Muscular Activity

Jake feels alive, at the edge, where he likes to be, but he’s also trembling.

  
Two months ago, Jake worked on the 28-member paint crew for the Golden Gate Bridge. Not a bad job, he’s had worse. Probably the fishery up in Alaska was the worst, couldn’t get the fish smell out of his clothes, his skin, mouth. Once he found a shiny silver fish scale in his ear. But listen, the color of the bridge isn’t golden. It’s reddish-orange, a hue that Jake stared at so long—eight hours a day—it made his eyes burn as if he stared at the sun. He lost count of how many times he walked the 1.7-mile-long bridge with a five-gallon bucket of International Orange paint. And it wasn’t how he thought: You don’t start at one end of the bridge and paint your way to the other, then turn around and go back the other way like a fucking machine. Thousands of rivets glue the bridge together, you paint those first because if they rust, the whole thing comes tumbling down, London Bridge style.

After he got the lay of the land, he quit, as was the plan. Recon task force, membership of one. Now he’s walking on the bridge as if he’s a tourist, two people between him and Melinda at the .2-mile marker. Members are already on the bridge, blocking traffic for the past half hour. Jake and his team, they’re the surprise. Bridge security doesn’t drive across for another three hours. Pretty lax, actually. He thought they’d patrol more, given the jumpers every year. He glances up, sees the foghorn mounted at the south tower—another one on the other tower—the horns emit different tones to guide the ships through dense fog. He has fond memories of those cold, foggy days. Two main cables cross along the top, 7,669 feet long and 36 and 3/8 inches in diameter. The cables, which look like sewer pipes, can bend 27 feet laterally to sway with the wind. Airway beacons top each tower to keep the planes from crashing into them. He’s grown intimate with the bridge and has a deep affection for it.

Jake has never held a job for long—by choice. When he starts to feel numb, he fires himself. If you stay too long, you fall into the habitus of that world, the language, the assumptions, the gestures, the value systems, and after a fairly short period, five, six months, you’re no longer aware of what you’re thinking or doing. He refuses to become dead while he’s still alive. Moves on when the humming aliveness fades. His daily check system: do you even know why you’re doing what you’re doing?

On the bridge, the wind is blowing 20 to 25 miles per hour, and he and the team wade through German, French, Chinese, Australian, Japanese, and languages Jake doesn’t recognize. The French makes him tilt his head, so it funnels in smoothly, the music that it is, and in his mind, he hears his mother. Sees her pretty oval face, her motherly, loving dark eyes. Ethiopian does the same thing because he hears his father. Rest in peace, dear parents.

Ropes around their shoulders, leather belts around their waists, hoods up, thin-soled shoes, jeans, layers of clothing, backpacks full of food, and army green vests stuffed with more food. Over the years, he’s worked as a carpenter, a dishwasher, a tile layer, a pool cleaner, legal assistant, fish cleaner, a bridge painter, and a notetaker at UC Berkeley. That job lasted the longest, three years because it was inherently changing; no day the same, and the massive amounts of knowledge—and wisdom, yes, he’d call it that—expanded his mind. Introduction to Business, Intro to Philosophy, Macroeconomics, Micro, Banking, Greek Mythology, Intro to Biology, Shakespeare’s Comedies and Tragedies, anything the college kids didn’t want to get their asses out of bed for, and were willing to pay for the notes.

Word got out. His notes were the best. He was meticulous, the notes were clear and detailed, you never had to go to class, and you could still get an “A.” Little pussies, missing out. He communed with some of the best minds in the world while they slept away their lives.

He rented a studio apartment on Telegraph Avenue and found a desk and chair abandoned on the sidewalk, along with a desk lamp, a small table, two wooden chairs, and a mattress. When the college kids head home in June, all this shit is dumped on the sidewalks. His apartment walls are thick with white paint, and the scratched wood floors creak and whine. One room, a little bathroom, a linoleum counter for a hot plate, and a mini fridge. Rent: $300 per month. Jake, 26 years old, a college dropout because he ran out of money, can now hold his own on the esoteric topic of 19th-century English literature and the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō.

