by Jeff Long
“I need to talk to Steck or Roper,” I told him. “Impossible,” he said, “they’re an inch away from killing the story. No one has ever heard of you, and it needed so much work. I’m doing everything possible to keep it alive.”
I wanted to at least see my manuscript. MT assured me it was safely locked away at Ascent, and besides there was no time. The magazine was going to press in a matter of weeks. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to damage our friendship, but this wasn’t right, was it?
There was no time for argument. MT left for California in the morning. We had already made plans to meet in Yosemite at the end of the month. By then, he hoped, I would understand how things work in the real world. At the month’s end, my car wouldn’t start, and I probably couldn’t have afforded the gas anyway. Ordinarily I would have sacked the trip. Not this one, though. I packed my gear and stuck out my thumb: first stop, San Francisco.
I called the Ascent office—as I recall it was Roper’s place, or was it Steck’s? They were happy to finally get a chance to meet me. One asked about my cave. I apologized for trespassing on their editorial decisions. We were all confused. Bit by bit we unraveled the mess. MT had told them I lived in a cave, and he was my only contact. They learned that MT claimed they would kill the story if I dared ask about its condition or the issue of co-authorship. They showed me my story. MT had told the truth about one thing: the magazine was about to be published. The pages were typeset and in galley form.
There stood my name in the shadow of his. I scanned the text. Except for arcane polysyllables and a few phrases, nothing had changed. My story was intact. I pointed out a dozen discrepancies, and they stopped me. It was too late and would be too expensive to change the galley. MT had won after all.
One of them produced a chair. They gave me a pencil and a cup of tea. “Change anything,” they told me. It took a few hours. My changes probably cost several hundred dollars, a huge sum to me. “Not your problem,” they said. I had circled MT’s name and moved it below mine, but didn’t want to go too far. One took the pen and crossed MT’s name out.
I met MT in the Valley. It was brief. I told him about my meeting. Outraged, as if betrayed, he ditched me. So much for a bus ride home. Hitchhiking never felt so good.
The Soloist’s Diary
...not to imply that I wish to specify the degree of pain and passion with which I die, nor the actual manner of death, nor even its approximate instant. But to control my death’s quality... to have mattered, one mute perception spanning the ages which this remote tirade against the rock has paradoxically rendered eternal, wrought in its own inconceivably lonely vast body.
Today: performed a most elegant movement. It was yesterday, I think, that I threw away all but twenty feet of rope.
Sound is the most tenuous of things: untouchable, deceiving, hiding in shadows, covering its damp tracks with echo, cacophony, history hanging on its subtle dark pallor or harmonies, a night which ridicules vision. So too I have trouble these days in hearing beauty. It is years now. All the rock is as it appears: a barrenness ending in human things with warped and mangled flesh, pale veins and tendons utterly void of strength. My nostalgia is infinite. My heritage of vacuum in the rich somber architecture of nature. My desire an impossible return.
Long ago I spoke with other wretched ones. One swore he remembered starting from waves, another from the desert. Still others mentioned primeval forests, rice terraces, lagoons; and another, a remarkable figure, yelled to me ages ago from across a crack that he had been born on the wall and was trying to find his mother somewhere high above him. I arrived by crude error and, forever, here....
I can vaguely remember starting to climb. Reduced to myths, I suffer on the rock. Various amnesias blot the tissue of my memory and deprive me of a heritage, making me into a creature of the rock. By climbing an infinite height we have created an infinite depth and our pasts have become doubtful.
But still... still it seems as if there was once a period of beginning, a time when the dead climbers seemed grotesque as they hung from the crack or became bones upon small ledges. Years of dedicated horror have eaten that innocence away. The ground is no longer visible, nor its image, and even the horizon is obscured by dense low mists. There are no sides to the wall. There is no summit, which is our first dilemma.
We climb because it’s what we did. For a long time now we’ve persuaded ourselves of our humanness by fluctuating and challenging the rock with our stifled personalities and raging diversions. There have been seasons of religious intent and seasons of ennui and of hatred. Our eyes flashed those days of flux, but the days are different now. Everything seems ancient. The days are indistinguishable from the rock and our eyes have nearly mineralized. We no longer take pride nor find pleasure in pretending. We no longer change. We simply climb.
