The Ascent (7 page)

Something flashed within me, sending a jolt of adrenaline coursing through my system like a fire through an old warehouse. I kicked it into high gear and matched Andrew inch for inch. Together we pulled the cliff down into the earth and brought the summit closer to our fingertips.

“You’ve got … a lot of willpower,” Andrew breathed.

Beside him, I said, “What’s the matter? Can’t you keep up?”

“I’m keeping up … just fine …”

Gritting my teeth, my fingers growing numb, I advanced up the face of the cliff but could not outdistance him. Goddamn it.

“Takes … a man … to make it to the top,” Andrew said.

“I know what it takes,” I growled. My arms quivered; my muscles ached. Still, I climbed. “Would it be too much of a cliché … to have me beat you to … the top?”

“Never … happen,” Andrew wheezed. Amazingly, he began to climb harder and faster, leaving me in his wake. It was almost preternatural. He clambered up the side of the cliff, issuing grunts and groans as his muscles surrendered under the strain.

I refused to surrender. I pushed myself, feeling the burn throughout my body, that great warehouse conflagration no longer a detriment but rather a source of energy—
use the pain
. I could see nothing but the top of the cliff just a few feet above: my goal.

“Shit,” Andrew groaned.

We both climbed over the cliff at exactly the same time. My heart like a jackhammer in my chest, I didn’t pause to collect my breath. I scrambled quickly to my feet and, like lightning arching toward the earth from a bank of clouds, tore out across the grassy plateau toward the opposite end of the cliff.

Andrew was right beside me, his bare feet smashing potholes in the dirt. He let loose his linen shirt, which was lifted by the wind and carried out across the bay. I peeled off my T-shirt and tossed it into oblivion, still running. Our finish line was the opposite end of the plateau; the winner would be the first to sail over the abyss. I pushed harder, passing him. The bastard might be able to beat me in climbing, but he wasn’t going to outrun me. Not by a long shot—

“Coming up on you, Overleigh!” He suddenly appeared beside me, a locomotive of white, ghostly flesh, his legs pumping like pistons through the reeds.

I could feel the sweat freezing on my skin, could feel the icy pull of tears trailing across my temples. The edge of the cliff rushed to meet me. With one final strain—a grunt, a childlike cry—I leapt over the edge just milliseconds before Andrew. Arms flailing, legs cycling through the air, I gulped down fresh oxygen and held it in as the frigid waters rushed up at breakneck speed to swallow me whole.

An hour before daylight, I climbed into bed beside Hannah.

“Hmm,” she moaned softly.

“He’s a strange guy,” I said.

“Are you talking to me?” Her voice was groggy with sleep. “Are you some stranger in my bed talking to me?”

I rolled over and kissed up and down her ribs, her neck. Hannah told me I smelled like the ocean, and I promised her that I’d already showered.

“Just how friendly were you two in college, anyway?” I asked after a while.

“Who? Andrew?”

“Who else?”

“In other words, you’re asking if we slept together?”

“I would consider that pretty friendly, yes.”

“I thought you were stronger than that.”

“What does that mean?”

She groaned. “Why do men always insist on dredging up the past?”

That was answer enough.

1

SHAKING. TEARFUL. I AWOKE ON A MATTRESS

sodden with sweat. The weight of my body, coupled with my perspiration, had cultivated a sinking Tim-shaped pit at the center of my mattress. The tiny bedroom seemed to close in all around me, making it difficult to breathe. For a split second, just before my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I swore I could see Hannah floating on the ceiling, her white cotton gown—the type of gown I’d imagined since childhood all the angels of heaven to wear—rippling along the ceiling like the sails of a ship.

2

“I’D LIKE YOU TO SEE SOMEONE.” SAID MARTA.

A marimba band performed on the beach, and in the early spring evening, the sound carried all the way up to my apartment. I walked out onto the balcony, a Dewar’s and water in my hand, and watched them. Despite the mild temperature, I was sweating through my work clothes, which were powdered with dust. The April breeze did very little to cool me off.

