I Step from cold outside air into cold air-conditioned air; you can almost feel the difference on your skin; a dog would smell the difference, I think.
The climbing store is a friendly warren, everything in piles, shelves making little corridors. Brand names I don’t recognize are everywhere; it’s a place that speaks to the climbing cognoscenti, not to me. But at the same time, I know the shape of the language, I am familiar with the structure—like seeing another Indo-European language, laid out on a twenty-six letter grid; you don’t understand it, but it’s familiar.
I have been in this kind of store before, to buy my baseball bat. I have learned the brand names, only for another sport.
I don’t see anyone, which is good.
I go deeper, half expecting a cop to put a hand on my shoulder at any moment. Soon, by accident, I find the books. One end of the shelves is all maps; toward the other end are the instruction manuals, the introductions. I pick one that looks basic, but thick. There’s an index at the back and I flick through it—
E, for equipment.
I flick to page 142, scan the paragraphs. Ropes, carabiners. Something called a passive wedge. I don’t have to read it for long before I find camming devices. Yes—that’s what I want.
They have two semicircular pieces, built on a logarithmic circle, which is important for some reason to do with friction.
The way they work: you pull a trigger, and the circles align, snug to each other, narrow. They have teeth, to make them bite more. You insert them into a crack in the wall, and you pull on the shaft, which your rope is tied to; they’re spring-loaded, but hinged to the shaft too; the more weight you put on it the more they expand away from each other, dig into the rock on either side.
Theoretically, then—the harder you fall, the more they hold you.
There’s a graph, some equations. Applied force, normal force, friction. They’re good for twelve thousand newtons of falling force, the bigger ones. I check some stuff in the appendix and then do the math in my head. Mass, acceleration, spring constant, etc. Long story short, the camming device will hold me easily.
Okay, good.
I go to the back of the book again—K for knots.
I spend a minute or two looking at the right pages. I hate this Girl Scout kind of thing. But I figure I can do it.
So: a rope, twenty feet, to give me room to get to the top, a couple of carabiners, to attach the rope to the loop, and the other end to me, and a camming device.
I shuffle down the aisles—there’s a whole wall of the cam things, and I grab the most expensive one; it’s actually a belt with like five of them on it, different sizes. Fine. Rope—easy; carabiners too.
When I have, in a TOTALLY LITERAL SENSE, got all my shit together, I move to the back of the store. I pass a little checkout, a table with a chair, a white Macbook, and a credit card machine. There’s a copy of American Gods, facedown on the table, a half-full cup of coffee.
Cigarette break, maybe? Good for me, anyway.
I pass by, and find the deepest, darkest corner of the store; it’s where there’s snow gear and hats, and it’s summer now so I figure no one’s going to come near. I put on a climbing harness, which I just took from a rotating display unit, and tie the rope to one carabiner using what I think is the right knot, then clip the carabiner to the harness.
I put down my backpack.
I close my eyes and try very hard to believe that I can just step around the world and into another place.
203 seconds pass.
I open my eyes again.
I calm my breathing. The store is still empty.
I close my eyes, and I hold my equipment very tightly and—