When Your Body Breaks. After I feel the gentle but insistent hip-to-hip caress and the inexplicable high-speed wobble, my bike lays me lovingly down on the asphalt. The pavement rises up to cradle me in a hot red rush. Ah, shit: my negotiations have failed; the road wins again. I think of a million reasons why not, but in the end I go along with it. I have no choice, although I secretly continue to believe it is a bad idea.
I am hot, dry, paying for my hot cat 3 passion by whirling through one of the less humiliating levels of Dante's Inferno. I come to rest, sitting and facing up the road. I sense the ambulance behind me and see a neutralized race in front of me, up the shallow hill that has just imposed its will on me. I can do this to you--hell, I can make you do it to yourself--whenever I wish, fast, slow, straight, curvy, race, ride, rain, sun, snow. There is nothing you can say or do. I will damage you well beyond your capacity to recover. Finally, I will twist you until your bones stick out of your skin. You are lucky. Fuck you, the hill adds offhandedly.
I imagine the neutralized riders feel impatient; I wonder if they are cat 4s? Pros? Women? I can't tell; I volunteer to move. I want my water bottles. My legs need stretching. I realize my arm is propped across my knees, my wrist with two quick right-angle bends in it. This begins to strike me as urgent. The road has only ripped my kit in two places and taken a small chunk out of my shoulder, in the precise size and shape a melon baller might make. The ambulance ride is hot, thirsty, and I move the ice bag from my arm to my neck to my groin. I ride sitting up; my arm must have been propped on something. My ambulance mates are both worse off and inexplicably more talkative than I, and I wonder if we might go splitsies on the ride.
And You're Left With Just Your Mind. After a wait of indeterminable duration, they shine bright lights through me, inject me with sleep, ask me again and again if the road rash hurts--it does not. I am glad to be taken care of. They wake me up. I am apparently post-operative, having slept through the stage of informed consent. They make me swallow, wiggle my fingers. They ask me to pee, prop me up, furrow their brows that I had not gone. Let me drink, I said. Surgery, they say; catheter, they say. I push and push and finally pee. They bring me breakfast, none of which I want, but which I eat anyway. I check few boxes on tomorrow's menu, but when the next mealtime comes I want much more than I had ordered. I know I will pay for it.
You're Gonna Be Fine. I ask the doctor if I will be able to play piano after the surgery, but as he reassures me I will, I am overwhelmed by a sense of morbid stupidity and deliberately screw up the comic timing, muttering that it's okay--he needn't participate in the old joke's vaudeville cheesiness; I can't play worth a damn. I feel luminous, like Stephen Crane's Civil War officer shot in the arm; the surgeon's understudy looks at me mournfully, talks to me carefully, like someone I know has just died. For the next week, people will treat me tenderly, acknowledging my unique and utterly commonplace delicacy, packing groceries, holding doors for me. My cast covers up secrets of the universe--like Crane's officer's wound, holding revelations of all existence--the meaning of ants, potentates, wars,
cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing.
It'll Take Time...It'll Take Time. The next doctors order more pictures, two weeks later. I wonder if I need to be more specific about my alcohol consumption now that I am out of training. Styloid, they say, outpatient, they say. More cuts, more needles. I can walk home, I say. They bind up my hand like some traditional Chinese girl-child's foot. I am unidextrous, undextrous, antidextrous. Sleep is intolerable. I will take an honest shower maybe once a week. Season over, they say. I walk home. I will ride once a week in my living room, as much as I can stand, propped on clip-ons, training for some sort of lackadaisical farce of a 45-minute time trial. My cuts begin to heal, although the bones will need fishline or pins or more screws to hold them together. I will need more than apples, calcium, and Vitamin D.
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