Marta appeared in the doorway, arms folded. “Are you even listening to me?”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“This is not the apartment of a healthy man.”

I continued watching the marimba band for a while, though my mind was on the aborted creation in my living room: a statue that was not fully a statue, a creature that refused to be brought to life. I’d spent months trying to summon my old talent, but it had proven futile. And the futility led to self-loathing. In the intervening months, I’d grown to despise Andrew Trumbauer for shipping me the hunk of granite; what had no doubt been a thoughtful gift had in my own brain been bastardized into a snide, deliberate mockery—Andrew’s way of pointing out my weaknesses. I was unable to create—had been since Hannah’s death—and that half-assed abortion in my living room was the proof.

Disgusted, I gulped down the last bit of bourbon, then chucked the tumbler onto the beach. It didn’t disrupt the marimba band, but a few kids who’d gathered around to listen to the music glared at me as if I were Count Dracula sizing them up from the parapets of my castle.

I heard Marta sigh and stomp back inside. I followed her, rubbing my bleary eyes with the heels of my hands. She gathered her purse from the sofa and tossed an empty McDonald’s cup into the trash.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” she said, a harsh finality to her voice.

“You can’t break up with me,” I told her. “We aren’t even dating.”

“I can’t keep seeing you like this. It’s breaking my heart, and you won’t do anything to fix the problem.”

“So what do you recommend I do?”

“Get the fuck out of this apartment and start living again.” She gestured toward the statue in progress. “This … thing … isn’t living. You’re stunting yourself. I never met Hannah and don’t know a damn thing about her, but if you’re going to—”

“Stop it,” I said.

“What happened to her? Tell me what happened.”

“No.”

“Well, whatever it was, you need to get over it. Unless you want to die in this apartment.” She shook her head. “You need to let go.”

“Stop,” I said again, though there was little force in my voice.

“You
stop,” she said, softening, and leaned in to kiss my cheek.
“You
stop. Okay? Or you’ll die, too.”

As she reached for the doorknob, I said, “It’s my fault she died. We were married, and I was too caught up in my career to give her what she needed. I felt the marriage breaking apart, but for whatever reason I didn’t try to stop it. So she left. She met a linguistics professor named David Moore, and they went to Italy. Then their car drove off the road and crashed. They were both killed.” The words had come from my mouth like a locomotive; I hardly took a breath.

Marta’s hand never left the doorknob. Finally she turned toward me. There was concern in her eyes, and her eyebrows were stitched together. She looked like she wanted to cry, but she was too strong for that. It suddenly occurred to me that I was the weak one. “That is not your fault.”

“It doesn’t matter what you say. You can’t change how I feel.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

After she left, I tore the kitchenette apart looking for alcohol, but there was none to be found. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shape move, but when I turned to look at it, there was nothing there except the refrigerator.

I stepped into the living room, where the hunk of granite stood, chunks of stone littering the floor, while powdered debris coated every available surface. I took a deep breath, inhaling the stone-dust particles that floated like motes in the air, and studied the unfinished sculpture.

The body was recognizable as female, but the face looked nothing like Hannah’s. The cheekbones were too high, too sharp, andthe brow was too dramatic and severe, almost Cro-Magnon. I’d spent the entire winter hammering and chiseling away at the stone, whittling it down to the framework of some unidentifiable woman. Looking at it, I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach. There had been a time when in a single afternoon I could have taken a hammer and chisel to a lump of rock and carved fucking Mount Rushmore.

But it wasn’t just the sculpture. It was Hannah, too. Because lately I saw her everywhere. It had become so constant that I started to doubt my sanity. Once, hustling down the stairwell of my apartment building, I thought I heard her laugh. I paused and stared up through the spiral mesh of stairs and caught a glimpse of someone retreating over the balustrade—a woman, no doubt. Hannah.

She was also in my apartment, and there was no getting around that. At night I would wake up to the sensation of her arm slipping around my waist or the feeling of her warm breath against the nape of my neck. These things were enough to drive a man crazy.

