The Ascent

Chapter 3

1

Three months after our chance meeting at

the Filibuster, I received a package from Andrew. It arrived in a wooden crate the size of a footlocker, delivered by two burly men wearing harnesses and fatigues. It was early November, but the men glistened with sweat, both of them panting in synchrony while I signed their clipboard. I felt obligated to offer them each a glass of water. They accepted without hesitation, and I listened to the click sounds their throats made as they drained their glasses in about three seconds flat.

“She’s a heavy mother,” said one of the men. He had a deep scar along one side of his black face, the skin itself looking like the coagulated film atop pudding that’s been sitting out too long. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. There didn’t appear to be a return address on the little slip that came with the crate nor anywhere on the crate itself.

“Thanks for the water,” the man with the scar said, and they both plodded out of the apartment, leaving the door open.

I shut the door and scrounged around the hallway closet for my largely unused toolbox. I located it buried beneath a mound of winter coats but frowned upon opening it. Unless I was able to coax the wooden crate open with a few thumbtacks and a bunch of old washers,

I was out of luck.

Like a lion stalking prey, I circled the crate, wondering what could be inside. My leg was fully healed, and I’d ditched both the wheelchair and the crutches long ago, but I swore I felt a twinge of pain in my left leg. It was a dull ache—nothing serious but enough to remind me of what had happened in the past year.

It occurred to me that I had my old sculpting equipment in my bedroom closet. I hadn’t messed around with that stuff since I’d given up sculpting—since Hannah’s death—and I’d all but forgotten about it. But sure enough, as I climbed a footstool and pawed through the cluttered mass of old books, blank VHS tapes, a pair of Adidas running shoes, and threadbare sweaters, I located the hammer and chisel.

A moment later, I stood like some mythological god before the crate with my hammer and chisel—God of Lame Legs, perhaps—and located a seam in the wood. I drove the chisel into it and heard the wood stress. Then I brought the hammer down on the chisel’s hilt, driving it deeper. The wood split. I felt a stupid, childish enthusiasm overtake me.

After a few more strikes of the hammer, the front panel fell away from the crate. Styrofoam popcorn spilled out and pooled around my feet in a cascade. What stood inside the crate caused me to blink, as if to realign my vision.

It was a massive chunk of granite, a perfect rectangle, perhaps three feet high and two feet wide and at least eighteen inches deep. The granite was dark brown, speckled with glittering mica and textured, multicolored stone.

There was a piece of pale blue stationery folded once over and taped to the hunk of stone. I plucked it off and unfolded it. A single sentence, inked in a child’s undisciplined handwriting, read:

Never take your talent for granite.

It took me a few seconds to realize the initials stood for Andrew Trumbauer—a connection I would have never made had I not seen him only three months earlier and because something about him and our chance meeting still resonated with me.

Two days later, when Marta stopped by for our ritualistic evening of board games and movies, the hunk of stone was still in the middle of my apartment, three-fourths of the wooden crate surrounding it. Though I’d attempted to clean up the spilled Styrofoam popcorn, there were many pieces on the floor, some having been flattened by the treads of my sneakers.

“What in the world is this?” she marveled, peeking into the crate with her hands on her knees.

“It grew there,” I said, “straight up through the floor.” “Tim …”

“Okay. Then would you believe a bunch of elves delivered it in the night?” I didn’t know why I was being difficult. Perhaps I just didn’t want to talk about Andrew Trumbauer. Because to talk of him was to talk about Hannah George, and Marta Cortez knew nothing about my wife except for the fact that she’d once existed.

Suddenly I saw elation fill her eyes. She all but clasped her hands over her chest. “Tell me this means you’re sculpting again.”

I went into the kitchen and poured Maker’s Mark into two tumblers, then added some sour mix. I stirred both drinks with my finger.

“An old friend of mine mailed it to me,” I said finally, returning and handing Marta her drink.

“I can’t tell when you’re being serious anymore.”

“I’m serious. It showed up two days ago.”

“Two days?” She looked incredulous. “And it’s just been … sitting here?”

“It’s a giant slab of rock. I’m not really sure where to put something like that in a tiny apartment without fucking with the feng shui.”

“What kind of friend mails you a hunk of rock?”

“One who’s both independently wealthy and overly eccentric.”

“Interesting.” She grinned. “Is he single?”

“He’s not your type.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s probably off in Uganda for the next six months.”

She rolled her shoulders and sipped her drink. “You know I don’t like to be smothered.”

