Only when another viewer added, “Not just that, he put his own hair on his dad’s body,” did Andrew finally say, “I need a break.”
Betty let Andrew wander off in search of a courtyard. If she’d been ten years older she might not have felt guilty while she continued to wander around the sculptures alone. She wouldn’t have felt so tethered to him in his grief. Care, yes. Coddling, no. But she was young and in love. Curtailing her last circuit of the mind-blowing, ego-dissolving sculptures, she sought out Andrew. She found him on a stone bench near an interior pond, took his head into her arms, her chest, wore a few of the tears he half-tried to hide.
“Do you need to leave, or can you make do waiting here with a book and a cup of tea?”
He did wait a while off in the gallery sidelines, but quickly enough he sought her out again, even told her he needed to see the flattened little dead father one last time.
When they finally left the gallery, they tried to resume their twenty-four-hour itinerary. There was hotel sex with its white anonymity and soulless décor. There was a long vegetarian feed at an Indian restaurant, each of them surprised that other people could leave the Mueck show and go off to eat flesh. Dinner and drinks were sweetened by the filial hooky of each of them being in Ottawa but not seeing, or even calling, their mothers. And yet throughout it all he felt the pull of a guilt he thought he had buried. Each of her consoling touches was chilled by the lie he had told her five months ago on that sunny Kingston ferry. There in Ottawa, she’d squeeze his hand thinking that he was nursing the scar of Stan’s loss, not its still-open wound.
Only when they descended down onto the frozen Rideau Canal to rent skates and slide out into the cold darkness did he feel any relief from the strain of guilt. His legs still worked. His lungs stretched reliably in the clean air. He was grateful for the seemingly endless ice of the winter canal, grateful to skate forever forward, not in dumb circles, skate past her patience for cold fingers and clamping aches. Moving across the hard, even ice he tried to push ahead of the pull of guilt. When she became too cold to enjoy herself, he parked her in a warm-up hut and assured her he wouldn’t be too much longer. No matter how much farther he skated, however, distance, pain and movement withheld their usual annulment. Each cutting blade and all of the cold, twinkling night said the same thing over and over again. Tell her the truth and she’ll leave you. Don’t and you’re not really together.
47
After the flicked cigarette, Andrew’s chest burns doubly. The actual burn, small but intense, a third nipple of pain, floats atop the conductive heat of his regularly pumping chest. A scorched hole in his jersey allows the wind to poke steadily at the circular burn. Both chest and knee add their own heat to that of his increased, enraged pace. Cresting one of his last New Brunswick hills, he sees that his heightened pace may not be useless after all. Thirteen kilometres into his pursuit of the Mustang, he finds a truck stop in the next valley. He will fill his water bag and get better fuel for his chase.
He swats the dusty water hose into his mouth and draws several deep mouthfuls while his intestinal chorus sings four eggs, two sides of beans, stack of brown toast, cream cheese, and a vanilla shake. Temporarily immune to fat, he mentally fills and refills his stomach and panniers. Four yogurts. An ice cream sandwich. Old nuts. A litre of chocolate milk. Tired bananas. A couple of power drinks for the parking lot. Woody oranges. He can practically feel the gummy ooze of a factory butter tart on his teeth when he bumps into the parking lot and sees the red Mustang tucked in among the waiting cars.
His shoulders and neck actually flinch as he squeezes to a complete stop and only relax after he checks and rechecks both the empty car windows and the nearest windows of the restaurant. Fear, then anger. He wishes he could admit otherwise, but fear flashes through him faster than anger. Their numbers. The size of the car. Their love of cruelty and his vulnerability in the open air. But then this wash of fear trickles down into his arms as anger. Step inside the restaurant and do what, though? Trade stares, then get jumped in the bathroom? Meet that mockery, all those tough nudges? Attempt a citizen’s arrest of four guys? His pinch of burns tightens. He stops moving toward the restaurant’s entrance, toward food and water, and buries himself instead in the depth of the parking lot. Blessedly, a minivan sits on either side of the Mustang. Thank you, soccer parents.
