The Compass

by Tammy Kling

  “I don’t feel sorry for myself,” I shot back.

  “Oh, crime, are you kidding me? You’ve been sappy since you first walked into the shop. You’ve sat here for three hours with your face on the floor, lost in your own world.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I said. “I’ve lost a lot.”

  “I know I’m the one in a wheelchair, but you’re a way more sorry son of a bitch,” he said. I didn’t know whether to hit him, or get up and walk away. Once again, I was frozen.

  “Old pain is like an anchor,” he said. “Useless.”

  I stared into my glass. The brown liquid swirled. I wondered if I was drinking too much.

  “You have to get over it,” Toin said, “get back in the game.”

  “Oh, you’re the expert, I suppose. You work in a bike shop and once you were a world-class cyclist? I don’t exactly see that as getting back in the game. It’s more like giving up.”

  “I could be bitter myself, you know. I could dwell on the fact that it was me who made the mistake that cost me my career, and almost my life. I made one mistake—just one tenth of a second—and now I have to live with it forever.”

  “You made the mistake that put you in a wheelchair? I thought I heard that you were hit by a car?”

  “I was. I was racing and I looked down. I was supposed to keep my eye on the road, but I glanced down at my gears and swerved into a car in our caravan. It was a freak accident actually.”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I had to forgive myself for that one-second lapse of judgment that changed my life. It was so stupid. Years of training out the window.”

  “How do you deal with it?”

  “Not very well,” Toin admitted. “But we’re all human, and we make errors. We have to move on.”

  I said nothing. Then I noticed that Anja was back. “So did you boys work things out?” she said wryly.

  I exhaled deeply and slumped down in the chair. I looked over at Toin, and he was grinning now.

  Our eyes met and we burst out laughing, hysterically.

  Chapter 10

  EXPECTATIONS

  Sometimes you think you know what love is, what anything is, when really you don’t know anything at all.

  —ANONYMOUS

  Each morning I stepped into the misty air on the balcony outside of my room and observed the city center. Anja told me that it was still a lot like it had been in the 16th century, when it was built.

  The countryside was woody, the landscaping much different and greener than anything I’d seen before. Amersfoort was a city with a country feeling, and on the outskirts were magnificent villages, tiny places where cows, sheep, and farmers lived. But in the center was a firestorm of activity, and in the evenings we’d find our way down to De Hof, an energetic square with terraces full of cafés that overflowed with people.

  One night Toin took me to the Lieve Vrouwekerkhof, a square with several bars, and we moved from quieter pubs to bars to nightclubs exploding with techno music and dancers. It was the craziest scene I’d experienced in a long time, and when we left, it was long after any reasonable hour a middle-aged man should encounter.

  The next day was ruined, and I stayed inside for most of it, beneath the covers.

  In no time at all I became immersed in the culture, feeling more a part of it than anywhere else. The landscape in Amersfoort was mystical.

  Nu Nu was studying for her PhD in environmental research at the university in Amsterdam, and she said that the light phenomenon in Amersfoort was a result of an isomere that reflects a strange aura from the sky. There were several theories that artists and historians had debated for years about the Holland light, and filmmakers had even produced a film about it called Hollands Licht, which Nu Nu was really into.

  Each day the sky would be a unique and distinctly different canvas, and I studied it and took time to glance up no matter what else I was doing. Nu Nu said that the grass in Holland contained more chlorophyll than other parts of the world and reflected light from the clouds that wasn’t seen anywhere else.

  Some days I’d experience the shadows of dark patches overhead while cycling, and then moments later, I’d encounter an inexplicable patch of light. The sensations were amazing.

  By the end of the first week, my line in the pub had become infamous, and each time we went there, Nu Nu or someone else would come up to Toin and ask, So are you famous, or what? in honor of the American who knew nothing. I laughed it off and drank my ale.

  Toin and I became fast friends and were so much alike we could have been brothers.

  “What is your trade?” he asked one evening. We’d had two pints already, and I had grown accustomed to the darker ale with its rich texture. Amersfoort had its own beer label, and Toin’s bar was famous for its large selection of Dutch and Belgian beers. For some reason the beer tasted so much better in Holland than it had back home. It could suffice as a meal, though the pub offered up great side foods, like a version of shepherd’s pie with minced meat and mashed potatoes.

  “Excuse me?” I asked. “What do you mean, trade?”

  “Your trade in America? Your job?”

  “I sell drugs. Sold, actually.”