I stood beside her, studying the slab of stone. “I just need to figure out how to get this thing out of here.”

“I’m assuming it was sent to you for a reason.”

“Is that right?”

“So you’d start working again.”

“My sabbatical is over in the spring.”

“Not that work.”

Still gazing at the stone, I said, “Maybe I’ll call the college art department, have them pick it up. I might get tenured for a donation this big.”

But by the following Wednesday, with midweek ennui settling around me, I found myself seated on a stool before the column of granite. I’d liberated it from its crate. Together, we stood in the center of the living room, a crystalline frost building up against the windows, my hammer in one hand, my chisel in the other. I sat staring at it, locked in unspoken dialogue with this ridiculous chunk of rock in my living room. The top of the column was buffed flat and smooth. It could be a podium for a potted plant, an art deco stand for a decorative vase. It could be anything, and I needn’t touch it at all. Not at all.

With a single stroke, I hammered off one corner of the slab. A spark flickered, and the triangular cut dropped to the floor and bounded under the sofa. The muscles in my arms felt weak; the

strike, which by no means had been forceful, reverberated through the marrow in my bones. I laughed.

2

I WAS TWENTY-SIX AND ON MY HONEYMOON WITH

Hannah in San Juan when I met Andrew Trumbauer. It was our third day on the beach, and Hannah and I had just finished snorkeling and were laid out on towels in the sand when Andrew came out of the sea. I paid him no attention at first, but as he drew nearer, I saw something akin to a skeletal smile break across his face, causing the corners of his mouth to push his cheeks into sharp points. There was something radiant about him, a confidence in his walk. He headed directly for us.

“Holy shit,” said Hannah. I thought I could see this strange man mouthing the same words at the same time, as if Hannah were providing the soundtrack of his voice. “I don’t believe it.”

Andrew’s shadow fell across us, and he dripped water on my legs. He carried a mesh bag of dog biscuits used to feed the fish when snorkeling, and I couldn’t turn away from his grin. His teeth looked preternaturally bright.

“Andrew!” Hannah shouted, bouncing off the towel and into his arms. She was laughing hysterically as she kissed him quickly on the cheek—a jab, really—and beamed over at me. “This is totally insane!”

“Indeed,” I commented, not knowing what I was required to say. “My head is spinning.”

“Andrew, this is Tim, my boyfriend.”

“Husband,” I corrected.

“Oh!” She laughed. She looked so beautiful and dark. It was before she cut her hair short, so she was very feminine. “Oh, God, we were just married a few days ago. I’m still not straight with anything.”

“I’m Andrew Trumbauer,” he said, grinning an awkward grin and driving his knees into the sand so he could shake my hand. His pale chest glistened. A string of cobalt-colored lapis hung around his neck.

“Tim Overleigh.”

“Andrew and I went to college together,” said Hannah.

“Good old JMU. I was the loser friend all the pretty girls took pity on,” Andrew said, still grinning.

“Not all of them,” said Hannah. “Most hated you.”

And then Andrew did something that caused my testicles to crawl up into the cavity of my pelvis: he winked at me.

“So true,” he said. “Most everyone hated me.”

Later that night we all had drinks together at a local dive, and Andrew waited for Hannah to stagger off to the restroom before practically crawling into my ear and whispering, “I’ve got something I want you to try.”

“What’s that?” I was expecting him to offer to sell me weed, speed, pain pills—whatever the going pharmaceutical trend on the island.

“Flying,” he said, which only reinforced my expectation. “You up for flying?”

“Sorry to break it to you,” I said, “but I’ve flown before.”

“Yeah?”

“All through college and every once in a blue moon on weekends.” I lifted my drink and nodded at him from across the table. “Alcohol’s been my airplane for the past year or so.”

Andrew laughed, and I immediately doubted its authenticity. It was too brash, sounded too forced. He was shirtless across from me at the table, his skin sunburned and painful to look at, the twin pink discs of his nipples resembling engorged pimples.

I went on, “And Hannah, of course, doesn’t necessarily appreciate—”

“I was asking you. Not Hannah.”

“No thanks.”

“Think about it. You’re in good shape.” As he said this, he

seemed to appraise me.

Not knowing what being in good shape had to do with shooting a few lines of coke or whatever, I could only laugh with some discomfort and wait for Hannah to return from the restroom.

That night, after a huge dinner and slow, lethargic lovemaking, Hannah and I fell asleep in each other’s arms. The windows of our small grotto opened on the water, and I woke when the sounds of distant quarreling echoed up from the beach. I listened for a very long time, staring at the darkened ceiling, while I rubbed my foot against Hannah’s.

