Another shortish chapter (maybe I’ll rewrite and consolidate?) but perhaps just enough for a cup of tea? Maybe jasmine tea – with a pinch of cardamom?
Part XI
Hydrogen Alpha
The starry midnight whispers,
As I muse before the fire
On the ashes of ambition
And the embers of desire,
Life has no other logic,
And time no other creed,
Than: ‘I for joy will follow.
Where thou for love dost lead!’
Bliss Carman The Starry Midnight Whispers
Sherman sat up in the middle of the night, his chest tight and heavy, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps – even as he pushed the wildest remnants of the dream from his mind. He felt his forehead and wiped away a little sweat as he reached for the bottle on his bedside table, and after he got the bottle open he slipped another nitroglycerin under his tongue and sighed. He checked the time on his watch and started the five minute countdown timer, then started to lay back on his cot – when he saw two people sitting on camp chairs just outside the tent. He put on his scrubs and pushed aside the flap and stepped outside into the cool night air, surprising William Taylor and – yet another woman?
“Ah, you’re up?” Taylor said, apparently a little surprised to see him. “How’re you feeling?”
“Okay, I think. There were two women here with me a while ago…”
“Angel and her friend, Dana. They ran up to the house an hour ago and Dana asked if we could stay here until they got back.”
“I see.”
“You look as pale as a ghost, Father. Should I call them?”
“No, no…I’ll just go and see if I can’t fall asleep again.”
“Well, okay, but just call out if you need a hand.”
“Will do,” Sherman sighed. “Thanks.”
“Say, I hate to ask, but did Gretchen’s lab work come back?”
“Gretchen?”
“Gretchen Marlowe. The girl with me this morning? That I carried over to the clinic?”
“Ah. Yes, it did. Did you want to talk about all that just now?”
Taylor looked at his companion and then shook his head. “I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay?”
Sherman nodded and slipped back inside the tent and went back to his cot, his mind racing. ‘Who is that with him?’ he asked himself. ‘She looks so familiar, I know her, but from where? She’s like someone’s – what, daughter? Ah, that’s it, that’s where I remember her from. Debra Sorensen. Ted Sorensen’s daughter. She was working at Universal or Paramount, I think, but where is Ted these days? Or did I hear he’d retired…?’
But then Dana Goodman stepped into the tent, and there was a dog with her this time.
“You’re feeling better, I see,” she said as she came inside and sat in the folding camp chair by his cot. The dog came in too, and it came up and sniffed his hand, then licked his fingers.
He looked at the dog and smiled, scratched behind an ear. “I woke up a few minutes ago, took a nitro…”
“Another one? That’s three so far this evening. One more and it’s off to UCLA we go!”
He looked at her again, now feeling a little annoyed with her easy familiarity, then images from his last dream came back… “I had the strangest dream. We were in the ocean, then we were surrounded by a bunch of killer whales,” he said.
“We? As in you and I?”
“Yup.”
“Should I be flattered, or maybe embarrassed?”
“Would you check my carotids, please?” he asked, watching her closely as she stood and came close again. She felt both sides of his neck and shrugged. The dog jumped up on the edge of the cot and sniffed his neck, too.
“They feel clear to me,” she said. “Did you feel something unusual?”
“Just curious, but what’s with the dog?”
“I’ve had her for a while; she joined me in Ethiopia.”
“Really? Now I bet that would make for an interesting story or two.”
“She’s a sweetheart,” Dana said, rubbing her friend’s back.
“She’s a Golden, I take it?”
“Yes. Name’s Bonnie.”
“Speaking of names, is that Debra Sorensen out there with Taylor?”
“Out there?” Dana said, pointing to the two people out front. “Gee, I’m sorry but I don’t know either of them. Angel will be here in a minute; maybe she’ll know?”
“Maybe,” he sighed. “Could I tell you a story?”
“Sure.”
“You know Orion, the nebula?”
“The archer in the winter sky? Sure. Even the people I met in Africa knew him.”
Sherman nodded. “We see one version of him. With our eyes, through our telescopes, but we see something entirely different when we look at him in a different light.”
“A different light? What do you mean?”
“We see one spectrum of light, and we get used to seeing the world that way, but there are other spectra out there we can’t see. And we couldn’t until we invented new ways of seeing. And one of the first new ways was to isolate the Hydrogen Alpha line. One night my dad and I took pictures of Orion using a Hydrogen Alpha filter, and the results blew me away.”
“Oh? What was so different?”
“Well, Orion wasn’t alone up there. He was surrounded by hundreds of other structures, not just alone in the darkness. Then we took more images, we increased our exposure times to hours, not minutes, and we resolved all those structures surrounding Orion.”
“And what did you find?”
“Flames. Red flames. Orion is up there awash in a sea of red flames. Alone, making his stand against the flames of Hell. Forever.”
She looked in his eyes, looked at the lost, helpless man making his last stand and she understood.“Sit back. I want to hook up the leads and run another strip.”
Sherman nodded and leaned back, closing his eyes to the lingering flames, then he felt this stranger hooking up leads and running another EKG, holding the paper up to the light in silence. “I think you may just be going into heart failure, Doctor Sherman.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” he sighed as he recalled images of Orion and the memory of falling through the sky to the sea below.
She sat back beside his cot and took his hand, then she looked him in the eye as she started to speak: “It would surprise me. Are you really so resigned to death?”
Sherman lifted his head a little and grinned: “Me? Resigned? Hell, darlin’, I’ve been cheating death my whole life. He was bound to catch up to me one day.”
“But…are you ready?”
“What? To die? Hell, no, I’m not ready to die! I’ve got a To Do list about three and a half miles long and it’s getting longer every day, so no, I’m far from ready, but that’s not really the point, is it?”
“What’s the point, Gene?”
“And you know my name – how?”
“Angel told me, and nice try but I’m not so easy to distract. So tell me, what’s the point?”
“We all have to contend with fate, Dana, with our destiny – whatever that may be.”
“Meaning what? That you’ll pass away when some benign deity up there in the sky says you’re ready, that it’s your time?”
“That’s one way of looking at it, yes,” Sherman sighed.
“You know, when I was in Sudan I probably held a couple hundred kids in my hands as they passed – usually from starvation. Was that their destiny, Gene? Was all that death a part of God’s divine plan?”
“I think you’re missing another point, perhaps an even bigger one, Dana,” Sherman said, sitting in the stillness and rubbing his burning eyes.
“And that point is?”
“That there’s a war playing out in real time, playing out all around us, and it has been since the beginning of time. You could call it a war between Good and Evil.”
“Between God and Satan, you mean?”
“Oh, of that I’m far less certain,” Sherman sighed, his voice trailing off to a faint whisper…
Then he felt a stethoscope on his chest, heard the faint whirring sound of the EKG spitting out another strip, then he heard more voices – faraway and insistent, as the pressure returned…
…but by then he was falling again, down to his sunless sea – now so full of rising stars.
+++++
He felt convulsive-shaking movements, then his body sinking in warm water. An eye, huge and full of stars, surrounded him, and he reached out to touch a pulsing super nova in the center before he realized he was flat on his back. Lying on sand, warm sand. No pressure. No pain from his prosthetic left leg. He was suffused with absent external sensations – like existing within pure nothingness, and he was terrified.
Then he realized he was spread out on sand, now motionless and still utterly terrified. His eyes were clinched tight, closed off from whatever was happening around him now, and to make matters worse he could hear absolutely nothing in this stillness.
“Is this death?” he asked the void. “Are you here now?”
But no. That wasn’t quite right, either. “I hear the wind. Faraway, like the wind in swaying pines.”
He sniffed tentatively, thought he smelled pines and he turned to face them.
Then he opened his eyes.
The atmosphere here, the sky was reddish blue, and there was a huge ringed gas giant overhead, almost like another Jupiter-sized world but with a methane saturated atmosphere, like Neptune’s. And rings like Saturn’s. Huge, omnipresent.
He lifted his head and saw a globular cluster – only this cluster was closer than close. He could see hundreds of individual stars within the cluster with his naked eye, and that just wasn’t possible, was it? But nothing he saw in this sky made the slightest sense, either. He saw not one familiar constellation and so this most basic part of his knowledge was unmoored, lost…and he felt adrift again.
He sat up, saw that he was sitting in a white sandy track, almost like a road made by primitive two-wheeled carts, like something used in ancient times…but even the Romans had paved their roads. But not here. Why?
Always why? Always analyze? Is that all that I am?
Then a passing shadow crossed the fields to his left. Not cultivated with crops – yet he saw what he assumed might be edible plants, and a lot of them, too. Enough to feed…?
His eye followed the shadow to his left and he saw the forest he’d heard and smelled in his darkness; but then he noted this forest was off in peculiar ways – like the color was all wrong. Conifers were cobalt blue, leafy deciduous trees looked like a patchwork of blues and greens, but then deep inside the forest he saw what had to be a blindingly powerful white light, and there was something flying in the air near the light source. More than one, actually. But what had made the shadow that passed overhead? And what was the light? A forge, perhaps?
He was, he realized, analyzing this new environment using the intellectual toolkit he’d carried here with him. Some of his tools might work here, some might not without first finding their proper context, but then it hit him, and hard. He felt both excited and scared and now, for the first time in his life, he felt alone. Alone, with his intellect.
“Well pardon the fuck out of me, but we ain’t in Kansas anymore, are we?”
He turned a bit and saw a fairly large mountain range. Snow covered, maybe fifty or so miles away. Sky color more red in that direction, but purplish-red closer to the horizon over that sea – and he didn’t see any clouds, anywhere. So maybe blue light from the gas giant refracted in the upper atmosphere here? But why no clouds? No evaporation? Then where did these plants find their water?
He tried to stand and in an instant realized his left leg was intact, like it had never been amputated, yet he still felt the muscle memory of climbing the Matterhorn with a metal leg. “Okay. I can get into this,” he sighed, smiling as he pushed all his toes into the sandy loam of the cart track. He held up his hands and looked at the skin he felt there – no age spots, no wrinkles. And no goddamn arthritis!
“Okay, whatever this place is, it ain’t Heaven, but it sure ain’t Hell,” he said as he turned his face into the wind. He looked down the road into the distance and thought he could just make out a house way down by the sea. Like a Greek house. White stucco, flat roof. What does that tell me? Rain catchment? Salt water in the seas? So, this is an earth-like planet. Okay, so how’d I get here? It felt like I was awake during the entire transit so it couldn’t have been all that far away? So…what happened? Trans-dimensional movement? Or…is this Earth in another time? But am I still on earth? Because if this Earth, even in another time, the gas giant and the stars patterns are crazy wrong…?”
Then the shadow was passing overhead again and someone was calling his name.
Warmth, warm darkness, then the cold pinpricks of rebirth.
Open eyes.
Back in the tent. On the beach.
But what beach? Venice? Or…there, on the planet with the blue gas giant overhead?
Then he was anchored to the sound of two voices just outside the tent. Two men. Two angry men, one subordinate. Pleas and threats. Implored logic, the pain of love too long denied. An oath broken, promised retribution coming. Bargains made, bargains pushed aside.
He recognized William Taylor’s voice. Heard his anguish, felt his desperation.
The other man had to be Ted Sorensen. Sherman could feel the other man’s power – even laying here in this darkened tent, safely isolated and well away from the caustic fury burning in other men’s souls.
Taylor had promised something. Something about hurting Sorensen’s daughter. He’d hurt her and had to stay away from her, let her go. With assurances made Sorensen had helped Taylor, mentored him, but now, tonight, Taylor had betrayed his oath. Taylor begged then he threatened, his position too weak for anything else because he’d betrayed his own love. Sorensen left Taylor sputtering by a pit full of glowing embers, his anger spent, their path ahead now painfully clear once again.
Sherman could just make out Taylor’s fading silhouette through the tent’s heavy fabric, but even so he could feel the other man’s pain. Trapped by events beyond his control he’d reached out to the only thing left that mattered. His love, the love he’d bargained away during a danger-filled afternoon a long, long time ago. Then love was tantalizingly close once again, but like Icarus he’d reached for his sun-drenched love far too late. Or…was it too soon?
And Sherman knew the poor man would never know. That poor men who bargained away their love would never know.
A few minutes later Taylor stood and walked away and Sherman lay there in the darkness, lost in the wonder of the moment.
“But I never even reached for the sun, did I?”
He thought of Betty Cohen chasing him up that mountain. In their enveloping darkness.
“Because I never reached out to the one person whose love for me was as pure as the love I felt for her,” he sighed as he remembered the love he’d felt for Beth as he watched her on the Ice Field, making that tortured final ascent to the summit. To St. Bernard, wasn’t it? Where we last touched hands?
So pure. Denied. “How am I a better man than William Taylor?”
And then the wind, lifting her, carrying her away. From me. Forever.
So pure.
And then the falling, but always down to my tainted sea – surrounded by life’s flaming wreckage.
Sherman listened to the lab tech as she read through the results, but the elevated white blood count and high lymphoblast count all but confirmed his initial impressions: the little girl clinging to William Taylor more than likely had ALL, or acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Confirming the diagnosis would be painful as hell – and costly – and Sherman almost questioned whether Taylor would want to get involved. But he’d seen the look in Taylor’s eyes, the almost suspiciously irrational commitment of one human being to another under particularly questionable circumstances, but there really wasn’t any doubt at all. Of the thousands of kids living out here on the beach this one little girl had piqued Taylor’s interest, caught his eye. She’d drawn the lucky number. And who knows, Sherman thought, maybe if he’d caught the diagnosis early enough, and with truly aggressive intervention, she might be one of the lucky kids that made it. Still, with a white count as off the charts as hers, he had his doubts.
He picked up the phone on his desk, hit intercom and waited for someone at the front desk to pick up, but when no-one did he looked up at the clock on the wall and sighed. “Of course no one is answering, you idiot! They went home two hours ago!”
Then he heard someone banging away on the front door, and he knew what that meant.
He walked out of the exam room to the front door and saw the boy from yesterday, the kid whose mother had been shot in the face. He was standing out there holding a towel to his gut, and blood was running down his pants onto the sidewalk.
Sherman unlocked the door and helped the kid into the first trauma room, if you could indeed call it that, but he helped the boy up onto the table then called 911 and asked for paramedics to come by for a pickup.
“LaShawn, isn’t it?” he said to the kid. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, man. They was waitin’ for me in the house. Two of ‘em, and one started cuttin’ on me soon as I was in the door.”
“You know them? Recognize them?”
“No, Father. Never seen ‘em.”
“You’ve lost a lot of blood, LaShawn,” Sherman said as he worked on getting a pressure dressing in place, “so I’m going to start an IV, but a surgeon will need to look at this wound,” he added, pointing at the kid’s right side.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I’m worried about this cut here, this one on your right side. Too much bleeding here, so I’d like for them to look over your kidney.”
“Can’t you just sew me up? I mean, I gotta…”
Sherman shook his head. “Not with a possible kidney laceration, LaShawn. You could be in real trouble if that’s not fixed just right, and I can’t do that kind of work here, not by myself.”
Ten minutes later LaShawn was on his way and Sherman went to the locker room to change out of his scrubs, and when he went to lock up he was surprised to find Taylor’s actress-friend waiting for him outside the clinic door.
“Angel, right? My, my, what are you doing out here this time of night?”
“Why? Is that a problem?”
Sherman shrugged. “Not if you know how to take care of yourself. Now, what can I do for you, Angel from Palo Alto?”
“Father Kerrigan told us that you’re looking for another physician to work here at the clinic.”
“I am. You interested?”
“Me? No, not really, but I have a close friend you might be interested in talking to.”
“Oh? Tell me more.”
“She went to Stanford, but before me. She’s been working with MSF in Sudan and Ethiopia for the last couple of years, but she’s back here in California now and she’s looking for something new.”
“Something new? What on earth does that mean?”
“Work. She’s looking for work.”
“I think I understand that, it’s just that they way you said that, well, it almost sounds as if this girl is out collecting experiences.”
“Collecting experiences? Really? I’m sorry,” the Angel said. “No, she’s just dedicated to helping the poor and the disenfranchised.”
“The disenfranchised? Really? How extraordinary,” Sherman sighed, trying not to sound too overtly sarcastic. “And does your altruistic friend have a name?”
“Dana. Dana Goodman. Could you meet with her soon, maybe let her see your clinic?”
“Is she here in Venice now?”
“She should be soon.”
“Well then, I’m working at the aid station tonight, then again over the weekend.”
“So, you’ll be working there on Halloween?”
“Yes. Lucky me.”
“Are you headed down there now?”
“As soon as I lock up a few things, yes.”
“Could I lend a hand?”
And Sherman could tell then…Father Kerrigan had told this Angel about his recent heart attacks. She was too…solicitous. Too…attentive. “Sure, if you have the time.”
It took them just a few minutes to walk through the clinic and secure all the pharmaceuticals and surgical equipment, then Sherman locked the main doors on their way out. And then he turned to face the flooding tide of humanity shuffling along the street bound for the boardwalk, and to the beach beyond.
She took his arm in hers and they stepped out into the current, and they were carried along in this human wave, gently but inexorably towards the beach. She helped him out of the flow and they walked over to the old life guard shack, then to the huge white canvas tents flying red cross flags.
And of course there were already a dozen or so people lined up and waiting for him.
“Need me to stick around?” the Angel said.
“Oh, only if you have the time. This is nothing unusual…”
“How long have you been working today?”
He turned and looked at her, then gently shook his head. “That’s not how it works, Angel, at least not in my world. I work until all the work is done.”
“Surely you know…”
“Know what? That I’m burning the candle at both ends?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I do.”
“You’ll die if you keep this up.”
“I suppose I will, yes. Yet I think I’ll leave when I’m supposed to.”
“You mean – God…?”
“Call it whatever you like. I rather the like the idea of cosmic tumblers falling into place.”
“Prosaic. I didn’t take you for a poet.”
“Yes, and I’m a Leo who enjoys rock climbing and progressive rock…”
She laughed a little at his off key humor. “Instant karma, huh?”
“Something like that. Life’s what you make of it,” he said as he opened the aid station by flipping over a little placard that featured an image of Lucy from the Peanuts gang, along with her archetypal note: ‘The Doctor Is Real In’ emblazoned in a bold red comic book font.
The first two people had dry, crusting sores on their lips and around their chins and nostrils, but their eyes were clear so he gave them tubes of Bactroban to treat their impetigo and he let the Angel make new charts for both of them. “Remind me to let the clinic staff know we have an impetigo outbreak out here now,” he added – before he remembered this Angel was not working at the clinic.
Yet she was writing up a note in his notebook and he smiled as he addressed her: “Why don’t you take the next one?” he said, looking her over, gauging her interest and enthusiasm.
And she did, without hesitation. An older man walked into the tent and sat. He told her about a lump behind his knee and she looked it over before she turned to Sherman, unsure how to proceed down here on the beach with such limited resources.
So Sherman bent over and had a look. He palpated the margins of the suspected tumor and felt the increased distal vascularization and sighed. “You know the clinic up on Grand?” he asked the man.
“Yeah, I tried to go once. Lines were too long and nobody gives a shit.”
Sherman nodded. “You come here to the tent first thing in the morning, say around seven thirty, and you and I will walk over and get to the bottom of this.”
“You know what it is?”
“I’m not certain, no, but a blood test and some imaging will give me a better idea.”
“Is it a tumor?”
“It could be, yes.”
“A bad one?”
Sherman nodded. “Yup. Could be.”
“If I just let it go, will it be painful?”
Sherman looked the old man in the eye. “Very. You wouldn’t want to go out that way.”
The old man looked down. “I got no one. Got no reason to go on, ya know? What would you do, Doc?”
“Me? If I was in your shoes I’d go down to the church and have a talk with the Old Man. Maybe he has something to say about things, ya know?”
“Don’t you be blowin’ sunshine up my ass, Doc. I got no use for all that…”
“I’m not. You asked me what I’d do, but you asked me, a priest, didn’t you? What did you expect me to say?”
The old man shook his head, then he looked at the Angel. “You a doc, too?” he asked.
And she nodded. “Yup. And I am not a priest,” she added, smiling a little, trying to put the man at ease.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“Me? If I was you?”
“Yup.”
“I’d come over here about seven and let me take you to breakfast, then you and I could walk over to the clinic and get some answers.”
“Answers. Then what?”
“If you’re not sure what to do, ask somebody who cares.”
“I told you…I got nobody.”
“But the Father told you who you could talk to, didn’t he? Because maybe there really is someone who cares, you know?”
“Do you believe, you know, in God?” the old man asked.
“Me?” the Angel replied, surprised at the question – yet she didn’t answer it, either. Instead, she placed her right hand on the man’s forehead and within a few seconds he went limp and fell to the tent’s floor.
Sherman had watched her, of course, yet he wasn’t sure what he’d just witnessed. He shook his head and went to the man and lifted him from the floor, and the Angel helped him get the old man on the cot they used as an exam table. “Mind of I ask what you just did?”
But when she looked at him he saw pure confusion in her eyes, and he knew then that she had absolutely no idea what had just gone down.
“Interesting,” Sherman whispered as he took her right hand in his. He palpated her fingers then the palm of her hand – and the tingling that started was at first quite subtle, yet within a second or so he felt the world slow and grow dim…before he too fell to the floor.
+++++
He was adrift in fog, a leaf drifting across a field covered in snow. Icy cold and shivering, he felt immense pressure in his chest and in an instant he knew what was happening. He was having his third heart attack, and this was going to be the big one, wasn’t it…?
He forced his eyes open and saw the Angel working on him, but someone else was here now too. Another woman, and she was hooking up EKG leads then slipping an oxygen cannula over his ears and into his nostrils.
“Your rhythm is good, Father,” the stranger said, her eyes smiling confidently, “so no worries right now.”
“Feel pressure,” Sherman said, “right here,” he added, placing his hand over his sternum.
“Do you take nitro?”
He nodded. “Pant pocket, right front.”
She got one and slipped it into his mouth; he manipulated the tiny tablet under his tongue and closed his eyes as the easing came on.
“That better?”
He nodded. “How’s the old guy?”
“Fine. He left a few minutes ago,” the Angel said. “I think we’ll see him in the morning.”
“Good,” Sherman sighed. “Now, who are you?” he asked the stranger.
“Oh, right. I’m Dana. Dana Goodman,” she said as she held out her right hand.
He took her hand and he marveled at the soft warmth, not to mention the delicate strength he sensed in her fingers. “You have a surgeons hands,” he said. “Angel tells me you’ve worked with MSF – in the Horn region?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“With whom?”
“Do you know Jean Paul Duvalier?”
“The thoracic surgeon? Yes. I spent a few months with him in Cameroon.”
“I know. He sends his regards,” she said. “He wanted me to ask how you feel about snakes these days.”
“He would ask that,” Sherman said, smiling. “That was a bad night.”
“He told me. You were very brave,” she said, smiling while she ran her fingers through his thinning hair – and yet he was stunned by the simple humanity of the gesture and his first impulse was to pull back.
Yet he couldn’t. Because in the next instant he felt an overwhelming attraction to this woman, a completely immersive feeling beyond anything he had ever known in his life. He understood a shift had just taken place, that something transcending the sexually mundane had occurred and that something he’d once considered metaphysical had found him out here on the beach – and that just didn’t make sense.
“So tell me, Dana…why are you here?”
She leaned close and whispered in his ear: “I’m just here to lend a hand, Father.”
The words were startling in their clarity, unnerving in their preconceived import, and yet he felt hollow, unsure of himself. “Lend a hand? But how…”
Yet now she placed her left hand on his chest, her right on his forehead, and when this circuit was complete he felt pulsing warmth flooding through his veins – before the echoes began again.
“To help you see,” she whispered again.
“See? See what?”
He was falling again, falling towards the sea – then he remembered – no, not remembering – he was feeling an echo of the morning when he had walked across the Boulder Field. When he had carried Betty and Beth to the summit of Long’s Peak. They had seen the same sea below when they fell, all of them, when they were inside that sphere, didn’t they? Then they were back on the boulders, drenched in sea water.
How cold they’d been. The sun had just been seeping over the horizon, the star’s warmth still far away, still becoming. Sitting there in a wet, ragged heap, shivering, going into shock…
Then the sphere had enveloped them again – even as people ran up to them – and they had disappeared – again.
Only to return seconds later, each of them completely confused.
Then the sphere was gone and they had no memory of what they’d experienced inside.
But the other people on the Boulder Field saw, and they remembered.
And now Sherman realized he was falling towards the same sea and he looked around, saw Hans and Jordan and Heather – just as they had been twenty years ago…
But why the sea – again? Why this sea – now?
He looked up, saw Boomer 505 – his A-6E Intruder – disappearing inside an expanding ball of flaming fragments, then he saw his ejection seat tumbling away, felt the searing pain in his left leg.
‘I’m falling – after I was shot down – that’s the Strait of Hormuz down there…’
Then he was in the sea, treading water.
Only Dana Goodman was by his side.
And the water was cold, too cold to be the sea off the Yemeni coast.
He turned and realized this was California, that they were a few hundred yards off Venice Beach, and it was still night. The thought filled him with dread, then a feeling close to outright panic followed.
“What’s wrong?” Dana Goodman said, smiling.
“Are you kidding me? These waters are a nursery for young male Great Whites this time of year. There are probably hundreds of them out here…”
“It’s okay,” she said. “They won’t let anything happen to us.”
“Who? What are you…” he started to say, but just then he saw four huge black dorsal fins slicing through the moonlit water and he swallowed hard, his mind filling with images of sharks feasting on him as he tried to swim to shore…
…then the first orca surfaced a few feet away…
…and the water around his shivering body grew warm…
…and when Gene Sherman looked into the orcas eye he saw a great globular cluster – with a faintly pulsing light in the center of the formation filling the womb of the night.
A longish chapter here, perhaps worth the time to make a cup of coffee or tea. Enjoy.
Part IX
Moonlight
The moon is distant from the sea,
And yet with amber hands
She leads him, docile as a boy,
Along appointed sands.
Emily DickinsonThe Moon is Distant From the Sea
Los Angeles, California Twenty years later
He seemed to feel the concussive gunshots almost before he heard them, the loud wump-wump sound coming through the clinic’s insulated windows in staccato bursts, causing several patients to automatically dive to the floor. But, Gene Sherman knew, people all around west LA were used to taking cover whenever a ‘drive-by’ went down, so he wasn’t exactly surprised. Besides, he had work to do.
Because he had a kid on a gurney right now, a kid found almost comatose in a nearby alley. Another kid with a needle still dangling from his arm, the filthy insulin syringe still loosely in the boy’s cephalic vein. His lips and nail beds were deep blue and the kid – he guessed the boy’s age was around 16, tops – was barely breathing.
“What’s his BP now,” Sherman asked the paramedic standing-in for their usual nurse that afternoon.
“65 over 40, pinpoint pupils,” Jim Turner replied.
Sherman was sure the kid had overdosed on heroin but really needed to make sure so he soaked a 4×4 in Betadine and swabbed the area around the syringe before he gently slid it free of the vein. He held the syringe up to the light and looked at the brownish gray fluid and nodded, then he injected a tiny amount onto the NarcID test pad and watched the fluid react.
Then he heard one of their volunteer receptions on the PA in the front office: “Multiple GSWs in the street! Doctor Sherman, you are needed out front, STAT!”
Sherman guessed the kid’s weight and filled a syringe with Naloxone, then injected the opioid antagonist into the kid’s upper arm before he turned to the paramedic: “Jim, get him cleaned up and see if a social worker can get to him while we’ve got him here.”
“What’s that around his mouth, Doc?”
Sherman shook his head. “Me guess is it’s semen. Kid’s been using his mouth to earn enough for his next hit.”
“You want me to do a draw for HIV? Or maybe an STD panel?”
“Not without consent, Jim. Sorry. Good instincts, but we can’t do it.”
Turner nodded. “Doesn’t seem right, ya know?”
Sherman looked towards the street and shrugged. “Hardly anything right about what’s going on out there,” he said as he walked to the supply room, grabbing a couple a gunshot wound trauma kits on his way out the door.
Next, he knew from experience, came the screams. The mothers and the girlfriends caught in the crossfire as two rival gangs shot up the neighborhood. This first casualty of the afternoon was a little girl riding home from school on her bicycle, the nine year old taking a round from an AK-47 in her upper thigh. Not far away, a young woman had been pushing a baby stroller and now she was on the ground holding her belly, though she was quite still now.
Sherman went to the little girl on the bike first. Blood oozing, not pulsing, strong pulse and decent respiratory rate, so he moved to the woman laying next to the baby stroller. Sucking chest wound just under the sternum, strong pulsing arterial flow so the bullet probably hit the aorta. He knelt and started an IV, running blood expanders wide open. Without getting her on by-pass, and fast, she had less than a minute left, and the sirens he heard were probably five minutes out – in this heavy evening rush hour traffic. The math was simple…she would die out here this afternoon.