So there was a world I knew. It consisted of the rock and the sky upon my back, of my strength, of Aaron and Gareth, of the cold nights, and water bottles and pitons, ropes, hammocks and fading things. They recede more and more. Within me I feel a far-belowness. There are caverns in me that are marvelously daubed with thick phosphorescent pigments and rich echoes, places that hide me from the wall and this gagging subjection. It is a sheer journey, a mercy of myself to myself. My mind, receptacle of images, is at once a holy strife. Half-formed characters grope their way into shimmering position. Many present moments but only one past, a darkened sanctuary.
In the mist there was nothing to see, only ashen forms a few yards distant. Unjointed shadows that faintly resembled things of the normal world existed down there. What seemed like a tree swimming before us was sometimes a tree; at others it was a thin strand of erect rock; sometimes it was nothing. Even the trees were without roots, free to wander. The outer world had disappeared. We were submerged, the brief scents, cool trees, and wet rock... without form. Only our touch was above suspicion in that place.
We edged cautiously through the forest, our huge packs looming up in perpetually slow light, with gray tails of mist gliding behind, attached to our thick, veined shoulders. Those wafting tails of mist were true ghosts, I suppose, dismal and pathetic remnants from earlier ages in nature. We felt this. They were no terrifying apparitions at all, just impotent little driftings without more purpose than to absorb all echoes, all definite perception, and all our thoughts. Everywhere we were relentlessly hung, pursuing and pursued.
We came across a tree with a patch of its bark shaved away. In the polished oval of wood there was carved a deliberate figure, a calligraphic revelation, a single character that seemed simple but was incomprehensible. I found it; it was one of the first nights. There it was suddenly, an impression, a solemn insolvent word deep in the mute forest; but as to whether there was meaning in it? Yes, I think so; but from that fossil I knew then and ever will, nothing. It was not to be the last of such scriptures.
It was a forest of petrified wood. Even the cold trees, their green needles hanging in a semblance of life, seemed forever frozen and empty of life. Petrified. Every tree stood faintly, fog-moistened and brown in the grayness. Each tree was a grotesque climax of the gloom of that place, and in a similar way the spectral birds with their dimly flashing colors increased rather than diminished the loneliness of that land. When the slight sound of their beating wings came plummeting between the trees, we weren’t raised out of the silence but only reminded of it and sunk deeper into its glaze.
Two ancient climbers were there, all rotted from aging and from the eternalness of apathy that was the fog. We were passing through the forest when suddenly we came upon them, two bent little figures squatting dwarfishly over a tiny birth of orange flame that was licking meekly at their world. There was no noise, not even spitting or crackling from the little fire. We watched them in silence, in astonishment, not knowing at all what they were. (Later we would know that they had descended while there was still a way back, an equally fatal course to take.) Both of them were clothed in rags; each had draped long scraps of old clo
th over the shoulders of their parkas, shredded and emptied of feathers, vacant and flat. Both were wearing pants heavy with mud and holes, and both were barefoot in the cold, their feet flattened, cracked like baked mud.
Standing there apart from them and their flame, I had to struggle to keep from choking, and my mouth was slack and whistling hollowly with my ruptured panting. I could hardly force air into my lungs, and I was hard at forcing it back out again. It was them and their fire; something in the separate baseness of it strangled me. There they crouched with their tangled hair wet, matted in heavy clenching nests upon their shoulders. They weren’t talking. They were just crouching intensely over the flame, absorbing its meaning, squatting under, within; possessed by the mist.
We withdrew silently and went far around their little circle with its handful of contemplated flame, away from the primality of their Neanderthal scene, away from the awfulness of their underworldness and their abysmal degeneration, and especially away from the fact of our similarity.