“Hmm,” she muttered. I couldn’t tell if she was awake or not.

I leaned over and kissed her cheek, brushed her hair off her face.

She smiled faintly without opening her eyes.

“I’m going out for a ride,” I said.

“Hmm.”

Outside, as I had done for the past three nights, I rolled a bicycle from the grotto shed and led it across the property to the roadside. The resort grounds were fastidiously maintained and accommodating; the streets beyond were dark and winding, where fast cars with missing headlamps sped, their radios blasting, and chickens loitered in squalid, feathered heaps in the culverts. On foot, I would have been concerned traversing the unlit byways of the island, certain that I’d run into unsavory characters up to no good. On bicycle, however, I blew by the hordes of shifty-eyed locals and was able to avoid the few automobiles whose drivers found it amusing to attempt to run me off the road—a dangerous scenario given “off the road” would mean plummeting nearly fifty yards over an embankment to wooded forests or rock quarries below.

I rode now on the snaking, single-lane roadway that wound up the mountainous terrain. The moon was fat and blue, so close I could nearly count the individual craters on its surface. My heart rate rose, and I could feel the sweat breaking out on my forehead and across my back. One mile, two miles, three—straight to the top of the world.

From this vantage, I could see one full side of the city, including the lights of the cruise ships docked at the harbor. I hopped off the bike and set it down in the reeds. It was impossible to gauge my height, what with the darkness fooling with my perception, but I knew I was high. Even my breathing, which I’d maintained at a regular pace while riding, was a bit labored at this altitude, although I wondered if that was only in my head. I could faintly hear calypso music and beyond that the squawking of phantom chickens.

Through a line of dense trees, I spotted dim lights issuing from the windows of clapboard houses along the cusp of the cliff face. Still somewhat unsure of myself, I stepped through the trees into a clearing. The closest house—a hovel, really, like something you’d see in one of those commercials where they ask for money while showing kids with no shoes muddle through sewage—was fronted by a screened-in porch. Large flaps of screen had been torn away and hung down like triangular wedges of pizza, and small birds darted in and out of the openings. Tallow light spilled from a single lamp beside the doorway. I heard the sizzle-pop of an electric bug-zapper firing somewhere nearby.

I sat on the porch steps and wiped the sweat from my brow. In front of me, my shadow stretched out along the brown grass, framed in a glow of dancing yellow light. Around me, the stalks of candles flickered. Many unlit candles littered the ground. Some even protruded from the mouths of discarded liquor bottles, and others were clustered together in clay pots. I retrieved a waxy yellow candle from one of the pots and held it above the flame of another until it grew malleable and dripped melted wax onto the grass. I proceeded to mold it into a sphere and elongate the sphere into a slight oval. My thumbs created the impression of eye sockets. With one fingernail, I carved out a mouth, then formed the fullness of a pair of lips around it. I don’t know how long I sat there sculpting before I heard the door open behind me.

“Well,” said Andrew, “you showed up after all.”

I really didn’t know why I’d come. I wasn’t interested in getting whacked out on drugs, and I had even less interest in spending any more time with Hannah’s college friend. Still, I’d come to the very spot Andrew had told me to, and not knowing why bothered me more than actually being here.

“I feel like you summoned me,” I said, tossing the ball of wax aside and standing. The second the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. It sounded like an admission of sorts, like I was granting him power over me.

Andrew smiled his queer smile. He was wearing a loose-fitting cotton shirt, and the hem of his floral-patterned shorts hung below his knees. He stood barefoot at the top of the steps, looking at me. “I’m glad you came. Are you ready to go?”

“Go where?”

“To fly.”

I nodded toward his ramshackle house. “I just assumed we’d … you know …”

“Come on,” he said, bounding down the porch steps and brushing by me.

I followed him through the trees, the leaves so dense above my head that they completely blotted out the moonlight. When we broke out onto the reedy precipice that overlooked the city, just a few yards from where I’d dropped the bike, Andrew turned away from me, placed both hands on his hips, and leaned back at a curious angle. I heard his spine pop.

“You live in that house?” I said.

“I’ve been here for about eight months. I’ve got a place in New York, too. My old man was filthy rich. He owned an oil company. When he died, he left it to me. Then I smashed it to pieces and sold it to the Japanese.”

“So what do you do?”

“Whatever I want,” he said, shrugging. He didn’t have to look at me for me to realize he was smiling.

