Biking at Night

By Katy Masuga

I found out yesterday that a friend from high school died. She had two little kids. Two years ago she found a lump in her abdomen. They removed a twenty-pound tumor and a kidney. Said she didn’t need chemo but needed regular check-ups. At her next check-up three months later, they found the shadow of the horror all wrapped around her pancreas. She had chemo for the next year but it wasn’t killing it, and her body couldn’t take it anymore. So they put her on hospice care. She died yesterday. She was a child. She had two little babies. She married her high school sweetheart. She was the catcher on the softball team.

I don’t know how to save anyone. I don’t know how to help anyone. I wanted to say the other night, I wanted to say I need to do more. I need to do more. I was running and running. And I remembered I can do more. And I remembered a lot about suffering and love and remembered I can do more. And I tried not to cry like I used to, when I’m running, because it makes running very hard and painful on the throat. Now I have throat pain again. And then afterwards I forgot to say how I remembered I need to do more. Not really a memory. But a reminder.

And then I went out, and it was too late to say. Too late to say that. Too late for many reasons, but mostly because of pity and shame. And now she is dead. And it’s too late again or not too late at all. I’m in a disgraceful stupid pain about it, and I have no idea what doing more means anymore.

I dreamt about mom again.

We had climbed a vast mountain and were gazing out over a valley of lakes. It was serene but still frightening and had been preceded by a serious nightmare in which my brother let out a cry, and I ran frantically upstairs to find him sitting in front of the computer with a single-line message from mom: “It’s taken one, the made line.” Were they crying and hiding behind something with a mask?

I couldn’t understand what she was saying or how she was saying anything, for that matter, since she had died already two years ago now. Thinking about it this morning reminds me of those peculiar times throughout my life when I have done ridiculous and seemingly reckless, at least unusual, things in order to find a space of safety, and these often involved running at night or otherwise getting away or getting there at night after some kind of fallout, even if it was my own mental fallout from, say, a nightmare.

And so it turns out that the first time I rode a bike in the middle of the night was when I was fourteen. I had just had a nightmare. Mom had already left us. She had just left. She had just left us. She had left, after all our lives long and her life long of hardship and prison sentences and starving and stealing and raising ten children on grubby restaurant kitchen floors, she had left us. Totally and completely. I was fourteen, and she vanished without a trace.

I had had a nightmare, and so I got up in the middle of the night and went around to the back of the house. I looked through the shabby bikes that we had back on the porch. Our house was a duplex, former vacation house that my brother and dad’s girlfriend split the rent on when mom had gone to jail two and a half years before. Funny how so many things can happen between twelve and fourteen. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had a high school boyfriend with high school sex, high school cigarettes and beer and pep rallies followed by secret bonfires in the woods with drugs and jocks and nerds and heavy metal kids playing in bands in the living room.

That night I woke up as a child and felt fear and felt something and felt myself looking for some decently working bike in the backyard so that I could make a break for somewhere that felt good and safe. Never mind the nightmare. It was all just a matter of getting to the place, physically getting to the one place where I knew it felt good, it felt like there was love there. So I went down the hall past my sister’s room and the room of two of my brothers and downstairs past the corner by the door where we piled up coats, shoes and our tons of random used sports equipment, tennis rackets, baseball gloves and bats, basketballs, volleyballs, roller skates, skis, snowboards, skateboards and so on, past the unusable bathroom, because it’s where we kept the massive bags of trash until it got to be too much, and eventually, after some weeks of stink and leak, we’d load it all up to take to the dump.

I went through the hall, past the thermostat in its usual off position for the night, regardless of the season, even with three feet of snow, and through the kitchen where the ants covered the countertops no matter how much I tried to kill them with whatever we had, usually lemon-scented furniture polish or WD-40 or window cleaner. The sink loaded with dishes, the washing machine piled with clothes, both dirty and clean, the accordion doors that kept it and the dryer hidden from view broken off their hinges but still awkwardly leaning there at a precarious angle. I went past the mini fridge below the long, black counter, which we didn’t use since we finally bought a full-sized fridge, the small one sticking around and serving as a reminder that our entire half of the house was really the rec room for whoever built the place. I went through the living room where three mismatched, plaid second-hand couches curled around an ancient television set with two silver dials and where the light brown carpet conveniently disguised our lack of vacuum cleaner. Once in a while I managed it with a broom, pieces of straw flying off it, adding to the dust and cat hair.

I passed the encyclopedia set wedged in the corner by the never-used dining room table and chairs. The books were installed by a proper salesman, paid for by my twenty-something brother, who took care of us, and first ordered by mom when she got out of prison and managed to pay for their set-up with the money of her latest boyfriend. My brother followed through on the purchase when that arrangement fell right apart. I imagine a set of encyclopedias to be pretty expensive, but I have no idea. My brother could afford $25 a year for each of the three of us to buy new clothes for school, so I think that in any case it took a long time to pay for those books. It wasn’t out of guilt that I used them constantly. I don’t know what really it was out of, but I did use them all the time.

I finally walked past my sister’s broken-down piano at the back of the room that she loved and played so much, that my dad got her somewhere, someone throwing it out, and I went through the sliding doors onto the porch where another mini-basketball hoop hung above the door, just like the one inside the door by the dining table, which my little brother used as much as I used the encyclopedias and my sister the piano.

Sliding the heavy door open, I stepped out onto the back porch. To the right was a round outdoor table with mismatching chairs and a large sun umbrella jutting out from its center. To the left was another plaid, used sofa pushed up against the back wall of the house. Near the far edge of the porch was a barbeque, partially broken and so leaning against several boxes full of faded magazines, pine needles, random tools, glasses, odds and ends, covered in a thick layer of cobweb. The railing of the porch had flowerbeds on it, installed by my sister. Just off the porch were several motorcycles of my older brothers, one of them covered with a dirty blue tarp, another leaning against the porch railing, with two helmets propped up on its seat.

On the other side of the step, down from the porch, were three bicycles. No one but my little brother really had a personal bike. To bike around town as a teenager would be humiliating. The only folks who biked were the illegal Mexicans who hid out in the mountain town and made their living as restaurant help. We had a couple random bikes. I chose the only one without a flat tire and set off into the night.

Katy Masuga writes fiction and nonfiction, blurring the lines of distinction. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Joint-PhD in Literary Theory and Criticism. Her publications include two monographs on Henry Miller, a handful of semi-autobiographical stories on memory, family, and serendipity, and a dozen critical essays ranging in content from Beckett, Wittgenstein, and Blanchot to the history of Shakespeare and Company in Paris to the vegetarian diet of Frankenstein’s Creature. Her influences include Sebald, Woolf, and Borges. She teaches comparative literature at Skidmore College in Paris, with a focus on modernism, particularly the intersections between literature, film and the visual arts.