The Bicycle

A short story

The Bicycle is the sequel to my short story, The Bicyclists.

I’m including the entire first story here for people who may not have read it, so you don’t have to click back and forth. If you’ve already read The Bicyclists part one, scroll down to the bicycle emoji, where Nathaniel’s ride begins.

The one-hundred-ninety-mile-an-hour gust drove rain through Nathaniel Gates’ Gore-Tex jacket as if the rain were a saber to a newspaper.

Nathaniel would have turned around to double-check the square, heat and cold-resistant Uber Eats container on the back of his 500-watt Haibike e-bike that contained spaghetti carbonara and a side of garlic bread from Giovani’s Bistro, but the storm’s fierceness forced him to keep both hands on the handlebars. 

Hurricane Noah turned Manhattan into a gray abyss. His bike’s light was useless against the storm, and he wasn’t even sure it was still on. 

As he pedaled along Broadway, street signs took flight, and small cars unmoored from the asphalt. Buildings groaned as the wind tore through Manhattan’s canyons. 

Crowds lined the road as he crossed the finish line in first place at the Olympics. Symphonic cheers and popping champagne bottles filled the air as Nathaniel’s tire passed the red line, his arms high. Spectators tossed a thousand red roses.

A mirage. 

Nathaniel would never make it into the Olympics—he had given up those unaffordable dreams long ago—but he would be the best Uber Eats person in New York. 

He now was on the street he hated: Forty-Second and Broadway, where an enormous Olympic Cycling Team recruiting poster stood two stories tall.

Acid burned his belly, and rusted metal filled his mouth every time he passed that sign, a cruel taunt.  

His bike’s battery drained fast, the human-engineered motor losing its battle against the storm’s limitless energy, but his leg muscles would power him through to his destination on Ninety First and Park Avenue. He would be exhausted to within minutes of collapse but would relish the surprise on the customer’s face when, in fact, Uber Eats had persevered during a storm that had flipped the city’s power switch to off. 

My personal Olympic challenge. 

Nathaniel was the only Uber Eats delivery driver on the street.

He was also the only person on any Manhattan street because being outside was madness. The wind howled like a cyclops blinded in its one eye. 

It was Nathaniel’s will versus the storm. 

He reached for the power gel tucked inside his jersey’s elastic pocket, but his grip was no match for the wind’s fury. The jel pack flew, ramming into the twenty-five-story One Times Square building like a missile, its force tottering the concrete and iron tower.

Lightning struck Nathaniel’s bike, and a brilliant white and blue aura enveloped him. 

Clementine Walters pedaled north along Broadway. On an ordinary day, she biked carefully, lest the rough cobblestone street shatter a milk bottle—or few. Her bike’s front basket held twenty-two bottles; the cart she pulled contained another sixty-four. She’d never broken a bottle, but it had happened to every other member of the Milk Bike Brigade, the sixteen-person team of Manhattan delivery girls who brought fresh milk to New Yorkers every morning.

Her bike’s cast iron frame bowed from the weight of the liquid and its glass containers. 

Clementine was in tune with the rattling bottles; she paid close attention to the pitch and frequency as they banged together. Her ears told her when to slow down and when she could cycle at full speed and then some.

But today, Tuesday, April 6, 1897, there was nothing except the roar of an enraged wind from the north. So strong was the wind that she felt she was moving slower than a donkey loaded with pots, pans, and sundries. She usually gauged her speed against the trot of horses, but no horses were out and about. This morning, only ghosts inhabited New York, their voices shrill winds. 

Somebody left a cow tied to a post. The rope looked new and robust, the knots secure, but whether the cord and knots were good enough to keep the cow from becoming airborne, Clementine couldn’t say. 

Though the sun had risen, swirling octopus ink shrouded the city. 

Clementine would deliver all her milk intact, hoping customers would hear her knocking over the deafening wind and thunder. She would pound and pound until the doors opened, confident that her strength would overcome the storm’s ruckus.

 It will be good exercise for me, she thought. 

Clementine pedaled so hard her leg muscles were afire, turning the rain into steam where it touched her skin.  

Every pedal push against the wind, every pound against a door was good exercise. 

Harder, faster, she said. 

She envisioned crossing the finish line at the Paris Olympics in 1900 on a shiny Wright Brothers' Van Cleve. She felt the weight of the Olympic cycling gold medal around her neck. While she could not imagine the life she’d lead after winning a gold medal at the world’s second Olympics, whatever that life was, it would not be delivering milk early in the morning. 

But that will never come to pass. The Olympics are a man’s world, and I am just a woman—at seventeen, still a girl. 

Lightning struck Clementine’s bike, and a brilliant white and blue aura enveloped her, the same as Nathaniel.

Brightness stung her eyes, and she shut them. The air was still; strange songs from all compass points replaced the wind. She thought she was dead, standing before heaven's gates. 

How many angels will there be? 

When, after a minute, she opened her eyes to a huge picture of a dozen men and women on bicycles along with writing that said, “Olympic Cycling Trials Start July 1,” Clementine’s skin tingled and she smiled more broadly than ever before. 

🚴🚴🚴

A powerful gust tearing from the west spun Nathaniel Gates. He squeezed his bicycle’s handlebars so tight the metal bent, yet he barely held on as visions of Dorothy’s house swirling inside a tornado ran through his mind. Blue lightning flared around him, and Nathaniel was sure he’d die as he and his bike slammed into the One Times Square building; if that didn’t kill him, he’d surely drown in the deluge. 

