Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

—Up . Hannah beckoned. Up .

I could have let the pain engulf and destroy me, but I allowed it to fuel my aggression and will to survive. I didn’t care if I ground the exposed bone to yellow powder against the walls of the shaft. I was going to climb out. The pain made me determined.

I continued to climb to the wan light. I didn’t know how long it took me to reach the chamber above and to let the fading daylight course down on me fully through a rent in the ceiling of the cavern—it could have been minutes or hours. When I finally climbed out of the crevasse onto stable ground, I passed out.

3

FLASHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS FLITTED BY LIKE

dragonflies. Whether or not I was actually dreaming, I could not be certain because when my eyes unstuck, I was somehow out of the cave itself and in the open desert, watching lizards lap water from kiss tanks with vibrating black tongues and feeling the pre-evening heat clinging wetly to my body.

I crawled in the dirt toward an immense outcropping of stone, suggestive of the undulating, skeletonized backbone of some prehistoric animal. Again, I fell into unconsciousness.

This time when I awoke it was night. The moon was a fat pearl shimmering behind a stretch of clouds like pulls of dirty wool. The air was frigid against my skin. I blinked several times, trying to remember where I was and how I’d gotten here.

When I tried to stand, my body refused to cooperate, and I was sent sprawling to the dirt, agony coursing through the marrow in my bones. I glanced down and saw the horror that was my left leg—the blackened, soaked trousers and the ghostlike glow of the bone in the moonlight—and vomited into the sand.

I wasn’t sure if I passed out again or if I switched over to autopilot, but the next thing I remembered was leaning against a wall of stone, the heavy limb of a tree under one arm as a makeshift crutch, and squinting into the distance. The sky was a velvet canopy of stars. Around me, the cacophony of nature—the twitter of insects, the screech of birds, the howl of wolves, the cumulative chatter of all things wild—was nearly deafening.

I peered across the vast white flats of the desert, searching for the highway. I could see no headlights of passing vehicles, nor could Ilocate the vaguely orange sodium glimmer of a distant civilization. The surface of the moon couldn’t look less desolate.

Hannah stood about twenty yards ahead of me. In a simple white cotton dress, her hair bobbed short as I’d often imagined it, her skin pale to the point of near translucence in the light of the moon, she appeared to hover like a spirit several inches off the ground. And of course she was a spirit—Hannah was dead.

“Hannah,” I breathed, my throat abraded and raw. It hurt just to breathe let alone speak. God only knew how long I’d been without water.

She turned and walked—no, floated —to a craggy hillock of stone, disappearing around the other side. She said nothing, and she was too far away to see her expression, but I was certain she wanted me to follow her.

Leaning on my makeshift crutch, I hobbled toward the hillock, pausing only once to catch my breath and allow the feeling to shift back into my numb left leg. There was no more pain. I was beyond pain now, which was good for the moment, though I knew such numbness was a bad sign in the grand scheme of things. The leg was going dead. Also, hypothermia was beginning to set in. All the signs were present—the profuse sweating while simultaneously shivering, the blurring vision, the lethargy I felt with each tedious step I took. I wanted to curl into a ball and close my eyes. In fact, that might have been my fate had I not spotted Hannah—

That’s not Hannah, a voice spoke up in my head. Hannah’s dead.

Hannah appeared on the other side of the hillock, staring straight at me. As I lumbered forward again on my crutch, she turned and headed through a veil of low trees.

I pursued this visage through the trees, using their outstretched branches as support, and if it wasn’t for the peripheral sight of Hannah’s white gown in the darkness, there but not wholly there, I would have surrendered to the sheer weight of my exhaustion before ever passing through the trees into a vast clearing.

But it wasn’t a clearing at all. It was pavement. I was standing in the middle of the highway.

4

I NEVER MET THE MAN WHO EVENTUALLY STOPPED

to collect my broken husk off the side of the road, propping me up in the backseat of his car and shuttling me to the nearest hospital, but the doctors later assured me that he was a very nice guy who wished me well.

Chapter 2

1

MARTA CORTEZ COME AT THE END OF THE WEEK,

looking pretty with her hair pulled back and her naturally tanned face fresh and without makeup. She hummed to herself, and the sound was pleasant enough to instantly brighten the entire apartment.

“Look at you.” She sighed, pausing in her long-legged stride. “You’re in one of your bitter moods.”

“How’d you get in? I thought I locked the door.”

“Don’t be so combative.” She practically swished through the apartment, her arms burdened with brown grocery bags and a swinging leather purse, and went straight for the kitchen.

I was on the deck, the balcony doors open, watching the distant glint of traffic creeping across the Chesapeake Bay. I maneuvered my wheelchair around and thumped over the rubber threshold stripping of the deck into my apartment. Even with the breezy summer air filtering in, there persisted the underlying stink of stale sweat and old, musty books throughout the place—a smell I’d once found comforting, the way some people find libraries comforting, though which recently alerted me to my own hermitic lifestyle. With the exception of Marta’s weekly visit to bring me groceries and playthe occasional game of backgammon or chess, my tiny Annapolis apartment entertained no visitors.

“This place is a mess,” she said, emptying the bags of groceries into the refrigerator. “Can’t you clean up a little?”

“It’s homey,” I retorted, surveying the room. Clothes clung like foliage to the sofa, while towers of paperback novels and DVDs teetered on nearly every available flat surface, including the leveled shade of a lamp—a potential fire hazard. A half-empty bottle of Macallan scotch, along with an assortment of used rocks glasses and champagne flutes, stood atop a stereo speaker. Empty food containers from various local delivery joints had cropped up like tiny civilizations seemingly overnight. In particular, a carton of reeking Chinese food balanced on a collection of DVDs that in turn perched atop a mountain of books on the coffee table in the middle of the room: a cumulative testament to just how pathetic I’d become. “Anyway,” I continued, ignoring the mess, “I’m still getting the hang of this chair. It’s hard to get around and clean up.”

“I thought you were on crutches now.”

I glanced at the pair of crutches propped in one corner of the room, a ratty old Hawaiian shirt draped over one of the cushioned supports. “Ask some of the neighbors, and they might attest to seeing a man in his late thirties, skin pasty, a bad dresser, stumbling around the lobby on a pair of crutches from time to time. But they’d also no doubt relay the embarrassed and frustrated look on the man’s face.”

“You’re an asshole, Tim,” Marta said matter-of-factly. Then, some musicality coming to her voice, she said, “I got you a surprise.”

“Oh yeah? What is it, a housekeeper?”

She appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking almost seductive in a pink halter top and a pair of too-short black shorts from which her brown, coltish legs seemed to slide like shafts of daylight. Marta and I were friends and had never dated. Although one night several years ago after spending a few hours getting hammered at a Main Street bar, we’d returned to this very apartment where, midway throughwatching a Coen brothers movie, we’d kissed. The kiss transitioned into clumsy groping, resulting in Marta bare-chested on my sofa, me on top of her with one hand down her pants—which was the exact position we woke up in the next morning. We were mutually humiliated, and I hadn’t kissed her nor seen her breasts since that night.