  Nu Nu stood with a tray balanced in her hand, eyes wide. Their faces grew ashen.

  “Not real drugs,” I said quickly.

  Toin laughed. “Fake drugs?”

  Nu Nu placed a round of free shots of liquor on the table.

  Toin pondered it for a moment.

  “I knew it was not work in a bicycle shop, since you did not know what a chain wear indicator was. Advanced!” He scoffed.

  “Very funny.”

  “I can teach you how to use one,” Toin said, “ but there are some things I cannot teach.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just like in life, there are things that are basic and things that are art. Building wheels is an art. It takes skill. You have to dish the wheel straight, you have to know how to find the right length spokes. The art is something you have or you do not.”

  I looked at my new friend and wondered what Solomon would have to say about him. He was a man with a passion so great that it was obvious, in a world of passionless people. He lived the bike, loved bikes, and found fulfillment working on bikes. He had found his passion, while most people spent their lives searching.

  “What was it like being a famous cyclist?” I asked, and I was actually dying to know. It was a Thursday night, and the bar and every table overflowed with locals.

  “Actually is quite sad sometime,” he said in broken English.

  “What do you mean?

  “I get to live my dream, but at a cost. There is always a sacrifice, and when you are well-known, you do not know who is there because they love you for you, or who is there for what you do or what you represent.”

  “But isn’t all of life that way?

  “Yes, but when you are famous, people are drawn to you because it is natural. The association is attractive—the ego of saying you have a famous friend. But with women, it has been a problem.”

  “What do you mean?

  “My last girlfriend before Anja could not stay away from her ex-boyfriend. She met me at the height of my career, and I fell in love. I thought she loved me, too. But as famous as I was, and as big of a life we had, she would always end up back with him. He was a nobody, a mechanic. But in the end, she could not conceal her love for him. Or should I say, her lack of love for me.”

  “That sucks, man.”

  “You say what?” he asked.

  “It’s an American term: that sucks. It means something is not good.” Toin grinned at that.

  “Haven’t you ever been out of Holland?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I have traveled in Europe, but not farther.” He looked out into the sea of people and nodded at a man waving his hand in the air. “So tell me about your work with the drugs,” he said. �
��Was it an important drug?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was. And it was much more than the drug. My research involved the brain, and my wife’s research involved the brain, as well. She was a neurologist, and we were both fascinated with the way the brain works.”

  “You had a wife?”

  “I do,” I said, catching myself. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Toin raised his hand. “No problem.” After a moment I continued.

  “I was able to research drugs and their effects on the brain. One of my theories, actually, is that some adults have an undeveloped prefrontal cortex due to trauma or something else that occurred during the critical growth years.” I took a long sip of ale and pondered this thought. It was the theory I’d been working on before I left California.

  “Other parts of the body can be stunted—such as height—due to improper nutrition or other factors, so it just makes sense that brain development could be stunted in various ways. Sometimes we see adults who have a pattern of inability to judge or decipher consequence. In some of those cases, where there is a consistent lack of judgment, it’s my theory that the prefrontal cortex hasn’t developed fully.”

  Toin looked at me. It felt good to talk shop again.

  “That’s fascinating,” he said.

  “Really?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  We both laughed.

  “Maybe sometimes we just do stupid things,” Toin said. “Maybe it is as simple as that.”

  “For sure,” I said. “For sure.”

  “You know,” he said. “I once had very strong legs. Big legs, like tree trunks. Legs that could power the bike. But now my brain is much stronger. My mind is my greatest asset.”

  “There are seasons,” I said, “for everything.”

  Toin stared at me. “Wow, Gandhi, that’s really profound.”

  After two weeks or so I became accustomed to the routine of working in the bike shop for a half day when Toin needed me and spending the rest of the days touring the small towns in the countryside. Sometimes I’d take the car, but most of the time I’d tour on bike, weaving over streets and waterways exploring, stretching myself in every way.

  I wasn’t used to riding on slick city streets, and one day I wiped out on the pebbles on the sidewalk in front of the shop and walked in with bloody knees. Toin said nothing, and I was grateful that he let it go.

  Later that week I remembered my promise to call Solomon in Romania, and I asked Toin if I could use his phone to make a long-distance call. I rang the number in Brasov and Victorita answered, and in seconds my young friend was on the phone, his voice lit up like a Christmas tree. He asked for my address.

  “Are you coming to visit?” I asked, joking.

  “No, Mr. America, you have a letter.”

  “What?”

  “A letter has arrived for you.”

