HANDS UP

  It was too hot to cycle—according to the weather app on my phone, the humidity topped out at 100%—but I suited up anyway, filled my bike tires, climbed aboard, clicked shoes into pedals, and glided away. I’d spent the morning walking to and from the Blacksburg Farmer’s Market, where the dog and I had met my wife after her Saturday morning run, and where we bought tomatoes and green beans and Thai basil and two frozen chicken breasts vacuum-sealed in plastic but no beef because our regular provider—a little dude with an overbite and a goatee and ratty baseball cap who wears the same Fahrenheit 451 T-shirt every week and always takes the time to inform interested customers that cooking a steak should begin with “a NASA-hot grill”—wasn’t there, so we left, walking up Roanoke Street, past a series of not-yet-opened vendor tents lining the sidewalks for our town’s annual street festival, whose vendors included purveyors of homemade dog treats, photorealistic paintings of Appalachian landscapes, hand-forged metal items, candles, jewelry, and various permutation of meats on sticks. I peeled an orange “Guns Save Lives” sticker from a telephone pole, crumpled it in my fist, tossed it into a flowerbed, and thought of what I might say to the guy at the “Guns Save Lives” tent who stands there all day—Glock holstered proudly to his belt—handing out stickers to anyone who’ll take them, many of whom press them, as if pledging allegiance, over their hearts. I wanted to point out that, as catchy a slogan as “Guns Save Lives” might be, there were probably a great many other things in the world that were far better at saving lives, like doctors, CPR, defibrillators, bed rest, seatbelts, a Mediterranean diet, a steady hand, clean water, blankets, medicine, flare guns, and love. I crested one of our town’s tallest hills, bracing myself for the long, fast descent into the valley, during which I dreamed about somehow having the road entirely to myself, or at least renting a ten mile or so strip of it for an hour so I could safely wear headphones, as this might help me kill the two-headed, week-long earworm that had been living in my head, and which repeated—with a relentless urgency—either the name “Lakshmi Singh” or the chorus from “Hands Up” by the band Blood Orange. Lakshmi Singh is a reporter from National Public Radio; the name Lakshmi is the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity. “Hands up, get out” is what police officers often shout at suspects they want to surrender; however, in the wake of recent deaths of young black men who have been shot by police officers, the phrase has become a rallying cry for protesters. Dev Hynes is the name of the person—a young black man from England—behind Blood Orange, and on the day his latest album dropped, and on which the song “Hands Up” appears, he dedicated the music—a collection of groovy, falsetto-powered R&B numbers—to anyone who’d been told that they were “not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way.” I hoped the music could be for me, too, a person who not only wanted to understand what all that might mean, but also to get outside himself, who often took long bike rides on a dangerous two-lane road because it led out of the town where he lived, past an imposing mountain that today—what with a gray cloud hovering over its summit—looked vaguely volcanic, not because he had some kind of death wish but simply so that he could escape the banalities of his life for an hour and so that he could say hi to the little church whose sign said “ALL ARE WELCOME,” and hi to the faded metal placard hanging from a pole on the side of a barn that said, “PET Pasteurized Milk” and hi to the cows knee deep in the creek, whose swishing tails called to mind the beasts’ moist, fly-bombarded orifices, and how the patient blinking of their long-lashed eyelids seemed like an embodiment of what it meant to be long-suffering. My own eyes felt beleaguered: I kept trying and failing to wipe away sweat but my gloves were sopping, so I stopped to scoop creek water onto my face. Though I was eager to get home and stand under an air conditioning vent and get blasted by a cold metallic breeze, I stopped once more, to inspect an orange newt whose head had been crushed into the asphalt. I took a picture of this little guy, and after posting it to Instagram with the tag “#exoticroadkill,” I remembered the video I’d shot on the way to the ATM this morning, before I met my wife at the farmer’s market, the one that featured a just-hatched cicada on its back—centimeters from the brittle exoskeleton (or “nymph skin”) from which it had emerged—pedaling its legs helplessly. I’d videoed myself flipping over the bug, and had planned to post this to Instagram as well, to give the world a glimpse of my largesse slash magnanimity, but then I discovered that the cicada’s left wing had been folded backwards and didn’t appear to be functional. Although I hoped that the wing might right itself, I didn’t stay to find out, and in the end, I posted a shot of the insect—its tapered body as iridescent as a baby leaf in spring—exactly as I had found it: spinning its legs in vain.

