A method of reaching ext.., p.2
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, page 2
She had dreamed of being an archaeologist like Schliemann, discovering ancient treasures at Ilium and Mycenae—or maybe she’d decipher the Linear A script of Knossos. Magical words, unimaginable places. Her mother had repeatedly pointed out that any career involving physical exertion was closed to her—she’d already had surgery, wore a brace at night so her chest wouldn’t rotate—but then Rollo found her hand in the darkest dark and all her dreams changed. But hadn’t she found a way, finally, to discover treasure? In tucked away corners of New Mexico, she, Frances Henley, unearthed hidden—
What’re you going to do when you’re not able to travel?
On the wall, a stern-faced bandit stared down at her from behind his glass prison. Had this come from him? She glanced around. Had she said it? She’d never asked herself this question, hadn’t allowed herself to think it. She hid her disabilities well enough from others; had she been hiding them from herself as well? She felt woozy. This was the trip she’d fought for? This airless room with its dried-up artifacts?
And what about you, with your dried-up spine?
She returned the bandit’s glare. She was physically shorter—so what?
She walked on. Several portraits later, she realized it wasn’t only her spine. The length of her recruiting trips had also shortened: her curvature’s compression forcing her home more often for care. She stumbled, reached out for the wall—and glanced up. Was she seeing double? She stepped forward, then back; shook her head to clear it.
No, there were two photos: smaller than the others and ornately framed, sepia rather than black-and-white. The men held old-fashioned flintlocks, and wrapped around their heads so that fringe hung down against their faces, hairnets. Cretan freedom fighters. The words came into her head from nowhere. Where had she studied Cretan freedom fighters? The answer floated to her through the shafts of sunlight in the long room. In Miss Garrett’s World History class.
She let the long, dusty room get vague. She saw herself in bobby socks and white suede loafers, starched petticoats and tight-cinched waist, the wide belt misshapen on the left side by her hiked-up hip. By the tenth grade, she’d run the gauntlet of high school cruelty—measured looks, whispers, exclusion—and had emerged, finally, for some reason, popular. And behind her in Garrett’s World History, Ropes Henley, looking over her shoulder, teasing her, telling stupid jokes while he copied her answers. She wasn’t in awe of him like the other girls were—he was too far out of reach—and she’d matched his teasing with her wit. Is that why he’d picked her? His choosing her over all the other girls had always been a mystery—and not only to her. All during high school and those first years of college, it had been made clear that even taking into account her intelligence, she was lucky—undeserving, really—to be on the receiving end of Rollo Arthur Henley III’s affections.
The sepia portraits came back into focus. The hairnets were clearly tribal headgear. Handwoven of thick cotton, they looked nothing like Lucky’s mass-produced nylon net. Fran turned to look at Lucky. She’d assumed he was playing the fool; he hadn’t told them his costume was a gesture toward authenticity and gravitas. But what else did “restoring the old ways” mean? A purposeful life—isn’t that what everyone wanted?
She turned back and studied the freedom fighters with their dangling fringe. Restoring the old ways—if only she could. Their purposeful life with children to rear, a business to grow; and even earlier, when Rollo had been her purpose. Wild and willful he’d been, like these fierce-looking men. So full of life it spilled over. Forcing his friends to bring him to her neighborhood of tiny flat-roofed houses, calling her name, insisting she crawl out her window or he’d wake up her mother, maybe the whole goddamn street. Urgent whispers in the early morning. And when she’d finally appear—always through the front door—Rollo would pick her up with both arms around her hips and bow his head against her body, calmed. That Fran! What’s she thinking, wearing PJs out in the yard with all those boys?
* * *
Fran followed the cuneiform hoofprints. Her body ached and her left foot slopped out of sync. The wide dirt path became a thin trail, then a narrow alley between high stone walls. The walls pressed in. She felt she was being herded down a slot—except the men weren’t behind her, but in front. She saw Lucky, then Rollo, disappear through an unexpected marble arch. Willing her legs up the high step, she walked through the arch and into an open courtyard. It fronted a whitewashed Greek church, one that seemed built on top of the world.
