by John McManus
“Unless you’ve done something to it.”
“You know the Bugaboos?”
“The mountains in British Columbia?”
“You wrote them up for Rock and Ice. Mary’s cousin has a house there he’s not using, near Radium Hot Springs.”
“Why the Bugaboos?” I said, playing along.
“I told you. We can go for New Year’s.”
“So the mountain range?”
“Snowpatch Spire has routes up to 5.12.”
“It’s just weird you picked it of all places.”
“We can do intermediates together.”
“But the word bugaboo.”
“Is that a word?”
“You’re smarter than this.”
“I know it’s a stroller.”
“Why do you take pictures?”
“What?” she said, echoing every lying woman in films.
“When you take pictures, other people are taking pictures of you taking pictures.”
“You’re sounding like your mom.”
“People watch us doing the things we do.”
“Do you wonder how I know how your mom sounds?”
“The jig is up, okay?” I said, raising my voice. Her book wasn’t a photography book. Easy enough to put a fake cover over some maps of neural pathways. But before I could levy my accusation, she cut me off.
“It was eating at me, what you said. I figured, what harm to visit? She talked about you for hours. She’s got copies of your articles. Pictures everywhere. Not that it seems pleasant to live in her head,” and so on, as it sank in that I must have killed a climber, kicked loose a rock and sent him hurtling to his death. Livia was that climber’s sister. Saying she loved me had been the giveaway. At the original ambush she’d gone on about a dead free-soloist, same as she did now about my mom. My mom knitting in a congregate apartment. My mom tearful over losing me. Somehow I lasted through it without taking the bait. Afterward she cuddled up against me in bed, an act no less cynical for her having done it for years. I waited until I heard her snoring, then gathered a sleeping bag, my climbing shoes, a tent.
When I returned for a last look, she was lying on her side, an arm folded across herself. Her scent can’t be a disguise, I thought, leaning over to inhale lavender and almond, which brought memories flooding in of years condensed into one day’s fever dream. It had felt so real; still, I’d seen this movie, and summoned up the next beat, which was me in my truck driving north onto the Florida Turnpike.
To the tune of a mournful ballad I guzzled Red Bull. The sun rose near Pensacola. When my phone rang—the new one Livia got me—I threw it out. Right away I realized it could cause a wreck. If an overloaded truck ran over it, one that was already struggling to balance, it could tip over. The phone could be traced back. Should I turn around? After hours of angst about this and about losing the only girl I would love, I pulled over and crawled under the camper to sleep. The next day I woke up and drove twenty more hours. The day after that, I arrived at sunset below the Yosemite climbers’ camp.
It was dark when I hiked up to some flat terrain beyond the campground. In the distance dozens of climbers clustered around their campfires while I pitched my tent. Hammering in my final stake, I heard a voice announce, “Max Rainey.”
There in the starlight stood a young climber I didn’t recognize. “Max Rainey’s in Camp Four,” he called out.
“Do I know you?” I asked, praying for him to be just some kid. After thousands of miles here I was, stuck in my mind.
“I love your essays. What happened?”
“Have you been watching me?”
“Everyone watches you,” he said, as a crowd approached, ten or twelve men masked by the dark and saying, “Dude,” “Hey, man,” as if I knew them.
“Hey,” I replied, wishing they’d get it over with.
“Gonna free-solo Half Dome?” said someone whose voice I nearly recognized.
“Maybe El Capitan,” I said.
A few of them laughed. “Where were you?” said the original voice.
“I quit for a girl,” I said, figuring I could admit that much even to my enemies. And maybe, unlikely though it was, they weren’t enemies. They were putting a lot of effort into pretending to admire me. Follow them to their campfire, I thought; spill my guts and be told relax, she loves you, use our phone, go back. I said no more. Even in my worst hours I’ve understood that abjectness fails when pitched toward minds that don’t throb.
“So if you’re back, she’s gone?”
“Correct.”
“Sorry, dude.”