Maybe I was going crazy …

A poor diet and a constant urge to jog through the streets of Annapolis caused me to lose considerable weight. And while I felt stronger and healthier than I had in a long time, I could simultaneously sense something rotting away inside me. I couldn’t blame Marta’s reluctance to hang around; I had become a shadow of myself.

Disgusted by the sculpture, I laced on some tennis shoes and went downstairs to the lobby to retrieve my mail. I rifled through the stack of standard bills, advertisements, and requests for donations. Only one letter stood out—in a plain white business envelope, the return address somewhere in Australia. It was from Andrew Trumbauer. The envelope was weathered and scuffed. Someone had stamped his boot across its front; the impression of the sole was clear, a formulaic matrix of clovers and wavy lines.

Just seeing Andrew’s name with the return address was enough to cause something small and wet to roll over in my stomach.

I carried the mail over to the Filibuster, where I ordered a glass of scotch and occupied the same booth Andrew and I had sat in eight months earlier. I drank the scotch, getting up to go to the bathroom three times before the drink was finished, my hands shaking, my face flush with fever. My reflection in the spotty bathroom mirror was gaunt and terminal, and I thought about a book I’d once read about a man waking up on a city bus with no memory. Suddenly I prayed for no memory, but I couldn’t stop picturing that old motorcar driving off the cliff, David behind the wheel, Hannah in the passenger seat …

I had two more drinks before I opened Andrew’s letter. It was written in the same childlike handwriting he had used in the note that had accompanied the hunk of granite months earlier.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

Included with the letter was an airplane ticket to Kathmandu.

1

THE AIRPLANE TOUCHED DOWN AT TRIBHUVAN

International Airport in Kathmandu after a connecting flight in London followed by several hours of nauseating turbulence. I tried to sleep, but it was useless. I’d only accomplished the type of half-sleep that recalled my days of falling asleep at my desk in high school, where every sound around me was incorporated into my dreams and boiled down to nonsense.

After the plane had landed and I gathered my bags, I hopped on a tram that climbed through brown villages. From every direction, I could see the mountains, enormous and capped in bluish snow. It was early November, and the villages were celebrating the Hindu versions of Christmas—Dashain and Tihar, according to the magazine article I read on the plane. We passed through Kathmandu, and I was slightly disappointed to learn it was a small city just like most small cities around the world, corrupted by industry and modernization. There didn’t appear to be anything magical or spiritual about it.

I hadn’t spoken with Andrew since our chance meeting at the Filibuster. However, approximately one month after I’d received the airline ticket, another letter bearing Andrew’s name appeared in the mail.

This time the return address was from Miami, and the letter itself was more detailed. Andrew outlined the items I was to bring and included a few hand-drawn maps of the surrounding villages and the name of the lodge where I’d be staying. He had already booked my room.

At first, his presumption provoked in me a childish stubbornness, and I quickly became resolute—I would not go on the damn trip. I couldn’t just pick up and leave everything behind on a whim, could I? Yet despite this determination, I never threw away the airline ticket or the follow-up letter.

By midsummer, the apartment was suffocating me. I couldn’t finish the sculpture, and Hannah’s ghost had become unrelenting. The first week in August, I couldn’t get the smell of Hannah’s perfume out of the place. I even had it fumigated, which seemed to do the trick for two days … until that aromatic lilac smell crept through the walls and soaked into the furniture. By that time, Marta was long gone; her refusal to set foot in my apartment was steadfast, although I would meet her occasionally for lunch at the City Dock Café. I told her about the smells and how it was becoming hard to breathe in the apartment. I told her, too, about Andrew Trumbauer and the airline ticket to Nepal.

“Is there any doubt what you should do?” she told me one afternoon. We were at the café, eating club sandwiches and knocking back mimosa after mimosa. “You once lived for this sort of thing.”

“My leg,” I offered.

“Is healed. It’s been over a year. And you’re out running five, six miles a day. Physically you’re in good shape. Mentally, though …” She rolled her shoulders, and her small, pink tongue darted out to nab the teardrop of mayonnaise at the corner of her mouth.