For the human body, cold is almost always an encroachment, a slow invasion up extremities toward the warm core. With severe loss of blood, with surgery, heat is lost from the core. Most operations find the body kept warm with heating pads and lithe electric blankets. When the doped-up body is finally wheeled into a ward room, the thermals are obvious to the caregivers and bystanders. Blankets, clothing, even a toque — fabric can only hold heat, not generate it.
Stan had never looked so angular, so sharp, as he did following the surgical attempt to relocate a paralyzed vocal cord. One, two, three extra blankets (requested, pleaded for and finally demanded) and still every joint was an arrowhead, each limb a rod. Delirious with blood loss and annihilating anaesthetics, Stan drifted in and out of consciousness and sensibility. Whether ordering “Lock down! Lock down!” or coughing up the intriguing “Never speak to me,” he always returned to “Cold, cold.”
More than words spoke. Stan’s eyelids became a slow percussion for the trembling limbs, tambourine shakes before the timpani barrage. Shivers went impressively global. Twitches plucked at the little dishrags of his quadriceps. The arced shoulders were tireless semaphores. An urgent but unreceived Morse was tapped out by his toes. Knowing that the well of the nurse’s station had run dry for him, that after three searches no thermostat was to be found in the hospital room, that rubbing Stan’s thin, unresponsive limbs wasn’t doing enough, Andrew began sliding his body into the narrow bed beside his father. Hauling his last, chaste foot off the floor, angling hips and torso and draping a connubial arm across Stan’s chest, he wondered if — in for a penny — he’d be better to remove his jeans, whether the thick denim dispersed or taxed this thermal delivery.
“Oh no, no,” Stan was just able to mutter, his eyes briefly their most open.
“Shh. Please, seriously. Shut up about this.”
The weak body that Andrew had puppeted or supported so often jerked now with shocking force down his own abdomen. The legs he usually guided or compensated for, or even doubled, now twitched along his own. The smells of antiseptic alcohol coming off Stan’s face were avoided with a burrowing of Andrew’s forehead, a move that conveniently spared him the sight of a salmon run of blood vessels up Stan’s neck and scalp. Finally, Andrew draped the inevitable, chicky thigh across his father’s.
“Oh no, Jesus. Jesus, Andrew.”
“Quiet.” He tried to lead their breath, pace out the old, skittish horse, all the while clamping a bar of heat across the thighs. “But you get an inch of wood, and I’ll smother you in a second.”
Father, then finally son, sank into uneven sleep.
63
The first run on a new trail unfurls spontaneously. Each new metre arrives suddenly, leaves just as quickly and feels almost unconnected to the remainder. Accelerating one minute then braking the next, too fast on a sharp corner, then too slow for a climbing curve, a rider on a new trail juggles various balls.
On Andrew’s first ride with Mark, each of them unknown to the other, each just a first name, a bike and a visible speed, Mark was faster, tighter on the curves. Even more impressive than his pace was the grip he had on his own force. When Andrew pushed more energy into the pedals, he lost precision in the hands, bumped out of the trail’s sweet groove. Bobbing his compact chest, tucking an elbow or a bronze, shaved calf before leap or landing, Mark kept the shadow of his force trim to frame and bone. Andrew was always behind. Mark’s breathing was steady; Andrew’s ragged. He hated Mark for waiting (“Water break? Pee break?”) and hated him for rolling on.
