The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  Cutler, slowing, looked forward again, the family close in front of him, the toddler oblivious, mother and father glancing back at last, heads swivelling in unison. Cutler wasn’t sure which way to move—which way the family would move—and at the same time from some inner recess sprang a fierce aversion to moving, anger at the cyclist’s reckless impatience, the overstated physique, the exhibitionistic, high-end gear (Cutler’s stuff hadn’t changed since the ’70s: anonymous cotton shorts, Tshirts, hooded sweatshirts). This trail was for walkers and runners as well as cyclists. The parents were exchanging mixed signals, converging to sandwich the child and then recoiling, then lurching leftward with the child between them, and Cutler was about to move left as well when the cyclist snarled, “Fuck, man, trail, trail!” The voice was wrong for the face and the body, as most voices are. Instead of a husky, territorial bass it was nasal and high, peevish, almost effete. Cutler edged left, just barely, and the cyclist, pedalling to regain speed, jolted past him to the right, not quite off the trail. Cutler flung him a look. The man stared straight ahead through his sunglasses, as if Cutler were now invisible, eliminated by his words. There was no physical contact but Cutler felt the draft of the man’s passing and smelled the fresh oil on his derailleur, clean sweat in his gear. His watch looked as complex as a smartphone. As his tires gripped the hard-packed straightaway and sped off, a birdshot of dirt and bits of gravel churned up by the tires’ deep grooves spattered Cutler’s legs. It was nothing much—like passing through a constellation of mayflies while you run on the first warm evening of spring—and maybe that would have been the end of it, but at that very instant the man called back in a jeering voice, “Dude, if you’re too slow for the traffic …”

  Maybe he’d meant to conclude you should just stay home but was saving himself the breath. By “too slow” Cutler assumed he meant “too old.” Above all, though, there was that “dude.” Cutler could have chosen to see it as a compliment by default—as if, despite Cutler’s greying hair and expanding bald patch, the man had somehow taken him for a peer. Instead, the word’s sneering chumminess seemed to sharpen and barb the taunt.

  “Well, he’s in a hurry, isn’t he?” the young mother called in a voice loud enough to include the passing Cutler, along with her partner and child, though probably not the receding cyclist. Her censure of the man seemed mild, philosophical. Cutler, starting to speed up on an aftersurge of adrenaline, glanced back over his shoulder, raised a hand and nodded once, as if to say, So everyone’s okay, then? The mother was a light-skinned South Asian, the father older, heavy, with freckled pink skin and a squashed-looking face. As he met Cutler’s gaze, Cutler realized the man was as angry at him as at the cyclist.

  The cyclist seemed to be slowing now, gliding over the small bridge, while Cutler was still accelerating, as if he really thought he could catch him. True, if the man stopped for maintenance up ahead, or took enough time at the trailhead parking lot racking his bike onto the roof of his vehicle (Cutler imagined a Jeep or some kind of SUV), he might get to have a word with him. Long odds. The guy didn’t seem the type to take his time doing anything. He’d brought the brusque urgency of the city—or the age itself, gridlocked in perpetual rush hour—into these woods where Cutler was still trying to hide out from time.

  Cutler longed to slow time, even halt and force it backward through some quantum wormhole—a feat actually achievable in certain early morning dreams from which he always woke in tears. After the boy’s death the world had not just gone on with its business, indifferently, but also seemed to accelerate away from Grace and Cutler and leave them behind, huddled together, crushed and redundant, at the graveside. He did wonder if what he perceived as the world’s new surliness and haste was an illusion born of the contrasting stillness and silence of grief. Or was it just his age? Grace didn’t tease him about getting old physically—they were lovers as active, he guessed, as many thirty-year-olds, even if for a year after the death they had both wondered if sex was finished for them. She meant old mentally, in his complaints about the age’s steroidal vulgarity.

