How Not To Fall by Emily Foster (4)

“No. What do you say before you touch the wall?” Charles says.

For the first time, I’ve just put my hands on the rough holds that are bolted to the climbing gym wall. I’ve spent the last forty-five minutes renting equipment, putting on gear, and getting the climbing gym’s official orientation and belay training, followed by Didactic Dr. Douglas’s additional Scout Safety lesson. There was a slight risk of me getting bored, and then I realized Mr. SafetyPants’s lecture was the only thing standing between me and the terrifying prospect of actually climbing up this wall.

But now I’m tied in and ready to go. Tied in means there is a rope that goes from a knot in my harness, forty feet up to the ceiling, where it loops over a pulley system, and comes back down forty feet to Charles’s hands. This rope and those hands are supposed to stop me if I fall off the wall. Otherwise, I plummet to my death. So that’s nice.

But right now I have two feet on the ground, and I’m being scolded by Charles. “Annie, what do you say?”

“Sorry. On belay?”

“Belay on.”

“Okay.”

“No, you say, ‘Climbing.’ ”

“Right. Um. Climbing.”

“Climb on.”

So I start to climb.

It is much. Much. Harder than it looks. I move like a vertical tortoise, everything in slow motion as I search for holds that look remotely big enough. And then every time I move my feet, I have to look down and search for a foothold within reach before I can move. I’m making progress though. I feel like I’m maybe ten feet off the ground when Charles calls, “Annie, I want you to let go, keep your feet on the wall, and sit down in the harness. When you let go, say, ‘falling.’”

I turn and look down—and I’m mortified to see that my feet are maybe three feet off the floor. “Why?”

“So you can learn to trust the gear. It’s much easier to do by choice the first time than because you fall.”

“Um. Okay.” But my fingers don’t want to let go of the holds I’ve been clinging to all this time. They really just don’t want to.

Charles is patient. “In your own time. Fear is perfectly rational until your body learns to trust the gear and your partner.”

I try letting go with one hand. That’s fine. I try letting go with the other. That is also fine. It’s letting go with both hands that’s difficult, and my arms are starting to burn with the effort of clinging like a brontosaurus to the wall. “Okay, I’m letting go,” I say.

“Say, ‘falling.’”

“Okay.” My arms are trembling now. “Okay.” I take a deep breath. This is not a big deal. Even if I actually do fall, it’s literally, like, four feet. “Okay. Falling.” And I let go of the wall, grab on to the rope, and sit like I’m sitting in a chair, my feet still on the wall. The rope stretches and swings a little. My ass is, like, three feet off the ground.

This is nothing! It was easy! I throw Charles an ecstatic smile. He smiles back and says, “You don’t have to hold the rope. Let your hands relax.”

“Oh!” I let go of the rope and drop my hands to my sides. I bounce my toes against the wall, swinging in the harness. “This is fun!”

“It is fun. Care to go higher?”

“Right on!” I reach forward and can’t grab any holds. “How do I get back on?”

I’m looking at the wall as he answers, but I can hear the smirk in his voice. “From where you are now, you can put your feet on the floor and start over.”

“Arrite, smartypants.” I follow his instruction and start over. It’s easier on my second try; I don’t have to spend as much time searching for big handholds, and I don’t have to look down at my feet as much.

But gravity, man. Not just a good idea; it’s the law. It seems to me that the higher I get, the more the Earth is pulling me back down. My muscles move as if through sludge. My brain is slow and my body unresponsive, my arms trembling, my fingers unsteady. Nothing seems to work up here; it’s just too high. Humans are not meant to function this way.

I call down to Charles, “Ummmm, I think this is high enough.”

“You’re only halfway up,” he calls back.

“Yeah. Well. Halfway is pretty high. So. I think I want to come down now.” There is a thin trembliness in my voice that I attribute to the extreme altitude. I’m about a hundred feet off the ground.

“I think you can do one more. See that big red hold about three feet from your right hand? You can get that one.”

“Uhhhh . . .” I don’t think I can get that one. Not because my arm is too short to reach it, but because my right hand seems to be Velcroed to the big blue one it’s currently on.

