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, the 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.