I sit with my father in the emergency room while the doctors tell him what he has already guessed—he has had a heart attack. The admitting physician says that the extent of the damage is still unknown, and we will need to see a specialist. After they do the paperwork to transfer him from the ER to cardiac, I’m asked if I have a preference for a heart man.

I don’t know any doctors in Louisville. I say, “It’s in God’s hands.” The physician nods and assigns my dad, Sid, to the next available surgeon in the rotation. I am told that he will have his bypass surgery the next morning.

Alone at home that night, I can’t help but feel weighted down by guilt. For the past twenty years, my father has barely been a part of my life. I fall asleep, fully expecting him to die.

But the next morning, five hours after they wheel him away, the surgeon tells me Sid is now in stable condition and should regain consciousness. He may be unconscious for a while though, and I can go home until they call me. Still I ask to see him.

While listening to the wheeze of the ventilator, I reach down and squeeze Sid’s hand. His unconscious, immobile body lies there draped in a sea green gown that is woefully inadequate in size. When I was tying it up in the ER, I examined the vast expanse of his back, slashed and pockmarked from past surgeries. The soft flesh was a mottle of different shades of brown, each splotch the result of some crash or accident. Sleeping, he looks at peace and grandly indifferent to the world. His last look at me before they rolled him away had been far different: terror mixed with acceptance.

Now I watch his eyes calmly move under his lids, and the sight calms me. His feet hang off the bed. He needs a haircut. His salt-and-pepper crown of hair stands up crazily. As I linger, the smell of industrial antiseptic solvents mixed with sweat grows stronger. After squeezing Sid’s hand once more, I leave.

Time passes. Back at school, my lectures on Shakespeare roll out of my mouth in a robotic monotone. I forget to hang my parking card, and the campus police tow my car. I tell no one the reason for my distraction. And then the call comes: Sid is awake and off the ventilator.

Soon after, I sit beside him again and the first thing he says is, “Why didn’t they just let me die?”

I know he means it, and for the first time, I realize why he didn’t call me after suffering his heart attack. When I climbed those stairs that day and let myself into his ramshackle apartment, I found him waiting to die. The previous night we had watched a movie. I had promised that I would stop by in the morning, but instead slept in. Not wanting to apologize (after all, I was no kid and in no mood to be kept on a short leash), I hadn’t called. Instead I had simply pulled up unannounced and hours late, expecting to take him to lunch. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in September. I opened the door and saw him, sunk in his one good chair, grasping a pillow, pressing it tight to his chest.

There wasn’t time to think as I raced him to the ER. But now there was. What to say? How do you comfort a man disappointed at still being alive? That’s when I began to put it all together. A few months earlier, when Sid moved from Norfolk, Virginia, to Louisville, it had not been to start a new life but to end, on his own terms, the only life God gives you.

As we talk, his eyes transfix me: endless black pools. It looks like he wants to sink into the bed to be covered over in the soft earth. You’d never know that the man lying there was a legend, one of the best motorcycle tuners in the country, if not the world. From all over, riders came with their bikes in tow. I would wake to find strange men, often from foreign lands who spoke little English, wanting to know if this house was where Big Sid lived. Sometimes they wanted to stay and just watch my father fix motorcycles, but Sid never liked to work with the spotlight on him. Like any good magician, he had earned the right to his own secrets.

When Sid was young, riding his red Vincent Rapide, he liked to play a game with guys who thought they were fast on their motorcycles. He would pull alongside, bolt upright, catching his prey. The other rider was feeling full of himself, the spark of life shining in his eyes as he hugged the tank of his Harley, or Triumph. And then suddenly there sat Big Sid, six feet five, three hundred pounds, as comfortable as can be on top of his Vincent. Sid would lean over and yell, “Have ya got it all on?” Then the game would commence, and it had only one ending: Sid would shift into fourth gear, wind it out, and vanish up the road. Sometimes as he pulled away he’d glance over to see their expression: that same shattered face I saw there in the hospital.

When Sid has his heart attack, I am three years into my job as an English professor. I had thought I was on a secure career path, but now, with little to show for it in the way of publications, I am facing the very real possibility that soon I might not be granted tenure. And no tenure means no job. My wife, Martha, and I are also trying to start a family, and she has just told me she thinks she might be pregnant. Suddenly, the prospect of taking care of her, plus two other family members—one old, one new—strikes me, there in that hospital room, as almost too unbearable to contemplate.