“Join us for s’mores,” said someone else, calling my bluff, so that I could only thank him and promise to come later. Really? Sure thing. Awesome. But surely they knew that if I could have joined them, I could have stayed in Florida. They wandered off. I unstaked my tent, moved it deeper into the woods. I lay down. I slept through myriad disturbing dreams that all vanished when I awoke at dawn into the same disquiet, more of it; it was nonsensical how much unease I felt by the time I was hiking to the base of the iconic vertical wall.
If I say I leapt onto the rock, it seems like boasting, but I wasn’t scared. Scrambling up a crack, I barely considered my grip on the holds. No, I was counting reasons to be ashamed, and everything I’d said, how each word had been misconstrued. I thought of women I’d mistreated. I could be a father by now, or some girl could have been fifteen. Too many to tally, these fears formed a solid cloud that became my mind until I recalled the other Max.
I dug in, hung back. Although the cliff edge blocked me from half the sky, Max could see me from some satellite.
“I forgot about my clothes,” I told him, angling my face up so he could read my lips, and then I glanced down and saw no one below.
It would have been okay to discover someone watching. I’d reached the death line, high enough that the throbbing died down. I could feel it dissipating into the valley. That was why I pulled myself higher. Never had I felt more eager for explicit danger. Gripping the fissures, I climbed into an empty-headedness, euphoric compared to earlier. At one point I rose into a swarm of flies that bit me all at once. What could I do, swat? The pain kept me focused. I thought of shouting for someone to phone Livia, tell her I’d fled for no reason. I counted fly stings, thinking of my body versus the rock, my energy against its inertia, until some gravel fell to either side of me, followed by a body-sized stone.
If there hadn’t suddenly been a six-inch ledge to hoist myself onto, I would have died in that earthquake. The whole mountain grumbled hungrily against my belly. Rock after rock fell past me as I stood on the brink, catching my breath. The pause calmed me enough that I became aware of my insane position hundreds of feet above the earth. So I began to gasp. Suddenly I couldn’t push air out fast enough. I felt above me for a knob or stirrup. Nothing. Far below, closer to the Merced River than to me, an eagle swooped. I’ll die, I thought, soaked in fearful sweat that was my body’s shot at saving me. The sweat would make the rocks slippery. In seconds I would die. And then I realized what most people find obvious: This is what fear is for. This is how it feels for fear to work right.
My body had gone haywire, fear when safe, well-being on the verge of death. Down below, no panic of mine had subsided on its own, but here was the answer, a thousand feet high. Hard to take, yet it offered a way out. My actions weren’t against the law. No one could prevent me from lifting myself onto fifty-fifty thimbles, as I did then, that is to say a thimble-sized knob with a fifty-fifty chance of holding me. It did. The next one, too. The next one, too, pitch after pitch until I summited that shark’s tooth of a mountain, pulled myself over, lay back to see a single wispy cloud drifting toward a faded moon.
“Nuh-uh,” said a woman I could have slapped, because already my chemical response was proving my theory true. I wasn’t ready for it to resume.
“Give me a minute,” I said, without turning to face her.
“USGS is reporting 4.7, but you’re crazy
under any circumstances.”
Now I did look up at this young, wiry climber. Like Livia she was awed, and dumb enough to perceive me as strong. “Your muscles are throbbing,” she said, imprinting on me like some turkey poult, as it became obvious: even if Livia did love me, it wasn’t for my mind, or my personality. My qualities.
It was bodily instinct, nothing more.
Pushing myself up, I said, “We’re not living in caves anymore.”
“Beg your pardon?” said the woman, stepping even closer, but I had had more than I could bear.
“This isn’t 100,000 BC. You people have got to quit seeking out somebody tough enough to club the lions.”
“You might be hypoglycemic,” she said, offering an apple.
“I won’t eat that,” I said, turning away, because she was a day too late to steal another two years.
“Wait, I know you,” she called out, as I maneuvered down past an old hiker who whimpered as he gripped a cable. To ignore her was easy. I just focused on the joy the man’s fear brought me. Not schadenfreude, but pleasure at the gulf between me and him. The whole way up, I hadn’t wished to fall, nor had I anticipated falling, except during one little hiccup. “Let go and your body will balance with your mind,” I said, startling the old man so much that I doubt I helped him. It was correct advice, though. I planned to follow it myself in the days to come, on all the new routes I was spotting, now that I was done running from what I loved.
