When Is a Man Read Online Free PDF

to the challenge, a divorced father might say about his eight-year-old. Teamwork, the parallels to ambition and hard work. Companionship, a single mother would admit. To teach courage and independence.
    Paul had his own reasons for climbing, one of which was the spectacle of Christine, the feline way she formed her body to the wall, fabric stretched against her, jaw taut with predatory grace as she reached for the next brightly coloured hold. A real beauty in her motions, not the ugly lunge that marked Paul’s progress. He was all raw strength and desperate clutching. He admired her Zen-like poise, but the real turn-on was her competitive, almost hostile drive to outperform Paul in the climbing gym. Which she easily did.
    He learned to trust the rope, his harness and the bolts and hefty carabiners that made up the anchor system at the apex of the climb, and he suppressed his fear of heights. But the equipment (minimal as it was) and the fear (unfounded as it was) distracted and took from his pleasure. He only wanted to think about the problem in front of him, the necessary series of moves, the crux he had to surmount. Mostly, he wanted to think about Christine.
    They were alike in many ways, both of them ensconced in academia for most of their adult lives after brief, unsatisfying forays into the “real world.” After high school she’d been a waitress, then a bartender, while Paul had started in construction for one of his father’s buddies before switching to retail during summers while earning his undergraduate degree. Neither of them had brothers or sisters, and both had spent their early, angst-ridden university years imagining the world as an infinite number of cultural groups, none of which they belonged to. They both preferred to think they’d outgrown that stage of their lives. She liked, he knew, his cleverness, the way he could connect obscure ideas and make something from nothing. He was ambitious but not serious. She was both.
    When Christine joined her research participants in their climbs, Paul would retreat to the so-called Cave at the back of the gym, a room of overhanging walls, big, grippy handholds placed on a low, sloping roof, and a floor covered in thick crash mats. Different colours of tape marked the routes that traversed the room. To move from one hold to another might require an upward lunge from a near-supine position, or a long reach from one razor-thin toehold to another with only one divot crimp for his burning fingers to grasp in between.
    In the Cave, he met the person who would become his first research participant, Xi Bai. Thin and quiet, the teenager had gone back and forth along the rear wall of the Cave several times without resting—Paul had to step off the wall to let him pass. He had an unorthodox style, showy and acrobatic, and went from hold to hold at a precarious speed, his wild swings threatening to rip him from the wall. Xi explained to him, in whispered, faltering English, that he’d decided to train here for parkour only because of the rain. What was parkour, Paul wanted to know, but the boy couldn’t say. He invited Paul to the next practice session. If it hadn’t taken place on campus, a few minutes’ walk from Paul’s office, he likely wouldn’t have gone.
    As a subject, Xi Bai didn’t make for an easy interview. Or Paul was trying too hard to make immediate intellectual connections, forcing theories before the fact. “Do you think, maybe, that parkour is a means of defining a foreign landscape on your own terms?” Paul asked. “A way of claiming a space for yourself?” The boy looked blank, a little frightened.
    â€œFun,” Xi finally stuttered. “Have fun.”
    Xi was not the only member of the group who found it difficult to articulate why he practised parkour. Paul’s scratch notes, recorded in a small notepad, were filled with little more than comical macho posturing and weird