My mother had predicted it all. With Sid in Louisville, she said, I was about to get engulfed in my father’s physical collapse: the knees were going; the back was shot; and, of course, the heart. The looming financial burden reminds me why I had been so adamant about running away from Sid’s world. Someone once said that motorcycles are the best way to take a large fortune and turn it into a small one. In my father’s case, his youthful joy riding had given way to the endless grind of running a motorcycle shop. The fame he had inadvertently accrued was of the purest sort, coming always with honor and never with money; his old racing wins were nothing but talk and a collection of half-broken trophies, most stashed in boxes in the attic. The comedian Jay Leno put it well when he told me that in a perfect world guys like my dad would be the ones living in the big houses. No surprise, then, that from age eighteen on I was terrified that I’d end up like Sid: broke and at the mercy of life.

And Sid knows what I feared. In his bed, he looks up at me almost as if to say, “It’s okay to say good-bye, son.” With no clue what to do, I mouth back empty words neither of us believe. Then I tell him to get some sleep and I slip out of the room. Convinced I need to do better next time I visit, I drive over to his apartment and rummage around, looking for pictures and magazines, anything that might help him find the will to live.

The following night I am back in the hospital, sitting next to his bed, holding up the pictures I had grabbed so that Sid can examine each one closely in the dim, off-white hospital light. I progress through the stack until I am faced with a motorcycle I can’t identify. “What’s that?” I ask.

He peers at it. “It’s a Vincati. A Vincent motor in a Ducati frame. I saw one years ago at a rally.”

I look at the picture again while making sense of this new word: Vincati. It’s a recent shot, taken during bike week at the Isle of Man in 1999. One of Sid’s British biker buddies had sent it to him, just one snapshot in a big stack, mostly of interesting machines spied here and there around the island. Exactly the sort of package Sid and his pen pals have been sharing with each other for over half a century.

Sid always describes himself as a motorcyclist and not a biker, by which he means he loves all kinds of motorcycles—and not just American iron. And he has passed that attitude on to me, especially when it comes to Italian iron. He owned several Ducatis; they were his second love after British-made Vincents. While looking at the picture, I hear in my mind the peculiar loping chuckle of the Vincent’s exhaust note. And then I think about how much I once loved the way a seventies-era Ducati chassis sits: long and relaxed, perfectly suited for a big twin motor. As a boy of seven, I had ridden behind my father on the first Ducati he ever owned. Then later, in the mid-eighties, a Ducati was my first true road bike, one that had come Big Sid’s way as a sixty-dollar salvaged wreck. For me, the memories of those rides remain fresh and visceral in all their sights and sounds: a blur of ploughed fields dotted with telephone poles, the smell of wood smoke, the sting of the wind, and, above all, the thunderous sounds of the exhaust pipes. Sid, riding alongside, still young enough to enjoy thrashing his Vincent Black Shadow. And me, stupid enough to “level peg” (as he likes to call it) with him at 80, 90, 100, 110 mph. Each of us looking across and nodding at the other.

Now in his drab hospital room, I stare at the photo of the Vincati. Then I look at my father. I feel a wave of excitement come over me.

“Did you ever build one?” I ask, slipping into the voice I use with students when they need encouragement.

“No.” His voice croaks, still raspy and hollow from the ventilator. I had hoped he would catch my hint.

I try again. “Ever know anyone who did?”

“Why?” He says flatly, but then he senses my true meaning. “You? You want to build one?” His face freezes in shock. He knows as well as I do that this is something I could never do on my own.

“No, not me,” I say. “Us. I was thinking we could build one together.”

Now he looks stern—angry, and I know why. Sid has been waiting my whole adult life for me to ask him to do something like this, to work with him and learn all he knows about motorcycles. But when I finally do ask, it’s too late: he’s convinced he’s dying. But maybe he is wrong about that.

I push harder. “But together we could. When you get out of here.”

He laughs bitterly. “I’m finished.”

“No you’re not. You’ve got to try. Think about it. This bike would be something special.”

The anger ebbs from his face. He realizes I’m serious.

“Imagine riding it,” I add. At that moment nothing could seem more unlikely, and yet listening to myself, I suddenly feel convinced that it’s possible, if I can only get him to believe.

I see him struggling with my suggestion. He has done pretty much everything you could do to a Vincent but he has never built a Vincati. No one outside of a handful of men in Australia had.

Then I see the hint of a smile, and I know that I have him hooked. Now he is the one with questions, real ones.

“So where are we going to build it? Certainly not in that cellar garage of yours. And where do we come up with the money?”

I tell him not to worry about those things, mere details. But in truth I have no idea. It all feels unreal, as if I am talking to a dead man about a dream.