I sat on a stone bench in the courtyard behind our house and watched our robust koi swim about; the randomness of their movements soothed me, and on this sullen Saturday I was eager to unclench my mind and allow a few pebbles of inspiration to fall into my consciousness, because I needed a breakthrough, because for a month now Tai Ping had beaten me to every punch, and there were mutterings – in reality there were no mutterings, only the taut sound of a truth ripening in the collective awareness – that Tai Ping had surpassed his mentor. I was sitting quietly, hands on my knees, head heavy with thought, when Percy wobbled across the gravel and laid one of her warm hands on the back of my neck, and asked me if I was still afraid of heights, and her impudent tone clashed so violently with my anxious cerebrations that I became angry, and told Percy that a truly intelligent man has access to his entire consciousness, and nothing inside him is beyond remediation.
Her neat trick was making it a matter of honor. My objections to her salesperson colleagues, who bounced around boardrooms and ballrooms like fragrant, overstuffed children, gabbing for hours on end about golf and wines, were met with, “Well, if you’re afraid, we can cancel.”
Percy referred to the Colorado trip as a time of transformation and renewal, of fresh perspectives and sweeping change; as it was a gift from her company, I could not scuttle it on financial grounds. I tried to explain that a crisis at work precluded my attendance, but she only pressed her berry-bright lips together and shook that great head slowly from side to side, and told me that a rest would do me good. Perhaps I began to believe her! Perhaps I began to hope that on some hygienic mountaintop I would be struck by the inspiration that my faithful koi had lately withheld, and would descend with my eyes aflame, clutching algorithmic thunderbolts, a visage so stern and terrifying that even Tai Ping’s narrow eyes would widen in awe.
The phobia struck as I inched down the gangplank, in the shadow of Percy’s fragrant bulk. As we took out seats, the fuselage seemed to hiccup and undulate like some enormous throat; giddy blue seats shoved one another so that I found it nearly impossible to squeeze into my row. The pilot blurted muzzy syllables in an aftershave baritone. Nobody seemed to know or care what he’d said. The passengers shuffled in, glassy-eyed and abstracted, like cattle cramming into the slaughterhouse car. In order to quash the bubble of panic in my throat, I told myself I’d solve my work problem before we touched down in Colorado. Yes, that was better. I buckled up and attempted to slip into the world of pure thought, but a man with a chin like a bubble threw himself back in his seat, jamming his headrest into my nose. His cowlick hovered before my watering eyes like a vortex of stupidity. The flight attendant neglected to make him sit back up before takeoff. I hated Percy already for dragging me to this ridiculous boondoggle. The plane rattled down the runway, screamed, and yanked its feet from the ground.
I turned resolutely to my problem. Tai Ping was in the office this very moment, working in his frictionless, noiseless, heatless way, a model of intellectual and physical efficiency, to trump me. As the space allotted to my lap was insufficient for my computer, I made several sketches of the problem (so complex that the first order of business was to frame it in some comprehensible way) on the cocktail napkins, but then Percy had a sinus attack from a sudden change in cabin pressure and, resourceful girl, she pressed my napkins to her nose a split second before she was convulsed.
When Percy removed the napkins I saw my prim UML objects drowning in a mass of translucent goop. I considered asking her to open the second napkin for a moment so I could fix the notations in my memory, but I knew she’d guffaw something about my nerdiness, so I desisted.
As the plane descended, it groaned like a bully forced to release a limp wimp. Percy leaned across me and snapped open the shade. “Look at the Rockies, my dear, they’re magnificent.”
A bubble had formed in my right-hand Eustachian tube; no matter how I swallowed or chewed the air, the pressure only grew more intense. Then, with a hideous creaking sound, the bubble squeezed itself into some dark cranny. The more I frowned and pounded my head, the more difficult it became to feel its presence. I thought of the Ceti eel slithering into Chekov’s brain while Khan, pectorals a-bulge, looked on; Percy shared with Khan a vigorous air and an affection for leather and wool, and I allowed myself to briefly hate her for the campaign she waged, by means overt and covert, against my peace of mind.
Percy turned to the man in the aisle seat. “Going on a little corporate retreat,” she said, in her best woman-of-the-world tones. “My company is picking up everything, don’t you love it, not to worry a bit about money?”
