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between parkour and larger social issues could be made. Diligence being the key word: ever since Paul’s master’s thesis—where there had been anonymous accusations of unprofessional, unethical behaviour on Paul’s part—the professor doubted his work ethic even more than the subject itself.
    Paul shrugged it off. The bantering between them, he figured, only raised his status among his peers. A few looked up to him, mostly because he wasn’t afraid of Tamba.
    He returned Tamba’s smile and tapped his finger against his scraped chin. “These are my field notes, pal.”
    Later, Christine sat at the edge of the bed while he stood naked before her. She ran her finger over a yellowing bruise across his ribs and frowned. “Do you think maybe he’s got a point?”
    â€œWho?” He grinned and motioned for her to lie back. He took her feet and pressed them against the relatively firm planes of his abdomen, and then up over the bruise onto his chest, her arches fitting to his pectorals as he ran his hands along her calves. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, a swagger to his movements as he pushed her heels back until her knees pressed against the bed, her legs wide. She brought her hand between her legs, and he did the same. Lately, this manner of foreplay had become habitual. They increasingly put each other at a distance and watched, as though sex would eventually require viewing each other through cameras and computers from separate apartments. When he was ready, he signalled her with an indolent spin of his finger and she turned over onto her knees and, just as languidly, arched her backside toward him. He held back, still the triumphant observer, savouring his own flesh, scraped and stinging and about to be satisfied, and had a brief vision of his body as a sublime machine, a beautifully humming engine.

    The next semester, things came to a head. Spring meant Tamba’s big conference, an international symposium on postmodern ethnography. Recognizing the chance to get on Tamba’s good side, Paul had offered to present a paper called “Urban Geography and the Sporting Body.” Of course, presenting a paper implied he was making good progress on his dissertation, that theories were emerging and the possibility of broader application or meaning existed. Nothing could be further from the truth. He and his participants accumulated bruises and aches and babbled philosophically—and rather pointlessly—about a physical activity that was only hypothetically useful: it might help them rescue someone or, perhaps more likely, to run away from someone. His research, barely begun, already carried the slight whiff of the stagnant, the frivolous.
    He knew good research took time—Christine was in the third year of her own dissertation—and that much ethnography could appear thin on the surface level. The title of Christine’s paper, “A Childhood on the Rocks,” sounded like a one-person play, not a PhD paper. He’d once read a study concerning a handful of widowed grandmothers in Chicago who sewed quilts on Wednesdays. Once you dug into the meat of the project—but it was exactly that, the meat, which eluded him. He loved the sport, but the idea of spending the next three years coaxing something profound from it was painful. Tamba’s warnings were coming true.
    Teaching, which had felt like an anchor and distraction before, now became a refuge from the frustration of parkour, the dread of writing a paper that would largely be fluff. He immersed himself in lesson plans, marking or updating the class website and forum. He posted links to upcoming archaeological digs hosted by different universities from several countries that gave students the opportunity to join field schools in excavations around the world. The majority took place in either the States, Spain, or Italy. There was a dig happening later that spring in Sweden, the