his pace, the next climb beginning to loom, does he notice a bright orange periscope breaking the green wave of the next forested ridge. A fire tower.
Although the fire tower isn't very close to the highway, it is in North America, so there's no doubt it's accessible by car or truck. If they can reach it, so can Andrew.
His pannier zippers begin to jiggle as he forsakes the highway asphalt for a gravel side road. Minutes later, these same zippers beat out a steady percussion as he leaves the side road for the half-overgrown bush trail he hopes runs up to the fire tower. The tower would be useless if it were in a valley, not on the peak of a ridge, so he must now scale the same height as if he were still on the reliably homogenous asphalt but must do so on the wildly varied terrain of a switchback bush trail. Dirt crumbles and coughs beneath his crawling tires. Every skittering rock and each additional turn pose an unavoidable question: why? Because he wants to see the forest, not just the trees. Because a map isn't an adequate image, and he wants to see where he's headed. Because bike and tower are both simple metal exoskeletons, every bone naked. Cars are still audible on the highway below him, racing past with their closed doors and lowered hoods, with their unseen chambers housing unfelt explosions. Metal and sweat send Andrew crawling away from human evolution into ancestral skeletons and non-electronic technology.
A circular saw blade whirrs inside each thigh. Water sloshes down the croaking pipe of his throat. Away from the highway's busy trough, the May air hangs still on the trail and lets the midday sun find its strength. A sharp turn and a steep ascent obscure the once-looming tower. Finally, a scimitar of curve and climb thrusts him toward the tower's multi-legged base.
The uniformly long grass of this small, treeless clearing is infrequently cut. Barely pedalling now, lungs scraped clean, he reaches, touches and finally stops at the tower's warm metal legs. He unclips, drinks again.
Dismounting, he is tackled by the usual pain. The cupboard doors of his trapezoids have sprung their fit. The back of each knee straightens onto a coarse grinding wheel. His shipwrecked pelvis.
Like those of many urban fire escapes, the ladder on the fire tower does not extend all the way to the ground. The deterrent gap of roughly three metres would be enragingly anticlimactic had he slogged here on foot. As is, he's able to roll the bike beneath, climb onto its top tube and debate a tremendously unwise standing vertical jump. He just makes the standing jump from the bike to the ladder's lowest rung. The padding of his cycling gloves, the gloves that he forgot to remove, is palpably soft, so clearly vulnerable, so much like his own skin amid the stronger ribs and tibia of the metal ladder and its surrounding cage. Fists just catching, idiocy barely confessed, he finally rests, hanging, his cramped shoulders easing apart in the still air. Ascending the ladder, he leaves his helmet on despite the sweat gathering within it.
A cylindrical cage of metal ribs surrounds the ladder. His laboured exhalations are almost chuckles, not quite tears, at the comparison between his body crawling up this metal chute and the diseased, syringomyelic swelling that rogue chromosomes caused in his father's spinal cord. Here in the bright spring air, curved metal all around him, Andrew is now the clambering disease, the neurological saboteur, the ugly face of fate. Two-thirds up, he pauses on the ladder in a spot comparable to the fourteen-inch-long surgical scar that transected his father's back. Simultaneously, he can see the struts and beams of the tower and the distant trees of Nova Scotia, or maybe even New Brunswick, and also that unforgettable scar on a now dead body, that pale record of decades-old neurological surgery. He had looked at the scar thousands of times before he learned that the pre-programmed swelling of Stan's spinal cord could have ruined him in other ways, depending on its location along the height of his spinal cord. A stop on this rung of the ladder took most of Stan's sense of touch, his balance and half the mobility of his arms and legs. A swelling lower down could have taken the legs completely, could have folded Stan into a stained wheelchair. Andrew resumes his climb, ascending the rungs and vertebrae of hearing and sight. Stop here and I'll freeze you blind. Stop here and I'll 'tard your brain.
Preoccupied, he's almost surprised to reach the top of the ladder so quickly, to perch beneath the bulbous skull of the tower's observation booth. Bringing up his knees and leaning into the ladder's ribbed
back, he's able to wedge himself into a sitting position. A few bolt-heads press uncomfortably into his back, but the legs take the weight without complaint; these thighs know a burn. A breeze washes over him. The dense green forest flows ceaselessly below. Cool, piny air wipes the sweat from his face and limbs. Up here, sunshine brightens the air without cooking it. Weather and light are perfect for his first, perhaps his only, view from a fire tower. A locked fire tower.
The trap door above him rises barely half an inch before snagging on a bolt or hasp snug on the other side. Stupidly, he tries pressing harder with one hand. It's obvious the incomplete base of the ladder and this hidden lock are designed precisely to keep people like him out, but how many people willing to climb one hundred metres to see trees really need to be kept out? Indignantly, he steps down a rung, scrunches his neck to get his helmet under the door, then lifts with both legs. Although the wooden door strains around the central lock, it remains steadfast.
That the caged ladder is a straight tube of such uninterrupted length he could now become his own lethal injection shooting down its syringe should be discouragement enough against an inverted kick. Hands locked on a rung, he draws his knees up to his chest and then rolls his head and shoulders back until he is hanging upside down. Now that he can stare up at his clenched hands and, beyond them, his feet resting against the door, he has several competing thoughts. One, this might just work. Your legs are strong. You'll feel it if you can't hold the strength of the push. Two, this is the second dumbest thing you have ever done. Three, if you get yourself killed, you'll definitely never see Betty again, let alone reconcile or get her pants off or learn anything. Four, this inverted kick is more than the upper- and lower-body contest you discovered on a mountain bike with Mark.