The man muttered something indistinct.
“My husband, can you believe it, has never been higher than sea level in his entire life? And he was at MIT. It’s absurd, someone with his intellect, so afraid.” Guffaw trailing into bemused hum.
The man muttered something else.
I opened my eyes. Ribbons of beige light trailed from the oblong windows, mixing with the antiseptic blue. I did not look out. It was bad enough to feel the plane shifting, to get the sensation from the deepening hue in the fuselage that we were banking ground ward. I still had the two days in Colorado. I could solve the problem. Stay up nights. Sandbag the clever Tai Ping with meaningless tasks. And if I couldn’t solve it? Well, that wasn’t worth considering. The pilot gargled into the microphone. A gong sounded; passengers surged madly into the aisle. Percy shouldered a red-faced man backward and motioned with her hand for me to join her, join her.
Our room looked out on the granite jumble of the Rockies receding into the distance like some impassable, Olympian barrier. Percy was in raptures. Immediately upon arrival she struggled out of her blue jeans and donned a capacious pantsuit, the slacks fitting high over her stomach. While she hung up her clothes she babbled about the good time we were going to have, the drinks we’d quaff, the meals we’d maw.
“I have some kind of pain.” I grimaced. “Something terrible in my right ear.”
“From the flight?” Flash of pursed lips.
“It’s simply agonizing.”
“Chew some gum, silly. It’s air pressure.”
But after she’d emptied her purse on the bed we discovered there was no more gum. In my annoyance I stalked to the window where I watched geese bob in Crayola-blue water.
Strolling to dinner: I was panicked over my mind’s inability to function. That pocket of ache had spread across the right side of my brain. I involuntarily recalled a medical film of an epileptic whose hemispheres been surgically disconnected; after the operation two distinct personalities emerged and the patient had carried on a conversation with herself, the face below the bandaged skull twisting this way and that. The mosaics on the arched ceilings depicted various alpine scenes. From the center of these tiled cups there hung crystalline chandeliers, drizzling glitter into my eyes.
“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Percy said, adjusting her tomato-colored shawl.
The burnished doors of the elevator bonged open and we entered, rode upward (while Percy kissed at her reflection and made definitive marks along her upper lip with a pencil) and emerged on a stone terrace with misty clouds roiling only a few feet overhead. Percy snatched a flute of champagne and took three quarters of it in a drought, handed it to me, turned to a little man with a red beard and tiny eyes aglitter with avarice: “I can hand him anything alcoholic and I always know it’s safe. He doesn’t drink. Paul Zamm, meet my husband.”
Zamm trapped my hand in his broiling paw as he looked me up and down. “Meet my wife, Joan.” He never took his eyes off mine or indicated which of the women nearby was his wife. “You in sales, too?”
Percy rolled her eyes. “You kidding? Oh god no. He designs software. A genius.” she chortled.
“I won’t ask. You’ll talk all night, I know your type!” Zamm’s off hand palpated the vertebrae of a white-haired woman.
“And how are you?” The woman’s face was still shiny from a recent peel; as I cocked my head to pound again at my bubble, her implants made a wry smile in her plunged neckline.
“When did you get in?”
The woman nodded. “This morning. Paul wanted to do the train to the top of Pike’s Peak.”
“Oh, how was it?”
“I lost consciousness from the altitude,” Zamm said, giggling. “Sounds better than admitting that I had been drinking all day, and fell asleep.”
“Lush.”
“Do you know, the driver told us, anyone who ventures above 5,000 feet develops brain damage?” Zamm’s wife said. “Something about the oxygenation of the tissue, right? I told Paul that explains all those crazy mountain men.”
“How high are we now?” I said.
Zamm frowned and punched a query into his phone. “Too late!” He cackled. “We can’t be saved!”
“Get your picture taken yet?” Zamm’s wife said.
“Oh, god!” Percy seized my hand. “Catch up later?”
“Wait,” cried Zamm, rubbing the side of his nose. “How’d you do with virtualization?”
