Read The Push & the Pull for Free Online Page A

rear tire practically brushing his ear, he discovered the secret tool of the bike frame: those alloyed angles were designed to split his body in two, to pit north against south in a wrestling match between arms and legs. He learned all of that one muddy spring, riding day after day alone or with his riding friend Mark, who introduced him to new trails and more.
    Now, hanging upside down from a fire tower, Andrew can only dwell on the past so long. He is inverted and exerting, head to the distant ground, legs pushing above him. Setting the soles of both shoes onto the hatch door, he makes a light diagnostic push of steady force. To kick or to shove? That is the question. A shove would be far more powerful, both legs, and he could use the glutes and thighs, the body’s biggest muscles. But that could also be too much force, a squat and heave strong enough to send him hurtling down. Perhaps a single, knee-to-toe whip would be enough.
    He shoves his way into a sweaty epiphany. The curved metal in his hands, and the controlled shove of the legs, this isn’t just strength, but new strength — the leg strength of this trip, of its training and daily annihilation. Holding metal and himself, he rediscovers one of the dumbly profound lessons of exercise: the body can be changed.
    The door and his shoulders begin to burst. As the door pops open, his back straightens completely and his forgotten jackknife, which had been tenaciously hanging in the lip of a jersey pocket, falls away. Fully inverted, he’s able to watch the red knife plummet down the tube of ladder and cage, then finally bounce off a rung and land somewhere beyond his bike.
    Uncurling and climbing up into the tower’s panoramic brain, he has much to contemplate along with the view of rolling green hills. That he chose to smash his way in to get this view. That the survival knife has always been on his body and never consigned to a pannier; that he has felt it there as he walked into every restaurant, every men’s room. That knife, which was once, briefly, Betty’s, is now missing. And the search for it will be a self-inflicted delay. Better enjoy the view.
    Shelves run down two sides of the panoramic windows. Pennies, paperclips and tiny scraps of paper litter the unclean and graffitied shelves. Only in a dusty corner of the floor does he find half a pencil. The slips of paper are about the size of a cinema ticket. He has justenough space to print
sorry
and draw an arrow beneath it, but stops himself before he lays it on the floor beside the popped door. The useless word. The wordy word.
    Up here, as at a campsite, as anywhere, really, there is no garbage can. He tucks the tiny note into a jersey pocket before lowering himself back onto the ladder. Climbing down,
sorry
at his back, he begins looking around, hoping to find the knife without undertaking a full forensic spiral.
Self-inflicted delay
implies there’s a rush, a schedule even, as if the remainder of his MA isn’t on indefinite hold back in Halifax (and his ownership of the Kingston house along with it), as if he even knows whether Betty is flying back on her original ticket or flying back at all.

14
    In high school, Andrew started arriving early to Stan’s bedroom to catch the late-night news on television. He’d wind up there to do Stan’s trache tube and the hand splint anyway. By his final year, electrodes added to the nightly routine, Andrew had grown to feel both independently and vicariously lazy just lying there on one side of the bed watching the news.
    â€œDo you need to see this or just hear it?” he asked, knowing that on the weekends Stan routinely glanced at a newspaper while the TV news droned.
    â€œI can usually get by with just listening. Why?”
    â€œGotcha. Get your butt down and your arm up. Nightly reps.”
    â€œWhoopee.”
    Andrew’s smooth arm, still bronze from summer, raised a crooked, pallid one. Circles for the