The Push & the Pull Read online

  One night, Andrew had sealed most of the charges, one, two, three, but then he stopped to feel the rise of Stan’s bony shoulders while he slept. Defiantly arced toward the ceiling even in sleep, this was definitely, indisputably bone, the steel of the body. Andrew pressed, gently at first, trying to ease that crescent down into the untouched mattress, waiting for gravity to do its share. Instead, the remaining electrode he’d stuck to the back of his own hand suddenly spat current. “Fuck,” he whisper-screamed, feeling in an instant the electric charges that didn’t even register on Stan’s benumbed body. Andrew’s arm shot out in front of him, whipping a cord across Stan’s chest. The shock stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving Andrew panting and Stan startled awake.

  “Didn’t that hurt?”

  “Didn’t what hurt?”

  “G’night, Dad.”

  Andrew pinched a single toe on his way out.

  7

  Preparing for his bicycle odyssey, Andrew had looked at a map of Canada so often that it became a folding cartoon with frayed edges, each panel of the map a tired animation cell. Eventually, his native city of Kingston, Ontario, became the tail end of a twitching fish.

  Read from left to right, Canada’s largest lakes depict a bird diving from the northwestern corner down to the southernmost tip, then rising again, weighted with catch. Great Bear Lake is steady in flight, the smooth hunt; Great Slave, a pair of reaching wings, a bid for air to power the dive of Athabasca, Reindeer, Winnipeg. The Huron-Michigan talons pluck Erie from beneath a dark surface to flash silver in the busy Ontario air.

  Halfway between Montreal and Toronto, a middle child with starlet siblings, Kingston marks the end of Lake Ontario and the beginning of the long staircase of the St. Lawrence River. Or the end of the river and the beginning of the lake.

  Eastern Canada is caught tight in a cold blue fist. The Labrador Sea is a set of straining tendons, the Hudson Strait the first length of finger past the Chidley knuckle. Thick merchant’s fingers reach for Hudson Bay, that fat man urinating, draining his plump James Bay pud all the way down to Kingston.

  The Gulf of St. Lawrence is a gouging thumb. Quebec and the Maritimes — Europe’s first handful.

  Halifax to Kingston: Andrew is biking from a thumb to a fish.

  8

  Syringomyelia: incurable and practically unknown, Stan’s degenerative neurological disease spared him and Andrew false hope and too many hospital parking garages. As long-term diseases go, Stan’s offered little medical comfort. Or intrusion. Ensnared in warping bone, he was nonetheless exempt from the roulette wheel of meds. Anti-inflammatories didn’t grease his joints but corrode his stomach. Nerve stabilizers didn’t cloud his thinking or tip his mood. With the exception of the arced silver tracheotomy tube in his throat and a few specialized physiotherapy devices, Stan’s body was little better for four hundred years of scientific medicine.

  “This is how it works,” Stan said more than once. “Children get stronger.”

  A few weeks after Chris, Nathan and all of Andrew’s school friends left Kingston to attend university somewhere else, anywhere other than where they were born, boredom or emotional self-preservation prompted Andrew to start recycling some of the lecture material he met during the day while he exercised Stan at night. Surely now he knew a few things Stan didn’t.

  “Otherwise, Donne’s a smart guy,” Andrew began while aiding then resisting one of Stan’s mutinous arms. “But for a time he’s just wasted with illness. Boils. Perpetual fever. In bed for months. And what does he do? Scours his soul to discover what sin he’s committed. In the seventeenth century, everyone, including you, would take one look at this bod and think, Child-diddling Satanist. I’d probably be standing over you with boiling oil, not a helping hand.”

  Stan’s arm weakened even more as he warmed to a story. He stopped staring absently at the ceiling and looked at Andrew. “I wouldn’t have been scrutinized for very long. I would have been the guest of honour at a mattress party before I was twenty-five.”

  “Mattress party? What is this, death by orgy?”

  “Not quite. Pre-industrial revolution, home was a place of work. Cottage industry. Tenant farming. Granny’s food consumption could only outweigh her productivity for so long. Admittedly, it’s tough to axe the old bird directly, and everyone was marooned in the same class, same five-mile geographic radius, same, here it is, prison of illiteracy,” Stan joked, punning on his job teaching for Correctional Services Canada. “We all understand about Gran. Invite the neighbours, unstop the ale and throw a mattress on top of her. Everybody piles on and no one person is guilty of murder. Six months later it was somebody else’s house.”