The photographer, an earnest- looking Asian with square trifocal lenses hovering before his sleepy eyes, put us against the stone railing and asked me several times (raising his hand as if pulling the strings on a marionette) to stand up straight. I resented him instantly. He reminded me of Tai Ping. I had once showed Tai Ping some sequences from the Pink Panther movies, a collection of those priceless battle scenes between Clouseau and Kato. Naturally I wept with mirth and expected Tai Ping, even if he missed Sellers’s subtle genius (twitching eyebrows, writhing mustache, lips puckering around some murdered syllable) to appreciate the slapstick combat; two men awash in feathers, shattering wooden screens.
“He said, ‘little yellow skin.’.” This from Tai Ping after the prolapse of an expressionless five minutes.
“Well, yes, but he’s a buffoon, you see.” I honked into my handkerchief, my cheeks a-quiver with suppressed guffaws.
“I find that offensive.” He stood and made for the door, his little back stiff with disapprobation.
The photographer asked me again to stand up straight.
“I am, damn you,” I said.
“He has a spinal condition,” Percy said.
“So sorry.”
“When did it get cloudy?” Percy said, through her fixed smile.
“Clouds roll down from the mountain.” The photographer adjusted us the way photographers always had, Percy at an angle and I facing the camera head on, my body positioned to make me look as wide as possible.
The photographer nodded with gratitude when Percy handed him a ticket from her purse. I dug in my ear, ground my thumb into the hinge of my jaw; was it possible that I was carrying around inside my head a small pocket of low pressure, stretching and deflating some crucial whorl of brain? Then there was a loud pinging sound which was picked up and repeated on the crowded balcony -- jewelry against champagne flutes.
“Dinner time!” Percy cried. “I’ll get us a seat. Refill my wine.” With this she took my face in her hand, compressed my cheeks, bussed me, and swung away through the crowd with ursine grace.
The reception dinner was one of those crowded affairs where conversation is made amid claustrophobic clusters of glassware; wine goblets, champagne flutes, the stolid water glasses with their dwindling pats of ice, the carafes of wine which constantly crowd one’s elbow. They brought out the courses as the band punched and tinkled through a series of muzak standards. Percy was already warmed up with her third wine and, casting out her stentorous net, raked in four people to her left with an amusing story about my fear of heights. I turned deliberately to my right. The woman there asked me a number of questions which, due to the noise, I failed to interpret correctly and before I knew it I was inveigled into a discussion about the chemical breakdown of lactose in the intestines. I could hardly hear my interlocutor (whom I will not bother describing except to say that her hair fell about her face like a potted vine), what with my damaged right ear and Percy’s nonsensical bleating in my left. Not that it mattered. People shouted. Bosoms heaved in glittering dresses. After a few cursory attempts everyone talked about whatever they liked. It was no more or less edifying than dining with a group of chimpanzees.
A small Frenchman sat on the other side of Percy, one of those Gallic bantams whose every expression conveyed resignation to his own desires and absolute intolerance of the world’s attempts to thwart him. His wife had coarse tresses and an aristocratic brow that lay across her nose at a perfect right angle, like a capital “T”. Francois and Anne-Marie. He wore a gray suit and a checkered shirt open two buttons at the neck, revealing a clipped carpet of chest hair. When he took a sip of his vodka-tonic he invariably shot his cuff to look at his Rolex. Percy found him charming and kept telling him so. Several times he reduced her to helpless fits of laughter during which she palmed her mouth, holding held her thumb and forefinger in readiness to pinch shut her nostrils, presumably to prevent a sudden egress of wine, as she was nearly always in mid-swallow when Francois delivered one of his bellicose punch lines. All this was agony to me; cooped up with these fluttering, flightless brains while what I needed was quiet, the gathering thunderbolt, the feverish solution!
But was I capable of logical thought? I could not stop worrying about the idea of tissue damage at altitude. Had my delicate mental ecosystem been dealt the kill shot on that airplane? I had to get back to that hotel room! God knows what Tai Ping had accomplished already.
Percy begged me to take a quick nightcap with the Emmanuels. We sat at a wooden table next to a pulsating brazier. The mountains crowded around like unwanted guests trying to hear the punch line of some joke. Percy chided me for my poor sportsmanship, for not participating in the festivities. She was drunk enough that her left eyelid had begun to droop; I’d have to take her home soon. I imagined her staggering and babbling, imagined letting her fall with a turgid splash into the pond.
