Children of the New World: Stories (10 page)

“We don’t have a choice,” I finally said to Mary. “You can stay with them and hold them. I’ll log out and do it.”

“Do what, Daddy?” June asked, peeking out from the hut we’d built in the corner of our bedroom. We were silent for a moment.

“Nothing,” I said quietly. “Come and give me a hug. You, too, Oscar,” I called, and our children emerged from the hut, climbing onto my lap to put their arms around me.

I often tell myself that I held them for as long as I could. It was worse for Mary; she felt their bodies disappear from beneath her embrace.

*   *   *

AMONG MY FAVORITE
memories: Snow. Its enhanced crystalline structure; its pristine whiteness; its silence. Oscar, June, and I on a sled, zooming down a snowy hill, which spools endlessly ahead of us, June pointing at the corn-piped snowman bowing to us and tipping his top hat as we speed by. And when we walk back to the house, our sled dragging behind us, the quiet end of the day, dusk falling along the horizon, the snow lilac with evening.

Mary’s favorite memory: A morning in spring, the soft light breaking through our windows and lighting up the wood floors. I’m playing with June, rolling a small Matchbox car back and forth, and Oscar is sleeping in her arms, our family together and quiet in the morning light.

Things I regret: raising my voice. The look of surprise on their faces moments before the hurt set in. And for what? For taking too long putting on their shoes; for not wanting to sleep when I was ready to log off; for asking me to read another chapter; for being children. There’s no way you can give everything to your children, no way you can spend every minute with them or be there for each hour of their lives. But give me a second chance, and I’d never log off. I’d read them stories until they were deep asleep, hold them tightly through the darkness, and tell them I loved them once again. The feeling of parenthood never leaves you. Not when I go to work now. Not when Mary and I go to dinner or sit alone at the movie theater.

*   *   *

EVERY SUNDAY, MARY
and I go to the support group they hold over in Corvallis at the community center. It’s facilitated by Bill Thompson, a large, heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard who reminds us of a grizzly bear. He’s a warmhearted guy, gruff in a comforting way, who smokes Marlboro Reds outside during breaks. Every meeting he brings a basket of assorted teas and coffee for us, arranges our chairs in a circle, and offers a hug more readily than a handshake. One of his common pieces of wisdom is, “Don’t let anyone tell you they weren’t real.” He puts his fingers over his heart and taps softly. “They were real here.” Of everyone who attends, he’s undoubtedly lost the most; he had a family of five and a wife he’d met online who turned out to be a scammer. She’d taken it all from him: drained his savings, stolen his identity, and infected the children. Not that we should compare losses, he tells us. There’s no hierarchy to pain. “Our work isn’t to figure out who hurts the most,” he says. “Our work is to heal.”

We take turns. New members tell their stories first. They go through the stages many of us have gone through. They show us their photos—if they’re lucky enough to have printed them—they talk about the smell of their children, the colors of the clothing they were wearing on the last day before they rebooted. They cry, and Bill holds the space for them, gives them a hug when it seems like they’ll accept one, and teaches us how to grieve. “We all have to reboot
this,
” he says, and motions to the room with his open palms. “This world, with all its pain and loss. This is where we learn to love again.”

Bill’s been a real savior to Mary and me. For a long time there was no one to share our pain with. We have friends and they’re good-hearted, well-meaning people, but they never had kids on the other side. They comfort us for a while, a couple weeks, a month; they send sympathy cards and flowers, but in the end they all offer the same advice: It’s time to move on. They were just programs. You can create new children. And we nod grimly, knowing full well we’ll never return.

Bill’s advice has helped us get to a place where we can say what happened wasn’t our fault, that we’re not monsters, that our children didn’t die because of us. We were lonely. We were needful. We wanted to feel pleasure again, to be caressed and loved. Our longings were those of humans, not monsters. No, the real monsters in this world are the hackers and scammers, faceless men and women who destroy lives for the joy of testing a virus, and who sacrificed our children to make a buck.

When the meetings are over, Bill invites us to be physical like we were in the other world. “Human contact is all there really is,” he says. And so we put our arms around one another, timidly at first, and eventually, with all the warmth of our bodies. We hold the others who come, the parents and widowers, the aunts, uncles, and grandparents. We pull strangers into our embrace and hold them tightly against us. There’s nothing electronic about the gesture, no hum to the body, only the warmth of their breathing and the beating of their hearts.

