Of the five of you scattered along the double-track needling up and up and up to sheer granite, you are last. Rope cloaks your narrow shoulders, and with each step, it slips down your body in a new direction. The three nearest you chatter a half-heard conversation, but that stops when the leader in the front, the big one, your brother, turns so that he’s walking backward. He fixes on you, shouts “What the fuck was that back there, Alex? Since when are you such a crusher?” And like that, the early evening air breaks like rotten sandstone.
“Crusher!” the others say, thrilled with the word. Even though they wouldn’t hesitate to use it for each other—a light compliment—pasted to you, it has a new glamour. “Crusher!” they say, as if they’d forgotten such people existed. And when they turn and face you, see the mess you’ve made of the rope, dragging before and behind you, they laugh harder and repeat with more vigor. “Alex is a total crusher!”
You arrange your face with what you think is a smirk displaying what you hope is quiet self-assurance. But you haven’t yet learned to gauge the depth of their sarcasm. The sun filters through maple leaves, and you think of goldpanners trying to shave the glimmer right off of rushing water. It’s October, and the evening is coming quickly. Under your puffer, you sweat from the exertion of the approach, but each step brings cooler air. It won’t be long before the rock becomes numbingly cold.
The crag is empty when you arrive. The five of you dump your equipment over the dusty ground. While you flake out the rope, your brother shakes loose the contents of his backpack: a neon orange chalk bag, a frayed harness, a large portable speaker, his shoes in the shape of quotation marks, eight dirty cans of Modelo. These he tosses to his three friends, but when he picks up the fourth, he chucks it at you overhand. You drop the rope and shield yourself right in time. The can ricochets down the hill. They’re laughing, and you tell your brother to fuck off, but it sounds whiny even to you. You haven’t learned to tell someone to fuck off like your brother can. You don’t know how to sing it like a joke or to lace it with a dark threat. When he says “fuck off,” his stubble grows richer, his brow heavier. When you say it, your voice is liable to crack. Down in the bushes, it’s already twilight, and you fish the can out of dead ferns. It fizzes when you open it, spraying your face and oozing down your hand and arm. You lick above your elbow and taste the full day’s exertion—sweat and chalk and mosquitoes and no shower for two nights now. You taste the beer, which you like no better.
Your brother paces under the rock where the light still reaches, sparking the blond in his hair. His back is broad and muscled through his shirt. At home, your mother will still brag about his birth (over nine pounds!) like he is some kind of fish. Your brother is some kind of fish. Your brother sleeps with his mouth open, and through his snoring you can tell that his dreams are of eating and survival. Your brother had his man-body at thirteen, whereas your body at fifteen is still oil-slick and soft. You watch him grapple lightly under the granite, grabbing his friends’ shoulders. Your brother is not afraid of the problem of physical contact with other boys. More than once, you’ve seen him whip off his shirt to wrestle another into the sticks, shoving their faces under his armpit or into his chest, as if some brutal fact concerning his victory can only be smelled or tasted.
When you return to the others, your brother has already finished his beer and collapses it against his forehead. While two of his friends fiddle with the speaker, he legs into his harness and slips on his shoes. You nudge toward the rope, ready if he names you.
“Joaquin. Belay?”
Joaquin, the smallest of the group excluding you, nods, and you rest against a tree.
On the rock wall, your brother is a gladiator. He pulls his weight roughly through each move, grunting and slamming his feet onto high holds. His left hand grabs a little nub of rock—from the ground, you can’t even tell it’s there—and you see the contraction of muscles all along his flank and shoulder. His body locked in place, he takes the rope in his mouth and then maneuvers it into the quickdraw. If the long day has tired him, he doesn’t show it.
Your brother does not seek out the good holds. He is not graceful. He doesn’t need to lean into the wall, or find clever foot positions, or otherwise save his strength. He is only concerned with testing his might against a force that won’t yield.
At the top, your brother doesn’t clip the anchors. He slaps the rock, whoops, and—not even pausing to take in the view—lets go. He crashes through the air, sending Joaquin shooting up like a bottle rocket. The wall isn’t particularly tall, and your brother comes to rest in midair, dangling just above his belayer. His thick legs swing and tangle with his friend. For a moment, they are intertwined, but your brother shoves away and they pendulum separately.
When the pair return to the ground, Joaquin starts putting on his shoes to take his turn, but your brother stops him. “Let’s let our resident crusher show us how it’s done.” And he motions for you to polish off your beer. You raise the can to your lips, sipping quickly. Your brother walks over and pushes your drink past vertical, and it gags you. You spit it back up onto him, and he pushes you to the ground. “The fuck,” he says, flinging backwash off his arm and onto you. He cleans himself as a wolf would, tongue brushing flesh and hair.
