by John McManus
The video feed showed a girl plunging from the pier into neck-deep water. Her shimmering hair floated behind her as she waded toward the Gulp, which swallowed her, leaving only rings of waves.
Max increased the playback speed. Hand in hand a decrepit white-haired couple scurried to their deaths, followed by more girls.
“What is this place?”
“I spy for the CIA on other countries,” said Max, as a parade of suicides continued dying for us under clear skies. Now he summoned up feeds where nude men and women sunbathed on a beach, an orgy of men sucked each other off by moonlight, and two shoeless women trudged across a desert full of yellow flowers. I took those two for refugees until one bent over to suck on the other one’s nipple.
“Get a load of this,” said Max.
I expected another video, but he poured me a scotch.
“I don’t drink,” I said.
“How long?”
“Four and a half years.”
“And she still won’t take you back?”
“Who won’t?” I said, uneasy.
“The girl you love.” He pressed the drink into my hand.
I couldn’t help but close my fingers around it. “This stuff was ruining my life.”
“It ever drive you to kill yourself?”
“Worse,” I said, breathing in the peaty smell. Already I could taste smoke on the lips of some of the girls I’d kissed while drunk. I put the glass to my mouth. What dread I’d had was flushed out by the whiskey that flowed into me and felt right. “Worse like how?” Max said, a question it felt possible to address now that I had liquor in me, so I began by explaining that he was right about the girl, Livia, whom I’d met on Coulter Mountain in my third year of recovery.
The first year, when I got back into climbing, I didn’t plan on free-soloing. I just hated speaking to people while I was sober. To find belaying partners, you had to talk to them. As for rope-soloing, I had too much anxiety in those days to move so slowly. Slower I moved, the more my head twitched. So one day I just left my ropes and Grigri in the car. About halfway up a 5.11, I realized I wasn’t anxious. Clinging to the rock I felt supernaturally good, like I was part of the earth’s mechanics. At the summit I vowed to climb that way from then on. For two years, I did. By the time I hoisted myself onto the dome of Coulter Mountain with no gear but chalk, I’d forgotten I had ever been ill.
On top of that cliff I rolled over onto my back and looked around. Cross-legged toward the view sat a hot girl in a sports bra, drinking something green out of a Nalgene.
“Did you just free-solo this mountain?” she said.
“For Rock and Ice,” I answered, which was true: Rock and Ice wanted a piece on how free-soloing helped keep me on the wagon.
“If you were writing about suicide, would you drown yourself?”
“No, I’d free-solo K2. Is that a margarita?”
“Yeah,” she said, offering it. I shook my head.
“Herradura Gold,” she said.
“Sounds delicious,” I said.
“Let me guess, free-climbing’s the next best thing to alcohol? A pure vertical dance? Like leaping on the moon?” She was quoting a climber named Brendan Timmins who had recently died doing it. “Think of his mother, think of his siblings.”
“Brendan was an only child.”
“Which makes his shit even more selfish.”
Without the endorphins lingering from my climb, I’d have been too timid to say, “Back when I chose to free-solo, I didn’t have you to live for.”
“So I’m saving your life?”
“Teach me how to use ropes.”
“You’re asking me out?”
“Feels like a date already.”
“Will you mention me in your article?”
“If you sign an exclusivity contract,” I said. We flirted like that for a while. It didn’t take me long to see her point: if I had died, I’d never have lowered her behind the summit’s cairn and kissed her. After a climb it’s so effortless to pick out what you want, and ask for it. I said so in my Rock and Ice essay, which Livia wept over. I wrote how, when I drank, I never trusted that I deserved anyone. Now that a smart woman who climbed fourteeners let me live with her, it felt like no small cozy miracle. I promised in print not to free-solo ever again. Livia is what comes of sober focus, I wrote, as if that along with my climbing had spawned a third, better accomplishment.