FALL LINE

I’M FILLING ICE
when Sunny radios that Desolation Pass is officially closed for the season. The top half is skiable, but after that it’s all patches of grass and rocks. “I’ll tell them to bring an inner tube,” I radio back, and Sunny says in his Cali drawl, “Riiiiight.” Ever since the Big Thaw, anyone wanting diamonds needs to buy a ticket to Dubai and shred indoor slopes. For the past three years, all we’ve had is slush and mud patches that catch your edge and leave you soaked and miserable by the end of the day. Even the hard-core skiers don’t bother going out more than once or twice a season. There will be flurries, the temp drops to thirty, and you get that phantom itch to grind bumps. Then you take the first run, mash through freezing crud, skid on a patch of ice, and realize why you don’t ski anymore.

The lodge is quiet, chairs still on the tables, just a group of old-timers changing into their boots—diehards who’ve been coming since the turn of the millennium, back when you could still catch knee-deep powder and the bar was standing-room only after the lifts closed. They’re all in their seventies and I wonder why they bother. The slopes are hell on the knees, but still they boot up and hit the runs for their weeklong vacation.

“Think we’re going to see some powder?” one of them asks.

“Sure, right over there,” I say and motion to the flat-screen, where we’re playing old X-Sports clips. Bonnie Hale is doing a 360 off a Kilimanjaro peak.

“Have faith,” another one of the guys says, and they lower their goggles and go trudging out.

That leaves the only other two in the room, a little girl sitting on the bench and her dad struggling to get her suited up. Our kiddie hills are dotted with toddlers and their parents who want them to experience skiing before it’s gone. Sunny runs a ski school, which manages to barely be worth his time. He’s got half a dozen kids booked in his morning class, another five in his afternoon Little Eskimo Club.

My agent found me this gig when I got out of recovery. It was becoming clear to him that I wasn’t ever going to return to the circuit, stomp powder again, make real money. He said a lodge in Utah wanted me to teach classes.

“No fucking way I’m doing bunny slopes.”

“All right, then let me ask you a question: When’s the comeback?”

“Soon,” I said.

“Uh-huh. You’ve been saying that for four years.”

“I was learning to walk for the first three of them.”

“Ronnie, you need to take this job. I can’t line up any more interviews if you don’t ski. People are forgetting about you.”

I didn’t take the job, and that summer my agent dumped me. I coasted on savings and posted updates on my Third Eye feed—mostly me lifting weights, going to physical therapy—but my followers were dwindling. I watched my feed drop below a million. Then I started bartending at Red Lobster, serving old biddies who had no clue who I was, and it depressed me enough to call the lodge and agree to work a season.

Rick, the mountain manager, wanted me to give extreme lessons. He figured he’d cash in while I was still alive in people’s memory.
Extreme ski with Ronnie Hawks: Big Snow Gold Medalist and Xtreme Games Champion.
I agreed, and though Third Eye’s focus fades as quickly as the next viral video, it worked. Old fans logged on to my feed and actually came to the mountain to learn tricks from me.

It wasn’t an extreme class. No cliffs, no 540 tail grabs or Lincoln loops, nothing that could break a neck or put someone in the hospital. What we had was a groomed slope with a couple packed jumps where I taught aging millennials how to do a daffy, a spread eagle, a backscratcher for the most advanced. We had a rail and a half-pipe, and I demonstrated combo grinds, watching as one after the other busted their asses. Every now and then I’d get a kid who wanted me to teach him a switched cork or backflip, and I’d put my glove beneath my chin, out of camera range, and point at my eyes. “Sorry, man, not allowed,” I’d say, which was my way of letting him know that if it wasn’t for the contacts, I’d have done it. The lodge made us keep them in so skiers could beam into any lift operator’s eyes and see the unbroken lines of snow or follow ski patrol to find out where the powder runs were. That’s a joke now—our streams are basically a bad version of the nature channel. You can watch empty ski lift after empty ski lift if that’s what gets you off, maybe see a single coyote make its way through the mush.