Sticky, damp, and cold, you approach the route. For nearly a year now, your brother has been bringing you on these climbing trips. It was at his insistence that you learn the endless vocabulary for rock, which might be chossy or slabby, overhung or in-cut, polished or bomber. His insistence that you bushwhack through endless approaches at dawn and stay out past dark, the climbing never enough, the rock never sufficiently conquered. Your working theory is that really he just wanted someone to carry his rope. A partner who can’t say no. A little experiment—a joke. It’s hardly the first time you’ve approached a route with the warm rash of anger in your head.
Your hands dip into the chalk bag, and your gaze wanders upward. But it isn’t until that first touch—fingertip against granite—that your body takes over. Hips sink into the wall. Your weight lowers as arms straighten, feet seeking ridges that will lever you upward. At the end of this long season of climbing, you’ve learned something precious: the rock has its own preferences. There is a correct way to regard it—deferentially, and with a light touch. If you attend to these things, it will hold you in return. And the heat between your eyes and at the back of your throat is not an emotion, but just that: heat. You aren’t a “fucking Gumby” anymore. Swinging your body to and fro, you glide to the first bolt and clip in. “On belay,” you call, and below you your brother spits.
The climb takes you up an arête—wind at your back, legs straddling a corner—and over a short roof. You skim thin holds on delicate feet. You distribute yourself evenly as if crossing early winter ice, then power through your legs to grab a high crimp.
You feel the beer in your face as a flush and a slowness. There is a slight lag in your actions, the pace of your mind. You feel ever so slightly removed from yourself, and as you ascend, your thoughts wander to your brother, and what he thinks—if he thinks—when he’s alone up here. When you reach the little nub that he clipped from, it takes you a minute to attach yourself to the carabiner on the wall. Even after several hard months of climbing, the rope can still feel like a stranger.
You hear shouts below you. When you turn, you see you are about forty feet in the air. Most likely you wouldn’t deck the ground if you fell. Joaquin is gesticulating, but his speech sounds garbled. “What?” you call.
“Backclip” your brother shouts. “You’re backclipped.”
You see your mistake, the quickdraw twisted. You move to unclip the rope and reverse its orientation. But by the time you have it out of the carabiner, you are pumped. The muscle ache is creeping up your arm, and your leg shakes underneath you. You fumble with the rope and the clip. You drop the rope, and it flops slackly against your harness. When you gaze down, there is a terrible expanse between you and the previous bolt. Reaching between your legs to grab the rope again, you blow the hold. You fall not through open air but along the wall, the rock no longer holding you but rushing all around you like water. You come to a stop halfway down the climb, your legs and arms cheese-grated and bruised, blood coming out of you in three places.
This is very exciting to the group, who cheers and shouts “what a whip!” but not your brother. He doesn’t let you try again but instead lowers you.
“I could have gotten it,” you say as you alight on the ground. “I wanted another shot.” But he just hands you a second Modelo.
This is how it is with him. He wants you here; he doesn’t want you here. You’ve learned not to ask for him to take up slack because more likely than not, he won’t do it. As a result, you’ve taken your fair share of big whips this year. More than your fair share. Ripping off your shoes, you fume a well-trodden path—that you’ve done well beyond what might reasonably be expected of you, after the terror of those first few climbs. Those tears that seemed an inevitable feature of climbing as you clung, petrified, to a bad hold, the prospect of making even one move beyond the bolt too much to bear. And that you somehow arrived here—wanting to climb, the vernacular mastered, the fear ebbed. You are better, you think with some venom, than he was when he was fifteen. Something you would never say to his face.
But you also know that, no matter how far the fall, you won’t hit the ground. The advice he gives, when he chooses to give it, is never wrong. His friends ignore you entirely as you sit in the dirt. You sip your beer and wait for this burst of anger to burn off.
The others cycle through the route quickly. When the last has finished, they debate for a moment what to do next. The sun no longer reaches this side of the wall, though it’s not yet dark. You gaze up through the tulip poplars above you. The branches begin five bolts up the wall. The tallest reach into clear sky, resting their canopy limbs on the rim. Your skin smarts where it’s been scraped raw, but a sweet heaviness is in you now too. You think of the campground, the down in your sleeping bag, how dark it will finally get this moonless night.
The others are setting up another route further along the wall. You wander over to watch as Joaquin readies for a crack climb. Despite the falling temperature, he removes his shirt, revealing a powerful chest rippled with dark hair. Someone whistles a cat call. “That’ll keep him warm,” another laughs. Joaquin smiles and gives a self-conscious little flex. Your own torso—hairless—shivers despite your jacket. You hug your arms, feeling the small knots of muscle that are like a cheap consolation prize. “Girl muscles,” your brother had once named them, to general approval.
