HANDS UP

It was too hot to cycle—according to the weather app on my phone, the humidity topped out at 100%—but I suited up anyway, filled my bike tires, climbed aboard, clicked shoes into pedals, and glided away. I’d spent the morning walking to and from the Blacksburg Farmer’s Market, where the dog and I had met my wife after her Saturday morning run, and where we bought tomatoes and green beans and Thai basil and two frozen chicken breasts vacuum-sealed in plastic but no beef because our regular provider—a little dude with an overbite and a goatee and ratty baseball cap who wears the same Fahrenheit 451 T-shirt every week and always takes the time to inform interested customers that cooking a steak should begin with “a NASA-hot grill”—wasn’t there, so we left, walking up Roanoke Street, past a series of not-yet-opened vendor tents lining the sidewalks for our town’s annual street festival, whose vendors included purveyors of homemade dog treats, photorealistic paintings of Appalachian landscapes, hand-forged metal items, candles, jewelry, and various permutation of meats on sticks. I peeled an orange “Guns Save Lives” sticker from a telephone pole, crumpled it in my fist, tossed it into a flowerbed, and thought of what I might say to the guy at the “Guns Save Lives” tent who stands there all day—Glock holstered proudly to his belt—handing out stickers to anyone who’ll take them, many of whom press them, as if pledging allegiance, over their hearts. I wanted to point out that, as catchy a slogan as “Guns Save Lives” might be, there were probably a great many other things in the world that were far better at saving lives, like doctors, CPR, defibrillators, bed rest, seatbelts, a Mediterranean diet, a steady hand, clean water, blankets, medicine, flare guns, and love. I crested one of our town’s tallest hills, bracing myself for the long, fast descent into the valley, during which I dreamed about somehow having the road entirely to myself, or at least renting a ten mile or so strip of it for an hour so I could safely wear headphones, as this might help me kill the two-headed, week-long earworm that had been living in my head, and which repeated—with a relentless urgency—either the name “Lakshmi Singh” or the chorus from “Hands Up” by the band Blood Orange. Lakshmi Singh is a reporter from National Public Radio; the name Lakshmi is the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity. “Hands up, get out” is what police officers often shout at suspects they want to surrender; however, in the wake of recent deaths of young black men who have been shot by police officers, the phrase has become a rallying cry for protesters. Dev Hynes is the name of the person—a young black man from England—behind Blood Orange, and on the day his latest album dropped, and on which the song “Hands Up” appears, he dedicated the music—a collection of groovy, falsetto-powered R&B numbers—to anyone who’d been told that they were “not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way.” I hoped the music could be for me, too, a person who not only wanted to understand what all that might mean, but also to get outside himself, who often took long bike rides on a dangerous two-lane road because it led out of the town where he lived, past an imposing mountain that today—what with a gray cloud hovering over its summit—looked vaguely volcanic, not because he had some kind of death wish but simply so that he could escape the banalities of his life for an hour and so that he could say hi to the little church whose sign said “ALL ARE WELCOME,” and hi to the faded metal placard hanging from a pole on the side of a barn that said, “PET Pasteurized Milk” and hi to the cows knee deep in the creek, whose swishing tails called to mind the beasts’ moist, fly-bombarded orifices, and how the patient blinking of their long-lashed eyelids seemed like an embodiment of what it meant to be long-suffering. My own eyes felt beleaguered: I kept trying and failing to wipe away sweat but my gloves were sopping, so I stopped to scoop creek water onto my face. Though I was eager to get home and stand under an air conditioning vent and get blasted by a cold metallic breeze, I stopped once more, to inspect an orange newt whose head had been crushed into the asphalt. I took a picture of this little guy, and after posting it to Instagram with the tag “#exoticroadkill,” I remembered the video I’d shot on the way to the ATM this morning, before I met my wife at the farmer’s market, the one that featured a just-hatched cicada on its back—centimeters from the brittle exoskeleton (or “nymph skin”) from which it had emerged—pedaling its legs helplessly. I’d videoed myself flipping over the bug, and had planned to post this to Instagram as well, to give the world a glimpse of my largesse slash magnanimity, but then I discovered that the cicada’s left wing had been folded backwards and didn’t appear to be functional. Although I hoped that the wing might right itself, I didn’t stay to find out, and in the end, I posted a shot of the insect—its tapered body as iridescent as a baby leaf in spring—exactly as I had found it: spinning its legs in vain.