I was angry. It was high time I started respecting my own genius; by god, who knew what Tai Ping had already uploaded into the source control system? Yes. I had to go. So, with a limp hand extended to Francois I took my leave, I dragged my long feet over the bridge and down and one of those endless carpeted hallways seen in horror-movie hotels. And then? An email with good news! Tai Ping had suffered a bout of food poisoning and would be out tomorrow. And then? I opened my laptop and began to code. After three breathless hours pursuing the scent of a solution through thickets of data, through shifting swamps of refactoring, I stood up abruptly. Time to take a break. I sloshed some water into a rocks glass, and went to the window. I threw back the curtain to espy Percy on a chaise lounge below me, in the relaxed posture that women assume when they are getting a spa service, only Percy was being serviced by the Frenchman, who was pressing his tidy buns forward, squeezing himself into her overgrown womanhood. I recognized in the comedic mismatch of their physical proportions my own ridiculousness all these years, the nerdy ectomorph rebounding like a ninepin from his Reubenesque wife in his frenetic attempts to bring her to pleasure, and, judging from the horrified and enthralled expression which had overspread Percy’s face, the little Frenchman was experiencing the success which had always eluded me.
No. I delivered a slap to my hollow cheek. It wasn’t real. I looked again. My god, he was rather energetic, he had the stamina of a true sex maniac. I must think. Not get emotional. I must not let this cloud my thinking. It was all too convenient. Why did they choose just this spot, directly below the window, to enact their grotesque sideshow? What did this mean? Was she trying to make me jealous, to distract me from my work? Did she believe, with an arrogance typically female, that my only chance at happiness lay in servicing her emotional needs? Was this how she’d bring me back to her, make herself relevant again?
I went to the laptop. I didn’t think of Percy and the Frenchman immediately, but as I stared at the screen my finger crept to my inflamed ear and my heart began to race. I was unable to make heads or tails of algorithms that I had written only minutes earlier. My mind slipped back to what I’d seen. I jumped up and drew the curtain. They were smoking cigarettes, their exhalations hanging like twisted paper above their heads. Perhaps it was only a hallucination. Perhaps the stress of the trip, perhaps that bubble in the brain, perhaps some change in routine, had rendered me temporarily insane. Had she loved him long? Had she brought me here to get rid of me? Were there drugs involved? Potions and powders slipped from sleeves? I frowned and sniffed at my water glass.
I woke in the morning a free man. I’d gone to bed with visions of righteous freedom burning in my mind and this idea of burning emerged from the changing room of my dreams as a line of fiery sunshine that flickered along the ceiling. And then as I watched the slurping tongue of fire and tried to establish (as a warm-up to tackling my code) the meteorological and floral conditions that allowed it to make those uncanny thrusts along the ceiling, I had an attack. Old Pan came whirling through the door, jaunty and evil as ever, doffing his ridiculous straw hat, his timeless eyes staring into mine, and I was gasping on the bathroom floor while Percy bellowed, through a cloud of wine fumes, something about my breathing into the plastic sack with which she was trying to asphyxiate me.
“You’re doing this to me,” I gasped. “I’m wise to your game.”
“Try to relax and breathe,” Percy said.
At breakfast I was forbidden to touch the coffee. Percy buttered her first roll, and then used the knife to punctuate a lecture on stress. I needed to take better care of myself, etcetera. She looked splendid; her dark complexion glowed with rosy tints. Her eyes sparkled with a child’s luminescence. My ear still hurt. I felt my mind caving in upon itself like a black hole.
When Francois came into the ballroom, his boots scuffing the garish carpet, Percy gave him a perfectly modulated smile and asked him to sit down, please. No, he couldn’t stay, he and Anne-Marie were going hiking. And we?
“Oh, wonderful! We’re going on a hike, too. Who knew we’d choose the same activity?”
“Funny we never discussed that last night,” Francois said, looking visibly uncomfortable. “But we were too busy doing this.” He tilted an imaginary glass of wine.
“Doing what, exactly?” I said.
“Oh, do you feel poorly?” Percy said to Francois.
“You don’t?”
“I feel wonderful,” Percy said.