Then…a cop car pulled up and two patrolmen – and another paramedic – hopped out and ran up to him.
“Man, I’m glad to see you guys!” Sherman said. “We need to get this gal to an OR, STAT, or she’s a goner…”
And seconds later the cops and the medic had loaded her in the back of their patrol car and were off, running code as they left, and at the same time he saw Jim Turner coming out of the Westside Free Clinic with a gurney, stopping by the little girl still in the street.
“Can you get a BP and stats going?” Sherman asked as he walked back to the girl, helping Turner lift the girl onto the gurney then looking at the wound more closely. “No exit wound,” he sighed as he started a line, “so the bullet probably took out the femur.” He taped the line down and looked at Turner, then down the street as LAFD paramedics approached, with pulsing strobes and sirens blaring away …
“Looks like 90 over 65, 16 and shallow, O2 is 92.”
“Okay, thanks. Get a mask on her while I start fluids.”
Then he saw the look in Turner’s eyes. Fear, anger, fight or flight. Then he felt someone coming up from behind, and he turned and saw a teenager with some kind of short-barreled carbine – like maybe an Uzi or a Mac-10 – and the kid was pointing the gun right at Sherman.
And as Sherman turned and faced the boy, the boy saw the priest’s collar and his eyes went wide.
“You a doctor or a priest?” the kid asked Sherman.
“Both.”
“Then could you come with me please, Father?”
“Is someone hurt?” Sherman asked.
“Yeah. My momma, she been shot.”
Sherman turned back to Jim Turner. “Get her loaded then come on over.”
Turner didn’t like the looks of this armed banger and smelled trouble, but he turned back to the girl and got her ready for transport…
And Sherman, or Father Gene – as he was known around Venice Beach – followed the banger along a dirt path between two run down houses, and there, slumped alongside a roaring air conditioning unit, he found a middle aged Black woman with a gaping gunshot wound that had shattered the left side of her face. “Jim! I need a kit over here, STAT!”
“Father?” the banger said, openly weeping now, “That’s my momma, she gonna die or what?”
“You wanna put that gun down and give me a hand?”
“What?”
“I need to get your mother on the ground but I want to keep her head elevated, okay? Then we’re going to start an IV…”
“She gonna die, man. Don’t you need to say something? You know, like talk to God?”
Turner came running up and skidded to a stop when he saw the woman’s wound. “Shit,” he whispered under his breath…
“Jim, go find me a couple of paramedics,” Sherman said as he took the trauma kit. “What’s your name, son?” he asked, turning to the banger.
“LaShawn,” the boy said.
“Okay, help me get your mom down,” Sherman said softly, wanting to calm the kid down, walk him back from the edge a little.
“You think you can help her?”
Sherman looked over the wound, then, using his fingertips, he worked his way up her neck and then palpated around the base of her skull. “It looks worse than it really is, LaShawn. So my guess is your mother will be fine, but you’ll find out more in a couple of days. But, and this is important, her recovery is going to take a while, and it will be painful. Now, what say you and me get to work, okay?”
+++++
“Did you ask him about the gun?” the detectives investigating the shootings asked.
Sherman shook his head. “As soon as I go down that road they shut up. My value here is as an honest broker, Andy. They need to trust me or they won’t come in for help.”
“Yeah, but,” the detective added, “that might work out okay for you but it makes my job that much more difficult.”
“I understand,” Sherman said. “And I know you understand that we’re walking the straight and narrow down here, Andy. One false step, one bad move and if we even appear to be taking sides, you know as well as I that we’re the next target on the next drive-by.”
Andy Ainsworth had been with the LAPD for almost fifteen years, and he’d been working homicide for six. He was a good cop, a cop who’d walked a beat down here and who knew what the score was: civilization was falling apart south of the I-10, from South Central all the way out to Venice Beach. Cops held an advantage during the day, but once the sun went down the balance of power shifted and the cops were suddenly outmanned – and outgunned. Cops had airpower, sure, but after two were shot out of the sky in a three week period, and at a loss in excess of twenty million bucks, the department was hesitant to risk those assets anymore, unless a truly dire emergency existed. Besides, from a PR perspective, helicopters were much more useful as Medevac and rescue assets.
Ainsworth was still working the westside, yet because of ongoing recruitment shortages his beat had expanded to include the movie studios in Culver City, the marina district, as well as the area around Venice Beach. There were now also twenty percent fewer officers assigned to CID than there’d been as recently as 2010, and yet the numbers were falling more and more with each passing year. As a result of this ongoing shortfall, detectives were doing their best to recruit snitches and other informants all over the city, but the danger these informants faced if they were blown was as ongoing as it was severe. And because the gangs in LA had nationwide affiliates in almost every city and town across North America, there was literally no place informants could hide. Even the FBI wasn’t as well organized, or anywhere near as lethal, as the Gangs of South Central.
And while Ainsworth knew that Sherman, like all the other priests working down here, was walking a tightrope, he still tried to cultivate ties with the physicians and nurses working the free clinics. They heard stuff, good intel, all the time, and the priests working the clinics had no qualms going out for a beer and shooting the shit, even with a cop. Still, Ainsworth knew better than to push…
“I know, Father Gene, I know. I gotta ask, you know?”
Sherman was working once again on the heroin overdose, getting more fluids onboard and trying to get a sample of sputum from the boy’s lungs so he could get a culture going. “How many dead today, Andy?”
“Four. Assuming that woman shot in the face doesn’t die.”
Sherman nodded. “We’re losing the war, aren’t we?”
“Sure feels that way. You know, some group from the mayor’s office was down here making a count of the homeless people, and I mean just right around here, at the beach. Almost ten thousand people, Father. Living either on the beach or sleeping on the sidewalk, and man, I just don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get, Andy?”
“Why so many? Why here? And what happens when more people come, Father? Where are they gonna go? We’ll end up with a hundred thousand people down here, sleeping on the beach, from Malibu all the way down to PV. Then what?”
Sherman looked in the boy’s mouth and found a likely bit of puss and took a bit on his swab and transferred it to the petri dish, then he put the dish into the culture ‘oven’ and marked the time on his clipboard. “Well, at that point we’ll be knee deep in feces down here, which’ll mean massive outbreaks of cholera. Rats will move in after that, plague will follow and pretty soon you’ll be burning bodies on the beach just to keep all these diseases from spreading inland.”
“Oh. Gee, thanks. Now that’s a happy thought.”
“Really? Well, our politicians can’t fix things anymore, Andy, because they’ve boxed themselves in by making promises they can’t possibly keep. Poll numbers on one side, polarized constituencies on the other, and anytime they try to innovate a radical new solution and, by the way, simply try to get something done, another aggrieved party calls forth one of the infinite legion of waiting lawyers to stop it, and endless appeals make any kind of meaningful progress impossible.”
“But it wasn’t always that way…”
“Once the courts were swept up in all the partisan bickering, all hope of meaningful democratic participation in government fell by the wayside, because up until then we had relied on impartial referees. They’re gone now, the courts are full of partisan hacks and so no one believes in the courts anymore. No one, Andy. Which makes me wonder…how will you enforce laws no one believes in? Especially when laws are seen only as protecting the economic interests of the wealthiest people, like, say, the one percenters? What then?”
“Father, I have four murders to make sense of…”
“Make sense of? Really?”
“You know what I mean.”
Sherman opened the sleeping boy’s eyes and, using the wall-mounted ophthalmoscope, peered into his eyes – then he groaned and shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” Andy asked.
“First signs of jaundice showing up.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Liver failure. Which, if it is what I think it is, he needs a transplant. But because he is who he is he’ll never qualify for the transplant list.”
“So, what happens to him?”
“We throw his body on the funeral pyre, Andy. Probably by next weekend, too.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“A homeowner found him passed out behind his garage, needle still in his arm. Some kids carried him here. And here’s the real nice part, Andy. His mouth was full of cum, crusted up around his mouth, too.”
“So turning tricks with his mouth to pay for his…”
Sherman nodded. “Sure looks that way, doesn’t it? Oh well, he wouldn’t be the first, would he?”
“So, you got nothing for me?”
“The kid? The one whose mother took a round in the face? I’m not sure he’s a banger. Could be, but I’m not sure.”
“But he had a gun…”
“Said it’s his father’s. Keeps it in the house for times like these.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t go after him?”
“I don’t think he’s a bad kid, not really. Why waste your time putting away one of the good ones?”
“You know him?”
Sherman sighed. “No, not really. I’ve seen him around though, from time to time. He helps out around the camps every now and then. Cleaning up, helping some of the older people down there, little things like that.”
“You know his mom?”
“Never met her.”
“Say, you know that movie producer? William Taylor?”
Sherman stood up and then stretched. “Taylor? Yeah, sure, I’ve heard of him. Why?”
“He moved out onto the beach last night, started organizing food trucks to start feeding the homeless down on the beach.”
“No kidding? That’s going to stir up some shit in a hurry…”
“Yeah. Our Watch Commander told us ‘Hand’s off’ at briefing this morning, I think they want us to back off for a week or so and see what happens.”
“You say he’s in a tent down there? You know where?”
“Yeah. Not too far from the old aid station, by the life guard shack. You working the aid station any this week?”
Sherman nodded. “Tomorrow night, and I’ll be there all weekend.”
“Then you’ll see him. He’s hard to miss, has an entourage and groupies, all the usual Hollywood bullshit.”
“I wonder what he’s up to? Think this is a political move? Maybe against the mayor?”
Ainsworth shrugged. “Yo no se, Amigo.”
“Pues…porque así es, Andy. We’ll just have to wait and see, but thanks for the heads-up.”
“Yeah, well, from what I hear Taylor and Father Kerrigan are pretty tight, so maybe you should talk to him about it.”
“No kidding? Kerrigan?”
“Yup.”
Sherman hesitated, hovering over the edge of his indecision, then he spoke slowly – and quietly: “Scope out the pink house at Andalusia and Grand, maybe around two this Sunday morning.”
Ainsworth nodded, then abruptly turned and left the clinic. ‘Welcome to the war,’ Ainsworth sighed as he walked out to his unmarked car. “Where, like it or not, everyone has to take sides.” He checked into service then made his way to the intersection to take in the details, and start his surveillance.
+++++
Sherman made it back to the Jesuit House at Loyola Marymount in time for dinner, and he found that, as was their custom these days, Andrew Kerrigan was waiting for him. They went to their table and sat, then poured iced tea from the pitcher on the table.
“Looks like you had a bad day,” Kerrigan observed, looking at Sherman’s hands – which were shaking a little more today than they had in weeks.
“A drive-by right outside the clinic while I was working an OD,” Sherman replied. “It never ends, does it?”
“What? The War?”
“Yeah, the war, good and evil, whatever you want to call it. It’s never going to end, is it?”
“Maybe you should reread Revelations again, Father.”
“No thanks. I’m trying to quit.”
Kerrigan chuckled. “If only we could.”
A waiter came by and dropped off several bowls of food and Sherman groaned. “Ah, if it’s Tuesday this must be pot-roast.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Kerrigan sighed as he ladled a spoonful of the goop onto his plate.
“I hear some kind of big-wig movie type has set up camp down on the beach. What’s up?”
Kerrigan looked up and smiled. “Yes, William Taylor, a producer over at Fox, I think. He’s working on a new project, a cop movie.”
“So…this is research?”
“You know, I’m not really sure what he’s up to, Gene. He’s got some new actress parked at a house down on the beach and the next thing I know he’s down there trying to organize food for ten thousand people…”
“No kidding?”
“I’m having breakfast with them tomorrow. Why don’t you join us?”
“Tomorrow?” Sherman sighed. “Won’t work. I’m filling in for Wittgenstein while she’s out on maternity leave.”
“That’s right. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I keep forgetting.”
“I’ll be at the aid station from noon on, so I…”
“By the old life guard station? I’ll see if I can get him to drop by. He’ll like you.”
“Me?” Sherman asked. “Why’s that?”
“He loves anyone that plays the piano, and the better they play the more he loves them.”
Sherman groaned. “Where’d you meet this one? Beverly Hills?”
“Hamburg. An old jazz club over off the Reeperbahn.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I learned a pianist I’ve known for years – from San Francisco, by the way, and a real master – was playing at the club while I was teaching at that ‘Vatican and the Holocaust’ seminar.”
“Oh yeah. Last year around Christmas, right. How was playing?”
“Callahan…Harry Callahan. Know him?”
Sherman nodded. “Yeah, of course. The cop. My mom worked with a doc at Stanford who’s supposed to be real tight with him. He took us to hear him play at a club up by the wharf one night. He’s good.”
“High praise coming from you. Still, I don’t think he’s as good as you.”
“I need to practice more.”
“Yeah. In your spare time.”
Sherman laughed. “We make our choices and then live with the consequences.”
Kerrigan wondered if Sherman really understood the layers of irony he’d just let slip. “Why don’t you play tonight? Maybe some Bach? A little Brandenburg? Before bed, perhaps?”
Sherman leaned back in his chair and looked at the sun falling behind the Santa Monica Mountains, then his eyes fell to the city stretched out along the base of the mountains. “All those people, all this – life,” Sherman sighed, exasperated, “yet we always seem to be caught up in endless war. The odd thing, Andrew, to me anyway, is that most of ‘em don’t even know the stakes.”
“What’s troubling you, Gene? What happened today?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Another drive-by, another overdose, a couple more bodies caught up in this endless cycle of suffering, and yet I’m always on the sidelines, always wondering where all this suffering is taking us, what does all this suffering lead to?”
Kerrigan nodded. “I have to assume we’re nearing the end, don’t you?”
“The end? And then what, Andrew? What happens after that?”
“I don’t know, Gene. Maybe it starts all over again.”
“So, an endless enigma? Is that what you’re saying? Is that the only answer there is?”
“You can always go over to the chapel and have a talk with the Old Man.”
Sherman shrugged, then looked at the piano across the room. “Last couple of times I did that I felt like, I don’t know, kind of empty.”
“I still think you’re simply depressed, Gene. Two big heart attacks in as many months and, well, I don’t know what you expect of yourself.”
“Really? Me? I was always so sure I’d live forever.”
“We all do, Gene. Then we grow up.”
“Or you have a big fuckin’ heart attack.”
“Yes,” Kerrigan sighed, “nothing get’s you in touch with your own mortality than ten tons of pressure on your chest.”
“You really want me to play tonight?”
“Would you? I know Father Rolfs would appreciate hearing the Bach.”
“Which one?”
“The Third Brandenburg, the allegro. He loves that.”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“Gene, if you stop using your hands the arthritis will get you before your heart gives out.”
“Did I ever tell you that you’re really a very pleasant, upbeat dinner companion, Andrew.”
“Yes. Last night, as a matter of fact.”
“Damn. I wonder what’s next…Alzheimer’s or dementia?”
“Are you looking for sympathy tonight, Gene?”
“No. Besides, there’s only one place you can find sympathy.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, in the dictionary, between shit and syphilis.”
“Of course. I knew that.”
+++++
Sherman took a taxi over to his bank and transferred some excess funds into savings, then he hopped onto a local bus and sat in silence while other passengers stared at his collar – some reverentially – yet more than a few eyes were laden with reflected suspicion. He understood both but had long since given up caring about the suspicious eyes he passed on the street; Kerrigan liked to say that such people were beyond their help, but Sherman saw them in a different light.
If he had learned one thing on his journey it was that there truly was something to the notion of fate, or destiny. Too many coincidences created a simple kind of math, at least in his mind. Watching Betty Cohen fall not once, but twice, had only sealed the deal.
He looked at the passing cityscape almost warily now; over here in Westchester there weren’t so many homeless camped on the sidewalks, but the closer the bus came to Venice Beach the more signs he spotted. The ubiquitous blue plastic tarps draped over a fence, forming a makeshift sun shelter, was the usual outlier, because this was the shelter of choice for the newly homeless. As you moved into more densely settled encampments you saw more tents, even makeshift latrines – and then the bus turned onto Grand and the real action was unmistakeable here. Within a block of the beach about all you could see was a sea of blue tarps covering tents, the tarps providing a little extra measure of cooling shade or room to move around and maybe set up a chair just outside your tent.
When he’d finished seminary Sherman had been assigned to teach at a Navaho reservation school in eastern Arizona, but because he was both a teacher and a physician he taught and he worked in the local IHS health clinic. Finding heart wrenching poverty the norm on that frigid, windswept winter desert, he’d begun to feel a kind of pity for the men and women who drank themselves into diabetic comas or overdosed on opioids.
Until he realized that pity was generally just another paternalistic tool to put some distance between his comfort zone and the suffering he encountered. And for Sherman that was a kind of epiphany, even if a small one. As both physician and priest he simply couldn’t afford to place even more insulating layers between his secondary roles in the community and his official position as parish priest. Being their priest was paternalism personified, and he’d had to find a way, and quickly, of being able to teach and work as a clinician.
For him it all came down to listening and not judging. Maybe that’s what Christ was really all about, he told himself over and over again. Let God be the judge, and just let me do what I can to ease their suffering.
Which led to another epiphany, Sherman’s second. Now assigned to a small parish church in western Cameroon, he soon understood that all the patience or empathy in the world could not ease the suffering of others – unless the person in need wanted help. Soon after he arrived he learned that guerrillas and other assorted ‘freedom fighters’ were more likely to come to his clinic in the middle of the night than mothers might bring sick children.
It all came down to trust, simple as that.
And the collar didn’t guarantee trust anymore, if it ever had.
Trust had to be earned, and if people didn’t know you well enough to understand what you were doing there they certainly weren’t going to trust you, and perhaps that was Sherman’s third epiphany. This he learned in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, which proved to be his most dangerous posting ever.
He was pulled into a dispute involving two rival families there. Both were involved in the ‘meth’ trade, producing and distributing product all over the region, from the Carolinas to Kentucky, but once he appeared to have taken sides his life was in danger. Within days the church had pulled him out and sent him to South Bend, Indiana, and he started teaching Astronomy again, this time at Notre Dame. He was reunited with Andrew Kerrigan at that time and, in a sense, they’d been together ever since. When Loyola Marymount requested Sherman come teach astronomy and astrophysics, Kerrigan managed to secure a teaching position there, too. Now they were considered too old for further postings, so this was it. They’d both finish their teaching careers in Los Angeles, spend their last years in the Jesuit residence on the hill overlooking the west side of LA.
Then Kerrigan was instrumental in opening a new free clinic near the beach in Venice, primarily to augment the basement clinic at the nearby parish church of St Mary’s, and he asked Sherman to seek permission to work at the new clinic – as a physician – when not teaching.
And so, by the time Sherman started working at the new clinic he was both a tested priest and a physician well equipped to handle the poorest people living in the area. Low level drug dealers and prostitutes were his usual patients, and while these people came to trust Father Gene, he never pressed anyone for information and rarely passed what little he did hear along to the police – unless lives were at stake. Within a year the word was out: ‘You can trust Father Gene.’
Then came the explosion in the number of homeless people in Los Angeles, and then the rapid concentration of homeless encampments in and around Venice Beach. Sherman was soon working seven days a week, serving an estimated population of more than ten thousand homeless people, a huge number of which were children. He recruited paramedics and pre-med students to help out, found a ready pool of talent in local convents, then he put the word out that any retired nurses or physicians were welcome and pretty soon the clinic was a real going concern.
Then came Sherman’s first heart attack.
He was at the clinic when it hit or otherwise he might not have survived.
His second occurred in the Jesuit residence while he was asleep, and only Andrew Kerrigan had heard his cries for help – but that had proven to be the margin between life and death. Now he was on a half dozen medications for his heart alone, but now his hips were shot, as was his right knee. Arthritis in his hands was becoming an issue too, but he could still suture the usual minor lacerations they typically saw at the clinic, and that would have to do – for now. Still, what he needed most and more than anything else was an able-bodied replacement who could take over the day to day supervision of the clinic, because he feared that when he was gone the clinic would simply wither and die.
He stepped off the bus and into the usual maelstrom that was the street scene in Venice Beach, and life was everywhere. Rich kids on skateboard rattled by, clutching fruit smoothies that had cost at least ten bucks…while passing destitute kids surviving on what their parents could scrape together – or steal. That was LA – in a nutshell, Sherman sighed. Endless.
Then from somewhere in the crowd he heard someone calling his name and he turned to see Father Kerrigan on the boardwalk waving at him. And with him, an impossibly dapper gentleman who simply had to be the movie producer he’d mentioned at dinner. ‘But who is that woman with him?’ Sherman asked himself as he returned the wave and then walked over to join them. ‘She has to be an actress,’ he mused – because he thought she had the look of someone used to being in front of the camera. Stunning and gorgeous were the only words to come to mind…
And then the producer leaned into his handshake, his grip firm, his eyes direct and penetrating.
“William Taylor, Father, and this is Angel. She’s here getting ready to start work soon.”
Sherman smiled and took this Angel’s hand in his, intrigued by the look in her eyes. “Gene Sherman,” he said before turning back to Taylor. “I understand you’re organizing some services down here. Very generous of you.”
“Yes, yes, and we’re off to lunch now, if you’d care to join us?”
Sherman noticed a pale little girl holding onto Taylor’s hand and it only took one glance to realize the girl was one of the residents down here at the camp. And now, suddenly, he was curious.
“Yes, I’d love to, and thanks,” Sherman added as he fell in beside the Angel. “And you, Angel? You aren’t from Los Angeles?”
“No,” she said, turning her head just a little and looking his way. “I’m from Palo Alto.”
“Indeed. I graduated from Palo Alto High.”
“Oh? So you’re a Paly?”
“Indeed I am. What about you?”
“I graduated from Castilleja, then went to Stanford.”
“Oh? What did you study?”
“Philosophy, then medicine.”
“Really? My mother used to teach at the medical school there.”
“Meghan Sherman? Is she your mother?”
“See, it’s a small world after all,” Sherman said, grinning a little.
“How is she?” Angel asked, frowning.
“Well, for one she just turned ninety seven, but all things considered she’s doing rather well.”
“She wasn’t full time when I was there,” Angel added, “but she dropped by from time to time.”
“I think she still tries to. She hated the idea of retirement, fought it tooth and nail.”
They walked up to a huge group of food trucks and Taylor lifted the little girl up and helped her pick something to eat, then Kerrigan and Angel ordered – but Sherman passed on food. “I had a late breakfast,” he said by way of making an excuse.
“Bosh!” Taylor cried. “At least get some coffee, would you?”
Once they found seats at a cluster of picnic tables, Taylor seemed to focus on the little girl – yet Sherman could see the man was lost in thought, struggling with the reality he’d discovered within and around this sprawling homeless encampment. Taylor helped the girl eat then held her in his lap as she fell asleep, and as touching as the scene appeared, at least on the surface, again Sherman sensed that something much deeper was – much like origami taking shape before the eye – enfolding within the producer’s mind. Then, out of the blue…
“Father? Something’s bothering me. Did you play football?”
“Yes. Quarterback. At Palo Alto and at Annapolis.”
“Linebacker. SC and the Forty Niners.”
“Grow up around here?” Sherman asked.
“Montana. Ranch outside of Billings.”
Sherman nodded, but he could tell Taylor was struggling with something. “Something else seems to be troubling you, Mr Taylor. The situation here, perhaps?”
“How could it not be troubling, Father. I’ve only run across scenes like this in Third World countries, and frankly, well, I never expected to run across anything like this…”
“So close to home?”
“Exactly. So close to home.”
Sherman smiled. “There were few safety nets left intact, Mr Taylor, as I’m sure you know. Most were systematically dismantled back in the 80s, and these days the remaining bureaucracies often do little more than impede help.”
“I see so many young people, families too, but there are a lot of older people out here, too. I keep wondering about Social Security, things like that…?”
“Hard to get benefits without a physical address. Harder still without access to a computer. And it’s impossible if you’re in the grips of Alzheimer’s or dementia.”
“But aren’t there people whose job it is to…”
“Systematically dismantled, Mr Taylor. Those are the operative words you need to recall, but really, that’s not where the real war is taking place.” Sherman caught an admonishing glance from Andrew Kerrigan but decided to press on. “You know the Bloods and the Crips?”
“The gangs? Yes, of course, but what have they to do with all this?”
Sherman shrugged away the indifference such questions represented, then he sighed. “Nature abhors a vacuum, Mr. Taylor. And complex systems in nature always seek balance. Call it homeostasis if you like, or even harmony, but a profound imbalance currently exists in nature. Here, in Los Angeles, and in cities like LA. These homeless encampments are just one manifestation of that imbalance, though they are very much one of the most visible elements of this imbalance. And remember, nature abhors a vacuum…”
“But what do the Bloods and Crips have to do with all this?” Taylor said, his arms sweeping wide to take in this sprawling human mass on the waterfront.
“Because the gangs are organizing politically, Mr. Taylor. The Bloods and The Crips are going after the hearts and minds of the people, and they are doing so systematically, neighborhood by neighborhood. They’ve already backed several people running for office…”
“You’re not serious!” Taylor growled. “Once word got out…”
“Hearts and minds, Mr. Taylor. Once you have the support of the people on a neighborhood level the game is afoot and all bets are off. And that’s kind of how things stand right now, as a matter of fact. But what you, as an outsider, have to wrap your head around is what happens when gangs, or even organized crime families, begin to tackle lingering societal ills like homelessness and even drug addiction? Because here’s the kicker? What happens when these gangs do a better job serving the people than our currently elected government does? Then what? Care to extrapolate the long term consequences of that? Care to think about who might be running the show ten years from now? Or twenty?”
“I can’t believe it,” William Taylor said, his voice now a coarse whisper. “How could such a thing…”
“Things fall apart, the center can not hold.”
“That’s Yeats, isn’t it?”
Sherman nodded. “That’s right. The Second Coming.”
“So, what you’re saying is…”
“That’s right. Moderation in politics has given way to the extremes, only the extremes turned out to not simply be limited to the usual left wing and right wing malarkey. Turns out that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Gangs are learning with the times, moderating their impact on families and neighborhoods, using their massive reserves of cash to undermine established political discourse and back their own representatives.”
“Sweet Jesus. And you’ve seen this process? The gangs, I mean. Organizing politically?”
“Every day. The process is well underway”
“Do you work down here?”
“I teach,” Sherman said as he pointed in the general direction of LMU, “up on the hill, but I also work in the clinic,” he added, pointing to the free clinic on Grand Avenue.
“So, you are a physician – as well as a priest?”
Sherman nodded. “I am. And I also teach astrophysics and astronomy, if that makes any sense to you. And, oh yes, in my spare time I help undergrads in the dorms learn how to separate and do their own laundry, too. And sometimes I even stick around and help them fold.”
Everyone at the table laughed at that, but Kerrigan had been growing visibly nervous as Sherman brought up the moves being made by the Bloods and the Crips. With all the seismic epistemological challenges these shifts would bring to ongoing political discourse, disbelief was sure to be a common first reaction. And because these changes weren’t really open knowledge, not yet anyway, talking about these shifts to someone like William Taylor might, perhaps, piss off all the wrong people. And that usually meant unanticipated consequences. And Andrew Kerrigan hated unanticipated consequences.
“Well, that’s laudable of you, Father Sherman,” Taylor said. “Too many of us talk a good game these days, but then we retreat to our McMansions and nothing ever gets done.”
“Oh,” Sherman began again, “things are happening, Mr. Taylor. Just not what you expect, or want to happen.”
“”If I might change the subject, this little girl seems a little under the weather to me. I’ve been looking after her for a day or so, while her mother is in the hospital, and she seems…”
Sherman leaned over and felt her pulse while she slept, the he felt her neck and forehead. “Do you have time to bring her by the clinic this afternoon?”
“I’ll make time, Father.”
“Okay. Well, I’m headed that way now if you’d like to join me.”
“May I come along?” the actress said. “I know I mentioned it, but I do have an M.D.”
“Indeed,” Sherman said, looking at her. “Please, the more the merrier – I always say.”
Taylor easily stood while still cradling the little girl in his arms, and he carried her to the clinic without breaking a sweat – and Sherman absentmindedly noted this, filing it away for future reference – but as soon as they walked inside the clinic the antiseptic smell hit the little girl and she woke up in the producer’s arms, then she looked around the exam room, suddenly quite alarmed.
Father Kerrigan sat in the waiting room – as he still needed to talk to Sherman about a few ideas for the homeless project Taylor had in mind, yet Kerrigan felt the timing was now all wrong. All Sherman’s talk about Bloods and Crips had to have upset Taylor, yet as he’d watched Sherman and Taylor interact he’d soon felt a shadow pass over them. A shadow…like death passing overhead.
A shadow because the South Central Bloods were using homelessness as a cudgel to beat the mayor, to chip away at his political legitimacy. And it was working, too. And as the problem grew and grew, as homeless encampments spread up and down the west coast, broadcasters aligned with the right were attacking liberals as out of touch, their misguided policies contributing to the problem, and not solving anything.
