The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  I’d internalized that code, after all, even though I’d been in violation of it my entire life, taking my father’s own escape impulses much further, breaching the Manville version of manhood: with graduate school, with literature, with the eschewing of construction and motorcycles, with an awareness and deliberate expression of the code’s frailty. Perhaps this made it all the more necessary for me to man up in these public ways, and at a time when the code was at its frailest. This meant muffling that internal scorn (of course he’d be killed on that goddamn thing) and conforming to the day’s procedure, choosing allegiance over disruption. In my most self-disparaging moments, this felt to me like weakness and complicity. But I don’t know that I had it in me to behave in any other way.

  Still—someone else should have spoken that day, someone less conscious of the pathetic inadequacy of language when confronted with calamity, of how the mind and heart just hang there in a charcoal cloud. Someone less apt to exploit the romantic pitch and pull of cemeteries.

  I was no less conflicted when, the day after the eulogy, my grandparents asked me, in a query that was also a mandate, to compose the epitaph for my father’s headstone. I had thirty-six hours to come up with lines to last the ages. This was no assignment I wanted, the deadline about three decades too soon. My family, I knew, expected lines that sounded the way they imagined poetry to sound: “Write something pretty,” Parma had told me. My preference for my father’s headstone—a stanza by Herbert or Donne, by Father Hopkins or Auden—was so far out of the question as to make me seem ravingly garish for thinking it a preference at all.

  How could I have been okay inscribing my father’s headstone with lines that he himself would not have recognized or lauded or found remotely consoling? What is our duty to the dead when the dead don’t care for duty? My answer is that the lines would not have been for him; they would have been for us. The dead don’t need poems. In the end, it was that us which elbowed me into nixing the possibility of lines from Father Hopkins, because the us really meant my grandparents. They were the ones who’d be squinting at the lines each week, in whatever weather the season saw fit to give them. Their daily pilgrimage to the cemetery would last long after the rest of us had returned to our willed versions of normality.

  I have a hard time understanding what I meant by the lines I wrote, and rather an easy time being embarrassed by them. I was conscious of having to maintain an obedience to the uncomplaining stoicism of my family, its strictures of manliness and daring. For the sake of my grandmother, I had to gesture toward the afterlife, at the inevitability of reunion with my father; what was illusory for me was essential for her. I also wanted to hit the right sentiment without swerving into bathos, to be able to live with whatever words I chose, not to sacrifice too much of my own selfhood in the completion of this task. This wasn’t mere difficulty; it was futility. So the epitaph turned out to be my elegy in miniature, the propaganda everybody needed, declamations of his strength and his love, of riding hard and building well, and of our becoming him in his absence, which makes sense only so far. Truly becoming him would have meant a Yamaha R1, meant killing ourselves at a hundred miles per hour.

  IV

  While we’re alive we live forever. Those aren’t wheels; those are wings. High-performance machines raced to the brink of divinity. But cross that brink and you are not divine—you are dead. Even gods can be killed. Get killed in an instant and you’re deprived of a final accounting. He never knew what hit him.

  Imagine being too young and finding yourself about to die, conscious of dying by some ill fate, some wrong judgment—consider how downright mistaken it would seem. Your mind would speed before it slowed, would hop from yesterday to tomorrow before settling on the now, on the disappointment, the dread. And when it settled, you’d no doubt consider that negotiations were in order, a moment of diplomacy, some stab at deal-making to annul this error upon you. My father might have had that moment. Most likely he did not, not with his three injuries. That’s what I learned after the funeral: he’d suffered three injuries, each of which was fatal—a broken neck, a crushed throat, and severe brain trauma. And maybe, in moments, I’m glad for that, for the quick obliteration, because negotiations with the Reaper never work.