“Where are we going?” I said after a while. The urge to hop on my bike and pedal the hell back to the grotto was suddenly overwhelming.

Andrew extended one arm and pointed off to the right.

I followed his arm but could see nothing except for the edge of the cliff. “Yeah. Funny. Flying, huh? Is that what you meant?”

“It’s what I said, wasn’t it?” He turned, grinning at me from beneath a partially down-turned brow. His eyes seemed to glitter in the moonlight. As I watched, he stripped off his shirt and tossed it in the reeds.

“I thought you meant something else.”

“Like what?”

I shook my head. “Forget it.”

Andrew began unbuttoning his shorts.

“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. I may have even taken a reactive step backward. “Hey, man, you’re barking up the wrong tree …”

Andrew chuckled. “I’m not a fag, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“So you only get naked with straight guys?”

Andrew dropped his shorts and stood there stark naked. His paleness was severe and nearly translucent. I thought I could make out his heart strumming through the wall of his chest. There was a small tattoo etched across his upper left thigh.

He winked at me, perhaps playing up to the homosexual undertones of the situation. “Look at that city down there,” he marveled, glancing over the ridge to the cluster of huts below. “Look at those lights.” He exhaled with enthusiasm. “Beautiful.”

He pivoted and tromped through the reeds to the farthest side of the cliff. Beyond, the moonlight dazzled on the surface of the water.

Closing my eyes, I could still see the enormous face of the moon floating like an afterimage behind my eyelids.

“Such is the way to immortality,” Andrew said. In an instant,he was gone, having flung himself over the edge of the cliff. For a moment, he seemed to hover in defiance of gravity, his legs pressed together and his feet pointed, his arms outstretched like the wings of some great bird. Then he disappeared, carried below the face of the cliff and out of my line of sight.

My breath caught in my throat as I ran to the edge of the cliff. I braced myself for a gruesome sight—Andrew’s pale, reed-thin body tumbling down the rocky mountainside—but what I saw was his ghostly white form sailing out across the darkness as if flying. He grew smaller and smaller until he struck the water in a perfect dive, slipping beneath the dark surface with hardly a splash. As the ripples spread and faded, I counted several seconds beneath my breath until the white orb of his face broke through the surface. Even from this distance, I could tell he was grinning.

“How was that?” he shouted, his voice borne on echoes rising through the valley.

I felt like a fool. I’d come here under the pretense that we were going to smoke some pot or maybe do a few lines of coke, failing to take Andrew’s comment about flying in its literal sense.

Andrew pulled himself from the water and scampered up a winding, sandy roadway that trailed to the top of the mountain. It took him nearly two minutes to reach the summit, and by that time, I was yanking my rented bicycle out of the reeds by its handlebars.

“Where are you going?” he asked innocently enough.

“Back to the grotto.”

“But it’s your turn.”

I laughed. “I don’t want a turn.”

“You’re not afraid of a little midnight cliff diving, are you?” Had the question been proposed by anyone else, it would have sounded derisory; with Andrew, however, it sounded oddly sympathetic, as if he felt some deep, inexplicable sorrow for me.

“You’re out of your mind,” I said.

“The sad thing is that you’re passing up what might prove to be the most exhilarating ten seconds of your life because you’re scared to try.”

“They could prove to be the last ten seconds of my life.”

Andrew ran his hands through his hair. His body, oily and slick, glistened in the moonlight. Several times I found myself staring at his genitalia and had to force myself to look away.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You came here tonight because you thought you’d be getting high, right?”

I shrugged. “So?”

“So you have no problem shoving shit up your nose, losing all control of your senses, and burning the fucking septum out of your face, but you won’t dive off a cliff.” He snorted. “Fuck you, Tim.”

“Hey.” I held up one hand—a traffic cop stopping a line of cars. “Listen, man, I—”

“This is your one chance not to fail yourself,” Andrew said.

And for whatever reason, that resonated with me. Don’t fail yourself, I thought, stripping out of my clothes. Don’t walk away from this chance.

It was stupid. Perched birdlike on the crest of the cliff, the cool night breeze stimulating my naked flesh, I took a deep breath, and as one single thought blazed like a neon sign outside a speakeasy—You’re going to make your wife a widow on her honeymoon—I pushed off the ground and let the air cradle me and carry me swiftly to the sea.

Hours later, just before the sun rose, I snuck inside our small rented grotto and slipped beneath the sheets next to Hannah. She sighed and rolled over, draping a warm arm across my chest.