Typical liberal constituencies had been holding fast, until recently that is. Then more radical activists joined the fight for elected office, yet when their public fundraising appeared minimal several investigations quickly found the source. Gangs were underwriting these campaigns, gangs were slipping into the mainstream, and it didn’t take much imagination to see where this could lead, and when Father Kerrigan learned about the growing depth of concern in the mayor’s office he began to take the shift seriously.
Because Jesuits had been mediating these types of conflicts for almost five hundred years, Kerrigan knew he had to get the Church out in front of the problem. The Church had never just found itself in a position of power; no, to the contrary, Jesuits had over the centuries learned how to identify and manipulate factions best seen as amenable to the Church’s long term goals, to shape discourse and help eradicate ideologies at odds with the Church. Kerrigan was a teacher, true enough, but first and foremost he was a Jesuit, literally a Soldier for Christ, and as a soldier it was his duty to advance Christian ideology in a heathen world. That was why he’d recruited Gene Sherman – and Sherman had been an effective voice for years.
But now?
Was Sherman becoming a danger?
And what if Sherman ‘infected’ William Taylor, one of the few Catholics in the top echelon of Hollywood producers? Would all his work recruiting Taylor be for naught?
And just then an LAPD detective walked into the clinic, a man Kerrigan had known for years.
“Andrew!” Father Andrew Kerrigan cried – in mock surprise.
“Andrew!” Detective Andrew Ainsworth replied – in his ritually feigned indignity. “How dare you steal my name! Again!”
Kerrigan stood and embraced the detective, as they’d been friends for more than ten years now. “How are you? The children?”
“We’re well, Father. You?”
“Ah, the burdens are heavy, but…”
“Someone’s got to do it!” the both added, laughing at an old, inside joke.
“So…what brings you to the clinic today?” Kerrigan asked.
“Oh, maybe nothing. Father Sherman mentioned a possible drug deal going down this weekend and I wanted to know if he’d learned anything more.”
“Ah. Well, he’s in with a little girl right now, but I’m sure he won’t be long.”
“Well, would you tell him I dropped by? Maybe he could give me a call later today?”
“Of course. So, will you be taking the girls out for ‘Trick or Treats’?”
“I hope so. Depends on how busy it is.”
But Kerrigan was hardly listening now. Sherman had violated their own precious neutrality, given the detective privileged information. And if word got out, well, there was no way to see all the unintended consequences, was there?
Another foray into the unexpected. Sorry, but that’s just how things go sometimes.
Music matters? Yup, always:
So? Ready? Well then, off we go…
Part VIII
Blinding Light
Sun turnin’ ‘round with graceful motion
We’re setting off with soft explosion
Bound for a star with fiery oceans
It’s so very lonely, you’re a hundred light years from home
Mick Jagger / Keith Richards2000 Light Years From Home
Boston, Massachusetts September 2002
His hands were still shaking, eyes closed and with his head bowed forward, sweat running down his face – now resting in his outstretched, cradling hands – as if hands alone could hold these errant, fleeting thoughts. ‘I think this is what you call an existential crisis,’ he muttered into the thin air surrounding the palms of his trembling hands. ‘That, or I’m losing my mind…’
But then he leaned back and looked at his skin wondering if it really was his – or maybe it belonged to someone or something else, like maybe to the echoes that just wouldn’t stop?
He was in his faculty office and had just started sitting for his daily office hours session, but already he felt like getting up and leaving. It was only the first week of the term and surely no one would drop by after just a few days of class…?
But no, he heard someone knocking on his door.
“Come on in,” he groaned. “Door’s open.”
But no, the head of the department stuck her head in the door to see if he was alone, then she came in and shut the door behind her. Then, without saying a word, she came and sat across from him.
“Gene? How’re you doing?”
“I’m not sure, Susan. Matter of fact, I’m not really sure of a whole lot right now.”
She shook her head and looked out the window: “You should’ve taken the term off, Gene. It’s just too soon, and I’m not even sure how you’re functioning right now.”
“Habit,” Sherman muttered, as he looked down into his hands.
“Do you want to talk to someone?”
“You mean, like a shrink?”
She shook her head. “Do you think you need a psychiatrist?”
“No. No I don’t. Of course I feel bad about what happened but I don’t feel responsible or even guilty, for that matter,” he said, trying his best to keep a lid on what had happened two days ago, just after he’d returned from his trip out west. “But things happened, Susan, bad things. I watched them happen and I can’t get the image – of them falling – out of my mind.”
“I couldn’t either, not if I’d seen something like that. In fact I’m not sure how you made it down off the mountain…”
“In a helicopter,” he said sarcastically, scowling as another memory came flooding in. “Hans and I came down in a helicopter.”
“That was a good call.”
“Do you climb?”
“A little. Nothing like what you’ve done.”
He nodded. “I’m done. With climbing, that is.”
“That’s understandable, Gene.” She hesitated, looked at him for a while then decided to ask the question that had been bothering her since she learned of the accident. “Gene? Do you believe in God?”
He shrugged. “Oh, I suppose like most of us I try to keep an open mind, Susan, but by and large I haven’t given the matter a whole lot of thought.”
“Well, teaching cosmology…I’d assume you’re at least conversant in the basics…?”
“I am, at least I think I am. But Susan, what are you driving at?”
“You seem confused, Gene. And I don’t want to intrude but you are, in a very real sense, my professional responsibility, and I need to be sure that you’re able to meet the needs of our students.”
He groaned inwardly, because he knew the hard pitch was coming next: “And what do I need to do to assure you I’m competent,” he sighed.
She took a deep breath, hovering over the edge of her own indecision, then she stepped into the heart of it: “If you don’t think you need to speak with a psychiatrist, what about, well, what about a theologian?”
“You mean like a priest? Excuse me, but are you fucking serious?”
She looked him in the eye and nodded. “There’s someone I know over at BC. He’s a Jesuit and a historian but he also teaches a series on the history of science, religion and science, those kinds of courses.”
“And – so he’s also a priest, I take it? I mean, Jesuits are priests, right?”
“Kind of,” she said, chuckling a little. “He’s a Jesuit and a priest but he’s also the most open minded…well, he’s so open-minded he’s almost an atheist, and, well, in this city that’s saying something. Anyway, he’s developed a reputation around town as a good listener.”
“Listener? Is he, like, are you saying he’s a counselor? Is that what you’re telling me? That I need to speak to a priest in order to keep my job?”
“No, actually, he’s not a counselor, and no, you don’t have to talk to anyone about this if you don’t want to. As long as you’re meeting our students’ expectations…”
“Okay, yeah, I got it. So, this priest. Why him? What is it about this guy that makes him…”
“Gene,” she said, passing over a post-it note with a name and telephone number written on it, “give him a call…but only if you want. You don’t need to tell me if you do, it’s all up to you, but I hope you do.”
She got up and let herself out, and as soon as she was gone he looked at the post-it note sitting on his desk, then picked up the phone on his desk and dialed the number.
+++++
He didn’t really know where else to meet this priest so he settled on The Chart House. It was the most relevant place he knew to the events in question – and besides, it still felt like a safe space.
Father Andrew Kerrigan, SJ, arrived a few minutes early and walked up to Sherman, who was then at the hostess’s desk checking in. “You Sherman?” Kerrigan asked.
“Yup,” Sherman said as he looked at the collar, then holding out his right hand.
“Would you like to sit outside?” the hostess asked Sherman.
“I’d rather not,” Sherman said quickly, perhaps a little too quickly. “I’ve had a too much sun this summer, if you know what I mean.”
Kerrigan shrugged. “Suits me, but you might regret that decision come, say, next January.”
“On second thought,” Sherman said as he grinned at the girl, “outside sounds about right.”
Either of you care for a cocktail?” the hostess asked as she seated them close to the patio’s edge, and they had a semi-unobstructed view of the harbor and Logan airport beyond. Sherman watched a group of small sailboats rounding a big orange buoy in the middle of the inner harbor and he almost smiled.
“I never learned to sail,” he sighed as he looked up at the hostess. “That almost looks like fun. And I’ll guess I’ll have a MaiTai, if you please.”
“Never too late to learn,” Kerrigan said before he turned to the hostess. “I’ll have the same.”
She walked off and Kerrigan turned to Sherman. “So, you never learned to sail?”
“No, I was into football and skiing, and summers I usually spent with my dad up in the mountains.”
“Camping?”
“Climbing. He was addicted to hot showers and camping wasn’t really his thing.”
“Sounds sensible to me; I like him already. Is he still around?”
Sherman shook his head. “Passed a month ago.”
“Sorry. Did I read something about you in the Globe? A climbing accident in Zermatt?”
Sherman nodded. “Yup.”
“I noticed your leg walking in. You made the climb with a prosthetic limb?”
“I did.”
“Pardon my French, but that takes balls – like big brass ones. So, what happened up there?”
Echoes buffeted him and he tried not to grab hold of the table, but then he realized his eyes were clinched tight and when he opened them again Kerrigan was looking away, looking at the boats out there on the water.
“Sorry about that,” Sherman said.
“Flashbacks?” the priest said.
And then Sherman took a deep breath, deciding then and there that he had to trust someone and that someone might as well be a priest. “Tell me, do multiple people usually experience the same, well, call them flashbacks, and at the same time? And, well, is it possible that, to the same degree, the experience leaves them all physically exhausted?”
And Kerrigan shrugged, turning back to look at Sherman: “Who am I to dispute what you say?”
Sherman seemed taken aback by that, like he was expecting this priest to roll his eyes and get up and leave.
“You know,” Kerrigan added, watching the expression on Sherman’s face, “why don’t you start at the beginning and get me up to speed on all this?”
And so, for the next hour Gene Sherman did exactly that, covering the entire year – from when he’d first met Beth Cohen to the accident on the Matterhorn’s summit – and he did so in as much detail as he could muster. Yet it turned out that Kerrigan was not simply an attentive listener, he had a prosecutor’s eye for detail and he asked probing questions of his own, especially concerning the guides on the climb and their role as both guides and also as de facto climbing instructors.
“Is this the sort of climb rank amateurs routinely make,” Kerrigan asked, suddenly perplexed by the idea that such a climb was routinely made by anyone who wanted to give it a try. “This whole climbing thing seems rather strange to me.”
“Well, I take it Europeans are somewhat more lax regarding personal choice, especially when it comes to mountaineering. I think they look at it as something like: ‘Well, it’s your life, so…’”
“But how many people have died on that mountain?”
“Oh, I think it must be close to 400 now. Usually about ten a summer. Falls and exposure, of course, but most accidents that happen usually involve people with little to no experience, and of course those trying to make the climb without a guide. The results are predictable, I think.”
“And it’s legal? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Again, I don’t think the people over there are into that kind of regulation, but the fact of the matter is the same situation exists over here, even in our national parks. Lot’s of people try to climb Half Dome in Yosemite every summer, and more than a few don’t make it. All that’s required these days is filling out a permit and off you go, no background checks, no nothing.”
Kerrigan shook his head. “Extraordinary,” he sighed. “Reckless, too. Did you feel that Beth and Betty were qualified to make the climb?”
“Yup. And both guides evaluated each of us before we set out. They would have stopped any one of us from making the climb if we weren’t fit enough, or not competent enough, for that matter.”
“Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I see. The flashbacks. When did these start?”
“You know, I’m more comfortable calling the phenomenon an echo.”
“An echo? How strange. Why an echo?”
Sherman looked down and clinched his fists, then he looked at the priest again. “I’m trying to be precise now, because words matter, but it gets weird from here on, Father. Okay?”
Kerrigan shrugged. “I can handle weird.”
Sherman nodded. “We’ll see. Anyway, turns out about the time the accident happened on the summit my old man died. I mean like almost down to the minute, okay? Hans, my guide, called a helicopter to take us down to the village and after that I packed up and left the hotel. I mean right then. I had a cable from home, my mom telling me that dad was close and to hurry home…”
“But I thought you said…”
“Yup, the cable was about eight hours old by then. Anyway, I flew straight home, to California, and once there I learned Dad had passed, and I also learned I had a son, a 30 year old son…”
One of Kerrigan’s eyebrows arched. “Indeed. How unsettling that must have been, given the circumstances, I mean?”
“Yeah. Understatement of the year, but yeah. After we spread my dad’s ashes we came back here to pick up Beth and Betty’s ashes and to take them to Colorado. My guide, Hans, showed up at Logan with their ashes and he wanted to go too…”
“Go…where?”
“To Long’s Peak, in Colorado.”
“They wanted their ashes spread from…?”
“Yup. We spelled all that out before we left for Zermatt, by the way. And then Hans gave me the contact information for Betty’s surviving family, which turned out to be her twin sister…”
“And don’t tell me, she decided to come along, as well?”
“Yup.”
“And how did that go?”
“Strange. That’s when the echoes started, but my son, Jordan, was the first to experience them. While we were driving west. These things started with, for him, visions, nausea, unsettled dreams.”
“And you?”
“Not until, no, well, we were in Colorado Springs, at the Broadmoor.”
“And you experienced the same things?”
“I did, yes. And Hans did as well, but his started on the day we set out for the summit, but that’s when everything went all to hell…”
“Explain?”
“It’s difficult to put into words, but I felt like I was phasing into another time and I was back up on the Matterhorn one second and then I was back on the Boulder Field…”
“Boulder Field?”
“Part of the climb up Long’s. About a mile or so of hopping from boulder to boulder on your way up to something called the Keyhole.”
“And phasing in and out? You saw both places? At the same time?”
“Yup.”
“And all three of you did?”
“At first, yes, then all four of us…”
“You mean Betty’s sister?”
“Heather. Yes.”
“She experienced this as well?”
“Parts, yes.”
“Okay. So, what’s the bad part?”
“We were falling then, falling towards some kind of ocean…”
“An ocean? Really?”
Sherman closed his eyes and grabbed the table as another echo crashed through his conscious mind.
“Excuse me,” the priest said, now staring at Sherman’s right hand, “but is it happening again? Now, I mean?”
Sherman shivered, shook his head. “Just an echo,” he said, grimacing.
“Look at your hands, Doctor Sherman.”
He opened his eyes and looked down, and he saw blueish static discharges arcing off his fingertips.
“Does this usually happen when they come?” Kerrigan asked.
“Nope. First time.”
“Up on the mountain, you were falling? What happened next?”
Sherman kept staring at his hands, only now several people at nearby tables were staring at them, too. “In a sense nothing happened. I was aware we were hovering over the rocks…”
“The Boulder Field, you mean?”
Sherman nodded. “That’s right. Like maybe ten feet up, then we woke up – but we were all drenched, in seawater. Only now we were surrounded by a bunch of other people making the climb, and all of them told us pretty much the same story. They saw us inside a blue sphere, hovering over the rocks…”
“A blue sphere? Surrounded with blue discharges like these?” Kerrigan said, pointing at Sherman’s hands.
“Yup.”
“Okay. You said something happened a couple of days ago. What? What happened?”
“Well, oddly enough I think all this started then…”
“But, this all happened a few weeks ago, did it not…?”
“That’s right, and I understand your confusion. But first, tell me, Father, just for purposes of this discussion, do you think that time travel is possible?”
Kerrigan stiffened then slowly leaned back in his chair. “Why do you ask?”
“A simple yes or no will suffice here, Father. Do you think it’s possible?”
“No, I don’t imagine I do, but I think that perhaps we ought to pay up and get the fuck out of Dodge, Professor, before those hands of yours get us onto the cover of the National Enquirer…”
“Know anywhere we can talk for a while?”
“Are you kidding?” Kerrigan said, smiling as he grabbed the check.
“No, please, let me,” Sherman asked.
“No way, Professor. If you reach into a pocket you’ll probably burn your clothes right off your body, and that just wouldn’t do! Know what I mean?”
+++++
They sat inside the nave inside St Mary’s Chapel, across from the Jesuit residences on the Boston College campus, and Sherman’s hands were still simmering, still glowing an iridescent cobalt blue.
“So, what has time travel got to do with all this?” the priest asked.
“We climbed up Long’s,” Sherman sighed. “Hans said a prayer for Pete, up on the summit.”
“Pete? The priest?”
Sherman nodded. “Yeah. The odd thing about it, Father, is that there were maybe thirty people up there with us, and they’d all seen us inside the sphere. Once they learned why we were there a kind of mystical aura surrounded our climb…”
“You mean a visible aura?”
“No, no…sorry. Poor choice of words. Maybe ‘purpose’ is a better one. Anyway, most of the people up there were serious climbers and a few had heard about our Matterhorn climb, so there was a kind of reverence, if you know what I mean…?”
“I do.”
“Well, every one of us, I mean the four of us as well as this entourage we’d acquired, made it back down the mountain and we each went our separate ways. We, the four of us, went to Palo Alto and dropped my son off, then Hans, Heather and I drove over to the Grand Canyon. I also asked Heather if she knew of a way to send the car back to Europe with Hans and that gave her something to work on while we drove back to Charleston.”
“The car?”
“Oh, yeah. The Beast. A flame red Eldorado convertible with a white interior…”
“Dear God in Heaven,” Kerrigan grinned, crossing himself. “You mean, like, a real pimp-mobile?”
“Exactly. And Hans loves the thing. Anyway, by the time we got to South Carolina Hans and Heather were screwing like rabbits and madly in love so I dropped them there and flew back here, and that pretty much brings us up to the events of a few days ago.”
“And this is the part of the affair that involves time travel, you say?”
“Yup. First, a little back-tracking. An associate of mine at MIT, and she’s a Nobel laureate…”
“Her area?”
“Quantum mechanics, quantum field theory…”
“So, not exactly a crackpot – isn’t that what you’re really saying…?”
“Yup. She came to me with a Harvard undergrad, music theory, a pianist I think, with the usual crackpot BS about ‘if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you?’ Well, I said it was improbable at best but that I thought that if something happened once that was probably it. You couldn’t change time…”
“You do know that’s a remarkably, well, a theological point of view, Sherman.”
“That’s what she said, too.”
Kerrigan nodded. “Basic Determinism, pure and simple.”
Sherman nodded. “Yeah, well, that wasn’t what drove my answer…”
“Not consciously, anyway.”
Sherman shrugged. “Anyway, a couple of days ago she comes by my apartment with this kid and they ask if I could go back to the Matterhorn and change the outcome would I?”
“Would you what?”
“Go back and change the outcome.”
“You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Shit…”
“You just about got that right, Father.”
+++++
His left hand on the large fixed rope, his right getting the Leica out of his pack, Gene Sherman knew in an instant he was back on the Hörnli Ridge, not far from the icefield and the final stretch to the summit, and then, without looking down he realized that Peter and Beth were just below him, Betty still climbing up to reach them…
…and yet his mind knew, really knew on every level imaginable that the three of them had been dead for weeks – and that he was in the living room of his apartment…
…then he was photographing the dawn and repacking his camera…
…and following Hans up the icefield to the summit…
…waiting at the statue of Saint Bernard, digging the camera out of his pack again, shooting the same images again as Beth, then Betty gained the summit…
But this time, when Hans asked him to cross the ridge – he did. And he insisted on holding a solid belay when Pete and Beth and Betty crossed. When it was time to cross again, back to the lower summit, he again insisted that Hans lead, but that Pete bring up the rear in order to maintain a really solid belay on the girls while they crossed.
And this time the same gust tore into Pete, now bringing up the rear, and this time he pulled Betty and then Beth over the edge. Again.
Same outcome, only the order of their return had changed a little, and yet this change in order, he suspected, had caused a spreading series of changes that, like ripples spreading across a pond, were reverberating across time.
“Only there’s absolutely no way to know which actions or what results belong to what timeline,” Sherman sighed.
“I’m curious, Sherman. When you returned to the Matterhorn this second time, what was happening to your quantum mechanic and her musician friend?”
“They never left my apartment.”
“So, you think these echoes happened as a result of your second trip to the mountain?”
Sherman shrugged. “I have no idea, not really, but it’s the only thing that’s come to mind.”
“Have you noticed your hands?” Kerrigan whispered.
And Sherman looked down, saw his hands were ‘normal’ again, just the pale flesh of his usual self.
“I’ve been watching them as you talked,” Kerrigan said. “The more you talked, the more you recounted those events, the brighter they became, then everything just stopped.”
“When?”
“When you were describing your second visit to the summit.”
Sherman began to shiver and he suddenly felt like crying. “Something is happening to me, Father. Something inside has changed, is changing.”
“Oh? How so?”
“I feel like I’m on the wrong heading, going the wrong way…”
“Wrong? What makes you say that?”
“Obviously something won’t let the past be changed, and obviously that something has to be God.”
“That seems obvious to you?”
“Doesn’t it to you?”
“Not in the least, Sherman. You might just as well have stumbled upon some new law concerning the nature of reality, or even of the universe, and that doesn’t necessarily imply divine intervention. Tell me, if you don’t mind, what is your academic background?”
“Annapolis, naval aviation…”
“You were a pilot? In the Navy?”
“That’s where I lost the leg, Father.”
“Oh, okay. Then what?”
“I thought about going to med school but settled on astronomy, got my Ph.D…”
“Where?”
“Stanford, then I came here, to MIT, to work on a post-doc in cosmology, and I got a second Ph.D.”
“Why medicine? Or really, why didn’t you go into medicine?”
“My dad, I think. We were both into astronomy.”
“What did your parents do?”
“Dad taught physics at Stanford, mom was a physician and a lecturer at the medical school there.”
“Ah, of course. You mentioned being on the wrong heading, so that comes from your background as an aviator, but I’m really rather curious now. If you could change your heading again, which way would you go – now, not then?”
“I’ve been thinking of little else since the Matterhorn, Father.”
“And?”
“I, well, I’ve been thinking about medicine again, at least I was until…”
“Until your second trip to the summit? Yes, I can only imagine. And now?”
“I’ve been thinking about seminary.”
Kerrigan nodded. “Yes, of course. I think I would too, under the circumstances. But why not do both?”
“Both? What do you mean?”
“Are you catholic? Ever been married?”
“Yes, and no. What are you saying?”
“Get your medical degree while you work on your studies as a seminarian.”
“What? Here? Is that even possible?”
And Father Kerrigan laughed at that, he laughed long and hard. “After what you’ve just been through, what you’ve experienced, you’re asking me if that’s possible?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean simply this, Professor Sherman. With you the line between the possible and the impossible seems to have been blurred a bit. By what or by whom I have no idea, but in light of this I feel that the rest of your life will be rather meaningless unless you are looking for an answer to why that line has been muddied. And, well, I could be wrong about this, but you don’t really strike me as the sort who simply throws his hands up in despair and gives up.”
Flickers of blue erupted from Sherman’s fingertips and he held his hands up, looked at the glow as torrents of fear and awe washed over him.
“And frankly, Professor, I don’t think this is the type of decision you can put off. Not for long, anyway. You’ll probably run out of clothing, and soon, too.”
A gentle piece full of the wind in your hair and, perhaps, the stuff of dreams.
Music? A little, if the spirit moves you:
Part VII
Coherent Light
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
There were errands to run, of course.
He needed to drop off all the rolls of Kodachrome he’d shot – on the Breithorn and on the Matterhorn – even if he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to look at them.
He needed a car, too, but it had to be the perfect car, didn’t it? But what was the perfect car for a cross country road trip? Jordan wanted a Beemer, and of course it had to be a ragtop. Hans voted for a Mustang, preferably a ragtop, but whatever the choice it had to be, of course, blazing red, and it had to have a huge engine. Sherman was leaning towards a Volvo wagon, which prompted jeers and a solid round of boos from the peanut gallery, and that was while they were still at the Chart House.
Then, of course, the unexpected came calling. Again.
“The lawyer in Bern wanted me to give you this,” Hans said as he passed over an envelope. “He said it is important.”
And suddenly no one was laughing anymore.
Gene opened the letter and read through it once, all three pages, then he went back and read it again.
“What is it, Dad?”
“A note from Betty. She wasn’t close to her family, and these are her instructions. For the call, you might say.”
“You mean,” Hans asked, “they don’t know?”
Sherman shook his head and shrugged. “If the lawyers didn’t call then they probably have no clue. I don’t have any contact information and Betty said they only talked when Beth went down for a visit.”
“Which means,” Jordan sighed, “that Beth was close to the people there. Shit Dad, that blows.”
“Jordan?” Hans said. “You have a talent for understatement so already I like you. We will be simpatico, no? That is the correct word?”
“That’s the one,” Sherman sighed. “Well, fuck. I’m not drunk enough to make this call. At least not yet.”
“How many have you had, Dad?”
“Not enough.”
“You know,” Hans said to Jordan, “I am with your father for a week, maybe more, and I see him drink maybe one beer. And now this. Who would have thought this possible?”
“You obviously don’t know many navy pilots,” Sherman grinned. “I can puke and hit the ten ring from five meters.”
“What is this ten ring?” Hans asked.
“Never mind. I got to go phone a find,” Sherman said as he pushed himself up unsteadily from the chair, grabbing his cane as he stood. He wobbled a couple of times as he compensated for his left leg, then he marched off in the general direction of the front desk, and when their waiter came by Jordan asked for the check.
“So, no more drinks?” the boy asked.
“I think he’s had enough, don’t you?”
The boy shrugged. “I haven’t ever seen anyone put down that much rum. Not ever.”
“Uh-oh, I think he is headed for the bathroom,” Hans cried, then came – a belated: “Oops!”
“I’ll go find a mop,” the kid sighed after he put their bill on the table.
+++++
He called Heather Sutherland later that evening, after a short nap and some coffee revived him enough to see the telephone. Still, he was not happy about having to make the call and was more than a little nervous when he dialed the number Betty had provided.
He asked for Heather Sutherland and introduced himself, then told her the nature of the call – and this was met with cold silence.
Then: “I know a little about what happened. A lawyer in Switzerland called and let us know she was gone, Beth too, but I don’t know the details.”
So Gene Sherman spent the next ten minutes going over his relationship to Betty, and Beth, and then the climb itself, which was met with incredulous shock.
“My sister climbed the Matterhorn? Are you serious?”
“I am. And your niece made the summit, too. It was really just a freak accident…”
“No such thing, Mr. Sherman. There’s no way she was qualified to make a climb like that, so I’d like to know what she doing up there?”
“Chasing a dream, Miss Sutherland.”
“What?”
“She told me she’d wanted to climb the Matterhorn ever since she was a kid, back at some camp in Estes Park…”
“You mean Cheley?”
“I suppose I do, yes. As a matter of fact, we’re headed that way in a couple of days. Betty and Beth wanted their ashes spread from on the summit of…”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. Long’s Peak, right?”
“Yup.”
“And you’re gonna do it?”
“I am.”
“You flyin’ across, or drivin’?”
“Driving. Why?”
“I’d like to make that trip, if you can handle it.”
Sherman took a deep breath and leaned back on his sofa, closing his eyes then slowly letting all the air out. “Oh, sure, why the Hell not,” he sighed.
“Where are you? New York?” she asked.
“Boston. Recall I mentioned that Beth was a student of mine?”
“Oh, right. So you teach, huh, and that would be at MIT?”
“I do.”
“Then it’s Doctor Sherman, right?”
“Yup.”
“What do you teach, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Astrophysics and Cosmology.”
“Well goodness, of course you do. Sorry, but I’m not really sure what either of those things mean.”
“Don’t feel bad. Neither do I.”
That was worth a laugh, and at least the sound of her laughter didn’t grate on his nerves too much.
“So, let me see if I can get a reservation and how ‘bout I call you right back?”
“I’ll be right here. And try for the day after tomorrow, or even the day after that. We’re still picking up the pieces over here.”
+++++
Early the next morning found the three of them, Jordan, Hans and Sherman, at a Cadillac dealer in Brookline, Mass, and there was a brand-spanking new Eldorado convertible just sitting there on the lot waiting for someone stupid enough to come along and snap it up. The beast was fire engine red with a sparkling white soft top and the soft tufted leather interior was white with red piping here and there.
“It’s a goddamn pimp-mobile!” Sherman whispered when he saw the thing. “All it needs is some shag carpet on the dash.”
“It’s perfect!” Hans cried.
Jordan’s eyes were saucer-like, full of disbelief. “Can’t we go to that BMW dealership down the street?” he pleaded – again. “This thing looks like something out of Thelma and Louise.”
“I don’t know, Jordan,” Sherman said, grinning sadistically. “Its kind of got something special going on, ya know?”
“Like what? Herpes? Or maybe a good case of the clap?”
“Exactly!” Sherman said as a salesman approached.
“Want to take her out for a test drive?”
“Sure,” Sherman said. “Why the fuck not. Do you provide condoms, or should we bring our own?”
Jordan rolled his eyes. Hans started jumping up and down, just like any other five year old might. And somewhere up in the clouds Betty Cohen was probably getting ready to hurl a couple of thunderbolts at Gene Sherman.