  My heart froze. My mind flashed to the United States, but then I reasoned that no one there knew anything about where I would be because even I hadn’t known. I hadn’t called anyone, not even my brother.

  “From who?” I asked.

  “It is from a return address in Italy,” Solomon said.

  I traveled the countryside on a hybrid mountain bike that entire week, weaving in and out of streets, thinking about Pete and his letter. Solomon had said he’d ask Victorita to forward it, and the waiting was difficult.

  The scabs on my knees from the wipeout were healing over, and then breaking open in the shower, and then healing over. If I wore pants the friction rubbed against them, opening the wounds again. The aging body was less forgiving, and healing came slower with each passing year.

  As a child I could skin my knee and forget about it, and in a week you’d never have known it had happened. Now that I was an adult, the scars remained a lot longer.

  I made stronger connections in Holland than anywhere on earth, almost.

  Anja and Toin had been an item for years, and they talked about getting married and the future they’d have, perhaps including children. They were in the process of building a new dream. Toin’s dream of being a world-class cyclist had passed, but it didn’t seem to stop him from creating exciting new possibilities.

  I sat talking with Nu Nu and Anja, and they were like two big sisters who were guiding me. Sometimes Nu Nu would get on her bike and ride out with me into the countryside.

  Nu Nu was in the last semester of her PhD, and on the days we rode out into the country, she stopped and gathered flowers, rocks, and specimens of the grass to study. She was always studying, always growing.

  One Tuesday morning we rode the bikes to the park and left them alongside a bridge overlooking the water. We sat down in the damp grass and watched the movement of life. Her English was better than my Dutch, but it was still sketchy, and sometimes she mistook one word for another.

  “I read you have a lot of Starbacks,” she said. “The place where everyone goes to meet and sit and talk.”

  “Starbucks?”

  “It is the coffee place, no?”

  I nodded. “One on every corner, just about. But not like your coffee shops. We don’t sell weed in ours.”

  She smiled. “You like the Starbacks?”

  “Not so much,” I said. “But my wife couldn’t live a morning without it. She would leave the house at exactly ten minutes ’til six just to make sure she had time to stop at Starbucks for her coffee.”

  “She is without you, in America?”

  “Yes.”

  Nu Nu looked away.

  “It must be hard for you,” she offered.

  “Something like that.”

  “You have tears in your eyes when you speak of her. It makes you sad?”

  “I love her,” I said. “But I’m not sure what’s going to happen, so it makes me sad to think of her. I don’t want to feel sad. I don’t want to feel any emotion right now.”

  “Emotion is okay as long as you realize it is not who you are. Whatever it is that makes you sad or mad, it is nothing. It is just emotion. When we believe our emotions are who we really are, we connect with an identification of the past, instead of the reality of today.”

  I looked into her eyes and in that moment saw a sea of green. They were large and shaped like almonds. I knew if I looked long enough, I’d see more than just a friend.

  “My English is not good,” she said. “But how you say, it is to wake up. It is an awakening to live in the now. In this moment.”

  Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach, as if I was being pulled in one direction and would forever ignore the life I used to have. I had been away for nearly two months, so long that I had begun to forget the small things about the life I used to have.

  “It’s easier to avoid dealing with the pain of the now,” I said finally. “Or of the past. I thought we’d be together forever . . . ”

  Nu Nu rolled her black hair in a ball on top of her head and tied it into a knot.

  “Maybe it is time you redefine your definition of forever,” she said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “The house, the wife and kids. That is American dream?” she asked. “Because it seems as if you are mourning the death of a dream and not just death, which is a natural part of life.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “But I suppose that’s all part of the grieving process.” I thought about the dreams that I had created since the moment Lacy and I knew we were pregnant. There were a lot left still that hadn’t been realized.

  “Maybe life is like a lot of little forevers,” Nu Nu said. “Instead of one.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that we consider life to be good if we marry one person and live for twenty years, and the picture is the same. But maybe life is a tapestry, instead. No? It is unpredictable. Maybe life is a series of small stories, instead of just one story.”

  “I think we should go,” I offered.

  Chapter 11

  LETTING GO

  Before I knew it, I fo
und myself acclimating to Holland, the culture, and the language. I could speak in whole sentences about the bikes in the shop now, and my face was covered in new growth. It was an evolution, as if I had shed some part of myself and was moving toward something else.

  In general I uttered very few words, went about my work repairing bicycles, and spent some days in the public library, where I could sit with coffee and choose from a wall of books.