The Night Cyclist Read online

  And then I saw it for what it was: An invitation. A challenge. A dare.

  I smiled, splashed through the tall grass, ran past the deep water, and hit the concrete running alongside my bike, catapulted up into the saddle already shifting hard, my nostrils wide because my lungs were about to need air.

  It had been too long since I’d really gotten the opportunity—the need—to open up. Coach had diagnosed me early as a sprinter, and he’d kind of sneered when he said it, like there was no hope, really. He’d work with me, sure, but I was what I was.

  For four years it made me faster, better, harder.

  He was right, though: I’m a born sprinter. I’ll burn through my quads those first two miles, leave the whole pack in the dust.

  It was one mile until the trail nosed up into the canyon for twenty vertical miles.

  It was one mile, and this night cyclist, he only had about a half-minute head start.

  If only Doreen could see me now.

  * * *

  Where I finally saw him again, it was at the pond the low part of the trail had become, downtown.

  He was standing there, one foot down in the water.

  There’s no way I was making any more noise than the flooded creek, but still, as soon as I rounded the corner, he whipped his head back settled his black eyes on me.

  I gave him a cocky two-fingered wave from my grips. He didn’t wave back. He was watching the water again.

  My big plan was to walk my bike up beside him, so as to keep from whipping water into his face. Not like we weren’t both already soaked, but manners are manners, even at two in the morning, in the dark and the rain.

  He never gave me the chance.

  I was fifty feet away when he hauled his bike around, rode the lapping edge of the water through the wet grass, all the way up to the road, stepped down for just long enough to lift his bike up onto the cracked sidewalk that runs up there. He didn’t lift his bike because he didn’t have momentum—the climb he’d just made would have even taxed my sprinter’s legs in their prime—he lifted it because road bike rims, especially old aluminum ones like he was running, they’ll crimp in from that kind of action.

  I bared my teeth just like he’d done, and I gave chase, having to run my bike up the last ten or fifteen yards, when my narrow road tires started to gouge into the mud.

  By the time I clipped in on the sidewalk, he was a receding black dot in the car lane.

  I ramped down off the curb at a handicapped place, and I gave my bike every last bit of myself I had.

  We took the turn—on the road, not the path—up into the canyon maybe ten seconds apart, him running the beginning of the red light, me catching the end of it, leaned over too far for wet asphalt but I didn’t care anymore. My left pedal snagged on the blacktop, hitching the ass-end of the bike over a hiccup, but the tire caught somehow, and I rode it out. Watching my line. I was watching my line.

  It led straight to him.

  He looked back just like Coach was forever telling us not to, but it didn’t slow him or tilt him even a little.

  A half mile after the turn, the road started its wicked uphill slope.

  Twice I’d gone up it, but that was fifteen years ago, and the road had been barricaded off for the event, and I’d still been pretty sure I was going to have to sag wagon it. Not because I was a sprinter. Because I was human.

  I’d promised myself never again.

  But this was now. This was tonight.

  I geared down, stood on the cranks.

  He was there in my headlight. Not riding away. Just crosswise in the road, like a barricade himself.

  I rear-braked, my rooster tail slinging past without me, like my intentions were going where I couldn’t.

  The night cyclist wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t anything. He was just looking at me.

  “I’ve got your—!” I said, pulling the clear glasses away from my neck, against the elastic.

  He turned in a huff, uphill, and, because I had the jump, I figured I’d be alongside him in two shakes.

  Wrong.

  He was faster on the climb than I was. It wasn’t even close. Even with me screaming for my lungs to be deeper, for my legs to be younger, for the grade to flatten out.

  It was like the mountain was sucking him uphill. And when he looked back on the first turn, his mouth wasn’t haggard and gasping like mine. He was calm, even. Not winded in the least.

  Two miles into it, blood in my throat, I had to stop.

  I threw up over the guardrail, then collapsed across it, not caring how it was chiseling into my midsection.

