by Adam Ross
“Instead,” Will went on, “I’m going to walk around this whole dorm, along this ledge. And if this ends with my falling to my death, you’re going to have to concede, obviously, and you’re going to have to tell everyone the version I prefer, which is that I told you I’d kill myself and then went and did it. This guarantees my legendary status at our beloved alma mater. It puts me up there with Patricia Wilkes and that guy who fell off the catwalk at Main last year and Dave Hendrick’s three-day acid trip. What do you say?”
“I say you’re on.”
Will stood up and retied his shoelaces in double knots, then looked at Casey and said, “I’ll be back,” as if he were an astronaut going out for a pack of cigarettes.
“Whatever.” Casey shrugged, though I could tell she was too afraid to look.
“You don’t have to do this,” Alyssa said. “Really. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” She was too scared to understand the exchange that had just occurred. I found her lack of perception as insufferable as Casey’s anxiety for Will, and a sudden feeling of loneliness gusted through me so powerfully I shivered.
“No,” he said, “it’s not.”
He stepped over the fire escape and, with his right hand holding the railing and right foot still on the grate, placed his left foot onto the ledge. He turned away from us, then ran his left palm along the building’s face, finding a hold and pinching the brick. He pressed his cheek to the wall and paused for a moment, making some sort of inner adjustment of his body’s ballast and a preparatory twist of the ball of his left foot. When he stepped off the fire escape, his whole right side was momentarily suspended over space until he closed onto the wall, his arms outstretched and his legs wide apart, looking as though he’d been splayed against the building by a giant.
He began to move, and it was like watching a starfish advance along the sea floor, his legs and arms active but the rest of his body still, every inch he gained along this horizontal path rippling from left foot to calf to thigh to buttock, from left hand to wrist to arm to shoulder, then expanding out to his right side. Like Will, we forgot about the height out of necessity and were transfixed by his concentration—too focused to be scared. He paused at the window ledge where he’d broken into the room earlier, a stop that appeared to be a physical relief to him, what with its various handholds, easy to negotiate by comparison to moving across the building’s face. He soon resumed, going through the same act of maintaining his balance. After several breathless minutes, he arrived at the building’s corner—a stage that required serious consideration—and in a fluid, confident move stepped out of our view.
Alyssa, Casey, Manion, and I looked at one another like we’d just seen someone blip out of existence, then laughed giddily and ran inside.
We began, singly or in pairs, sometimes as a foursome, to follow Will’s progress around the building. We went from dorm room to dorm room as he advanced along the perimeter, all of them unlocked and empty since everyone had bolted after the fire alarm, catching glimpses of him as he slid past the windows or waiting two rooms ahead, throwing open the panes and rooting him on. At other moments we just watched silently as he passed, then raced out and barreled into another room. Will moved very slowly, resting for minutes at a time, and certain parts of his journey were dicier than others. At these points we’d separate into pairs, to get a look at where he was stuck or do reconnaissance for any upcoming obstacles—potted plants or empty beer bottles—and call out to one another from our different stations when his position seemed particularly precarious. We were like a bike racer’s support team, and as Will rounded the second corner in his Spider-Man crawl he gained confidence and speed.
I was waiting in a room several yards from his position when Casey slid up behind me, pressed her hips into mine, and stuck both her hands in my front pockets. “Find me later,” she whispered, kissing the back of my neck.
“Where?”
“I’ll sleep in my own room tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
She turned me around. She took clumps of my hair in her hands and fed on my mouth, sucking on my top lip, biting it. I grabbed hold of her jeans at the waist and pulled her into me and she climbed up my body, hooking her ankles behind my knees and wrapping her arms around my neck, and we stood there like a circus act. She was surprisingly strong and she seemed keenly satisfied to have climbed me. We kissed once more before she jumped off me, and there was Will at the soot-dark window, either staring at us or—like Casey during sex—focused inward, assessing the state of his body’s endurance and balance, working out problems I was neither privy to nor able to understand. He didn’t react as if he’d seen us, but he was right there, and the sight of him made my heart jump.
We continued around the rooms as Will approached the home stretch, across the back of the building and around the final corner. “Holy shit,” Casey said, in a tone that pained me, “that son of a bitch is going to do it.” She and Alyssa barreled out the door to the fire escape. Manion and I were alone for a moment in the last room that Will would pass. We could hear the girls cheering outside. “You can do it, Will,” they screamed. “You’re almost there.”
“I can’t top that,” Manion said, smiling and shaking his head, his appreciation palpable. “I just can’t.”
Then he joined the girls on the fire escape.
