The Ghost and the Machine

            The air is crisp and the morning sun is blinding. Five of us unpack our tennis bags by the net post on the court at this neighborhood park. We are going to play doubles. Frank has set up a folding chair for himself and leans back against the chain link fence. Beyond him, on the other side, two kids lazily shoot baskets.

            “How are we going to do this?” Dave asks. Five players, but only four play at a time. “Rotate after each game?”

            “No,” Frank says. “Brad and I will rotate. We have knee issues.”

            My eyes settle on wide black braces fastened around both of Frank’s knees. I half-listen as he explains the particulars, recent history where one knee gave out during play. I hear a hollow canyon in his voice, the awe and helplessness we feel when the body we take for granted fails to report for duty. It’s an interesting canyon. Everyone hears the echo, but it resonates more deeply for those of us in our sixties.

            “What’s wrong with your knee?” someone asks Brad. Brad points to the scar up the front of his leg that looks like a zipper on a giant’s britches.

            “Oh,” Dave says, laughing. “You got a new knee. How is it?”

            “The knee’s great. The question is whether I can bend it.”

            Brad explains the artificial joint is strong, but stiff. A painful part of rehab is trying to force the knee to bend.

            “If it just won’t bend, there’s another operation where they knock you out and doctor just bends it like this.” He makes a cracking sound, acts like he’s breaking a stick over his knee, and laughs, macabre humor making light of his pain.

            Knee replacements are not my fate, not yet. But next week I’ll have a cataract removed from my left eye and an outlet created behind it to drain fluid to relieve my glaucoma. It’s routine procedure (the drainage part, not as much), outpatient, and I shouldn’t worry. But it’s my eye, a vulnerable part of the body, so I covertly nurse anxiety. I push thoughts of my impending procedure out of my mind. I flex my spine, expand and contract my muscles to summon vigor,  as if smearing blood on the doorpost of my body to ward off death. 

            We begin to play. Every three games Brad and Frank switch, one sitting, the other playing. The nice thing for older players about doubles is there’s less court to cover. With the knee issues, Brad can’t cross the backcourt to return a ball lobbed over his partner’s head, and Frank can’t dash from the baseline to the net for a drop shot, but nobody’s hitting those kinds of shots on purpose. What’s the fun in that? In the race against bodily decay, we’re all on the same team.

                                                                        #

            When I first agreed to the cataract operation, I thought it was just lasering off a growth that obscured my vision, like having a wart removed. Only later did I realize that an artificial lens would replace the lens I was born with, and drainage for the glaucoma is accomplished by implanting a titanium stint behind my eye. Two foreign objects would become part of my body.

            Now I’m flat on my back in one of the prep rooms before surgery. A nurse inserts a needle in a vein above my right wrist to create the IV, and then gives me a shot of another anesthetic to relax me. Meanwhile, a second nurse is bathing my eye with drops to dilate and drops to anesthetize. Drops, then daub, drops, then daub. The anesthesiologist steps in, tells me I won’t be knocked out completely during the operation “because we don’t want you moving around.” I don’t understand. Isn’t knocking me out the way to make sure I don’t move around?

I’ve worried about how my eye will stay still, imagining a vice will hold my eyeball or the doctor will say don’t move as he pokes my eye with an instrument resembling a soldering iron.  “I don’t have to do anything, do I?” The anesthesiologist says no.

The nurse resumes drops, then daub, drops, then daub, but the pace quickens, repeating over what feels like a long time. Then the curtains slide open. More people enter. They grab the sides of my bed, and roll me down the hall. All I feel is the cushiony vibration of wheels bouncing against the floor. I cannot form thoughts. I surrender to my fate, whatever it is.

In the operating room, new people introduce themselves to me. They examine my eye, discuss dilating more, aestheticizing more, add drops. Finally I hear my doctor’s voice, remember that when I first met him I thought he looked like a teenager. A device is positioned over my face. A bright light shines in my eye. I observe the light systematically pulverizing the cataract from changing angles. He’s trying to get it all because if a piece breaks off I will need a second operation. The light is insanely bright, but I don’t feel pain. The doctor announces he’s gotten the cataract and is moving on to the “harder” part of the operation. I don’t feel alarmed. I’m an impartial observer recording an operation during which the thought of “me” is an abstraction. This changes for a moment when I feel something like a wire enter through my cornea and go around (or through?) my eye. There’s a little pain, but it’s over quickly. Anesthesia is an amazing thing.