Deep roots cut across the narrow trail just as it doglegged into a nasty climb. Learning to traverse the exposed structural roots of trees without losing too much speed is a requisite trail skill, especially at the start of a climb. Andrew had previously paid the admission price of bruised shins learning to fluidly cross a washboard of hard roots, some of them five inches tall. Here, though, one escarpmental root towered at the base of a climb, and Andrew slipped across its merciless ridge. When he clipped out one foot to stabilize himself, the noise felt as loud as a pistol shot. Then he was forced to take the hill cold. The click and set of cleat, then gear, was thunderous. Ever climbing, Mark’s spins and snorts poured into the leaves ahead until he paused rebukingly. Mark’s lean into a hilltop tree, his loaded pause, reduced this forest soundtrack from stereo to Andrew’s own mono. Because he had slowed Mark to a halt, Andrew heard more clearly when Mark started riding again. He didn’t know this ribbon of curving mud beyond the metre immediately in front of him, but Mark did. Making the next climb, Andrew stopped trying to ride with his eyes and concentrated more on what he could hear. Mark’s clicking derailleur would prompt and caution his ride. The click and flick of a downshift meant the climb ahead was steeper than it looked. A click and toss meant the climb was about to end and they were in for a drop. Soon their ride was fluid, tandem. Andrew shoved his body forward into not only a space, but also a shape Mark was just vacating. He learned to ride, to really ride, to ride out of his body and into a new one, by chasing this bright, living ghost in front of him.
At the close of each ride with Mark, Andrew was battered but amazed. Alone, he would have been less. Slower. More cautious. Andrew thanked Mark for his introductions to new lengths of trail or, early on, the occasional tip, but he had tried to keep his deeper gratitude private. Then at the close of one ride, vis-à-vis no comment of Andrew’s save the pumping of his chest, Mark announced, “Each of the four or eight people in a rowing shell pulls harder than he would alone in a solo shell.”
Until that moment, the two of them together hadn’t said as many words on the entire ride.
64
Deprivation holiday. Lying (absurdly, he admits) on a golf course lawn, closer to sunrise than midnight, fleeing a car chase that may or may not be happening, these two words pour down on him from the starry sky above. Deprivation holiday. So far he’s been able to tell himself that the trip, this earned distance, isn’t anything so bourgeois as a holiday. He biked away from an apartment he’ll never enter again. By day, he powers himself up indomitable Maritime hills, and by night he lives without electricity, running water, or solid walls. And yet he’s still a white, middle-class North American with a credit card in his saddlebag and an affluent mother one phone call away. However arduous the biking, the deprivations he’s putting himself through are all chosen.
If Betty had been travelling in the East, not Europe, sending postcards of monks and seeking enlightenment as well as cheap hotel rooms, he might have thought of the Buddhist notion of chosen suffering earlier. Without the one shining statement he does remember — in fact, he can’t forget it — he’d readily agree that his knowledge of Buddhism is superficial, nothing more than an afternoon’s reading from a borrowed textbook and then a few web searches over the years. Without this one phrase he can’t forget, he’d say he knows nothing. But the noble truth “All suffering is created by desire” finds him once again, this time on an empty golf course chasing the wispy gleam of religion. Enlightenment doesn’t care whether he knows one Buddhist thought or a hundred. Right now, cold, sore, exhausted and wishing he didn’t have to get back on the bike, he sees the unbreakable chain between suffering and desire. Suddenly this is more solid than a phrase, stronger than an idea. Push desire and you pull suffering. Sitting up on the grass, he utters the truth aloud, amazed by its combination of brevity and profundity. Pound for pound, All suffering is created by desire must be the wisest statement in human history.
Finally, caught by one phrase, he crawls across the fairway to dig out Betty’s postcards and search out another.
Dubrovnik. There are bullet holes in the famously gorgeous marble walls. This whole coast is, as the cliché goes, ruggedly beautiful. Cooked beige. The rocks look straight from the oven.
In her Chardonnay, Mom likes to say there are four walls in the house of love. Taste. Humour. Morality. And of course, lust.
Tell me, did we get three or four?
Scaling t
he walls,
— B.
Temporarily enlightened, he’s glad he had offered Betty Stan’s house before he got caught in the lie(s) that drove her out of it. If it’s love, ego-dissolving love, you’ll bet whatever farm you have.
Betty’s postcards are beside his feet, and their Kingston arguments are never far from the top of his mind. When he had tried to reconcile himself to Stan’s will nudging him out of the house, his first revolutionary plan had not necessarily been the stalling tactic of a graduate degree, but nominally selling the house to Betty.
