Having watched their son abandon the bow and arrow after he’d done the same to the bow and viola, Garegin and Siran decided to try a bicycle on Armen, though he’d never expressed any interest in bicycles. He was afraid of bicycles. Riding one required measures of faith, courage and ambition that Armen was certain he didn’t possess. Finally being given a bicycle meant that he must finally ride one. For him it was nothing but a dread test of his worthiness as a boy. The time had finally come for Armen to be exposed as the fraud that he alone knew himself to be.
They’d want to see him ride it, of course. But he wasn’t going to ride it. He didn’t have the slightest idea how to begin, and even if he had, he was sure the thing would throw him off. It might as well have been a colt. Even if he had known how to start, where could he try it without being seen? He was sure that he was the only eleven year-old in town who couldn’t ride a bike, and he didn’t want any help. He was too ashamed to ask.
The bicycle taunted Armen relentlessly until he surrendered one moonless night and walked it out across the boulevard and down a nearby alleyway. He thought for a moment of abandoning it there and telling his parents it had been stolen, but he had even less courage for deceit. He pushed the bike and jumped on, and fell, and fell again, and again. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t painless. It was all he could do just to keep it quiet, but before long he was wobbling down the alley, feeling like a giraffe riding a runaway barrel. It took him awhile longer to learn how to stop by braking rather than crashing into shrubs and parked cars, but already—even as he crashed again and again—he couldn’t get enough of it.
Armen hadn’t imagined what it might be like to move so freely. He’d been carted around in the backseats of cars and busses often enough, but in such cases he was little more than cargo. He had not been the driver, and even had he been behind the wheel, he would’ve merely been directing the movements of a machine that encased him while the world outside moved. Riding a bike gave Armen a new sense of motion as well as mobility. Now he felt the breeze that he made with his motion. He hadn’t imagined such a breeze could be felt here in the Sink just by hopping on a bike. And Slough City didn’t just breathe more easily; it got smaller. Armen could just hop on and pedal to the hobby store or the library, and what’s more, he could even leave town.
This was when the stranger in Armen met his wanderer. Seemingly never at home in one place, he discovered a comfort in drifting; a natural ease in disconnection that he had never imagined; a hidden Buddha inside—a Buddha with his own special wheel.
That wheel transformed the Sink before Armen’s eyes. It transformed his very world. That world seemed to expand from a fishbowl to a limitless plane. He suddenly felt a craving for a map, and once that map was procured, the immense grid of roads beyond the city limits became endowed with names, and towns began to appear on the grid, and those towns had more than names: they had stores, drive-ins, city parks, and libraries. They even had personalities.
Armen began by exploring the outskirts of Slough City. He pedaled past the dairies, the drive-in theater, and along the canals. He then ventured farther and farther out, pedaling as far as the naval base, the river, and Visalia, where he could see hills emerging out of the smoky air. No, not hills—mountains. Yes, mountains; mountain tops that jutted out of the plain like shipwrecks. There were limits to the Sink. There were lands beyond: mountains, cities, oceans, and lakes. Of course he’d already known it as a matter of fact; he’d just never known it personally.
Where his feet couldn’t pedal him, Armen continued to explore the world via map. He discovered a trove of maps at the county library. To see more, he acquired more maps. He obtained maps with his parents’ auto club membership. He wrote chambers of commerce all over the state and received from each chamber a map flavored with local commerce.
Maps became Armen’s personal window into the world. Like books, they facilitated both exploration and imagination. They were stories—fiction and nonfiction, but in a different artistic medium, a different language. They were visual, spatial, and geometrical. They were things of beauty that gave new beauty to the Sink and the world beyond.
Armen had finally found his personal domain. Suddenly his incompetence in particular activities no longer mattered to him. No single failure could act as a summary judgment upon his character any longer, once he had found his personal, virtual realm. He no longer avoided games on the school grounds—had he any time for them, and recess was no longer such a dread time of day. He even returned to the neighborhood games.