Gareth came to camp with a human bone nestled gingerly in his open hands. We followed him to a broken hut built of granite and rotted pine. In its shadows lay a thin skeleton half-buried, a layer of dirt covering its legs. Something in the hasty nature of its covering imparted an air of breathlessness to the scene, as though near death the man had hurriedly dipped himself into the shallow grave. We stood about looking at it for a few minutes, then Aaron and Gareth drifted away. I stayed waiting while the earthen skull stared sightlessly into the depths of the wasted ceiling. I was filled, for the few moments I contemplated the hollow sockets, with something beyond myself but soon, discerning no message, I left the sepulchral shadows and reentered the mist. Night came. We had no idea where the rock wall began. We’d searched for days in the mist, ground-bound. Now we ate our rice, carrots, onions, drank our tea. And sat by the fire.
Mosquitoes, the lips and arms of succubae, their opaque wings humming, sang at me in the darkness, luring me from my veil of smoke. But I wouldn’t leave the fire. Feeling the black air on my cold back I knew somehow that if I so much as closed my eyes to the light of the fire, the night would devour me. I could do nothing but cling to the fire. Out there was some character of the void and seemingly I was the only one of the group to sense it. I said nothing to warn Aaron and Gareth; instead I hugged the flames with my worried brow, afraid, protecting the others with my fear. I heard popping, clattering noises and whirled about to face the night. I grabbed a thick stick and mumbled hoarsely, but there was nothing. Later in the night, when the others slept, something touched my shoulder. I was instantly alert. But again it was nothing. My horror: it was far worse being touched by nothing than by any something. The nothing offered no substance, no resistant solidity to belie oblivion. I can remember that. I was new to voidness then.
We found the wall and soon after the preliminary crack. A queer beach spread out before the wall. We thought at first we’d come upon the site of some massacre or a gruesome sacrificial field. There were men lying everywhere, not in any dense abundance, but randomly scattered all about. Some were more recently dead and were only partially eaten and decomposed, others were only bone or shadow. The remains lay positioned so that we were unnerved at times when one or the other of us suddenly tripped over the hidden bones of an unexpected body. There was no predicting where to set our feet. Grass and brush were everywhere; the bodies were anywhere. We were, as children, stunned. It was my first exposure to dead bodies, and it was a grisly first. The limbs twisted in terrible directions, skulls were bashed and empty, parts missing. Tropical birds and ravens had long before settled on them and had picked away their eyes. Animals had since died and had been buried, so to speak, on the dead compost of the skeletal piles. This too I remember, how the animals fed upon and died upon a single substance.
Lying everywhere were weathered pieces of manila, nylon, refuse, words.
We should have known. They were fallen climbers. We looked up and acknowledged the rock. It was above us irregularly, and hardly visible for the mist. Gareth drew a circle in the air and pointed upward; Aaron secretively scratched a figure into the dirt. This terrible deadliness was a new dimension to climbing for all of us. In climbing we’d always known an elusive risk, but such rampant danger? We’d assumed a dignified nonchalance before in the presence of rock. Here, though, was a graveness. There are victims of accident and there are victims of something more (something of themselves). These were like so many mites shaken off an animal. Other occasions would arise in my future, occasions for my will, but by the time those sediments and springs of seeming freedom initiated balance, or ties to the earth (in apparition), I would long since have been swallowed by my choice, and circumstances would never again permit a contradiction of this. Naively I opted for the wall as I treaded its beach of grass and lost ones.
We groped about at the base of the rock wall, seeking out the proper crack to begin climbing. We knew of it but had no method of finding it. It was in fact merely a climber’s tale that had fertilized our venture. The vague rumor of an unclimbable wall... but we could see nothing for the mist. Nevertheless, from the root of the abruptly rising rock we could sense that it was a huge wall, and too that it was occupied. From the base it was an empty slab, no sight or sound coming down, yet we could easily feel its population. We put our hands to the rock and knew that somewhere above us were other climbers touching its glabrous angles.
For two days we wandered along the base of the wall, searching for the primary crack, craning our heads back to stare upward into the mist and to imagine the great wall. Amidst the scree, the congestion of dead shattered things slowly grew. That afternoon we were touching the crack. It was horrible. There was a cozy simplicity then, sanctioned by such a mass above us, an unseen thing. There was no drama in the beginning. We were unsure of everything and had set no regimen for the ascent. We inserted our pins into the crack and ascended. And there upon the rock was the vision of the outside. Everywhere were dead climbers and climber’s things. Ropes hung from hanging bodies. The sky was rock.