  No headlights came along to hitch me down the hill, into town.

  “What are you?” I said to the night cyclist, wherever he was.

  Miles away by now, I thought. Or—watching me from the trees?

  I tried to bore into the darkness, to catch his outline there, but then I was throwing up again, from deep, deep inside, like I was dry heaving all the years between who I was and who I had been, and then I climbed back into the saddle like the rag doll I was, rode my brakes home, taking the roads this time.

  * * *

  I was bonked by the time I crawled into my living room. The adrenaline had burned through all the blood sugar I had, and left me in the hole for more. I couldn’t remember the last time this had happened. I didn’t miss it. It was like having sludge for blood, and having to look at the world through one narrow, long straw.

  I settled my bike against the back of the couch in exactly the way I never do—it was Doreen’s couch—unrolled my knives on the counter to be sure the oiled leather had kept them dry, and then I ate great heaping handfuls of corn chips and chocolate morsels from the pantry. Not because that’s any kind of magic formula, but because they were the first things I saw.

  It took ten or twelve minutes, but I finally woke up enough to rack my bike, dry it with a hand towel from the kitchen, even going so far as to twist off the valve stem caps, blow any lingering droplets in there back onto my face.

  Only after my bike was properly stabled did I change into dry clothes myself. Just some mountain bike shorts I’d only bought because they were on clearance and I had credit at that store. They were my house shorts, had a pocket right on the front of the thigh. My phone dropped into it perfectly.

  I turned on the television to see if our race had been documented, but all up and down the dial it was just cop shows sentenced to ten years, hard syndication. The first time I woke still watching, I rolled off the couch, checked to make sure the front door was secure—never trust yourself when your blood sugar’s flatlined—then climbed into bed on what I was still calling my side. The way I turned the lamp off in the living room was by shutting my eyes.

  The next time I woke, I wasn’t completely sure that’s what I’d just done. The way my legs were still both burning and noodled at the same time, I thought for a second that maybe I was at the end of a long ride, years ago. Something up in the peaks, in the thin, crisp air, permanent snow back in the shadows of the evergreen.

  Was that where he lived, I wondered? The night cyclist?

  Except—nobody could make that ride up the canyon. Any sane person would fork over the change for the bus. But this night cyclist, he hadn’t had a pack, hadn’t had a rack on his bike. If he did live up the hill, what was he even down here in the big wet for?

  Exercise? Recreation?

  That would be more like suicide, having to make that climb after bopping all around town in the dark. And, yeah, now that that was on the table: the dark. No light? Nothing reflective to him at all. Like he just wanted to whip past, be already gone by the time the smear he’d been even registered to anybody on the trail that late.

  “What are you?” I said out loud, but the comforter muffled my voice.

  Which was good.

  There was a shadow stretched out through the open doorway of my bedroom.

  My heart gorged up into my throat.

  And then, like my heart was that loud, t
he head of that shadow, it cocked around in a way I knew. A way I remembered.

  It was him.

  My first response was to curl deeper into the safety of my comforter.

  My next response, it was to ask him how he’d done that. How he’d sprinted uphill, away from me, a born sprinter. And on a relic of a bike at that.

  Keeping the blanket around my shoulders, I stood, shushed over into the doorway, for some reason superstitious about stepping directly into his shadow. Like it was a well I could fall into? Like that blackness was going to leech up through the print of my bare feet?

  I don’t know. It was instinctual; it was automatic. It was polite. In magical places, you make all obeisance you might think proper.

  He knew I was there, had probably clocked my approach from the exact instant I’d stopped breathing.

  What he was holding, and considering, it was his clear glasses.

  The reason he was considering them, it was that I’d put them on the plate Doreen had decreed the home for all glasses.

  The reason he was reconsidering them, it was that right there in the bowl were mine. My daytime ones, polarized, iridescent, and my night ones, clear and sleek, the elastic tight and young. My clear ones were enough of an update on his that they were practically a reinvention.