Nathaniel shut his eyes, partly in anticipation of death but also because the driving rain made it too painful to keep them open. He gripped the handlebars even harder because if he was going to die, he wanted his life to end on his bike. But instead of dying, the storm simply switched off.

The air stilled, the wind’s roar vanished, and when he opened his eyes, a fulgent sun warmed him.

Where is Times Square? Where is everything? 

Nathaniel looked left, right, left again, and forward, but New York City was gone. Pine and a mixture of other scents he couldn’t place hung in the air, and birdsong replaced the traffic and horns and voices and vibrating phones with which he was familiar. 

Whoa.

Nathaniel was in the middle of a circular meadow in what appeared to be a forest filled with cedar, birch, and oak trees. 

That’s some storm, Nathaniel thought. Somehow, the wind lifted and transported me a vast distance, but where am I? The Catskills? Connecticut? Maine? 

There was crunching. 

Nathaniel knelt behind his bike on the side opposite the sound.

The crunching grew louder.

Nathaniel knelt lower. 

A family of deer appeared at the edge of the trees—two adults and two fawns with myriad white spots dotting their brown fur. The fawns approached Nathaniel, but the adults bolted in front of them and nudged their little ones back into the woods. 

Nathaniel’s stomach now rumbled. 

I’m hungry. 

He glanced at his phone: 2:25pm. 

Is this now Tuesday? 

He rubbed his chin. 

I picked up my order at six-sixteen, but was that the previous day? Have I been unconscious? 

Nathaniel realized his phone’s GPS showed no satellites either.

Weird. I’ll deal with the GPS later. Wherever I am, this order won’t be delivered, so I might as well enjoy the spaghetti carbonara while it’s still good. 

After he finished his meal, Nathaniel packed the trash in the Uber delivery box, mounted his bike, and wondered which way to go.

Nathaniel's bike computer, a display mounted on the handlebars, told him he had thirty-eight miles of battery left.

I’ll follow the sun. 

Nataniel rode a well-worn trail through the woods, cycling swiftly—that was the only way he knew how to bike—but also carefully, lest he crash into a low branch or slip on wet leaves. The deeper into the woods he rode, the more wildlife there was. Deer, but also raccoons, large cats that he couldn’t identify, though they were beautiful and fortunately didn’t seem interested in him, boar, white squirrels, a family of bears, and—

An elephant? 

The forest had abruptly ended, and grazing just beyond the trees were a dozen gigantic elephants with equally enormous semi-circular tusks. One turned its attention to Nathaniel, lifted its trunk, growled, and took a step toward him, only to return to eating the grass. 

The other creatures ignored him. 

Nathaniel blinked twice and shook his head. 

These aren’t elephants. These are Mastodons. No, wait, Nathaniel thought as he tapped his forehead. Woolly mammoths. 

Have I ridden into a real Jurassic Park?

When the woolly mammoths denuded the grass beneath and around them, they focused on Nathaniel. The entire herd snorted. The largest stomped its front feet, sending tremors through the earth and nearly toppling his bike.

Time to get out of here. 

Twenty-one miles of electricity remained. He wished he'd been on his Cannondale SuperSix Evo, a fast, all-human-powered carbon fiber bicycle weighing only 6.8  kilograms, but he’d make do. Any bike was better and quicker than no bike. 

He spun away from the woolly mammoths. 

Six men and women wearing sheepskin clothing and gripping spears stood at the meadow’s far side. The three men and three women had long, black hair that flowed over their shoulders and three perpendicular painted lines on their foreheads, one red, one blue, and one green. 

“Oh, shit.” 

What’s worse? Being trampled by extinct, giant mammoths or speared by—who knows who they are. 

The mammoths raised their heads and tusks, and the people raised their spears. It could be that the spear-holders would attack the animals, but Nathaniel didn’t want to find out if he or the animals were their intended target. 

He pressed his bike’s full-power button and pedaled faster than ever. He winced as his calves burned.

Nathaniel zigged and zagged through the trees, his helmet colliding with branches every other second. He was pretty sure that woolly mammoths couldn’t chase him through the forest and also thought that it would be hard to throw a spear among so many trees, but Nathaniel had no experience in these matters of life or death, so he pedaled even harder until adrenaline and training were no longer sufficient to propel him forward.

He stopped.

Henry Ford leaned over his work table, examining the blueprint for his invention: the Model T. He traced his fingers along the automobile’s lines and released a long breath that sounded half like a sigh and half a whistle. “It was a good idea,” he said to his assistant, Bertram Lewis, “but this is better.”

“Yes,” Bertram said. He removed the blueprint and hoisted the bicycle onto the expansive oak work table.

Ford said, “Automobiles would be big and expensive, but a motorized bicycle not so. People would have to store their automobiles in a garage or on the street, but a bicycle can be kept inside an apartment or house. Instead of one automobile, a family of four can have four electric bicycles. An electric bicycle will travel sufficiently fast and far for everyone’s daily needs. But I’m still dumbfounded. Where did they find it?”

“In Fort Tryon Park, the northern tip of Manhattan. Or rather I should say, under Fort Tryon Park. Archaeologists at Columbia University discovered this odd bicycle during a dig.”

“And this electric bicycle is how old?”

“Nobody can figure that out. They estimate it’s at least ten thousand years old.”

“And the battery?”

“More advanced than anything I’ve ever seen.”

“More advanced than anyone’s ever seen,” Ford said, smiling. “No matter, we’ll replicate the technology, sell tens of millions, and the electric bicycle will revolutionize transportation in America and the world.”

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If you enjoyed The Bicycle, I think you’ll also like my story, The Ferris Wheel.