  SINKHOLE

  You’re not supposed to look at your phone first thing in the morning, at least that’s what an article I read recently—on my phone—told me, but I always wake up wondering what happened in the world while I was sleeping, so that’s exactly what, every morning, I do. Today, I scrolled through my feed—bypassing links to articles about Trump’s call to have Hillary assassinated and “Alfred Hitchcock’s Literary Legacy” and all those female runners who somebody keeps murdering—I paused, and let one of those “watch from above as food is prepared” videos play, specifically a so-called “one-pot” recipe for spaghetti, a dish that, in the end, didn’t look very appealing. I resolved to make spaghetti myself, and I resolved to make it in a far superior manner, using San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, basil, butter, and—for the meatballs—ground buffalo meat, panko breadcrumbs, and ricotta cheese. You may have heard that buffalo meat is lower in cholesterol and thus better for the heart than beef, but it’s still a red meat, too much of which, I know, has been linked to heart attacks, and these, so I’ve come to understand, are more deadly in middle-aged men; often, when I’m pedaling up a very long, steeply-graded hill, I imagine my heart exploding: I know that’s not what happens during a heart attack but because of how hard it’s pounding it sort of feels like it might. I’ve often thought that if a study came out determining that cycling was bad for one’s health, I would still do it, not only because it allows me to burn enough calories so that I can pretty much eat and drink as much as I want and still retain a figure that resembles a svelte pear, but because it’s fun and it makes me feel afterwards—and I suppose this is true—as if both my mind and my body have been detoxified. A former student asked me recently if my bike route was dangerous and I told him that even though it can be a little unnerving to have a dual cab Ford pickup blast by you at 50 mph, my sense was that however obnoxious drivers can be—I always imagine that they are miffed when they come upon a cyclist—they would rather not murder me, even if I am wearing funny clothes. I think about crashing every time I go out—and thanks to the spectacular wreck of that female Dutch cyclist at the Olympics, I have a very particular image to summon: the back wheel rising, the body flying headfirst over handlebars—but I spend most of my time during my rides as a receptacle for awe and wonder, noting, say, a skink ribboning across the pavement, or the webbed mesh of a leaf in the road that at first tricks me into thinking it’s the wing of a butterfly, or the dazzling actual wings of a butterfly as it sucks vital minerals from a pile of excrement. I might think a thought like I thought today, a thought like: If somebody told me I was going to die tomorrow, next week, or next month, I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I also couldn’t argue—not in the least—that I hadn’t lived a full life. Halfway through today’s ride, I found a children’s book titled Stanley the Farmer, whose cover featured a cartoon hamster riding a tractor, sitting in the middle of the road, so I picked it up and—savoring the completion of an anonymous good deed—placed it on a fence post in front of a nearby house, not knowing whether anyone there had checked out the book, or if it had been shoved by tiny hands out the window of a passing car; either way, I hoped it might find its way back to the Montgomery County Library, whose name had appeared on a label stickered to its spine. Of course, I can’t see the name “Stanley” and not think of Stanley the dog, a yellow lab who was supposed to die of cancer years ago, and whose owners—my very good friends—fed him a steady diet of bacon and steak, and even took him on a trip to the beach, thinking that because doctors had given him no more than three months to live, he deserved to retrieve a few tennis balls from the ocean, but that was three years