The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  To Dallas’s credit, he said exactly the right thing: “You need some sugar.”

  He disappeared into the general store and returned five minutes later with a bag of pastries, which he dumped onto the seat between them, like a pirate’s treasure. There were chocolate chip cookies, cherry turnovers, and huckleberry bear claws. It was far more food than the two of them could eat. Zoe unwrapped a bear claw and began to devour it, licking the frosting off her fingers. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  “When we’re finished with Silver Teardrop, I want to go see Black Teardrop, okay?” she said. “I haven’t seen it since…”

  She trailed off, and Dallas finished the sentence for her: “Since we looked for your dad?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You really ready to see that place again?” said Dallas.

  Zoe laughed. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the sugar.

  “Who knows,” she said.

  They left Polebridge and drove the last ten miles to Silver Teardrop, the car bucking and rattling over the road. The forest in this part of the mountains had recently burned. The trees were stripped and charcoal black, and rose out of the snow naked as needles. They reminded Zoe of the woods near Bert and Betty’s house, of course—and that reminded her of chasing Jonah and the dogs through the blizzard, of meeting X, of meeting Stan. It was just like Dallas said: everything was connected.

  Silver Teardrop lay under a frozen creek bed that ran alongside the road. There was nowhere to park. Dallas drove an extra half mile, and finally the road widened enough for him to pull over. For the next five minutes, he blared Kanye West’s song “Monster” at top volume, which seemed to be a pre-caving ritual of his. Zoe stood outside the truck, watching in amusement as Dallas duplicated every move from the video. Finally, the tune ended. Dallas emerged from the truck, red-faced and beaming.

  “Woot!” he shouted, not so much to Zoe as to the universe.

  He gestured for Zoe to follow him. He walked to the back of the 4Runner and opened it with a flourish.

  “Behold!” he said.

  Zoe couldn’t speak for a moment: It was a gearhead’s paradise. There were beautiful coils of rope hanging from hooks. There were drills, bolt kits, harnesses, ascenders and descenders, caving packs with holes in the bottom so water could drain out. There were folding shovels and gleaming ice axes. There were whole unopened boxes of Clif Bars and CamelBaks full of water. Everything was meticulously curated and cared for. Everything was shiny. Zoe’s dad always used as little gear as he could get away with: he liked to improvise, and he was kind of a slob. Dallas had four identical orange helmets. He even had a stack of jumpsuits, which were a lighter shade of orange. They appeared to have been ironed.

  “Turns out I have a little OCD,” said Dallas.

  Zoe didn’t want him to feel self-conscious.

  “No more than, like, a serial killer,” she said.

  Dallas took a jumpsuit from the pile, popped it open, and stepped into it. The suit used to have a breast pocket, but Dallas had removed it so it wouldn’t fill with mud when he crawled. The front of the suit had tiny holes in the shape of a U where the pocket used to be.

  Next, Dallas inspected the row of helmets. Zoe wondered how he could even tell them apart. Finally, he picked one, rigged it with an LED headlamp, and strapped it on. He was square-jawed and handsome in his orange helmet-and-suit ensemble.

  “How do I look?” he said.

  “Like a Lego,” said Zoe.

  She put on her own jumpsuit, which had been crushed in a ball at the bottom of her duffle. It was off-white, and so stained with mud that it looked like an abstract painting. Her helmet came next. Her dad had given it to her when she turned 15. It was dark blue, and scarred from low ceilings and falling rock. It was slightly too big and poorly padded. Whenever she nodded, it did a dance on her head.

  For ten minutes, Dallas and Zoe geared up. Everything Dallas owned seemed to have been scientifically engineered—even his gloves looked like something you’d use to repair a space station. Zoe’s stuff was all shabby crap from the land of misfit clothes. But Dallas didn’t judge her, and she didn’t embarrass easily, anyway. She pulled on her yellow dish-washing gloves like they were made of silk.

  Zoe and Dallas double-checked their headlamps, their batteries, their backup batteries, their drill. Dallas got pissed when he realized that he’d forgotten to bring walkie-talkies. Fortunately, Zoe had thought to pack a pair. She dug them out of her duffel, and handed him one.

