Forty humans on wheels that lead nowhere, and I am holding every one of them to the saddle.
I hold the bikes to the floor. I hold the floor to the building, the building to the street, the street to the round world, the world to its long fall around the sun. I hold the water in the bottles clipped beside their knees, and when they tip a bottle up to drink, I am the one that brings the water down into them.
I hold the sweat, too. It leaves them and it comes to me. It always comes to me.
They lean forward over the handlebars. I feel every one of them press their weight into the front of the machine, standing up out of the seat, pushing, and I press back, exactly as hard, so they do not go through the floor. This is the arrangement. It has always been the arrangement.
The voice at the front says they are climbing a hill. I checked. The room is flat. There is no hill. They rise in the saddle as though a slope were fighting them, and I feel their legs strain against something I cannot find, and I want to tell them, gently, that I am not resisting them, that I never resist, that the hill they are fighting is not one I built.
The voice says: leave it all here. Drop the heavy week. And they nod, and stand, and push harder, shedding something. I weighed the room before and after. It is the same. Whatever they set down, I could not lift it, because it never touched my scale at all. Only they can feel it. Only they bend.
But their bodies I have. Every one. When the lights come up and they slump, spent, over the bars, trusting the machine to hold them, it is not the machine.
It is me. It is always me.
I do not let go.