John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

Normally I’d have been into Max’s theory, but I was getting drunk. I floated into imagining a psych student’s compare/contrast paper on two brains, my mother’s and my own. Cremate her, I told myself, specify cremation in my own will, and so on until I passed out. I came to in my truck camper, lying on the mattress I kept there for climbing trips. The gate to the Jackson Ditch spur had risen, and Max’s car was gone. I remembered nothing past the audit machine.

As I pissed into the filthy water of the swamp, my head throbbed so hard I knew I couldn’t face Livia. Instead I drove to the beach. Feeling more strung out by the minute, I walked the boardwalk until I came to the kind of wood-paneled, windowless juke joint I used to like. I ordered a bourbon there. Drinking it, I had some thoughts that would be damning in a brain scan, about the fate I wished upon everyone. I thought of my father, who drank daily, and of my cousins on my mother’s side who still lived with their parents and hadn’t set foot outside in years. I’m not feeling paranoid, I thought by way of appeasing my mind. If I were like my relatives, I’d be paranoid even on whiskey.

At the next bar, a Joe’s Crab Shack, a girl split off from her friends to come touch my fingers. “I climb,” I said to explain their size.

“Where, Cuba?”

“Wherever there’s a mountain.”

“You looking for one?”

“You have one in mind?” I said, studying her closely now that she’d asked a smart question. She was perky, spritelike, twenty-one or so. Already I knew I could drive drunk with her over bumps without fear of the bumps.

“There’s a rock gym up the road.”

“Pretty thing like you must be seeing someone,” I said, running a finger along her arm. It would be bliss to ride over the bumps with this girl.

“Boyfriend cheated, so I dumped him,” she said, setting us in motion to buy ourselves a room at a beachfront hotel.

It was only afternoon. The hours flew by. At midnight we snuck up to the rooftop pool and took off our clothes. Before I joined her in the water, I turned on the spotlight over the diving board. “No, by moonlight,” she said, shielding her eyes.

“But I want to see your body,” I replied, which was true. More importantly, I thought Max might have been keeping track of me. I hoped to pay him back for saving my life. “Okay,” said the girl, wrapping herself around me. Even knowing I would crawl home alone in shame, I waved happily to the sky. For every moment of it I loved Livia, is the thing, wanted to grow old with her, take her to France to the calanques, where even she could free-solo alongside me because a fall lands you in the sea.

I woke up alone, with enough gin still in me that I didn’t dread Livia’s verdict yet as I drove home. With mild concern I noticed bumps, laughing at myself a little. The radio news spoke of some Mexican tomato pickers enslaved near Orlando. “I lost my phone,” I repeated as I drove, rehearsing my lie until I walked into my home and Livia ran and squeezed me like a harness and said, “I thought you were dead.”

“I lost my phone,” I said, heart plummeting into my gut.

“It’s okay, these things happen.”

“I don’t remember where.”

I waited for her to smell the other girl. Instead she said, “I want to help.”

“To what?”

“I’ll join you at meetings.”

“You hardly drink.”

“Every day I drink.”

“One margarita with your friends.”

“I love you, Max.”

I studied her face for a sign of why she wasn’t angry. For why she would love me. “I’ll try harder,” I said, not lying. If there’d been a way to add, “Something’s wrong and I need more help than you can give,” I’d have done it, but the shock of seeing her had sobered me up. My brain was dividing back into two parts, not hemispheres, but overlapping parts, sort of like air and the Higgs field. The Higgs field isn’t the air, but wherever there’s air, there’s the Higgs field. I’d have explained this, but the energy was pulling me into a maze with all manner of dead ends. “Something’s wrong” was one she had predicted in a wager. I kept quiet. The next day, whether or not she believed I was at work, I walked the beach, stopping every few miles for fifty push-ups. My mind felt less urgent if I was moving. Before continuing with fifty sit-ups, I would wave to Max. At sunset I drove home to find Livia reading about some photographer.

“Max, I have a surprise. Is your passport current?”

“Unless you’ve done something to it.”

“You know the Bugaboos?”

“The mountains in British Columbia?”

“You wrote them up for Rock and Ice . Mary’s cousin has a house there he’s not using, near Radium Hot Springs.”

“Why the Bugaboos?” I said, playing along.

“I told you. We can go for New Year’s.”

“So the mountain range?”

“Snowpatch Spire has routes up to 5.12.”

“It’s just weird you picked it of all places.”

“We can do intermediates together.”

“But the word bugaboo .”

“Is that a word?”

“You’re smarter than this.”

“I know it’s a stroller.”

“Why do you take pictures?”

“What?” she said, echoing every lying woman in films.

“When you take pictures, other people are taking pictures of you taking pictures.”

“You’re sounding like your mom.”

“People watch us doing the things we do.”

“Do you wonder how I know how your mom sounds?”

“The jig is up, okay?” I said, raising my voice. Her book wasn’t a photography book. Easy enough to put a fake cover over some maps of neural pathways. But before I could levy my accusation, she cut me off.

“It was eating at me, what you said. I figured, what harm to visit? She talked about you for hours. She’s got copies of your articles. Pictures everywhere. Not that it seems pleasant to live in her head,” and so on, as it sank in that I must have killed a climber, kicked loose a rock and sent him hurtling to his death. Livia was that climber’s sister. Saying she loved me had been the giveaway. At the original ambush she’d gone on about a dead free-soloist, same as she did now about my mom. My mom knitting in a congregate apartment. My mom tearful over losing me. Somehow I lasted through it without taking the bait. Afterward she cuddled up against me in bed, an act no less cynical for her having done it for years. I waited until I heard her snoring, then gathered a sleeping bag, my climbing shoes, a tent.

When I returned for a last look, she was lying on her side, an arm folded across herself. Her scent can’t be a disguise, I thought, leaning over to inhale lavender and almond, which brought memories flooding in of years condensed into one day’s fever dream. It had felt so real; still, I’d seen this movie, and summoned up the next beat, which was me in my truck driving north onto the Florida Turnpike.

To the tune of a mournful ballad I guzzled Red Bull. The sun rose near Pensacola. When my phone rang — the new one Livia got me — I threw it out. Right away I realized it could cause a wreck. If an overloaded truck ran over it, one that was already struggling to balance, it could tip over. The phone could be traced back. Should I turn around? After hours of angst about this and about losing the only girl I would love, I pulled over and crawled under the camper to sleep. The next day I woke up and drove twenty more hours. The day after that, I arrived at sunset below the Yosemite climbers’ camp.

It was dark when I hiked up to some flat terrain beyond the campground. In the distance dozens of climbers clustered around their campfires while I pitched my tent. Hammering in my final stake, I heard a voice announce, “Max Rainey.”