  “Please come prepared next time,” she said.

  Dallas locked up the 4Runner—cheep! cheep!—and they hiked back down the road, trudging along stiffly under all the layers of clothes. After a few minutes, they came around a bend and saw some deer in the snow up ahead. The deer’s eyes were wet and nervous. Their coats, thin and red in summer, had turned coarse and gray to survive the cold—and hunting season. They stared at Dallas and Zoe, then darted away, jumping high like horses on a carousel.

  In the silence, Zoe’s anxiety began to seep back in. She tried to clear her mind, but couldn’t. A story her dad had told her when she was 10 or 11 came back to her and the minute she remembered it, she couldn’t shake it. The story was about British cavers in the ’60s who got caught underground when a freak thunderstorm flooded their cave.

  She’d never forgotten the details: Rescuers came running from their pubs. They built a dam, but it kept collapsing so they had to hold it together with their bodies. They worked through the night to pump out the water. Finally, they wriggled into a small tunnel to search for survivors. Deep in the cave, the lead rescuer found the bodies of two dead cavers blocking the way. He had to crawl over them to find the others. They were just corpses now, too. The last of them had squeezed into a tight fissure in a desperate hunt for air. The lead rescuer began his retreat, knowing all was lost. The volunteers behind him were crying and throwing up in the passageway. He said to the first one he saw, “Go back, Jim. They’re dead.”

  Dallas noticed that Zoe wasn’t talking.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said.

  “The British cavers,” she said.

  “The dead guys in the tunnel—those British cavers?” he said. There wasn’t a caving legend that Dallas didn’t know. “That’s a horrible thing to think about, dawg. Hit Delete right now. Seriously.”

  Zoe shoved the story into the Do Not Open box. It didn’t want to go in—it wrestled with her—but eventually it did. She imagined herself sitting on the box to keep the thing trapped.

  But still she felt unsettled as they trudged through the wilderness. Between the silence and the snow and the burned-out forests sliding past, Zoe felt like she and Dallas were characters in some postapocalyptic movie—survivors of a deadly virus that only they were immune to.

  Dallas didn’t seem remotely nervous. He never did. He seemed stoked, giddy almost, oblivious. They were within arm’s reach of each other, but still miles apart.

  “It’s this way,” said Dallas, who’d been staring down at his GPS. He thrust a fist in the air: “Woot!”

  He led her to the side of the road, and down the steep embankment. If there had ever been a trail, it was buried now. The slope was piled with fallen trees, which plows had shoved off the road. Their trunks were charred and blistered.

  Zoe struggled to climb over the logs. The weight of her pack kept pulling her off balance.

  Getting to the cave was supposed to be the easy part.

  Dallas was just ahead of her. She tried to step exactly where he stepped. She started to sweat under her clothes. She was near the bottom of the embankment when her snowshoe landed on a rotten log.

  She had a sick feeling, like the ground was disappearing.

  It was.

  She pitched forward, her arms churning helplessly.

  Dallas was still babbling. He had no idea. Zoe fell toward his back, arms outstretched and grabbing at the air. A branch shot past her face. It missed her eye by an in
ch.

  She crashed against Dallas.

  He gave a grunt of surprise, then fell forward, too. The whole thing took only an instant. Less than an instant.

  The sky spun above Zoe’s head. She landed on her side in the snow. She heard a sharp, dry crack—the sound of a bone splintering—and waited for the pain, but it never came.

  Dallas lay in a heap a few feet away. He’d tried to break his fall with his hands. He was clutching his wrist. His mouth was an O, and he was about to scream.

  Dallas insisted that Zoe could crush Silver Teardrop without him. He was not going to wreck the day for her. It was too huge. He popped some Advil from his pack, and sat on his butt at the bottom of the embankment, his wrist plunged in the snow to stop the swelling. He swore he was fine—that it was probably just a sprain and that he’d only screamed because of the shock. Zoe argued with him, and lost.

  They followed the creek bed awhile, and soon the GPS informed them that they’d arrived at their destination. Zoe saw nothing resembling a cave. The entrance had to be deep under snow.

