some pretty lady from some magazine’s art department coming up to you at a party
and asking if you’d lost weight. That wasn’t even close to real motivation. He wasn’t
vain enough (or horny enough) for such possibilities to keep him going over the long
haul. He’d eventually get bored, and lapse into his old Krispy Kreme ways. No, he
had to decide where the road was, and where it was going. Then he could pretend to
ride there. The idea excited him. Maybe it was silly—loony, even—but to Sifkitz that
excitement, though mild, felt like the real deal. And he didn’t have to tell anyone what
he was up to, did he? Absolutely not. He could even get a Rand-McNally Road Atlas
and mark his daily progress on one of the maps.
He was not an introspective man by nature, but on his walk back from Barnes &
Noble with his new book of roadmaps under his arm, he found himself wondering
exactly what had galvanized him so. A moderately high cholesterol number? He
doubted it. Dr. Brady’s solemn proclamation that he would find this battle much
harder to fight once he was post-forty? That might have had something to do with it,
but probably not all that much. Was he just ready for a change? That felt like getting
warmer.
Trudy had died of a particularly ravenous blood-cancer, and Sifkitz had been with her,
in her hospital room, when she passed on. He remembered how deep her last breath
had been, how her sad and wasted bosom had heaved upward as she drew it in. As if
she had known this was it, this was the one for the ages. He remembered how she’d
let it out, and the sound it had made— shaaaah! And how after that her chest had just stayed where it was. In a way he had lived the last four years in just that sort of
breathless hiatus. Only now the wind was blowing again, filling his sails.
Yet there was something else, something even more to the point: the work-crew
Brady had summoned up and Sifkitz himself had named. There was Berkowitz,
Whelan, Carlos, and Freddy. Dr. Brady hadn’t cared about them; for Brady, the
metabolic work-crew was just a metaphor. His job was to make Sifkitz care a little
more about what was going on inside him, that was all, his metaphor not much
different from the mommy who tells her toddler that “little men” are working to heal
the skin on his scraped knee.
Sifkitz’s focus, though…
Not on myself at all, he thought, shaking out the key that opened the lobby door.
Never was. I cared about those guys, stuck doing a never-ending clean-up job. And
the road. Why should they work so hard to keep it clear? Where did it go?
He decided it went to Herkimer, which was a small town up by the Canadian border.
He found a skinny and unmarked blue line on the roadmap of upstate New York that
rambled there all the way from Poughkeepsie, which was south of the state capital.
Two, maybe three hundred miles. He got a more detailed plat map of upstate New
York and thumbtacked the square where this road began on the wall beside his
hasty…his hasty what-would-you-call-it? Mural wasn’t right. He settled on
“projection.”
And that day when he mounted the stationary bike, he imagined that Poughkeepsie
was behind him, not the stored television from 2-G, the stack of trunks from 3-F, the
tarped dirt-bike from 4-A, but Po’-town. Ahead of him stretched the country road, just
a blue squiggle to Monsieur Rand McNally, but the Old Rhinebeck Road according to
the more detailed plat map. He zeroed the odometer on the bike, fixed his eyes firmly
on the dirt that started where the concrete floor met the wall, and thought: It’s really
the road to good health. If you keep that somewhere in the back of your mind, you
won’t have to wonder if maybe a few of your screws got loose since Trudy died.
But his heart was beating a little too fast (as if he’d already started pedaling), and he
felt the way he supposed most people did before setting out on a trip to a new place,