Eggshell cracked into tiny pieces, first dented by fingertips then picked apart by blunt fingernails. I hated watching it, the movements of someone who barely knew how to interact with the world. At this pace, we’d be stuck in the low foothills for far too long.
The sandwiches sat on a napkin untouched. Mosquitos landed in the shade of the picnic basket. I regretted the effort of packing it.
The plan was to climb the mountain before nightfall. I didn’t want to do what we had to do in the dark, even if the dark would make it easier.
“Let’s go,” I said, and stood up.
“Already?”
His mouth hung open after he spoke, and the mashed yolk inside nauseated me. I brushed eggshell off my legs and turned away from him, toward the trail. I gestured behind me. “Don’t forget the canister.”
I walked up the gentle path under a canopy of healthy oak, breathing the dry, scentless breeze. Instead of watching the forest, I pictured his scarred face. A face made ugly by mistakes. Normally that face hid indoors, avoiding the sunlight, but today something tired and angry in me was in charge. Unable to face those scars, I didn’t look back. I knew he would follow.
I’d spent years frustrated by his refusal to explain himself for the mess he made of his life. I’d shout at him and I’d shout at the shower walls and I’d drive out here to shout at the mountains. Eventually his unbothered, foolish face outlasted me, and I’d given up. And having worn me out of shouts, he’d started answering.
Each night, smiling and bitter, he’d scrape the worst corners of his self against me to keep me awake in the dark. He’d unburied himself my centipede of ill-formed habits, all his legs broken on the right side, alternately pitiable and too repugnant to touch.
Last night in this uncounted passage of nights I had decided to return to the mountain.
We walked past pleasant, uncaring oaks. I heard the wind whip leaves above us, and the sharp question-call of scrub jays. I wondered when we’d reach the creek, then realized we’d already crossed it, a shallow, leaf-litter slump in the dry season. I stopped seeing the landscape and tried to remember when I’d first explored these hills.
Soon I stopped even that, and only walked.
In lost unnoticed time light scree slipped and dry California grass crushed soft beneath chest and stomach and I raised my head to sunlight on the slope and the true hike already begun. I heard no footsteps behind me. In urgency I pushed myself back up through a rustle of broken stems.
A hundred feet below I’d passed the last tall oaks at the mouth of the forest, gatekeepers to the sunlight. Between them now the tall canister stood on the ground, and above it his still hands held something white.
A heavy wind stirred through branches. His fingers curled protective, and a ripple of faint white down passed over the forest in the cold quiet howl of the gust. I saw innumerable thin strands hanging from every branch of oak and walnut, almost invisible at a distance but real. I thought of silk and byssus and spiderweb, and imagined an animal that might craft strange hairs: a pale damselfly with long, loose wings, wrapped around the end of its strand, now resting on his palm.
Standing on the slope in that moment I didn’t know how to share how I felt with him down below. The feeling never solidified into words, and it passed on out of my understanding.
He let go of the insect, and watched its thread swing away. He looked up at me.
You can think about death, on barstools and bridges and especially on cold linoleum floor under a kitchen table when you’ve lost the will to stand, but you can’t look at death. Never look at your own reflection in the water when you are about to die, or you’ll go back home with an even sharper misery.
Once the wind stilled, I nodded. He slouched slightly to lift the metal canister I made him carry. As he crossed the threshold the sun lit his face and I broke from his gaze, afraid I would change my mind. None of this mattered or had ever mattered, now that I had a plan in the heights of the mountain.
Though I knew better, I imagined for the first few minutes of that walk in the sunlight that he had turned back to witness again that forest of fragile animals in unexplained silk. I dreamed myself alone in my doom, and him a distant wanderer outside my venom footprints.
Instead I heard his asthmatic gasp at my neck.
We climbed past small-leafed manzanita and scrub that couldn’t block the sun. He groaned as sweat ran down his scars and made them itch and inflame. The uneven thump of his legs and the endless breaths and worst of all his heart, pounding louder and faster, a headache agony.
Endlessly on, to a switchback trail where on each steep-banked turn the heavy metal canister thumped against his leg until he started pushing it awkwardly with his hands as he stepped. Clipped to his belt and sun-hot now, the metal scorched his palms, bruised his thigh, battered his shin.
Everything became monotony, a pointless mountain path of a thousand identical steps matched by a thousand bruising thumps and the thousand unendurable heartbeats. Still we climbed.
By the time we’d reached the thin, dry wind of the heights, his legs burned with exertion. He walked with his spine bent left, so the hot canister and the acrid reek of the fluid inside dangled away from his leg.
“Are we going all the way up?”
No, I thought. Neither of us will ever make it to the mountaintop. He didn’t ask again.
I was awoken out of my awful reverie by shadow across my eyes. My feet felt level ground. Now in the saddle between two peaks, we saw with new clarity a still mountain lake, half-ringed by stunted juniper shrubs and choked by silence.
The shore was barely a dozen steps away, just off the path. For the first time he walked in front of me, limping, and I noticed the dark bruise on his thigh from the canister.
I had daydreamed about this for so long, but now that we were here I wasn’t sure how to move, while he was calm in a way I had never seen him before. He knew why we were here, but I had never been sure which of us were in favor of it. I had made the plan with the canister and forced him to carry it, and now I was the one following him. No matter how much I raged at him, I couldn’t avoid taking on his desires.
Both of us noticed we were too close to the water at the same instant, and our necks twisted away in synchronized time at a painful angle, our eyes desperately squeezed shut. Both of us fumbled blindly at the cap to the canister, the prickling of anxiety flowing through our arm, until finally the lid unscrewed. We started to relax.
I saw yellow grass move in a downslope wind that couldn’t reach us. I smelled warm contamination and listened to the glub, glub, glub of thick, dark oil spreading over the water.
He faced the lake now, looking down at the black surface. I couldn’t see his face and we couldn’t see our reflection. I waited for a while, sure we were finally going to explain ourself. There didn’t seem to be any hurry anymore. But no speech came. I still couldn’t figure out what there was to feel, whether we were satisfied, what there was to wait for.
I pretended it was long ago, in our hopeful, painless time. I pushed us into the water.
Our limbs thrashed plunging through the oil, but stilled themselves invisible beneath the dark forgiving curtain. Air found its escape and became a gift to water. The unendurable heart beat harder and livelier and broke into silence, which was everything.
Someone sat on the ground and rested against the single scrawny pine among the juniper. The sun came out on the other side of the eclipsing peak, then fell to the horizon, slower than it ever had before.
An animal howled, once, in the night.
At dawn, my leg throbbed, the bruise from the canister much heavier than I had realized. When the sunrise reached my face I felt the heat on my scars again, but the itch I felt today was the itch of a healing scab.
There are no certainties after all, I thought. I stood to drink cold water and to walk downhill. It is time to marvel at insects living on the whiskers of ancient trees.