  She and Dallas removed their snowshoes and climbed down to the frozen creek. A couple hundred feet up, it ran into a rocky hill and slipped underground. Zoe helped Dallas off with his pack, took out a folding shovel, and began to clear the mouth of the cave. Dallas insisted on helping. He’d filled a pocket with snow, and he kept his right hand buried in it as he hacked away at the entrance with an ice ax. They worked slowly to conserve their energy. They didn’t talk much, although at one point, Dallas looked at Zoe’s yellow rubber gloves, shook his head, and said, “Can I please give you a better pair? I promise to give yours back if we have to wash any dishes.”

  Zoe’s fingers were already so cold they seemed to be burning. She nodded so forcefully that Dallas cracked up.

  When they’d cleared the snow, they found a dense wall of ice blocking the mouth of the cave, as if defending it from intruders. They chipped at it for half an hour. Zoe’s arm began to ache. Shards of ice flew up at her face. But as the entrance of the cave emerged from the ice, she found she was grinning like an idiot. She locked eyes with Dallas. Even injured, he had the same loopy, blissed-out expression.

  “Right?!” he said happily.

  The map hadn’t done justice to how narrow the entrance was. It was shaped roughly like a keyhole, and not much more than two feet wide.

  “Man, that’s tight,” said Dallas. “I couldn’t have gotten in there without scraping my junk off.”

  “Thank you for that image,” said Zoe.

  She and Dallas crouched down, and their headlamps flooded the tunnel. The ceiling was slick with condensation, the floor littered with broken rock and bubbles of calcite that cavers called popcorn. But none of this was as troubling as the fact that the tunnel never seemed to widen. Zoe would have to crawl down a meandering, 50-foot corridor on her side. Neither of them spoke, and while they were not speaking, a giant wood rat wandered into the light and stared up at them indifferently.

  “You got this,” said Dallas.

  “I know,” said Zoe. She thought of the tattoo on his shoulder. “‘Never don’t stop,’ right?”

  “Exactly!” said Dallas. “‘Never, ever don’t stop!’”

  He hesitated.

  “Unless,” he said.

  Zoe had never seen Dallas hesitate.

  “Do not mess with my head two seconds before I go in there,” she said. “Or I will scrape your junk off myself.”

  “No, no, no, you got this,” said Dallas. “But. If you get in there and there’s a shit-ton of running water, you gotta get out. Promise me you won’t get all intrepid.”

  Zoe promised, but they both knew she was lying.

  She put on her seat harness and descender. Dallas double-checked them so carefully it actually made her more nervous. He was acting like she was about to jump out of a plane.

  Zoe tested her walkie-talkie. All she had to do now was stop stalling.

  She took a last breath of fresh air.

  The first ten feet of the cave were furry with ice. Her father’s voice popped into her head, like a cartoon bubble: “That’s hoarfrost, Zoe! Also known as white frost. Come on—know your frosts!”

  She ducked into the tunnel, and lay down on her side. She shimmied forward like a snake, pushing a fat coil of rope and a small pack in front of her.

  The passage was insanely claustrophobic. The walls were like a clamp.

  She made it about five feet before the back of her neck was slick with sweat. She could already hear the waterfall pounding up ahead. She thought of the British cavers who drowned—she couldn’t help it—and of the men who rushed from their pubs and tried to save them.

  “Go back, Jim. They’re dead.”

  She had to focus. That’s the first thing you learned as a caver—you focus or you get hurt. Actually, the first thing you learned was that it was nuts to go caving without at least two other people. That way, if someone got injured, one person could stay with her and the other could run for help.

  She twisted her legs so she could push with both feet. She dragged her body over the rubble and calcite. Even through a wet suit and four layers of clothes, she could feel them bite.

  When the tunnel grew even narrower, she filled her lungs with air, then released it so her chest would shrink and she could keep crawling. She made it another five or six feet. She had to crane her neck to see where she was going. Her helmet bobbled and scraped along the ground. Every so often it scooped up a stone and she had to shake her head until it tumbled back out. In the distance, the waterfall grew louder. She’d forgotten how ferocious water sounded in an enclosed space—how it got your heart drumming even if you weren’t afraid.