  He reached the bridge and loped across, feeling the give and spring-back of the planks, like on the two-hundred-metre indoor track at the CNE grounds back in the ’70s when he was training for Montreal. He couldn’t enjoy the sensation this time. The cyclist was out of view beyond the next bend in the trail. By now, in fact, the guy might be half finished the tough set of switchbacks zippering up out of the valley. Cutler, starting to feel the pace in his lungs, eased off. Still, he was in good form today, fluent, light-limbed, and he would finish his route at a decent speed, burn off this mainline hit of cortisol and calm himself down.

  Cutler had been a true amateur in the ’70s, the age of “shamateurs” along with those East European guinea pigs, many now dead but at the time undefeatably amped up on synthetic androgens and other chemical jelly beans. He too had been obsessive—no athlete succeeding at a national level could be anything less—but he hadn’t believed in winning at any price, if that price included shooting up, lying and cheating. (As if to be extra fair, he’d actually handicapped himself with a performance-reducing substance, alcohol.) Still, maybe it was true, what one recent patient had confided. A college hurdler leaning toward steroids, he’d told Cutler that being a “good loser”—he framed the term with derisively twitching fingers—was no longer an option; it was naive to think anyone could compete at the highest level now without chemicals.

  Cutler rounded the bend and saw movement ahead and above: the cyclist was two-thirds of the way up the hill, moving slowly around the first of four tight switchbacks at the toughest part. Of course he wouldn’t be at the top yet—Cutler had forgotten how steep the grade became halfway up, how much it would slow a cyclist, even in lowest gear. Cutler accelerated into the base of the hill. He felt a sort of hunterly excitement, made a fresh projection of possible conjunctions. He might be able to beat the guy to the top. Leaning into the slope, he kept his steps light and short and worked his arms, almost silent.

  The cyclist was steering around the second-last hairpin when Cutler caught him. Instead of trying to get around him—the trail too narrow here—he cut up across the hairpin, almost sliding back on the loose stuff that shot out from under his scrambling treads. Without glancing at the cyclist, who seemed startled, he rejoined the trail—now levelling out, straightening, widening—and pushed for the top. Stay relaxed, make it look easy, like a jog, that was the secret, though it wasn’t easy, not after a forty-metre hill, Cutler’s legs breaking down on this short final pitch.

  Don’t look back. Never look back.

  Just before Cutler crested the hill, the cyclist came breezing alongside, his big speed-skater thighs pumping fast in shiny tights. The clean, efficient hum of his machine, in lowest gear. As the grade lessened, then flattened, he cruised away up the trail without a glance back and it struck Cutler that the guy had only been slow on the hill before because he’d chosen to stay in higher gear, to work his legs. Of course. It was absurd to think a fifty-eight-year-old, drug-free runner, however strong, could outpace a man half his age on a well-tuned machine. Yet Cutler, however foolish, was not slowing down. He had to keep the rider in sight—and for now it was possible, the trail’s next leg running straight as a baseline road for half a kilometre. Naturally the cyclist was opening a gap, though not as fast as either he or Cutler might have expected; the man’s wide torso swayed violently as he rode, a kind of seated swagger that Cutler knew was slowing him down. Maybe he was tired from a long workout. Or he wasn’t such an athlete after all. A grandstander with toy muscles and a cartoon mascot’s gritted teeth.

  Cutler sped up. At the end of this stretch, as he knew well but the cyclist might not, the trail descended again into the gully of another creek. It snaked tightly down through cedars and firs and there the cyclist would definitely have to slow. Cutler would catch him before he got to the bottom. Across that creek, a mirror slope climbed fifty metres—Mattie had named it the Reaper, after
some lethal entity in one of his video games—and even in lowest gear a cyclist would have to stick to the switchbacks. If Cutler could run straight up, off-trail, he could put even more distance between them.

  In his ear, Grace’s drowsy, droll voice—his internalized good sense, his moral positioning system—remarked that when he wasn’t playing the irascible old crank he was making like a child. Racing some grade-school rival home through the woods. Well, so be it. Even these days (all right, especially these days), when he came upon another runner or heard one behind him, he automatically, helplessly sped up. It was just something that runners of a certain calibre and competitive background did, he told himself, though at times he caught inklings of a deeper truth: that he ran these days in a state of quiet fury, never far from his grief.