  He looked up to me, and his face, it was cut stone. Harsh, angular, pale. And those eyes. I’d been right, last time: The pupils or irises or whatever, they were blown out. There was hardly any white.

  Of course he didn’t need a headlight.

  Creatures of the night, they get along just fine in the darkness.

  There were no eyebrows, either.

  “What happened to you?” I almost said.

  And his thighs—if I hadn’t seen him ride, I’d never have clocked him for a serious cyclist. A rider who can rabbit up the canyon even just a mile or two without breaking a sweat, his quads should be jodhpured out past what any denim could ever contain, with thick, veined calves to match. Like gorilla forearms.

  His legs though, they were slender, smooth. Probably pale as his face, pale as those wristlets of white between his gloves and sleeve, between the cuff of his tights and the crescent of his shoe-tops.

  He must be corded like steel, and wound tight.

  At which point, finally, I cased the front door.

  It was shut, the deadbolt still twisted tight.

  Meaning—yep. Right on cue, the drapes over the sliding glass door billowed in, then sighed back out onto the balcony.

  The third-floor balcony.

  “I know what you did to those kids in the creek,” I said. “Before they were in the creek, I mean.”

  It was supposed to be what kept him from coming for me. Knowledge. Except, idiot that I am, I’d made sure he knew that the only place that knowledge lived, it was in my head. Dig that out, and he’d have nothing to worry about.

  “You didn’t have to,” I added. “They were never going to get that log moved.”

  He just stared at me. Evaluating me, it felt like. How long had it been since anyone attempted conversation with him, I wonder now? If he had spoken, if he could, what would he have even said, after so long? Would he have asked why a die-hard cyclist was defending those who would do violence to cyclists?

  Looking back, my guess is that he couldn’t speak at all. Not without showing me his teeth.

  “I didn’t invite you in here,” I said to him, my bulk—with the comforter—filling the doorway.

  To show how little threat I was, he turned away from me, studying his glasses again. Then raising them, to inhale their scent.

  “I didn’t wear them,” I said. “Not really.”

  What he was smelling, it was my sweat on the band, from when they’d been around my neck. From when I’d been chasing him.

  In a moment’s association, then, I knew that that was how he’d found me here on the third floor of an apartment building miles away from the last place I’d seen him.

  He’d picked my scent out of all the smells of the city. Out of all the thousands of other bodies out after dark. He’d known me through the rain.

  I swallowed, the sound of it crashing in my ears.

  He’d come here because I’d seen him. He’d come here because he couldn’t be seen.

  “You don’t ride in the sun, do you,” I said. It wasn’t really a question. I nodded down to the glasses he was still considering. “And the stores are only open in the daytime. So you can’t—you can’t update your gear.”

  I could tell by the new stillness about him that he heard me, but he didn’t look up.

  “Take them,” I said.

  Slowly, by labored degrees, he looked over to me.

  “Mine,” I said. “Take them. You need them.”

  Because it wasn’t in him to leave evidence behind, he hooked his down over his neck like I’d worn them, then settled mine around his head, the continuous lens cocked up on his forehead. When he lowered them, the dents left from the elastic’s pull didn’t fill with red color.

  But I’d known that wasn’t going to happen.

  “You’re fast,” I said to him. “I used to be fast.”

  He looked up to me for what I knew was the last time. I knew it was the last because there was a grin spreading across his face. No, not a grin. A sneer.

  What he was saying was that he was fast. The fastest.

  And he didn’t need lungs.

  And he slept—where he slept, it was probably burrowed into a hole somewhere up the canyon. Under a rock ledge, in a cave only him and the marmots and the chipmunks knew about, and whatever beetles and grubs can live in gaspy thin air, without the sun.

  The moment his grin flashed into a smile, I saw the dirty yellow sharpness past his lips and I took an involuntary step back.