“You can come down if you like, but I think you can get that red one. It’s a bucket, you could fit your whole hand in it.”

“Okay,” I say. And I stop thinking and just reach for the red bucket. My fingers sink deeply and solidly into it and I pull myself a few more feet up the wall. My pulse is pounding in my throat, and I’m breathing like I just sprinted a mile. I press my body against the wall. I had initially been concerned about Charles watching me be a beginner at this, but that tiny worry has been completely subsumed by primal, life-threat fear.

“How about the green one on your left?” Charles calls. “The green one just below the blue crater. See it?”

“No. Where would my feet go?”

“Just stand up on your left leg. Straighten that knee and reach for the green one.”

I turn my face to the left and see the green one. I don’t think, I just reach and grab. And somehow my knee is straight, and my hand is on the green one. “Oh my god,” I whimper. “This is really high.” I close my eyes to stop myself from looking down.

“Two more, then you’re there,” Charles calls from about seven hundred feet below me. “See that big one on your right? That’s got a big concave surface on the far side. Put your fingers in that pocket.”

I see the hold he means. It doesn’t look promising, just a bump on the wall, but fine. Whatever. If I’m going to die up here, let it be because I tried and failed, not because I gave up.

“Okay,” I pant to myself. “Okay.” I reach. My fingers touch the hold, but I can’t get to the far edge of it. I have never worked so hard physically in my life—not so much because it’s physically demanding, though it is, but that it’s demanding and also ten thousand feet off the ground.

“Um,” I call to Charles.

“If you step up and get your weight off your left foot, you can reach it,” he instructs.

If I take my weight off my left foot, then only my left hand and my right foot are on the wall. Two points of contact are not enough. I am not going to do that.

But I can stand en pointe in my rented climbing shoes. I tried it when I first put them on. The rubber sole is so stiff, I can stand on the very tips. So I relevé to the point of the shoe, gain the necessary two inches, and reach the pocket behind the hold and pull my weight up with an unattractive grunt. The air must be thin this high off the ground. That would explain why it’s so hard to breathe.

“Nice,” Charles calls. “You’ve got this. See the giant one right at the top? That’s it. That’s the goal. Go get it.”

Easy. I straighten my knees, reach up, sink my left hand into the topmost hold, and go, “WOO-HOO!” I’m smiling uncontrollably, even as my lungs are laboring to keep my muscles oxygenated.

“Nice job,” Charles calls up. “Now say, ‘Take,’ and sit down in the harness.”

“Take,” I say, and I bend my knees into the harness without letting go of the wall. I hear Charles’s laugh drifting up from the canyon far below. I stand back up and call, “It’s not funny!”

“You haven’t got my view,” he calls back. “Try again. Say ‘Take,’ let go, and sit down in the harness.”

The trick is not to think about it. You just do it. You do the irrational, stupid, ridiculous thing of letting go of the wall you’re clinging to thirty-five thousand feet above the ground, and sit back into empty space.

I do it.

And it’s easy. The rope stretches a little, but I’m totally secure.

“Let go of the rope, Coffey.”

Woops. I let my hands dangle at my sides. My palms are burning and my forearms are trembling.

“Now keep your feet on the wall and walk yourself down as I lower you. When you’re ready, say, ‘Lower.’”

“Go slow, please?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, lower.”

“Lowering.”

He does. I descend only slightly faster than I went up in the first place. It’s bizarre to drift downward this way, my feet guiding me along. When I reach the ground, I hold the rope again as I put my feet on the floor—and then realize what I’ve done and let go.

Then I look up at the wall, all the way to the ceiling.

I climbed that.

My muscles are shaky, my blood is tanged with adrenaline, my lungs are still working like bellows, and I feel alarmingly close to tears. I did it!

“You did it,” Charles says.

I turn to him with wild delight. “I did it!” I cry, throwing my arms around his neck. I’m rewarded with a bear hug, the rope sandwiched between us.

When he lets me go, I bounce on my toes and say, “I wanna do it again!”