                                                            #

Two weeks later, I still take steroid drops in my eyes twice a day. My eye doesn’t feel “normal,” but I read eye charts better than I could before the operation.

I’m cleared for normal activities. Per my doctor’s instructions, I wear protective goggles when I play tennis. I explain why to the other players. Some say the goggles are cool, make look “intimidating.” I think they make me look like the cartoon character Fearless Fly. Regardless, I’m now officially part of the bionic Baby Boomers, except it’s not like on TV. We aren’t Cyborgs with superpowers. We’re lawyers with double hip-replacements from too many years of sitting, half-ass tennis players with heart stents, members of AARP cobbled together like Frankenstein wannabes. And there’s no operation or implant that forestalls the decline in energy that comes with age. Time will tell whether I have the self-discipline to do yoga, lift weights, and take other steps to slow loss of bodily vigor I’ve taken for granted my entire life.   

I’m thinking these thoughts when my wife, Bunny, calls me to our front door. She points across the street to a man with white hair, dressed in flannel, looking disheveled. I wonder if it’s a street person or an old drunk who has wandered into our neighborhood. It’s the middle of a humid day and the heat index is triple-digit.

“He’s just sitting there in this heat,” she says. “This can’t be right. I’m going over.”

Bunny walks out the door and heads toward the old man. I grab my shoes and follow. By the time I’ve joined her, Bunny has scoped out the situation. The man’s name is Clyde and he’s a neighbor we’ve never met. He’s sitting in front of his own house. He fell when he went to get the mail. I see letters littering the grass beside his mailbox. Bunny asks him if he tripped. Clyde says he doesn’t know. He just suddenly found himself on the ground. I wonder whether we should call 911.

“Can you try to get up?” Bunny asks. She takes his hands and leans back. I grab his arm and lift from behind. Nothing happens. “Can you straighten your legs?” I ask. He gets that, and is able to straighten his legs, but the result is him leaning backwards at a twenty degree angle against me. Bunny holds his hands and leans in the opposite direction, as if she and Clyde are making a V together. I try to lift and push him forward, but no sense of balance clicks for him. He’s forgotten what standing feels like. I push more and Bunny pulls. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is still leaning. Bunny tells Clyde she’s going to start letting go. I’m holding him by the upper arm, and as my wife very gradually withdraws her support, Clyde leans against me, but he’s more upright than before. It’s taken ten minutes to get him from sitting to standing and we’re all sweating. Now we have get him turned around and walking toward his front door. Again, I wonder whether we should call 911.

“Can you take a step?” Bunny asks.  

“I don’t know.”

We watch his feet. Nothing’s happening.

“Try to lift your foot,” I say. I see a little twitch. He’s having trouble finding his feet. He tries again, and lifts his foot half an inch, but immediately it falls back to the ground. Bunny encourages him to try again. With Herculean effort he manages to get the front part of his left foot above the two-inch gap between the public sidewalk and the path to his front door. We help him rotate so he’s perpendicular to, and then almost facing the house. With his weight on the one foot that’s up, together with me lifting from the rear, he manages to get the other foot up.

We proceed in tiny, shuffling steps, an inch at a time, Bunny steadying and me supporting. Clyde stops frequently to rest and wipe sweat from his face. The back of my shirt is soaked and I fight off feeling woozy. Clyde’s heavy, about 230 pounds to my 160. I keep my center of gravity low and secure my grip under his arms. I take the measure of my own vitality and decide it’s enough – if Clyde’s legs buckle, I’ll be able to hold him up. My old vigor will return for this special task.