  That was all it took to spook him.

  He moved like quicksilver over the couch, past the rattan stools, and onto the balcony. I rushed over after him, to see him silently touching down, or swimming through the night air, but he was already gone.

  I should have expected nothing less.

  * * *

  Three nights later, the waters receded from the bike path.

  I hadn’t been riding to and from work.

  Doreen had called, actually. Just to talk.

  I told her to swing by the restaurant soon, that I’d make her favorite, like old times. Her breath hitched a bit over that.

  Four years, that’s a long time. For me too.

  “And you need to be careful,” she said, when we were both signing off awkwardly—awkward because we’d been saying the same thing at the end of every call for so long. What were we supposed to say now?

  “Careful?” I said.

  “Those two kids who died,” she said.

  “They weren’t riding,” I told her.

  “Just be careful.”

  I promised her I would and we somehow broke the connection.

  It was my night off.

  What she’d said, though. It was a challenge, wasn’t it?

  You only have to be careful when you think something can really happen to you. When you’re twenty, twenty-five, nothing in the world can touch you.

  To prove that still applied to me, I unclamped my bike from the rack, checked the tire pressure front and back, then nodded to myself about this, trucked us downstairs, to the sidewalk that led to the path that ran alongside the creek, up the canyon if I followed that far.

  It was one, two in the morning. Late enough that the hand-in-hand lovers would be bedded down someplace secret. Late enough that all the smokers who’d promised they’d quit weren’t out for one last drag.

  Just me and the creatures of the night.

  My headlight only stabbed fifteen, twenty feet into the darkness.

  To show I could, that I still had those legs, I pumped hard for the black space of the mountains. I knew better than to try to make the whole climb. But even a little would prove something.

  I made it the same two mi
les, not pushing hard, just steady climbing, before I wheeled around, rode gravity back to town.

  Two homeless men, tuned to nature better than the usual baby stroller crowd, stepped away from each other to let me slip between them at thirty miles per hour. I nodded thanks, but it’s always an empty gesture. You’re going too fast for it to register, and you can’t ever check back to see if they even saw your gratitude.

  Empty gestures are what make the world go round, though.

  I swooped under two, three bridges, pedaling though I didn’t really need to. There was still silt on the concrete. It crunched under my tires like sugar granules.

  “Careful,” I said again, to myself. Just retasting the word. Mining into it for what Doreen had really been trying to get across.

  I looked down, shut my eyes—I was on a straightaway, the one that tunneled through the next quarter mile or so of trees—watching my top tube coast back and forth instead of doing the first thing Coach always said: keeping my eyes on the line I was taking.

  My headlight was what saved me from myself.

  A piece of driftwood, obviously dragged up onto the path.

  Doing it without thinking—it was years too late to stop—I bunny hopped the wood. When you’re clipped in and your bike goes eleven pounds, you can do this.

  I came down with both tires at once, like’s proper if you want to keep control, and had to skid immediately, as clearing the next chunk of driftwood would only land me on a third piece. This wasn’t just a symbolic attempt to sabotage the trail. This was set up to hurt any rider who came at it with a head of speed.

  I didn’t wipe out, though. It was close, but I knew to cantilever out, ahead, and keep hold of the bike so it didn’t crash into me, send us both spinning into the darkness. It was a once-in-fifty tries dismount, but I landed it.

  Breathing hard from the close call, all the profanity I knew welling up in me, I looked back at what almost was, what should have been if I hadn’t just cashed in all my luck for the next ten years, and then I directed my headlight ahead, into the turn, to what other obstacles awaited.

  The night cyclists’s white face looked back to me.

  His white face and his red mouth and chin. His deep black eyes.

  I flinched, but then realized why he wasn’t already at my throat: He was impaled on the seat post of his own bike. He was impaled just like I would be, if I hadn’t reeled all my speed in. But my speed, it had probably only been half of his.