It was just enough to wake him up.
Sifkitz found it hard to believe that he was falling asleep down in the alcove while
riding the stationary bike at a steady fifteen miles per hour, but he didn’t like the
alternative, which was to think that he had gone a little crazy on the road to Herkimer.
Or in his SoHo basement, if you liked that better. That he was having delusions.
One night while channel-surfing, he came across a program about hypnosis on A&E.
The fellow being interviewed, a hypnotist who styled himself Joe Saturn, was saying
that everyone practiced self-hypnosis every day. We used it to enter a work-oriented
frame of mind in the morning; we used it to help us “get into the story” when reading
novels or watching movies; we used it to get to sleep at night. This last was Joe
Saturn’s favorite example, and he talked at length about the patterns “successful
sleepers” followed every night: checking the locks on the doors and windows, maybe,
drawing a glass of water, maybe saying a little prayer or indulging in a spot of
meditation. He likened these to the passes a hypnotist makes in front of his subject,
and to his line of patter—counting back from ten to zero, for instance, or assuring the
subject that he or she was “getting very sleepy.” Sifkitz seized on this gratefully, deciding on the spot that he was spending his daily two hours on the stationary bike in
a state of light to medium hypnosis.
Because, by the third week in front of the wall-projection, he was no longer spending
those two hours in the basement alcove. By the third week, he was actually spending
them on the road to Herkimer.
He would pedal contentedly enough along the packed dirt track that wound through
the forest, smelling the odor of pine, hearing the cries of the crows or the crackle of
leaves when he rolled through occasional drifts of them. The stationary bike became
the three-speed Raleigh he’d owned as a twelve-year-old in suburban Manchester,
New Hampshire. By no means the only bike he’d had before getting his driver’s
license at seventeen, but inarguably the best bike. The plastic cup-holder became a
clumsily made but effective hand-welded ring of metal jutting over the bike-basket,
and instead of Red Bull it contained a can of Lipton iced tea. Unsweetened.
On the road to Herkimer, it was always late October and just an hour before sunset.
Although he rode two hours (both the alarm clock and the stationary bike’s odometer
confirmed this each time he finished), the sun never changed its position; it always
laid the same long shadows across the dirt road and flickered at him through the trees
from the same quadrant of the sky as he traveled along with the manufactured wind of
his passage blowing the hair back from his brow.
Sometimes there were signs nailed to trees where other roads crossed the one he was
on. CASCADE ROAD, one said. HERKIMER, 120 MI., read another, this one
pocked with old bullet-holes. The signs always corresponded to the information on
the plat map currently tacked to the alcove wall. He had already decided that, once he
reached Herkimer, he’d push on into the Canadian wilderness without even a stop to
buy souvenirs. The road stopped there, but that was no problem; he’d already gotten a
book titled Plat Maps of Eastern Canada. He would simply draw his own road on the
plats, using a fine blue pencil and putting in lots of squiggles. Squiggles added miles.
He could go all the way to the Arctic Circle, if he wanted to.
One evening, after the alarm went off and startled him out of his trance, he
approached the projection and looked at it for several long, considering moments,
head cocked to one side. Anyone else would have seen very little; up that close the
picture’s trick of forced perspective ceased working and to the untrained eye the
woodland scene collapsed into nothing but blobs of color—the light brown of the
road’s surface, the darker brown that was a shallow drift of leaves, the blue-and gray-
streaked green of the firs, the bright yellow-white of the westering sun to the far left,