The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  “That warning sign is too close to the turn,” I said, gesturing behind us to the crest.

  “It’s way too close,” he said. “There’s an accident here at this guardrail once a month, at least. We’ve petitioned the county, a couple of times, to have it moved farther down so people have time enough to slow, but they won’t move it. I don’t know why.”

  I wanted to interview this couple, ask them the specifics they remembered, what they saw and felt, how it all seemed: colors, scents, tastes, the sound the wind made through the boles. But I couldn’t do it just then, not with my family there. The husband gave me his telephone number and said I could call him whenever I wished. We had this weighted thing between us now, this affiliation of hurt: his son, my father, both named William, both dead before their due, killed on unlucky number seven, their deaths tinged with unknowables, without completion, without condolence. I never did call him, and I’m not sure why—because although I wanted facts, I didn’t want too many of them?—and I can’t call him now, sixteen years later.

  Mike hammered the wooden cross into the soil, and as I squatted near him at the guardrail, I thought this: What did you expect at the other end of that crest, at a speed I cannot guess, the trees a blur on both sides of you? My hours will be ravished by wonder, seeing these Pennsylvania paths of asphalt and your color gashing through the countryside. Your death is black and red, bright white and chrome. Now my own life shrinks and swells on this road, at this spot, this right-angle right turn you didn’t see until much too late. Where are we now? How can our planet expend the energy to spin? I want to sink into this spot that claimed you, to see for myself in hope of knowing. I can see you now, lying here broken, life leaking from you. Perhaps a lone thought survives long enough to let you know: this Sunday will never end, and the race is under way. The ruin in the wake belongs to me, not you. Who will reverse the heart and allow our blood to run backward? How can I choose to live in the hypothesis of reverse? Dad—what did you do?

  Before we departed that afternoon, I made a point of locking within my memory everything about that road and its surroundings: the shallow rock-filled brook, the broad-leaf trees, the furrowed farmland, the nearby pond, the costly homes set back on acres of coifed grass and shrubs. That day was the only time I’ve ever been there, though the place appears periodically in my dreams. That’s one of the pastimes of the dead: bored invigilators, spying sprites, they breathe on us while we sleep.

  Two years later, Mike returned to Slifer Valley Road, and when he did, the middle-aged couple once again came to the road to greet him. It must have been a necessary hobby for them, to sit watch over that right turn, no doubt remembering their murdered son, praying—they seemed like the beseeching sort—that another motorist wouldn’t mangle himself in sight of their home. The cross Mike had pounded into the spot of our father’s crash was still there, although altered in an unexpected way: a swan had built her nest and laid her eggs against it, so that only the top, the T-section of the cross, was now visible. Mike’s initial thought was that sacrilegious landscapers had been heaping their sticks and cut grass onto the modest monument to our dad’s death, but then the wife told him about the swan.

  In their thirty years of residing in that house, she said, they’d never seen a swan cross Slifer Valley Road to nest away from the pond. But during the first nesting season after our father died there, a rogue swan built her large bed and laid her eggs directly against the cross, on top of our father’s blood stained into the asphalt. Each day when she crossed the road from the pond to reach her nest, she’d linger there in the center, on the yellow line, just before the right turn. As if, the wife said, in caution—a swan warning speeders to slow down.

  Slifer Valley Road as my father’s swan song, the sound of the bike a music he loved, a rapturous tune for those with ears to hear it. Swans don’t actually sing before they die—one species is known to whistle—although you see that superstition at certain spots in literature: in Plato and Euripides, in Cicero and Seneca. Some Greek myths speak of Apollo, the god of music, as a swan. Homer was the Swan of Meander, Shakespeare the Swan of Avon. In Othello, Emilia says, I will play the swan, / And die in music. In Anderson’s famous fairy tale “The Wild Swans,” the swans are heroes, brothers who have been turned into the birds by a malefic witch and who rescue their sister from the executioner.