“And you must feel fine too,” Francois said to me. “Mister non-drinker.”
I tried to stare him down, but he was standing in a blaze of sunshine, and my eyes began to water uncontrollably, and when I raised my trembling coffee cup, he averted his gaze and made some joke about the tendency of the French to avoid pointless exertion.
The van took us across a craggy red ridge; we descended into an amphitheater of rock, and parked in an deserted parking lot. We disembarked.
“And who is afraid of heights?” The tour guide said, raising her weathered hand.
Percy pointed at me.
“Okay, we got one?”
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I am a vigorous man in the prime of life. Let’s go.”
I felt all my troubles stemmed from an inability act courageously, to wrest control from fate’s cold grasp. Would I just stand by while my wife boffed another man? Would I allow Tai Ping to chisel away at my feet of clay? I was devastated one moment, giddy the next. I felt capable of deeds heretofore reserved for fantasies; I began to picture a quick shove and a long, silent fall.
“Big talker,” Percy said.
“It is okay if I take pictures?” Francois had a camera slung around his neck, featuring a telephoto that must’ve been eight inches long. I wondered if Percy’s mind, as she admired the lens (“I’ll bet you could shoot just anything with that”), was calculating the diameter and length of the clammy tool in his shorts.
“Of course,” the guide said. “You should see the Japanese.”
“A bit of a stereotype,” Anne-Marie whispered, and I gave her a severe nod. I could revenge myself by seducing Anne-Marie. Ah, but she had no weakness for genius; look at Francois. I contemplated a rape and decided against it. I would avoid prison if possible. Had to keep a level head. Must not go giggling or barking mad, must go mad only on the inside. My revenge must be as elegant and cool as Percy’s provocation was obscene.
We went up a graded path, past several large outcroppings of rock against which the nimble Francois leaned Anne-Marie, taking pictures from all sorts of absurd angles. I tried not to ask about our elevation. Everyone else seemed fine. Percy, thick legs bursting from a pair of hiking shorts, pulverized the dirt with each step, panting like a locomotive as she made steady progress upward. The guide pointed out ponderosa pines, she pointed out lamb’s ear, aspen trees, and then, after a sudden turn, we came into view of a strange canyon. Spreading out below us at various distances were impossible vertical dimensions. A tiny pond closed its sightless eye as a cloud slid over the sun. The figure of a man, his arms and legs swinging, disappeared behind a low building. Even further away a man in climbing gear spidered up a wrinkled cliff. I felt my stomach turn and, before I could stop myself, I was pressed against the rocks behind us.
“Oh, his heights,” Percy said, twisting lips the color of old blood.
“Are you all right, sir?”
I couldn’t speak. My throat had been cemented over. The sunlight reached down and tickled me with thin fingers; my face was creased with a pleading smile.
“He’s had a bad time already,” Percy said. “He’s been working too hard.”
“We could connect with a tamer trail,” The guide said. “Why don’t we do that. This way, sir.”
Perhaps to reassure me, perhaps to distract me, the guide opened her map and pointed out with a calloused finger where we’d soon intersect a trail that ran, she said, “alongside a creek. Nice for everyone.”
I heard Francois, twenty paces ahead, groan and mumble something to his wife. She continued to ascend various rocks, she vamped from vertiginous perches for his massive camera. Francois spun his lens, he squatted and leapt upward, he ducked and dodged, he exclaimed, squinted at the sun, wiped his brow with a chamois which he kept in the breast pocket of his camp shirt. I staggered along the trail, as far from the edge as I could get, while the guide cupped my elbow. A fine position, this. Was I finished? Had Percy succeeded, like a modern-day Delilah, in robbing me of my powers? I tried to transform the clouds into software objects, I tried to imagine my way into a digital world where my problems could be solved, I beseeched my mind for some sign of its former splendor but got back only a dull ache and the sensation of oily smoke rising in my skull; I could not escape this oppressive reality.
We came back below the tree line. The shifting green light seemed to push the dirt around below my feet. Perhaps all I had left, like Samson, was a final press of the temple pillars. Only one chance, that was all I asked of life. Like a cloying melody, that vision of Francois and Percy recurred, it wove itself around my thoughts, Francois with his hips in motion and Percy with those legs thrust star-ward like twin telescopes; and now I pounded at my head for a different reason, and was told by Percy to let the bubble make a natural exit, but what I had in me now could only be blasted out, could only be shaken loose by some violent shock.