January saw their nasty fights, then February, with its lean toward sunlight, saw mergers of defence and offence.
The Argument of Inheritance
“So you stay in school for two more years,” Betty genuinely asked, “is the house going to be any easier to sell then?”
“Depends on who I sell it to,” he said, poking her.
“Oh no, wait —”
“Not marriage. Just two people who love each other and share a house.”
“No. No. No. Your dad didn’t lose this house to divorce.
How would you feel if you did?”
“What’s a relationship without trust?” he replied, still lying.
65
Compared to the tired bureaucrat of English, French is a richer language in the mouth, with its elastic vowels and chewy consonants. And topographically, Quebec is a mouth. The open throat of the St. Lawrence lolls among a varied set of craggy teeth. Mountains, escarpments and hills rise and fall throughout the province. Drumlins, those old, single molars, stand alone in plateaus and fields. In the east, the province is one sharp incisor after another. Hills and valleys. Hills and valleys.
Riding toward Rivière-du-Loup just before dawn, he sees yesterday’s religiosity still burning in today’s valley in the form of a red glowing cross. A metal cross several metres high rides a promontory overlooking the city. Its lipstick red glow gives the cross a campy, neon Gothic look, yet the province with the highest per capita rate of agnosticism still has the architecture and infrastructure of homogenous faith. A towering metal cross punctuates this landscape of steeples every three hundred kilometres. Metal remembers.
The red cross’s unmistakably electric glow charges his sagging pace. The distant beacon of right angles, roads and power grids now advertises new trinities. Food, beer and a doctor. Cheese, fruit and pints.
With the city growing in sight, he again appreciates the railway’s blasted grade. This old gash of industry will funnel him to the St. Lawrence, the national birth canal. The St. Lawrence also returns salt to the air and slips its fine hooks into his nostrils.
Three or four kilometres from the riverside city’s puddle of white light and its Christian prick of red, he is a pinball driven up its narrow, loading trough. Arriving, he shoots out on the top of the city’s raked tiers. Knowing nothing save the few metres of road in front of him, he jinks his way down a hillside of the city, randomly passing through one stoplight then veering off another, silent bumpers for this rolling pinball.
Between the city’s top shelf and the moving field of the river below are two other tiers. Adjacent to the river is a surprisingly wide flood plain. Pollution-cook an ice cap or two and this downtown becomes a coral reef. Above the fertile first floor is a second tier nearly as flat and wide. Andrew rolls from the hilltop houses with enormous windows into a polite second tier of smaller homes, lawns cut and trim, two cars to every drive. A teacher here, a manager there. On the bottom tier, the cars are older and rustier.
The St. Lawrence River made Canada. The great blue umbilical cord to the Old World challenges its banks and isn’t at all intimidated by the mountain range flanking the north side. It isn’t still, but the river is so wide that it can’t be seen as running alongside the bordering land. Wide and deep and as long as any schoolkid can doodle, the St. Lawrence is perpendicular, never parallel.
This long night’s ride of the soul has put shakes into his hands, squeezed his vision down to just two dimensions and made the bike frame into a rolling iron maiden. Spoiled by the lost railway, he is utterly bewildered by local traffic and may not have survived a midday arrival. The sweet pull down hill after hill hides a burr of incompetent fear. Additionally, Andrew is lost to the siren song of water.
As the sunrise finally pours down into the valley, he wobbles toward a park marked chutes. A smaller, more rivery river runs downhill to the St. Lawrence, and Andrew soon discovers a deep gorge cut into auburn rock. The roar of rushing water echoes up the rusty rock walls to hum in his ear as he rolls over a scenic bridge with the St. Lawrence to his left and a small hydro dam high on his rocky right. Only in Quebec would producing electricity be cause for a park.