Scarcely above the thickest of the mists appeared immense, inverted platforms of granite that blocked our sight upward and looked impassable. We had never encountered anything like it before. The entire wall just changed direction and flattened out as an endless ceiling, a panoply. That they are territorial gates which allow progression but no descent is possibly the greatest factor that traps us here on the wall, but something more prevents us from even attempting to retrace our path to reach the ground again. We took several months to sew our way across the ceilings and can never retreat. The roofs composed an agglomeration of hundreds of down-vaulting rotten bulges and overhanging crumbling dihedrals requiring innumerable fixed anchors. Had we been able to see through the mist before starting, we would have witnessed this catastrophe of nature: a flat, horizontal wall thousands of yards above the ground, extending along a parallel over the forest for miles, with nothing to suggest that the entire colossus shouldn’t topple as a mountain in itself to Earth. Its confusion is indescribable; my accounts have oftentimes been discounted by Aaron, and his by Gareth, for we each formed perspectives and fears of the overhangs, none the same, none even consistent within themselves. There were, hanging from the rock, thousands of geometries which we had to skirt, but there were so many and they were so varied. Forms seemed to recur as we wove about beneath baffling plates of rock, doubting our paramnesias. The filaments of color, the membranes that laced the ceiling like wafers, were static, but their effect was disturbingly animate. As we negotiated the stone roofs, we were closed upon by the rock. As soon as the last man had finished cleaning the pitch, we would look back in the direction from which we’d come and would know we were lost backwards, that we could only move by ascending, by going outward. We had come out of a myth, an elder Earth, and felt wrongly, fatefully, about it from the instant we were suspended.
Then one early gray dawn we could see the ending of the roofs, and we perceived a summit awaiting us
over the rim. Before the ground below disappeared, I was struck by a last real vertigo while surmounting what we thought to be the last of a seventy-day wall-roof. I was on the pitch leading. I mantled onto a long and wide cup of amber flakes, but as I did so I was confronted by two tiny, insane things. They were crack animals such as we ate, but something in their extra-familiarity was abnormal. One opened its beak and shrilled at me, its black tongue lapping vilely. I backed away, one hand on the wall for balance. Wildly they sprung about, in a frenzy at my trespass. They were just crack animals, no larger than my hand, smaller than many I’ve killed, yet they had me backed against the rock. I went to my knees and began swatting at them, swinging my free hand at them with a fierceness to balance my fright. But they came on anyway. Their insistence was all the more intimidating; I’d never before had a crack animal chasing me, always they only hid. They pattered about in little circles, striving to drive me off their world. By chance I tapped one with my fingers and the creature was lifted up and across the lip of the basin. It shrilled feebly, then sank away. The other paid no heed and that one too, as light as a pebble, was caught with a swipe of my hand. It fell and I watched. And for the first time, still spastic from their miniature aggressions, I realized something of what was meant by my height. The yawning panorama had absorbed them valuelessly.
Suddenly I understood what danger I was in. Hitherto believing I had escaped by climbing apart from the world, I was reprimanded with sickness for having diluted a truth; there can be no escape from the ground, it would say, that womb, that voracious pit all spread out below in mocking. I froze and dizzied, became faint and desperate for solidity. I wanted the reassuring pressure of something firm against my body. I wanted total security of compassion in matter. I fell onto my belly, but as I lay prostrate it seemed my back might somehow betray me, perhaps fall and pull me with it. I clutched deeper and unhappier into the slight turf of the basin, then carefully, very slowly, I rolled onto my back. Crossing my arms over my chest, I cautiously looked into the sky, but it was all empty, depthless too, full of content (its blueness) but barren even of cloud, a formless form. I lay pinned hysterically on a platform in the thin mist, a last dream before the rock became the sky and the earth disappeared behind me and under my body, in both directions and backwards. I closed my eyes and lay miserably on my back, throbbing with wild intuitions of the hungry earth and the hungry sky absorbing me into its granitic eternity. We began coming upon decaying parchment fragments like chronicled flotsam on the rock. Folded or tucked into old haul bags, or tied within pieces of plastic that hung from the wall, we usually found these mementos in some isolated spot, rarely in the company of other journals. The dead men presumably preferred it that way.