The Road Rider

The lead dad biker chimed his cutesy bell then aggressively yelled, "on your left,” which made me flinch for the first time in a long time. To his credit, there was a dim trace of restraint in his voice, an attempt to dull the agitated harshness in his yell, but just barely. It was like a plastic water bottle taping itself to the barrel of a revolver and trying to muffle a gunshot. I get it: his family probably lives in the suburbs; his work is in the city. He’s a commuter, and commutes are better than CIA water boarders at extracting confessions regarding the dwindling state of a soul. But still: didn’t he see me fifteen steps back turn my head, plainly notice him and the train of his polyester posse trailing behind, and make space? My soul was strong. I wanted to yell back, “on your right.” But, as it happens, it was my body which was dwindling.   

That summer was one of scorching temperatures and exceeding worry. Every other week it seemed someone in my family was going under the knife. First was my sister, and her surgery concluded an hour early, but as she was staggering through the garden-path that lies before recuperation, my grandpa’s back surgical date arrived and I delivered him unto it. My summer was marked by daily drives to see my parents, grandparents, sister, and brother in their homes to assist them: watering plants, walking dogs, tightening leaky faucets. They were screened, scheduled, opened for an interval, then shut. 

By August I was the body vacant surgical scars, discolorations the shapes of provinces, or, really, any signature of degeneration. Circumstances being what they were, though, here and there I’d be jolted by random nonsense aches: my heart would skitter, my kidneys pincered, my unmentionables—indescribable: splinters of ghostly pains my brain produced from fear for when my number would be pulled at last. Being a caregiver left little time for much else, and most days I’d ease my worries by walking sluggishly down the bike path that ebbed along a nearby river. 

The biker rang his bell again. "On your left!" Ring-ring! I sighed and detoured onto the grass. Which had already suffered enough, yellowing under the same boundless arrogance of sunshine seeping the river low. Then, apparently dissatisfied, the biker yet again sounded his saccharine bell. I got the feeling that, in his eponymous shorts and arrow-head helmet, he might be a sociopath who intentionally weaves through vehicular traffic to quell his demons. So, I accommodated, drifting further into the wasteland. 

When he passed, I stared him down. He avoided my glance, but his team, oh boy—seemingly his wife, siblings, kids, and cousins—all of these motherfuckers said the line: "on your left, your left, your left, left, left," the pageant of them chiming needlessly out-of-sync like I was an abandoned motel counter who might’ve wronged them in the dead of a Montanan winter. 

I took a hard right and waded into the brackish water of the adjacent river that my brother once laughed at me for calling turquoise until it was up to my neck and my head was below the tree line. I held onto an exposed root as the water eased clumsily around me.

There, I could feel my appendix the way you can feel your arm or your big toe, sitting jittery at the edge of its bench, a third-string waiting for its turn. Everyone I cared about was a float in a parade of scalpels, dug through and excavated by way of untapped enclaves: the nape, the lower back, through which jumbles of unaffiliated somethings were excised, or where one potential source of a chronic, unknowable pain was exculpated, thereby incriminating another. Standing there in the river—it didn’t make a sound, as if long ago it had been anesthetized and its flowing was a measured, unconscious breath. I sat with the not-quite-pain for several minutes, until the coast was so overwhelmingly clear. 

I crawled out of the river and onto the dying grass, beached and waterlogged, collapsing face first to dry off, where I hatched a plan; I’d forgive the cyclists. When I heard them whir my way from the opposite side, I’d stand and glower in a manner so loudly magnanimous that they knew that they had been forgiven, whether they were ready to exchange contrition or not. As I laid there, the feeling in my appendix spread. My spine was one quick-turn from snapping. My liver was about to crumple and drop like a payload. 

If they had only shown back up the world would be a better place, but it got to be too late in the day to linger. My sister had two partial pit bulls that needed walking. My parents wanted me to eat dinner with them, and I would need to monitor the preparation. I stood to look at the park’s majesty, scanning either side of the pavement. At the elms, their almost square leaves fluttering so fast their shadows seemed to lag behind. At a baby bunny dodging its bounding sibling like an affectionate matador. At a doe by a park bench digging its nose into the grass. I’m not being dishonest. Nature is beautiful. But its first-order effect is that of clearing my head. I only remember these vignettes from that day because I was seeking a spot in that park that was attractive and worthy, a place where I could deposit all of my newly-found grace.