He’s tempted to sleep on the nearest patch of soft grass but also wants to press deeper into the park for privacy. Having crested a small pedestrian bridge, he lets gravity lead him into a dark trail on the other side. He wouldn’t even look at the trail if it weren’t downhill. As is, he’s willing to abandon the trim lawns and rectangular flower beds behind for the shady forest ahead. Free speed and the roar of water merge to sing here, here, a song he resists not for any competing desire but from a laziness so thorough he doesn’t even want to pull the brakes. A footpath offers a peek of the rushing river on his left while levelling terrain slows him to a wobbly stop. Old, gnarly apple trees surround him as he brakes and dismounts. He is in an old orchard, and he flops contentedly in the fragrant air, an itchy dog keen to make his shade.
66
“Come on,” Betty argued as Pat’s proposition beeped to a close on their answering machine. “I’m going to show you mine.”
They had returned home to a surprise message from Andrew’s mother announcing she had been suddenly called to Kingston and would they like to meet for dinner.
“No. No. No. No,” he said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“You live with me, not my mother.”
“Free food. Better wine. Stories about you when you were a wee laddie,” she said. “Come on.”
“That’s just it, her stories will all be about how I was never a wee laddie. She’d prefer if I showed up tonight on Rollerblades and blew bubbles in my milk.”
With less than two hours between their receiving this message and the proposed hour of invasion, with the fun of showers and gin, of pinkened bodies tucked into layer after layer of familiar clothing, he simply forgot to worry about his mother and his lover possibly discussing when his father died. His only thoughts were of lowering the thong he had watched rise, and of whether Betty would confirm the rumour that the presence of a (common-law) mother-in-law makes a young woman even hornier. If they’d known of Pat’s visit days, not minutes, in advance, he might have made one quick case or another to Pat to ensure that Betty wouldn’t be told so casually of the lie upon which their relationship was based. Given how infrequently he and Pat talked, let alone talked about Stan’s death, he probably could have left her a brief voice mail or email, a simple Please don’t mention exactly when Dad died and he’d have been fine. Even at the restaurant, working on the fly as Betty went to the washroom, if he’d leaned closer to his mother and made a quick request for secrecy, he would have earned a disapproving look from her but still found sleep that night in the usual way. He might even have waited until Betty was approaching the table and tried a shotgun pass; “It’s easier for me if she thinks he died two Augusts ago.”
Yet the pleasures of living with Betty were both constant and evolving, and he couldn’t always remember that their household was founded on a lie. The surprise of his mother’s visit and, unbelievably, its laughs, further blinded him. To his shock, that evening’s three-way conversation with his mother was the first loss. Dinner between just him and Pat had been more or less perfunctory since he’d graduated from Happy Meals. His choice of restaurant, her credit card. See you in two weeks. Suddenly, Betty in the mix, the laughs flowed more freely than the wine.
“I’m serious,�
�� the well-dressed Pat assured the well-dressed Betty, “a snowsuit, a balaclava and a diving mask. In July! All so he could free a bee from the car.”
Endure this embarrassment and he’d soon be back in Betty’s arms, back in the body trade. She had become his night, his lust and sleep, his home. Until Pat reached into her purse for a khaki envelope.
“Look at this,” Pat held up a mid-sized Revenue Canada envelope. “We’ve been divorced for sixteen years. He dies, and six months later I get his tax forms. Honestly, what do we pay for?”
“Six months?” Betty asked.
Andrew froze.
“Counting’s still the same since I was in school, isn’t it? August. Now. There isn’t a new new math, is there?” asked Pat.
He actually preferred the hatred in Betty’s face to the confusion and the diplomacy which preceded it. She had every right to put on the visor of nastiness that fell from her quickly peaked eyebrows onto her burning eyes. He deserved her sharpened jaw, her compressed lips and much more. Or much less.
Betty calmly announced, “Pat, thank you for the meal and company. I’m leaving now. I’m sure Andrew can invent some explanation.”
“Betty, wait, listen —”
“No. Not one word. Do not follow me.” Rage boiled in her face.
Watching her push herself across the restaurant, he could just recognize the envy beneath his own guilt and shame. Yes, Betty, I’d run away too if I were you. Absolutely goddamned right.
The Push & the Pull Page 17