I couldn’t stay away from her. I would come sit in her photography classes, help with shoots. I took up trail running so we could do the Colorado Trail together. When my delusions started coming back, I hoped they were only a byproduct of love. Sometimes when I fell prey to daydreams where she was bludgeoned and I was the suspect, or where her brakes failed after rusting out from road salt that I’d forgotten to hose off from her truck’s underbelly, I drove to the canyon without my gear and scrambled up as far as the death line. Up there at that height, ropeless, I could quit fearing that Livia would die by my inadvertent hand. Perched on crumb-sized knobs I felt as if all history, plate tectonics, evolution, had conspired to bring me a peace I could tap into in secret, once or twice a week, until Livia finished her MFA and got a job offer from a Miami art school.
With no idea how it would feel, I told Livia I’d go anywhere. We moved into an apartment in Hialeah beside a sixteen-lane highway, five hundred miles south of the nearest hill. The temperature was always seventy indoors, one hundred outdoors. I found a job at a rock gym, where I taught kids how to tie knots and brooded my way into a full-on mood disorder.
It began with little things, like driving over a bump, then obsessing over the idea that the bump had been a person. I would scour the news for evidence of a hit-and-run. At the gym some guy would fall onto the mat, and visions of a criminal investigation would plague me. I grew scared to strap kids into their harnesses lest they accuse me of touching them. The sound of any siren suggested that Livia was dead and the cops were coming. The more unlikely the idea, the harder I obsessed.
“Do you ever dread stuff that will never happen?” I managed to ask Livia over coffee one morning. It was the first time I’d mentioned such a thing to her. No matter how she’d balked at free-soloing, I figured she was mine only because her instincts drew her to strength and daring.
“Sometimes I dream you’ve run off to free-solo Half Dome.”
“I mean things that could literally never happen.”
“Like you being nice to my friends?” Some of her colleagues had taken us snorkeling in the Keys, hiking in the Everglades, which unfortunately was causing her to enjoy life in Miami. Livia took her new job to get rid of me, I thought later at the gym. By following her to Florida, I had called her bluff. The choice to relinquish mountains was an exam I’d failed. Now she wished for me to go free-solo Half Dome, and fall out, except maybe I had no courage left to climb at all. That’s what I was thinking when I realized I could have left the stove on that morning at breakfast.
As unlikely as it seemed, I felt so certain about it that I couldn’t bring myself to call Livia. I had already killed her along with a dozen others. No matter the worry’s insanity; it consumed me. My stomach roiled, my cheeks burned. Hours later, when I finally did call, she didn’t answer.
I was dialing a second time when Ty, the owner of the rock gym, walked in. “I’ve been ringing you for days,” he said.
“The phone was broken. I just fixed it.”
“I don’t care how good a climber you are; you’re fired.”
“Okay,” I said, nearly thanking him. With pure relief I hurried home to find an intact apartment, where Livia was drinking mimosas with a pixie-faced woman.
I hardly had time to relax before that woman came in toward me for a European-style cheek kiss. Even during my calmest era, studying abroad in Marseilles, deep-water soloing in the calanques, I’d feared these damned gestures, because which side? How many times? Her lips were traveling toward mine as if we were to kiss like lovers—which, since it went so fast, was wh
at I did, giving her the quickest peck.
“So lovely to see you,” she said, as if I’d done nothing wrong, but already I could hear the two of them later, cackling with their friends about it.
“Come kayaking with us,” said Livia, pouring juice into a champagne glass. The stove was turned off.
“I have to get back to work.”
“I was just telling Livia we’ll offer her early tenure. We’d hate to lose you.”
My arms thrummed with the creep of mercury inside me, as heavy as on a climb. That was it, I thought, I’d fallen and this was my dying dream.
“Max, I showed Mary your magazine pieces. She thinks we can get you a spousal hire in creative nonfiction.”
Now the whole scene felt staged. “Cheers,” said Mary, clicking glasses to mine. Had they snuck champagne into my drink? I almost hoped so, but booze soothed only healthy brains; what if I drank and my fears lingered?
“Tell me how it feels.”
“How what feels?” I said, wondering if she meant anxiety, or being stupid enough to kiss her on the mouth.