  He started down the hairpin descent almost faster than was safe. He couldn’t see the cyclist below through the trees but could hear him crunching over the gravel stretch where Parks Canada had rebuilt a washed-out hairpin. That would be halfway down, more or less. Cutler loved zipping down this bit of trail, slaloming the tight corners. All his running life he’d preferred cross-country to track because of such pleasures, leaning into banked turns as if riding motocross, feeling the gears shift in the brain’s intuitive transmission as contours change underfoot, new scenery always unfurling, crossing winter fields of unmarked powder or barefooting beaches and the night-cool, velveteen greens of golf courses.

  His love of cross-country had probably cost him in the end. By 1974, when Cutler was twenty-two and on a winning streak, his coach had begged him to start training more on the road and especially on the track, the track, the track. Cross-country was just strength-work. The season was varsity track in winter and spring, club and nationals come summer. But he couldn’t stay off the trails. The grinding track intervals he added to his routine deepened his allergy. “Look,” he said—or remembered saying—“if I spend the next five years running around a quarter-mile track and fail, I’m nothing and I’ve gone nowhere. If I spend those years out in the woods, I might still be no one but at least I’ve been somewhere.” His coach pointed out correctly that champions didn’t hedge their bets—and that Cutler needed to stop drinking if he was going to get really serious.

  But he was serious, he was ranked, and in the best race of his life—the ’75 World Cross-Country championship in Morocco—he was the top Canadian, finishing twenty-first in a large field. This was before the East African onslaught of the ’80s and ’90s changed everything; still, the performance impressed many and Cutler seemed a genuine hope for the Montreal Olympics. But at the Canadian trials for the 10,000 he got boxed in and tripped heavily and he had to qualify in the 5,000 instead. He made it, but in the opening Olympic heat, scared yet elated, soaring on adrenaline, he started too fast, led the field for four laps and by midrace was struggling. The 5,000 was not his event and the track was not his element. The media didn’t mention those factors and Cutler, watching a replay of the heat a few days later, was stung by their offhand dismissal of his effort. The commentators—who like most North American sportscasters knew little more about track and field than they knew about cricket or canoe-polo—described Cutler Connell as “either out of shape or out of his league.” They didn’t understand what a world-class 5,000-metre race meant: a three-mile-plus sprint. Neither commentator could have run the length of a city block at the pace he averaged for those thirteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds.

  He caught the cyclist just before the bottom of the hill. This time he surprised him not at the moment of passing but seconds before, since downhill steps, however light, are never silent, especially over gravel. The man glanced up, his sunglasses hiding the look in his eyes but his black eyebrows twitching up over the rims. This time Cutler had to pass him on the outside of the last hairpin and he managed it neatly, twisting his torso to squeeze past the right handlebar with a gruff, significant, “Pardon me.”

  The gully floor was narrow and sunless, carved out by a bouillon-coloured creek whose channel ferried a glowing flotilla of oak, beech and maple leaves southward to the Ottawa. As Cutler crossed another small bridge—weathered, moss-grown, it seemed more a process of nature than an amendment of it—the cyclist pumped past him, as expected, working hard, bunched over his handlebars like a kid speeding on a tricycle. But now the Reaper. Cutler charged into it, to the left of the zigzag trail, while the cyclist swung into the first switchback, downshifting and pedaling fast—no more trace of pretence now, fully committed to the race. So was Cutler, yet now he wondered if he’d miscalculated—whether the slope was too steep to run up off-trail, the surface too crumbly. He dug with his arms like a sprinter. By halfway up he was leaden, lactic, but here the grade eased off ten degrees and he slowed and glanced down and back: the cyclist was well behind him, stitching his way up the hairpins. Cutler drove himself on, each exhalation a grunt of pain. This was more a climb than a run. Dangerous, Grace might say, thinking not of a fall but of his heart. His legs were tying up badly, his legs were beside the point now, he was drawing on raw will and pride, the things that had kept him moving at a respectable pace in the dying laps of his 5,000 heat in Olympic Stadium thirty-four years ago, though he was punch-drunk and the other runners came gliding past him in a steady file, as if the lane next to him were a moving sidewalk. Their respirations—surreally distinct, stethoscopically loud—crashed in his ear. No other sound; the roar of the home crowd a sort of amplified silence. On the last lap his vision started to go, his brain hypoxic, blackness moving in from the margins. He collapsed on the finish line and lay heaving and for him as a serious competitor a finish line is what it was.