+++++
They rode the T to a camera store while the car was readied for delivery, and Sherman picked up his slides from the climb, and while they were there Gene put the slides on a light table and Hans stood with him, slowly going through the stack and picking out the best shots. Then Sherman asked the tech if they could make some eight-by-tens of their selections by tomorrow, then, when the tech hesitated he decided to buy two new lenses for the Leica, a 21mm and a 75mm – “for the trip!” he said before they headed back to the dealership. The tech smiled and went to the darkroom.
The Caddie was hideous, exactly the kind of car a hooker would lust over, yet with the top down Sherman’s new car took on a completely different look…like now it looked like something made for a Gene Wilder – Richard Pryor movie. “Like Silver Streak, only this time the cross-country trip will take place in a full-blown pimp-mobile,” Sherman said. Jordan looked at the car like it carried the plague. Hans was in love – because the dealer had thrown in white pin-striping and the furry pink dice now hanging from the rear view mirror – and all at no extra charge.
So, Sherman drove the Caddie to his building and the parking attendant didn’t know what to say when he saw staid old Professor Sherman behind the wheel as it drove up and stopped.
“This yo car, Doc?”
“Sure is, Mal. Like it?”
“Like it? Like it? He-he. You boyz gonna go out looking for some girls tonight?”
“Nope. Road trip. Tomorrow.”
“No foolin’? Where y’all headin’?”
“Colorado, Mal. We’re going to the mountains. We’re gonna go climbing.”
“I thought you just come back from climbin’, Doc. You goin’ climbin’ again already?”
“Sure am, Mal. We all are, but first, it’s back to the Chart House, ‘cause we didn’t get near drunk enough last night.”
“You going for the record, Doc?”
Sherman smiled the smile of the condemned man walking to the gallows.
+++++
By the time he found Heather Sutherland and got her out of the baggage claim area and out to the car, she would have been happy to find Sherman had a rickshaw – but it seemed the red Caddie was a bridge too far.
“What the Hell is this!?” she cried when she saw the thing.
“My new car,” Sherman said. “Like it?”
“Like it? Hell, I love it! You just get it?”
“Picked it up yesterday.”
“It’s perfect!” she bellowed, her southern accent so thick it made the hair on the back of Sherman’s neck stand on end.
Jordan rolled his eyes when he heard what to him sounded like a rebel war cry.
“So, you ready to roll, or do you need to make a pit stop?” Gene asked, trying his level best not to stare at Heather Sutherland’s outlandish bouffant hairdo.
“Nope, ate some nuts on the plane so I’m ready to roll.”
“Okay, let’s get this road on the show,” he added after he got her suitcase loaded in the boot.
Hans and Jordan took the back seat; Gene hit a button on the dash and the top retracted, then it was on to the Mass Pike – westbound, with Hartford their first planned stop – for gas. Sherman continued to ignore Heather as best he could, but it wasn’t easy. Aside from the hair she looked just like Betty, but maybe that was because they were twins. Identical twins, as it turned out.
He handed her a big white envelope after they made it out of Boston, and she opened it and pulled out the pictures Gene had taken in Switzerland. She looked at each one for the longest time, lingering longest over images of Beth, and when he looked at her once she was crying just a little. She put the pictures away as they passed Sturbridge on their way to Hartford, then she turned to Gene Sherman and just stared at him for about twenty minutes, maybe like she was trying to memorize his features.
They stopped at a diner about halfway between Hartford and New York City and that was really the first opportunity they’d had to talk – because talking with the top down had proven almost impossible. And when he walked up the steps to open the door into the diner she realized Sherman had only one leg.
“Excuse me, but did you know you only have one leg?” she said, exasperated.
“No? Really? Gee, I never noticed that before.”
“I mean, Gene, you aren’t supposed to climb mountains with just one leg, are you?”
“You know the pictures you were just looking at? The ones on top of the Matterhorn?”
“Yes?”
“I took ‘em, Heather. All of ‘em. Any questions?”
“I am amazed, Gene Sherman,” she cooed, her accent a mix of Deep Carolina and Antebellum Georgia, kind of like a Dior gown covered in cream gravy, maybe with a side of fried okra.
“You and Betty? Twins, I take it?”
“Yes indeed. What was the first clue?”
Sherman grinned. “I’ve been trying my best not to stare. Sorry.”
“Dad?” Jordan said. “Are you saying Betty looked just like Heather?”
“Almost. You’re a little taller, right?”
She nodded. “By about an inch, and I’ve got more freckles, too.”
Sherman looked at her face and once again he tried not to stare. “Uncanny,” he whispered at last.
And Jordan could see the love his father had felt for Betty just then. In fact, anyone looking at the man sitting across from the woman at that table would have assumed he was very much in love with her. It was obvious, as obvious as it was incorrect.
Yet he found it curious that the Caddy’s top stayed up for the balance of that first day, and Jordan was able to listen as his father began to fill in all the blanks about the trip to Zermatt he’d missed so far. And, as it happened, this accidental son began to feel a sense of wonder as he listened to the many changes that came over his father as he spoke to Heather. It wasn’t really love, was it, but then again…what was lurking in their conversation if not love? An echo? Could it be that Heather was little more than an echo of her sister, and if that was so was it also possible that his father was speaking to this echo? And as he listened he thought, just for a moment really, that he was getting a handle on this whole love thing, but the complexities were subtle – though real enough to feel, even in the back seat of a pimp-mobile. Watching his father and Heather soon felt a little like watching a chemical reaction, or maybe even an electric discharge, though maybe in slow motion. But most of all, he soon realized, love was most like gravity. An uncertain, tentative gravity – true – but a force to be reckoned with – and ignored, he soon felt in his gut, at great peril.
At one point Jordan asked to see the pictures his father had taken up on the summit of the mountain and he looked at them again and again, one by one, but this time going slowly through each captured emotion, taking his time to see beyond the obvious. And in time Jordan studied everything he could about Betty and her eyes. While there really wasn’t a lot to see, besides all the obvious climbing gear, he most often found a studied determination on her face, yet when he focused on her eyes he thought he saw a deep, uncompromising love.
‘But of course she felt love,’ Jordan told himself. ‘She was looking at the photographer, at my father, so why wouldn’t she?’ Yet he saw other emotions in her eyes, as well. Subtle things, complex and confusing, too, like maybe the things only two lovers know about one another?
They stopped for the night outside of Pittsburgh and Jordan thought saw the same look in Heather’s eyes when she looked at his father, but he really wasn’t all that surprised. Chemistry, gravity, whatever you wanted to call this thing…he had to assume the look was the same here in Pittsburgh as it had been over there on top of that mountain. So he had to wonder – maybe because Jordan had just seen almost the very same impish, secretive look in Heather Sutherland’s eyes, why his father seemed almost happy.
But that had to be a good thing, right?
Even if his father was listening to an echo?
+++++
Hans and Jordan sat up front on the second day of the trip, Hans proving to be a capable driver and Jordan an attentive listener. Heather and Sherman sat in the back seat, and once the sun was well over the horizon she asked that the top be retracted again, so for the next several hours they cut a swath through Ohio and Indiana, finally relenting and putting the top back up when the afternoon proved too warm and the insects too gooey.
Jordan tried to keep an eye on his father but with the top down that proved impossible, so he passed the time talking with Hans as best he could, usually about climbing, but they also talked about the places they liked to ski. It turned out the only time he got to listen to Heather and his dad that day was when they stopped to eat, and he learned that Heather was a lawyer practicing in Charleston and that she like the mountains too. She had recently hiked the entire Appalachian Trail over the course of two autumn treks, and he began to think of her as a little more complex than he had initially thought. And of course Heather had gone to the same summer camp in Estes Park that both Betty and Beth had, and that she too had climbed Long’s Peak. Twice, as a matter of fact, but not the Diamond Face. Sane people, she said, didn’t tackle that face.
Jordan handled the driving chores that afternoon, and they wound up stopping on the east side of Kansas City. Sherman was unusually quiet that evening, and Jordan could tell something had changed over the course of the day. An unseen switch had tripped somewhere in the afternoon, and the train had changed directions, because his dad seemed distracted and almost distant when they sat down for dinner. Heather, too, seemed different.
Then it hit him.
Heather and his dad were acting just like teenagers. Maybe like they were trying to hide something big…from…who? Him?
And sure enough, about an hour after lights out his father slipped out of their room and he didn’t come back. When Jordan and Hans finally woke up the next morning they found a note from Sherman telling them to come to the restaurant across the parking lot and join them for breakfast, and they both grinned.
“Maybe this will end up being a good trip for your father, you know?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Don’t you think it might be too soon to get involved again?”
Hans had stopped brushing his teeth and seemed to consider an answer, then he shook his head and started brushing again.
“What’s wrong, Hans?”
“Does something feel strange today? To you I mean…does it feel strange? Like we have been here before maybe?”
“I felt something weird last night at dinner. I kept thinking something felt like an echo.”
“An echo. Yes, that is what I was thinking. Exactly so, yes.”
And it was the same at breakfast. Jordan’s father was doing his best not to act like a sixteen year old who had just done the deed for the first time, and Heather appeared to be even more distanced and distracted than she had been at dinner the evening before. Everyone ate a big breakfast then they loaded up in the Beast, as Hans had taken to calling the Caddy, with Heather driving now, Gene riding shotgun, and the boys in back. Heather, of course, had put the top down before they left the parking lot.
“So, where to today, Professor?” Hans asked, looking at the big book-like road atlas, now spread open to show all of Kansas.
“We ought to make Estes Park today, but we won’t get in ’til late if we do.”
“Why don’t we stop early,” Heather said, “and maybe not beat ourselves into the ground?”
“What?” Gene sighed. “You mean…like Sherman’s march to the sea?”
“Exactly,” she said. “We need to find a place with a nice pool to just lay back and relax for a day.”
So the next time they pulled off the highway for gas, Sherman made a few calls.
“So? Did you find something for us?” Heather asked, her smile wicked enough to scare the shit out of Scarlett O’Hara.
“I’ll never tell,” Gene said, grinning as echoes danced all around them, all like ghosts in the walls.
+++++
The little group made a slight detour, to Colorado Springs, and they ‘camped out’ at the Broadmoor Hotel for a couple of days. They ice-skated the next morning and then went swimming under the hot noonday sun, and on a lark they hopped in The Beast and drove over to The Garden of the Gods, getting out and walking a few of the most popular trails, even running across a pleasant little rattlesnake along the Cathedral Valley trail. And Jordan hung back a little on these walks, now more than ever a little perplexed because these echoes were – if that’s what they were and if something like these were even possible – growing stronger and stronger, as if the closer the group came to Estes Park, and to Long’s Peak, the more intense these echoes became.
+++++
“Man, look at all those stars!” Jordan said, his voice now husky with excited anticipation. “It almost looks like you could reach out and grab onto one, ya know!”
Sherman looked up and nodded. “It’s colder than I expected,” exhaling and looking for vapor. “Too dry,” he added.
“I am surprised so many people are here already,” Hans said.
It was just after three in the morning and they’d left the Long’s Peak trailhead parking lot for their ascent about ten minutes earlier. They carried daypacks large enough to stow the layers of clothes needed, and Hans had insisted on bringing along crampons and rope – just in case. Heather had made sandwiches to enjoy on the summit, with black forest ham, Dijon mustard and Gruyere cheese on pumpernickel her weapon of choice, and though she’d made two for everyone she was pretty sure that wouldn’t be enough so she packed a couple more. This was a nine mile walk and climb and out of necessity the trek was made on an empty stomach, because starting out at nine thousand feet and ending up over fourteen thousand, a full stomach used up too much vital oxygen, especially on the long trek up the Boulder Field, so it was considered best to wait and eat on the summit.
And Gene Sherman carried Beth and Betty Cohen in the bottom of his backpack. He would be responsible for them once again, and see them to their final rest – as he’d promised to do – ‘if something happens…’
And because something had happened he was on this trail, making this one last climb. Because he was sure now this would be the last time he ever set for on a mountain. Talking with Heather for the past few days had been a necessary part of this journey, but in the end she had proven to be little more than an unexpected diversion. She was indeed beautiful, perhaps even more so than Betty, and she was an articulate, energetic dynamo, opinionated in the extreme but even so a decent listener. She’d also been married – twice – and had just broken up with a boyfriend after three years of living together, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. She’d been raised in a hyper-competitive family and was chronically insecure – and in ways Betty never had been, because Betty had been the winner. Betty made it into Dartmouth, Heather had just made it into Clemson. Betty went straight to medical school at Columbia while Heather took a year off after graduating – because her board scores weren’t good enough to make it into a decent law school.
And she was still competing with Betty even now, always trying to sell herself as the more accomplished, and Sherman knew where any relationship with her would end up. It took a few days but she was transparent enough, and after their stay at the Broadmoor he started spending more time with Jordan. And she was bright enough to know the score, to move on gracefully.
And Sherman didn’t feel any sense of loss, despite the sudden fall. He liked her, well enough to want to keep in touch with her when all this was over and put away for good, and he didn’t have any lingering issues with her now that they were on the trail. On the contrary, she had been telling them about the summers she and Betty had spent at Cheley, about the many mountains in the park they’d climbed together and the trail horses they ridden to secluded campsites high up in the surrounding mountains. Tales of camping in covered wagons and roasting hot dogs on sticks over roaring campfires, and of fishing for trout in high alpine lakes then dipping the cleaned fish in cornmeal and frying them in butter.
She was, when all was said and done, a good companion to have along on the trip. Life, too…maybe…if she could ever let go…of the past…
The trail was relatively flat at first, but then a series of sharp switchbacks took them up out of the pine forests and onto tougher, boulder-strewn terrain, and their headlamps illuminated the sandy-dirt trail as it wound around large boulders dotting the grassy landscape. They talked less as they gained altitude, and by the time the first amber traces of dawn arrived they were well into the Boulder Field. There was no grass here, and rarely enough dirt for even the strongest wildflower, but there were rocks. There were boulders as big as cars up here, and some that were merely the size of a small cow, but now the trail pointed relentlessly up. There were no more switchbacks, not even a trail now, just trail markings pointing out the way up through the boulders.
And maybe because of his leg Gene Sherman was content to let Hans and Heather lead the way now, and he followed Jordan, too, watching all these people who had come together to celebrate the life and death of the two people he now knew would be the only two people he would ever really love.
He watched Jordan and tried to understand the boy’s life as anything other than an echo of his own. Essentially born and raised by his parents and a girl who probably had no real idea how she’d been manipulated, Jordan had been the glue that held his parents together after he left home.The question rattling around in Sherman’s mind was simpler still: knowing that he was soon leaving home, had his father kept Beverly around as a ‘babysitter’ so that, well, so that she could have a baby? A blood relative, what would amount to another son?
It wasn’t beyond his father, he knew.
Maybe his father had toyed with the idea of fathering a child with Beverly, but perhaps he recognized the dangers to his marriage if he did. Using his own son to get Beverly pregnant, on the other hand, ensured that his wife would be an enthusiastic participant in the scheme. And that also explained why his parents had kept Jordan out of sight until after his own father passed. Dead men tell no tales, right?
His mind set adrift against this raging sea of rocks, he slowly played in the countercurrents of thoughts like these, not really sure where these swirling interpretations of his life were taking him, only accepting that he – somehow – needed to be thinking about these things.
So by the time the sun began to show itself he was like a castaway washing up on an unknown shore. Alone and not really sure of anything anymore, it dawned on him that of all the people with him now, he’d known Hans the longest. Hans had taken part in the most momentous moments of his life; indeed, without Hans perhaps he too would have perished on the mountain.
He sighed inwardly, wishing there was some way to turn off his mind, to stop the endless flow of tortured ideas from washing through his conscious thoughts, but just then he felt besieged by a shimmering assault of memory. No, what he felt now was more like a series of echoes, but of…what?
“Dad! Look at the horizon!”
He looked up, saw Jordan pointing to the east, so he turned and looked…
…and furious echoes of the sunrise on the Matterhorn slammed into him, pushing all other thought from his mind. He was aware, for a moment, that he was looking out over Loveland and the great prairie beyond Interstate 25, yet he felt the rope in his hand from the Matterhorn climb, then of steadying himself against the ridge while he pulled his camera from his pack, then composing images, setting the aperture and shutter speed and fiddling with the focus to get everything how he wanted it to be, then he looked around and saw he was standing in a field of boulders and that some strange kid was calling him ‘dad’ and none of it made the slightest sense to him…
“Dad? You alright? The altitude getting to you?”
He shook his head, tried to clear the cobwebs, and then he recognized Betty up ahead…
‘…but that’s not right…she’s coming up from below, under Pete and Beth…and what’s she doing with Hans…?’
“What the fuck is going on?” Hans screamed as he fell to he knees, and then Heather bent down to help him.
So, I was in the yard earlier today, cleaning up my grill for the winter and otherwise minding my own business when up there in the sky a rather large formation of USAF C-17 military transport aircraft rumbled by a few thousand feet overhead. Then an even larger formation of F-15 and F-16 fighters came along, tailing the transports. Heading northeast, as it happened.
But, you see, the thing is, there is a huge military base not far from here that focuses on preparing US ground forces to fight under extreme winter conditions. Also, I live fairly close to the Canadian border and the only relevant things northeast of here are the airways used by airliners – and military transport aircraft like the C-17 – flying between North America and Europe. But this was no big deal, I reasoned, because I didn’t see any long range refueling aircraft accompanying these formations.
So of course, cue the KC-10 Extender refueling birds, entering the scene from stage left and now dutifully following the transports and fighters on their way to heaven only knows where, yet by then I was having a full-blown moment of raging paranoia.
Why, you might ask? And why should you even care?
Well, because of a short article in the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper, which earlier this week exhorted the people to begin stockpiling food. Why? Well, the first reason mentioned in the article was that climate change has been disrupting traditional sources of food. Okay, so what does this have to do with my raging paranoia? Well, first let’s take a step back for a moment. The analysis I am referring to was in a daily China brief I receive aspart of a subscription with Foreign Policy, a respected (read: not really too biased) journal put out by and for diplomats and other assorted foreign policy wonks (yes, this includes yours truly, once upon a time, anyway). So, the analysis concluded that both recent flooding and ongoing supply chain disruptions have really put a big dent in the Chinese food supply system.Okay? With me so far?
But also hidden in this article, in the CCP People’s Daily, was another little tidbit, namely that people needed to stock up on food because war over Taiwan now appears inevitable. Read that last sentence again and let the implications wash over you for a moment, then let’s put that in our pipe and smoke it for a while, because as funny as this information is…it is not by any stretch of the imagination the funniest thing that happened last week.
No, for an advanced course in human levity we need to amble on over to Ukraine and to a press conference held by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, late last week. Mr. Zelenskiy advised that multiple intelligence services had uncovered a plot to overthrow the Zelenskiy government, and that approximately a billion USD had been invested by sources in Russia to initiate a coup d’état on or about the first of December.
Okay, so no big deal, right? Putin is always pulling off this kind of crap. It’s his main thing, ya know?
Except that Putin has been moving elite armored and other mechanized units to the west, amassing these units along not just Ukraine’s border, but also into a position to strike Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. Into NATO’s eastern flank, you might say.
So, two big questions come to mind now:
Russia and China are allegedly allies these days, so is there a coordinated effort to divide US forces at play here and now?
Has intelligence exposing the coup attempt changed the timing of any potential invasion of NATO and/or Taiwan?
And why now? In December, of all things? Well, Russia has a much shorter supply chain to protect, and any effort by NATO to resupply a winter campaign would face the usual extreme weather challenges. Implicit here is Russia expecting to fight a brief war with very limited objectives. So…
Why Taiwan? Why now? Well Xi can no longer appear weak on the issue as he’s been pushing the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland for too long, and guess who’s facing an election? Well, kind of an election, because, well, you know…let’s not go there right now other than to say that Xi dare not appear weak on the issue RIGHT NOW.
And in the United States? We have Sleepy Joe Biden in the White House.
Sleepy Joe Biden. Let’s put that in our pipe and smoke that, too.
Because if Russia and China are banking on Biden being an indecisive dove, well, shit, about all I can say is they’ll be making a really big mistake, a mistake of historic proportions. Joe Biden is about as articulate a president in the foreign policy arena that we could have at a time like this, yet Republicans have painted a portrait of Biden as a doddering incompetent who is drooling his way to the old folks home. Putin knows better, so I assume Xi does as well, so why is the Russian’s propaganda machine (and by that I mean Fox News) piling on the ‘Biden has dementia’ byline? Could it be they want to set the stage for another little coup attempt over here to get things going again?Another January 6th action to really shake us up? Destabilize the US so our response to protect both Taiwan and NATO would be hamstrung by domestic political divisions?
So yeah, food for thought.
There’s another narrative floating around out there in the Facebook Metaverse that’s been gaining traction since the beginning of the pandemic, and this one is absolutely loaded with raging paranoia.
So yeah, one of the Big Things floating around in places like Davos is this thing some people have been calling the Great Contraction. The GC has a simple premise, namely that there are too many people on the planet and the best, most expeditious way to save the planet from climate collapse is to, well, get rid of a bunch of people without destroying the planet in the process – because, let’s face it, global thermonuclear war would get rid of a bunch of people but the rest of the planet would pretty much be gone, too. Not exactly an optimal outcome, ya know?
So why not make an easily modifiable virus and turn it loose?
Guess what?
Well, the thing is, when you drink enough Paranoid Brand® KoolAid, all this virus stuff begins to sound pretty good. Logical, even.
That’s why the “good vaccines” are only making it to the places where you find the “good people” – aka White Republicans who watch Fox News or OAN. Except those folks aren’t exactly lining up to take the vaccine, are they? And both Fox and OAN claim that vaccines are laden with microchips or guacamole with too much cilantro or God only knows what, so taking the vaccine makes you, at the very least, a commie sympathizer. Which is bad. Except that Trump and Putin, well, you know.
Again, let’s not go there. Really, why bother?
That’s the problem with paranoia. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, right?
So, what’s the point here?
Well, there are a bunch of people out there who still think that nuclear wars are ‘winnable’ and unfortunately a bunch of those people are in the Soviet, uh, no, that’s the Russian Duma, their version of our Congress – only a little less bat-shit crazy. Maybe Mr. Putin thinks he can win a short war over Ukraine, and maybe even a couple of small Baltic states thrown in for good measure, too. And maybe Xi thinks getting his hands on Taiwan will be an easy, bloodless affair. And maybe Putin and Xi think that Sleepy Joe Biden will be the biggest pushover since Chamberlain.
But here’s my takeaway, my two cents – for what it’s worth, if you will.
The skies over central Wisconsin were full today. Full of troops, I’d say. Well trained, battle-hardened troops. Troops being sent in harm’s way, full of angry purpose, because the defense of Europe is as vital today as it has ever been. My guess is troops are headed out over the Pacific, if they aren’t out there already. I hope that Putin and Xi pay close attention to this and pull back from the brink. Failing that, I hope someone reminds them to watch Dr. Strangelove, because war is about nothing so much as it about unintended consequences.
As for all this vaccine bullshit? Well, so far I’ve had three doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and I’m now absolutely convinced my jabs were absolutely full of extra guacamole. And I know this is true because my farts now smell like cilantro, so what else could possibly be behind it all?
Sorry. Bad pun.
Must be time to go.
Really, I’m so sorry. I just can’t help myself.
But remember, Christmas is almost upon us, so get out and spend some money. And don’t forget to spend a little on yourself, just go easy on the guacamole.
So yeah, the beat goes on, and the drums keep pounding that rhythm to the brain. Oh, lot of ground to cover in this chapter, so grab a cup of (insert your choice of frosty beverage here) and settle in for a quiet read…
Music? Start here, ’cause I did too, and as an aside, Graeme Edge, the Moody Blues drummer from, well, yeah, from the beginning, passed away last week. Just thought you should know as it kinda bothered me here and there as these words found their way to the page.
Part VI
Black Light
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
Graeme Edge & Justin HaywardNights in White Satin
How strange, he thought as he looked at the passing landscape sliding by in the darkness below. Strange, because he could see Yosemite down there through the clouds, and for a moment he was sure he’d just seen Half Dome in the twilight. Strange, because his father had always wanted to climb that one. Funny, too, as he’d mentioned wanting to climb the Matterhorn one day. Strange now because his father had asked that his ashes be spread from Clouds Rest – “so I can can spend eternity watching over my favorite place on earth.” And he’d said so often enough, too, at least he had whenever the subject came up.
Strange, indeed. Because even now, descending over the Sierra Nevada, Sherman found he had two more mountains to climb. The first with his father would be a kind of goodbye, a last walk together. So first he had to come full circle with that distant past, then he had to get back to Boston and be there when Betty and Beth’s remains arrived from Zermatt. At least, if everything went according to their contingency plans, their ashes would arrive and, as they’d discussed together a few months before their planned return to Zermatt, Betty and Beth wanted their ashes spread from the summit of Long’s Peak, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.
“Now that’s an odd choice,” he recalled saying to them at the time, but as is so often the case, the choice was rooted in their past as well as their future.
“We both went to summer camp in Estes Park, Gene, at Cheley, and we both climbed Long’s when we there. I guess you could say that’s where it all began for us. Only about thirty years separated my experience from Beth’s…”
Sherman had heard about Long’s Peak, of course. About the so called Diamond Face and the more accessible Keyhole route, but he’d never seen it and his father had had no interest in climbing there so they’d never made the trip.
“And now I guess I finally will,” he sighed to the passing clouds under his Swiss A-340. “Lucky me,” he added wistfully, just as a flight attendant came on the speaker and advised they’d be landing in ten minutes…
“Yes, lucky me.”
+++++
His mother met him at the airport but she insisted he drive home,
“I can barely see now, Gene.”
“It’s just cataract surgery, Mom. It takes ten minutes and doesn’t hurt, but you know all that so why don’t you tell me what the real problem is…?”
But she’d simply shrugged and hugged him again. “It is so good to see you again, to feel you in my arms. Even under these awful circumstances.”
Sherman looked away. “Circumstances?” he sighed.
“What an awful thing,” she added, “but let’s not talk about all that, not this trip. We have other things to take care of concerning your father.”
“Concerning Dad? Really?”
“Oh, yes, and I mean beyond the trip to Yosemite. How long can you stay?”
“I have to be back in Boston on the tenth, so call it eight days.”
“Good, that will be enough, and by then you will be quite tired of me…as you have always been,” she said happily, though a little carefully.
“I never get tired of you, Mom.”
“But I was never a part of your life, either,” she sighed. “You were your father’s son, and I know that. In fact I cherished that about him most of all.” He also noticed she had trouble walking now, and he was glad her old Porsche wasn’t parked too far away.
He looked at her as he put his carry-on onto the shelf behind his seat and sat down behind the wheel, and he wasn’t sure where she was going with this conversation, but he knew her well enough to be on guard now. She slapped her seatbelt on and sighed, and again he got the distinct impression she was hiding something.
“What is it, Mom? What are you not telling me?”
“I have a glioblastoma, and it is metastasizing aggressively,” she said as she slammed her door shut.
He nodded as he fully understood the implications. “How long? Six months?” he asked.
“Maybe, but I am foregoing treatment, so probably a little less.”
“Okay. I think I understand.”
She shrugged again. “Surgery, chemo, then radiation and go through all that and possibly add two months to the balance sheet? No thanks. I have seen the outcomes of these treatments and at my age I have no interest in such things.”
“Okay. What do I need to do to help?”
“You need to start the car, Gene, because I haven’t had anything to eat today, so please, head straight to the Oasis. I feel a strong need to have an extended coming to terms with a hot pastrami sandwich!”
A half hour later they were in the same booth they’d always tried to get, and he could still find where he and his father had carved their initials into the old wood table – now almost forty years ago – then he looked at his mother looking at his hand on the initials carved down there in the old varnished wood.
“You remember those days too, don’t you?” she asked fondly.
“I’ll never forget. You were perfect parents, you know?”
She smiled at that. “Hardly perfect, Gene, but we always tried to do the right by you, to lead…”
“…by example. And you did, Mom. You taught me the value of being committed to your work while at the same time loving your family. You two were always so much in love, too…”
“And that eluded you, until Betty came along? Yet there were other things, too…”
He nodded. “That’s right,” he sighed. “Until Betty came along.”
“I’m sorry I never met her daughter. What was she like?”
“Mom…ya know, I think she was a survivor, at least she had to have been to get through that childhood.”
“Was it a mixed marriage?”
“I guess. Markus Cohen, Betty’s husband, is from a prominent manhattan family, investment bankers one and all…”
“So, a Jewish family?”
“I assume so, but I never asked. They met at Dartmouth and she went to med school at Columbia, did all her post-grad work in New York City…”
“Where was she from?”
“Charleston.”
