I came down the stairs from my little brother's room carrying the heavy ancient hippy pack which had bounced around Europe while I was too small to see. In some strange way it was my own personal eggshell, and I knew it. I would take it with me, and with any luck, before I was through I'd break it, too.

Near the front door lay a duffel bag full of clothes that hadn't fit in the pack. My dad sat in the living room chair, and looked up at me. Right at that moment, there seemed little between us, aside from the fact that he wouldn't loan me his own pack which sat resting unused in the attic. I felt he would say something archetypal to him, and to his connection with me. I narrowed my eyes.

"You can't hitchhike with all that stuff," he said.

'I don't know what I'm going to do. Let me worry about that, though. Right now, I need your help with something.' I set down the pack next to the duffel bag, and went down to the basement. I stopped at the top of the stairs. 'Come on.'

I stood looking down at my enchanted green bike and the u-lock which still clung tenaciously to the frame and front wheel. My dad had his dremel moto-tool, and was fitting a round ceramic cutting disk into it.

While the minutes separating me from flying out the door ticked away, I tried very hard to hold my body still, as though attempting to interrupt a case of the hiccups. If I didn't breathe, didn't move, didn't think about anything at all, nothing would happen to interrupt Mat on his way to where I waited.

There was always a strange reversal with my father, like in 'Heathers.' So for him to be so clearly engaging in a fatherly role was somehow strange. On the other hand, it came as no surprise that he was more comfortable doing the cutting himself. When he was around, there was always the thought that my hand would go flying and take a chunk out of the frame, or my hand. The disk spun out sparks, and began to glow as it cut into the exposed metal of the lock. I tried not to consider how many miles away Mat might be. Clearly, the blade had begun eating the metal away. And then the blade snapped, sending half of itself harmlessly to the floor.

For a split-second, I imagined that he would give up on the task, but I resisted that thought. He fitted another disk into the tool and the small shower of sparks resumed bouncing harmlessly from the green paint of the frame. Somewhere half-way through the lock, the blade broke again, and this time the hot fragment bounced from the ceiling before coming to rest on the carpet. It was already cool to the touch when I retrieved it.

The third blade charmed its way into the metal as though heartened by the progress of its comrades, and before I could consider how many blades remained in the styrofoam case, the lock swung apart with a finality I couldn't put my finger on. These two pieces wouldn't hold together now if I duct-taped them, and an hour ago they may as well have been welded into a single loop.

I rested the bike against the far wall, and gave it a gentle tentative pat, as though begging forgiveness. It held perfectly still.

I stood in the living room, waiting for the world to collapse around me like a plastic sheet. There was a faint sound which rumbled through me like the tremor of a distant freight car. Mat's car pulled up out front, just as it always had, just as if we were still in high school, and we planned to escape for a few hours, to a movie, or perhaps for a weekend. But I knew it wasn't like that.