ago, and Stanley’s as fine a dog as ever, barking ferociously at me every time I come to the door, and patiently waiting, until I utter the word “Okay,” to gobble the piece of cheese I’ve placed on his paw; once, when my friend Katy did this trick, she forgot to say “Okay,” and so Stanley waited and waited and finally picked up the treat with his mouth and carried it into a room and placed it on the floor before his owner, who felt badly that she’d made him wait but was—as she should have been—impressed at what a very good boy he had been. Stanley would love to swim in the creek that winds alongside Dry Run Road, a narrow strip of gravel I ride to get from Catawba Road to Mt. Tabor Road; today was the first day all summer I’d seen it flush with water; in fact, the stream flowed so lavishly, so abundantly, it would’ve been hard to imagine that only days before it’d been a trough of dusty rocks. This phenomenon—that of a disappearing and reappearing creek—was explained to me by another cyclist—a mechanical engineer, who’d startled me when, the week before, during another ride on this same road, he’d come up behind me and said, simply, “Hi”—who surmised that the creek’s fluctuations were the result of a sinkhole, which can suck up only so much water: if there’s more than it can drink, the creek keeps going; if not, it peters out. I passed the little white clapboard house where only once did I ever see a little man sitting on his porch, who waved when I waved, but I didn’t wave to the little blond girl, the one who was setting a bowl of water down in the grass for two white pups, because I didn’t know her and didn’t want to put her in the position of having to wave to a stranger. And, on this day, I did sort of feel like an alien on an exploratory mission; it occurred to me, as I glided closer toward town, that the day was so vivid—so real, I caught myself thinking. Too many video games? For the first time yesterday, on my son’s first day of eighth grade, I played No Man’s Sky—a game about survival and space exploration that, thanks to a computer algorithm, creates itself as you play it, and which, according to the little guy at GameStop, would take every person on earth playing it continuously for sixty years to explore the game in its entirety; as soon as my son got home he laid out a series of papers the school needed me to sign, but I was too busy exploring a cave on a virtual planet, trying and failing to find enough resources to repair my spaceship. I learned too late that every time I died—thanks to a spiderlike bug that kept attacking me—I needed to return to the site of my death, since if I visited the grave of my previous self, I could recover the resources I’d left behind when I died. I chided myself for wasting so much time in a virtual world, and the thought occurred to me that I am no more magnanimous than when I am riding my bike: High on an endorphin-blast, my brain surges, and whatever sinkhole normally sucks up my gratefulness for being alive is flooded with said gratefulness, causing me to acknowledge that I’ve done nothing to earn a life as good as the one I have, where I can spend the entire summer—when I’m not mowing the lawn or washing dishes or cooking dinner or responding to email or walking the dog—riding my bike and reading books and writing, and that I love my house and town and family, and thereby pledge forevermore to be kinder to everyone, but then, once my ride’s over and I’ve showered and snacked and am driving my kid to soccer practice, I’m back to my old egocentric self, exasperated by my son’s inquisitive cheerfulness, because it’s distracting me from the news story Audie Cornish is introducing on NPR, or annoyed by the fact that my wife—who has the metabolism of a hummingbird—is crunching another dill pickle chip while I’m trying to think, which means that I have no choice but to confess that the best version of myself—because it lives only in my imagination and is thus virtual—has yet to see the light of day.