Every day for the past week he has kept his knife in his right-hand jersey pocket. He can feel its stiff outline, knows it is warm with his heat.
He stops himself from leaning the bike against their car, not out of any consideration for its paint job, but because it would attract too much attention, declare fender-scratching war to anyone else crossing the parking lot or glancing out. To keep the bike upright and ready, his parking options include leaning it against a Dumpster or a picnic table. The Dumpster would hide the bike, and to the Mustang crew any glimpse of the bike is a glimpse of him. But the Dumpster is also deeper into the parking lot than the car, whereas the picnic table is even closer to the road. He prefers a fast getaway and props the bike against the picnic table, careful to point it toward the road. Setting his hands into the low of his spine, he arches back into a stretch that allows him to surreptitiously slide the knife up and out of the deep jersey pocket. With the knife closed and hidden in one hand, he pretends to dig out coins with the other, then drops them and chases them toward the Mustang’s tires.
This knife, purchased in Kingston by Betty then half-stolen by Andrew, is less than a year old and has never cut anything more substantial than cheese, apples, or packaging. As he pretends to stoop for fallen coins he isn’t even sure the blade will be able to penetrate the thick hide of the car tire. Nonetheless, a two-handed shove driven by the weight of his chest slides the bright silver blade in to the hilt. Twisting the blade is like opening a tap of fetid air. Despite its stink, he showers his face in the tire’s spray of hidden air. Briefly, he even tries opening one leg of his shorts to direct the cool air at the rash he feels there even now.
Expert in flats and patches, he twists his squat little Excalibur in the opposite direction as he withdraws the blade and then reinserts it to lengthen the gash. The steady buckling of the corner of the car increases his nervousness. When he duckwalks back to stab the rear tire, he knows how firmly the rubber will hold his blade, that a kicking foot could reach him long before he could withdraw it.
Stowing the knife in a jersey pocket releases another fear. He hasn’t bought any food or filled his water bag. He’s a brightly clothed vandal travelling slowly in broad daylight away from a lopsided car, and he’s running low on fuel.
48
When Betty and Andrew finally started arguing, all fights save the one that started in a restaurant with his mom were about “clinging” versus “running away.” He was accused of clinging to the house, to his past with Stan and even to their own recent past in the house, nostalgia already. She was accused of running away on a borrowed fantasy or, worse, a marketed fantasy. Rail passes, hostels and anything to do with the indicting term backpacker were all baubles of consumerism. Freedom prepackaged. Dharma in your size and colour.
Sometimes the fights lasted for an evening, sometimes they were just quick jokes. Travelling now on separate continents, they each feel the half-life of those old arguments burning away. They resurface on his bike, clinging arguments rising on one knee while another sinks and runs away. For months, they had both thought she was running away, but look at him now, slashed tires just one problem behind him.
He should have paid more attention to the contradictions. What is a lover if not her contradictions? They each contained multitudes. Academically, they had been equally motivated, chasing skill, knowledge and personal expansion in equal measure. And yet she didn’t like his plan to do an MA. She didn’t like it or her plans didn’t like it. Every week she had some little gem to share with him mined from readings or class, and yet nothing could dissuade her from pausing that growth to strap on a knapsack. “Anyone can go to E
urope,” he once resorted to saying.
A taunt one day, and then two days later one of them would have some new wonder to share. She once told him about a contemporary artist, one of the gallery pranksters normally devoted to manipulating the surface of some ready-made thing, anodizing a shopping cart, dipping an inflatable bunny in gold or blood or both. For one piece, he simply dropped a few basketballs into a rectangular tank of water. The sealed, transparent tank showed four or five beefy basketballs floating in a row. Because air and water refract light differently, the submerged fraction of each tan basketball appeared to be offset from the top fifth left floating in the air. That little perspectival gap, that wonk, that was the piece. Kids at the beach submerge sticks in the water to see this difference between air and water, this undoing of what we think we know.