I stared at the ceiling, mottled with incoming daylight, listening to my heart throb in my chest. Wired, I could not close my eyes.

“Where’ve you been?” Hannah whispered, still half asleep. Her voice startled me.

“I met up with your friend Andrew.” I couldn’t help but grin. “He took me flying.”

I felt her smile as she pressed her lips against my ear. “Oh, the cliff-diving thing.”

The remainder of our honeymoon was punctuated by intervals spent with Andrew. He took us to various hole-in-the-wall bars, the best places for drinks on the whole island. The drinks were all heavy with rum and decorated with slices of rubbery fruit.

“Do you think they call these drinks cocktails because all the fruit hanging over the lip of the glass looks like the feathered tail of a rooster?” Hannah said at one point.

We dream-waltzed through lush lands, past fenced-in yards populated by suicidal-looking chickens and land crabs captive in pens, which ate nothing but grain in order to cleanse the badness from their noncomplex systems before becoming meals. In parts, it was a city of somnambulists: the shambling, drunken-eyed swivel of puppet necks outside every whitewashed tavern with pictures of naked young girls pinned above the bar showing gap-toothed smiles. Saw-toothed, spade-shaped flora waved at us at every turn. The skeletons of rusted automobiles snared in mountainous ruts, the green veiling of trees, fences of fronds, and all the wet and dark places that smelled of some indeterminate amphibious odor.

On our last full night in San Juan, after a bout of acrobatic love-making, I left Hannah curled up in bed and met Andrew at one of his favorite bars by the bay. A number of empty glasses stood before him on the bar, and when he turned to look at me, his eyes were like the headlamps of an eighteen-wheeler.

“It’s your last night, Overleigh.” A tannin-hued hand clamped down on my shoulder. The glow of the gas lamps prompted shadows to caper across his face. “Tonight will be the flight of all flights.”

We’d spent every evening jumping blindly from cliffs along the bay. This night, however, we taxied across the island, the looming silhouette of the Sierra de Luquillo now at our backs, and were dropped off at a slope of beach covered in dark, reflective stones. To our left,a sheer cliff, black as a thousand midnights and like the rampart of a castillo, rose into the night sky.

As the taxi lumbered away through the brush, I gazed at the wall of rock. “Where’s the path to get up there?”

“There is no path. We climb.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s impossible.”

“Nothing,” Andrew said, removing his sneakers, “is impossible.”

I took several steps backward, still staring at the vertical face of the cliff, until my feet were lapped by the surf.

“Take your shoes off,” Andrew said. “It’ll be easier to dig into the rock. Besides, there’s too much moss on these stones. The soles of your sneakers would slip right off.”

“You’re out of your mind—do you know that?” But I was already following Andrew’s lead, pulling off my shoes and tossing them farther up the beach and out of reach of the surf. “We’re both gonna die here tonight.”

“No.” Andrew stood beside the face of the cliff, his hands planted on his hips, looking straight up. His white linen shirt was unbuttoned and billowed in the cool breeze. “Not tonight.”

The climb began slow and arduous. There was little talk, as much of our concentration was limited to the climb. Finding hand-and footholds was tough at first—the niches were either too small or the protruding fingers of stone too thick—but I soon got the hang of it. Halfway up the face of the cliff, I could feel the muscles straining at the back of my legs, my heart galloping at a steady pace, and the ebb and flow of my breath coming in syncopated rhythm.

Only once did I pause to glance over my shoulder, and that was when I nearly lost it. The world tilted to one side, and the tremendous expanse of water, black like velvet covered in glittering jewels, seemed to rush up and claim me. My muscles tensed.

An instant later, Andrew’s fingers wrapped around my wrist. “Don’t look down.”

“Yeah.” I directed my eyes back against the wall of rock. Closed them briefly to recalibrate. Opened them.

“Never look down. Come on.”

He ascended steadily and I followed, shinnying ratlike up the vertical face. Still, the top seemed very far away.

“She’s a good girl,” Andrew said as I came up beside him. “You’re a lucky guy.”

“Thank you. And, yes, I am.”

“Would it be …?” He paused, swinging out to grasp an overhanging finger of stone. He pulled himself up, his toned legs following. “Would it be too much of a cliché if I were to threaten you with her well-being? You know, the jaded male friend locking horns with the new guy?”

“It would be a cliché,” I said, “but I appreciate the sentiment. I love Hannah very much.”

“I would hope so.” He climbed faster now, his arms working like machinery, the tendons in his ankles popping with each pivot of the joints.

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.