                                                            #

When I was young and practiced martial arts, I remember hearing that a baby’s energy starts in the abdomen, then rolls down into the legs as the baby learns to walk. In old age, the energy rolls back up, returning to the baby stage, the scroll of life winding up after the final reading. A longevity benefit of practicing Tai Chi is it keeps energy flowing between the earth and the legs. I recall this Tai Chi lore when, after we get Clyde back in the house, I quiz him on what happened. He says his legs just stopped supporting him. I think the energy rolled back up to the abdomen. I’ve seen it happen with tennis players, too. Players who once commanded the court become like Clyde, barely shuffling to the next shot, relying on their wits and pro-active defensive tactics to stay in the game. That evening, when I receive an email promoting a new Tai Chi class, I take it as a sign from the universe.

“Want to go for a walk?” Bunny asks.

We amble down neighborhood sidewalks, check out yards, flowers blooming, the condition of houses. I ask Bunny how her knee is – she, too, is bionic. A gel injected in the joint  gives relief from what was a crippling condition. We cross paths with a gray-haired dog-walking neighbor. She and Bunny chat about an unusual tree in the neighbor’s yard. Bunny brings up the therapy pool the neighbor and her partner installed behind their six-foot fence.

“It’s nice in this heat. And it’s shaded in the afternoon.”

“So do you still use it for swimming?” Bunny asks. The neighbor nods, mentions her partner has had two knee replacements, adding “and I’ve had two hips replaced, and I have vertebrae fused in the back.” She reaches behind to touch her lower back, as if we can touch it with her. She pauses. “And I’m getting ready for an operation on my foot.”

I contemplate the idea of so many things repaired and replaced. I study my neighbor’s level of vitality, wonder how it feels to walk with two hip replacements and a fused backbone.

Are repairs and replacements actually white flags of surrender sugared-up as face-saving tactical retreats? Is death a choice we made, a boomerang we threw and spent a lifetime waiting for it to return and hit us in the head? Every creature feels life is eternal but every creature knows the body is temporary. Later in life, retired or not, we all get a new job – staying alive. But we aren’t John Travolta shaking his hips to the beat of the Bee Gees. We’re R2-D2 squirting oil in the joints and recharging batteries, looking over our shoulder, hoping the junkyard truck isn’t cresting the hill. 

https://brightflash1000.com/2023/09/07/the-last-time-i-saw-aunt-lynn/

“My Bike,” memoir of mine that recently appeared in Longridge Review (click on link)

14 . . . 33 . . . 22 . . . 14 . . . 33 . . . 22 . . .

I recite the combination of my new lock as I walk from the Y locker room to the spin
studio, picking my way between treadmills and weight machines. I must burn these numbers into
my brain. My street clothes, car keys, phone, and wallet are locked away and I can’t get them
back if I forget the number.

I’m surprised how crowded the gym is at 5:30 a.m. Women in baseball caps, hair
gathered in ponytails, and men in gym shorts and t-shirts stride on treadmills as if they really are
going somewhere. A woman wearing a weight vest walks through the gym carrying large weight
plates in each hand. A blocky man on the stair-climber doggedly ascends a never-ending
mountain. A gray-haired grandmother patiently cycles. A young girl does crunches and leg lifts
under the tutelage of whatever speaks in her ear pods. A twenty-something ex-football player
curls dumbbells I’d need two hands to pick up. It’s a zoo, but it’s also church. All of them are
serious. I’m going to be serious, too, because aging and an office job has made my muscles
atrophy, ballooned my belly fat. The mitochondria in my cells are shuttered factories. Exercise is
will be my self-imposed intervention.

When I open the door to the spin studio, it’s as if I’m entering a night club. The room is a
square with bikes bolted to the floor in concentric semicircles facing the instructor’s bike like
disciples around a guru or tables around a stripper’s stage. The lights are dimmed, with windows
behind the back row of bikes allowing some additional light from the gym proper. Fans
suspended from the ceiling blow air that eddies in mini weather patterns. Class hasn’t started but
everyone’s already cycling. Last time I tried to take this class, I came five minutes early but that
hadn’t been early enough – all bikes were taken. Because this isn’t just any spin class. This is
Randy’s class. Today I get lucky. There’s one bike left in the middle row. I claim it quickly.