I watched Will through his last window. The pane was open, so I could’ve touched him, even given him a little push. Or I could’ve reached out and held him by the belt, told him the game was over, that Manion had conceded, and helped him climb inside. But games have their own momentum, and I didn’t do any of these things before the end, though I want to fast-forward and talk about what became of everyone before I get to that. This is a story about college, after all, and like most people I check the class notes in my alumnae quarterly to see who’s doing what, if for no other reason than to compare my life to theirs and get a sense of my place in what feels like a race, even if it isn’t one. So:
Alyssa Richardson became a neurosurgeon specializing in hemispherectomy, an astonishing procedure used to treat severely epileptic children. The storming half of the brain is disconnected from its healthy counterpart, or in some cases even removed. These are performed only on the very young, when the organ is most plastic and the remaining hemisphere can take over the tasks of its darkened opposite. It gives patients something resembling a normal life, and I imagine her brother’s condition could be said to have inspired this breakthrough. She married her prior boyfriend, and they’re the proud parents of Leslie, five, and Danny, three. E-mail her at [email protected] or friend her on Facebook.
Casey Connor went into marketing. She married Manny Swift, MIT ’85, who made a fortune in the midnineties developing web-streaming technologies. They had two boys, Will and Toby, and were living quite happily in San Francisco until Casey had an affair with Manny’s business partner (I got this part through the grapevine). So it seems she needed to repeat the sort of episode that I had the pleasure of being part of years ago but never got close enough to understand. Casey currently lives in Atlanta; she’s a junior VP at Coca-Cola and apparently doing her best to boost their falling stock price. I’m sure she’d love to hear from anyone in the class of ’87.
Johnny Manion became a successful commodities trader. He married Alicia Febliss and had four children in quick succession, barely a year apart. He was on the eighty-ninth floor of Two World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11. He and three associates immediately decided to evacuate and urged their colleagues to join them, but they were ignored. Some of them had been through the ’93 bombing, and they considered this a false alarm. Manion’s group took the stairs to their terminus at the sky lobby on the forty-fourth floor, and here they wavered, along with people from offices on other floors who were also uncertain what to do. The mood was upbeat, borderline anarchic, like a high school fire drill. Manion’s team decided to return to work, crossed to the
other elevator bank, and again Manion hesitated, watching with a sense of dread while the car filled up. He boarded last, just as the doors closed and the second plane hit. The impact ejected his group from the elevator but sent the remaining passengers plummeting to their deaths when the fireball instantly melted the cables. He quit trading immediately afterward and now practices Chinese medicine, something he’d always dreamed of but never had the guts to do.
As for me, I became a writer, and every job I’ve ever held or choice I’ve ever made has been ancillary to this task. This means I’m free to embellish, to treat memory as fact or shape it to suit whatever I’m working on. My primary responsibility, I suppose, is to set you dreaming. If that requires me to alter things, then I will, though I can’t change what follows because it’s true:
Will fell. This was, as he predicted, a legendary tragedy at my college and a defining moment in my life. There he was—a moving, life-sized X—just a few feet away from me, then he stumbled over a gargoyle and disappeared. The fire department turned around and came back to campus, the police questioned all four of us, and Alyssa, Manion, Casey, and I received counseling for the rest of the semester. Will’s parents sued the hell out of our beloved alma mater, where nowadays when you open a window onto a fire escape an alarm will sound.
You see, it turns out that Will was wrong about defining moments. We don’t invent them; they happen to us. And I think about that night all the time. That was the night I woke up. For the first time in my life, I started to feel whole. Because from that night forward, as often as possible, I began asking myself: What are you doing? This isn’t to say I necessarily do the right thing. It just means that I can’t say I didn’t think about it. That it can be a beautiful autumn evening, and the best or worst day you’ve ever known, and it doesn’t matter. That given a minuscule ledge or a length of rope, you can contrive your own death, whether you meant to or not.
In the Basement
We were at Nicholas and Maria’s house, watching the video of their ultrasound. They’d decided they didn’t want to know the sex of the baby before it was born, so the technician had edited the tape for them. But Maria was finishing her residency in internal medicine, so perhaps there were clues in the image only she could see, something about the shape of the fetus’s winking heart that indicated a girl, or a rhythm to the dusty blood flow that revealed a boy. If she guessed, she didn’t let on. She serenely watched it, as if conducting a conversation with her child, cataloging all the secrets and stories she would tell, the bedside songs she would sing, the mistakes she might prevent. We sat in their living room. It was winter in Nashville and we’d had a week of snow. It was snowing even now. In the mornings I woke to a world of uniform grayness, the trees on the powdered hills bristly and charred, the sky as colorless as the screen in front of us.
I found the ultrasound disturbing. I’d never seen one before and the unborn child seemed to me a mutant creature, barely human. The figure was so striated that it was like looking at the fossil of an embryo, as if the fetus was carved out of bone. It lay at the base of a cone of light, feet up, hands curled near its mouth. When it moved you could see ribs fanning along the axis of its spine, reminding me of the sinuous skeletons of snakes. As the technician moved the probe over Maria’s belly, orbiting the child, the image took on a funhouse-mirror quality, the baby’s face suddenly elongated like a Munch painting, its eyes two enormous dotted sockets, its head distinguishable as two separate interlocking parts: jaw attached to skull, skull arching over the eyes like a centurion’s helmet.
“That’s the brain plate,” Maria explained. The fetus seemed to stare out at us from the television, then twitched convulsively and came to rest again.