There are no bolts on this route, so Joaquin must place his own protection as he climbs. His harness swishes around him like a metallic skirt—cams and nuts and hexes. Joaquin moves deliberately, replacing feet in the crack, edging upward one fist length at a time. When he is so high that you must crane your neck to see him, you lie on the ground. You imagine that Joaquin is not climbing at all but crawling over a horizontal surface, gravity inverted, and if you only willed it, you would fling forward into the rock. You tug on your puffer. It’s getting colder.
The others are joking about a topic you don’t quite understand. A girl named Chelsea, who might have had sex or not had sex with one or several of them, or else they wanted to have sex with her, or would find having sex with her repulsive. They speak in innuendo and halves of inside jokes, as if trying to lock you out. Probably they don’t care if you understand or not. There is a joint being passed around. You hope it doesn’t get passed to you. It doesn’t.
Your brother only chimes in when directly requested. He quickly finishes the remaining two beers, stamping on the cans, not taking his eyes off Joaquin as he feeds out rope. He digs through his pack with one arm, finds another Modelo—even dirtier than the others—and opens it. You watch as he brings it to his mouth, pauses, then turns to you. “Here,” he grunts, and though you feel already queasy, you sit up and take it. You feel your brother’s eyes on you as you take a massive, upchuck-suppressing gulp. But he doesn’t make you finish this one. He takes it back, sipping in contemplation.
The light fades quickly, and soon Joaquin is a smudge on your vision. You feel twin pangs of regret and relief—there won’t be enough time to climb again. You can count yourself done for the day, perhaps for the year. But when Joaquin is finally back on the ground, your brother turns to you. “Why don’t you clean?” he asks. A task he would normally do, but you can hear the beer in his voice.
This alarms you. You barely know how to get the gear out of the wall, and the Modelo sits heavily in your gut. But you do as you’re told. Soon you are out of your puffer, chilly in the evening air, and slipping your hands into the crack.
The first cam comes out of the wall easily enough, and in a few moves you lose sight of the others, who have lit another joint. Gradients of shadow color the wall, but it’s still light enough to make out the holds. Perhaps for this reason, or else the fuzziness from the beers, you don’t realize you forgot your headlamp until you are well off the ground.
You pause, considering your options. It’s not fully dark yet, you reason. The climbing couldn’t be more straightforward—just the single crack, all the way up. You don’t need to see, not really. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble of having them throw it up to you, joking as you can’t manage to catch it. You picture the parabola of your headlamp arcing out of your reach and cracking on the ground, none of them bothering to catch it on the return fall. No, you can finish this easily enough without it. It’s what your brother would do.
While the air on the ground shivered your bare arms, halfway up the wall it feels comforting, like crisp sheets. Your exertion steams off your wrists, and you feel a strange pleasure in your invisibility on the rock, the others (who have activated their lamps) reduced to weak pricks of light below. If only, you think, life could be boiled down to its barest elements of light and dark and rock and air and coldness and heat. If there wasn’t the problem of bodies, of flesh, that stuff that grows and molts, attracts and repulses, commits violence, requires love. Bodies, which divide into boy and man, or man and woman, and the subdivisions of touch and desire and the sprawling and ever more minute distinctions governing manhood that seem to only exist for you to fail at fulfilling them. If you could shed your own body once and for all, leaving only the part that is metamorphic and immovable. In the gathering dark, this seems possible. Ascending in that crack—your hands growing numb and stonelike within the cleft of rock—your thoughts take on a fidelity and exactitude you could never manage on the ground. There is, you think, only this.
At the top of the climb, you find the anchor Joaquin built between two trees: an elaborate arrangement of rope knotted taut. There is a small ledge, just wide enough for the balls of your feet. You try to remember the correct order of operations for cleaning the route. You untie the rope from the trees so you can take down the anchor, and you untie the rope from yourself so you can set up a rappel. But in your preoccupation, in your tipsiness, your hands not quite working properly, you drop the rope. But this time, no longer attached to you, it hisses away past your feet like a zipper.
A dagger of vertigo shoots through your loins into your feet. It seems like you might stumble backward. Your own voice issues from your mouth like that of a stranger. Your hands slap the wall instinctively, finding enough texture to hold your weight, but your feet shift on the ledge. Their grip is tenuous. Though you know there are better placements, it’s now too dark to look and find them. It seems that every muscle along arm and leg contracts. No tether connects you back to the world of the blinking lights below you, the world of the living. This feeling—hanging on for dear life—reminds you in a sickly ironic way of your first time climbing, the rock some hostile and terrifying creature that your body had not yet learned to join with.
