John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“Do you ever dread stuff that will never happen?” I managed to ask Livia over coffee one morning. It was the first time I’d mentioned such a thing to her. No matter how she’d balked at free-soloing, I figured she was mine only because her instincts drew her to strength and daring.

“Sometimes I dream you’ve run off to free-solo Half Dome.”

“I mean things that could literally never happen.”

“Like you being nice to my friends?” Some of her colleagues had taken us snorkeling in the Keys, hiking in the Everglades, which unfortunately was causing her to enjoy life in Miami. Livia took her new job to get rid of me, I thought later at the gym. By following her to Florida, I had called her bluff. The choice to relinquish mountains was an exam I’d failed. Now she wished for me to go free-solo Half Dome, and fall out, except maybe I had no courage left to climb at all. That’s what I was thinking when I realized I could have left the stove on that morning at breakfast.

As unlikely as it seemed, I felt so certain about it that I couldn’t bring myself to call Livia. I had already killed her along with a dozen others. No matter the worry’s insanity; it consumed me. My stomach roiled, my cheeks burned. Hours later, when I finally did call, she didn’t answer.

I was dialing a second time when Ty, the owner of the rock gym, walked in. “I’ve been ringing you for days,” he said.

“The phone was broken. I just fixed it.”

“I don’t care how good a climber you are; you’re fired.”

“Okay,” I said, nearly thanking him. With pure relief I hurried home to find an intact apartment, where Livia was drinking mimosas with a pixie-faced woman.

I hardly had time to relax before that woman came in toward me for a European-style cheek kiss. Even during my calmest era, studying abroad in Marseilles, deep-water soloing in the calanques, I’d feared these damned gestures, because which side? How many times? Her lips were traveling toward mine as if we were to kiss like lovers — which, since it went so fast, was what I did, giving her the quickest peck.

“So lovely to see you,” she said, as if I’d done nothing wrong, but already I could hear the two of them later, cackling with their friends about it.

“Come kayaking with us,” said Livia, pouring juice into a champagne glass. The stove was turned off.

“I have to get back to work.”

“I was just telling Livia we’ll offer her early tenure. We’d hate to lose you.”

My arms thrummed with the creep of mercury inside me, as heavy as on a climb. That was it, I thought, I’d fallen and this was my dying dream.

“Max, I showed Mary your magazine pieces. She thinks we can get you a spousal hire in creative nonfiction.”

Now the whole scene felt staged. “Cheers,” said Mary, clicking glasses to mine. Had they snuck champagne into my drink? I almost hoped so, but booze soothed only healthy brains; what if I drank and my fears lingered?

“Tell me how it feels.”

“How what feels?” I said, wondering if she meant anxiety, or being stupid enough to kiss her on the mouth.

“The crazy shit you used to do.”

“You stay in the flow without worrying,” I said, gripping my glass and swearing to myself that she wasn’t flirting, nor would any mothers of young rock climbers be turning me in for child molestation.

“So like yoga, but with the risk of death?”

“It gives perspective.”

“Wish I had that kind of mind control.”

“You’d be no fun if you did,” said Livia, and then they were laughing together and I pretended not to notice how it masked a deeper laughter.

“I should return to work,” I said, hurrying toward the door so as to avoid another kiss. What I really did was drive to Key West. It took five hours because I kept pulling over after bumps to verify that no bodies lay in my wake. How I yearned to put that behind me. I’d always thought going crazy meant not knowing it, never feeling it set in. On Key Largo I began brooding over the stove eye. When I’d checked that it was off, had I twisted it too far? So many could perish: retirees, children, infants; then there would be the trial, prison, until I parked on Duval Street and walked the avenues of the village past old men sipping wine. Their little salmon-colored bungalows looked so familiar, but I’d never been here. Livia had come frolicking with her friends one time. It struck me that déjà vu was memories of the future. I had turned away from the past, which was rock climbing; the future was Florida porches because of a girl who’d never desired me to begin with.

Delusion or no, I would feel this way from now on. A mountain might help, but it was impossible to drive so far over so many bumps, farther and farther from proof of dormant stove eyes. Instead I traveled to the Everglades and hiked out to that tree-ringed lake to give myself to the Gulp.

As soon as I’d thrown my phone in, it began to ring. That’s the cops, I thought as it sank into the lake. To destroy evidence suggested guilt, but over what? Livia? Why dread the future here at the brink? If Livia was dead, shouldn’t I jump? To regain the serenity to kill myself, I sat down by the water’s edge and gazed up the ditch that Andrew Jackson’s slaves had dug. Their nearest mountain had stood a month’s journey away across deadly country. All their lives they’d labored without knowledge of the prospect a climb offered. Had they climbed trees, at least looked down on the river of glass? Here I was struggling for the wherewithal to breathe. To put my breakdown on hold long enough to die, I thought of all the slaves who’d had no breakdowns, along with slaves in my century. More slaves were alive now than ever. Indentured tomato pickers, miners, young virgins being smuggled out of the Third World, making it through their hardships to carry on.

“You’re too connected to your fear receptor,” said Max the spy, once I’d brought him up to the present.

Feeling sanguine under the influence, I nodded. He gave me another pour. “But sometimes my receptor shuts up.”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“I’ll show you.”

I had him load footage for such and such coordinates for a day I’d crack-climbed a wall in Utah. Suddenly there I was, scrambling ropeless up a red cliff face, the satellite orbiting at a low enough angle that we could watch me pull myself higher. I might as well have been crawling on flat ground, so quickly did I place my fingers on the holds.

“I can see how that would feel tranquil,” said Max, without apparent sarcasm.

“Really? You’re the first one who’s understood.”

“Do many die?” he asked.

I gave him another set of coordinates. Soon we could see Brendan Timmins inching up a cliff in Eldorado Canyon. He sped the playback up to 32x, so that in seconds Brendan’s grip gave out and he fell backward onto a candlestick spire.

“Spectacular,” Max said.

“If you like that, there’s plenty more.”

“What I like is naked people fucking.”

“Go to Half Dome, in Yosemite.”

“You go to Half Dome in Yosemite.”

“Are you saying kill myself?”

“Were you happy, climbing?”

“Always,” I said.

“Then go to Half Dome.”

“Will you watch me?”

“If you take your clothes off.”

“Deal,” I said, offering my hand. We shook on it, then settled back into viewing live-action porn on three screens.

“If you don’t die soon, you’ll live to see the day when they can scan our brains, take audits of every thought we’ve ever thought.”

“Seems like that’s a few years off.”

“Depends on your brain. If you let them freeze it when you die, they’ll never resurrect you, they’ll just hook you up to the audit machine and view a montage.”