Nicholas said he thought it was a boy. He sat on the couch next to my wife, Carla. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen, and when he said this he stuck out his hand and gestured, laughing. “It is,” he insisted, as if it were self-evident, as if proclaiming it made it so. “Look at it,” he said. “Look at him.” And suddenly I saw a clear resemblance to Nicholas in the protruding brow, the discretely prominent chin, the distance from the mouth to the eyes suggesting the same small nose that Nicholas had. And I thought, Of course it’s a boy. Of course Nicholas would exercise his will even over Maria’s womb. And of course Maria would have a son when she needed a daughter—an ally against Nicholas and this life in which he surrounded and enclosed her.
“Let’s turn this off,” he said after a while.
“All right,” Maria said, picking up the remote to pause the tape. The image of the creature-child hung there, frozen.
We were at that point after dinner when it isn’t clear what to do next. Carla got up to get more wine. Maria cleared some plates and followed her to the kitchen, even though Carla had told her to stay put. Nicholas and I had to get up from our seats in order to let them out of the room. He and Maria had long ago outgrown this dank little place, a nondescript brick duplex, but Nicholas hadn’t had a job in almost two years. He was eight years into his philosophy doctorate, struggling to complete a dissertation on the pre-Socratics that he’d never been able to explain to me. They couldn’t afford to move on Maria’s salary alone. To compensate, Nicholas had made all sorts of home improvements. In the living room he’d installed a bike rack hung from the ceiling. For all their books, he’d run track shelving on the adjacent wall. In the kitchen he’d erected a wooden countertop over their washer and dryer, a contraption that folded open on hinges, the machines half visible beneath it like a pair of caged animals. Above their bed he’d wired a pair of reading lights into the walls and built floating shelves into the corners so they could squeeze in the largest mattress possible. Most ingenious was the changing station he’d fashioned in the closet of the nursery, a table that slid out like a keyboard plate with storage for diapers and blankets in the drawers below. Their place reminded me of a nuclear bunker—a testament to Nicholas’s insistence on using every inch of space they had. (He’d worked construction to pay for college tuition but now—with a child on the way and an unborn dissertation—he wasn’t doing anything.) Despite all this, there was no room in the apartment for a Christmas tree, so they’d hung a wreath over Maria’s small piano and stood all their cards below it.
One of them caught my eye, and Nicholas noticed me staring.
“She’s drop-dead, isn’t she?”
It was a photograph of a husband and wife and their two young children, a boy and a girl, the family on a beach somewhere luxurious, though nothing captured your attention like the woman. She was incredibly beautiful.
Nicholas smiled. “Ever seen two uglier kids?”
Their homeliness was as remarkable as their mother’s beauty. I looked at the card again. It was a pleasure to be able to stare at the woman so unabashedly. She had long, curly brown hair, blue eyes so pale they seemed lit from within.
The girls returned. When Maria noticed which photograph I was looking at she said “Oh” and tucked her chin into her neck. “That’s Lisa.”
“Tell them the story about Lisa,” Nicholas said.
“You tell them.”
“No, you tell it.”
Maria sat down gingerly, adjusting her skirt. Then she looked at her chest and brushed herself off, as if she were covered in crumbs. “I don’t know where to start,” she said.
“Start at the beginning. At school.”
Maria reached over to the table, picked up her wineglass, took a sip, and put it down. Marx and Weber, their two German shepherds, squeezed past the coffee table and curled themselves neatly around her feet, having grown noticeably more protective during her pregnancy. She bent forward to pet them, then leaned back in her chair.
“Lisa,” she said, “was my best friend in college. We became close when we were sophomores in chemistry, and we shared an apartment together our senior year, the year that Nicholas and I met. She was gorgeous, just like you see her now, but I don’t know, she seemed even more so then. Do you agree with that?”
Nicholas shrugged. He ran his palm across his short black hair. When we met them two years ago, he wore it long, down to his shoulders, but now he cut it himself. He was half Russian and a quarter Cherokee, with Asian eyes and the full lips of a Mongol. He’d played football in college, and his body still had some of that absurd mass.
“Go on,” he said.
“She was also brilliant. No, that’s not even right. She was one of the most intelligent and creative people I’ve ever met. She was a big star in the English department and a dual major in biology. She could paint, too, and didn’t she come to school on a dance scholarship?”
Nicholas nodded.
Maria took another sip of wine. “Anyway, when you were around her you couldn’t help but think how nice it must be to have unlimited options in life. And yet you couldn’t hate her or be jealous—at least I couldn’t—because she was so kind. She was good. She was good, wasn’t she?” she said to the dogs. They lifted their heads, waited, then put them down and sighed. “She had nothing to be afraid of,” Maria said. “I remember that fall we were all talking about what we were going to do with ourselves next, and Lisa had all sorts of glamorous plans—teach English in Japan, work for Doctors Without Borders, go to Africa for the UN. And I supported anything she suggested without question because somehow I needed her to do something spectacular.” She looked at Carla. “Does that make sense?”
Carla had lit a cigarette. She’d opened the window by her to spare us the smoke. “Absolutely it makes sense,” she said.