There is a commotion down below, voices talking over voices, and though you are still close enough to hear what they are saying, the noise comes to you as if through a filter. You cannot make sense of the words. They shout “Alex!” and throw questions skyward. But you can’t respond. It’s as if your name hissed away as well beneath your feet, and the word they call no longer relates to you. A bewildering and intoxicating fear blooms, and a corner of your mind notes that every small panic you ever felt while climbing was just a premonition of this, the real thing. Fear is the wild animal inside of you, hairy and hissing, jolting between your limbs, and it is also the wordless prayer on your tongue. Fear thrums and vibrates and shapeshifts, grows larger than you. You pray that you don’t vanish in this fear.
For a long minute, you fix your gaze forward, but eventually you dare to glance down. One of the lighted figures must have tied into the rope coiled now on the ground. Between your legs, you see a rapid zigzag, one among the four growing larger. And without hearing him speak, seeing only the headlamp bobbing, you are sure it’s the rough, brash movements of your brother.
But you cannot hold this pose. Already both your legs are shaking, and a film of sweat slicks your fingers and the slight ridges they latch onto. Slowly, you allow your right hand to pass in concentric circles over the rock. In this manner, you find a small pocket, and you secure your hand there. You do the same with your left, and you find a better ridge. But when you shift your right foot toward where you think the best part of the ledge is, your left slips. You catch yourself on your improved hands. You dangle in the silky, violet night. “Fuck,” you hear yourself sob, but even your own voice seems to come from the other side of that filter, and you don’t quite understand it. Fear bangs its ugly drum. Yet some impulse, some wisdom you’d cultivated since those first few times on the wall—your brother yelling as you shook in fright to stop overgripping! Don’t fucking overgrip, Alex!—rises within you and relaxes the muscles up your arms and into your shoulders, allows you to dangle in that calm, controlled fashion that the rock prefers.
You think only of breathing. You focus on the sounds coming from below, the heavy, sibilant grunting that indicates a big move. Crack climbing is not your brother’s strong suit. You picture him, unwilling to wedge his feet into the small crevice, relying on his immense shoulders to pull and pull and pull up the heft of him.
Your fingers are getting number, and the familiar pump is like a constricting animal wrapping around your forearms. These sensations have an emotion, a desire—just let go, just let go. You ignore it. The lights on the ground have gone silent. Your brother is close enough that you can hear his every breath. And every couple seconds he says, in a voice loud enough for only you to hear, “You’re a fucking crusher, man.” You hear this without any distortion, as if it’s just the two of you in a darkened room. You close your eyes, then open them. There is no difference between the two shades of black, as there is no difference between homonyms, how two different things might share the same name. “Fucking crusher,” he says, admiration thick on his voice. But on the third repetition, or the fourth, you realize what you don’t hear—the clink of metal, the scraping sound of placing cams into the crack. He’s not protecting himself, instead climbing freely up the wall to reach you quicker. For some reason, realizing this, you start to laugh.
In this moment, you learn several things. Your pumped arms, the sense of invisibility and separation cloaking you, the fear that changes its face so as to renew your terror—they aren’t real. These sensations are like a bad magic trick acting on your mind and your flesh. Underneath, there is a firmament, and it goes like this: you won’t let go. You won’t let go because a fall would mean colliding with your brother, sending you both plummeting to the earth. You won’t let go because you’ve climbed through a pump, through numb fingers, and you know how to measure the strength left in your arms. A lesser climber might not be able to hold his weight on a wall for ten minutes without good feet. But you are a crusher. One of those legendary granite champions whose names are spoken in disbelief.
You feel something similar to joy, but it is not joy. It is certainty, a beam of white light so pure and concentrated that it splinters into color as it passes through you. There is the certainty, and there is a secondary awareness of that knowledge, as if you are watching yourself from several different vantages. A refracting ray that reaches both past and future. You have this body, and you will not die today. You will not send your brother whipping to the ground.
You look down between your legs, where you still can’t see your brother beneath the glare of his headlamp. But as he gets closer, you can see, with each move, arms and hands emerging on either side of the light. One at a time, they catch the glow for a brief moment as he swings them toward the crack. The chalk on his swollen fingers is streaked through with blood. He might just save your life. “Crusher,” you call down hoarsely, a word you’ve never used before, giving him back that name that has held you on the wall, so that he might use it too.
***
Rumpus original art by Nina Semczuk