  The wife gave Mike a photograph she’d snapped of the swan in the nest, its question-mark head and neck beside the white cross. When Mike returned that day and showed me the photo, I said, “Please don’t tell me you think our father is that swan.” He didn’t tell me that, no, although his face said otherwise. The swan, our father, as hero-crooner. That photo is still framed above his bed in Colorado, and every so often his dreams are filled with floating, singing, waddling swans.

  In the months after his death, my father did not appear in the wilderness of my sleep as an apparition or omen. He did not arrive to say “Remember me.” He had no advice, no wisdom or warnings to impart, no events to foretell. No ghoulish haunting to undertake. He was simply there, the image of him projected into my sleep. I maintained the awareness that he was dead, and so his appearance in my sleep seemed a resurrection, and that’s what I felt while asleep and dreaming: the awe of this Lazarus act. There he’d be, just standing in whatever room I dreamed I was in, his typically wry countenance, unaltered by burial, comfortingly at ease, with nothing to say or do, no will remaining, and I’d look open-mouthed at him and weep, wonder how he’d climbed from the grave.

  And when I’d wake I’d be weeping still on a wet pillowcase, feeling drugged, fatigued by the dream, trying to crawl fully awake, away from its lingering, but also wanting it to last, because I could feel him still, the way scent from a candle stays in the room after you’ve stanched the flame. The tears were actual, both in and out of sleep, and this merging of one realm with the other—the dead with the living, the unconscious with the conscious—is how our dreams manage to feel so pertinent to whatever quest we’re on. In one dream I approached him, in Parma’s kitchen as he leaned against the counter, and I held him but he did not hold me back, would not or could not, and I soon woke myself with the shock of that, with the shuddering of sobs.

  My brother and I had the tearful task of going through my father’s van, sorting through the many tools, papers, envelopes, sitting in the sawdust and dried dirt. A hopeless junk-food fiend, my father had littered the van with chocolate wrappers and cookie boxes—Snickers, Reese’s, Lorna Doone, Fig Newtons—and we grinned at that, though grinning seemed impossible. The letters I’d written him over the years from the various places I was living—from Myrtle Beach, from Boston—and some of the photos I’d enclosed: they were all folded into an overhead compartment.

  On one envelope, the back side of a bill, he had written, in caps, SPEED VISION, and above that was a telephone number: 1-888-SPEED. He was a nostalgic keeper of tiny things, and now I needed to keep everything too, every receipt that held his signature, every square of paper that showed his scrawl. Since my brother lived in Colorado, we agreed that the van would go to me, and I would drive it for the next two years. My brother wanted all the tools, our father’s utensils of creation. There was still the mission of going through his clothes, smelling, touching the fabric that had touched him. And then the task of the items he’d stored in blue bins in the basement of the townhouse he shared with his fiancée. Cards and letters, photos and notebooks and pamphlets, medical records and our report cards, sales papers for the motorcycle, keepsakes from wherever he’d been over the years, on vacations, on weekend motorcycle jaunts.

  And I remembered this: when I was a sophomore in high school, after my first girlfriend dumped me for a football star, just prior to my discovery of bodybuilding, my father asked what in God’s name was the matter with me, when I was going to shake myself out of this doomsday funk. I was miserable to look at, and as a single father with enough misery to brook, he didn’t want to be living with a depressed roman
tic. My mother had been out of our lives for five years at this time.

  “Move on,” he said. “You’re a teenager. This is called normal life. It happens every day to everyone.”

  I clomped upstairs into my bedroom, retrieved the perfumed, rubber-banded brick of love notes the girlfriend had scribbled to me, and then clomped back down to present them as evidence to my inexperienced father.

  “Here,” I said, and clapped them into his gut. “Read these notes and maybe you’ll get it.”

  There at the counter in our kitchen, he unfolded the notes and read a high-school girl’s words of eternity. He didn’t smirk; he barely blinked. Very carefully he refolded those fragrant pages—their familiar scent slapping me as I stood there watching him—and he said, “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  In our garage, in a cedar chest that had always been with us, my father had stockpiled every note, letter, and card my mother had ever written to him—fifteen years’ worth of regal blue loops and dots, beginning when they were themselves in high school.