I pull the knob behind the seat to adjust the height so my legs will circle smoothly
through the nadir of the peddling, neither reaching nor cramped. I put my weight on the bike to
steady myself as I mount the bike, and find the handlebars wobble badly as if about to fall off.
“You got the broken bike,” the guy on the bike next to me says. He’s smooth-shaven,
both face and scalp, with a big chest and a friendly smile. “They’re coming to fix it this
afternoon.”

I sense this is common knowledge among the regulars. And why no one had claimed this
bike.

“Yeah, it’s the only one left. I think it’s just the handlebars.”

“I’d be happy to trade bikes with you.” I’m touched by his generosity – he’s protecting a
newbie.

“That’s okay, I’ll be careful. Thanks.”

I start peddling. Suddenly, Randy himself is standing in front of me. The Randy, whose
classes summon reverent tones when they came up in conversation. I feel an involuntary thrill.
“This bike is broken,” His expression is friendly, protective. “You got it just before they
came to fix it. The handlebars won’t support you.”

Randy has brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair. He’s middle-aged, his body saying
late 30s, the lines in his face saying Medicare-eligible, the truth probably somewhere in between.

“I’ll put my weight in the middle,” I promise, looking down at the handlebars as if I’m
afraid he’ll take the bike away. When I look back up, Randy is gone.

I lean forward, putting my left hand where the handlebar attaches to the frame, and
slowly pedal as I program the bike’s monitor. I enter my age, weight, gender. The monitor asks
me to rate my general physical condition. I choose medium, the way patients lie to doctors about
smoking or drinking. The menu requires me to choose a “level.” I pick one just below the 50th
percentile. Once I answer all the questions, the monitor’s sensors spring to life, telling me my
revolutions per minute, my heartrate, the calories I’m burning, and my color-coded performance
“zone.”

Each bike’s headlight broadcasts the color of the rider’s zone. Soothing pink is the lowest
zone. I pedal faster and my light changes to a smooth blue. I push the lever that increases
flywheel resistance and the light changes to an energetic green. I looked at bikes around me and
see two higher colors – a bright yellow, like warning signals at a railroad track, and an alarming
red. At the front of the studio, Randy adjusts the PA system, then climbs on his own bike. Led
Zeppelin fills the room, an aroma from Randy’s secret recipe.

“Okay, we’re on flat road.” Randy is conjuring an imaginary ride we will take together.
Everyone’s pace increases in response to Randy’s voice.

“I’m brainwashing my kids,” Randy says. “I told them Led Zeppelin is the best rock band
of all time.” Randy looks too old to have young kids. It must be a second marriage, I think, a new
family late in life.

“Brainwashing is good,” someone calls out. Encouraged, Randy responds.

“My 11-year old and my eight-year-old – if you ask them who the lead singer is for Led
Zeppelin, they can tell you.” Randy is home-schooling his children on the holy truths of
rock-and-roll. We pedal in silence for a few minutes and then Randy says “Okay, let’s raise it.
About 6.5.”

Years ago, before the Y had bikes with fancy monitors, imagination was the monitor and
bikers would adjust resistance of the flywheel and pedaling speed based upon a subjective scale
of 1 to 10 in difficulty. Randy is old-school. Monitors and zones on the new bikes are just bells
and whistles. In Randy’s class, what needs measuring is something inside each rider.

“Who did this song?” Randy calls out, as a new tune begins. Randy’s playlist is
legendary, one reason some of the older regulars are devoted to the class. People have told me
Randy creates a new playlist every week, but it’s always from the sixties and seventies. Randy
always quizzes the class on each song. This time, no one knows the answer, so Randy tells us.
“Strawberry Alarm Clock. 1967. By the way, today is Jimmy Page’s birthday. January 9.
I should’ve mentioned that when Led Zeppelin was playing.”