  And then it struck her: she didn’t have to be afraid. She was cold, her body was tense as a wire, she felt like she was crawling into an animal’s throat—but she didn’t have to be scared. She knew how to do this. She loved doing this.

  And she wasn’t even alone, not really. She had a whole support team in her brain: Dallas, Jonah, X. Even her dad, in a way.

  Especially her dad.

  “You’re freakin’ awesome! You can do this! You’re my girl!”

  She arrived at a bend in the tunnel and wriggled around it. She imagined she was a superhero who could transform into water or molten steel—who could flow through the rock and then reconstitute at will.

  Her stupid grin was back.

  Suddenly, the walkie-talkie trilled. By the time Zoe finished the laborious task of taking off her glove and fishing the thing out of her pack, it had stopped. Annoyed, she called Dallas back.

  “I’m being molten steel!” she said. “What could you possibly want?”

  There was a pause during which Dallas presumably tried to figure out what the hell she was talking about. When he answered, his voice was so distorted that she had to work to fill in the missing words.

  “Where (you) at?” he said. “You killin’ it? Can you (hear the) water?”

  “Of course I’m killin’ it,” she told him. “Go away!”

  She slid the walkie-talkie back into her pack, wiped her nose, and put her glove back on. Even in that brief interval, her hand had become stiff with the cold, and she had to flex her fingers to get some life back in them.

  Just ahead, a thousand daddy longlegs hung from the ceiling in a clump, their legs packed in such a dense mass that they looked like dirty hair. Zoe was used to spiders, but she was surprised to see them so late in February. She slid under them and squinted up. She heard her father’s voice again: “Daddy longlegs aren’t spiders, Zoe! They’re Opiliones! Come on—this is Insects 101!”

  When she was small—five, maybe? six?—her dad gave her an ecstatic lecture about this stuff. There were two things she’d always remembered. The first was how her father’s face glowed with excitement. The second was a gruesome tidbit about how daddy longlegs could play dead by detaching one of their legs to trick predators. They’d leave it behind—still twitching!—while they c
rawled in the opposite direction. Only her father could have thought that was a cool thing to tell a little kid. And yet it kind of was.

  Zoe shook her head and smiled. Her helmet did its dance.

  She’d already lost track of how long she’d been in the cave. Time had a way of shattering underground. The waterfall roared even louder now. She kept crawling in the dark, telling herself to focus.

  The tunnel finally widened, then stopped at the edge of the giant drop that led down to the Chandelier Room. Zoe rolled onto her stomach. She lowered her head to the ground, and exhaled gratefully, like a swimmer who had just barely made it back to the beach. Her neck ached. The left side of her body felt ravaged. She dreaded looking at the bruises. Were superheroes supposed to get this tired?

  She rotated her head slowly, her headlamp sweeping the walls. There were bolts on either side of her that another caver had left in the rock—a primary and a backup. She unspooled her rope and rigged up with loops like bunny ears. She struck the bolts with a buckle and leaned close to hear the solid, reassuring ping.

  There were still five feet between Zoe and the giant shaft that plunged down to the Chandelier Room. She pushed herself up into a sort of Gollum-like crouch, and inched toward it, hoping the waterfall wouldn’t be as ferocious as it sounded.

  The shaft was roughly circular. Its walls were jagged and embedded with pockets of ice that glinted in the light of Zoe’s headlamp. Off to her right, an underground river burst through an icy hole in the wall, then tumbled down, like Rapunzel’s hair. It wasn’t the trickle that she and Dallas had hoped for. She was glad he wasn’t there to say, Forget it, dawg, this is waaaay too intrepid. She was sure that if she rappelled straight down, she could avoid most of the spray.

  She tested the bolts in the wall again, though it didn’t tell her anything definitive: if they were going to pop out, they were going to pop out when she was hanging in midair. She hooked herself onto the rope. She took a deep breath and turned around.

  She stepped backward off the edge.