We came to a small clearing where the path forked. Both trails, the guide said, ran along the river – this one, as she’d promised (finger tracing the map again) went down while the other went upward a “few more thousand feet, to the waterfalls.”
“Is the upward trail difficult?” I said.
The guide shrugged. Her lower lip protruded. “Nah. I mean, not really, but if you have heights issues.”
“I’d like to take the upward trail,” I said.
“Now come on,” Percy said.
“Are you afraid?” I grinned. My face hurt.
“We can go that way if you want,” the guide shrugged and scuffed her feet.
“I don’t care,” Anne-Marie said.
Decision time: Francois or Percy? It was Percy’s fault, certainly, for dragging me on this trip and, by exposing me to these ruinous altitudes, turning my mind, my cornucopia of cognition, into a dry husk; her fault for the evil bubble in my ear, for the searing image of the chaise-boff which appeared ceaselessly before me. But still, she was my wife, after all – I was not one of those Hitchcockian monsters who calls his wife down to the basement so she can admire the grave he’s dug for her. No, I wanted to spare Percy, but she must be made to see, I must tell her in the silent language of horror, that I was not to be trifled with again.
“Some fine pictures up there, Francois.” As I let my eyes cycle through the granola guide, the severe Anne-Marie, the toady Francois; I could use his lust for the picturesque to get him alone.
“That may be,” Francois said, mopping his brow. “No offense intended but you are not much fun in this nature.”
“Let’s meet back in one hour,” I said. “Francois and I will go on up. Some lovely pictures there, I would imagine.”
“Are you sure?” Percy said.
“I can’t do that,” the guide said. “I’m responsible.”
“We’re in a public park. We can go where we like. Give me the map, please.” I snatched it from her hand. “One hour. We’ll go up for half an hour, then come back.”
“It’s fine.” Francois waved his hand, flipping his fingers upward like the bristles on a paintbrush. “I will take pictures, and he has something to prove, this man, I think.”
“I don’t mind going,” Percy said.
“You should keep Anne-Marie company.” I wanted to tell her she should be grateful I was sparing her bovine life, that she should be happy that I’d led her out to pasture instead of the slaughterhouse, but I desisted. I smiled. “I am excited to conquer one of my fears. Just the guys, hey?”
The map showed an unassuming black line that stretched through penciled trees, next to the gray band of a river. When we entered the trailhead there was very little dissonance between representation and inspiration. The trail was wide and the grade almost imperceptible. A small alpine stream babbled over the rocks. We stopped and splashed the cold water on our faces and then kept on. Gradually we came into regions more remote; the canopy overhead shut out the sky. The brook crept muttering away into the undergrowth. The grade grew more severe and our conversation (I was being as pleasant as possible), once fluid, now came in disconnected splashes. Francois, his pert buttocks pumping in green shorts, puffed his bearded cheeks and fell silent. There were switchbacks, and suddenly we were at the base of a massive frowning cliff whose fir trees jutted out like underbiting fangs.
“This is lovely,” Francois said. “I will take a few pictures.”
“Did you know, Francois that my wife planned your exhibition as a blow to my mental acuity?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Francois said, peering into his camera. The snaps of his remonstrating shutter hung in the air.
“Oh, I think you do,” I said.
He pressed on. I followed, a tuneless song whistling in and out of my lungs. The reduction in air pressure eased the pain in my ear and loosened the channels of my mind. I felt more comfortable. I attempted again to make Francois understand.
“Have you ever wondered, my friend Francois,” I panted, “The Faustus myth was never about the Satan, Il Duce, some divinity with a craving for souls, no, it’s about the willingness to make one’s bargains with the world. Like a bogeyman it guards, with its tale of a lost soul, the secret of personal power.”
“I am not a reader,” Francois’s voice brushed my face like a fog. “I am not liking all this talk by you. I may tell you frankly I find you unpleasant.”
I laughed. “Of course you do, my friend Francois.”