As I pedal, I compare my color to those of the men and women around me and feel
zone-shamed. I struggle to make blue but the guy beside me pedals effortlessly in green. Another
pedals yellow as if it’s coasting pink, and an Asian lady is deep in ambulance red and staying
there. But then I realize it doesn’t matter. Each rider is focused on his or her own path with no
ill-will toward anyone. Yet something unites us all. I can’t put my finger on what it is.

“Out of the saddle. We have hills to climb,” Randy rises from his seat to pedal while
standing. “Increase resistance.”

We all stand and pedal up the imaginary hill, an array of colors, an array of hills,
ascending together, the colored lights of our bike monitors like a string of Christmas headlights
on a fleet of starships in the dark. Suddenly, the guy beside me who’d offered to take my
damaged bike jumps off his own bike and runs out of the studio. Moments later, another fellow
follows behind him. I wonder what’s going on. Someone says something I can’t hear and Randy
responds, “I think he wants to help.”

None of it makes sense, so I put it out of my mind and focus on riding. The others are
pedaling steadily, no slackers, and I won’t be one either. We continue climbing hills together.
When I cycle into the yellow zone, even though I can’t stay long, I mentally pat myself on the
back. But after a bit, I see Randy looking past me through the windows in back of the studio. I
twist around to look, too, continuing to pedal. From where I sit, the wall blocks any view of the
right side of the gym, but through windows on the left I see people outside the studio have
stopped exercising and gathered together, watching something on the ground in the area I can’t
see. From looks of concern on their faces, it isn’t something they’re watching, but someone. “If
you’re the praying type,” Randy says as we continue riding, “right now might be a good time to
send a prayer.”

It’s unnerving to hear a comment like that in cycling glass, but now I understand.

Someone in the gym has had a heart attack or some life-threatening injury. That’s why the two
guys had dashed out of the studio. Someone just outside the door of this studio, fifteen feet away
from me on the other side of the wall, is about to die. Time has passed since the two guys had
hurried from the studio, so I assume paramedics have been called. I imagine them pounding the
victim’s chest or loading a body on a gurney. I keep twisting around to look, but, because of the
wall, all I can see is the crowd watching. There’s nothing I or anyone in the studio can add, so we
keep pedaling. But even as he leads us up another hill, Randy, whose bike faces the windows,
continues watching.

When class is over, I get off my bike and look out the window. The crowd is gone. I wipe
down my bike with spray cleaner, then emerge from the dark studio into the blinding light of the
gym proper. I don’t see blood on the floor or other physical evidence to corroborate trauma. I
look in faces around me, but they’re all lost in the world of exercise.

I wander over to the free weights for wrist curls, then to the floor mats for yoga, but
everything feels wrong. I feel I should call my wife, as if I just survived a plane crash she might
have seen on TV. Finally, I accept that this unsettled emptiness I feel isn’t fixable. I give up on
working out and head for the locker room.

As I turn the corner, I see riders from Randy’s class congregated outside the locker room
door. Randy’s there, too. I sense they’re talking about the event, so I sidle up to listen. But when
I get close enough to hear, they disperse. All I pick up is that “he” is at the hospital. I turn to
Randy.

“Is he alright?”

Randy gives me the summary I’d been looking for. The bald guy who’d bolted out of the
spin studio is a fireman. He performed CPR, but it hadn’t worked. The paramedics arrived and
did CPR again, reviving the victim. “He was out for at least ten minutes,” Randy says, “but he
was breathing when they took him away.”

“What happened? Did he fall? Did he have a heart attack?”

“I don’t know. He was a new guy. We hadn’t seen him before.” Randy nods at me, turns,
and walks away.

I push through the locker room door, navigate to my locker, and sit on the hard wooden
bench. I contemplate how, in a New York minute, everything can change with no color-coded
warning. That sometimes the hill wins. That phoning my wife won’t change a thing. That street
clothes, car keys, phone, and wallet don’t matter as much as I thought they did.

Bio:
Mike Wilson is the author of Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, (Rabbit House Press, 2020),
political poetry for a post-truth world. His work has appeared in Fiction Southeast, Mud Season
Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Deep South Magazine, Anthology of Appalachian Writers,
and other publications. Mike lives in Lexington, Kentucky