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shoulders — guide them, stretch them, resist them.
    A few weeks later, the news circus found another euthanasia case to salivate over, legal cases, not policy or debate, being the only way North Americans contemplate euthanasia. When a woman’s husband and parents spoke through different lawyers at different times into the same microphones from the same networks, Andrew once again stood at the intersection of Stan’s slow body and his quick mind.
    â€œNot to sound too eager here,” Andrew asked, “but have you thought of a living will?”
    â€œLiving will?” Stan replied. “What do you think you are?”
    â€œSeriously. Ol’ Hamlet Senior could have spared a heap of bodies if he’d had a better will.”
    â€œHamlet Junior could have spared a heap of bodies if he’d been clear on what he wanted. If
he’d
had a better will.”
    â€œJust think about it, okay? A living will.”
    â€œI have thought about it,” Stan said conclusively. “I’m saving all my fire for my
dead
will.”

15
    Near Sackville, New Brunswick, bike and body smashed by cross-winds, Andrew tries to keep Betty’s postcards from the devil’s hand. Here, finally, is the cluster of radio towers that throw CBC Radio around the world. This anticipated landmark, this thrusting metal hand, marks his passage into a second province much more than did the flags and fake lighthouses of the official Nova Scotia – New Brunswick border one valley behind him. Here, at dusk the towers already glow with red lights. A dozen ruby rings flash from this reaching metal hand. What wired analogue technology of expansions and contractions transforms that metal into a radio transmitter while his bike frame rides by mutely? Betty, cock an ear, and I’ll crank the miles, spin this buzz into song.
    Read, fingered and sniffed as they arrived over the winter at his drafty Halifax apartment, and now read, fingered, shuffled, flipped and rotated at each nightly camp, Betty’s European postcards have stowed away in his innermost pockets of memory. Their very inclusion here in the panniers, despite their useless mass, attests to his obsession for them, and yet that obsession makes the artifacts themselves less and less necessary as they become flashcards of memory. Paris: here I go. Turkey: you’re an idiot. Amsterdam: something about fucking, either
Let’s fuck
or
Why aren’t we fucking?
or
I need a fuck
or
Where the fuck are you?
Copenhagen: who am I?
    Originally grateful for his one novel’s reliable escape, for the flights of nightly fancy off his dull Therm-a-Rest, he is now routinely dumb with fatigue within minutes of leaving the bike, eyes fluttering then not so much shutting as rolling back into his skull. The novel he tries to raise above his prone chest feels as heavy as a tombstone. Fingers, wrists and elbows launch labour grievances against after-hours work, for work beyond job description. Still, he can’t understand the people who ride without a novel. There are numerous blogs by riders whotour with video cameras but nothing to read. Enervated daily, he needs to find a story, not try to make one.
    Compared to the heavy brick of the novel, the postcards are oblong fleas, little more than air and ink held in a rectangle. The cards have become his gospel, his tarot. This
homme pendu
, hung from the frame or tacked out on the Therm-a-Rest, sorts and resorts the cards each night, as if one spread or another, one new formation of image or text will spell out some message other than
You made the wrong decision
.
    Even the address and postmarks are indicting. Dodging Stan’s will, he tried to keep the Kingston house by doing a graduate degree, but three provinces away. Betty, and every smug European man she has met, knows that his studying in Halifax is an absurd way to try to maintain ownership of a house three provinces away. Her cards are mailed from every