  “Jesus,” Andrew said, rotating Stan’s arm with his.

  “The Princess might have had a pea,” said Stan. “Everybody else got Mom or Dad.”

  9

  After her fourth consecutive night in Andrew’s Kingston house, Betty awoke to an empty bed and the sound of a distant foghorn warning her: rebound, rebound. He’d already left for campus, so she had the house to herself. Wrapping her hands around a mug of tea, she wandered through the rooms alternately trying to tell herself that she hadn’t just leapt from one relationship to another (again!) and that, okay, there clearly was a possible relationship here, but it was a good one. Once your pants were off, once he had crippled you with laughter, what could “take things slowly” possibly mean? “Take it slowly” was for self-help books. The heart doesn’t have a throttle.

  Her mother, Elaine, might say, “Take it slowly,” but both of them would know it was the sort of advice she felt she ought to say, not anything she really meant or advice she’d ever followed herself. Hollywood produces enough caricatures of mothers that Betty and even Elaine have been able to laugh at various satirical portraits of a mom keen to be more hip and rebellious than her daughter. Elaine’s idea of cutting the apron strings was asking Betty, “Can you come on ecstasy, or do you spend eight hours half an inch from the finish line?”

  When your mom tells you she has trouble reaching orgasm if her window blinds are lowered to different heights, when she tells you this at breakfast, you either learn to raise your voice or you discover solitude and discretion. Baby boomers for parents: what a joke. Baby boomers are baby boomerangs — they keep coming back when you try to throw them away, and when they’re not crying or soiling themselves, they’re trying to put something in their mouths.

  Elaine would forget saying “take it slowly” as soon as she’d said it, but she’d call back later to add, “Make sure you have your own key” and “You know you always have a room here.”

  Betty did indeed know there was a room at her single mom’s house in Ottawa reserved for her, and that was one reason why she was doing her Visual Culture degree here in Kingston. Just last night she’d told Andrew her theory that the phrase dysfunctional family is redundant. “All families are dysfunctional.”

  Until her ex-boyfriend Dave and her ex-roommate Sara had suddenly rearranged the emotional furniture of her Kingston apartment, she’d told herself that living away from home she finally had a room of her own. Growing up in eight different bedrooms, each of them hers alone but only for a while, Betty had read Virginia Woolf as a teenager. Maybe Andrew was right; maybe she needed a whole storey of her own, not just one room.

  Their first night, surrendering to fatigue near dawn, mouths tired as much from talk as sex, he had asked if she wanted to sleep alone, offered her any bed, any room in his house. No, that was another, more crucial virginity. She’d always found sleeping together literally much more intimate than the half-hearted and often half-assed sleeping together figuratively. Your chest my back’s proper blanket. The top of your foot filling the arch of mine. “Not a chance,” she had replied to his offer of separate quarters. Separate home offices, yes. Separate beds, never.

  Now, alone in the house, she showered but purposely didn’t shave her legs. Time for a think. Hair in a towel, a second mug of tea in her hands, she wan
dered through the rooms of the 1920s four-on-four-style house. Nice house, nicely cut, but neglected. Acres of hardwood floor. Eight-inch baseboards. Five-inch moulding and corner caps around every door. But the bare walls needed fresh paint and some pictures. The fossilized lighting consisted of a combination of perfunctory overheads (with unoriginal shades) or unfashionably aged lamps seemingly designed to illuminate a minimum amount of space while hiding the remainder of a tired old room in shadow or half-light. He had already tried to explain his renovational siege on the ground-floor washroom, had apologized for the half-open wall. Frankly, she didn’t care. As her mom’s joke went, she was looking for human texture, not architecture.

