When Is a Man (5 page)

When Paul had first suggested the project, the two men had had a lively discussion about the philosophical background of parkour, from Georges Hebert's “Natural Method” to the
dérive
and Guy Debord's “hurried drifting.” Tamba worried that parkour, in and of itself, was a difficult subject to take seriously. Still, with diligence, connections and parallels between parkour and larger social issues could be made. Diligence being the key word: ever since Paul's master's thesis—where there had been anonymous accusations of unprofessional, unethical behaviour on Paul's part—the professor doubted his work ethic even more than the subject itself.

Paul shrugged it off. The bantering between them, he figured, only raised his status among his peers. A few looked up to him, mostly because he wasn't afraid of Tamba.

He returned Tamba's smile and tapped his finger against his scraped chin. “These are my field notes, pal.”

Later, Christine sat at the edge of the bed while he stood naked before her. She ran her finger over a yellowing bruise across his ribs and frowned. “Do you think maybe he's got a point?”

“Who?” He grinned and motioned for her to lie back. He took her feet and pressed them against the relatively firm planes of his abdomen, and then up over the bruise onto his chest, her arches fitting to his pectorals as he ran his hands along her calves. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, a swagger to his movements as he pushed her heels back until her knees pressed against the bed, her legs wide. She brought her hand between her legs, and he did the same. Lately, this manner of foreplay had become habitual. They increasingly put each other at a distance and watched, as though sex would eventually require viewing each other through cameras and computers from separate apartments. When he was ready, he signalled her with an indolent spin of his finger and she turned over onto her knees and, just as languidly, arched her backside toward him. He held back, still the triumphant observer, savouring his own flesh, scraped and stinging and about to be satisfied, and had a brief vision of his body as a sublime machine, a beautifully humming engine.

The next semester, things came to a head. Spring meant Tamba's big conference, an international symposium on postmodern ethnography. Recognizing the chance to get on Tamba's good side, Paul had offered to present a paper called “Urban Geography and the Sporting Body.” Of course, presenting a paper implied he was making good progress on his dissertation, that theories were emerging and the possibility of broader application or meaning existed. Nothing could be further from the truth. He and his participants accumulated bruises and aches and babbled philosophically—and rather pointlessly—about a physical activity that was only hypothetically useful: it might help them rescue someone or, perhaps more likely, to run away from someone. His research, barely begun, already carried the slight whiff of the stagnant, the frivolous.

He knew good research took time—Christine was in the third year of her own dissertation—and that much ethnography could appear thin on the surface level. The title of Christine's paper, “A Childhood on the Rocks,” sounded like a one-person play, not a
PhD
paper. He'd once read a study concerning a handful of widowed grandmothers in Chicago who sewed quilts on Wednesdays. Once you dug into the meat of the project—but it was exactly that, the meat, which eluded him. He loved the sport, but the idea of spending the next three years coaxing something profound from it was painful. Tamba's warnings were coming true.

Teaching, which had felt like an anchor and distraction before, now became a refuge from the frustration of parkour, the dread of writing a paper that would largely be fluff. He immersed himself in lesson plans, marking or updating the class website and forum. He posted links to upcoming archaeological digs hosted by different universities from several countries that gave students the opportunity to join field schools in excavations around the world. The majority took place in either the States, Spain, or Italy. There was a dig happening later that spring in Sweden, the second year of an ongoing project.

The stark fields and wetlands featured in the website photos for the Vastmanland dig looked both alien and familiar, perfectly suited to his rather bleak mood. In the forefront of one photo, several muddy young men and women dressed in colourful raingear grinned wildly at the camera, arms around one another. They were likely as lost and bewildered as he felt—why Vastmanland, when there were the Roman baths in sunny and grand Pollena Trocchia, for God's sake?—but they seemed happy with the prospect of searching for Viking artifacts in the muck.

Of course, the notion of putting his dissertation on hold to pick up an archaeologist's shovel was laughable and dreadful. Tamba would eat him alive. It was too late to enrol in the field school—it was intended mostly for undergraduates wanting to learn basic archaeological methodologies—but the school encouraged observation or volunteer participation from doctoral students. He sent some e-mails and put himself on the volunteer list, just for the hell of it. If he could at least toy with the possibility of an exit strategy, it might take the pressure off writing his conference paper.

“What would you say,” he said to Christine one night, “if I ditched the conference to travel to Sweden?”

“I'd say it was hilarious,” she said. He lolled in the middle of the bed, post-sex, while she checked e-mail on her phone. She'd showed up at his place late, after drafting the paper she'd be presenting at the conference, a summary of her work over the last year.

“I've been thinking I'll be busy over the next while,” she said without looking up. “Probably won't have much time to spend together.”

“We don't already. Stay with me while you work,” he said lightly. “That way we'll see each other nights, at least.” He admired, maybe loved, how she was less interested in theory than the emotional core of her research—the myriad inner thoughts of parents who anchored themselves by rope and harness to their children and watched them climb, grasp, and slip.

“Thanks. Thank you.” She put her phone away and placed her hand on his chest. “But I need my desk, my books. I like our arrangement.”

“It does keep things exciting,” he agreed, both relieved and disappointed. They were silent for a while.

“Actually, I wouldn't find it funny,” she said. “It'd be a colossal fuck-up.”

He laughed softly, trying to reassure her. “I'll be all recharged, get a whole new perspective on my work. Much better than me serving up some bullshit about Guy Debord and dérive.”

