When Is a Man Page 3

  “And?”

  “I said, ‘I’m not in Castlegar. Or Grand Forks.’ Anyways, he was being facetious. He thinks I just grab ideas from thin air.”

  “Well, don’t you?” Tanner asked and shot back the rest of his drink. “Like the parkour?”

  “Maybe the parkour,” he admitted. “All right, maybe every ethnography I’ve done. It’s great fun, it really is, finding out what makes these groups tick, what sustains them. I mean, what kind of grown man would belong to a parkour club for five years? But it’s true I’ve never found something I could really latch on to, not the way you have with bull trout. I want to keep going. Somehow.” He was an academic, he’d lived so long on research grants and university money he couldn’t imagine another way of getting by.

  Tanner was staring at his empty glass. He suddenly laughed—a vulgar growl. “Fucking bloated. Like a grey balloon.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “You have to wonder.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Who it was, I mean.” Tanner poured another drink. “They ushered us out pretty quick after the corpse hit the stretcher. Once you were, you know, back from the woods.”

  Paul flushed, a sudden surge of anger at the drowned man, the way the body had intruded on his life and made everything about the camp feel ominous and unsettling.

  “Guaranteed I’ll know him,” Tanner said. “Hopefully not well.”

  “I’m not going to think about it either way.”

  “So, what’s the deal, then?” He gestured irritably at Paul’s body, maybe because he wouldn’t be suckered into talking about the dead man. “Didn’t bring any booze or steaks with you, you’re drinking tea. You look like crap. Are you okay or not?”

  “They got all of it, for now. If that’s what you mean.”

  “How about . . .” Tanner pointed again, this time toward Paul’s crotch. “I hear, sometimes with the surgery . . .”

  “Yeah.” Paul fidgeted with his teacup. “I’m out of commission.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Not a twitch.”

  “Wow.”

  Both men looked out the window. The wilderness all around them, the generator their muttering lifeline to civilization.

  “Not for long, though, right?” Tanner turned back to him. “You’re young, geez. Haven’t even had kids yet.”

  “I can still have kids.”

  “Sure. Artificial insemination, test tubes. Fuck all that—the mechanics are what’s important, right?”

  “The doctors say—well, doctors say a lot of things.” He raised his teacup in a mock toast.

  “So is that—you know—is that all right with you, then?”

  Paul struggled for a moment to speak and ended up laughing, helplessly. “I don’t have a lot of choice here. It’s better than the alternative, I’ll give it that.”

  Tanner yawned. “Time for bed. And up early to count. Will the table-bed be comfortable enough?”

  “Sure. I should warn you, I’ll probably have to get up a few times.”

  “Won’t even notice. I’m more snug out here than at home, but let’s not tell Beth I said that.” He winked, then paused. “We’re trying to get pregnant. Figured it’s time.”

  “How about I go out and kill the generator,” Paul said.

  “Sure, yeah. Get ready for the silence.”

  4

  Before he stumbled across parkour, Paul had been in limbo, having finished, with partial success, a study on cycling clubs. The overwhelming trend among Paul’s peers at the university was ethnographies of the “sporting body,” a reaction against the abundance of netnographies, studies of online communities that saturated journals and publications. Or maybe a natural outcome of living in a city obsessed with recreation and its own greenness, or even the upcoming Olympics. Students conducted fieldwork among cultural groups formed by marathon addicts, competitors in extreme endurance races, or transgendered wrestlers. There was always pressure to find original, eclectic material, a community that occupied a very particular or unusual niche. Sometimes it felt like you were spinning so-called cultural groups out of nothing, just to keep pace with your fellow academics. But he enjoyed the challenge of identifying some obscure, tenuous cultural phenomenon and then mining it for publishable work that actually said something about society. There were risks, of course, like chasing an idea down a dead end—his master’s thesis had come close—or simply becoming stumped for ideas.

  He’d been dating Christine for a few months, and she was teaching him sport climbing. Her dissertation was a study of families who climbed at a gym called The Edge. Usually she worked with the binaries of broken or strained marriages: mother and daughter, father and son, and so on. Each parent had his or her own reason for climbing with a child, different values. Teaching him to rise to the challenge, a divorced father might say about his eight-year-old. Teamwork, the parallels to ambition and hard work. Companionship, a single mother would admit. To teach courage and independence.

  Paul had his own reasons for climbing, one of which was the spectacle of Christine, the feline way she formed her body to the wall, fabric stretched against her, jaw taut with predatory grace as she reached for the next brightly coloured hold. A real beauty in her motions, not the ugly lunge that marked Paul’s progress. He was all raw strength and desperate clutching. He admired her Zen-like poise, but the real turn-on was her competitive, almost hostile drive to outperform Paul in the climbing gym. Which she easily did.

  He learned to trust the rope, his harness and the bolts and hefty carabiners that made up the anchor system at the apex of the climb, and he suppressed his fear of heights. But the equipment (minimal as it was) and the fear (unfounded as it was) distracted and took from his pleasure. He only wanted to think about the problem in front of him, the necessary series of moves, the crux he had to surmount. Mostly, he wanted to think about Christine.