  SPOILER ALERT

  I can’t stop recommending Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, and when I do, I always provide the following three examples to illustrate the treasure trove of oddities lurking within its pages: 1., a couple who, not long after receiving a miniature hand-carved coffin with their picture inside, climbed into their car, where they were repeatedly bitten by nine giant rattlesnakes that had been injected with amphetamines; 2., a whorehouse in New Orleans that served cherries—cooked in cream and absinthe—from an octoroon’s vagina; and 3., a movie star who once played “You Are My Sunshine” on a piano using not his hands, but his penis. These were, according to Capote, real things that happened. Another real thing that happened: I attended a meeting with my department chair and a woman whose research examines the attempts to preempt and eradicate biological danger; together, we brainstormed activities for an event called “Viral Imaginations,” one that would include a reading and craft talk by author Justin Cronin, who wrote a series of very long books that I will never read about a vampire apocalypse triggered inadvertently by military scientists, who inject twelve subjects with an experimental drug made from a virus taken from a South American bat, which grants, to the infected, psychic powers and a thirst for blood. Far more interesting than vampires, though, was the description the women provided about real-life guinea worms, a nematode parasite that can gain entrance to your body if you should ever drink water containing water fleas, who themselves have been infected with guinea worm larvae; a year later, after the larvae attach themselves to your intestinal wall, where they mate, the male dies and is reabsorbed into your body, while the female migrates through subcutaneous tissues and begins to emerge through your skin, the effect of which causes a blister and, I’d have no choice but to suppose, a great deal of distress, once you realize that a tiny worm is burrowing very slowly—it can take as long as several weeks—out of the flesh of your arm or your leg. “You should YouTube zombie insects,” the expert on biological danger told me, and though I haven’t yet, I probably soon will, though I doubt I will binge on those videos as voraciously as I did Stranger Things—a Netflix series about the disappearance of a boy in a small town and the appearance of a girl with supernatural powers who escaped from a government industrial complex, and who might be responsible for opening a portal between our universe and another, thus giving birth to a hideous Alien-like monster. The teenage girl who tried to shoot the monster—a bipedal thing whose body appeared to be covered in scales secreting slime and a head that opened up like a carnivorous flower—reminded me, when her forehead wrinkled with worry, of an ex-girlfriend of mine who, with her brother, had been killed instantly when an eighteen-wheeler rear-ended them after it had failed to slow for traffic produced by late night highway construction; at the funeral home, I peered into their caskets to say goodbye, and noted that they looked, what with their shining hair and purplish, sparkly makeup caking their faces, like a pair of storybook siblings who had drowned, but might, at any moment, be revived. I recently downloaded the soundtrack to Stranger Things and because the music is mostly keyboard washes and looped arpeggios, it has the power to inject otherwise ordinary events with import, making, for instance, a single green turd floating in the yellow water of a toilet bowl easier to imagine as a display of some hovering varietal of space rock that’s able to grow its own golden aura. I figured that this perceptual shift might also be blamed on having played No Man’s Sky on PlayStation yesterday; I wandered a virtual planet shooting various flora and fauna with a mining ray-gun, and observed a giant, turd-shaped rock floating inexplicably above a mountain that swished greenly with virtual grass. After coming home from church, where I read aloud to the congregation a passage from Hebrews in which the writer says that he doesn’t have time to tell all the important faith stories from scripture, which include those “who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight . . . were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented, wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground,” I noted that though I had mowed my lawn only three days before, the grass was nearly tall enough to warrant being cut again. I remembered that the couple who recently moved to our neighborhood had claimed that it was so hot and dry in Colorado that keeping a green lawn alive for a month required more water than an entire household would use during that same period of time. It’s easy to forget that lawns, like so much of what we live with, are rather arbitrary conventions invented by man; in the Jacobean era of the early 17th century, lawns were a sign of wealth and status, and proved that their owners were wealthy enough to possess property that wasn’t being used for animal grazing. And while having a yard of one’s own can certainly feel luxurious, especially when walking barefoot over just-mown grass, I’m willing to bet that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has ever mowed a lawn, much less tried to fit a mower into the back of a Honda CRV, so as to transport it across town for repairs, which is what I did over two weeks ago. Once the mower’s fuel intake system has been rebuilt, I will fork over a sizeable amount of money for its release, and the man I pay, I know, from having paid him before, will have no left hand, merely a stump where a hand had once been, and I will wonder, as I always do, whether repairing machines with dangerous whirring metal blades is his way of proving to the universe that he’s mastered the very thing that disfigured him—and that having successfully done so, he now has nothing to fear.

 

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