Through more switchbacks, along aspen-crowded tunnels, panting up a series of small hills (Francois’s little arms swinging from his narrow shoulders, his dainty feet crunching the dust. Oh, how I hated him). Then we turned and everything to our left fell away as if wiped clean by a giant hand. The plummeting space yawned below me, the air tugged at my pantleg. And there, perhaps a hundred yards distant or perhaps half a mile (it was impossible to judge the distance accurately), was another vertical face, the older brother of the first, orders of magnitude larger, menacing, richly forested with those vertical trees, each of the thousands my vision waving and undulating in the breeze. The effect was mesmeric, like the glittering scales of a serpent. I felt the remnants of sanity drain out the soles of my shoes, sucked up by the greedy mountain dirt. My papery heart crackled with each painful spasm. Still, I could not stop looking. To continue upward was impossible but to go back down was equally impossible. Something must change before we could go on. Time sloshed in its basin, hours splashed, minutes trickled. Had I already killed him? I began to pant; I pushed myself back against the rock. Carefully. Carefully. I opened my bottle of water and took a drink. And there was Francois, sitting on a rock nearby, framing that horrible sight with an eyepiece attached to his neck by a silver chain.
“Magnificent, I think, is the word?” he said. “You are not afraid?”
“Did you enjoy last night,” I said, my voice floating up from my belt. “Did you enjoy my wife?”
He did not lower the eyepiece. “Don’t be a fool.”
“It was grotesque,” I said. “But give her this. She did get my attention.”
“We were drinking a nightcap, nothing more.” He frowned and lowered the eyepiece. His puffy, ovoid eyes stayed fixed on my face.
“You drank your fill, from what I could see,” I panted.
“Perhaps you should see a doctor for your head.”
“And you must pay, Francois. You must pay.”
“I’m going back.” Francois grunted himself upright, fluffed his hair, which was like a puff of smoke in the slanting sunlight, and turned on the narrow pass. “I think that you are a little crazy.”
“Something must be done, Francois.”
“Look, what do you want me to say?” he half-turned, spread his hands. “Your wife is your business. She is nice enough, but too much for me. I would not know what to do with so much woman.”
He made as if to pass me, and I was filled with manic glee at the realization that he was in my power, the time was at hand. The time was at hand. I imagined my rigid fingers dive-bombing his little ribs, the electric stiffening of his body, the helpless giggles, his feet losing their grasp as I shoved him into space. I found myself sneaking behind him, my toes twinkling in my shoes, my arms above my head, fingers wiggling like worms. I suppose I looked at that moment exactly like Sylvester the Cat stalking poor Tweety Bird, and just as in those madcap cartoons, it was a chance movement that turned the tables; as I was preparing to pounce, to deliver him into the hands of green gravity, Francois spun to interject some axiomatic comment on the nature of women. His mouth was a pink hole in his beard. We collided. I rebounded. The lichen-covered rock slipped away from my feet. I pivoted backward and saw, in its upside-down splendor, the whispering mountainside, the wavering firs.
I expected to be dead in a matter of seconds. I even had a moment, god help me, where I thought of my life as one long joke culminating in this absurd punch line (the man afraid of heights goes off a cliff). Then I impacted the mountainside for the first time and I realized that Percy, clever clever girl, had won, had defeated me utterly. Then came the fast-whipping vegetation, my screams, my hopeless clutches, my somersaults suddenly and brutally arrested by the same trail some two hundred feet down the mountain. I did not even have the good fortune to black out. I stayed conscious while Francois explained over and over (to Percy, the guide, the medics) that I had tried to tickle him on the trail.
“Altitude madness,” someone said.
As they shut the doors on the ambulance I slipped into a daze; I saw myself in the hospital, hunched over my laptop where in a single incendiary session, lasting fourteen morphine-glazed hours, I would write over two thousand lines of code, and vanquish Tai Ping. Someone was clutching my hand. I squinted to make out the face, saw that familiar forehead, those soft jowls, covered with a black down that shimmered in the green light from the ambulance window. Her mouth was moving, and although I could not make out the words, I gave her a smile. If my arms were no longer functional she might have to serve as my amanuensis, because I could feel the ideas coming, really coming this time, marching across the darkness of my mind with the synchronized stride of soldiers on parade.
