The Hero's Body (33 page)

He emerged over the crest in the road, saw the curve, locked up the back brake—it's what you do when you need to stop immediately—and skidded for fifty-six feet. Then he let off the back brake for forty feet. Whether or not he was trying to slow with his front
brake, the one with too-slim padding, I can't say. Then he locked up the back brake again for fifty-four more feet. By that time, the bike was beginning to tilt at the start of the curve. It won't stay upright when the back brake is locked, not when it's still moving at eighty miles per hour. And he wasn't going to have any of that. He wasn't going to let the bike go over. He wasn't going to lose it. So he released the back brake then. He righted the tilt as he went into the turn. And that's when the rubber caught the road. That's when the catapult happened. That's when all of this happened.

For sixteen
years I've been trying to imagine my father's thought—singular, because there wasn't time enough for more than a lone thought, one that is nine-tenths emotion—as he emerged over the rise in the road and saw that ninety-degree turn there waiting, with patient and deadly resolve, with infinite terminus, on the other side of it. I've tried to imagine his feeling—singular too—as he went into that skid. He had to know it was bad. You lock up the back brake only when it's bad and you're trying to keep it from getting worse. But he couldn't have known much more than
This is bad
.

There were perhaps two seconds, three at the most, from the time he saw the turn until the time he was too damaged ever to see anything else again. Count it:
one, two, three, done
. And two or three seconds don't produce enough oxygen, aren't expansive enough, for an intelligible thought or completed feeling. Conception or death, the beginning and the end, can happen in that abbreviated span, but little else. A sneeze, perhaps.

Near the start of
TT: Closer to the Edge
, from a head-on camera angle, there's a high-side accident that approximates what happened to my father. I've watched it fourteen times over, pausing it every half second so that it plays in slow motion, and still I cannot fathom
precisely how the physics of the crash unfolds. Even in slow motion it happens too quickly, too minutely, to understand with the eyes.

When you let off the brake and come out of a slide, the back tire gains grip, and if the bike doesn't have the right position, if it's not exactly vertical on the road, it goes from no traction to instant traction, from sideways to straight. When the tire grabs asphalt it has no choice but to force the bike straight. And then the bike's momentum gets pretzeled, wants to twist itself over, and so it does—the bike always does what it wants—and then the bike and the rider both get flung. It's a matter of weight transfer, from the front tire to the rear. The bike is heavy in front and light in back when the front brake is applied, but light in front and heavy in back when the back brake is applied. This weight transfer affects everything that happens on the bike.

YouTube has plenty of high-sides for the crash-curious, and most are just like that, from upright to upended so rapidly you can't make out what's happened. Which tells me this: even if I had perfect video footage of my father's crash, or if I'd been present that day, observing from some clear vista on Slifer Valley Road, I would not have been able to process the microseconds in which it all went irredeemably wrong.

In a different context, Kipling made the phrase “thinking with the blood,” and maybe that fits here. My father reacted with his blood, not his brain, and his blood told him to save the bike, not to lay it down. We can't calculate correctly in only three seconds, and so the viscera makes its own decisions. Often there's not time enough even for that. If you've ever crashed your bicycle you know that you can be horizontal on the sidewalk with a leaking gash in an elbow or knee before you even understand how you went down. Before you have the chance to prepare to fall, you're already fallen. Car crashes are similar: one second you're in the sane and reasonable direction on the road, and the next second you're askance in a ditch.

There are certain troublous situations where, in that second when you understand with your blood, with your saliva, that you will not make the turn, you can glance for a spot to crash, “to jump ship,” as Guy Martin puts it. You glance for anywhere that's flat, unmarked with immovable objects made of metal or wood, a patch to lay it down and slide or roll, or preferably a very soft place. A wheat field would be nice. A child's bouncy house in a large front yard would be ideal; you'd aim your crash for that, if your crash were in any way aim-able, which it usually isn't. It happens much too quickly for anything other than the controlled chaos of physics.

That wheat field or bouncy house, frequently there when you don't need it, is never there when you do, and that's what makes the street such a perilous place for a motorcycle. Everything, everywhere is a solid object against which the organs and skeleton have no chance. My father didn't get that one crucial second for that one crucial glance, and anyway, there was no good place to crash on Slifer Valley Road, unless he could lay it down and low-side, let the bike slide out from under him. The broken vertebrae would have hurt but he would have lived. As it was: I believe he had no time to understand that crashing was guaranteed, no time for rationality to declare
I don't have this one
, and so no time to let it go. No crash options. He didn't
decide
not to lay it down. He didn't decide anything. A decision takes time he didn't have.