Later, too late, he would realize he'd made the classic male mistake of thinking that if she didn't want anything serious with him, then she didn't want anything serious at all, with anyone. There was a line in a movie he'd liked—something about how you end up hating the person for the same reasons you fell in love with them.

In May he withdrew his conference paper at the last moment, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Stockholm.

5

In the morning, Tanner checked the ratio of clove oil to water in the cooler, Paul's tagging technique, and all the other details that would make the job run more smoothly. They processed the handful of trout in the traps, then entered the data and made their eggs and oatmeal to eat on the edge of a small but sheer bank at the confluence of Basket Creek and the Immitoin. The river was three times as wide as the creek and ran different shades of blue and silver midstream, steel grey and pale green along the forested banks on the other side. Paul watched a slate-coloured dipper bob from stone to stone and then plunge underwater.

“So, you feel comfortable with everything?” Tanner asked.

The thrill of finally being abandoned and left alone jolted through him. “Sure,” he said. Anyone, really, could do this job as long as they didn't mind being alone or working outside at night. If a person actually
understood
fish, or even liked them, that would be better, but anyway, here he was.

Tanner crouched, swished his plate in the creek, and then dipped his mug into the river. He rose and drank deeply, eyes closed. “Okay.” He grinned and tugged at an imaginary cap on his head. “Time to put on the film critic hat. Try not to screw anything up.” They walked back to camp, where Tanner packed up and drove away.

For a while, Paul wandered in circles around the camp, unsure what to do with himself. Before he could properly register his being alone, vehicles rumbled up the road. Their approach was slow, and the violent shake of equipment and the laboured mutter of truck engines in low gear echoed through the valley. He could see the road through the trees, a hundred metres or so uphill from where he stood beside the camper. Two large crew cabs hauled long white trailers, followed by some smaller trucks, their cargo boxes loaded with chainsaws, shovels, jerry cans, and other gear. Clouds of dust drifted through the trees, and by the time the air settled, the last rattles and engine noise had faded.

First task: clean the fence. He grabbed his waders from where they hung drying beneath the camper's awning and went to the measuring station. Except for the weirs near the shore, the fence ran across fast-moving, choppy water and sizable rocks where the female trout wouldn't lay their eggs, so there would be no redds to disturb as he followed the length of the fence.

He picked at the twigs and bark bits piled against the mesh, grabbed handfuls of alder and aspen leaves and tossed them downstream. Then he scrubbed the mesh with a wire brush until the matted leaves had flaked away. There were branches stripped of bark and nibbled to sharp points by what he guessed were beavers. Tanner had warned him that after several days of bad weather there'd be so much debris piled up that either the fence would be blown out or the creek would flood. A chainsaw was stored in one of the camper's bins in case a tree swept against the fence. He'd never used a chainsaw and thought that standing knee-deep in storm-tossed currents wouldn't be the best place to learn.

Midstream, a small fish, a rainbow or cutthroat, had wedged its sloped head in the fencing wire and snapped its spine, the body rubbery and clammy. A sad waste, but learning to gut and cook a fish was beyond him today—another foreign, unfamiliar task. He threw the trout downstream, and it floated on the surface for a moment, pale underside flashing in the sun, then disappeared.

Ten o'clock. Waders off, and his work done until nightfall. Now what the hell was he supposed to do? He returned to where they'd eaten breakfast at the confluence and crouched on the shore to absently scoop warm pebbles and sift them through his fingers.

On the other side of the Immitoin, a broad, flat forest stretched along the shore before it ran into the hills and mountains beyond, a range of conical and boxy peaks with snow-covered ridges and cols, suspended in hazy air. The woods across the river were dense and marshy, a place where a hundred elk could disappear.

His thoughts were erratic, flighty. Whatever he wanted from his mind, it was impossible to access. He became drawn in—downward, it felt like—by the sound of the river, the rhythms and counter-rhythms, the layers of melodic and discordant voices created by unexplainable surges and shifts among different currents. The noise pulled his mind along, stripped it of language, and left him with a tattered patchwork of disturbing and fleeting images. White, claustrophobic images: hospital rooms and hospital sheets, a toilet bowl with a trace of blood spiralling in the water, snow falling in late May outside a bar in Skinnskatteberg.

The report of stones hitting stones made him jump, and he spun to face upstream. A woman stood on a dirt bank undercut by the Immitoin, her hands shoved in the back pockets of her cargo shorts, a ball cap shielding her face. She was nudging small rocks with the toe of her boot, pushing them off the bank and into the water. Or no—she stepped back to reveal a boy, about four or five years old, trying to throw stones that slipped from his small hands. Paul waved once, a little reluctantly, and walked over to them, tripping here and there over exposed willow roots.

“Usually a different guy up here,” she said. “A skinny man.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm the substitute, I guess.”

There was something solid about her. Not that she was stocky, exactly, but she wouldn't be easily knocked off her feet. Tanned, freckled—an outdoorsy woman. About his age, faint crow's feet at the edges of her eyes, laughter lines around her mouth, a strand or two of grey in the dark hair that stuck out from under her cap.

The boy wanted to show him a stick, and squinted up at him, sandy-coloured hair draped over his forehead and eyebrows, a slight scowl.

“This is Shane,” the woman said. “I'm Gina. Hubert.”

“Were you cooking hot dogs?” the boy asked. He held up the stick, a thin willow branch whittled to a point at one end, and whipped it back and forth like a fencing foil. “It's nice and bendy.”