“You will,” he says. “But take a break, and then we’ll switch. You belay me.”

My smile vanishes. “I belay you?”

He nods. He’s still smiling, and he’s undoing the figure-eight knot that’s holding the rope to my harness. “You belay me.”

He lets me rest for a few minutes—I have some water, I waggle my forearms and try to move more blood to them—and then he ties me in to the belay end of the rope, saying things like, “Never let the lines cross,” and I laugh, but apparently he’s never seen Ghostbusters. Then he also ties me to a rope that’s bolted to the floor.

“What’s the anchor rope for, young Coffey?” he asks. It’s a pop quiz.

“Uhh . . .” I look at the system of ropes. Floor, to me, to pulley on the ceiling, to . . . Charles. Probably twice my mass in meat and bone on the far end of this rope I’m tied to. “Oh. Gravity. If you fall suddenly, I’m in the air.”

He nods approvingly. “So where should you stand relative to the anchor?”

I think through what would happen if he fell.... “I should be right under the top rope, with the anchor rope already taut, so there’s no slack there.”

He nods again and says, “They don’t give these honors degrees to just anybody.”

Then he pulls slack into the top rope, which is looped through a belay device, which is clipped to a carabiner on my harness. The whole system seems insane to me, but clearly, it works. “Show me how you take up slack,” he says.

I show him, pulling the rope through the device and locking it down. And again. And again.

“Good,” he nods. “Let’s do it! On belay?”

“Belay on,” I say with an intrepid smile.

He puts his hands on the wall and says, “Climbing.”

“Climb on.”

He’s fast. Shit. I take up slack as fast as I can, but I’m behind. “Wait!” I call, “I can’t keep up.”

He pauses and looks down at me. “You’re doing fine.”

I do not, I do not, I do not want to be responsible for the tragic death of Charles Douglas. I pull the rest of the slack out and say, “Okay.”

“Climbing,” he says.

And he waits.

“Annie. Climbing.”

“Oh! Climb on. Sorry.”

He begins to climb again, a little more slowly, I think, and I keep up, taking up slack as he goes.

It’s an odd sight to stand below a climber. Mostly what you see is their butt. Charles has an amazing butt. He’s wearing outdoorsy hiker pants with legs that zip off to convert to shorts, and a T-shirt that looks approximately as old as I am. The harness makes his pants bunch in unflattering ways as he climbs. And yet he’s a beautiful sight, fluid and balanced. He moves like he’s floating up the wall. His forearms and hands are perfectly steady, so unlike the way mine felt as I climbed—they’re also massive and powerful, unlike mine, so that might explain at least some of the difference.

He calls down, “Little slack.”

“What?”

“Slack. The rope doesn’t have to be taut.”

“Oh.”

I loosen the rope, and he says, “Thanks. Climbing.”

I catch it this time. “Climb on!”

He gets to the top in no time and has barely broken a sweat.

“It’s your big moment!” he calls then, standing confidently on two invisible chips on the wall, fifty thousand feet above me. “I’m going to say, ‘Take,’ and let go, and you’re going to lower me, just as I did you.”

“Okay,” I announce. “I’m ready.” I’m locking the rope down ferociously, my feet spread wide. I keep my eyes on him.

“Take.”

He lets go—and I fly off my feet with a “Waugh!” until I’m tethered between the top rope and the anchor rope. Now we’re both dangling from opposite ends of the rope, which I’m still holding locked down with both hands. He’s laughing. I am not. If I let go of the rope, I fall about two feet, and he falls more than twenty.

“Sorry!” I call.

“No problem,” he says, smiling down at me. “Next time, brace yourself, Bridget.”

“Who’s Bridget?”

“I’ll explain later. Just, when I say, ‘Take,’ next time, sit down in your harness the way you sit down up here. Got it?”

“Got it.” I’m still dangling between the two ropes, holding on for dear life—my own and his.

“Okay, let’s try again,” he says, and he gets back on the wall—how did he do that?—and climbs enough to let me down to the floor and put a little slack in the top rope.