GATEWAY TO THE OZARKS
BEFORE THE FIRST GENETIC clone of Thomas Jefferson turned thirteen, he would puzzle out the steps that had led to his conception, beginning with his mother Marissa’s debt. To creditors the bipolar and unmedicated Marissa Barton owed fifty thousand dollars; to the drug dealers of Southwest Missouri, a smaller, more pressing sum. At Shoney’s she had been earning two-fifteen an hour plus tips. When she signed up for the crack-cocaine study, it was for the cash, and after blowing through that easy money Marissa didn’t balk at having her bills paid in return for submitting to a new kind of hysterectomy. Her daughters had moved out, her son was sixteen. If she wound up conceiving, said the researchers, she must carry to term or forfeit the payout. It made no sense, but Marissa was too strung out for questions and anyway, Bob, her boyfriend then, had had a vasectomy.
From an early age, Marissa’s youngest child didn’t mind spending time alone while his mother partied. Carl Barton’s indoor pastimes—editing Wikipedia and drawing blueprints—were solitary ones. Compared to the mood elsewhere in his home, Carl enjoyed his bedroom and the quiet of his thoughts. He’d have explored the Ozark hills alone, too, but Silas Boyd Jr., the lisping boy across the road, trailed along chattering about Warcraft. It brought Silas no awe to discover an Osage arrowhead. If he mentioned school, it wasn’t to wonder about a science lesson but to prattle on about the polyester pants their science teacher wore. Carl didn’t care about pants. He edited encyclopedias. Lying beside Silas on the grassy hilltops, he would try to model the behavior of inquisitiveness, asking questions like, “Did you know these aren’t mountains, but an eroded plateau?”
“You’re an eroded plateau.”
“Have you been to the Rockies?”
“Do what?”
“You take vacations?”
“My mom’s a manager.”
“Mine’s a scientist.”
“She’s a crackhead.”
“She studies stars.”
“Want to get naked?”
“No,” Carl said. The wind on his naked skin might feel magnificent, but what he sought climbing Thistle Mountain was serenity. Gazing into a wild but consistent landscape dotted with fiery blooms, he lay still.
“Maybe next time.”
“Maybe,” Carl said, and indeed next week Silas asked again. Again Carl said no. The third time, Silas proposed a game: they would drop their pants and kick each other in the balls, and whoever took the most kicks would win.
“I played it with my cousin and I beat him.”
“Which means you lost.”
“You’re a dipshit,” said Silas, which was outrageous.
“Fine, I’ll do it, but with my clothes.”
“Well, I’m taking mine off.”
Silas let his pants fall. Proudly he stood there in briefs as Carl readied his leg and kicked, hard. The blow landed on target. Gripping himself, Silas lurched and leaned into the pain, trying not to wail.
It felt good to hurt someone as embarrassing as Silas. After a few moans, though, Silas stood upright again and grinned, which was when Carl fell forward into a fetal crouch of his own.
“You win,” he howled in mock pain, upside down while Silas’s pan-faced head moved closer. He shut his eyes. Was he okay? “I don’t know,” he whispered, wanting Silas to worry.
After a minute Carl opened his eyes to see Silas’s crotch bulging out through his briefs. His balls appeared twice their former size.
“Did that happen when you played with your cousin?” Carl said, pointing.
Silas reached down to feel. “I might should put some ice on it.”
They walked downhill. “Maybe a doctor, too,” said Silas on the trail.
“One word to your folks, and I’ll tell everyone.”
“It doesn’t hurt, it just chafes.”
“Your balls grow as you get older,” Carl said, more to reassure himself than to comfort Silas. “You’re probably just growing up.”