  He plunged a hand into the chest, yanked out a clot of paper, and said, “It’s all bullshit. It doesn’t mean a thing. Words, that’s all. Lots of goddamn words. Nothing but your actions count in this life. Words are easy. A person’s words aren’t worth shit.”

  Words are easy. This in-the-garage pep talk mollified my grief not one bit, and yet the significance of that gesture trails me still. Auden: The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living. My father wasn’t wrong. In his nook of the world, from his manly vantage, actions mattered, actions elevated and saved. But I wish he were here for me to tell him how hard the right words really are. I wish, too, that I could say this for the sake of drama: my father and I took that cedar chest into the backyard that afternoon, doused it with gasoline, and set it ablaze, the two of us shoulder to shoulder, staring at the fire, at all of my mother’s untrue sentences disappearing in black smoke.

  VI

  Gravity, velocity, trajectory, horsepower and torque, Newton with a notebook and quill. The aggressive greed of it, gravity’s single-mindedness, the self-serving mandates of momentum, how velocity or traction won’t be talked into changing its mind. The motorcycle as finely tuned organism. The front and rear suspensions are correlated to the tires: the tires won’t work right, won’t have optimal stick or spin, if the suspension isn’t tweaked to the rider’s weight and height, nor will the brakes, the always singeing brakes, work properly. The best acceleration and deceleration rates, winning and losing, dying and living, are often a product of centimeters, of quarter pounds.

  The motorcycle as a kinetic presentation of physics, of those numinous equations that altered how we see and build. In a turn—at a lean angle of seventy, sixty degrees—a rider shifts his weight, lowers the bike’s center of gravity so it can take the curve, keep its speed of forty, fifty miles per hour, and keep a contact patch with the pavement so the bike doesn’t slip away from underneath him. Heading into a turn quickly, very quickly, as the rider is leaning and cranking the throttle, centrifugal force is determined to pull the bike to the outside edge of the road or track—he’s got to hit that turn just right, at the right angle and the right speed, and exert the right amount of force to keep the bike going where he needs it to go.

  You want a 60/40 weight distribution from the back tire to the front, and you get that ratio when you’re on the gas—the bike is happiest when you’re on the gas. That’s when it handles. It gets glum when you’re on the brake and in a turn, and a glum bike is a deadly bike. The bike wants to go straight, and it wants speed, was designed for it.

  Newton’s First Law of Motion, the law of inertia (if only my father had been tempted by inertia and not its opposite)—an object in motion (the motorcycle) wants to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force (brakes or guardrails)—is not good news for a speeding bike. It means that the quicker it’s traveling, the less apt it is to turn. Not a problem if you’re on an airport runway; a giant problem if you’re on a Pennsylvania back road.

  To take the turn and come out the other side of it with all your bones intact, you’ve actually got to nudge the bike slightly away from the direction in which you’re turning. The wheels are basically gyroscopic at this point, and so the counter-lean has the inverse effect: It sends the bike in the other direction, into the turn. While that’s happening, the rider takes himself off the seat, leaning into the turn—you can see it in MotoGP races, the riders dragging their knees and elbows on the track. The bike, though angled, retains that crucial contact patch so it doesn’t go down, but the rider is hanging off the thing like a monkey to redistribute the weight.

  And when it all goes wrong—when the forward, downward, outward forces don’t get along—then what you have is this: the laughable fragility of the human skull, no better than an egg. How unprotected we are on the earth, nothing sufficient to shield us, tissue all-too-easily torn, bones cracked, veins and arteries tearing under pressure. How did Homo erectus endure the peril? How did Cro-Magnon relax? Rubber and steel, asphalt, chrome, and gasoline: just begging to kill you. The human form will not fit in the world now. A yurt is sturdier, an armadillo better equipped.

  In the night I fell prey to magical thinking. I had a child’s notion that I could undo what had happened, buy back my father from the Olympian forces that took him. The money he left my siblings and me must have caused an uptick in my guilt—that reliable Catholic guilt, never tardy—because I wanted to trade the money, blood money, for his life. Half-asleep, I thought that if I could just find the right administrator, invoke the proper deity, I could hand over the cash and walk out with my father.

