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.