“Do you think you would have married her?”
He nodded. “She wanted to, I think very much, and I think Beth wanted that to happen, too.”
“But…what about you? What did you want?”
“I guess, well, I’m not sure, Mom. Everything is confused right now.”
His mother’s right eyebrow arched, a sure sign she was growing a little perturbed. “You’ll never be sure, will you, Gene? I feel this is the one place we let you down. You say you saw how much your father and I loved one another yet I am left to wonder. If this is indeed what you say you experienced why have you never felt this way too?”
He resettled in his seat, felt uncomfortable in his skin as he tried to formulate an answer, then he gave up and looked down. “I’m not sure I’m capable of feeling love, Mom. At least I pretty sure I haven’t, not yet, anyway, and at my age if it hasn’t happened I don’t think it ever will.”
“Well, at last we finally have the truth!” his mother said. “So much for setting a fine example!”
“Don’t say that, Mom. It isn’t true and you know it.”
“Oh? I do? So tell me, Mr. Genius Astronomer, just what did we teach you about life?”
“You taught me humility and determination. You taught me self-respect and empathy. Dad taught me the value of curiosity, and I think he developed in me the patience to explore. All in all, Mom, those aren’t bad things.”
“No, surely not. Those are each good things, noble things, at least they are in and of themselves – yet, I wonder what these things are worth in a life without love. I mean a deep, abiding love. A love worth living your life for. Ah…they are calling our number! Would you go get our sandwiches?”
“Sure, Mom.”
They ate in silence, Sherman marveling at the consistency of the memories this place engendered. The table: the same. Their sandwiches: the same they had been for the past forty five years. Even the air smelled the same, and the memories that followed were echoes bouncing off the same walls, the only thing missing now – his father and the giant shadow he’d cast over all their lives.
“Two of your father’s friends will join us to Yosemite, if that is alright with you, and of course Beverly will join us, as well,” his mother said when she finished half her sandwich – and as she had for the past forty five years, she wrapped the other half in a couple of napkins to take home and eat a few hours from now.
“Of course I don’t mind. Who’s coming?”
“Neal and Patricia, as well as Beverly – and her son,” she said.
“Her son? Have I met him?” Beverly had been his father’s secretary for the past twenty years, maybe more, and a more dedicated soul he’d never known. Still, he had his own secret history with Beverly that went a little deeper than infatuation.
“No…no you haven’t, but now I think it is time that you did.”
“Oh?”
“Well, he is almost your brother, after all.”
Sherman felt an icy claw grip his chest as his mind stammered through the implications. “What does that mean?” he just managed to say.
But his mother smiled evasively at his question. “Yes, perhaps a brother. Because, or so it seems, your father was indeed just a man after all, and perhaps he was not the paragon of virtue you might have imagined he was.”
“Well…I be damned.”
“You? Saint Gene? Oh, surely not. But your father? Well, the jury is still out on that one, oh son and heir to the throne, but be careful. Things are rarely what they seem.”
+++++
And now, eight days later and here he was, sitting in yet another airliner – this time a Delta 757 headed to Boston. He looked out over the city as it slid by a few miles below, the TransAmerica Pyramid still the most easily identifiable icon within the ever growing skyline, and he had to admit that, once you scraped away a little surface paint, things hadn’t changed all that much down there. Silicon Valley had changed the nature of the game just a little, but San Francisco had always been about making money, and a lot of it, usually as fast and with as little risk as possible. San Francisco was the “sure thing” city, where West Coast new money went after the easy money, and Sherman scoffed when he recalled that when the “right coast” mob decided to move out west, the first stop on their easy money train was Frisco.
Yet the other side of this equation was dark. Real dark.
Because San Francisco was the West Coast’s version of Manhattan, she had quickly become another ‘City of Broken Dreams,’ and now there were a lot of desperate people living down there in an exceptionally small city, with all the usual, and predictable results. But that was California now, too. Sinking under the weight of too much and too many. Too many people chasing the dream.
And who knows, maybe Beverly Bishop had been one of the good ones, one of the good girls that had gotten swooped-up in all the drama that swirled around the whole Silicon Valley thing. She wasn’t really bright, after all, and with just (barely) a high school diploma in hand, she hadn’t really been considered well educated, but she sure was cute as hell and she’d had really nice legs – and for a young girl just striking out on her own and trying to find work as a secretary, in the late-70s those were her most valuable assets. And it goes without saying she knew how to exploit those assets to her greatest advantage. Her high school education had certainly taught her that much.
Then again, Neal Sherman had proven to be the antithesis of who or what she had expected. As a ‘boss’ and more importantly as a human being.
True, he was a physics professor and there was usually a pocket protector tucked neatly inside his shirt pocket. True, an HP-41 graphing calculator always hung from his belt. And, yes, true, his trousers were hemmed about two inches too high. He was also nice. He never ‘bossed’ her around. He was always empathetic, always let her have some time off when her ‘little friend’ hit too hard and the cramps became almost unendurable. And on the rare occasions when the Sherman’s went out to dinner in The City, or when they went to academic conferences of some sort, Beverly Bishop stayed at the Sherman house in Menlo Park, ‘babysitting’ for Gene, making sure he didn’t get into too much trouble.
The trouble with this arrangement was simple enough to understand. Gene Sherman was, by the time Beverly entered the picture, already a teenager. He was a little nerdy, too, but he was a good looking kid, AND he was the quarterback over at Palo Alto High, which made him a real BMOC, or Big Man On Campus, and not a Pretender. And Beverly was cute. And if anything, Beverly was a little oversexed, which is a polite way of saying that when she met Gene Sherman she got a little moist down there where the sun don’t shine. And one night, when the Shermans were up in The City, she taught Gene all about kissing, and all the other little ins-and-outs that usually attend such studies. And as he was in everything else he did, Gene Sherman was a quick study and he began to look forward to his parents heading out to dinner.
And then he was gone. Off to college, to some place called Annapolis, and all Beverly Bishop really understood about all that was that Gene Sherman was on the opposite side of a very big country and that she was now very, very pregnant.
+++++
And of course Gene Sherman was good at arithmetic. He could add and subtract, and he could count months and years and the passage of time and the numbers tended to work out neatly. Yet the sums he arrived at now were inescapable.
So when Neal and Patricia Hefti and Beverly and Jordan Bishop met up at the Sherman house on Arbor Road, Gene Sherman was a little on edge, maybe even a little bent out of shape. Nervous might even be a better descriptor. Because, while he knew on a visceral level he was headed to Yosemite to spread his father’s ashes on the wind, he also understood he had reached one of those turning points in life, a point that had been concealed and too long denied by all parties.
He understood, in other words, that he was, quite probably, about to meet his son. And he was scared shitless, too.
The boy wasn’t really a boy, not now. He was a young man in his thirties and he worked at H-P designing circuit boards and chips. And Jordan Bishop was, for all intents and purposes, a knock-off of Gene Shepard, and standing side by side that interesting fact became instantly, and embarrassingly clear to everyone standing out there on Arbor Road. They were the same height. Their hair color was identical, eye color too. And it was the eyes that gave it all away, because Jordan and Gene looked exactly like father and son. Probably because…well, you know…
Yet if this was some kind of revelation it seemed that Gene Sherman was the only one who really hadn’t been keeping score over the intervening decades. The Heftis certainly knew, and when he looked at his mother he realized that she too had known all along. So, what was going on?
And so, when it came time to divide up into cars for the drive over to the park, Gene asked if Beverly could ride with him for a while. Beverly graciously consented, because of course she had been waiting for just this exact moment for, uh, well, for thirty two years.
+++++
“Your father was worried that, well, that if it came out it might wreck the whole Annapolis thing, and then everything just sort of spun out of control from there. Your mom and dad took care of me, Gene. And they have ever since.”
“This is kind of hard to believe, Bev,” Gene growled. “I mean…that’s my son, my boy, and I might have died last week on that mountain and never known a thing about him…”
“I know. When you came back last year, well, once we learned about Betty we decided to put it off again. It wasn’t some kind of grand conspiracy, Gene. It all just kind of happened, and everything developed a momentum…”
“Now you’re talking like Dad.”
“Maybe because I’ve been around him all my life, Gene. I loved him, too, ya know. Like a father, because in the best way possible that’s exactly what he was to me…”
“And a grandfather…?”
“Yes,” she whispered, “that too.”
“So…I have a son.”
“You do.”
“A son I don’t know. Now, ain’t that ducky…”
“Look, I know how bitter you must…”
“No, you don’t, because I’m not, Beverly. Not really. Shocked? Hell yeah, but not bitter. I can see my old man, ya know? Was he there for the delivery?”
She nodded. “He held my hand, Gene. He even took pictures, because he knew that one day you’d want to see…”
“Jesus H Christ on a motorbike. Yeah, I got it. Hell, I can almost see it all happening…”
“Of course you can. Because he was decent and honorable, and he did everything so that you could stay focused…”
“Stay focused?” Sherman cried. “Focused on what? Playing football? Looking at the stars? Is all that supposed to be more important than being a father? For being there, for my kid?”
She looked at him and shook her head. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“You’d just left home, Gene, and now they were alone, but then all of a sudden along came Jordan and all that magic came back into their lives. Do you realize we spent the first three years of Jordan’s life living with your parents, and you never came home, not once. Your dad went out to your graduation at Annapolis, and again he went to Pensacola, but you never once came home…”
Sherman’s eyes filled with tears and he started to pull over to the side of the road but managed to wipe them dry.
“Then the thing with your leg and you came home after that. You came home when you needed them and they were there for you, weren’t they?”
“And where were you?”
“Oh, we’d moved out by then. Your dad took out a second and bought us a little cottage over by Menlo College.”
“So…he kept you close?”
“Wouldn’t you have done the same thing, Gene? The most important thing was always protecting you and your career, but taking care of us became a real focus for them once you were gone.”
“I assume he knows I’m his father?”
“Of course. You’ve been like some kind of God to him, Gene. He’s terrified right now; I don’t think I’ve ever seen him more upset. Afraid of being rejected, afraid you’ll push him away, push all of us away…”
And that was it. All Gene Sherman could take. First Betty and Beth, then his father, and now this. He pulled over to the side of the road and their little convoy pulled over, too.
“Are you okay, Gene?”
“No,” he said, staring off into space. “No, not really.”
“You come on over and sit in this seat,” she said, opening the Porsche’s right door and stepping out onto the road’s shoulder. But he hadn’t moved, not even a little, so she went and got Jordan and together they moved him, and got him buckled in.
And then Jordan got behind the wheel, and once his mother was in the Hefti’s station wagon off they went, onward to Yosemite.
+++++
“You know how to drive this thing?” Gene asked the stranger by his side.
“I learned to drive in this car, Dad. I even took my driving test in it.”
“Of course you did.” Sherman sighed, sitting there in a state of shock, hearing but not quite realizing that this kid had just called him Dad, and that this otherwise unknown human being sitting behind the wheel of his mother’s Porsche was in fact his son.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult all this must be for you,” Jordan said.
“Really?”
“Really. What happened over there, Dad?”
“Over where?”
“On the Matterhorn?”
“Strong wind out of nowhere, just like this.”
“Like this? You mean, oh…as in meeting me?”
“Unexpected,” Gene Sherman whispered. “Everything has been so unexpected. So, losing my dad must be like…”
“Yeah,” Jordan sighed, and that was all he said.
“I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.”
“Doesn’t matter, Dad. Like I said, I don’t know how you’re able to process all this?”
“Process? What does that mean?”
“So many conflicting emotions coming at you so fast.”
“Oh. So, did you and my father come up here a lot?”
“Yosemite? Oh yeah, sometimes every weekend.”
“He taught you to climb?”
“Yeah, and to ski, up at Tahoe usually.”
Sherman nodded, the picture becoming much more clear. “Did you play football?”
“Yup, but I was nowhere near as good as you. I played two years at Berkeley then blew out my knee.”
“Quarterback?”
“Yeah.”
“Which knee?”
“My left, why?”
“Oh, just wondering. Does it bother you much?”
“Not too much these days,” Jordan added. “Why? What’s on your mind?”
“Betty and Beth are coming back next week and they asked that I spread their ashes from a mountain in Colorado. If you have some time you could take off, I’d appreciate the help.”
“Really? I’d love that, Dad.”
Sherman ignored the incongruity of the boy’s response, wondering if the tacit selfishness was innate, or something a little more…peculiar…? But then again, he said to himself, how would it be to grow up with a web of deceit and evasion right outside your door?
+++++
Another Delta 757. Coming into Logan about an hour after sunset, Jordan in the seat next to his. And now, after almost a week together, he had to admit the boy was good company. They got on easily enough, too, at least once all the tiptoeing around hidden landmines was over and done with. Or maybe that was the point. There’d never be enough time to skirt all the inherent drama, because now it seemed as if both their lives, the entirety of both their lives, had been and was nothing less than a living tissue of lies.
And how did you overcome something so pernicious? Sherman had no idea.
Was something so intricately woven into the fabric of time subject to such understanding and empathy? He found himself looking at this stranger, his son, not really able to put the context of life as he’d known and understood it into the ever expanding subterfuge of Jordan’s day-to-day existence.
But was it really fair to look at the boy’s life under that kind of lens? Parsing meaning out of emotions he’d never witnessed, let alone experienced?
The 757 was circling out over the bay, lining up to land with the downtown skyline glittering behind the airport, and he realized that almost all his memories of Beth and Betty were tied up in and around that island of glittering history. Like a gayly wrapped Christmas present, complete with festive bows and ribbons…to: Gene – from: Santa Claus – they’d all come together here, like atoms pulled by an uncertain gravity into the nucleus of life in just this one particular city. Then again, flying over the United States at night was kind of like looking down on a series of globular clusters spread out across an unseen landscape, and Boston was just the end of one chain…
“I wanted to apply to a couple of schools back here,” Jordan said.
“Why didn’t you?” – but he already knew the answer, didn’t he?
“No scholarship money. Wasn’t good enough, I guess.”
Which, Sherman knew, was just a part of his ever expanding fabric of lies, the private tapestry built up around his life. I’d probably just moved to Boston around that time, Sherman thought, and had just started teaching at MIT, so Jordan’s sudden emergence might have interfered with all that, too. Because once the lie began it had developed a momentum all its own, and like some kind of hideous runaway fission reaction the lie consumed truth as easily as it devoured fuel rods, or even the Cheerios both of them had eaten for breakfast all their lives. They were living in a hall of mirrors, their lives a series of distortions, even the one basic truth they shared had withered under the sheer weight of this tapestry.
“You seem to have done well enough at Berkeley,” he replied, continuing the charade.
“It’s a good school.”
“You got your Masters, right?”
“Stanford. Double-E.”
Now here was another minefield best avoided. ‘Did Dad pull a few strings to get him in?’ But no, don’t go there, “Lot of good connections, good networking opportunities. Is that how you got hooked up at H-P?”
It was all so easy, like all you had to do was hitch up your trousers and follow the good old yellow brick road, so yeah baby, just Sing, Dorothy! Sing! – ’cause there’s no place like home!
The jet touched down and he was pulled into his seatbelt as reverse thrust kicked in, then they were spit out of the belly of the beast and into the beating heart of his memory. Beth and Betty had been his truth for almost a year, yet all that waited for him now was Dorothy and her red slippers – in the shape and form of this stranger by his side.
“You live over by MIT?” Jordan asked as they took the escalator down to the T.
“Yeah. It’s not a bad walk from the Red Line, so it’s convenient.”
“Any good places to eat around here?”
“You hungry?”
“Always.”
“Steak sound okay?”
“You bet.”
So yeah, of course the yellow brick road goes right by the Chart House, doesn’t it? I can get two birds with one stone tonight, so on to the Blue Line we go, and off at Long Wharf and yeah, maybe I’ll have a Mai Tai with my salad, and make mine a double, would you?
‘He’s a good kid, ya know?’ he said to himself as he polished off drink number one.
“So Dad, I have to ask. What was it like to fly off a carrier?”
And Gene Sherman didn’t really know how to respond to that question anymore. That was the first question just about everyone asked once they learned he’d been a Naval Aviator, but he’d found that, more and more often recently, that his leg got in the way of any answer that came to mind…but then again this was his son and his son deserved an honest answer, especially given the circumstances…
“I hate to say it, Jordan, but carrier aviation and mountain climbing have an awful lot in common. You have to balance the equations, that’s all. In the beginning, when you’re learning and still a nugget, the equation is fear versus confidence. Later on, say after you’ve got a couple hundred hours logged, the equation changes on you little by little. It becomes arrogance versus self confidence. The word is that the most dangerous person in the world is a naval aviator with 200 hours of flight time, because by that point he’s sure he’s God’s gift to the aviation world and can therefore make no mistakes…”
“What did you fly?”
“The A-6.”
“That’s the Intruder, right?”
“Yup.”
“What’s the deal with flying the A-6?”
“Something called DIANE, which means Digital Integrated Attack/Navigation Equipment, which all-in-all is nothing but a convoluted way of saying the aircraft could take off and land from a carrier in zero visibility and then fly to a target in the middle of the night, and in the worst weather imaginable, and put bombs on targets no larger than a mouse’s ass.”
“No shit? But I thought the Intruder was designed back in the 50s?”
“Yup, it was. And one of the guys working on the original design also developed the F-14 and the lunar descent module, so those guys knew a little something about computers, even way back then in the stone age.”
“Could you, I mean, did you ever carry nukes?”
Sherman shrugged. “The Intruder was capable of that, yes.”
“How’d you get shot down?”
Sherman tried to maintain eye contact but somehow he knew the kid was going to ask the one question he just didn’t want to answer – and yet now there was nothing to it but to answer him. “An Iranian F-14, well, there were four known F-14s ahead of us but another came in low and got past our Hawkeye. That one launched from down on the deck, from my six, and we never had a chance. Funny, ya know, because we trained their pilots. They knew our doctrine, our ROEs, and man…did they catch us with out pants down.”
“That happened during the hostage thing, right?”
Sherman nodded as he took a long pull from his second Mai Tai. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“So…landing at night on a carrier? Is that as hard as it sounds?”
“Remember that equation? Arrogance versus self confidence?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, there are very few arrogant Naval Aviators, Jordan, and yet there are none that are afraid of landing at night in a storm on a carrier. The training is all about getting you to the point where you’re confident in your skills. If you don’t get there you don’t get your wings, simple as that. Now, how’s your steak?”
“Good. GrandPa said you wanted to try for the astronaut program?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I lost that when I lost my leg.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I mean, I’m sorry about everything that’s happened this summer…”
“You learn to roll with the punches, and if you go down you have to get back up on your feet and get going again.”
“Is it really that simple, Dad?”
Sherman looked away for a moment, lost inside the easy sounding bullshit the question implied. “I’m not sure yet, Jordan. I’m still down on the ground, still trying to figure out when I’m going to find the strength…”
+++++
He wasn’t sure about the what or the who or the how of Betty’s and Beth’s return, only that someone from Switzerland was accompanying their remains and that they’d be on the noon-thirty flight from Zurich, so both he and Jordan were waiting outside of the main Customs exit at noon two days later when he saw Hans walk out into the concourse. He waved and Hans smiled as he walked over.
“Professor, you look surprised to see me?”
“Actually, I think that’s because I am. Hans, good to see you, and how are you doing?”
“Better. Still not one hundred percent, but better. Now, who is this with you?”
“Hans, this is Jordan Bishop. Jordan, this is Hans Castorp.”
“A friend or a student?” Hans said as he held out his right hand.
“My son.”
“Indeed. Well, Jordan, nice to meet you.”
“You too, sir.”
“Did you eat on the plane, or would you like to grab a little something to eat? And what are your plans, Hans?”
“Maybe we could find someplace quiet to talk? I am curious about some things.”
So, one more time…follow the yellow brick road…like maybe this was getting to be a little too easy?
+++++
“So, this is a Mai Tai? It is somewhat strong? Rum, I think?”
“Yup, rum. And a lot of it, too.”
“I think I like it,” Hans said after he downed the glass – in one long pull. “Yes, I think I like this very much.”
“So, what’s on your mind, Hans?”
“You are going to Colorado. To Long’s Peak. This is correct?”
“This is correct.”
“I want to go with you.”
Sherman inhaled sharply. “Really?”
“Is this a problem?”
“No, not at all. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Well, I have brought Father Pete with me, as well. I think he would have liked this, no? To be with Beth and Betty up there on this mountain. You see, he climbed the Diamond Face twice, and I think this was a special place for him.”
“I’m not really familiar with it, Hans, only that Betty wanted me to take a trail called the Keyhole. Something to do with how both she and Beth made the climb when they were kids.”
Hans shrugged. “The way to the summit is irrelevant, only that we gain it together. And I must tell you, Professor, that I have set aside some of the, well, you know…”
“Please tell me you’re kidding?”
“No, no, not at all. I have set a little of each one aside, in case you might care to return to Zermatt next summer and carry them to the summit again.”
Sherman tried to pretend he hadn’t heard the remark and casually turned to signal their waiter. “I think we’re going to need a shitload of these,” he said once the kid made it to their table, and then, pointing to their empty Mai Tai glasses with a grin, he added: “so keep ‘em coming ’til one of us either pukes or cries uncle.”
“Gee Dad, that sounds like fun,” Jordan said, grinning a little too madly.
“What does? Puking?”
“No, doing the Matterhorn together.”
“Fun? Gee, you know what, kid? You and me, we got real different opinions about what constitutes fun. Know what I mean?”
“But wait! Does this mean,” Hans cried, apparently lost in reveries all his own, “that we are going to get to take a road trip? Like, maybe, the Great American Road Trip?”
“Maybe,” Sherman sighed. “But first, well, I don’t quite know how to say this, but, well, first thing is we’re gonna need a car.”
“Alright!” Hans cried, slapping the table. “Fuckin’ A! The professor doesn’t own a car!”
“And what’s the next thing, Dad?” Jordan asked as he watched his father down his second drink.
“I’m gonna need another fuckin’ Mai Tai,” Gene Sherman said – just before he started giggling. “Holy Mother of God. A road trip. Well Betty, looks like you get the last laugh after all…”
Even after climbing a few mountains in my time, including the one in question, I still have no idea why we do it. “Because it’s there!” seems a trivial, even an off-putting and banal denial of the risks involved. Then again, why does the chicken cross the road? Or – which came first, the chicken or the egg? And oh yes, let’s not forget to ask why we still threaten to annihilate our perceived adversaries with hydrogen bombs? And why, for God’s sake, would anyone eat escargot? Are we simply stupid, or is it something in our humanity that compels us to climb higher and higher? Just something to think about while you read.
And oh yes, music matters very much.
And as if that wasn’t enough, don’t forget this one:
Part V
Reflected Light
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
Kahlil Gibran The River Cannot Go Back
He struggled to find his way to sleep, but it never came his way. Too excited? Perhaps. Or maybe it was something else? Something else pulsing in the night sky?
Sherman finally gave up just before 0200. He’d showered earlier before hitting the sheets, hoping the heat and the water would ease the way ahead, but no, that was simply not to be. There was nothing to do now but wait for the rest of them to wake up, so he dressed and walked down to the restaurant, scents of freshly baked bread filling his mind’s eye with comfortable memories of other mornings, of distant fires and other impossible dreams.
He soon found he wasn’t the only person unable to find sleep. A dozen or so climbers sat alone at tables nursing cups of herbal tea, no one wanting to drink so much that they’d have to stop and pee on the mountain. But really, everyone knew that at this altitude dehydration was the biggest danger. Any perspiration that managed to appear on your skin up there on the mountain would evaporate almost instantly, and between the sun and the wind your body was constantly fighting a losing battle with hydration. Why the big deal? Well, a gallon of water weighs more than six pounds, and that’s six pounds you have to balance with other, more immediate needs…things like rope, for one.
Sherman saw Father Pete sitting by himself, sitting as if lost in a trance, staring out one of the huge panoramic windows that looked out over the valley below, and to the Klein Matterhorn region where they’d practiced on the Breithorn earlier that week – just a few days ago, really. How odd, he thought, that everything they’d done right over there now seemed like it had happened in another lifetime.
‘Time is so fluid up here,’ he said to another passing memory of his father. ‘Isn’t that what you always used to say…before time came and stole all your memories?’ He couldn’t believe how fast he had deteriorated after the strokes.
And how odd that, of all things, he and this priest full of doubt had fallen into one extended conversation about God, a drawn out affair that always picked up where it left off – yet always after another ascent or the next traverse. And how odd that this endless looping conversation always seemed to circle back to the mysterious pulsing light coming from Messier 22.
“Really, Gene, what do you think the light means?” Father Pete asked just before they made it back to the tram to ride back down to Zermatt.
But Sherman had simply evaded the question like any trained astronomer might. “It’s hard to ascribe meaning to something we haven’t had time to study, and as far as meaning goes you might remember that the photons tickling your retina last night got started on that little journey almost eleven thousand years ago…”
“So? Maybe God wanted to send you a message, and knowing where you’d be he snapped his fingers and there you have it…! Instant pulsing light!”
“Do you really think like that?” Sherman remembered asking, and he remembered the impish grin spreading across Father Pete’s sun-drenched face, and the twinkling in his eyes.
“I told you, Professor Gene, about my doubts. Do you not have any of your own?”
“About globular clusters?”
“About belief, or this non-belief of yours.”
They had just stopped outside the gondola station and were taking off their packs, and Father Pete had taken out a fresh bottle of water – yet he handed this bottle over to Sherman, smiling as he did, as if the water might be taken as a peace offering.
“I’ve studied the stars my whole life,” Gene said as he took the bottle, “and I have no idea what it is.”
“And so I assume you’ve had no time to study your fellow man?”
“My fellow man? What has man got to do with beliefs, and God?”
Which made the smile on Peter’s face spread even wider. “But Professor Gene…of course they are one and the same thing. Man is God, and God is man, and to study one is to study the other…”
Sherman scowled and nodded. “Then I understand why you turned your back on the priesthood.”
“Ah? How so?”
“Your story about the two thieves. Human nature guides our destiny, and if that is so then our destiny is inescapable.”
“True enough, Gene, yet I am not so sure about this life, that in our ignorance perhaps we can only perceive the surface of the question. Still, I think that further study will require a trip to the other side, and this I am not sure I am ready to undertake just yet.”
“Perfectly rational point of view, Father Pete. I understand that much completely.”
Now, up here at the Hörnli hut and with the start of their climb up the Matterhorn due to start in an hour and a half, Father Pete was still looking deep into the heart of Sagittarius, into the pulsing globular cluster flailing away to the beat of a distant, unseen drummer. ‘Perhaps he is thinking about his God?’ he thought, somehow finding the notion comfortable.
“She still doing her thing?” Sherman said as he walked up to Pete’s table. “Mind of I sit?”
“No, please. I see you too did not sleep well.”
“No, not well, maybe a couple of hours.”
Pete shrugged. “It is not so unusual. We are now at 3300 meters; the air is very thin. Do you have the headache?”
“No, I drank a bunch of water at dinner, and that seems to have done the trick. I hope I am not intruding, but you seem worried. You okay?”
“Me? Yes, I am fine. If I have any concerns it is about Beth. I think perhaps she has a touch of acrophobia.”
“Then she shouldn’t make this climb,” Sherman said.
“I have watched her, and I have talked to her about this, yet she remains adamant she is going to make this climb. In truth, Gene, this climb is not so difficult. The summit ridge and the Icefield will be the worst for her, and these can be easily avoided.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, I think so. I mention this now as you will be ahead of us today, so you will be able to talk with her as we climb. So, yes, I think it will be important that you do.”
“Do you have a contingency plan in mind?”
“Yes, of course, and Hans and I have gone over this. If she has a problem then Betty will join you and I will bring Beth down here to the hut. I will then return to assist with your descent.”
Sherman shook his head. “Peter…I’m not sure this is worth the risk.”
“Well, apparently she does. Gene, I am not sure why she is making this climb, not really, but again I think she is doing this for you.”
“What are you saying, Pete?”
“I am not saying anything, Gene. Yet, perhaps, if because you were not able to sleep you feel that it would be unsafe for you to make the climb, then perhaps she would stay here with you.”
“Oh no, Goddamnit,” Sherman cried, “don’t you dare put this on me! If you see danger you and Hans are being well paid to help us avert trouble. Am I being clear?”
“Yes, Gene, of course, but there is no need to shout. It was just a suggestion that came to me just now. We will proceed as planned, but you keep an eye on her too and let me know what you think. So far, as you have seen, she is an able climber, and I think she will do well, but again, I would keep her off the summit ridge.”
A moment later Betty and Beth came into the dining room and Betty waved at Gene and Pete before she went for tea. Hans followed a few minutes later and they sat together and ate their recommended breakfast in silence, each lost inside that other world, that other place where dreams and reality run into one another…
+++++
“Damn!” Betty screeched. “It’s fucking cold out here! What time does the fucking sun come out?”
