Unpossible (35 page)

The trail runs through a narrow neck, perhaps thirty yards wide, with sky on either side of them. The park pamphlet said that cowboys would fence the narrows and corral wild horses out on the lookout. The legend is that one winter the cowboys left for home and forgot to take down the fence. Naming the point came easy after that.

The land widens again, but then the trail ends in sheer cliff. Julia gestures toward a nose of rock jutting into the air. "My favorite spot," she says. She walks onto it like a veteran high diver. Venya’s stomach tightens to see her standing on that slender platform, sky above and below.

Suicide runs in the family, Venya thinks. Maybe she isn’t here to help Julia kill herself, but witness it. Or help Kyle cope with it.

But then Julia sits down, and slides forward so that her legs hang over the edge. Venya cautiously follows Kyle onto the shelf. They sit down on either side of Julia with their flashlights between their thighs, letting their feet dangle over a thousand feet of empty air.

They face south, looking out toward hazy mountains 50 or 60 miles away. Between Dead Horse and the mountains are 5,000 square miles of canyon country the park maps call Islands in the Sky. A good name. Venya looks down on an ocean of air, a stone basin walled by raked cliffs over 2,000 feet high. The bottom of the basin is a vast labyrinth of stone: mile-deep chasms; sharp reefs and table-flat mesas; crenellated buttes like castles surrounded by invisible moats.

At the very bottom flows the only water visible in this stone country, the olive green coil of the Colorado. The river winds out of the south, aiming lazily for Dead Horse Point. Two miles before it reaches the point, the river abruptly goosenecks, bending 180 degrees around a butte shaped like the prow of a ship, and disappears again into the southern maze of canyons.

Venya thinks of those horses, dying of thirst within sight of the river.

"Wow," she says.

"Mmm hmm," Julia answers.

They sit in companionable silence. In the fading light the land seems to flex and shift. The cliffs to their right are already in twilight, but the eastern faces glow with deep reds and smoldering oranges. Shadows run down the cracks and seams, pooling two thousand feet below at the darkened feet of the cliffs.

"This Calvinist goes to heaven," Kyle says.

Julia sighs, and then starts chuckling to herself.

"But instead of the pearly gates, there’s a fork in the road, and a sign pointing down each path. One sign says ‘Believers in Predestination’ and the other says ‘Believers in Free Will.’" Julia shakes her head, and Venya wonders how many times she’s heard this joke—and whether she heard it while awake, or as background chatter while she was thinking of something else.

"The guy’s always believed in predestination, so he goes down that road, and eventually he comes to a huge wall and a big door with the word ‘PREDESTINATION’ written over the top. He knocks, and an angel opens the door and says, ‘What brings you to my door, mortal?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, there were these two signs, and I chose the one that said predestination.’ The angel says, ‘You chose it? You can’t come in here, Bub,’ and slams the door. The guy’s heartbroken. Finally he trudges back to the crossroads and goes down the other road. Eventually he comes to another giant wall and a door that says ‘FREE WILL.’ He knocks and another angel opens the door and says, ‘Why did you come this way, mortal?’ And the guy says, ‘I had no choice!’"

"Slam," Julia says, and laughs.

Venya laughs with them, but she wonders at these two odd, grown children. Orphans, really. Maybe they like the joke because they share the certainty that the universe will screw them over. No—that it already has.

Venya scootches forward and leans out over her knees, staring down. A thousand feet below is a pink shelf perhaps two miles wide and perhaps another thousand feet above the river.

"That’s the White Rim Trail," Kyle says. He means the pale thin track that runs along the shelf like an old surgical scar. "Jeep road from the uranium-fever days. I always meant to drive that. I’ve never even gotten down to the rim."

"There’s always the quick way down," Venya says, and Kyle laughs. "One gust of wind."

"Stop it," Julia says.

Kyle says, "When we were here when I was a kid I used to scare myself by thinking of the rock snapping off under my feet, like in a Roadrunner cartoon. I’d hang there in the air for minute, then thwip! A little puff of dust where I hit."

"Bury you right there in your silhouette-shaped hole," Venya says.

"With a gravestone that says, ‘Ouch!’"

"Stop it, both of you!" Julia says. She pushes back from the edge and her flashlight topples and starts to roll. Kyle snags it before it reaches the edge.

"Careful," he says.

Venya says, "Jay, what’s the matter?"

"We should head back now," she says evenly.

Kyle doesn’t answer.

"It’s getting cold," Julia says.

"I’m fine," Kyle says. "I’d like to stay out here a while longer."

"Let me take her," Venya says to him, and realizes she’s slipped back into talking about Julia as if she isn’t there. She quickly adds, "Jay and I need to talk some more physics, right Jay?"

Kyle laughs. "Liar." He squeezes Venya’s arm, a silent thanks. The man’s been on duty for more than twenty years, Venya thinks. Walking Julia home is the least she can do. And she and Julia do need to talk: The light is fading, and the pot probably won’t last much longer.