“The crazy shit you used to do.”
“You stay in the flow without worrying,” I said, gripping my glass and swearing to myself that she wasn’t flirting, nor would any mothers of young rock climbers be turning me in for child molestation.
“So like yoga, but with the risk of death?”
“It gives perspective.”
“Wish I had that kind of mind control.”
“You’d be no fun if you did,” said Livia, and then they were laughing together and I pretended not to notice how it masked a deeper laughter.
“I should return to work,” I said, hurrying toward the door so as to avoid another kiss. What I really did was drive to Key West. It took five hours because I kept pulling over after bumps to verify that no bodies lay in my wake. How I yearned to put that behind me. I’d always thought going crazy meant not knowing it, never feeling it set in. On Key Largo I began brooding over the stove eye. When I’d checked that it was off, had I twisted it too far? So many could perish: retirees, children, infants; then there would be the trial, prison, until I parked on Duval Street and walked the avenues of the village past old men sipping wine. Their little salmon-colored bungalows looked so familiar, but I’d never been here. Livia had come frolicking with her friends one time. It struck me that déjà vu was memories of the future. I had turned away from the past, which was rock climbing; the future was Florida porches because of a girl who’d never desired me to begin with.
Delusion or no, I would feel this way from now on. A mountain might help, but it was impossible to drive so far over so many bumps, farther and farther from proof of dormant stove eyes. Instead I traveled to the Everglades and hiked out to that tree-ringed lake to give myself to the Gulp.
As soon as I’d thrown my phone in, it began to ring. That’s the cops, I thought as it sank into the lake. To destroy evidence suggested guilt, but over what? Livia? Why dread the future here at the brink? If Livia was dead, shouldn’t I jump? To regain the serenity to kill myself, I sat down by the water’s edge and gazed up the ditch that Andrew Jackson’s slaves had dug. Their nearest mountain had stood a month’s journey away across deadly country. All their lives they’d labored without knowledge of the prospect a climb offered. Had they climbed trees, at least looked down on the river of glass? Here I was struggling for the wherewithal to breathe. To put my breakdown on hold long enough to die, I thought of all the slaves who’d had no breakdowns, along with slaves in my century. More slaves were alive now than ever. Indentured tomato pickers, miners, young virgins being smuggled out of the Third World, making it through their hardships to carry on.
“You’re too connected to your fear receptor,” said Max the spy, once I’d brought him up to the present.
Feeling sanguine under the influence, I nodded. He gave me another pour. “But sometimes my receptor shuts up.”
“Not sure what you mean.”
“I’ll show you.”
I had him load footage for such and such coordinates for a day I’d crack-climbed a wall in Utah. Suddenly there I was, scrambling ropeless up a red cliff face, the satellite orbiting at a low enough angle that we could watch me pull myself higher. I might as well have been crawling on flat ground, so quickly did I place my fingers on the holds.
“I can see how that would feel tranquil,” said Max, without apparent sarcasm.
“Really? You’re the first one who’s understood.”
“Do many die?” he asked.
I gave him another set of coordinates. Soon we could see Brendan Timmins inching up a cliff in Eldorado Canyon. He sped the playback up to 32x, so that in seconds Brendan’s grip gave out and he fell backward onto a candlestick spire.
“Spectacular,” Max said.
“If you like that, there’s plenty more.”
“What I like is naked people fucking.”
“Go to Half Dome, in Yosemite.”
“You go to Half Dome in Yosemite.”
“Are you saying kill myself?”
“Were you happy, climbing?”
“Always,” I said.
“Then go to Half Dome.”
“Will you watch me?”
“If you take your clothes off.”
“Deal,” I said, offering my hand. We shook on it, then settled back into viewing live-action porn on three screens.
“If you don’t die soon, you’ll live to see the day when they can scan our brains, take audits of every thought we’ve ever thought.”
“Seems like that’s a few years off.”
“Depends on your brain. If you let them freeze it when you die, they’ll never resurrect you, they’ll just hook you up to the audit machine and view a montage.”
