Top Gear

I am riding my bicycle in top gear. It has been three weeks since I began to do so - to always ride in top gear. The bicycle has thirteen lesser gears and it must be a waste not to use them all. But I reasoned that the pain induced by the fourteenth gear must have to be good for my thighs and calves and maybe buttocks too. By good, I mean that these will become leaner and not bulkier. It’s not that I have pressing weight issues, but more that I invent inconveniences for myself and am then forced to overcome them because I fear my own non-performance. There may be another reason too. I am a bicycle courier – a recent one – and my kind as a rule rides gearless bicycles. Perhaps I am trying to belong. But in a way that not surprisingly for me is unreasonable and psychologically knotty. If so, I could at least have chosen gear seven as the symbol of my camaraderie. But it had to be fourteen and will remain so.

Anyway, I glance down at the grey lever and it is set at maximum torture. It remains there even when I am starting up or riding uphill, and even though my thighs really hurt, and I do not then concentrate as much as I should on the traffic. There is an intersection ahead and I slow down and stop for the grey Toyota that is coming on my right. It is driven by a man in dark glasses. Maybe forty five and maybe a T employee. He sees me and stops too. He jerks his head asking me to ride on, and then looks away to check for traffic on his right. This happens all the time and I usually ride on with an invisible wave of quick gratitude. But my thighs are killing me now. So when he looks back, I am still stopped. He jerks his head again, this time more dismissively than his first. I respond by looking at him vacantly and massaging my right thigh, hoping he would understand that we could get this done much quicker if he just drove on. He now uses his hand to gesture impatiently. I jerk my own head for him to drive on. This does not come naturally to me, and maybe it appears stronger than the minimal rudeness I had intended. I stand my ground because I really cannot move and am reluctant to accept and be grateful for his artificial magnanimity to my lesser and unequal mode of transport. We continue to exchange gestures till the car behind him blows its horn.

He rolls down his window as he drives past and says very coherently, “Hey asshole, this is a stop sign, not a competition.”