She limped back and forth across the marble pavement, looking out, unable to speak. She could barely take it all in: a sky striated hot pink, craggy mountains rosy with light, and far below, down and down, opening out at the end of the world, a triangle of glittering sea. For a moment, her body lightened. It had been a long day, but now there was this! Her reward for pain endured. She turned, and her joy fell away. Rollo. He’d dug out his cell phone. Here, in this ancient and sacred place with the world’s grandeur before him, and all he could think about was the damn store. Founded by his grandfather to sell hammers and nails, it now overflowed with hair dryers, lightbulbs, mousetraps—and out back, a lumberyard and a nursery with bedding plants and fertilizer. All the material goods of modern civilization. Derision hit her spine full force, then just as suddenly, her shoulders slumped: Walmart had poured a foundation.
Lucky stroked his mustache, one side and then other. Hadn’t he told them? Hadn’t he said there was nothing like his ancestral village anywhere else in the world?
A goat with a long white face and a piebald eye stepped through the arch. “Ho, Yarrow,” Lucky said. “How did you find us up here?” The goat’s bell dinked as it trotted daintily across the marble—straight to Rollo’s leg. Rollo swiveled his body this way and that, turning smoothly from the animal’s attempts at affection, all the while punching in numbers. He looked like some balding, overweight matador.
Fran laughed out loud. She identified with the goat. She’d bought new clothes and hennaed her hair a flirty new copper color for this trip, hoping that she and Rollo could resurrect their old passion. They’d had a wildness in them when they were young—and for many years after. But long years of marriage, like water dripping on stone, had worn away desire’s sharp edge. Such a mysterious, never-to-be-deciphered imprint, desire … She stopped her thought: No, that was wrong. It wasn’t only the years.
She sat down on the stone wall that fronted the gorge and watched Rollo evade the goat. Ten days in a room too small for their big American bodies, their suitcases too large to slide beneath the twin beds, no space in the bathroom, and outside the portholes, the hypnotic motion of a sea moving at eye level. Without speaking of it, the two of them had established a routine that flowed naturally and involved moving in and out of the bedroom to grant the other privacy. A gracious routine that meant they were never naked in the same space at the same time. Eleven nights they’d gone below deck, and every night Rollo had had too much to drink, or she had, or he’d fallen asleep by the time she’d finished squirming undressed—always hiding for fear Rollo would see the deterioration, the changes.
Rollo cursed, slapped his phone shut and dropped down beside her on the wall. Yarrow trotted off to interrogate Lucky, who was capering about with her camera. Fran adjusted her bra strap to ease the drag of her jutting left shoulder blade and arched her back. Rollo must have felt this effort because he kneaded the bunched muscles in her hip, all the while watching Lucky. He’d been doing this since they were fifteen—forty-one years. Fran thought how automatic the response must be for him. Why had she thought this sky, these mountains, and the plunging gorge constituted her personal reward? You didn’t have to work for them or deserve them. They were here for anyone with eyes to see.
Lucky snapped photo after photo of the two of them sitting with their arms around each other’s waists. How fabulous they looked against the sunset! Smile! Postcard-perfect! Then he wanted his picture taken with his “outlaw friend.” By the time the men finished posing and Fran put the camera away, the color was drained from the sky, the gleaming water no longer visible—which meant that when the three of them entered the church, they entered darkness.
* * *
Fran waited for her eyes to adjust, but even when they did, she couldn’t see anything. She was afraid to move, she might fall—and the floor was stone, she could feel that. Was there an electrical switch on the wall or a slanting rack of candles? She felt in her purse for her flashlight, a thin card imprinted with HENLEY’S HARDWARE, dozens of them hanging next to every cash register. Before she could find it, Lucky was dancing his light around. It did little to illuminate the darkness. The interior of the church was more smell than sight: mouse musk, mildew, a hint of urine—but no flavor of incense or prayer, nothing to contradict the judgment: deserted. She heard Lucky’s voice. The fresco is very famous. People travel to it from all over the world. What a liar he was.
“The magnificent fresco of St. George killing the dragon. Right here! Fourteenth century. Imagine! Come this way, this way. Follow me!”