  Absence takes up space, has mass, moves from room to room. In its decisiveness, it seeks you. Someone ought to coin a term for that days-long stage between the buzzing of shock and the boredom of grief. Grief is much heavier, much stickier, than whatever precedes it. Tiring and tiresome, grief will gain complete occupancy of you. On other days it felt as if a silent tearing had occurred at the hub of me, a ripping that sent vibrations out across my body, currents running just beneath the skin. After the initial jolt subsides, what you feel is closer to fear than grief. Lewis: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. You are a tangle of regret for what’s left undone, and of remorse for what’s now undoable. You quail four or five times before noon. The month, the season, feels all wrong.

  Details began filtering in from the six riding partners my father had been with on the day he died. He had complained of brake problems at the gas station just prior to the crash. He planned to lag behind, let someone else lead the pack. Yamaha had recently done a recall on some element of the R1’s braking system, but my father never followed up on the recall, so one guy was convinced that my father’s brakes failed when he went into that turn, because an expert rider doesn’t just collide with a guardrail on a day you could not have painted any better.

  Two other guys claimed they’d heard my father say, “I don’t feel well,” a sentence he would not have spoken. A man who views the wordless enduring of pain as a sign of election does not gripe of feeling unwell, and certainly not to a clan of riders for whom machismo was a weekly contest. Someone else suggested my father might have had a heart attack as he went into that turn, but he was only forty-seven, and we don’t have young heart attacks lurking in our family history. Another floated the idea that a deer might have bounded out in front of him, but just a minute before, a bevy of machines had screamed down the center of the road sounding like a war. No deer bounds out into that unless it’s deaf.

  There was also this: an irate old farmer in a pickup truck, not pleased by that scream of engines passing him at a hundred miles per hour. Someone offered the absurd speculation that, because my father was lagging at the rear of the pack, this farmer ran him into the guardrail. So, a homicidal old farmer, then. But even a five-year-old can tell you: it’s not possible for a pickup truck, any pickup truck, to gain ground on a Yamaha R1.

  And then there was this: my father had mounted a camera to the anterior of the bike so that he might study his riding style and make improvements for the following Sunday. But the camera was missing, and it took me two days to discover that another rider had taken it before the police appeared at the crash site. He knew the evidence would show a hollering catalog of traffic crimes. This information created a clog in my chest that would not wash down. A man I did not know was in possession of my father’s camera, and on that camera was the crash that killed him. I made infuriated phone calls and finally got ahold of the wife of the guy who’d taken the camera.

  “Let me talk to Frank,” I said.

  “Frank is very upset about this. Frank was very close to your dad. Frank can’t talk right now.”

  “Frank is upset? Did you just say to me that goddamn Frank is upset?”

  That week, Frank returned the camera to my brother but I didn’t ask if he watched the footage, if our father’s crash was on the tape. It was enough for me that the camera was back in our possession, whatever my brother chose to do with it. We had the equivalent of a black box, and I know it makes little sense—grief cares nothing for declarations of logic; it takes whatever egress it needs, whatever path conforms to the enigmas of its own internal working—but I never considered watching it, and I don’t think anyone else did, either. I wasn’t aware of being concerned about the acceleration of my sadness, about glimpsing sce
nes that would alter my conception of my father. But watching the crash would have no doubt confirmed his recklessness and blame, and I needed to soak in denial, to imagine my route into his death, and in this way perhaps imagine my way into the last moments of his life.

  I could see the point of other investigations, other inquiries that yielded to the agency of the imagination—I’d soon be obsessing over documents and details and diction, the coroner’s report and police report, the testimony of his riding partners about that day—but I must have been living in a low-level fear of that camera’s proof. I could not have proof, one way or the other, because the omission of proof is the only way the sacred stays sacred.

  When the pack realized my father was no longer behind them, they waited. When he didn’t show, they doubled back and discovered him half beneath the guardrail, the bike on top of his lower half. The old farmer in the pickup truck was there, and a couple who lived in the house nearby, and some others who had stopped. Another rider claimed he heard my father say “Oh God,” claimed he saw him move his arm on top of his chest as he was being lifted into the ambulance. He’d said it all the time, “Oh God”: in jest, in sarcasm, in exasperation, in exhaustion. When Pop found out that my father had mumbled “Oh God,” he said, “He knew he was hurt.”