Normally I’d have been into Max’s theory, but I was getting drunk. I floated into imagining a psych student’s compare/contrast paper on two brains, my mother’s and my own. Cremate her, I told myself, specify cremation in my own will, and so on until I passed out. I came to in my truck camper, lying on the mattress I kept there for climbing trips. The gate to the Jackson Ditch spur had risen, and Max’s car was gone. I remembered nothing past the audit machine.
As I pissed into the filthy water of the swamp, my head throbbed so hard I knew I couldn’t face Livia. Instead I drove to the beach. Feeling more strung out by the minute, I walked the boardwalk until I came to the kind of wood-paneled, windowless juke joint I used to like. I ordered a bourbon there. Drinking it, I had some thoughts that would be damning in a brain scan, about the fate I wished upon everyone. I thought of my father, who drank daily, and of my cousins on my mother’s side who still lived with their parents and hadn’t set foot outside in years. I’m not feeling paranoid, I thought by way of appeasing my mind. If I were like my relatives, I’d be paranoid even on whiskey.
At the next bar, a Joe’s Crab Shack, a girl split off from her friends to come touch my fingers. “I climb,” I said to explain their size.
“Where, Cuba?”
“Wherever there’s a mountain.”
“You looking for one?”
“You have one in mind?” I said, studying her closely now that she’d asked a smart question. She was perky, spritelike, twenty-one or so. Already I knew I could drive drunk with her over bumps without fear of the bumps.
“There’s a rock gym up the road.”
“Pretty thing like you must be seeing someone,” I said, running a finger along her arm. It would be bliss to ride over the bumps with this girl.
“Boyfriend cheated, so I dumped him,” she said, setting us in motion to buy ourselves a room at a beachfront hotel.
It was only afternoon. The hours flew by. At midnight we snuck up to the rooftop pool and took off our clothes. Before I joined her in the water, I turned on the spotlight over the diving board. “No, by moonlight,” she said, shielding her eyes.
“But I want to see your body,” I replied, which was true. More importantly, I thought Max might h
ave been keeping track of me. I hoped to pay him back for saving my life. “Okay,” said the girl, wrapping herself around me. Even knowing I would crawl home alone in shame, I waved happily to the sky. For every moment of it I loved Livia, is the thing, wanted to grow old with her, take her to France to the calanques, where even she could free-solo alongside me because a fall lands you in the sea.
I woke up alone, with enough gin still in me that I didn’t dread Livia’s verdict yet as I drove home. With mild concern I noticed bumps, laughing at myself a little. The radio news spoke of some Mexican tomato pickers enslaved near Orlando. “I lost my phone,” I repeated as I drove, rehearsing my lie until I walked into my home and Livia ran and squeezed me like a harness and said, “I thought you were dead.”
“I lost my phone,” I said, heart plummeting into my gut.
“It’s okay, these things happen.”
“I don’t remember where.”
I waited for her to smell the other girl. Instead she said, “I want to help.”
“To what?”
“I’ll join you at meetings.”
“You hardly drink.”
“Every day I drink.”
“One margarita with your friends.”
“I love you, Max.”
I studied her face for a sign of why she wasn’t angry. For why she would love me. “I’ll try harder,” I said, not lying. If there’d been a way to add, “Something’s wrong and I need more help than you can give,” I’d have done it, but the shock of seeing her had sobered me up. My brain was dividing back into two parts, not hemispheres, but overlapping parts, sort of like air and the Higgs field. The Higgs field isn’t the air, but wherever there’s air, there’s the Higgs field. I’d have explained this, but the energy was pulling me into a maze with all manner of dead ends. “Something’s wrong” was one she had predicted in a wager. I kept quiet. The next day, whether or not she believed I was at work, I walked the beach, stopping every few miles for fifty push-ups. My mind felt less urgent if I was moving. Before continuing with fifty sit-ups, I would wave to Max. At sunset I drove home to find Livia reading about some photographer.
“Max, I have a surprise. Is your passport current?”