“I guarantee you Fran will know more about it than you do.” Rollo’s voice was resonant in the darkness. “Won’t you, Franny?”
Fran did not respond. Blind, she held both arms out in front of her and shuffled her feet forward. From what she could make out—not much—this seemed the usual Greek Orthodox Church: hanging oil lamps, painted screens, a single choir stall. The old church in Chimayo in the hills above Santa Fe was remarkably similar. She rode the wave of homesickness that rose up in her and landed back where she’d started: in pitch-black darkness somewhere in the mountains of Crete.
“Here it is!” Lucky said. He moved his tiny pin-light up, down, and sideways along a rough whitewashed wall. Blackened plaster bore witness to a long-ago fire—or fires. “Fourteenth century!” Lucky said, tapping his staff on the wall. “Seven hundred years of warfare and it survives!”
“Tell us what we’re seeing, Franny.”
In Lucky’s pin-light, the fresco showed itself in fragments: long white equine face, blue armored breastplate, slender stretch of horse leg, green coil spitting flames. Fran leaned closer. Lucky continued to circle his light around the wall-sized image: St. George sticking a dragon with a spear, showing every one of its seven hundred years. Disappointment filled her. The fresco’s reputation was fraudulent: it was an apricot-colored blur. But there—what? On the rump of the horse behind St. George: a small figure in blue.
Before she could ask about it, Lucky flowed into full tourist guide mode. “It is very rare, yes? To have this small boy sitting behind this great Saint George? Usually, there is no such figure. In most Byzantine frescos, it is always Saint George by himself killing the dragon. A mysterious figure, this boy. There are many stories coming down about him. He was a boy stolen from his parents and sold for his beauty to—to outlaws, Rollo! Outlaws, like we spoke about earlier. Perhaps Saracens, we don’t know. Outlaws, anyway, keeping him for many years. But Saint George, he rescues this boy and brings him home on the back of his beautiful white horse. A miracle, no?”
For some reason, Lucky switched off his light. In the darkness, Fran could hear Rollo’s heavy breathing, could feel the heat of his body, his hand fumbling for hers.
Rollo fumbling to find her hand.
She doesn’t have to think about it: the memory is physical; it’s in her body.
Rollo fumbling to find her hand in utter blackness.
Lucky was still talking about the fresco, but the closeness of the tiny church had swung wide and carried her back. An emptiness too immense to imagine—its smell too, unknown: earthy and dank. She is standing on a concrete ledge looking into an immeasurable maw, surrounded by other tenth graders, everyone subdued, their chattering silenced as they filed down and the air cooled and sunlight faded. A man in a brown uniform tells them that the bottom of the Carlsbad Caverns lies eighty stories below them. The tallest building in Roswell is three stories high; eighty stories is impossible. The enormous space with its high curved arch seems miraculous, an entrance into the infinite heart of Earth.
The man speaks about the discovery of the Caverns by cowboys who saw, night after night, millions of bats pouring out at sunset to darken the sky. He wants to show them what it had been like for those boys the first time they entered. To do this, he has to turn off the lights—Hold on! It’s just for a minute. One minute. By the time he has twice admonished everyone to stand absolutely still, Rollo has inched his way next to her, his nearness pushing her starched petticoats forward. The man says, Are you ready? Here we go!
The blackness is so stunning it takes away whatever breath she has left. She feels Rollo fumble for her hand. She helps him find it. He raises it up—all this felt, not seen—and holds her palm against his cheek. The single minute of utter blackness seems endless. Electric lights buzz on. Around them, startled, their classmates jostle and joke with each other—they weren’t afraid, not them!—but Ropes Henley stands silent, holding her hand, gazing into her eyes, and Fran feels the wonder of her life opening out before her, all promise.
A small sound brought her back. She sensed the walled church around her—the sound, not here in the enclosed space, but somewhere near, a sound close and familiar as Rollo’s breathing. The sound diminished, then returned. Yarrow. Her skin prickled with awareness: the darkness felt looser, the silk of her blouse like bluegreen water.