“Right. Ready?” he says. “Sit down in the harness.”

I do, and the top rope tightens between us, almost pulling him off the wall. “Shit,” he calls. “Not yet.”

“Oh my god, sorry!” If I had a hand that wasn’t occupied with preventing Charles from a thirty-foot free fall, I would facepalm.

“My fault, I was unclear.” (It so wasn’t his fault.) “When I say, ‘Take,’ keep the rope locked down and sit down in the harness.”

“Okay. Ready when you are.” Rope locked. Knees bent. Anchor rope as taut as I can get it.

“Okay. Take.”

As he lets go, I sit, and he only goes down a couple of feet before the rope catches him. And both my feet are still on the floor. My heart is beating just as fast as when I was at the top.

“Well done,” he says. “Now when I say, ‘Lower,’ you say, ‘Lowering,’ and just gradually let out the rope. Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Lower.”

“Lowering.” I feed the rope out, keeping the pressure as steady as I can, though the nylon is burning against my already sensitive palms. It’s a little jerky, and I slip once, but he makes it down in one piece. When his feet touch the ground, I am elated. Dr. Charles Douglas put his life in my hands, and I did not kill him.

“This is fun,” I say.

“It is fun. Want to climb another wall?”

 

We each go about five times. By the end of that, my palms are red and throbbing, and my arms feel like they’ve been turned to rubber and then set on fire. I think this might also describe the smell emanating from my sweaty, disgusting armpits. About midway through, I took off my T-shirt—a pink one that reads NICE WORLD—LET’S MAKE IT WEIRDER that my mom got me when I graduated from high school—because it was literally soaked through, like somebody threw a bucket of warm water at my back.

So I’m there in yoga pants, a sports bra, and a climbing harness, looking . . . well. I want to tell you I look powerful and sexy, like those women in commercials for exercise equipment, where sweat beads on their toned, tanned abs as if they’ve just been Rain-Xed, but actually I look and feel like cooked spaghetti, pale and soggy.

I’m lying on my back on the thick mats that cover the entire floor of the climbing gym, trying to persuade more blood to flow into my throbbing arms. I tell Charles, “I had this gym teacher in middle school—”

“Middle school is how old?”

“I was, like, twelve?”

“Ah. Okay.”

“This guy was a meathead. And one day we’re all trying to do pull-ups, right, and a buncha twelve-year-old girls, we’re not going to be able to do many. But I couldn’t do any, not even one. And this meathead gets right in my face”—I put a hand over my face, to show where he stood—“and he yells, ‘Upper-body strength, Coffey!’ And all I remember is this huge, red, bulging face. It was like my lack of ability to do a pull-up actually made him angry. Why would it make him angry?”

Charles hands me a paper cup of water from the fountain and sits down next to me on the mat. He says, “I don’t know.”

“I can do the biceps kind of pull-ups now, but I still can’t do the front ones. And it’s those front ones you need for this, huh?” I lean on my elbow and sip the water.

“You don’t need them, but they help,” he says. “The biceps kind is a chin-up.”

“Oh. Those are the ones I can do. Chin-ups. I can’t do any pull-ups.” I turn my face to him. “Can you do any pull-ups?”

“I can,” he says, and I don’t think I’m imagining the smugness.

So I say, “How many?”

He gets up and walks over to the emergency exit door, over which is mounted a horizontal slab with a variety of grips molded into it. Charles jumps up and grabs it, and he starts doing pull-ups. Oh, this is hilarious and adorable. He’s showing off. When he gets to ten, I start counting out loud. At fifteen, he’s slowing down. He drags himself painfully through the twentieth, and then lets himself drop down to the floor. He walks back over the mats and sinks down next to me, breathing heavily and grinning. He lies back with his arms over his head, hands curled. There are veins standing out on his forearms. Dude. I know he was showing off, but it fucking worked.

“That’ll make the rest of today a challenge,” he says through his panting breath. He looks up at the ceiling and then puts his hands over his face and says, “God, what an idiot I am.”

“Who’s Bridget?” I say.

