The Hero's Body (28 page)

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.

Our father watched him drop, and then from the bottom floor Mike watched him rush, jump, panic down the open staircase. He'd landed on a mound of scrap lumber and broken cinder blocks, plywood and two-by-fours, and because our father was unlucky but not
that
unlucky, Mike wasn't impaled, his liver or kidney not perforated by a ten-penny nail, nor did he drop crown-first or else fracture his spine or neck on the concrete. He was not, in fact, injured at all.

So that was how he was able to see our father dashing down the steps after him, his grimace and panting impossible to mistake for anything other than uncut terror. And that's what Mike was remembering
now on the phone with me, not two weeks after our father's death: the panicked look on his face as he bolted down crumbling steps after his youngest boy, the wayward one whom he expected to find unfixable. It was, Mike said, exactly what love looked like, and we wept there together on the phone.

That summer
of death was also the summer of something wrong with my plumbing, an involuntary pause in urination, a caesura in my stream, and also an unclear rectal annoyance that often had me sitting sideways. This, I knew, was the body looted by emotion: intestines, rectums, urethras sacked by feeling, bowels squeezed by grief. The soul will show itself, will manifest its damage, and the most intimate precincts of your body will take the hit.

I saw a urologist who, without any type of test, was rapid in pronouncing “prostatitis”: an inflammation or infection of the prostate (and not, as one friend thought, “the disease of seeing too many prostitutes”). It would require a blitzkrieg of elect antibiotics because, said my urologist, the prostate is notoriously stubborn, a foul-tempered gland—it doesn't want interference from us. And because I didn't have health coverage of any kind, my canary-maned and boylike doctor gave me a week's starter dose of pills, and then charged me only $35 for the visit, not his standard fee many stories north of $35. Perhaps this was pure and unprompted kindness on his part, but I think it's likelier that I told him about my father's death, that I hunted his sympathies—that I was being exploitative, in other words, manipulative with my mourning.