"Are you sure?" Julia says to Kyle.

"Of course. Here, take my jacket." He starts to untie the gray fleece from around his waist.

Julia walks behind him and squeezes his neck. "Always the good little brother." She bends and kisses the crown of his head.

Venya’s forgotten how quickly darkness falls in the desert. The sun drops behind some far ridge and suddenly Venya can barely see Julia beside her.

Venya clicks on her flashlight and plays it over the trail. After a few minutes of walking she says, "You sounded scared when you called me, Jay."

Julia doesn’t answer. For a moment Venya thinks she’s disappeared again, but then she makes a sound like a sob. "I’m so sorry, Vee. It wasn’t fair to call you."

Venya wants to see her face, but resists the urge to lift the flashlight. "I promised to come back," Venya says. "If you ever got lost." So lost in her head that she’d never be able to tell anyone when she wanted out, when she wanted to end it. "You said you were afraid of not having a choice."

"That’s not what I’m afraid of anymore," Julia says.

"What, then?"

Julia walks on in silence. She still hasn’t turned on her flashlight. Venya feels for the lump of the joint in her jeans pocket. "You want me to light up?" she asks.

After a few seconds Julia says, "Sorry, I ... When I woke up and saw we were at Dead Horse, I knew what he was thinking about. The last good time we had."

"He told me about that," Venya says. "The vacation before your mom died."

Another long silence. Venya thinks they’re passing through the narrows, but it’s hard to judge in the twilight. She thinks of the mustangs, made stupid by a simple barrier of crossed logs, unable to escape without someone to guide them.

Venya touches her arm, and Julia says, "The path out is the same as the path back. It’s laid out like a map ... "

"Stay with me, Hon. No math now. Tell me why you called me."

"He’s so tired," Julia says. "You can’t see it—he’s being Kyle for you. But you can’t see him like I do. It’s like time travel. Every time I come back, he seems to be aging so much faster."

"Julia?"

Julia stumbles against something on the trail and rights herself. "He couldn’t tell me, of course. He knows how important the work is to me. But I was so afraid he’d leave me before you got here, and without him ... I’m very close, Venya."

Venya stops but Julia keeps walking automatically, her voice growing softer. "The math is ... the math is laid out like ... "

Venya seizes her arm, jerks her to a halt. "Julia!"

She says nothing.

"Julia, I need you to snap out of it. Listen to me." She shines the flashlight in her face, but Julia’s staring into nothing. No, not nothing. The map of the world.

Venya pushes down on her shoulders. "Sit here. Don’t follow me. I’ll be right back." Julia lowers to the ground, her knees up by her chin. "Good girl. I’ll be right back."

Soon, Venya will find his flashlight on the shelf of rock, turned on and pointing into empty air. Sometime after that, when the park rangers and police have finished with their questions and she’s signed the papers that Julia cannot, she’ll find the binder that Kyle set out for her. She’ll turn to the pages about meals, and make Julia her breakfast.

Now Venya turns and begins to jog back the way they came, the flashlight beam jumping from rock to bush to gnarled juniper. Behind her, Julia rises and begins to follow.

In the Wheels

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of the amber, out of the midst of the fire ... and this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man ... Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.

—Ezekiel 1:4-5, 20

I
t was just a car.

"No!" said Zeke from underneath it, "it’s more than that, Joey. It’s fucking perfect."

We were fifteen. Zeke had found a huge underground vault, a crypt of old cars in the City, and he had dragged me out there to hold the lantern while he checked it out. I was supposed to be on the way to my Uncle Peter’s farm to help bring in the hay.

"Zeke, don’t be crazy. Let’s get out of here." The City was death, everybody knew that. I could feel the germs and the rads crawling across my skin. We were going to be dead in three days with huge welts all over our skin. Superstitious, I know.

Zeke could always get me to do stuff I never would have done on my own. He would say something like, why don’t we go up and sit on the white highways; and even though I thought it was a completely stupid idea, I would go. Or he would say, let’s go into Dead City and look for a car, and even though nobody’d lived in The City since before the Cold, I would say all right, and we’d go.

And here I was.

The car looked to me like a crumbling wreck. It was a big Chevy, which Zeke pronounced "Shev-ee" like his father Frank. The tires were flat and rotted out, the paint job was webbed with cracks, and the stuff on the inside was all split and pitted.

Zeke rolled out from beneath the car and grinned. "Don’t be such a little girl. The block’s intact. It’ll work."

"You’re crazy," I said. The car looked nothing like the chariots they raced on the white highways, and I told him so. "Besides, how are you going to get it out of here?" We’d had to dig our way through rubble ourselves, and I saw no way to get this heap up to the surface.

"Leave that to me," he said. I should have known then that he was serious. There was no natural way to move that much rock out of the way, much less carry the car up.