When Andrew and Betty drove home from their Dead Dad pilgrimage, he did not bring his stick into the light of truth, but left it to bend between light and water, left it floating among half-truths. And yet he did want her to hear the truths.
“Dad was the first one to tell me that dads die, parents die, that’s the usual deal,” he said, speaking honestly but staring into the middle distance of the drive, not her face. “But missing him, it’s like I’ve lost the star witness to the trial of my life.”
“We get new witnesses,” she said, raising a cheekbone and shaking her face a little in self-nomination. “We earn new witnesses.”
They had travelled, talked and seen enough that he had driven into an emotional quadrant that wouldn’t let him keep quiet. Thirty minutes later, he started to tell her how long Stan had really been dead. At least, that’s what he thought he was starting to tell her.
“And many have it worse. Imagine losing your dad at seven, at nine. And hey, what’s a dad compared to drinking water? But all the same, hope is an exercise of the future. One of my philosophy profs defines despair as the inability to imagine change. You can’t even think of a future different from your present. This is chronic starvation or totalitarianism. Dad and I could think of a future, all right. We couldn’t help but think of a future, and it was worse.”
Know this, Betty, know this.
He drove on, running away beside her.
49
Until now the knife has been a tool. Riding here on the New Brunswick – Quebec border, the border into his third province and his second language, he cannot stop feeling the outline of the knife against his back. All of the gear is ranked according to its proximity to his body. The shoes with their unseen metal cleats (the cyclist’s equivalent of car keys), his brain-sealing helmet and the ass-protecting shorts — the holy trinity of cycling — all ride on the body, crowning the top, banding the middle and grounding the bottom. The jersey, part clothing, part luggage, holds in its pockets enough food for a half day’s ride. Curved bananas, apples weightless with their lack of taste, PowerBars softening from the dual heat of the sun and his endogenously warm back, all ride in the tall jersey pockets atop the low of his back. Along with the knife. With the slashed Mustang ten, then eleven, then twelve, kilometres behind him, he feels the prioritized spiral of his gear all over again, feels not just the knife at his back but also the emergency blanket and tool kit beneath his saddle. A tool kit loaded with tire patches.
Back at the slash site, he wasn’t able to see whether the gas station had a fully operational garage. If so, would they have the right tires in stock? What, thirty minutes for installation? Surely he cut deeper and longer than a patch could patch, didn’t he?
He may or may not be pursued, and the carload of thugs may or may not be his only pursuers. The same knife he wants in his jersey for the Mustang could be problematic if he’s overtaken by a police car. Legally, are they able to search his clothes but not his bags? In the pain of his increased pace, a pace higher than he thought he could maintain, he’s still able to chuckle at the absurd thought of searching cycling clothes. Only the thong is more revealing than cycling shorts. Lycra and spandex follow every curve and are designed to offer no baggy resistance to the wind. Mark used to joke that there are no closet Jews on a bike trail.
Eventually, humour nibbles away at fear, but the unpredictable ripples of laughter also release waves of doubt. The drilling burns on chest and knee don’t let him forget that this is happening. He is light-headed with more than just hunger. Hours of a red-lining pace, all on the electrolyte poverty of a day without one of the bioengineered sports drinks gas stations sell to overweight drivers.
Fear, hunger and fatigue, those thin, dirty siblings, run up and down the alley of his body. Thirty-seven kilometres an hour robs him completely. Thirty-seven. Grandparents don’t even drive that slowly.
In the radius of importance that travels out from jersey to saddlebag to pannier, his water bag is closer than the simple luggage of the panniers. It is closer, and draining quickly. There can be no ride, fast or slow, without water.
50
To his shame, he and Betty came home from the Dead Dad road trip even closer. Imprisoned as he was in delusion, caged by fear and shame, he even began to think that he had already told her when and how Stan really died. This heightened closeness, with its confidence and ease, surely this was a new them, a more together them. This themmer them was undone by a series of phone calls.