“It is 38 degrees Fahrenheit right now, and we climb in darkness for more than two hours,” Peter said gently as he checked their headlamps once again, “and don’t forget, there may be ice on the rock…usually a thin layer this time of the morning…so make sure your hand has a solid grip before you shift weight.”
“Gene!” Betty shouted up into the darkness. “What’s it like up there?”
Sherman looked down at the three headlights gathered about twenty meters below him: “Easy going so far. It’s not as steep as it looked yesterday, and the rocks are almost spaced-out like stairs.”
“Cool!” she replied. “That’s great!”
“Okay,” Peter said to Beth and Betty, “now we begin. Again, I will lead, Beth will come next and Betty, you will follow. Beth, stay close so you can see where I place my feet, and Betty, do not fall behind as I do not want to let-out so much rope. And again, whatever you do, do not step on the rope.”
“Got it!” Betty said…a little too loudly. She turned and looked at the hut, still tantalizingly close in the darkness, still only about fifty meters below, then she turned and looked up at the long string of headlights marching up the mountain like luminescent ants – because there were a hundred and forty climbers making the ascent and already they were strung out at dizzying intervals. And because of Gene, and his leg, their little group had elected to go last, which had only made sense.
The rock under lamplight was the same mottled rusty grey-yellow-brown it had been yesterday when they’d made their hike up to the hut, only now they weren’t walking on an old, well-worn trail. She watched Beth make her first few steps, aiming her own lamp to aid with hand placement, then she reached up and felt the rock, savoring the moment.
“One hand after the other,” she sighed, gritting her teeth as the stark terror of the moment finally sunk in. ‘How can I feel so scared and so full of…joy?’
+++++
One hour in and finally Hans stopped.
“Time for a sip of water, Herr Professor. How is the leg?”
“Better than expected. How much further until we need crampons?”
“Another hundred or so meters and then we will stop and see. You still have good water left?”
“Yes, plenty.”
“Your hands are warm enough?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Look,” Hans said, pointing across the valley.
“Sweet Jesus,” Sherman sighed as he took in the night sky – and at that pulsing light in Sagittarius – but then he could also just make out the thinnest orange light defining the eastern horizon and the sight was gorgeous. “That’s just outrageous!”
“No camera will ever capture such beauty, Professor, so look now so that you may remember this moment.”
Sherman nodded as he scanned the eastern horizon, purple blending to orange and just now an amber tinge was appearing within the misty line, the horizon line suddenly a serrated jumble as he looked out over the alps – now stretching all the way to Austria – and just then it seemed like visibility was at least a hundred miles, maybe more.
“Gene!” he heard Betty call out. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“Turn and look at the sunrise! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life!” he replied. He soon heard their appreciative gasps and he took another sip of water, then put his bottle away and turned to Hans. “Ready when you are.”
Hans nodded and turned back to the rock. “A very steep pitch comes next, Professor, but there is already a large rope in place. Check that your gloves have a good grip, okay?”
“Got it,” he said as he watched figures within the rock begin to morph through shades of red and orange and a strange, mottled purple-black, then he reached up with his right hand and found the next perfect handhold, then he pulled his rigid left leg up until he sort of felt it slide solidly into the foothold he’d chosen, his eyes always on the rock just overhead, his mind on the hole in his life left by an absent leg. Next, he said to himself, bring the right leg up again and push the body up, then reach up with the left hand and find a solid hold and get stabilized again, then do it all over again. And again.
A moment later he saw the rope Hans had mentioned and he reached up for it, getting his right foot stabilized…again…then he pulled his way up to the next foothold…
+++++
Beth watched Peter’s ass. She had since the sun came out, and now she was sure this priest had the best looking ass on planet fucking earth. Yet there was something almost magical about the way he moved up here, too, like he was some kind of Buddhist monk at one with the rock. His motions were both spare and fluid, and there was never any hesitation, either. He reached and he moved up, simple as that. He never retreated, he never made a mistake. When she remembered hearing him say he had only ever known God up on top of these mountains…well…now she understood what he meant.
And then the funniest thing happened. As she watched Peter move, as she moved where he moved, she felt all her fear just sort of wrap itself in a ball and fall away. She leaned out from the rock and looked down the ridge and felt not the slightest whiff of fear, only a deep need to see what was up ahead.
“You are climbing nicely,” Pete said as she came up to him. “Very strong.”
“I’ve never felt better in my life,” she said as she took out her water bottle. “God, it’s magic up here, ya know?”
“I do,” Pete said before he took another sip of water. “The next segment is rope all the way. Very, very steep but there are excellent holds for our hands and feet. One warning, however. Grasping the rope for so long leads to cramping, so switch hands as much as you can,” he said as Betty came up from below. “If you feel your hands cramp get your weight on your feet and shake it out. Wrap the rope around a forearm and just shake it out. Now Beth, just pay attention to where my feet go and try to follow me exactly…
“Exactly,” she sighed as she stared at his ass again. “Can do!”
+++++
‘My serum potassium must be low,’ Betty said as another cramp wracked her left thigh, this one leaving her breathless as the pain crushed her will to move up – yet again.
‘It’s not your fucking potassium, you fucking wimp,’ the tormenting inner voice screamed at her again, ‘it’s you! You! You’ve been running from me all your life, haven’t you? Running from me and my fear! But you know what, you stupid low country cunt, you ain’t ever gonna get away from me! Never, because this is the day I’ve been planning for us all our life!’
She stretched her left leg by pointing her toe towards the emptiness below, then she brought her knee up to her waist. She rotated her foot and then took a deep breath before she reached up and felt for the next handhold. She looked up just then and saw Beth on the rope, and she was filled with love and hope. Again. ‘That’s my daughter, my love, my everything!’ she sighed.
‘And fuck you,’ she said to the fear crawling up the hard face of her gut. ‘You ain’t ever gonna beat me so just shut the fuck up and leave me the fuck alone!’
+++++
“How is the crampon?” Hans asked.
“Better, but I wish we’d made the two front blades a little longer.”
“That’s what everyone says when they are on the ice,” Hans said, smiling. “Well, the next fifty meters are not so steep but now it is all snow, and there is no rope already there for us so I will lead and place anchors in the ice, and from perhaps twenty meters up I will go ‘on belay.’”
Peter was now just below Sherman, and both Beth and Betty were close behind, listening and looking where Hans pointed. “We move slowly here as we are exposed to sudden wind gusts now that we are close to the summit. Remember, use both axes now as you would use your hands and I will keep the rope tight and out of your way.”
“And once Professor Sherman is off belay,” Peter said, “I will move up and get the rope ready for you, Beth. Betty, you will wait here until I send the rope down to you, then it will be your turn.”
“And this is the last pitch before the summit?” Beth asked.
“Yes, we are almost there. This is the steepest part of the final pitch, what is called the ‘Icefield.’ Once we get to the top of this steep pitch we will walk up the final pitch using our axes. It is not so steep, but we will be approaching the summit ridge so do not get ahead of me, or my rope.”
“Why didn’t they run a rope up this stretch, Hans? It looks like the worst part of the whole climb.”
“Leaving rope exposed in the snow and ice does not work. Chain has been tried but it rusts quickly and is hard on the hands. Just keep your eyes on where I place my feet and stabilize yourself with both of your axes before you take the next step. I will not rush here, and neither should you, and let me get my anchors set before you begin. I will call out ‘On Belay!’ – and you reply with?”
“Belay on. Climbing.”
“Correct. Now watch me closely, and be very careful before you begin.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” Sherman sighed, staring up the sheer wall of ice overhead – and knowing that there was a sheer drop-off just a few feet away, off his right side, really didn’t help.
“Are you okay, Professor?” Peter said, now coming next to him, Beth and Betty still a few meters below.
“Oh, I was just wondering what the fuck I’m doing up here. No big deal.”
Peter laughed a little. “I think the Icefield as also called the What the Fuck Am I Doing Up Here part of the climb. Everyone reacts this way, so don’t feel despair. It is actually easier than it looks, and you have already finished the worst parts of the climb.”
“Ah. So, this is called the Bullshit Pep Talk, right?”
“Exactly. Just so,” Peter said, chuckling again. “You are too well informed, Professor.”
“When are you going to start calling me Gene?”
“When we become friends, Professor.”
“And when will that be?”
“When we get back down to the hut, of course. I think Hans is ready now.”
“That’s just fucking swell, Pete. I was so enjoying out little talk…”
“You’ll do fine. Get your right axe up and set, then your left.”
“On Belay!” Hans called out from sixty feet above.
“Belay on, climbing,” Sherman called up the mountain, then he muttered: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Right foot up and get the crampon set, then pull the left leg up and get it set.”
“See, you are already the expert!” Pete said, maybe a little too jovially.
“Pete? Any idea how hard it might be to get one of these ice axes out of your ass?”
“We will discuss these difficulties over dinner this evening. Now, get your left leg set before you transfer weight.”
Beth climbed up to Pete, easily handling the mix of ice and snow and now feeling very happily confident. “Looking good, Gene!” she said as she watched Sherman’s hesitant ascent with a growing sense of alarm. She watched him take a minute to move up to the next foothold, and it should have taken him just a few seconds. “I wonder if his leg is bothering him,” she whispered to Pete.
“I have seen a spot of blood on his pants,” Peter replied.
“Shit.”
“He is determined, but his spirit is flagging. The next hundred feet will be critical.”
“Should we start up now, get behind him?”
“No, no. If he falls we might cause a new problem. We will set our own belay, you see.”
“You guys do know I can hear every fucking thing you’re saying, right?” Sherman growled. “And I am not going to fucking fall, okay?”
“Oops,” Beth said, chuckling with Pete.
“What’s up?” Betty said as she finished climbing up to Beth and Pete.
“Oh, nothing,” Pete said.
“Actually,” Sherman added, “I was warning Pete not to come up too close behind me. Must have eaten something real bad last night, ya know? Fartin’ up a storm.”
Betty shook her head. “And here I thought it was just me,” she added.
“We are turning the entire mountain green this morning,” Pete sighed, not taking his eyes off Sherman for a second. “Okay Professor, ten more feet and the worst is behind you. Slow and easy now, do not feel tempted to rush!”
They watched Sherman reach Hans and everyone cheered.
Then, of course, he farted.
“Damn. I thought he was kidding,” Peter sighed. “Oh well, this is one morning I wish the wind was blowing even a little bit.”
+++++
There is a little bronze statue of Saint Bernard near the summit of the Matterhorn, and in order to insure a safe trip back to the base it is said climbers must pat Bernard’s head a couple of times before starting back down the mountain. The area around the statue is about the only place on the summit where an exhausted climber can sit, and Sherman had planted himself firmly on top of a snow covered rock right beside the statue – ostensibly to pull out his Leica and blow through a couple of rolls of Kodachrome – and so he was able to photograph Peter and Beth and Betty as they made their way up the last snowy pitch. And, he hoped, these few images would define a completely undefinable moment for them all, because he was coming to realize that words alone could not begin to express what he was seeing, and feeling.
Beyond his feet, just a few feet away, was a sheer thousand meter drop. Behind him, again just a few feet away, was another thousand meter drop. To his right…the Icefield he had just climbed. And to his left, the last real part of the climb – because about ten meters to his left was the official summit. And between the statue of Saint Bernard and the official summit there was a short ridge-line, perhaps twenty feet in length.
Yet this ridge is narrow, and the way across the ridge is composed of ice and snow that has settled into a razor thin knife-edge of finely crenellated rock. There is a path in the snow and ice that crosses the ridge but it is barely a foot wide, and on either side of this ridge are the very same thousand meter drops that end on boulder-strewn fields of fractured glacial moraine. Experienced mountaineers approach this little ridge was extreme caution.
“Herr Professor, do you want to cross to the summit?”
Sherman stood and looked at the knife-edge and grinned. “You’re like a crazy person, right?” he said to Hans.
Who shrugged. “You paid me to bring you to the summit,” he said, pointing at the ridge. “So? What is it to be?”
“You know, I think this works for me right where I am.”
Peter, Beth, and Betty walked up to Sherman and then they looked at the knife-edge.
“Holy shit,” Beth muttered. “Is that for real?”
“That’s about as real as it gets, Beth,” Sherman said. “And I ain’t about to go out on that fucker. No way.”
Betty came up and put her arm around her daughter. “Well, we gonna do it?”
“Seems a shame to come all this way and not to at least try.”
“Hey,” Sherman snarked, “don’t blame me when you shit your pants…”
“Oh, Gene…!” Betty sighed. “Come on, give it a shot!”
“No thanks, Ma’am, I already gave at the office,” Sherman said, grinning. “But you go right ahead…knock yourself out!”
“You’ll take our picture, right?”
“You bet. I got at least two more rolls just ready to go.”
Hans set up their ropes while the girls took off their packs, then he held belay for Pete while he walked slowly across the ridge. When Pete rigged their lines he called “On Belay” to Beth as she walked up to the edge. “Just go slow, and do not look down. Focus a few feet ahead – where you want to place your feet, and remember, if you feel unsteady I’ve got you.”
Yet Beth scuttled across like a mountain goat, like this ridge was just another part of her world, and yet after she crossed she hugged Pete and grinned for the camera, and Sherman obligingly shot off a dozen or so images, even managing to catch a few of her trip across the ridge.
Then Betty inched across the ridge, literally almost one inch at a time, but she made it across and then beamed for Gene’s camera. They walked over to the actual summit – and it might have been a foot higher over there, but if it was Sherman could hardly see the difference…beyond a small cairn that had been placed there. He took several more shots until he reached the end of the roll, then he took off the base-plate and began reloading his camera, leaving only Hans with him now.
“You have plenty of film?”
“Yeah, two more rolls, 36 exposures.”
“Slide or print?”
“Slides. Kodachrome 64.”
“Is that a polarizer?”
“Yup. Pretty bright up here. Thought it might come in handy.”
Peter grabbed the line he’d used to cross and started back across, and Beth came out on the ridge right behind him – just as a colossal burst of wind came up the south face – picking both of them up then in effect knocking them off their feet, and by the time Hans could react both Peter and Beth had disappeared off the ridge, falling down the north face while Betty, still roped-up to Beth, was violently pulled from the summit and over the edge. By the time Sherman looked up from his camera she just falling out of his field of view, and he dashed for the edge, reaching out –
But Hans pulled him back, pushed him down to the snow. “Be still. Stay right here,” Hans said as he grabbed a rope and his ice axes. He made his way to the ridgeline and looked down into the abyss, and then he turned to Sherman and shook his head. “They are gone,” Hans said, his voice suddenly cracked and dry.
Hans came back to his backpack and pulled out a radio and called some sort of dispatcher, and he advised the people down in the village what had just happened.
Sherman was balled up on the snow, his eyes wide and unseeing, and he was completely unaware of what was going on around him. He did not hear the approaching helicopter, nor did he react when helping hands lifted him into the passenger cabin. Hans buckled him into the helicopter’s middle seat and still his eyes remained fixed on some unseen terror off in the mist, yet on the flight down to the village they heard another pilot say that they had found one body so far.
And Sherman came out of it when he heard that.
“We need to go and help find them,” he said to Hans.
“There is nothing we can do now, Gene. Let the experts handle this. This is what they do.”
“Experts,” Sherman mumbled. “There are experts in this?”
“Oh, yes.”
Sherman leaned back, closed his eyes. “Pete was a good friend, was he not?” he asked.
“Yes. The best.”
“I’m so sorry, Hans. So sorry.”
“This has been a bad result, Gene. A day we will never forget.”
“No. Never.” Sherman turned and looked at the village – so close now, buildings coming into sharp relief, then he saw the Air Zermatt base and curiously he realized there was no one down there waiting for him. ‘And now I am alone again,’ he sighed, unaware that he was crying for the first time in decades.
+++++
Hans walked with him to the hotel and Sherman went up to his room, made two telephone calls then got his belongings and the relevant paperwork from the safe. He looked around the room and shook his head, then he carried his things and the papers down to the lobby. “These are our evacuation and repatriation policies,” he said as he handed over copies of the documents. “The helicopter company will need these, and the hospital I assume.”
“We do not need to talk about these things now.”
“I’m leaving, Hans. Now. Right now. We retained a lawyer in Bern a couple of months ago. His card is in the envelope,” he said as he extended his right hand.
Hans took it. “Are you sure you are alright?”
“I am not alright, Hans. I will never be alright. Not ever again.”
“Herr Doctor Sherman,” the concierge asked as he walked up. “I have a communication for you, from your mother, I believe.”
He took the note and quickly read it, then he turned to the concierge. “Would you change my flight for me, please. I’m currently on the nine thirty flight in the morning, Swiss I think it is now. Geneva to Boston. I’ll need to change that to San Francisco. and could you book me a room in Geneva for tonight, please?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Thanks.”
“Trouble at home?”
“My father has passed.”
“Today?”
Sherman nodded and looked away for a moment, then he walked over to a huge picture window that looked out over the village, and the Matterhorn stood there in silent majesty, the setting sun bathing her in a golden glory all her own.
Not too long, not so short to be a pain in the ass, but we gain in altitude this time out, so be careful…
Music? Right…off we go!
Part IV
Refracted Light
“More light, more light! Open the window so that more light may come in!”
Goethe Last words spoken before his death
The sun was out, the air on the mountain remarkably warm. Snow and ice were melting off the Matterhorn’s north face, something that was happening with more frequency. Two climbers the day before had gained the summit without employing a guide, and both had fallen to their deaths just after they started their descent – and these were the fifteenth and sixteenth deaths so far this summer. Two weeks before Sherman arrived in Zermatt so many people reached the summit at almost the same time that guides had had to act like traffic cops, keeping several groups from making the summit so that those ready to start their descent could safely do so. Things were getting out of hand.
But, Gene said to Betty after they’d checked-in at the Zermatterhof, the same thing was happening on Everest, and even on the Savage Mountain – K2. A carnival-like atmosphere prevailed when the weather cooperated on these mountains, and huge groups made mad dashes for the summits of these dangerous mountains. So many people with almost no climbing background had summited Everest that the allure was beginning to fade, causing the real extreme climbers to look for even more extreme challenges far off the now well beaten path.
“It’s almost like the adrenaline junkies are taking over the world,” Beth Cohen said – as she took another bite from her kale salad at lunch.
“Some people need challenges like this to simply feel like they are still alive,” Betty said.
“Do you feel that way, Mom?”
“Sometimes I think I do,” Betty said, sighing as she looked up at the Matterhorn from her seat on the patio outside the hotel. “I kind of hate to admit it, but I deal with death so often, you know, on a day-in day-out basis, that in a way I almost feel – sometimes, I guess – like I’m just shuffling in slow motion towards my own shallow grave.”
Sherman looked up from his salad, not quite sure he’d heard her correctly. “What do you mean by that, Bett?”
“I’m not sure, Gene, not really, but I think it all goes back to what you’ve been saying all along, about facing new challenges and feeling alive. You know, I move from one case to the next and one day blends into the next and it feels like my life has turned into an endless parade of death.” Betty looked down at her plate of untouched food and shook her head. “Yet I remember seeing pictures of this crazy mountain when I was a kid and it’s funny but even then I wanted to know what it would feel like to stand up there with the wind in my face and look out over the world…”
When she looked up again there were tears running down her face, and Gene reached across and wiped them away. “You don’t have to do this, you know? Just because I…”
“You have nothing to do with it, Gene. I decided to come to Zermatt last Christmas because I wanted to see this mountain for myself. I wanted to hear her call, see if her call was true. I did, and it is. She’s calling me, Gene.”
“She?”
“I’ve been seeing her in my dreams, and before you look at me like that you need to hear me out.”
Beth looked at Gene then at her mother, but Gene simply nodded, in effect telling her to go ahead…
“The dream starts the same way every time. I’m falling through darkening clouds and then into a forest. It’s dark out. Dark trees, like trees in winter. Bare limbs. Cold air. Black leaves, moldy black leaves,” she said, yet she decided to leave out the skulls waiting for her under all that decay, “then I see an old lamp, like a streetlight really, glowing in the distance. I go there and she’s waiting for me.”
“She?” Gene asked. “As in…the mountain?”
“No. A woman. A woman in a deep red cape, and she leads me to a stairway. The stairway leads me, every time, to that mountain. And I climb into the mountain, Gene, I mean into the mountain. To a beating heart within the stone, Gene, and that stone, that’s what calls out to me…”
“What does it say, Mom?”
Betty looked at her daughter and smiled. “I think that’s between me and the mountain,” she sighed.
“I know this is gonna sound weird,” Beth said, “but I’ve had pretty much the same dream. Only in mine there are moldy black skulls under the leaves, like an ocean of skulls under there, waiting, and calling…”
Betty felt an icy grip fall on her chest, tightening with every new breath she made. “Skulls?” she said
“Uh-huh. Skulls.”
“Me too,” Betty added. “Gene? What about you? Have you had dreams like this?”
He shook his head. “No, but this is getting pretty goddamn weird. Mind if we talk about something else?”
“I thought Hans and Peter were meeting us for lunch today?” Beth said.
“They’re going to come by at four, and we’ll have tea with them here while we go over the training climb.”
“Is all this really necessary?” Betty asked.
“They do it with all their clients, and they seem to think it’s vital. First we’ll do the Breithorn, then we do some ice climbing on a glacier, then, if the weather cooperates, we head up to the lodge on the mountain.”
“So, two days of training before we make the climb?” Beth asked. “Don’t we need more time to get acclimated to the altitude?”
“If we have trouble up on the Breithorn then yes, we’ll spend a few more days walking around up there, around the Klein Matterhorn area, and work some more on our rope skills.”
“I’m ready,” Betty said, her voice a cold, matter-of-fact remnant – that Beth suspected came from within an uncertain dreamscape.
+++++
“You know,” Hans said to Betty at tea later that afternoon, “I was surprised to learn that you and Beth had decided to join the Professor. May I ask why?”
“It has been a dream of mine for some time,” Betty said.
“Well, I am most surprised at the change I see in your daughter. Beth? You almost look like a different person. How much weight have you lost?”
Beth cringed inside, still tired of being judged because of her weight, only now from the opposite vantage. “My weight didn’t change all that much,” Beth said. “I think because muscle weighs more than fat.”
“What did you do to accomplish this?” Peter asked.
“Running, weight training, climbing walls…you know, the usual. So, Peter, you will be guiding my mother and me?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And you’ve been doing this a while?” Beth asked.
“This will be my sixtieth ascent.”
“You will be in most capable hands,” Hans added. “Peter has been a member of the mountain rescue team for more than ten years, so he has lots of experience dealing with complex situations as well as simple guiding up the mountain.”
“Well, I was curious,” Beth said, “because I had thought the instructor who was with us last December was going to make the trip with us.”
Hans and Peter exchanged looks, but it was Hans who spoke now. “He was involved in an accident two weeks ago.”
“Is he alright?” Betty asked.
But when Hans simply shook his head, in effect opting to leave the rest unsaid, Betty blanched and voiced her most immediate concern: “And you didn’t think we’d need to know this?” she cried. “What else have you kept from us?”
“It was not his fault, this accident, and so there is nothing else you needed to concern yourself with. Dwelling on these events only upsets a climber needlessly, prevents the focus necessary for a successful climb, and this I must not allow. We stay focused on our climb, okay?!”
“What about tomorrow?” Sherman said, trying to break free from Betty’s sudden hysterics. “What do we need to bring?”
“You will need your crampons and ice axe, only you will need a walking length axe, as opposed to the shorter length you will use on your ascent.”
Betty was still visibly perturbed but allowed herself to move on. “So, we will need to bring two axes on the Matterhorn?”
“If possible, yes. The shorter length is preferred on the ascent, but it becomes useless on your descent. Some experienced climbers can make do with a long shaft, but then again they will usually bring two, because this is optimal. Gene? What will you do about crampons?”
“Ah, Hans, this is the really cool part. I had a couple of engineering students design a leg with multiple spring pre-loads, but, no, well, here’s the cool part. The foot detaches and I can, in effect, attach a dedicated crampon foot, one that is optimally suited to ascents on rock, and I have a third optimized for descents on rock or scree. While you guys are putting on crampons I’ll just need to change foots!”
“Really!” Han and Peter both said. “But this is amazing!”
“Yeah, part of my conditioning routine was to load up a pack with sixty pounds of rock and step up and down on an eighteen inch step. The spring pre-load on the ascent foot actually helps stabilize the motion, and the descent module has a shock absorber!”
“Cool!” Hans shouted. “When can I see these?”
“I’ll bring all of them with me tomorrow?”
“Excellent, but what about the weight of so much gear?”
“Oh, that’s the best part, Hans. They’re titanium and they weigh almost nothing! MIT patented the design and a company in California is going to put them into production, because it turns out they’re really good for all kinds of activities, even skiing.”
Hans and Peter both shook their heads, and both were grinning knowingly, because they understood how this could impact the disabled climbing community – which was a lot larger than most people knew.
“Did you design an axe, too?” Peter asked.
“We did, and I brought one with me, but I’m not sure how practical it is. I’ll bring it along tomorrow and you can look it over.”
“Excellent!” Hans said.
Betty and Beth had quietly watched this exchange, and though somewhat mollified Betty had crossed her arms sullenly over her chest. “Hans, perhaps you could come with Beth and I and help us get the best axes for the Matterhorn.”
“What about our crampons, Mom? You wanted to have him check out the ones we got in New York, didn’t you?”
“Bring what you have tomorrow morning,” Hans said. “We will have plenty of time to make changes after we return from the mountain.”
“I wanted to pick up a camera,” Sherman said, out of the blue. “Is there a good shop here in town?”
“Yes, there is a old, established shop next to the Mont Cervin. Tell Max I sent you and he will be accommodating.”
“Perfect. Betty? Beth? I’ll leave you to it and see you back at the hotel in a couple of hours. Hans? See you at tea time?”
“Yes, we will meet you in the lobby of the hotel at 1600. And I have made arrangements for breakfast in the hotel at 0500, and then we go up the mountain and begin our walk after the sun has been up for a while.”
“Sounds good to me,” Sherman said. “See you then.”
He turned and left Betty and Beth standing there with their mouths hanging open, but he was a little angry now and wanted to get away from Betty before she recognized his feelings. Even Beth had watched her mother’s outburst and turned away, and Sherman could see the humiliation on her face, and a part of him imagined this was just what her father had done from time to time, and suddenly he wasn’t too sure this was a good dynamic to have on a climb like this.
‘But why now?’ he asked as he walked down the main street to the huge old Mont Cervin Hotel. They’d seemed perfectly attuned to each other on their three practice climbs over spring break, and there’d been no friction at all. At least none that he’d seen.
“Hi!” he heard Beth say as she jogged up to him. “Mind of I tag along?”
“No, not at all. What’s your mother up to?”
“She said she was going shopping. Climbing pants, I think she said.”
“Climbing pants?” Sherman sighed. “Shit. I was gonna wear an old pair of Levis.”
“Mom’ll kill you if you do.”
“Really? Why?”
“Won’t look good in photographs.”
“Blue jeans? No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Well, pardon my french,” Sherman growled, “but what the fuck are you going to wear?”
“Levis. I mean…I will if you will,” she grinned.
“Well fuck-a-doodle-do…I guess we better go look for some climbing pants.”
“Add that to the list, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“So, what kind of camera are you looking for?”
“Simple and light, but super high quality.”
“Well,” she said as they walked up to the camera store, “this place ought to have what you need.”
Sherman looked at the red Leica sign and sighed. ‘Well, you can’t take it with you, so I might as well spend it now.’
+++++
“I hope you slept well,” Hans said to Betty as he walked into the lobby early the next morning. “Any signs of altitude sickness?”
“No, no, we slept well,” Betty said cheerfully, “all of us.”
“Excellent! Now, I have taken the liberty of ordering breakfast ahead, so let us be seated and go over the next two days.”
They walked into the dining room and Beth noticed their usual table was ready for them, their places already set with plates of poached eggs and smoked salmon, as well as a huge salad of carrots, beets, and…pineapple?
“These are all optimal foods for the day ahead, so load up now as we will only have a small midday meal, and our supper at the hut this evening will be very spartan indeed.” Hans looked at the spread he’d ordered, satisfied that all was as it should be. “And before I forget, no caffeine from now until after we return from the Matterhorn. If you need a hot beverage we will drink herbal teas only!”
“I stopped a month ago,” Betty said. “I tried to get these two off of the stuff…” she added.
“But I had finals, Mom.”
“And I had to grade finals, Mom,” Sherman added, grinning.