“Imagine the happiness!” Lucky’s voice in the darkness was exultant. What a great tour guide he was! What a grand restorer of old ways! He turned on his tiny light and ran its beam from the horse’s face to its rump where a little boy dressed in navy blue pants and a light blue shirt sat, a tiny figure behind the armored, oversized saint. “Imagine the surprise and the happiness in the home of the parents when the little boy walks in!”
The pin-light looped around the blackened edges and faint colors of the rough-plastered wall, and outside the sound of a dinking bell—now close, now far.
Gospel of New Eyes
IT’S THE STILLNESS THAT STRIKES HER, SHE WHO IS ALWAYS IN MOTION. THE May morning seems to be holding its breath, and from the parking lot, the prison looks like a sleepy community college. Emy Lou McCracken thinks, This isn’t so bad.
The thought is punctured by the electronic whump of the unlocking gate. Her body jerks involuntarily. The door to the psych ward had made this same sound, and in an instant she is there again, in Parkland’s halogen glare with Andy’s thin cries, These aren’t my real hands, my real hands are smaller.
Lowering her head, she falls back, lets Bev lead.
An armed guard—male, unsmiling—sticks out an oval basket into which Bev places their drivers’ licenses and her car keys. A phone call confirms they’re expected. They follow another guard—male, heavy key ring slapping heavy flashlight—toward the cluster of red brick buildings that constitutes the Mountain View Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections.
A mockingbird pours its heart out somewhere close by, the smell of freshly turned earth fills the air.
In a breezeway, at a window labeled INFIRMARY, a line of women in white jumpsuits.
The women eye them. Nothing is spoken directly, but the whispers close in behind. Check those badass earrings. Dont’cha jes love that belt? Lookit those boots!
Emy Lou straightens her shoulders, holds her head high. She’s followed the warden’s directive: “Wear good clothes and jewelry when you come to visit, ladies. The girls love it.”
As they walk, gathering whispers, through breezeways, past buildings, she’s conscious of offering herself up, a momentary salve against monotony.
The guard opens a door, and they enter a room that could exist in any school: a wall of windows, a big blackboard, rows of laminated desks with writing arms. Bev introduces her to the teacher. Mrs. Betty Keck is short and round and motherly looking. Emy Lou shakes her hand, but she hardly sees her because she’s too busy looking at the students, a blur of white jumpsuits with pops of color her mind can’t organize. Red, blue, yellow, green—crude kindergarten colors. Then she sees. Tied in bows, folded Brooks Brothers style, thrown casually over a shoulder, mufflers. The windows are open, it’s spring outside, but inside, every woman is muffled.
Mrs. Keck introduces them: “These visitors are from the Women’s Halfway House in Dallas. They’re going to tell you why you might want to go there when you get paroled.”
Bev, the director, begins the pitch.
Bev’s normal navy-blue shirtwaist has been replaced by a peach-colored rayon one; her ripple-soled oxfords by nylon stockings and sandals. A loaded key ring usually jangles at her waist, but today she makes no sound as she walks back and forth in front of the Pre-Release Class. She outlines the support the House provides ex-offenders: drug and alcohol counseling, GED classes. Her voice is flat, factual, filing-cabinet beige. She drones on and on.
Emy Lou’s mind wanders. Oversized maps paper the classroom’s back wall, and she notices, in front of the large Mercator map of the world, a crocheted cap. There are forty women in the room, women of all shapes and colors, but only one woman on the back row wears a baby-blue cap that matches her muffler. The woman’s neck is long and lovely, like those in Byzantine mosaics Emy Lou has seen in her travels. Behind this woman, the world has been broken up and spread flat into loopy oceans and strangely elongated landmasses, and the woman’s skull, with its close-cropped hair, looks fine and round, pleasing, against it.
Bev is still droning, and Emy Lou is thinking that if the woman’s cap were crimped out of tinfoil, it could be Andy’s hat. It fits on her head in the same way. For years Emy Lou chafed against this hat, but now she feels quite tender toward it: it keeps her son safe until he can get well. It blocks the blare of the radios in his head, although it doesn’t do much for the invisible helicopters and their chop-chopping sounds. Emy Lou sees Andy as she saw him that morning: a heavy thirty-year-old wearing pajamas covered with tiny brown footballs, and on his head, a tinfoil hat that fits the curve of his head.