Back home, trying to edit, he kept losing himself in the same sentence on mountain formation. What was distracting him—his mother’s snores? She slept through plenty of afternoons. The bills? His brother Frank was paying those. The pain he’d caused? Thinking about that, he pulsed with dread. He felt like a sick pervert. Out the window he noticed that the Boyds’ car was gone. Where? The hospital. Why? His breath went shallow; he gulped down puke. Either Silas had told, or he’d succumbed before naming Carl. If the latter, the exam would show a bruise or there would be no exam. If the latter again, no one had seen the kick or someone had, everyone had, and so on until Carl heard on the TV news that, in a freak accident, a local boy had suffered testicular trauma, gone into shock, and passed away on a gurney in the ER.
For days Carl waited for the cops to come for him and find his mother’s drugs and arrest her too. He could warn Marissa to lie low, hide the pipes, but how to justify his concern? Better her in prison than him coming clean. On the fourth day he attended the funeral, so awful that he retained few memories of it later on Thistle Mountain’s survey stone, eating wild berries until the knife-blade of dread chased him from his crime scene. A mother who paid attention might have connected Carl’s behavior to Silas’s death. One naïve question and Carl might have burst into blubbery tears, told all—it would have brought such relief—but the closest Marissa came was the day he found her on the couch, the curtains wide so any passerby could see her smoking.
“I’m studying Alberta,” she said, when he went to shut them.
“What’s Mrs. Boyd doing?”
“Gardening. Was Silas your best friend?”
“We knew each other.”
“You were always climbing hills.”
“I still climb hills.”
“It’s like, here I am, and Alberta’s got energy for flowers? I never taught you about death. I’ve had friends die, but I wasn’t young, I took you to that funeral and I . . .”
She trailed off. If she’d been clean, she might have felt in Carl’s vacant shoulder-pat how anxious he had become.
“I know what death is,” he said.
“Maybe sort of, but not really.”
“Spot and Rex died.”
“You remember Spot?”
“Mom, treat me like an adult?”
“Okay,” Marissa said. Had Carl obeyed the moment’s instinct, he’d have followed her gaze out to watch the Boyds’ house like a film with her. Instead he returned to his room and drew plans for a four-story shopping mall. Sketching its soaring atrium, he was able to breathe easily. As he laid
out a zoned city around the mall, a belief crept in that he’d intended to kill Silas, so he threw himself into a more ambitious project, a megalopolis made up solely of limited-access highways. In 2000:1 scale the cloverleaves metastasized onto page after new page, crowding out thoughts. Evolution, taunted Carl’s mind in the distance, had paired Silas’s instinct for being hurt with his for hurting. He only drew. Like editing, the work was endless. If he heard a car at the Boyds’, he focused harder, and so on until August, when the principal began the welcome-back assembly with a moment of silence for their classmate who had tragically, et al.
Weighing the rhyming sounds of silence and Silas, Carl went hollow. Each school day would begin with a similar call for “a moment of silence for meditation or personal belief,” and each day plainclothes cops would observe to see which kid froze up in guilt. Blueprints wouldn’t help. Nothing would but some all-out war. Fort Leonard Wood was up the road. If China nuked that base, killing everyone, one boy’s demise would come to seem a tiny thing. Their ballistic missiles had the range. Atomic holocaust, chanted Carl’s wanting mind as other kids coaxed meaning from their friend’s demise. “It’s when you touch yourself too much.” “It’s AIDS.” They seemed as excited as they were troubled. Nodding to agree that such a death could claim no honest victim, Carl wiped out his school with hydrogen bombs, conveying to God what he wanted now that he’d given up on his mother.
In his first real memory, not a muddled glimpse but a sequence in time, Carl was four and Marissa was forty. They were eating popcorn on the carpet while reporters canoed through the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He asked, “How far is that?” and Marissa replied, “Today? I need a place of peace. What’s it called, Carl, when you can concentrate? I’m losing focus, you’d do better with your sisters, they’d cook you food, at least,” and so on, patting his head to a peculiar rhythm. He asked no further questions. He was silenced by the thought that, even as he sat beside her, he might see his mother floating across the TV, face-down in the putrid waters spilling from Lake Pontchartrain. Lighting a pipe she’d never concealed from him, she said, “Don’t tell,” as if loyalty was something he still needed to learn. For years in his nightmares they’d been carting her off to jail. Those dreams stopped when Silas died.