Read Online The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter - Free Book Online Page B

the DIYwebsites recommended taking hallucinogenic mushrooms to accelerate a home makeover project.
    By 4:17 on Saturday morning, he was convinced he wasn’t simply painting the walls; he was a tanner, stretching skins. The superfine plaster dust coating every single hair on his head, as well as those on his arms and legs, and even his eyelids, made him feel like a powdered doughnut filled with he-didn’t-know-what. While these preoccupations came and went, the reach and claw of other rooms, other floors, was constant. One floor down, the pantry/bathroom lay cut open but unsutured, moaning in its post-op corner. Down the hall, a long plaster gash threatened to slip off the wall then fly through the dusty air and garrotte him. High on shrooms, he suffered no risk of falling asleep on the job, not that he really understood what the job was any more. Peeling up the carpet in Stan’s room felt like he was skinning an animal, a long-dead and very aged animal. Ripped from jaws of small black teeth, pried and scraped from patches of mysterious tenacity in the middle of the room, the rough carpet and its clammy underpad were shockingly heavy. Pushing from one end did nothing. Pulling from the other moved the top layer but not the entire roll. Only by bowing his chest completely and wrapping the carpet in a bear hug, a hug that sealed his averted cheek to the pasty underpad, could he waddle it out, inch by infectious inch.
    He saw individual rooms, or even single surfaces — a wall, a floor — when he should have been thinking of the whole house. He had painted one room a dark, autumnal orange for her without knowing if she would stay, if there were more kisses to come, or even if she’d arrive at all. He flitted from room to room, painting here, dismantling there, to make the house seem healthy, not sick, the house of a bright future, not a near-invalid past. All the while he did this, he ignored the fact that not two days ago, on the ferry, he’d given everything — this house, their kiss and his own future — a rotten foundation. He’d lied about how long Stan had been dead, giving himself thirteen months of mourning in fiction when life had only given him one. Worse, and unbeknownst to him, his was not the first significant house in Betty’s life that had been built on a contentious foundation. He tried to see ahead to her in these rooms but could not see ahead tothe other rooms, a restaurant dining room and a lawyer’s office, that would send her packing again.
    Enough. Enough. The house already had all the doubt it needed. It was time to sand some of the spackling compound. He’d be thirsty with all that sanding. When you’re up all night, a beer at six a.m. isn’t really beer for breakfast.

21
    The exploding car, the croaking bicycle. When you drive, how often do you think of explosions? We pump liquid fuel into cars but don’t see the four mechanical strokes that turn that liquid into a vapour and then explode it to roll the beast forward. Tens of thousands of tiny explosions race past Andrew’s left elbow and side, fierce combustion tucked beneath a leering hood. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow the cannons again. Fire on past your need for water. At least a hundred kilometres between gas stations out here. An hour’s drive. A day’s ride.
    His passage from Nova Scotia into New Brunswick moves him from ocean to rivers.
Nova
and
New —
new lands to pollute. If his map and memory are correct, rivers should soon begin to snake through these valleys. For the vast majority of this country’s history, rivers fed industry and body both, floated all appetites. Choked now with the runoff of agricultural fertilizers, these Maritime rivers are hardly suitable for bathing, let alone slaking endless thirst.
    So what
is
floating on by? Back at the University of Nova Scotia, he’d read that the Nobel Prize–winning German chemist Fritz Haber is remembered