13

Rappel

FIRST WAS THE LABYRINTH, A NARROW MAZE OF FISSURES and dead ends, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, walking and aching for miles in his dive boots on the uneven cave floor. The boots ripped. Thermoprene wasn’t meant for serrated-edge ground.

Julian moved through crevices—treacherous, utterly infuriating. The height of the walls was ten feet, but the width was between three feet and eighteen inches! It was so narrow in places that Julian had to creep sideways as if on a window ledge, his back against the wall. The hard-shell pack on his chest made him too bulky. He had to take it off and carry it in his hands. Often these crevices ended abruptly in a hill of stones, and he had to double back and head into a different fissure, climbing over boulders, searching for a one-man slot that might lead the way out. The claustrophobia of the maze was matched by his stifling frustration.

And because nothing is so bad that it can’t be made worse, he tripped over his shredded boots and dropped the backpack. Julian tried desperately to catch it. It careened off a stone, teetered for a moment on a ledge, and then slipped through a crevice and disappeared before Julian could grab the strap. He cursed wildly for five minutes before he resigned himself to the backpack’s loss and resumed his trek. Like he always said, you can’t overprepare, and in the end, it won’t matter. Why was it still so hard to accept how many things were out of his control.

When he finally climbed over a rocky protrusion and walked out onto a mesa above a cave chamber, he wished he were back in the suffocating web of stone. The high plateau where he stood over a canyon was covered with cones, limestone deposits, rocks and cave matter. These prevented him from walking, much less running and leaping. The growths were three-dimensional etchings rising from the ground, appearing to him as writhing monsters, as grisly beasts. In the beam of his headlamp, their shadows, tall and self-important, reflected off the cave walls.

He stood at the rim of a miniature Grand Canyon, if the Grand Canyon were contained in a closed space the size of two airplane hangars, one on top of another, and instead of the sun and birds and evergreens and the sky, there was nothing but rutted darkness. The things that looked like birds and trees were stone. It was the Grand Canyon without any of the grandeur and with all the peril.

A thousand feet below him, the river he needed to get to carved through the canyon floor, emerging from one end of the cave and meandering into the other. The perfectly round moongate rose over the river’s right exit. The waters flowed through the moongate. There was no jumping over this chasm. To get to the bottom, Julian had to rappel the steep canyon wall with a useless harness and without rope or an anchor because all the rope and anchors were inside his lost backpack.

Watch out for falling mountains, like in Topanga, Ashton told Julian. No danger of that here. The only thing that would be tumbling off these cliffs was his sorry ass.

Julian had no choice. He scaled down a thousand feet, hugging the canyon wall.

Dripping water had hollowed out holes in the vertical rock, like jug handles. The surface was jagged, uneven. It took him infinite time, using the rule of three. Three limbs always attached to the wall—two legs, one arm, two arms, one leg—finding a step or a ridge to hold on to. His headlamp illuminated the rock four inches from his face, and nothing else.

Why couldn’t Julian have crampons to help with his descent today, when he could most use them? Instead of cleats, he had torn slippery Thermoprene on his feet.

One misstep, one mishandling, one ridge not wide enough for his gloved hand, one stony lump not large enough for his barely clad foot and down he’d go, careening against the stone with her crystal and beret.

To navigate down the canyon wall, he needed a cord and spikes, he needed an anchor, a hook, belays, carabiners.

But Julian didn’t have those things. He had nothing.

He crept down the ravine harnessed to nothing but his red faith.

He reached the bottom by falling the last ten feet. He landed roughly and lay on his back on the pebbly shore, gathering himself. His headlamp was dimming. No wonder. He must have been glued to the wall like a salamander for a hundred thousand hours. It was a good thing he’d brought another headlamp and stuffed it inside his wetsuit.

The enormous canyon above him was a live ominous presence he couldn’t see but strongly felt. It pressed down on his chest. He rested for barely a few breaths. He had to hurry. She was waiting.

Wading into the river waist-deep, Julian chugged down handfuls of cold cave water, hoping it wasn’t the water of forgetfulness, and swam through the moongate, looking for something to grab onto and float. He felt better in the water, invigorated even, after the physical and mental stress of his interminable free-climb descent. He had made it over the bright black chasm. Now the river would take him to her. Very soon he would see her face. If only he could tell her from the start how much he had missed her, having lived a lonely year without her. And though Julian was relieved he had made it, he was frightened of what lay ahead. It had been such a worrying supernatural effort to get to the river. Almost as if he was being kept from her.

He had no trouble finding something to drift on. The river was filled with crap. Julian had his pick of garbage. He grabbed onto a small door and found a narrow board to use for an oar. Balancing in the middle of the panel, he sat cross-legged and paddled through the rubble.

What was going on with this river? Like a tsunami had swept through and washed a demolished city into the water. Was he hallucinating? In the beam of his waning headlamp, the river looked filled with human things. Fragments of chairs, segments of walls, washboards, empty buckets. The flowing debris got trapped in the bends as if under the starlings of London Bridge, piling up higher and higher, narrowing the river and increasing the pressure of its current. Paddling became impossible. Julian threw away the oar but didn’t lie down. The flow was too strong. He’d get thrown off if he relaxed his body.

Were there other humans on it? He called out. Only his voice echoed back. Were the humans dead, except for him? Did they run to the river and die, leaving their things and bodies behind? Or was the river where they lived, amid the junk, wet with life?

And what was more frightening?

The descent down the cliffs took a lot out of Julian. He didn’t have a moment to recover before being hurled into the junkyard flood. He had to be at full attention. There was no floating, no drifting, no sleeping. He turned off his light to conserve it, saved the other one for the just in case, and swirled in the darkness. He kept getting knocked into impassable hard things and navigating out of piers built up from refuse.

Where was he headed that this was what he had to overcome to get there?

Josephine, I will follow you to the end of forever. Julian tried to close his eyes for a moment. But where are you taking me?

After what felt like years, he was tossed from his useless carriage into shallow water.