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For reasons I can't entirely explain, I loved it. My riding focus had never been more
intense, and the obstacle course of the trail felt to me as if it had been designed for the
pleasure of a challenge, as if it were an amusement park attraction. My bicycle performed
splendidly. When I brought it in, splattered in mud and grit, to be cleaned and tuned
at the bike shop in Hancock, the mechanic couldn't find anything he needed to tune.
The last twelve miles, I took a paved, parallel trail, and the smoothness underneath my
wheels was pure luxury. A massage. Dessert.
That evening, having acted on a whim and driven all afternoon from New York, my
friends Bob Ball and Maria Kastanis joined me for dinner. Among other pleasures of that
visit, it was titillating to realize that I'd gotten to within a day's drive of home.
Still, I hadn't seen Bob since Billy's funeral, and before our reunion turned jolly, we
had some sober moments of recollection over drinks.
Death trails you wherever you go, right? And for me, at least, especially at this age,
its shadow is generally pretty apparent. We all have our appointments in Samarra, an
acknowledgment of which was one of the big reasons for the bike trip in the first place. I
wanted to escape the daily plodding toward the grave in the obituaries department, and
it's probably a healthy thing that for several weeks I haven't been thinking much about
dead people in general. But I was a little disappointed in myself to realize I hadn't done
much thinking about Billy in particular since I'd flown out of Los Angeles. Bobby said
he'd been haunted with memories of the weekend the two of us spent with Billy before
he died, when he was suffering so terribly, and the vivid memory of his anguish came to
me in a painful stab.
Bobby suddenly laughed.
“I found this,” he said, and from his pocket he took a piece of paper and unfolded
it on the table, a copy of an old photograph I hadn't seen in decades. In it, Billy was
about eighteen, and he was running, a full and graceful sprint. Leaning forward, his
arms pumping, he sped across the campus of Clark University, in Worcester, Massachu-
setts, where he and Bobby had met. Though the picture was taken from the side, you
could make out his facial expression—it was gleeful and mischievous—and he was car-
rying something in the crook of one arm, maybe a bundle of clothes. Aside from sneak-
ers and sweat socks, he was naked. Streaking, we called it then. I don't know that I've
ever seen a more joyous, animated, vibrant portrait of anyone, the embodiment of mean-
ingless daring, an adrenaline rush, and happy rebellion.
Talk about time and distance.
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