although both of those things might be side-effects. He kept thinking of Dr. Brady’s
metabolic working stiffs, ordinary joes who were really trying their best to do their
job but getting no help from him. He could hardly not think of them when he was
spending an hour or two every day painting them and their workaday world.
He fantasized quite a lot about them. There was Berkowitz, the foreman, who aspired
to have his own construction company someday. Freddy, who owned the truck (a
Dodge Ram) and fancied himself a fancy carpenter. Carlos, the one with the bad back.
And Whelan, who was actually sort of a goldbrick. These were the guys whose job it
was to keep him from having a heart attack or a stroke. They had to clean up the shit
that kept bombing down from that queer red sky before it blocked the road into the
woods.
A week after he began the painting (and about a week before he would finally decide
it was done), Sifkitz went to The Fitness Boys on Twenty-ninth Street, and, after
considering both a treadmill and a StairMaster (attractive but too expensive), bought a
stationary bike. He paid an extra forty dollars to have it assembled and delivered.
“Use this every day for six months and your cholesterol number’s down thirty points,”
said the salesman, a brawny young fellow in a Fitness Boys T-shirt. “I practically
guarantee it.”
The basement of the building where Sifkitz lived was a rambling, multi-room affair,
dark and shadowy, bellowing with furnace noise and crammed with tenants’
possessions in stalls marked with the various apartment numbers. There was an alcove
at the far end, however, that was almost magically empty. As if it had been waiting
for him all along. Sifkitz had the deliverymen set up his new exercise machine on the
concrete floor facing a bare beige wall.
“You gonna bring down a TV?” one of them asked.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Sifkitz said, although he had.
He rode the stationary bike in front of one bare beige wall for fifteen minutes or so
every day until the painting was finished, knowing that fifteen minutes was probably
not enough (although certainly better than nothing) but also knowing it was about all
he could stand for the time being. Not because he got tired; fifteen minutes wasn’t
enough to tire him out. It was just boring in the basement. The whine of the wheels
combined with the steady roar of the furnace quickly got on his nerves. He was all too
aware of what he was doing, which was, basically, going nowhere in a basement
under two bare lightbulbs that cast his double shadow on the wall in front of him. He
also knew that things would improve once the picture upstairs was done and he could
start on the one down here.
It was the same picture but he executed it much more quickly. He could do this
because there was no need to put Berkowitz, Carlos, Freddy, and Whelan-the-
goldbrick in this one. In this one they were gone for the day and he simply painted the
country road on the beige wall, using forced perspective so that when he was mounted
on the stationary bike, the track seemed to wind away from him and into that dark
green and gray blur of forest. Riding the bike became less boring immediately, but
after two or three sessions, he realized that he still wasn’t done because what he was
doing was still only exercise. He needed to put in the red sky, for one thing, but that
was easy, nothing but slop work. He wanted to add more detail to both shoulders of
the road “up front,” and some litter, as well, but those things were also easy (and fun).
The real problem had nothing to do with the picture at all. With either picture. The
problem was that he had no goal, and that had always bugged him about exercise that
existed for nothing more than its own sake. That kind of workout might tone you up
and improve your health, but it was essentially meaningless while it was going on.
Existential, even. That kind of workout was only about the next thing, for instance