By Boen Wang
0. Don’t worry; there’s no point.
1. Picture them: man and woman, middle-aged, white, standing outside their one-story house with the garage door open. They seemed familiar with each other, possibly married. I said my name and shook his hand, and he said his. The woman hung around the driveway making interjections, which the man seemed experienced in ignoring.
He’d posted the bike on Craigslist for forty bucks. A silver Schwinn, the kind mechanics at the Bicycle Shop dismiss as a “Wal-Mart bike.” 21 speeds, front and rear reflectors, water bottle holder. He wheeled it out of the garage and set it in front of me. I asked if I could try it out before I bought it.
“Let’s see the money first.” His words were slightly slurred; his balance a bit wobbly. The woman told him to cut me a break, the kid’s not going anywhere, which he ignored. “I just don’t want you getting any ideas,” he said.
I gave him my backpack as a sort of security deposit and he handed me the bike. After confirming the bike wouldn’t immediately fall apart, I got off, handed him the money, retrieved my backpack, and rode away. It was downhill from there.
2. Like videogames and birding and heroin, people who are into cycling are really into cycling. It’s funny how people are flattened by the things they do: cyclist, reader, gamer, foodie, druggie. I have a friend who has a bike, though he wouldn’t call himself a cyclist. He came here as a PhD student and always lived off-campus; cycling was just the easiest way to get to work.
He and I are in a Christian group—someone described it as like a frat with a lot less drinking and a lot more Jesus—and at the end of every semester we would hold a banquet. The freshmen and sophomores and juniors would each come up with a presentation dedicated to the graduating senior class, usually a video or skit. Because we are nominally a Christian family, all adopted sons and daughters of our Holy Father, we are expected to wish our brothers and sisters in Christ warm and genuine goodbyes; because we are, in reality, a collection of cliques and subcliques, we oftentimes barely know the people we’re celebrating.
Not many people knew my friend, at least not that well, so he became That Guy With A Bike. Everyone made a video and every video had a ten-second shot of someone on a bike pretending to be That Guy. I was That Guy for my class’s video. We laughed every time: That Guy does have a bike, and he sure does ride it!
Which is how a twenty-six-year-old Filipino from Ames, Iowa, a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Iowa State, a PhD from Penn State in materials science, his dad a forensic scientist and his mom an accountant, an older brother in Columbus, Ohio, smattering of freckles beneath his eyes, obsessively neat room, early waker, good listener, mediocre cook, a guy, like all of us, with fears and dreams and desires and memories I do not and cannot begin to understand, became That Guy With A Bike.
3. I am, of course, doing the same thing to him now.
4. Summers here are strange. State College operates by Penn State’s schedule, and when Penn State is off-season, so is State College. Bus lines shut down. Bubble tea places go bankrupt. Campus becomes pleasingly depopulated, especially the library, where it becomes easy to find an open computer. The summer I bought a bike That Guy was in Japan for an internship, so I figured I could be the honorary Guy for the time being. I spent my days picking a place on Google Maps and riding there, converting clean street lines on a screen into reality.
In between my aimless wanderings, I volunteered. The church I attended held monthly service projects, usually at places far from campus, and since I could now go places with my bike I signed up.
The first project was to paint a man’s house. His name was Tony and he lived in Houserville, a mostly residential neighborhood east of the 99-322 interchange. His house was a ranch house among cul-de-sacs lined with other ranch houses, all with well-manicured lawns and backyards, the sort of place where you can forget Penn State exists.
Tony wanted his kitchen and bedroom repainted. While we spread plastic tarps over the carpet and furniture, Tony sat at the kitchen table and chain-smoked. He had a cup of coffee on the table and a cat by his feet. His voice sounded like he looked. He’d take a drag, cough ferociously, and take another.
I went to the bathroom and scraped the ceiling with a paint scraper. Tony had tried to paint the bathroom before but it didn’t turn out very well, all uneven and splotchy, so I was assigned to convert his handiwork into paint-dandruff. It caked my hair and face and arms. People looked at me funny. I kept scraping. After a bit I moved to the bedroom and used rollers to cover the walls. I hadn’t painted a house in a few years, so another volunteer told me to apply even pressure and make smooth vertical motions. I didn’t quite get it, though, and in between making small talk the volunteer would surreptitiously go over the parts I did, which made me like him less.
I went to the kitchen. Tony told me he had bronchitis; I avoided pointing out the obvious. There were pictures of his kids on the wall behind him, all my age and older. He told me he was from South Philly and came here to study mechanical engineering. He worked at the university for a while; he was retired for a while. These days he made drumsticks, like literally, sticks you hit drums with,sold them to the music shop on North Atherton by the Vietnamese place. He’d a drumset in his basement and demonstrated for me. He’s pretty good, as far as I could tell.
When we finished Tony got up to thank us and say goodbye. The volunteer and his wife offered to give me a ride home; my bike just barely fit in the back of their minivan. His wife was Australian and much better at small talk than he was. When we passed the football stadium she commented on a bride and groom taking wedding pictures in front of the giant Penn State logo. “It’s like a place of worship,” she said, which I think offended her husband’s American sensibilities. I was just glad I didn’t have to bike up the hill.
5. Because it’s not like driving a car, where elevation changes barely register and mountains are surmounted by a slightly firmer push of the right foot—no, you feel every crest and dip and bump, it travels up through the wheels to your arms and spine, you realize conservation of energy isn’t just an equation in physics class but a physical sensation forcing you to look ahead and pay attention, benign streets you’ve walked down a million times now interpreted in terms of the familiar made unfamiliar.