  Anna and I spent that summer at my godfather’s house in Maplewood, New Jersey, just south of a bombed-out Newark, thirty minutes from my grandparents’ place in Manville. The house sat behind a scrubby lawn on a wide suburban street lined with oaks that reached their arms over rooftops. It was a capacious two-story Colonial built in 1926, brick front with cedar-shake siding, detached garage, a back deck with a space-age grill for barbecuing. The original owner of that house had grown up in it, had become a wealthy banker, never married, and then in his eighties committed suicide in the downstairs office, I don’t know how. Lots of money, no love.

  But we made lots of love that summer, in that house, and in that downstairs office where, unknown to us, someone had once ended his own life by rope or razor or gunshot. We had the house entirely to ourselves because my godfather passed the days at his business and the nights at his fiancée’s condo. We moved into the pink bedroom upstairs—it was like living inside a watermelon—the bedroom that was supposed to be reserved for his daughter. Both of my godfather’s children resided in Pittsburgh with their mother, eight hours away, and barely ever visited Maplewood. Lovemaking inside the shell of grief is an uncommon salve: the emphasis on love, the emphasis on making. It eased that grief by millimeters on some days, by inches on others. A ravenous bonding as if in hormonal defiance of death, half-aware of that timeless sex/death duet and dance, their almost rhyme. Sex brings life, life brings death, therefore sex brings death. But it didn’t—it doesn’t. The death of a beloved can be an unwelcome reminder of the restorative potency of lovemaking, and then lovemaking in turn becomes a stay against the always-shuffling, always-approaching umbra of your own death.

  The trance of grief, its squashing calm, how it reduces you daily. Even TV commercials make you lachrymose, those ads selling pills for the many ineptitudes of your life, or a father and son test-driving a Ford pickup. The future seems cruciform. On those ninety-degree, sweating summer midnights, I lay looking into the pink bedroom’s dark, feeling the multiple vibrations of grief, quickened by an inability to sleep, to forget, to pinch shut my eyes and not see Slifer Valley Road, not see the physics of my new grief. Sleep always eventually came, but I woke with the sun and I woke with the sunder and it was as if I’d never slept at all.

  During the days, we’d lie reading in the backyard
sun and then walk into town to fetch the night’s dinner at the fish market and grocer. We’d make use of the grill on the deck, sirloin and corn and skewers of shrimp. Food, like sex, is better than prayer. After dark we’d watch films in bed—Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini—and read again until we were tired enough to attempt sleep. The daylight world was all atilt for me. Only at night did things seem flush, steady in darkness, the black as ballast. I preferred those days of crippling rain, unexposed by sunlight, hidden indoors but near enough the window to savor the storm.

  My brother had returned to Boulder, Colorado, just days after we’d gone through our father’s van. One night before sleep, the heat of the day still held in the dark like a memory, he phoned me, his voice altered by tears because he’d just remembered something that happened when he was a child:

  In 1988, when Mike was ten years old, our father and uncles began renovating a four-story warehouse into apartment units. The building had once been Redfern Laceworks, where Pop toiled as a machine operator after Korea. It was a Saturday morning (our father worked Saturdays too), and Mike went with him to the job site that day, perhaps because there was no family member available to watch him. Since the divorce two years earlier, our father had been ceaselessly arranging for the three of us to be looked after, tended to, checked on, picked up, dropped off: with my grandparents, with aunts and cousins and kindly neighbors. There was always in the air a pestering smog of dread, an anxious sense that without them all we’d perish.

  Our father must have had no other option but to take Mike with him that morning, because in the initial stages of renovation, the building was a filthy, jagged trap of hazards, an invitation to injury for any ten-year-old. Floors two, three, and four each had a rectangular gape where the elevator would go, a gape that someone had neglected to cordon off. Despite the warnings, Mike wandered and then fell through it, from the second floor to the first, fifteen feet onto the cracked concrete foundation.