  But how could my father say that, or anything else, with a crushed throat, with his windpipe ruined? With all three of those life-ending injuries? How could he lift his arm when I knew—I knew—he was already dead? That is one of our many unkillable wishes in the world: to keep the dead in conversation, in motion. Keep them talking, keep them moving, and you can keep them here.

  Two days after the funeral, I phoned Christian, one of the men who’d been with my father that day, and asked him for everything he remembered, scratching these words onto a legal pad as he spoke:

  “He was too good. He refused to lay it down, never doubted for a second he could take that turn. When we found him, he had one leg up over the bike, his head propped up against the bottom of the guardrail. The tires were pointed toward him. He hit the guardrail the same time as the bike. His legs lay in the direction he came from. I saw him lift his arm up and put it on his chest.”

  But another rider would tell me that my father moved his arm onto his chest once he was laid on the stretcher, not when he was still on the road. Which is right? Is either right? Because only a conscious man moves his arm. Because if there was consciousness in those last minutes, then he might have been aware of what he’d done and where it would lead. And if he had been aware? That somehow changed things for me—I’d have to reimagine, reconfigure his terminal seconds—even if it changed nothing for him.

  “I didn’t hear him speak,” Christian told me. “Carlos did. I didn’t hear him say ‘Oh God.’ ”

  “Tell me about the bike,” I said.

  “Every Sunday that bike looked brand new. The brakes must have failed; there’s no other reason. He never would’ve taken that bike out of the garage that day if the brake pads were worn down like everyone’s saying. I think something failed as he went into that turn.”

  I have these puzzling words from Christian looking at me now from a yellow page, words from sixteen years ago: Possible pump malfunction, there was too much blood, it needed to be pumped out. What can that mean? The heart, of course, is a pump, but that can’t be what he meant. He must have meant the engine’s fuel pump. But why, then, “too much blood”? A bike doesn’t run on blood, and a fuel pump would have had nothing to do with a crash. And “pumped out” from where, with what, by whom? I’ve reordered those words in a number of ways, thinking I might have scratched them down wrong—bereavement is a garbled tongue, has no fixed syntax, is rife with tautology and non sequitur—but no matter what I do, no matter their arrangement, I cannot make them click.

  Christian said something else to me on the phone that day. He said that when they’d found my father under the guardrail, his head looked as if it had been wrenched around 180 degrees. And I did something terrible that night. In my grandparents’ kitchen, just the three of us there, I told them of that detail, of my father’s head wrenched around 180 degrees on his shoulders. The sound that came from Pop was part moan, part gasp, the name “Jesus Christ” beneath it. And then I heard myself apologizing—twice, three times—in a voice lifted by a chest-swell becoming sobs. Why would I tell them such a thing? Why didn’t I understand that what Christian must have seen was not my father’s head wrenched 180 degrees, but his helmet that had turned on impact and given that grisly impression?

  Through a wet tissue, Parma said, “It’s okay. I want to know. I want to know everything.”

  New Jersey’s population is the densest in the nation: it’s a claustrophobic, comma-shaped state. Population density means more cars, and more cars mean clogged roads when they don’t mean murder on motorcycles. And so, each Sunday, my father and his cohort retreated across the state line to the backroads of bucolic Pensy, roads that were curvier and better maintained than most of Jersey’s. They weren’t worried about Pensy’s guardrails, lampposts, or ample oak trees because they maintained an intransigent belief in their own abilities. No—they worried about the distracted jackass in the convertible, the homicidal ditz dashing to the mall while applying eyeliner in her rearview, the silver-haired slaughterer driving east on the westbound side of the highway.