  They were alike in many ways, both of them ensconced in academia for most of their adult lives after brief, unsatisfying forays into the “real world.” After high school she’d been a waitress, then a bartender, while Paul had started in construction for one of his father’s buddies before switching to retail during summers while earning his undergraduate degree. Neither of them had brothers or sisters, and both had spent their early, angst-ridden university years imagining the world as an infinite number of cultural groups, none of which they belonged to. They both preferred to think they’d outgrown that stage of their lives. She liked, he knew, his cleverness, the way he could connect obscure ideas and make something from nothing. He was ambitious but not serious. She was both.

  When Christine joined her research participants in their climbs, Paul would retreat to the so-called Cave at the back of the gym, a room of overhanging walls, big, grippy handholds placed on a low, sloping roof, and a floor covered in thick crash mats. Different colours of tape marked the routes that traversed the room. To move from one hold to another might require an upward lunge from a near-supine position, or a long reach from one razor-thin toehold to another with only one divot crimp for his burning fingers to grasp in between.

  In the Cave, he met the person who would become his first research participant, Xi Bai. Thin and quiet, the teenager had gone back and forth along the rear wall of the Cave several times without resting—Paul had to step off the wall to let him pass. He had an unorthodox style, showy and acrobatic, and went from hold to hold at a precarious speed, his wild swings threatening to rip him from the wall. Xi explained to him, in whispered, faltering English, that he’d decided to train here for parkour only because of the rain. What was parkour, Paul wanted to know, but the boy couldn’t say. He invited Paul to the next practice session. If it hadn’t taken place on campus, a few minutes’ walk from Paul’s office, he likely wouldn’t have gone.

  As a subject, Xi Bai didn’t make for an easy interview. Or Paul was trying too hard to make immediate intellectual connections, forcing theories before the fact. “Do you think, maybe, th
at parkour is a means of defining a foreign landscape on your own terms?” Paul asked. “A way of claiming a space for yourself?” The boy looked blank, a little frightened.

  “Fun,” Xi finally stuttered. “Have fun.”

  Xi was not the only member of the group who found it difficult to articulate why he practised parkour. Paul’s scratch notes, recorded in a small notepad, were filled with little more than comical macho posturing and weird cheerleader platitudes. From Tran Minh, international student: “To go higher, better, really kick the wall’s ass. That’s what I’m talking about.” Or Nathan Cook, BA candidate in political science: “Break out of those set rules of movement, the prepackaged, so-called reality of our surroundings. Reinvent.”

  The group also had a desire for fame. They filmed themselves obsessively, edited and synched the footage to hip hop and heavy metal, and then uploaded it onto their own YouTube channel. Nathan, ever the purist, tried to lend an instructional bent to the videos by adding voiceovers, but most clips were all bombast and rhythmic jump-cuts, testosterone with a soundtrack. Filming his fieldwork proved to be a headache, and Paul quickly abandoned it—participants were too eager to be in front of a camera, it became a fetish object instead of an unobtrusive means of documentation. That might have posed some interesting meta-ethnographic possibilities worth exploring—except, really, he just wanted to play.

  He spent the summer learning how to do proper rolls and tumbles on the grass, something he hadn’t done since he was a child. Parkour wasn’t meant to be competitive, but Paul found a friendly rival in Tran Minh. They competed at kong-vaulting picnic tables and ledges or muscling over walls, and taunted each other when a manoeuvre was bungled. But Tran also proved to be a willing teacher, perhaps revelling in the novelty of instructing someone much older than himself. By October, the physical enjoyment of becoming a competent traceur, of his own unexpected transformation into a faster, stronger, more limber man, far outweighed the pleasure of conducting interviews, writing up field notes, or instructing archaeology students. A fact that didn’t escape the notice of either Christine or Dr. Tamba.

  One evening after a long session with Tran and Xi, Paul went to the lounge where he often met and drank with a handful of instructors and grad students. He liked his department. They were mostly younger and, like him, still valued the academic life over family, children. Tamba was putting in a rare and unfortunate appearance and sat at the head of the table with Christine and the others gathered around him. In his late forties, smooth-shaven and blessed with Mediterranean skin that rendered him both exotic and ageless, Tamba was more charismatic than handsome. He never spoke loudly or with any real vigour, never intruded or forced himself on a conversation, but always caused a stir. The female students in the department, even Christine, cheerfully confessed to having a crush on him. He’d made his reputation at conferences lecturing on the participant-observer oxymoron and the ethics of conducting consumer, or mobile, ethnographies. In public he spoke with a self-deprecating tone noticeably absent when he met with Paul inside the confines of his office.

  Paul slipped into a chair at the far end of the table. He sported a fresh purpling bruise on his forehead and a scraped chin. Dr. Tamba stared deliberately at Paul’s wounds. He raised his glass—a clear alcohol, garnished with a sprig of mint and a lychee—and gave him a thin smirk. “I see you’re going native,” Tamba said and made it sound like a bit of martini-dry humour. The crowd chuckled. It was, in fact, an old saying among ethnographers, an accusation that Paul had lost his objectivity and gone beyond the acceptable limits of participant observation. Everyone heard and registered the undertone of contempt.

  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 bat
hs 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.