  Just below the crest of the hill he veered back onto the trail and ran, or barely trotted, the last two hairpins. The cyclist would need another thirty seconds or more. Cutler topped the hill, gulping air as if surfacing after a full minute under water. Slowly his stride gained back its length, the jolting of the pulse in his jaw eased off. It was clear the cyclist must be heading back to the trailhead and parking lot, a mile farther on. No chance Cutler wouldn’t lose badly if he and the man raced the whole way. Anyhow, he’d beaten him up the hill. Stop here, wave him past with a wry nod. Nice try, dude. Or slip away into the forest and run a shortcut—Cutler knew a good one—and so be there waiting for him at the trailhead, the finish line, grinning. Gratifying to think of that. Somehow Cutler couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  The gliding whirr of the mountain bike approached from behind him and he opened up his gait, fast but relaxed, fists loose, jaw floating. The trail here was level as it passed through another stand of maples and entered the tract of huge white pines he called the Basilica—not quite a cathedral-like grove of raincoast giants, but close enough, the trail running through a broad nave arcaded by stately, even-spaced trunks, while from ten storeys up, stained-glass light shafted downward, green and gold. A century’s fall of pine duff had laid an ideal surface for running, silent, soft and fast. His favourite part of the trail. He and Mattie would start to recover their speed through here after the gruelling work of the Reaper. And now he recalled that this was the place—when Mattie was seventeen and Cutler was toughing out an off day—that he’d first felt the boy carrying him, holding back just a little for his father’s sake.

  He entered the grove at a controlled sprint, knowing he could hold it to the far side, maybe four hundred metres or so, and knowing that the cyclist would pass him well before he reached that point. But he would make him fight for it. Make him realize he had to work to beat this guy on foot—this old man, as Cutler must seem to him with his dated gear, his vulnerably threadbare scalp, a face creased and strained in the twilight under the trees. Cutler’s anger seemed gone now, depleted or paid out, as at the end of the trial three years back when he’d stood up and, before the bailiff could intervene, addressed the man who had just been convicted of reckless driving (a nine-month suspended sentence). In his fixated way Cutler had rehearsed the moment a hundred times, nights when
the vodka and Ativan hadn’t bought him even a few hours’ rest, and he’d meant to holler one of several lashing denunciations he’d prepared. Instead he’d heard himself say, in a voice that must barely have reached the convicted man, “Are we just supposed to go home now?”

  The only things that truly helped during those months had been these forest trails and, above all, Grace. Every night for months they lay twined without ever having sex, a strange shift from all the years when they had often made love but always slept a little apart.

  The rider came sweeping alongside and past, his legs a blur, nostrils flaring as he exhaled in sharp little huffs. Cutler was almost grateful for this competitive seriousness. He chose not to give the man a direct look, instead fixing his eyes on the trail, trying to retain his speed and stay relaxed and fluent, as dignified as possible for someone in late middle age who’s red-faced, puffing, stumping along in a frantic race with a stranger. At some point a dead leaf had caught between the front mudguard and wheel of the man’s bicycle and the shreds of it rattled in the blurring spokes like those hockey cards Cutler and his friends used to clothespin to the frames of their CCM three-speeds back in the early ’60s, the cards smelling of the brittle wafers of bubble gum you would get in the twenty-five-cent packets. He could no longer recall why they’d wanted to set those cards—always some forgotten journeyman’s card, never one of the stars—rattling in their spokes. Maybe there never was a reason.