6 (a). The next month I helped clear out a house in a subdivision south of the high school. A bike trail went out there, past the pool through Orchard Park and across Blue Course. Tussey Mountain loomed in the distance. In the driveway was a dumpster and a van, the dumpster for unsalvageables, the van for transporting stuff to Goodwill.
A woman had lived there. She died of cancer. One of the volunteers, Brian, said she lived alone and didn’t have many friends. Her kids didn’t call. She’d call Brian at midnight and wouldn’t stop talking until four in the morning, he said. He didn’t seem too torn up about her death. He did IT for Penn State, went to school here in the 80’s and stuck around for a few decades. He was her only friend, if you could call him that.
There’s a videogame called Gone Home where you walk around your family’s empty house looking at things: notes on the refrigerator, your sister’s report card, your parents’ divorce papers. The stuff is scattered around the house seemingly at random, but it’s arranged in such a way that a story emerges about the people who lived there.
The woman’s house had no story. There were two floors, plus a basement and garage. Her personal effects—clothes and photo albums and letters—had already been disposed of. What was left were boxes filled with yellowed magazines, empty inkjet printers, broken CRTs, stereo sets, couches, mattresses, chairs, sheets, lamps—symbols shorn of significance, a mountain of material with no throughline.
We started with the office. It overlooked the dumpster in the driveway, so we chucked folders and lamps out the window. A German girl helped me defenestrate. She was a high schooler who through some sort of exchange program “interned” at the church. I asked her what sort of responsibilities a church intern had. She either didn’t understand the question or chose to ignore it, and I didn’t press the issue.
The hard part was the furniture. Brian and I, in capitulation to patriarchal gender norms, tackled the heavy stuff, the drawers and dressers and cabinets. Most of these were located on the upper floor, which meant maneuvering unwieldy pieces of furniture down a narrow stairwell, one of us guiding the piece at the top and the other smooshed against it at the bottom. The dumpster was overflowing, so we had to break down the furniture before lifting it up and tipping it in. Towards the end of the day, Brian and I moved two redwood bookshelves onto the lawn. We’d thrown out the books beforehand. He brought hammers.
6 (b). How to smash a redwood bookshelf on a dead woman’s lawn: stand back. A couple yards should do it. Hold the hammer at your hip. Stride forward, big powerful steps, faster than walking but not quite running. Cock your arm. Lift your hand. Legs inexorably pulling you towards your target and right arm making a smooth arc, the hammer lifted above your head then down-down-down: sharp crack of wood and nails buckling and boards popping. It should sound like punctuation. Give it a kick for good measure.
The German girl looked at me funny. I continued deconstructing.
7. I wonder who lives there now.
8 (a). Towards the end of the summer I lost my best friend. “Lost” isn’t the right word, as it implies passivity on my part; “break up” is closer, except that phrase seems to only apply to romantic relationships. “Pushed away” my best friend, “rejected” her. Something like that.
I spent the summer biking to her apartment downtown. I told her about the chain-smoker and the dead woman, the weird scent of loneliness in their houses. We cooked dinner, played board games, and watched movies. We did the things we always did except now I didn’t want to do them.
I told her: that I didn’t like spending time with her, that I didn’t like her, that I didn’t want to be her friend, that it wasn’t her fault but mine, that I didn’t understand it either, that I continued doing the things I did because I didn’t know what else to do, that therefore I should stop, and therefore we should stop being friends. It struck me even then as a shitty explanation. Most of this came out in a conversation we had walking back to the house I was living at, my bike going tck-tck-tck-tckas I felt a twist in my chest, like I was hiding a terrible secret, except when I revealed it my heart twisted tighter. I won’t pretend to know how she felt.
Before the school year began I saw her one more time. She’d moved into a new apartment. Her roommates weren’t around, which she’d made sure of. We sat on opposite ends of a couch. She told me I didn’t really mean what I was doing, that self-loathing was warping my thinking, that pushing her away seemed like the right thing to do now but wouldn’t resolve anything. It was, in retrospect, my last chance.
She folded a piece of paper into a five-pointed star. She’d been on a church retreat the previous weekend and told me about an illustration she heard about LGBT youths who come out in the church.
When they start out they have their family, friends, classmates, acquaintances, and the church. She pointed to a star’s point for each category. When they come out in conservative Christian settings, they usually lose their family first, she said, ripping off a piece of the star. She went through every category, tearing the star apart piece by piece, until all that was left was a jagged pentagon.
I don’t remember if I said anything. I left and didn’t see her for a year.
8 (b). Explanations I have come up with for why she did the thing with the star:
She was coming out?
She really liked the illustration and wanted to tell me about it?
She was comparing herself to LGBT youths who are rejected by everyone they know when their true selves were revealed? Like how after I had known her for five years—working together at the same summer job, going to the same school, eating almost every meal together our freshman year, getting as close as I could to knowing someone outside myself, quite possibly loving her—I rejected her?
9. Let me tell you the point.
10. These days the brakes on my bike are shot so I scrape my foot against the ground to stop. While lying in bed I think of near-misses I’ve had, cruising down the long hill on Shortlidge and almost hurtling into traffic on College, pressing back with both feet in a desperate attempt to stop. This keeps me up at night, among other things.
The sole of my shoe is worn down, the rubber layer scraped away. There’s a smooth gray surface beneath the hard black sole. One of these days I’ll get the brakes fixed, but for now I use my foot. Eventually, I stop.
Boen Wang is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.