The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter

Author:Darryl Whetter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9780864925961
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2008-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

58

The cafeteria of the botanical gardens is about to close so he loads up before leaving. Sick of the tasteless bagels, he settles for multiple bananas, peanut butter and mildly bilious orange juice. Only when the clerk bends beneath the counter for another handful of peanut-butter packets does Andrew notice a pink highlighter jutting out of a Styrofoam cup beside the cash register. “Actually, could I get a few more?” By the time the clerk rises again with a double handful, the pink highlighter has leapt into one of Andrew’s deep jersey pockets. “What about a spoon?”

Ostensibly racing or fleeing the Mustang crew, Andrew doesn’t last more than an hour on the darkening cycling trail before he stops at a picnic table (oh, the civility) to dig out postcards, novel and highlighter.

Austria:

A,

If you’re lugging any brain at all along with your pack, travel will make you a Marxist, though Groucho’s your man, not Karl. Vienna is a conveyor belt. Starfucks on one side, DickFondles on the other. I want to see architecture. Instead I see fatties looking up from their guidebooks.

I hear rumours of an annual summer convention / competition for pickpockets. They choose a city, descend en masse, and pluck away. No wonder. Another day here and I’d pick my own pockets.

Heading to Turkey to skip class,

You Betcha

What, he only now wonders, is he doing on this ridiculous bike?

Prague,

Even I love Czech beer, you idiot.

That’s a chandelier made of human bones. Very huge. Very thrilling. From an ossuary outside the city. S’posedly there’s at least one of every bone in the human body. Short ones connected to the long ones.

What’s that bike of yours made of?

—Plan B

Here and now, riding what should be a cyclist’s dream, an unhilly, carless trail of more than one hundred kilometres punctuated by hand pumps of potable water, he wants Betty more than he wants rolling speed and the aggregate pleasure of the kilometres rolling on by. Opening his half-novel and turning it sideways, he writes perpendicularly across the type with the pink highlighter.

YOU ARE

MY PUSH &

MY PULL

Conserving paper for fires yet bursting on with telegrammatic brevity, he flips onto the next pair of hinged pages and continues. In the moonlight he can just make out how the translucent fuchsia ink of the highlighter picks up random black letters from the novel, like stray iron filings plucked from the sand.

His cyclist’s half-gloves could be the hand protection of a tombstone engraver. In this privately lapidary mode he is finally wise or honest or both.

MISS YOU

LIKE CRAZY.

LIVE W / ME.

Or I’ll live with you. The bike is now a stockade. Clipping back in is punching at the cancerous factory, crewing up on the low-riding fishing boat. Something like 115 kilometres left to Rivière-du-Loup. Until now, his credit card has been useless mass, a precautionary rectangle. He could book a flight at the nearest ’net café and ship the bike to K-town. Train to Montreal. Flight to Madrid. Clothes somehow, somewhere.

Home may well be where the

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