Nevada Barr - The Rope

If she was sane, if she’d “do,” as Molly said, she hadn’t suffered a psychotic break. She sniffed her hand, cupped it to smell her breath, sniffed her hair. She stank, but she didn’t stink of wine. As crazy as she’d been the last months, she’d never blacked out without benefit of a couple of bottles, yet now she remembered nothing.

Had someone pushed her in? The tumbling fall could account for the knot on her head and her shoulder being out of its socket. Why would anyone steal her clothes and drop her in a pit?

Rape.

“God, God, God,” she moaned and spread her legs, pushing her feet back into the searing sunlight. No semen smeared on her thighs, no bruising.

She didn’t feel raped. A person would feel raped.

“Not raped,” she whispered. “Naked in a hole and not raped.” Pushing into the sand with her heels, she backed into the curving wall of her bizarre prison. No exits, no steps cut into the rock face, no rope, no ladder. No way out.

Slapping the stone with the palm of the hand on her uninjured arm, she screamed, “Help! Help me! Somebody help me, God damn it!” Words careened off the wall, echoed feebly, then were gone. She pounded and screamed until it seemed all sound was taken from her, poured out, pooling around her, not a single decibel making it up the sheer walls and out to …

To where?

Balling her hand into a fist, she struck the stone hard.

“Stop it!” Molly ordered.

Anna stopped, letting her bruised hand rest palm up on her thigh in an unconscious attitude of supplication.

“Breathe,” Molly said from somewhere behind her eyes.

Anna breathed.

Pulling her knees to her chest, she wrapped her good arm around her shins and, rock protecting her back, fought to push through the dense fog clogging her mind.

Stretches of Anna’s mind were blank, black and clean as if wiped with an eraser. The blow to the head, or whatever mind-altering substance she’d consumed, had stolen time from her. For a while she crept across this featureless plane; then, at last, the dim dawning of a memory.

That morning—this morning, a morning, some morning—she’d gotten up early. Before seven, she remembered. Already the day was hot. Summer heat in New York came from milky skies, pouring moist and heavy over the city, flowing down from the buildings and up from the subways until it suffocated. Desert heat came from hard blue sky and weighed nothing. Like a weak acid solution, cleansing and caustic.

Anna remembered that—remembered thinking that on that morning. This morning. Some morning. She reached deeper into her mind and the images scattered, leaves before a thunderstorm, skidding across her brainpan.

Breathe in: one, two, three. Hold, two, three. Out on a five count. Just breathing, not chasing the memories. Air in, air out.

Tentative, but real, an image drifted back: her, sitting on a rock, looking down at Dangling Rope Marina.

Battleship gray and uniform, the marina was laid out like a kid’s game of hopscotch painted on flat, fake, teal green water, a single runway, wider near the shore end where the snack bar and ranger station were, narrowing as the dock thrust into the lake. Blunt rectangular arms stretched to each side, one for boat fuel, one for garbage Dumpsters the size of semis, one for the sewage pumps where houseboats could dump. In between were mooring slots. All gray and square and dull in hot light from a dead blue sky.

“Lake Powell is a hundred and eighty-six miles long and has almost two thousand miles of coastline,” she whispered without opening her eyes. That she’d learned during orientation.

Dangling Rope was a third of the way uplake, between Wahweap, which was near Glen Canyon Dam, and Hite Marina to the northeast. Uplake, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area butted into Canyonlands National Park; downlake, into the Grand Canyon. That she’d learned after stepping off a bus in Missouri—or maybe Alabama—and buying a map.

Grand Canyon, Canyonlands—photographs of them were prettier than those of Glen Canyon. Glen Canyon was a warped, half-drowned land. Chameleonlike colors shifted with every change of light. The unnatural lake was not gentle with sand-and-shell beaches and cattails in the shallows, but fever green in a dead world. An inland sea in hell or on Mars under the merciless blue of a hard rock sky. It suited Anna.

Unreal, or surreal, stark and freakish, the landscape could hold no memories. The past was burned to dust by the sun and blown away on winds that were seldom still.

Could hold no memories .

“I hate irony,” Anna mumbled. She prodded the image gently, hoping it would metastasize and tell her where she was, how she ended up here, and why her brain no longer functioned properly.

Another image slunk from the shadows at the edges of her mind. A big yellow sun. Eyes lost behind sunglasses, rays spiky, Mr. Sun was smiling down on a powerboat towing a water skier. It was her daypack, bought at Wahweap’s gift shop. She remembered opening it, taking out the water bottle the park gave her, uncapping and drinking.

God, but that was a great memory.

My lieu days, Anna thought as the ghost water slid down the throat of her past self.

“It’s Tuesday, July 11, 1995, and Bill is still president,” she said aloud to her sister.

Molly did not reply. Maybe it was no longer July 11. How long had she been unconscious? Hours? A day? Days? Not days. At orientation they were told nobody could live in the desert for days—plural—without water.

Thirsty, she opened her eyes. No cheery sun in Ray-Bans greeted her. The pack, along with her clothes, had not journeyed with her into this place. No bottle filled with water that, like the rain that often didn’t reach the ground in the desert, never seemed to reach her thirst but evaporated in her esophagus.

Did desert peoples cry? she wondered. Or had dehydration reached their Anasazi tear ducts? She no longer cried, and she missed it. Tears were warm and kept her company. When tears were gone, what remained was emptiness the size of a basketball, yet paradoxically as heavy and solid as a chunk of concrete. Inflating her lungs around it was a chore. Swallowing food past it was more work than it was worth. Carrying it from place to place exhausted her.

Out West, where there were wide-open spaces, big skies, where deer and antelope did their thing, she thought breathing might be easier. Out West there was supposed to be more air in the air.

Out West.

Out here.

Outdoors.

Not long ago “outdoors” meant the streets and avenues of Manhattan. “Wilderness” was Central Park after sunset. Robert Rowell, a costume designer she’d been fond of, summed it up nicely. Slamming the window of his ninth-floor apartment, he’d announced, “I love the outdoors! Let’s leave it out.”

Then Zach left and Anna wanted out: of the city, her skin, her life. Three drinks with a stage manager working at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts and she’d applied for the first seasonal park job she found.

She’d gotten it.

There was nothing left for her to do but to practice breathing all the air in the wide-open spaces.

Except she was in a hole smaller than the average New York apartment. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she muttered and shifted her weight on the sand. A harsh grate of agony shot out from her shoulder to ricochet around her skull.

“Sorry I blasphemed,” she managed. Given her situation it was best to stay on the right side of all gods whether they existed or not.

When the worst passed she realized she could keep her eyes open. Pain seemed to be clearing her mind, not enough to produce anything like total recall, but enough that she could open her eyes without the stone tornado spinning her into a vomiting session.