  I’d grown up listening to my father carp about the average person, the average driver especially. Although he mellowed in his forties, as men are known to do—as sperm count dwindles, patience improves—he was ever sarcastic when he wasn’t cynical, frequently complaining about humanity’s lack of competence. “It’s amazing mankind has come this far with so many stupid people” was one of his favorite sentences. He had a proletariat’s definition of intelligence, indistinguishable from efficiency and what used to be called common sense. You wouldn’t have wanted to be in the car with him stuck behind some hapless sightseer doing half the speed limit. “All it takes is one idiot,” he’d say—to make him late, he meant, but more generally, to inconvenience him. In my family’s mindset, it’s something of a capital crime for one man to inconvenience another. It’s simply not done.

  From start to finish, a typical Sunday’s ride looked like this:

  Some guys would meet at Pop’s house at eight thirty, look over their bikes, bullshit about throttles, tailpipes, handlebars. By nine o’clock they’d meet another band of riders in the next town, near the highway. They’d meet at the base of a water tower standing at the center of a honeycombed industrial complex owned by one of Pop’s pals. A ramp led down to the tower, and as each new guy showed up, he’d pull a wheelie on the ramp to the cheers of those who were already there. More bullshitting and inspection of bikes until everyone arrived. By ten o’clock they’d have to meet the Pennsylvania batch of riders at a diner on Route 202, near the state border. They had a rule that turned into a joke because every man broke it: no racing before breakfast. Some guys never made it to breakfast.

  They’d time the red lights on 202, deliberately slow to catch the red, so they could drag race, gun it to the next traffic signal, or they’d try to pass one another through the sweeping jughandles on and off the highway. There was no plan for contingencies: if you crashed and were not killed, the best you could hope for was somebody dashing to a phone to dial a tow truck or an ambulance. Once, a helicopter was summoned when a rider ended up shattered in a ditch, bleeding everywhere on the inside.

  Breakfast lasted half an hour, forty minutes at most. When my uncle Nicky first began riding with this group at thirty years old, none of the younger guys would sit with him at the diner—he sat beside Pop or his brothers, ignored by the rest—until he proved himself by passing one of the fastest guys in a jughandle. After that, the rider he passed was full of reverence and affection for him. While eating: no family talk allowed, and no work talk either, nothing personal, domestic, nine-to-five. Motorcycle talk only: the MotoGP races, recent magazine articles in Sport Rider, new bik
es, new parts for bikes, gossip about guys who’d recently crashed. Some couldn’t eat much, toast maybe, their guts tied up in anticipation of the coming speed, of the concentration they’d need. But Pop’s appetite was always unwavering; each week he’d speak the same line to the waitress: “Pancakes golden brown, with sausage.”

  After breakfast, the fifteen bikes lined up at a single pump at the adjacent gas station. Each topped off his tank and passed the nozzle to the next guy. Each began the ride on full. Those back roads had no gas stations, and if you found one, it was a mom-and-pop general store not open on Sunday. The price to top off fifteen tanks was normally twenty bucks, and Pop normally paid it. He and another alpha planned the route through the Pensy countryside. In the lead, Pop always knew the roads, every pothole, crack, and sudden curve, how to take a turn, where the dips were, the rises, where the elm root buckled the asphalt at the edge. And so the riders who crashed were usually those following him too fast into a turn: guys broke legs and backs trying to catch Pop.

  The day had its clan lingo. Don’t go in the marbles meant “Don’t run wide off the clean part of the road, into the stones, dust, and dirt on the shoulder.” Stay off the paint meant “Keep your tires off the white and yellow lines,” because they were slick when wet. I see your chicken strips meant the tread on your tires wasn’t worn on the outside, which meant you weren’t riding aggressively enough. The bike’s on rails meant the bike was stable, steady, smooth. Keep the shiny side up perhaps went without saying: it meant “Don’t crash.” And the day had its code for cops, too: When the pigs light up their cherries and start to chase, split up: they can’t chase us all. And if you got caught, you never gave up the names of those who didn’t. When troopers once snagged Nicky near a cornfield, they forced him facedown into the road, handcuffed him at the back, and hollered at him to name the others. He never did.