I made good tips and usually got free drinks. Everyone wanted to know about the accident, what it felt like to drop off that cliff, go tumbling halfway down a rock face, how I could ever bring myself to put on skis again. If they were fans, I’d drag the story out for as many rounds as I needed to get plastered.

“It hurt like hell,” I’d tell whoever was buying. It sucked. But your bones healed and you got over it, because you don’t give in to fear—not in life and not in extreme powder. “Give in to fear and you might as well give up on living,” I’d say, just like I had in all the post-crash interviews. People wanted to hear that my crash was a metaphor for their lives: overcome the odds; don’t give up no matter how hard you fall. It was symbolic to them, and they’d go back to their office jobs imagining they were applying my philosophy when they were turned down for a promotion. What they didn’t want to hear was how my bones screamed at night so bad I had to smoke enough weed to get a busload stoned to fall asleep; how maybe I’d put on skis and do a rail slide, but there was no way I’d ever go off a cliff again; how my career officially ended when I fucked up that jump, and all that was left for me was a stupid extreme class, a couple last retrospectives, and free drinks at Jerry’s Lodge.

When people still remembered me, I could end a night with a snowbunny. We’d take the shuttle down to Bear Ridge and the girls would run their hands over my scars and see the tattoos I’d gotten inked to cover the worst of my wounds. “Feel this,” I’d tell them, guiding their fingers along the firebird that spreads its wings across my left hip. Sympathy medicine, Jerry, the old bartender, used to call it. He said the crash was the best thing that ever happened to me. “Man, if I could go home with as many chicks as you, I’d ski off a cliff any day.”

“Yeah right,” I’d say, thinking,
No you wouldn’t
. Not if you knew what it was like to spend three years in recovery you wouldn’t, not if you had to learn to walk again you wouldn’t, not if you knew how bones can scream, you sure fucking wouldn’t.

*   *   *

THE WINTER AFTER
I got out of recovery, X-Sports did a final documentary on me, pitched as a comeback story. When I get in a real dark place, I’ll open a brew, vape some medical, and watch it. The first half shows me stomping every mountain known to man. It’s sick. I achieved first descents on every continent; fucking dominated big mountain skiing. There’s no doubt I was the best extreme skier out there. Then we hit
the fatal mistake
. Usually I’ll fast-forward through that section—but nights when I’m real low I’ll just sit there, the weight of Sour Diesel keeping me pinned. I see myself heading toward the cliff I never should’ve taken. I’d spotted the jutting ledges from the helicopter, marked it as a no-go, but the mountain stoked my ego and, in a split-moment decision, I wrecked my life thinking I could conquer anything. Fast-forward through my recovery, my parents saying they know I’ll pull through, my buddies saying I’m the gnarliest skier alive and there’s no way I’m ever going to stop rocking trails. And then there’s me, learning to walk again, three years sped up to make it look like five minutes. The doctors predicted I’d never walk, but I fought against it, stopped taking the drugs, chewed through the pain to avoid the sleepy numbness, forced myself to try. The video doesn’t show any of that, just hints at my return to skiing as I take my first steps out of the hospital.

The biography ends with me getting back on my skis and teaching my pathetic extreme class. “Nowadays, Ronnie’s getting his confidence back and teaching a new crop of skiers how to tackle the mountains he once conquered.” There’s a clip of me doing a fakie off a rail and a small group of students clapping. “He’s getting ready to take on his old nemesis, and when he does, you can bet we’ll be there.” They fade out on the Neacola range, the very mountain that ate me, and the implied promise that I’ll rise to fight that cliff again. And that’s it: a comeback story without a comeback. When I didn’t return to extreme skiing, the interviews stopped. If I wasn’t willing to risk my life, the media wasn’t interested in following me. No blood, no money.

A year later the thaw began and I got a pass from Mother Nature. I escaped with the dignity of my promised return; it wasn’t my fault I never went back, just the sorry state of the environment. But everybody knew the truth—my buddies, the videographer, big mountain skiers like Ethan Perdergast and Sean Godly—the sky could’ve dumped snow for the next hundred years, and I never would’ve gotten into another copter to pick my line toward that cliff.

*   *   *