Han shrugged. “So, this morning we ride up to the Klein Matterhorn. From there we will rope up, with Peter, Betty, and Beth leading the way, while Professor Sherman and I follow. We will be making what is called the Breithorn Traverse, from west to east, and we will summit all three peaks and then retire to the Breithorn hut, which is located under the eastern summit. Tomorrow we will return to the central peak and make a lengthy trek across the rock face to an ice climb, then we will return by gondola, to the village, and hopefully in time for supper. We will rest at least two days and closely examine the weather forecast before we decide on making an ascent of Matterhorn, but I must warn you. Rain down here in the valley often means heavy snow up on the mountain, and by heavy I mean that a meter or more is not at all unusual, even in July. After such an event it usually takes at least four days of sunshine until the route is clear enough to make an attempt.”
“Oh, swell,” Betty said.
“Yes,” Hans sighed, “as you say, swell. You see, there is a big storm coming up from Genoa, and a cold front from the north is possible. If that happens this will be the end of the season. No climbing until next summer.”
Sherman looked up. “Why not come back tomorrow and make our attempt the next day?”
“Even if everyone does well on the rocks today and tomorrow, we will have equipment issues and even health issues to deal with, and believe me, you will want all the rest possible before we make our climb.”
“Yeah, I know. And me most of all,” Sherman added.
“The mountain is not going anywhere,” Peter said. “Many an effort has come undone because of the weather. Flexibility is key to not only success, Herr Professor, as even your survival is at stake, as well.”
“What an optimist!” Betty sighed.
“Mom…take it easy, okay?”
“Well,” Han concluded, “let’s finish eating and get our gear. The tram opens in twenty minutes and we want to get to the top as soon as possible.”
+++++
“Shit! It’s almost impossible to tell how far away things are up here!” Betty growled. “I’ve got no depth perception at all!”
“Keep probing with your axe as you walk,” Peter advised. “If you stumble upon a crevasse you will only fall as far as the amount of rope between us.”
Gene Sherman, standing ten meters behind Betty’s group, had been listening to her nonstop griping for at least a half hour, as almost as soon as she exited the tram her complaining started. Even Beth had moved off, asking Peter to take-up the position between Beth and her mother, and now even Sherman was beginning to feel a little embarrassed for Betty. Peter, on the other hand, appeared to have the patience of a saint and he was handling her outbursts perfectly. Instructing, calming her, helping with new ideas, keeping her focused on the plan, not allowing her rants to gather momentum…
As the sun rose and cleared the range to the east, right on cue the Breithorn’s long shadows appeared – shadows like dark claws spanning the vast white plain they were crossing to reach the first summit.
But even this innocuous looking plain was littered with hidden dangers. Crevasses barely covered with loose snow were everywhere, their presence betrayed by only the slightest depressions in the otherwise flat white snow. One step into a crevasse meant a sudden fall, with sudden injury or even death being averted only by being roped-up to the people behind you.
So one of the first drills they practiced was how to use their ice axe to stop a sliding fall. Left hand on the bottom of the axe, right covering the crossing of the T, and they practiced falling on moderate slopes then digging the long, sharp part of the T into the snow – while keeping the bottom anchored to their hips. If, as Hans intimated, one of them fell into a crevasse it would be up to the others roped onto that chain to get down and anchored to the snow – in order to keep everyone from disappearing into the maw.
The first summit appeared, from some distance, to be little more than a brooding shoulder of snow, but as they closed on this first summit the trail narrowed until they were making their way up along a knife edge, with a thousand meter sheer drop to their left, and a long, sloping fall to the right. And the further the two groups progressed the narrower the trail became – and the more vocal Betty Cohen’s complaints grew. First her feet hurt, then her hands were too cold. She was tired of leading. Her eyes were watering. Her gripes became a constant refrain, the music they marched too, and as the morning wore on Gene Sherman began to have his doubts. His first doubts, as it happened, about her.
He’d run into Pretenders everywhere, of course. When he learned to ski, when he and his father first started climbing and SCUBA diving. They were there, always there. When they barely knew how to ski they showed up with ‘pro’ racing skis. When he went to star parties with his simple four inch refractor the Pretenders came with enough equipment to stock a professional observatory. They were everywhere, yet they were nowhere. They did little but get in the way – but, by golly, they were good for business, and yet more and more it seemed like the Pretenders were extending their reach into matters that they simply had no business getting into. Like going into politics or becoming celebrities, and now it seemed that their poisoned reach was beginning to pollute everything they touched.
And that morning Sherman watched Betty Cohen as she griped her way up the Breithorn and he wondered if she too was a Pretender. By mid-morning he was sure that she was…until they’d made their way across to the rock-faces of the central peak…and all of a sudden, when the going became incredibly tough and then outright dangerous, Betty seemed to fall into an unsuspected groove. She climbed with the dexterity of an animal raised on sheer mountain faces and her complaints simply fell away as the danger increased – and his eyes met Hans’ at one point and the guide merely shrugged, as if to say “Hey, you never know…”
The key to deciphering this performance, he decided, must lay with Beth…so he started to watch as she reacted to her mother’s rants. Yet if anything Beth had become a master of concealment, and in a way Sherman realized she’d probably learned to conceal her emotions simply in order to survive around two toxic parents. When he caught fleeting glimpses of the expression on her face he realized he might as well have been looking at rock.
Yet he soon realized that Beth was not at home on the sheer rock face. She was struggling with fear, and the realization hit him hard. She was, he thought, the last person he’d ever considered being a Pretender – so why was she pretending now?
He came up right behind her at one point and stood on the face by her side.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked.
“I’m okay,” she answered, “but I sure wasn’t expecting the gut punch I feel up here.”
“What? The sheer face? The drop-off?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s one thing to look at drops like this in a book or on TV, but when there’s nothing under your feet but a thousand feet of air…”
“Butterflies in the stomach, right?”
“Big time.”
“Do you feel anything, well, like vertigo?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like there’s an invisible hand pulling you, pulling you down, something you can’t control.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head and not avoiding eye contact, “nothing like that. It’s more like I really don’t like looking down right now,” she said, laughing a little.
“Want to stop? Ready to go home?”
She turned and faced him. “You gotta be kidding, right? Man, I’ve never had as much fun in my life, and we just got to the good part!”
“Okay. I had to ask. But if you do, don’t let me be the last to find out, okay?”
“Ain’t gonna happen, Gene.”
+++++
Sherman was sitting on a boulder near the mountain hut’s stone patio, his good knee pulled up close to his chest, maintaining his balance on the rock with an outstretched left hand. The sun was still about a fist above the horizon, and the last of the day’s warmth felt good on his face – even if Hans’ observations about the day’s lack of progress had unsettled him. Now he was nursing a precious bottle of Evian, and at this altitude he thought he could feel his cells soaking up the water. After he finished the bottle he put it down then rubbed the bridge of his nose, even his eyes – just a little – because they were still tearing up in the dry air.
“I am surprised to see you out here, Professor,” Peter said as he walked up, sitting on another boulder just a few feet away. “I had thought you would go right to bed after our meal.”
“Sunset looked too pretty to pass up,” Sherman said, holding up his Leica.
“Ah. The golden light. One never knows when it will come…”
“I think about ten minutes more and it will put on a good show. The clouds look about right.”
“So tell me, what did you think of our day on the rocks?”
Sherman shrugged. “You saw the same thing I did.”
“Indeed. They are both technically competent, but I worry about the emotions we observed. I am curious, but why do you think Beth is here? To compete with her mother?”
“Compete? For what?”
“For you, Herr professor. For your attention, and your affections.”
Sherman shook his head. “That’s never been a question, Peter.”
“Ah, well, then perhaps my observation lacks clarity.”
“Did you grow up in the village too?”
“Too? Oh, you mean Hans. In a way. I grew up in a smaller village down the valley. I went to seminary, became a priest and returned to our parish.”
“You? A priest? Now that I didn’t see coming…”
“Thank you. I will take that as a compliment.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you see I have never experienced God in a church, or inside a cathedral, yet every time I climb a difficult mountain He and I usually have extended conversations.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t hypoxia?”
“Reasonably so, yes, but of course, one never really truly knows, right?”
“So,” Sherman remarked – pointedly, “you were a priest – with doubts. That sounds somewhat reasonable to me.”
“Perhaps so, yet my superiors failed to understand such a position.”
“Only true believers need apply?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Well, understandable when you consider the Church is just another money making enterprise.”
Peter shrugged. “You have not seen the good the Church can accomplish, Professor…”
“And yet, here you are.”
“Yes, here I am. May I tell you a story, a kind of parable, really?”
Sherman held up his camera and metered the horizon. “Sure, fire away.”
“Two thieves, perhaps they were bank robbers, got away after a – oh, what is the word…?”
“A heist?”
“Yes, just so. Well, the two had been friends since childhood, best friends, yet one of them was apprehended and eventually he was taken to prison, and for a very long time. The other thief was actually an decent enough fellow, and he had hidden the money well, and had even promised to never spend any of the money they had stolen.”
“Ah, so we’re talking real fiction here.”
Peter chuckled. “Perhaps. Anyway, after forty years the friend was released from prison and he returned to his village and of course he went to his friend’s house and he wanted to know about the money. ‘I have not spend a single franc, my friend,’ the other man said to his friend, to which he replied ‘That is good.’”
“And, I assume, this story has a point?” Sherman asked, framing a shot through the Leica’s viewfinder.
“Indeed. So the friend took the released prisoner to see the money, and all was as the man said it was. The money was all there, undisturbed, so the released prisoner asked his friend how he had managed to avoid the temptation of so much easy money so close at hand, and the friend replied that only his faith in God had prevented him from taking all the money and running away. ‘Faith in God?” the other friend replied. ‘How is this so?’ Well, the other friend replied, because you were in prison and it must have felt as though God had forsaken you, but then one day God came to me and told me that if I kept the money safe I would restore your faith in Him, and that after that happened we could take the money and go live the life we had always dreamed of living.”
“Indeed,” Sherman said, as he composed an image and tripped the shutter.
“Yes. Indeed. But then the man just released from prison walked over and stabbed his friend, very nearly killing the man, but it turned out the police had followed both men and they swooped down and arrested the man just released from prison, and they took the other man to the hospital.”
“There, you see,” Sherman sighed as he advanced the frame and took another picture, “justice after all.”
“Truly? I think not, for once the man was well enough he too was sent to prison, only now all the money was gone, taken by the police and returned to the rightful owners. But now the two men were together again, sharing a cell in the very same prison, and the man who stabbed his friend asked his friend one day, ‘Now, what do you think of your God?’ to which the other man replied, ‘God? What has this to do with God?’ ‘So, you haven’t lost your faith?’ the first friend asked. ‘I haven’t lost a thing,’ the other man replied– just before he turned and stabbed his friend in the back, killing him. ‘You stole my life, just as you stole the life of my friend,’ the murderer said to his dying friend, ‘and now I will spend the rest of my life in this living hell.’ And his dying friend spoke his last words just then, saying to his friend: ‘And you will spend those days alone,’ the friend said as he died. And after his friend was taken away he sat in his cell and he smiled, because he was not alone. He never had been, and he never would be.”
“So, he was with God all along? Is that the point of your story?”
“Perhaps that is the point of religion, Herr Professor.”
Sherman shook his head. “It all sounds rather pointless to me, Peter.”
“And perhaps that is why I am no longer a priest, Professor. You have found the perfect picture here on the side of this mountain. I hope you are able to capture the essence of the moment.”
And spread out before the two men was an orange sky fading to deepest purple overhead, the summer stars overhead just coming out to play, and yet deep within an ancient globular cluster a faint pulsing light arrived, after having crossed the gulf of space and time for thousands upon thousands of years, and astronomers around the world watched, fascinated, knowing that only one astronomer alive might truly understand what was happening.
“Do you see that?” Peter asked, pointing up into the night sky – as the pulsing light had suddenly caught his eye. “What on earth could that be?”
Sherman followed the man’s hand to his old friend, yet when he saw the pulsing light he was at a loss for words. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he whispered.
“God seldom does, Professor,” the man who talked to God on mountaintops said – as he saw two men in a prison cell face off again and again.
A fairly long romp here, so consider yourself warned. Coffee on the boil?
Music? Of course:
Part III
Ambient Light
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore RoethkeIn A Dark Time
October 2001 Palo Alto, California
Eugene Sherman was sitting in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room outside of the Radiology North imaging suite at Stanford University Medical Center. He was slumped over in an uncomfortable hard plastic chair with his face in his hands, and he hadn’t slept in 30 hours. He’d driven his mother home to get some rest and had returned just in time to learn that his father had possibly thrown another clot and that he’d been rushed to imaging for a possible diagnosis. He’d been sitting in the same prickly chair for almost an hour when his dad’s neurologist came out with some news…
“I’m sorry, but he’s definitely had another CVA,” the neurologist said in answer to the question he found waiting in Sherman’s eyes. “I don’t think, well, hopefully this one wasn’t as bad as the other two, but we’ll know more later this afternoon.”
“So, he’s going back to the ICU?”
The neurologist nodded. “Yup.”
“Did you make the initial Alzheimer’s diagnosis?”
Again the neurologist nodded. “I did, yes. We’re still in the early stages, so with any luck at all he will have a few, well, he may still get to make a few more good memories before everything slips away.”
Sherman shook his head and then looked away, out a nearby window. “I never saw this coming, Doc. I never saw my old man going out this way…”
“Would you like to talk to someone about it? Maybe an end of life counselor?”
Sherman shook his head again, still looking out the window. “No, I’m not ready to go there just yet.”
“Understand. I’ll see you up in ICU in an hour or so. They should be moving him back up in just a few minutes, and I’ll have a better idea of what comes next by then.”
“Okay. See you there,” Sherman said, then he walked over to the window and looked out over the campus and at all the old oaks leaning as a hot, dry wind came in off the bay – before he saw the old football stadium in the distance. Gauzy memories of Saturdays with his father came rushing in and he felt light-headed for a moment, so he made his way over to the hard plastic chair and sat, face in hand once again as honey colored memories of throwing the football with his old man found their way back to his hands. Then memories of his last Army Navy game his senior year at Annapolis, after he’d driven the Midshipmen down the field for a desperate last minute score to win the game, and his dad had been there on the sideline, cheering him on – just like he always had. When he graduated at Pensacola and got his wings, his dad was there once again, and when he came home from Germany – minus one leg – his father had stayed by his side all the while…getting answers and finding solutions to each new problem that arose.
Always there. He’d always been there for me, hadn’t he?
But…what now? What can I do for him now?
What can I do for mom?
He felt more than saw a girl walk up and stop in front of him. “Are you Mr. Sherman?” the candy-striper said.
He looked up and tried to smile. “Yes, that’s right.”
“I have a message for you,” the girl said as she handed him a note scrawled out on a post-it note.
“Thanks,” he said – but the girl was already walking away so he looked down and read the note – from Betty Cohen: “Please call ASAP,” he read, noting the New York number.
“Well, isn’t this just a kick in the pants?” he sighed, and as there was a phone in the waiting room he walked over and dialed the number, entering his own phone number when prompted for payment information.
“Hello?” Sherman heard Betty Cohen say.
“Hi there. Gene Sherman here. I just got your message.”
“Oh, Gene! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”
“No problem. What’s up?”
“Listen, I’m on my way to Kennedy now, but I just wanted to let you know I’m going to be in San Franciscothrough the weekend, and I wanted to know if you think you might have time to get together for dinner sometime?”
He shrugged, even if the gesture was only to himself, because just then he saw his father in his mind’s eye. “Things are kind of fluid here right now, Betty. Do you have my number at the house?” She read off what she had and he confirmed that was the best number to reach him. “When were you thinking of meeting up?” he added.
“Oh, I thought I’d leave that up to you,” she replied.
“Okay. Well, where are you staying?”
“I’m downtown, at the Stanford Court. I’m slated to speak at a conference on Friday morning, so I’m kind of free until then, and after, for that matter.”
“When does your flight get in?”
He heard her fumbling through papers, then: “Scheduled arrival is eight-ten this evening, on American.”
“Okay…well, how ‘bout I pick you up at the baggage claim and I’ll take you into the city. We can grab a bite and talk over things then?”
“You know, I hate to put you out like that…”
“You’re not. Matter of fact, I kind of need to get out of the house right about now, if you know what I mean.”
“How’s your dad?”
“Getting another MRI right now; he threw another clot.”
“I’m sorry, Gene. I know this is a tough patch, so if…”
“Betty, I friendly face would be great right now, so don’t…”
“You’re sure?”
“I am. I’ll see you at the airport. Now – go, catch your airplane!”
She rang off and then he smiled – though as he thought about the incongruity of her timing he shook his head and chuckled a little. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered, rubbing the top of his left thigh to get the circulation going again, before he made his way back to the ICU.
+++++
Betty Cohen’s flight was ten minutes late, which worked out well enough as traffic had been heavier than expected, but even so he made it to the baggage claim before she arrived – and he was more than a little surprised – once again – by how overtly elegant she appeared as she walked up to him. Most of the men gathered around the carousel cast little covert, sidelong glances her way, their eyes lingering on her legs a little longer than what might be considered polite, and the first thing that popped into his mind was that Markus Cohen was a pure-bred idiot.
“How’s the leg?” she asked as she walked up and kissed him on the cheek.
“A little stiff today. I’ve been walking on it more than I have in a while.”
“Maybe we can get some exercise,” she said, grinning. “You know, maybe work out the kinks?”
He cleared his throat as he met her grin: “Well, I have to say I’m up for anything.”
“Good,” she said as she turned to the carousel, suddenly darting over to the slowly spinning ramp and grabbing a medium sized tan leather suitcase.
“Can I get that for you?”
“Nope. You just work that cane,” she said, her accent now like something out of the Deep South. “I can handle this thing just fine.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. You originally from Georgia, or South Carolina?”
“Oh? What gave me away?”
“Seriously?” he chuckled.
“Savannah,” she answered, though she was laying it on thick now. “Pure low country, I think they call it. Shrimp and grits for breakfast, don’t you know.”
“Never been,” Sherman said, “but I hear the food’s decent.”
Decent? Decent? Those are fightin’ words, Sherman!” she said, laughing gayly.
“Well, I’d think with a name like Sherman…”
“Ooh, that’s right. Say, you ain’t related, are you?”
“He was my great, great grandfather.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, yes, I am…but it was worth it to see the look on your face.”
She slapped his arm playfully, then she fell in beside him as he began walking for the day lot, and they made idle chit-chat all the way out to his mother’s car.
“Your mother drives a Porsche?” Betty exclaimed when she saw the old dark green ’78 911 Targa.
“Yup. She’s the original ‘Little Old Lady from Pasadena,’ if you get my drift.”
“Pardon my asking, but how do you manage?”
“Oh, a bit of luck, really. Porsche had the Sportomatic transmission back then, a forerunner of the current Tiptronic version, and Mom just had to have it. It’s kind of complicated, but once you get used to modulating the throttle it’s a decent system.”
“So…no clutch?”
“That’s right, and that means it was just made for people modified just like me!”
“Oh, Gene, I didn’t mean to make fun…”
“You didn’t, Betty. I did. Maybe that’s just the way I deal with it these days, but let’s not tip-toe around my leg, okay? Just say what you’re thinking, because I can handle it.”
“Got it.”
“So, heard from your girl?” he asked as he opened the front boot.
“You do know she has a little crush on you, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I kind of figured something like that was going on, maybe a kind of ‘daddy-transference’ thing…in a Freudian manner of speaking.”
“Ooh, I’m impressed. You speak Freud?”
“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?” he sighed.
“Not really. In fact, you’d be surprised how far he’s fallen out of favor.”
“Doesn’t mean he was wrong, Betty.”
“You’re probably right. Say, can we pop the top, ride into the city with the top off?”
He reached in and popped the levers, then collapsed the top and put the top into it’s bag and then into the boot. “Ready when you are,” he said as he opened her door for her.
“I’ll let you do this just once, okay?” she said.
“Yes Ma’am. Anything you say Ma’am.”
Again she slapped his arm, again playfully, but then she turned and faced him and kissed him full on the lips, and she wasn’t being particularly shy about the way she kissed him, either.
And so, when they came up for air a few minutes later, Gene Sherman kind of settled back against the car and grinned. “Wow. Where’d that come from?” he asked as he looked into her eyes.
“I didn’t want all our baggage hanging around waiting for us, Gene. I wanted to get this out there in the open so we can see if there’s something there…”
“Well Hell, darlin’…I felt that one in my toes, so if that means something…”
“You think we could head on over to the hotel right now? I kind of feel something going on down there, too.”
“Let’s do that,” he said as he helped her into the low-slung seat, then, ignoring an uncertain stiffness in his groin, he went around and hopped behind the wheel. “So,” he continued, “what did Beth have to say?”
“Well, she did say she thought that you and I would make a cute couple…”
“Cute, huh? Well, I’ve heard worse…”
“I can’t tell you how much you impressed her at dinner last weekend. Her father knocked her for a loop, she was really off balance, but there you were. You know what to say, what to do, and instead of a horrible night she said it turned out to be almost hopeful.”
“Hopeful?” he said. “Now that I did not expect.”
“You have no idea how you make people feel, Gene. I mean, not really.”
He accelerated onto the 101, heading north into the city, and with the top off the buffeting grew too loud for casual conversation, but he was conscious that Betty was looking at him as he drove, and at one point she leaned over and slipped her hand around his arm…and he felt that same electric messaging between them.
A half hour later he pulled up to the valet stand in front of the hotel and, as she went up to the lobby, he put the top back on and instructed the attendant on the intricacies of the transmission before he joined her in the reception. A few minutes later they were in her room, and he was suddenly so nervous, so unsure of his appearance and his self, that he began pulling away from her.
Yet she seemed to have anticipated this reaction and took over from there. She guided him to the precipice and then let him decide whether he wanted to make the leap with her.
It was, he decided, not so far to fall.
+++++
“Hi, Mom. How is he?”
“We had a good night. He managed to say a couple of words, so maybe there’s hope.”
“Oh, that’s so good to hear. How are you this morning?”
“Okay. Are you home now?”
“No, still up in the city.”
“Well, when you come I’ll just go home and get cleaned up a little then come on back. Maybe he’ll recognize you this morning.”
“Maybe so. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Okay. Just come on up when you get here.”
He rang off and turned to Betty. “You sure you want to come down?”
“Yes, Id like to meet your mother, and I’d like to have a picture of your father in my mind, so, if you don’t mind?”
“No, not at all. You ready?”
When they were back in the Porsche he turned to her once and looked at her, still not sure how to think about last night. Was she on the rebound? Had that bastard really been having one affair after another for the past ten or so years, and had she truly been – essentially – leading a celibate life…? If all that was so…perhaps that explained the explosion of sexual energy he’d experienced. Yet the truth of the matter was simple enough: he’d never experienced anything like last night ever before, and he suddenly felt more unsure of himself than ever before. Sex had never been all that important to him – yet it obviously was to her. She’d been simply insatiable and had only grown more so as the night wore on, yet now, sitting beside him, she was acting in the most demure way imaginable, almost pensive and bordering on the contrite – like last night had been a pleasurable thing, but a guilty pleasure nevertheless.
“So, did you call Beth?” he asked.
“I did. She sends you her love.”
“Her love?”
“Hey…her words, not mine,” she said, grinning sheepishly.
“She is a sweetheart.”
“She always has been, but that’s been her achilles heel, too. Her father was merciless, always taking advantage of her eagerness to please. Kind of like Charlie Brown and Lucy holding that football.”
“Really. I’d imagine she’s got trust issues after going through all that…?”
“You have no idea.”
“Geez, I’m sorry she had to grow up with someone like that.”
“I feel like a lot of it was my fault, but like most physicians I was never around to mitigate.”
“I know. My mom was the same. Dedicated, in love with what she chosen to do with her life.”
“Did you feel that way? Like she loved her work more than you or your father?”
“No, not really. I think I found her passion more inspiring than anything else, and I know my dad certainly did. It’s a calling, Betty. I understand that, and what’s more, I respect the nature of the passion, too.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, I think so. When you get out there on the floor time just disappears. You can help people, they need you, and you really make a difference. Maybe some people can’t see that, maybe they even get jealous, but that doesn’t take away from the nature of the calling…what you’ve chosen as your life’s work.”
“Mark hated me for it.”
“And yet he married you. Why do you think that happened? Was it love?”
“Mark has never loved anybody, or anything for that matter, other than money.”
“And did you know that going in?”
She looked away. “I saw it in him, but I thought I could…”
“What? Change him?”
She nodded her head. “Yeah.”
“We can’t change what people are, Betty. I’m not really sure such elemental change is even possible. You set yourself up for infinite struggle if you do that, as a spouse, I mean. Yet sometimes we fall in love, or think we do, when all we’re really feeling is a little less lonely.”
“Is that what you’re feeling right now? A little less lonely?”
“Me? Hell, Betty, I feel like a teenager right now. I feel like I’m in love for the very first time.”
She took his hand in hers as she nodded and smiled. “Me, too,” she cried. “And the sun is out and shining on my face and I’m in love with life for the first time in my life, too! Oh, God, I feel like a slave who’s just been cut loose and set free! Oh, Gene, you’ve made me feel this way and I love it. I love you, and I love the way I feel right now.”
“Gee,” he added – a little sheepishly, “why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
“Say, Beth reminded me. She had an idea and I want you to hear me out, think it over before you answer. Okay?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“We planned a trip for Christmas vacation this year, the three of us, to go skiing in Switzerland. Beth still wants to go, too, only she wanted me to ask and see if you might like to come with us?”
“What? Skiing…in Switzerland? Are you serious?”
“You know how to ski, don’t you?”
“I did, yes, but that was…”
“And Beth has already checked. There are ski schools there set up to teach people with all kinds of challenges – even blind people, for heaven’s sake – and besides, we booked two rooms so you would have your own space and everything…”
He shook his head while he grinned, then he took a deep breath and stepped right up to the edge. “Well, who am I to argue with the two most headstrong women I know? So sure, I’ll go. Let’s do it!”
“You will!? Really?”
He squeezed her hand and marveled at the return pressure, and the way that made his heart sing. “You know, the way I’m feeling right now, Betty, I’d do just about anything to see you smile like that…”
+++++
Looking out the 757s window on final to Logan, dark splotches of Massachusetts appearing between variegated openings in the low hanging layer of slate blues clouds just below – then this changing world defined by pulsing blue-white strobes inside the softness. Five hours since he’d left her at the airport in San Francisco, five hours since he’d cried when the reality of leaving her slammed home. What an impossible week. What a soft cascade of emotion.
Finally breaking through to his mother, finally talking to her about all the things they’d never talked about before. His father in and out, little lucid flashes of recognition between variegated splotches of the dark landscape that waited for him just ahead, in a darkness all his own. And when Gene wasn’t lost inside all those mesmerizing cloudscapes, he was finding his way through the lofty softness of Betty Cohen’s entrancing eyes, more often than not his lips grazing the infinite softness of her enveloping smile.
Then lining up for 4-Right, flaring just after clearing the ship channel and then the soft runout after touchdown, and he suddenly realized just how much he missed flying…because this whole Swiss vacation had snapped him out of the silken reveries of all his silent denials. ‘Goddamn! If I can ski…what else can I do? Could I pass the physical, get my license and start flying again? And if I can do that, what would keep me from…”
All these renewed possibilities were suddenly intoxicating in the extreme, and in a very real sense he had Beth Cohen to thank for this expansive new view. As the jet turned off the runway he looked at the terminal building and he was struck by the thought – about the how and the why of this girl asking him out to dinner with her parents. Life turned on a dime, didn’t it?
“You never know when,” he muttered, just under his breath – as the airliner pulled up to the gate and stopped. Doors opened, his wheelchair produced, a RedCap called. After everyone else deplaned he was pushed up the Jetway and down to the baggage claim area, and yes, there she was – and with the same blissfully aware eyes her mother had bestowed on him. Even the same smile graced her face.
And he was surprised how glad he was to see those echoes.
So as she walked up he stood and held out his arms. She fell into his embrace, buried her face in his chest and wrapped her arms around him, and perhaps everyone in the area – if anyone even bothered to notice such things – might have thought this just another heartfelt reunion between father and daughter, because that’s exactly what this looked to be.
And in truth, maybe in their innocence that’s exactly what had sprung up between these two, yet there were other things floating in the air between them, tiny little things in new orbits around halos rarely seen and never heard, but felt most deeply in the heart.
+++++
Two months later, Sherman and Beth Cohen checked their bags at the Swissair counter in Logan’s Terminal 5, then they went upstairs to wait for the boarding call. Sherman had grown increasingly worried about the choice to fly Swissair as they’d declared some sort of bankruptcy earlier, in October, but then again almost every carrier was struggling in the wake of events on September 11th.He walked up to the huge expanse of glass that looked out over the busy ramp and saw that their jet, a wide body MD-11, was already at the gate, then he recalled this was the same aircraft type that Swissair had lost back in ’98 due to an unconfined electrical system fire…
“You okay?” Beth asked. “You look kind of worried…?”