At that speed, in that turn, with that guardrail curved there before him and elms standing ancient and obstinate on either side, his only option was dying. You can add better brakes to the equation, subtract ten degrees from that miserable heat, change the time of day to eliminate his fatigue, but at that speed in that turn, the outcome is still a trinity of fatal wounds.

Crashes are
usually relayed in seconds. The famed
split second
. Or the finger-snapping
just like that
. The always popular
in the blink of an eye
. The much-hyped
out of the blue
and its globetrotting twin,
out of nowhere
. Avert a roadway fiasco and it's usually done
in the nick of time
—
nick
: “a small broken area that appears on something after something else hits or cuts it.” The escape is always
narrow
, the call always
close
. Any closer and it'd have flung you far away. The miss is always
near
, and yet it's the
hit
that was near. Mourning happens when the bike
hits
the guardrail, not when the bike
misses
the guardrail. Don't avert that roadway fiasco and you're
at the wrong place at the wrong time
, although the truth is that you'd be at the wrong place at the
right
time, or the
right
place at the
wrong
time. We'd do well to get our
wrong
s and
right
s right. It was the wrong speed on the right road, the wrong speed in that right turn.

We're pawns of causation, of
because X then Y
. Bodybuilding was no different: training hard equals getting strong. To live uncrazed in the world, we require a comprehension of the nexus from A to B, a knowledge of the strings making objects dance. We prefer to calculate the effect from the cause, of course, but when we're already battered in the ditch, or dying beneath a guardrail, then we're forced to calculate the cause from the effect. The speed, the rain, the ice, the multitasking derelict with only one hand on the wheel . . . the Yamaha R1 tearing down Slifer Valley Road.
He never knew what hit him
.

But
I
know what hit him, and I live now with knowing that he didn't. No final tally of forty-seven years, no concluding thought of his children, parents, all the good work he'd done. What does that matter, a final thought? Final thought of us or no final thought of us, the result was the same. But it matters to me. To believe that those last seconds don't count because the result was the same is to believe that
all
seconds don't count because the result is the same. If his thoughts were important that morning, if they were important
the day, the week, the year, the decade before, then they would have been equally important as he was skidding, screeching, beneath the guardrail bleeding.

Perhaps he had the famous flash you've heard about—
My life flashed before my eyes—
but flashes aren't thoughts. Nothing gets tallied, no daughter, mother, son fully conjured, in a flash.
To go peacefully in my sleep:
that's the understandable wish of many, and I don't dispute the peaceful part. But to die and not be aware of it, not digest what's happening to you, not
experience
it, not glimpse the narrowed glare of the Reaper? That seems to me a stupendous deprivation and injustice. Next to being born, dying is the most important thing that ever happens to you.

Officer Branch's
formulation “point of final uncontrolled rest”—not once but twice—is an idiomatic marvel to ponder. He means where the bike stopped when the crashing was done, I know, but “uncontrolled rest” is a new concept to me, a deliberate contradiction, as if a chaotic calm were possible.
Final rest
, on the other hand—that makes sense if you insist on the euphemism
R.I.P
.

(“He's at rest now” was one of the more irritating declarations I had spoken at me during the funeral, always delivered in that pastel tone, mostly neutral but with a trace suggestion that it was
better
to be at rest, to be dead. It took rappelling down into auxiliary wells of politeness not to respond with “But he didn't
want
to be at rest now.” Still, that wasn't as loathsome as the popular nonsense that says
Everything happens for a reason
. To those who uttered that to me, I wanted to reply,
Yes, and the reason is pointlessness and pain
.)

My father was in control of the bike until he was not. Under the guardrail, he and the bike were not both resting; they were both bleeding. I'm struck by that image mobilized by Branch, “a puddle
of fuel,” the bike's gasoline mingling with my father's blood, the propellant of one meeting the propellant of the other, both of them propelled no further, no farther.

I was struck, too, to learn in Officer Branch's version that bystanders had wheeled the bike thirty feet away from where they'd found it, because I'd been told by the other riders that my father was with the bike against the guardrail, his leg or legs partially on top of it. Which means that these bystanders weren't standing by, but rather had repositioned my father to get him off the bike, or to get the bike off of him. More conflicting reports from Calvary.

It's the impulse, I suppose, in a situation such as that, to attempt some form of rescue, however meager, however futile (to watch a man die and do nothing must cause a permanent ruction to the self). But I'm pretty sure that the repositioning of someone with those injuries isn't in the protocol. Not that moving him or not moving him made any difference at all. At that point, nothing for him made any difference anymore.