  The walls were tremendously bare. Save for a large reproduction of what looked like an antique prison blueprint on one ground-floor wall, the house lacked paintings or prints. The few framed photographs that hung on the walls were old, black-and-white wedding pictures and childhood photos from half a century ago, probably Andrew’s grandparents. And they were all tucked away on half-walls and behind corners, available if you wanted to see them but never dominating a room. Upstairs she found a black-and-white graduation photo of what must have been the legendary Stan. Some kind of pioneer hair gel sculpted his hair into unmoving waves. Contrary to Andrew’s descriptions of his ailing father, this smiling, late-sixties graduate looked like any old dad. Well, maybe the smile was a little lopsided, one lip barely rising. And there was some asymmetry in the eyes. Only by leaning closer to stare at his eyes did Betty see the ghost of another, absent picture frame hanging beneath this one. Moving back and forth in the bright morning sunlight, she was able to see a rectangle of less faded paint suspended on the wall like an uncrooked version of Malevich’s painting White on White. At some point, a photo had been taken down. Mysteries and minimalism: the beginning of any romance.

  In their courageous and carnal first week, she had given and received thorough orifice tours, and yet she didn’t know who was (and was not) in these few photos on his walls. Well, maybe we fall in love out of time anyway. Your parents and mine are in this house and they are not. We’re together in something; let’s let it grow.

  His bedroom had a few posters, but room after room, floor after floor, just paint, and almost all of it in need of redoing. No, wait, above his desk was a small rectangular frame. From halfway across the room she recognized the distinct shape of a personal cheque within the frame. Because she didn’t recognize the name Gamlin, Betty noticed everything else before concluding that Patricia Gamlin was once Pat Day, his mother. Twenty-one hundred dollars on his twenty-first birthday. Given but not accepted. The framed cheque was uncashed.

  In the bottom left corner of the cheque, mirroring her elegant signature at bottom right, his mother had written Hatred is a burden in the same graceful hand. Betty had to wait all day and well into the night before she found Andrew sitting again at this desk. She walked over, wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, nodded at the framed cheque and asked, “Anything you want to tell me?”

  10

  Surrender to the ride’s pain. Graft your breath to the pain. Indissoluble from every endurance sport, synonymous with the very word endurance, is one fundamental command — breathe pain. Make the pain your breath. Stretch your lungs with pain. Betty, an occasional practitioner of yoga, once gave Andrew a yogic prescription for “nowness.” “Your body is the past; your mind is the future. Your breath unites them in the present.”

  Now, every aching moment of now, his bike trip is a debate of pain. Any desire must now win approval from the legs. To want is to sweat.

  Any desire is a weight. A small bag of fine white powder. The well-folded map. A contraband novel, that decadent slab of unnourishing, non-warming mass, squats with its corrupt weight in the front right pannier. A second novel would’ve been dead weight, fire fuel long ago. Worse, Betty’s twenty-seven European postcards may not be able to stow away much longer from the priorities of cycling. Each towering hill asks three questions of everything he carries: Water? Food? Warmth? Only the worst hills make him doubt his jar of Nutella.

  And what’s this? Irregularity, the ultimate vegetarian affront. After days in the saddle, he resents the gluey oatmeal’s cling to the inside of the compact pot-cum-bowl. Easily thirty millilitres unused. Mountain Equipment Co-op’s got to offer a little camper’s rubber spatula. Wouldn’t take much space. Just a few grams. Make it a fin on the back of a fork or knife.

  The more he eats, the less he hauls. Magic gut: just add endless climbing and five grams of oatmeal will disappear. Dehydrated soups, vedge chili, peanut butter he transferred to a zip-lock bag. If only he could get decent cheese. And wine. Betty’s right; France, it should’ve been. Rouge ou blanc chaque jour. We could have travelled together and stayed together. Maybe.

  Behind him in Halifax is an MA he started in part to maintain ownership of the Kingston house that hangs, distantly, in front of him. His father’s house. His mother’s ex-house. The house his father did not want him to keep. The Andrew-and-Betty house. Study in Halifax to keep a house in Kingston. Betty did notice the twelve hundred kilometres separating house and MA. “Grad school,” she said more than once, “snooze button on the alarm clock of life.”