“Hm?” he says, dropping his hands to the mat again.

“Who’s Bridget? ‘Next time, brace yourself, Bridget.’”

“I ought not to have said that. It’s a stupid, rather mean joke.” He pauses for a minute and then says to the ceiling, “What’s foreplay to an Irishman?”

“Oh, I see. ‘Brace yourself, Bridget,’” I finish. “That’s pretty funny.”

We lie there, staring at the ceiling for a few more minutes, until Charles says, “Right, young Coffey,” as he drags himself up from the floor. “Let’s get out of here.”

He holds out a hand to me. I take it, very aware of his calloused fingers against my swollen, red palm, and between us we manage to get me to my feet. In the lobby, I return the rented harness and shoes while Charles packs up his stuff—he has his own shoes and harness and a chalk bag and all kinds of stuff.

I pull off my soggy socks, look at my mangled feet, and say, “Ah, memories.”

“Hm?”

“The bleeding blisters take me back to my innocent youth,” I tell him. “Pointe shoes.”

“You dance?” he asks.

I’m surprised by the question. “Wow, you really do know nothing about me.”

“That’s what I was saying. Well, that explains why you climb so well for a novice. I’d have thought you were having me on, if you hadn’t been so nervous about the height.”

“I climb well?” I can’t help it. It’s always exciting to hear I don’t suck.

“Balance, flexibility, strength, coordination—yes, you climb very well for a beginner. Practice would allow you to build the motor patterns so you can climb efficiently, and you’d construct decision maps for choosing moves, which would make you faster.”

“And I can stand on my toes!” I add as I slide into the flip-flops I wore to the gym.

He smiles at me. “Yes. I can’t do that.”

“But you can do pull-ups, which I’m sure more than makes up for it. Also, even without that you’ve got”—I stand on tiptoe in front of him and measure flat across the top of my head—“three inches on me.”

“But I can’t put my knee in my ear. A skill worth coveting. Ready?”

We walk out to his car and head home.

“Well, young Coffey, what shall we do next? Coffee on Thursday?”

“I can’t Thursday, I teach at the community center that night.”

“What do you teach?”

“Dance, dummy.”

“How should I know? You might have taught biology or maths or, for all I know, painting or poetry or Polish.”

“Just dance,” I say. “Ballet on Tuesdays, jazz on Thursdays, and this semester I rehearse on my own on Wednesdays too.”

“What are you rehearsing for?”

“Just the end-of-year recital. All the teachers do solos. It’s no big deal, but, ya know, you can’t just throw something together.”

“No,” he says. “You can’t just throw something together. Well. What time are you finished Thursday?”

“Seven thirty.”

“How about I meet you there—on Grant Street, right?—and we can get some food and work for a couple of hours. You’d be working anyway, right? Me too. Might as well work together.”

“Sure.” I smile. In my head I’m already texting Margaret: “WE MIGHT AS WELL WORK TOGETHER!!!” :-D

 

And when I get home, of course I dissect the whole adventure with Margaret.

“So he showed off,” she summarizes. “But mostly he was teachery.”

“Yes.”

“And on Friday he brought you food and said you were ‘his sort.’”

“Yes.”

“And you’re having a study table on Thursday.”

“Yes.”

“Dude, he likes you.”

“I think so too! But there isn’t anything.... Like you said, he built a wall.”

“Yeah, I don’t mean he likes you likes you, I think he wants to, like, mentor you as you launch into the world.” She makes a launching gesture that looks to me kind of a lot like masturbation, and we both laugh.

“There was totally mentoring happening on his side, at the rock wall,” I say to my bowl of tuna and greens. “And on my side, it was mostly, ‘I want to bite into your ropy forearms and run my fingernails down your treasure trail.’”

“I don’t know, that was just my imagination. He kept his shirt on the whole time.”

“Ah. That’s a shame. But it reinforces the ‘mentor not fuck-buddy’ hypothesis. I bet he’s got amazing abs, and he totally could have taken off his shirt and shown them to you.”

“Well, I’ll take what I can get.”