“Oh, not really worried, but I’ve found that more and more often I feel edgy when I fly commercially, like I’m not the one flying and I can’t see what’s happening on the flight deck and that just bugs the shit out of me.”
“Is that called being a control freak?”
“Probably,” he said, grinning madly from ear to ear.
“Maybe you need something to drink…like a stiff belt of bourbon or something…?”
He looked at his wrist and shook his head. “Nah…I want to keep close to the gate.”
She nodded. “How’s your leg feel?”
“You know, not too bad. Those exercises have really helped. So did the new padding.”
“Good. Do you remember what time Mom’s flight left?”
“Twenty minutes ago…that is, if they left on time. I’m going to go pick up a couple of magazines or something. Want anything?” he asked.
“Maybe a bottle of water?”
He nodded and started to walk off, but the announcement for pre-boarding their flight came over the PA and he stopped and turned to Beth, shrugging as she came up and took his arm in hers.
“Goodness, but you are as antsy as a cat on a hot tin roof!” she sighed.
“I guess its been a while since I took an honest-to-Pete vacation…”
“Maybe you should take more, you know?”
The gate agents checked their boarding passes and waved them on, and Sherman held on to Beth with one arm while they walked out the Jetway, and they made their way to seats 4A&B and he stood aside in the aisle and waited for her to get her small carry-on stowed. “You want the window or the aisle?” he asked.
“I took a water pill,” she whispered. “You take the window…not that it matters much.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It’ll be dark all the way, so what’s to see?”
Sherman grinned. “Stars, for one thing, but there’s a good chance we’ll have a strong aurora tonight, and we’re on the left side of the aircraft so we might catch a sight of it.”
“Don’t wake me, okay?”
He chuckled at her lack of enthusiasm. “Got it,” he said as he got himself buckled into his seat.
“Did you finish grading our exams?”
“I did.”
“So? I’ve been dying to ask. Are you going to keep me in suspense until we get back?”
“Yup.”
She shook her head and groaned. “No preferential treatment, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Good for you, Professor Sherman,” she said – with a straight face.
Yet about all he could do was shrug – though maybe he grinned just a little. “How did that ethics paper come out?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I felt kind of lost trying to defend my final position, like I was grasping at straws, ya know?”
He nodded. “Ethical dilemmas are often like that. No clear cut solution, so what matters most is the justification you construct to support your decision. But hey, life is kind of like that too, I guess.”
“So you think ethics is good preparation for life?”
“Hardly. It might be a good framework to employ when you’re confronted with an unusually complex ethical dilemma, but common sense and a decent moral compass are really all you need to get by in life. Spending hours to work out the moral underpinnings of a questionable situation is a luxury most people just don’t have.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
“Oh really? Why’s that?”
“Well, you strike me as very ethical…”
“Common sense, remember? And a strong moral compass?”
“So, you’re saying, in effect, that some people are born better able to handle difficult moral problems?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Sure you did. Because it seems to me that lots of people lack both those things and who knows, maybe they’re born that way. You know about Piaget and Kohlberg?”
“Of course.”
“So, people aren’t born with those things, they develop over time, and that implies that a person’s environment…”
“Beth?”
“Yes?”
“Are you sure you really want to talk about this for the next ten hours?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, crap! I’m sorry…I’ve been arguing about all this stuff for the past two weeks and…”
“And it’s hard to shift gears. Yeah, I get that, but it’s time to decompress now. Just shake your hands and muss up your hair, do whatever it takes to leave school behind for the next two weeks…”
“But I’m going to stress about my grade the whole time, so how do you expect me to…”
He leaned over and whispered in her ear, and she smiled.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yup,” he said as a flight attendant walked up with hot towels and champagne. “And this is exactly what you need to cut the cord, Beth.”
“A hot towel?”
“Yup.”
+++++
They were early and met Betty when she deplaned in Geneva, and they grabbed a shuttle to the main train station in the city center. They caught an express that rounded the north shore of Lake Geneva on its way to Lausanne and Montreux. The train turned south and east there and proceeded up the narrow Rhone Valley to Visp, where they transferred to the much smaller line that led directly to Zermatt, and Sherman seemed to spend the entire trip from Geneva on with his face turned to watch the passing landscape…
“My, my, my,” Betty Cohen said after about a half hour of this, “you sure are quiet this morning. Did you get up on there wrong side of the bed or something?”
He turned and looked at Betty, then at Beth. “No sleep last night,” he said as he yawned. “Someone decided she really wanted to stay up and talk.”
“I slept like the dead,” Betty said, grinning guiltily. “At least I did after they served dinner.”
“Did they roll a cart down the aisle?” Beth asked.
“Yes,” Betty replied, “and it was loaded with roast beef and Beef Wellington, carved right there in the aisle.”
“We had creamed spinach,” Beth added, “and Yorkshire pudding! It was almost surreal!”
“Same on our flight,” Betty sighed. “Then it was lights out for yours truly…”
“Not on our airplane,” Sherman growled. “We talked…ethics…all the way to Ireland, then we switched over to what it must be like near the center of a super massive globular cluster.”
“Oh?” Betty said, casting a quizzically sidelong glance Beth’s way while she wondered what was going on. “Now that must have been…interesting.”
“Interesting?” Sherman said as he turned back to the passing landscape. “You should play more chess.”
Betty caught the sinking inflection in Gene’s voice and immediately understood. After Betty had told Beth that she and Gene would share a room once they arrived in Zermatt, her daughter’s whole demeanor about the trip had changed. Beth had, in fact, gone from open and excited to walled off and almost combative, and things had only grown worse in the weeks since. And now that she knew Gene understood the state of play she decided it was time to act.
But just then Gene turned to Beth and patted her on the knee. “You know, I’m so tired I think I’ll be a real drag on you two for a day or so. Why don’t the two of you take the big room so I can catch up on some shut-eye?”
Beth watched her daughter brighten up instantly, yet she wasn’t exactly sure what had flipped her switch…the import of his words…or was it the familiar pat on the knee – but then Betty had looked at Sherman, sure she was reading him well enough but not at all sure why he’d caved so easily. She was sure he’d never get involved with a girl Beth’s age, but then again they’d just spent almost four months ‘together’ – albeit in a classroom setting. What was going on now?
“These cities look like Bauhaus run amok,” he said to no one in particular, “but as soon as you get out in the country everywhere you look you see another mountain chalet, even on flat farmland. I wasn’t expecting that.”
They passed through smaller mountain towns, stopping just once at Sierre before the express departed on the last stretch to Visp. Once there, Gene followed Betty and Beth across to the narrow gauge Visp-Zermatt Line, and they boarded the small First Class carriage and settled in for the final 80 minute ride – and almost as soon as Sherman sat he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When he opened his eyes he realized the train had stopped, and Beth was shaking his shoulder.
“Come on, Sleepy-head. Time to get up…we’re here!”
He sat up, wondering how – or why – his mouth felt like a horse had slept in there, but he stood andas suddenly recoiled as a piercing, knife-like pain arced from his stump up his spine.
“You alright?” Beth asked, automatically getting under his right arm and holding him up, maternal concern clear in her eyes, and in her voice.
And this complex set of reactions was not lost on Betty Cohen who, nevertheless, pretended to be oblivious to the exchange as she walked out of the carriage and then into the thin mountain air. She waited for them out there, watching as her daughter helped Sherman get settled with his cane once he was on firm pavement, then she noticed he was sweating and in real pain and she too went to him.
“Do you need anything?” she whispered in his ear.
“May be an early night for me,” he groaned. “I gotta get this contraption off my leg ASAP. How long a walk do we have?”
“You stay right here,” Betty said to Sherman, then she turned to Beth: “Come with me, and I mean right now,” she snarled, more than a little cross now.
She found the horse-drawn carriage from the hotel and instructed the driver to get their luggage loaded then to help get Herr Professor Sherman into the carriage. When they arrived at the Grand Hotel Zermatterhof, Betty checked them in and made sure that Beth was put in the single, second floor room and that she and Gene Sherman shared the large top floor suite, then she had the hotel staff get his wheelchair and bring it up to their suite. After their luggage was delivered she helped Sherman out of his clothes and into the jacuzzi-tub, and she took her time rubbing his shoulders, then his left thigh. She examined his stump as she dried and helped him into bed, then she stormed off to her daughter’s room, by now seething with barely contained fury.
Beth was unpacking in her room, her lower lip protruding in full pout mode when her mother knocked on the door. By the time Betty left her daughter, and that was almost a half hour later, Beth was in tears and one more time Betty regretted the day she’d met Markus Cohen. She asked the concierge where a certain private ski school was located and took off in that direction, because she had work to do if this vacation was going to go according to plan.
Because Betty Cohen planned literally everything – and with the precision of General George Patton’s final North African campaigns – and she’d be damned if she was going to let her daughter interfere. This vacation WAS going to come off as planned, but as was always the case, it was going to be up to her to make it come together!
She arranged for time early tomorrow morning so this specialized ski school could get equipment fitted to Gene’s special needs, and with that done she walked over to a ski shop close to the hotel to pick out her’s and Beth’s ski’s for the morning. She looked at her watch and noted their dinner reservation was an hour off so she walked back to the hotel and went back to Beth’s room.
“Are you ready for dinner?” Betty asked.
“I’m not hungry,” came her daughter’s sullen reply. And she was already under the duvet, another bad sign…
“It’s not like you to pull this kind of nonsense, Beth. Do you want to tell me what’s going on between you and Dr. Sherman?”
“What’s going on? Are you kidding, Mom? Nothing’s going on! Can’t you see that?”
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it? You want something from him, right? Something more?”
Beth nodded, then she sat up on the side of her bed, clearly scrapping for a fight. “You’re goddamn right I do. I’m nineteen years old, Mom, and I’ve never had a father…not a real father…and I want one who isn’t going to treat me like a punching bag, ya know? Someone who’ll actually love me for who I am…you know, the fat kid who always gets the highest grades in the class…because that’s me, Mom! The fat girl with the zits on her forehead. The fat kid who eats too much. The fat kid who’ll never do anything good enough. That’s me, Mom. That’s the way my father treated me, and you know what, Mom? I’m glad he’s gone! I’m glad I don’t have to watch him verbally beat you up whenever he doesn’t get his way, and I’m glad I don’t have to go to sleep at night hoping he won’t come to my room and humiliate me before he runs off somewhere, probably to his fucking mistress’s place… So yeah, Mom, I want something more!”
Betty Cohen stood there in shock, her arms crossed protectively over her chest, then she pursed her lips and shrugged. “Okay. Get dressed now. We’ll meet you in the dining room in a half hour.”
“Right. Sure thing, Mom. Whatever you want, ya know, ‘cause I sure don’t want to disappoint you, ya know?”
She went to the elevator in a dizzy huff and hit the call button, not really wanting to wake Gene up but needing him tonight, of all nights, to be there for Beth. She rode up in silence, barely looking at a spry French couple who seemed to be studiously ignoring her, then she walked down to their suite and slipped into their room…
…only to find Gene up and ready for dinner, dressed in black – and with his leg on!
And she ran into her arms and burst into tears. “I just had a run-in with Beth…”
“I can only imagine…” Sherman sighed as he ran his fingers through her hair.
“It seems she wants a father, Gene. She said things she must have been holding in for years.”
“I know.”
“Has she talked to you about Markus?”
“Yup. Every Wednesday night for the last two months.”
“Every…what do you mean?”
We go out to dinner on Wednesdays, usually to the Chart House, and she vents.”
“She…vents?”
“Yeah, about her dad, about her anger, about you?”
“Me? What on earth do you two talk about concerning me?”
“Anger, for themost part. How alone she felt, how – in her words – you didn’t stand up for her.”
“That’s not exactly true, Gene.”
“And believe me, Betty, I get that. A lot goes on behind closed doors that kids don’t see, that they aren’t supposed to see or hear, but Betty, she needed someone to listen to her and she chose me. I wasn’t then and I’m not going to turn away from her now.”
She kissed him just then, hard, on the lips. “Oh, God, how I love you,” she whispered.
“Ditto, Kid. Now, think they serve up decent grub in this place, or is there a McDonald’s around here we can hit?”
+++++
“You were a good skier once, no?” his instructor remarked.
“I could usually get down the mountain in one piece,” Sherman sighed, adjusting to the unusual pressure of the ski on his prosthetic leg.
“I still think we are rushing things just now, Herr Professor. Outriggers and one ski would be…”
“Would make me look like a gimp, Hans. And I’m not into the whole gimp thing, ya know?”
His instructor shook his head but knew stronger skiers often had the most trouble adjusting to getting out onto the snow again. They pushed and pushed until they finally broke down and settled on lowered expectations, but after two hours on the mountain with this navy pilot he wasn’t so sure this was going to happen. Stubborn and hard-headed weren’t adequate words to describe this man, and he was much stronger than he first appeared.
But after two runs without a fall on the very short, very easy run under the Sunnegga chairlift, his instructor decided to take Sherman up to the midway station on the Blauherd lift, and try the longer though still easy run down to the Finoeln chair; if he could handle that run a few times today the crusty old pilot might be ready to tackle the Gornergrat in another day or so.
“Are you ready to try a longer run, Herr Professor?”
“Please, call me Gene. The whole professor thing was never my bag, if you know what I mean.”
“I do, yes. I taught engineering, then quit to come home and make specialized skis for special needs skiers.”
“You’re from Zermatt?”
“Yes.”
“Have you climbed that?” Sherman said, pointing up the valley to the hulking Matterhorn.”
“Seventy five times. I am a guide when the weather turns warm.”
“Any people like me ever make the summit?”
“A few, yes, but Gene, this is not recommended. It is a very difficult achievement for even dedicated climbers.”
“My dad and I climbed a lot when I was a kid. Yosemite, mainly, but we did Shasta, Hood, and Rainier one summer.”
“So you have experience on ice?”
“Yup.”
“If you are serious about this, Gene, I will get you to the top, but you will need to be in the best shape of your life. You understand this?”
“Define this, please?”
“You must be able to run at least ten kilometers at sea level, and be able to complete fifty chin-ups. You know these?”
“I do a hundred, three times a week.”
Hans looked at Sherman anew. “Your leg still gives you trouble?”
Sherman nodded. “Yeah, sometimes a lot, but Betty thinks I need a better prosthetic, and she’s found a lab in New York that makes legs for people who do marathons.”
“Then start work at a climbing wall when you get home, and work on your rope skills too. If this is something you really want to do, please let me know by the end of March. The best times fill up rapidly after that.”
“When is that? July?”
“Usually the last two weeks, yes, but the crowds can be daunting if the weather is good. Guides are not required, so tourists come up and try…”
“How many die?”
“Usually ten or so. Sometimes a few more, but much depends on the weather.”
“When I was a kid I looked at pictures of this mountain and wondered…”
“It starts that way for most. With me, the mountain was outside my window and my father was a guide, so…”
“You’re a lucky man, Hans.”
“You know, after hearing all the things you have accomplished I would say that you are the lucky one, but isn’t it always that way?”
Sherman nodded. “Yeah, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”
“Exactly. Just so. It is a human thing to never feel contentedness, even when contentment is all around.”
Sherman looked up at the mountain and sighed. “Ain’t that the truth, Hans. Ain’t that the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
+++++
Though breakfast and dinner were included with their rooms, after a full day skiing their second day Betty announced they were headed out to a hut near the bottom of the Sunnegga area that served a very special fondue in the evening, and at five-thirty a horse drawn carriage came for them.
How’s your leg?” Beth asked after she watched Sherman almost hop up into the carriage.
“Good. You know, I think I’ve been taking it a little too easy on the thing. What a wake up call, ya know? Time to really start pushing. Time to get in shape again, ya know?”
“Hans tells me you’re doing well enough to come up the Gornergrat tomorrow,” Betty remarked. “Would you mind if we joined you?”
“Would I mind?” Sherman cried, “would I mind! Hell, darlin’…I’m countin’ on it!” He took a deep breath and turned to Beth, smiling now. “Damn, but this place sure must agree with you. You’re as pretty as a peach,” he said, taking her hand and giving it a little squeeze.
She smiled too, even if she was a little unsure of his unusually upbeat performance. “I hear you’re doing pretty good up there. What did you do today?”
“Well, Hans wasn’t sure, but I talked him into going up the Rothorn and we skied up there all day, then we came down all the way to the village. Man, I was whupped. Never felt so tired, but then the endorphins hit. What a rush!”
“You skied all the down the Rothorn?” Beth said, incredulous. “To the base?”
“I did, and I feel great!”
“We were going to try,” Betty added, “to ski all the way down past Riffelalp but there’s just not enough snow yet. Maybe this next storm will drop enough.”
“What do you think about doing Cervinia?” Beth asked. “I hear it’s a pretty long run?”
“I’d love to do that one at least once,” Betty added.
“I’ll ask Hans, see what he thinks.”
“See if he can come along with us?” Betty said. “He sounds really dialed in.”
“He is. You know, he takes people up the Matterhorn in the summer,” he said, watching their reaction.
“You mean, people climb that thing,” Beth said, turning around and looking up at the mountain. “Why?”
“Good question,” Sherman sighed. “When I think of a reason I’ll let you know.”
Betty watched this exchange with interest, because she could see it in Gene’s eyes. He wanted to do it. He wanted to make the climb.
But then again, for that matter so did she. In fact, she’d wanted to all her life. That’s why she’d decided to come to Zermatt in the first place, and that’s why she’d hooked Gene up with an instructor who was also a guide. And it really didn’t matter to her if Beth came or not. She turned and looked up at the mountain and smiled. It seemed to speak to her just then, to call out her name, and yet she never wondered why…
+++++
The next morning they took the Gornergratbahn up to the old weather station and observatory and they skied the gentle slopes up there in the sun all through the morning, then once again the group – Beth, Betty, and Gene, as well as both of their instructors – skied all the way back down to the village, an exhausting slog that sent everyone straight to bed after a brief attempt at dinner…with the proviso that everyone rise early so they could start the very long day needed to make it down to Cervinia and back.
They woke at six and had a lite breakfast of fruit and poached eggs, and met their instructors at the entrance to the Trockner Steg lift, and they began the almost hour-long journey up to the Theodulpass, and Hans liked to boast this was the only ski run in the world with a passport control checkpoint at the summit – though it was often unmanned. After the group arrived at the pass everyone stretched and cried out as an icy torrent of wind-driven air bit into all their soft, tired muscles, but then Hans led them all in a series of exercises to loosen up the knots and kinks. Yet the sun had just barely cleared the mountains to the east when the took off, and so they were soon skiing in deep, cold shade. The terrain around the pass was wide open, too, with no trees in sight, and depth perception was limited in the dim light, so when Beth fell she tumbled to a flailing stop covered from head to toe with powdered-sugary snow, and she sat there in a ragged heap, suddenly and completely disoriented, and almost in tears.
But when Gene slid to a stop just under her position and helped her stand, she grabbed onto him and held him close – and tight, and he seemed to feel more than hear she was crying…
“Hey, kiddo, you alright?” he asked…gently.
“No, not really. I’m cold and I can’t tell which hurts more, my thighs or my feet.”
“My head,” he sighed, “feels like an elephant is sitting on it.”
She laughed and held on to him tighter still, and right then and there, deep down she had to admit she loved him so much that that hurt most of all, because she could never have him, and never even tell him…
She let go and stood up straight and he helped brush the snow off her back and legs, then they skied down to the others.
“Bad fall?” Betty asked.
“No, not really,” Beth said, and probably more cheerfully than she felt. “I think I just got disoriented and lost my balance.”
“Try to look further down the mountain,” her instructor said helpfully, “and look where you want to start your next turn.”
Beth nodded and blew out a deep breath. “Ready when you guys are,” she said.
They took the long way down the valley, the entire run devoid of trees but the sun finally cresting the ridge behind them and dramatically warming them up, and they made a few more runs before they skied down to Cervinia for lunch.
And there was no fondue over here on the Italian side, no raclette or other Swiss mainstays. The menus in this village were heavy, four course pasta and veal feasts that took hours to complete, and they simply didn’t have enough time for all that. Hans took them to a small basement bistro that served hearty mountain fare to instructors and guides, and when she saw a huge stone fireplace roaring away in a corner, Beth went right to it and sat on the stone hearth, unbuckling her ski boots while her back soaked up the heat.
Her mother came over and sat next to her, wrapping an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and pulling her close. “You did really well this morning,” Betty said encouragingly.
“Mom, I’m really beat. Could we take a day off tomorrow, maybe just hang around the village and check things out?”
“That’s why we came for two weeks,” Betty said. “I think we could all use a day off!”
“Oh thank God,” Beth sighed. “I really didn’t want to let you guys down.”
“That would be impossible,” Gene said as he sat in a chair he’d just pulled over. “I can’t believe how good you’re doing up on that steep stuff, Kiddo! For an intermediate skier, you’re doing great!”
“Me?”Beth cried. “I’ve got two legs, Professor Sherman…and I look at you and know I can’t let you down. I’ve got to keep up, ya know?”
Gene nodded as another tumbler fell into place. “Listen, Beth, I raced in high school so you need to realize that once upon a time I was actually a pretty good skier, and though it’s been a while it’s all coming back to me. Sure, I’ve got to relearn things because of the leg thing, but sports have always come easily to me. Anyway, in my book, Kiddo, you’re doing fantastic.”
Beth nodded but she looked up into his eyes just then. “You think you could do me a favor?” she asked.
“Sure,” he nodded. “Name it.”
“Stop calling me ‘Kiddo,’ okay?”
He looked into her eyes, saw the hurt inside and he nodded. “Done,” he said. “Now…Hans tells me they make a mean lasagna here. Wanna go for it?”
By the time lunch settled and they’d made it all the way back up to the Theodulpass, the group had just enough time to ski back down to the village before darkness settled over the valley, but as they reached the lower slopes – which turned out to be little more than trails cattle had worn through the trees over the ages – they ran into icy patches and even a few rocks, so before they reached the hotel they’d each fallen at least once. Hans and Gene more than once.
When they reached the hotel, Gene told Hans they were going to take the day off tomorrow…
“Oh, thank goodness!” Hans said. “My knees could use a complete day in the hot-tub! What about the day after? Do you want to continue with the lessons?”
“Yes, I do. At least for another three or four days, but I was wondering. Could you meet me in the climbing center sometime tomorrow? I want to study up on the mountain, get some reading material…?”
“Absolutely! Why don’t we meet there just before noon, and we can get some lunch after and talk.”
They shook hands and Gene joined Beth and Betty in the ski room, telling the technician they were taking the day off tomorrow so they’d not need their skis in the morning, then they took the elevator up to their rooms, agreeing to meet for dinner in an hour or so. After they made it to their room, Beth threw off her parka and muttered “You know, Gene, I think I’m too tired to screw tonight. What about you?”
But Gene Sherman was already curled up on the bed, gently snoring away, his ski boots still on.
Betty went over and helped him sit up and undress, but by then he was ready for dinner. “Geez, I’m sorry, Betty. I must’ve just passed out or something…”
“You’re exhausted, Gene. And so am I. The last mile, in those trees, I thought I was going to just quit. My legs were burning, they were shaking, and I was sure if I fell I wouldn’t be able to get up…”
“I need to check my stump. I think it may be bleeding.”
She helped him out of his bibs and he undid the harness that held the prosthesis to his “residual leg,” and when she pulled the sock off his stump she shook her head. “You’re blistered, alright,” she said. “Let me get some gauze, and I’m calling for the wheelchair.”
He shook his head. “Goddamnit,” he snarled. “How bad does it look?”
“It’s been worse,” she sighed. “Maybe we should take a couple of days off?”
He looked at her and nodded. “You know, I don’t think Beth will put up much of a fight about that.”
“She seemed pretty upset up there – for a little bit, anyway. What did she say to you?”
“She really didn’t say much, Betty. It was more like a physical thing, the way she was hanging on to me. I felt need, real need on her part, like she needed me to hold her just then… I don’t know…does that make any sense?”
She nodded. “It does, because I need you to hold me, too. Sometimes it hits me real hard, Gene. And yes, it’s a physical reaction. Sometimes I feel that if I can’t grab hold of you and hold you tight there’s some kind of invisible hand out there that’s going to yank you away from me, and keep you away…”
He looked at Betty, not really knowing what to say or how to meet this immediate need, but instinctively he held out his arms and she came to him. “Nothing’s going to take me away from you, Betty. I love you, and there’s no force in the universe that’s going to change that.”
She buried her face in his neck and held on tight, yet in that instant he was hit by echoes of Beth’s clinging needs and the thought hit him…were these two women really so very different? He loved Betty and by now that was an unquestioned fact, yet at the same time he had feelings, even strong feelings for Beth. Were these the feelings a father usually had for his daughter? He didn’t know, yet he could barely grasp the implications of so many conflicted, and conflicting emotions. What made the whole thing particularly confusing was the sensation of touch, because when he held either there was almost no way to distinguish Beth from Betty. Their skin was identical, even the so-called galvanic response of their skin on his own. Their eyes were identical, so too their mouths. Betty was a little taller, Beth was indeed a little fuller-bodied, yet the differences were trivial, and he imagined that in ten years Beth would be indistinguishable from her mother. So, he wondered – while he clung to Betty – would he ever really be able to think of Beth as some kind of daughter?
The phone rang and Betty picked it up.
It was Beth, down in the lobby: “Mom? Are you guys coming down?”
“I’m putting some gauze on Gene’s leg, and as soon as his wheelchair gets here we’ll be down.”
“You want to eat here or go out for fondue?”
“I take it fondue sounds good to you?”
“Uh-huh, if you guys don’t mind?”
“Okay. Ask someone at the front desk which restaurant we should try, will you? Someone’s at the door now, so we should be down in a minute.”
“Help me with my leg, would you? I don’t want to use the chair tonight…”
“It looks pretty angry, Gene. You sure?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll just pop some naproxen, see if that gets me through the night.”
“Everyone else I know would be mainlining opiates by this point. Gene, I don’t think you ought to push so hard…”
“I’ve been wimping out the last ten years, getting soft. Time to change that.”
“Is that what this whole Matterhorn thing is all about?”
He looked at her and shook his head. “You sure you’re not a shrink?”
She smiled. “Sorry, but I really enjoyed my psychiatry rotation. I gave it a thought…”
With his leg now securely attached, he grabbed his cane and stood, gradually shifting weight onto his raw left stump. “Yeow! Now that smarts!”
“Want the chair?”
“Hell no!” he growled as he walked to the door. “So, we doing fondue tonight?”
“I think that’s what Beth wants.”
“Good, good. Nothing better than a bunch of bread and a trough full of oily cheese. Yum!”
+++++
He met Hans at the Climbing Center late the next morning and they went over the basics: conditioning, equipment, and of course, the direct costs of securing his services as a guide and all the ancillary costs like lodging on the mountain and expendables like rope and such.
“It won’t be inexpensive, Professor, but most people who undertake such a climb are rarely concerned about the cost.”
“What do most of your clients say is their main reason?”
“The challenge of climbing one of the most difficult mountains in the world, and certainly one of the top five in Europe. It is not the Eiger North face, you understand, yet nevertheless the Matterhorn presents unique challenges, of which the most difficult is the mental challenge associated with making the entire ascent on a razor sharp ridge line. As such, the summit is one of the most terrifying places on earth.”
“From what I’ve read so far that route isn’t all that technically demanding…”
Hans laughed. “That is true enough…for the ascent. Yet what most people fail to adequately consider is that you come down the mountain by exactly the same route, but here is the thing, the real problem. When you are climbing up you are looking up, and you are slowly pulling yourself up one step at a time. Yet when you are coming down you are looking down, but recall you are coming down a knife edge and gravity is now working against a slow descent. Gene, the simple truth is that the descent is much more difficult, and most people find this part of the affair much more challenging psychologically.”
“Yeah, I can see that. There isn’t exactly an elevator to take you back down to the bottom, is there?”
“Yes, our mountain is very unlike the Eiger in that regard. There are many easy routes down after you gain the Eiger’s summit, including by train. Not so with Matterhorn. In fact, it is an odd truth that here almost all accidents happen on the descent. The saying is, when you are on the summit, anyway, that if you feel yourself falling you must yell out “I am falling – to the right!” so that your guide may have time to jump to the left and keep you from taking the Matterhorn elevator, which is a thousand meter nonstop free-fall down to the rocks in the valley. And Gene, here there are almost always accidents, and every summer, too. And so we usually see many serious injuries, and also many fatalities. You must consider this when you make your plans.”
“Cheerful thought, Hans. Thanks.”
The guide shrugged. “This is a part of the allure, Gene. There are no great challenges without equally great risks.”
“Are you familiar with the concept of Death Wish?”
“I am indeed, Gene. The greater question you might consider here and now is how familiar are you with the concept? Now, I see two women waiting for you out on the street. Shall we take them to lunch?”
Adrian Leverkühn Writes 