  Now he hauls one bag on top of another. Jersey pockets, saddlebags, panniers. Bag, bag, bag. Oatmeal in the pannier’s top inner pocket, knife in a long jersey pocket, emergency blanket in the bag beneath his saddle. Hydration sack lashed to the rear. Packing and unpacking each night, he’s begun to think in three dimensions. The snug grenade of the stove rides behind his right foot. At back left, the mess kit brawls for all space. Clothing — fluid, co-operative, sometimes another wrapped defence against rain — is spread all round, tarped here, wound there. Four condoms, those coins of freedom, entrance tokens to the land of just in case, shuffle around the waterproof matches in a pocket. The things he carries.

  Thanks to condoms, he isn’t carrying home any surprises to Betty. That is, if he ever sees her again. The Kingston house he’s biking to may no longer really be a home, and Betty may not even fly back from her European Grand Tour. They’ve been apart eight months now, as much his fault as hers, if not more, and yet he still hopes hers hasn’t been a Grand Tour of hooded European cock. Dropping E on Ibiza or sunning topless on the Canary Islands, strangers handing her drinks. Please have used a condom.

  Sexually transmitted diseases are a contemporary version of the ancient Greek gods, although they cackle and scheme atop a shorter Mount Olympus. Sure-footed Chlamydia wanders on her rocky shore. Lame Gonorrhea stirs in his dark cave. Herpes on winged sandals doth fly. At least it isn’t flying to Kingston.

  Habitually, Andrew still thinks of the twice-contested Kingston house as their home, his and Betty’s, not his and Stan’s — certainly not his parents’ — even though that house became too constraining for Betty and too heavy for him. The things he carries.

  Think of the knife. Clipping in after breakfast, wobbling up to highway speed, he flicks the chrome pig’s tail of the corkscrew open and shut, open and shut as he rides, wondering who thought to thread a removable eyeglasses screwdriver here into its centre. Who stared up the empty helix and saw millimetres of unused space? Two nights ago, when he sawed most of the handle off his toothbrush to shed a few grams, he wanted to know who invented dental floss. Who saw that contested space and thought of how to reach it?

  Barking flies through the air like a fist. Given time, man on bike will outrun a dog. Given how?

  Two o’clock, gaining, as tall as a pony. Black and tan fur streaming back from bared teeth, from chomping bark. Down, down, down on the pedals, Andrew is up, standing, pumping, all but leaping from the cage of the frame. Time must become maximum distance. He must spin out his road more quickly than the dog devours his lawn.

  Acceleration is easier on four legs. Sans panniers, transported to the Prairie, Andrew could crank up to fifty-five, fifty-seven kilometres an hour on the flats. But not quickly. And never four-belly pregnant, pann
iers swollen with gear. Legs, legs up and down past side dog, ditch-in-one-leap dog, just-ahead-of-gravel dog.

  The human skeleton is bipedal, allowing us to walk upright, freeing our hands and prompting us to see the world more than we smell it. A bicycle de-evolves the body, collapsing the straight angle of torso and thighs into the acutely angled hips of a quadruped. The multiple vertices of a bicycle frame fold your hips and force you to mime your hunting-gathering ancestors. On a bike, you pedal out of the biped.

  Saved by a rare stretch of flat Maritime road, he has time enough to regard the dog as another stamp in his passport, another border in car country. Between cities, Halifax cast off behind him and Truro hanging in the distance, he has biked beyond confined dogs. In rural Nova Scotia, few people expect (or tolerate) a pedestrian, let alone a half-breed, someone on a vehicle not in one, someone earning his own speed. In the country, many dogs are left unchained, too slow for cars but fast enough for anyone who steps onto their property. Several touring sites recommend a canister of pepper spray strung off the handlebars or a length of wooden dowel lashed to the top tube.

  Without the first barks he’d have been nabbed, teeth into a bare, stubbly calf. Canis familiaris. No wolf, no predator, would bark then charge. Here I am. Danger on your right. Dogs bark for people, not themselves. We wanted them to scare from a distance. We wanted loud terror, and we got it.

  11

  Week after week, Stan would leave a nearly identical version of the same list of errands on the kitchen counter for Andrew. Groceries. The dry cleaners. A utility bill to be paid. Stan’s disease itself, his quarterly losses, his trajectory of despair, was recorded on those lists, deprivation and need written out shakily on the backs of used envelopes. Finally, after months of little change, the seismogram of these lists would record new tremors of disease.