Because he’d grown up so close to Stan, he met the utterly relaxed pleasure of two people reading quietly in the same room through family first, not romance. Although he already knew the readerly pleasure of inhabiting the same room as someone else but being in a different world, each inhaling a private smoke out of their common air, he didn’t know until life with Betty that, to him, this would be one of his very images of love. He didn’t know he’d been searching for someone else with smooth feet and a warm crotch to read with at the other end of the couch until he found her. One blanket, two bodies, five or six books scattered around them, they were together yet distinctly parallel. For various reasons, some barely conscious, he was content to let the phone keep on ringing.
“Your phone’s ringing,” she said.
“It’s no longer my phone.”
“You just don’t want to get up.”
“I don’t want either of us to get up.”
This call was no problem left to the machine, a classmate phoning about some token group work. The very next night, however, the desolation of January prompted three people too many to check up on him by phone. He came home to a trident of piercing messages.
First his mother: “Hello, Andrew. I wonder how you’re doing there. Please give me a call.”
Second, even his old friend Nathan was a liability: “Hey, Day, thought I should keep in touch. Hang in there.”
Lastly it was Larry, friend of the family, lawyer and, potentially, chief whistle-blower: “Hi, Andrew, hope you’re well. Could you please give me a call? Home or office is fine.” What if Andrew hadn’t made it home first? Macbeth’s finger reached for the delete key.
By the next day he had to widen his liar’s miserable gulf, had to further bury that sunken, lying ferry of September. Biking home from class, he had a whole body glow. Love draped down from his shoulders and jumped up from his knees. When he looked up to the familiar brick house, he saw through to the new blue and orange paint inside, could hear the house’s former soundtrack — all hangdog cello and netherworld bassoon — replaced by sunny violins and sugary guitar. Everybody let their hair down.
As he stepped inside he saw Betty already on the couch, sipping tea, glasses pushed up her nose.
“Larry phoned, said he’s your lawyer. Wants you to stop by. Who are you suing?”
“My Classics prof. Did he say what it was about?”
“Would you want him as your lawyer if he had?”
Andrew stepped around the entranceway phone to head upstairs. After flushing an empty toilet and running an unused tap, he slipped into his office to call Larry back. Returning to the couch, he had a book in one hand and his poker face snug.
“Anything
wrong?”
“No. Just form X by date Y.”
“God, it’s taken a year and a half to settle your dad’s estate?”
“Mmm? Yeah.”
51
In the late 1960s, the undergraduate Stan zipped through no exams more quickly than he did those of a baffled campus physician, then one specialist, then another as he complained of an inability to breathe in his sleep. Almost overnight he seemed unable to sleep in a bed. Suddenly, his lumber-mill snoring deepened into abrupt jolts in his throat. “It’s like I hiccup myself awake,” he told one doctor, then another. Finally, he was admitted to a neuro-psych ward for tests and observation. For loved ones who come to know the sweep of hospital doors and the sharp smell of their bright corridors, admittance is very much an admission, a confession of seriousness.
Lying in a hospital bed, not even twenty-five, Stan then had no trouble getting in or out of bed or dressing himself, save for his lack of anywhere to go. Unknowingly protected from pain by the same neurological failure that was expanding its paralytic reach through his body, Stan was relieved one evening to hear his friend Larry’s voice down the hall, long after visiting hours had ended. He inflated a little with each approaching footfall.
“Mr. Day,” a nurse announced from her starch and whites, “your lawyer is here to see you.”
Suit. Hardback briefcase. Confidence. Even Stan agreed that Larry the law student looked like a genuine lawyer. “Thank you,” Larry said to the nurse, turning to her with the complete expectation that she would draw the curtain closed before leaving.
“Well, Lar, thanks for stopping by.”
“Stopping by? Thank me for the beer.” Setting his briefcase onto the bed beside Stan’s already skinny legs, Larry snapped it open to reveal six shining cans of cold beer.
The Push & the Pull Page 13