He thought he could do the notetaking job for a long time, but one class got under his skin like a bad rash that turned into an incessant itch that changed into a fever and upended everything. Professor Richard Whitman, who would pace the front of the lecture hall, his face blooming rose red from the heat of his lectures. He was passionate, a lover of what he taught, and endlessly fascinated with his subject matter. It was like watching a train wreck, and Jake couldn’t turn away. Whitman took a stick and poked and probed the remains and called everyone over to take a closer look at the gutted mess.

Whitman’s class was Environmental Science, and he went on and on in a cheery tone about the collapse of the ecosystems, water, air, agriculture, food supply, oceans, forests, and biodiversity systems, i.e., animals. Jake sat there spellbound, terrified. Why did he keep coming back to this horror show? Every other subject was trivial compared to what he was ingesting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning from 10:00 to 10:50 a.m.; everything else was a distraction, averting his gaze from the massive destruction going on.

After class, in a daze, Jake would stumble out. Like going from one world to another. From horror to comedy, from devastation to pseudo-order, he couldn’t shake the terror. It clung to him. He’d head to the library and, in the periodical room, obsessively read the newspapers, hunting for news of the earth’s collapse—rarely on the front page, but tucked away, A5, A12, B2. Sometimes, outrageously, nothing at all. The world, he decided, found endless ways to look away. He, too, was guilty of it. If you have a mind that likes to think, you’re one of the worst culprits. Guilty as charged: look at him, gobbling up all this subject matter.

Now, he looks down at his broad hands and prays that his hand grip exercises will pay off, along with the squats and balance beam work. He yanks on his harness to make sure it’s secure.

A sign, he knew, he was in trouble—that he viewed jumping off a bridge as an acceptable, understandable act because we are doomed.

The fifth week of the semester, Professor Whitman had a guest speaker, Eleanor Gergen. An elegance to her, tall, thin, with a bony angular face and piercing eyes. Like a sculpture in a museum that has become animated, she captivated the room, all eyes on her. Jake imagined if his mother had lived, she would look like that in her old age, though she wouldn’t have Eleanor’s voice, which was deep and laced with anger and disbelief. Eleanor told them about her work, how she spent her life trying to convince the big U.S. companies to internalize externalized costs—air and water pollution, cutting down trees, contaminating rivers.

“Some wins, sometimes a big win,” she said. “Those were glorious! Getting Brazil to stop burning down the Amazon by forming a coalition of international investors who said they’d no longer invest if the country continued. Do you want the good news first or the bad?

“Let’s start with the bad. The world is breaking down. It is dying. Now some of you are going to stop listening to me. Denial is part of human nature, sometimes it helps, but in this case, it does not. Physics and chemistry don’t care about denial. Billions of people will soon be migrating—it’s happening right now—across borders as the land they call home becomes barely habitable because of extreme weather. Today 1 percent of the world is a hot zone. By 2070, it will be 19 percent. Have you been to Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz? It used to be so lovely, so verdant, with crops of maize and coffee. Anything could be grown there in that dark, rich soil and temperate climate. Now with the alternating droughts and sudden floods, barely anything can grow. Corn as dried out as Halloween decorations. Rainfall in this area is expected to decrease by 60 percent, so there will be no more corn—or beans or rice. Half the children are already chronically hungry, with bellies of air,” she said. “And the same thing is happening in Southeast Asia, with the increase in monsoon rainfall and drought, which have made farming nearly impossible. More than eight million people have moved to the Middle East, Europe, and North America. This will only get worse if nothing is done. I have not even touched on displacement from rising sea levels.”

She smiled softly, shook her head. “Frankly, you should be enraged at the older generation, at me, who knew and didn’t do enough to solve it. And we didn’t because we’re too invested, too much skin in the game, as your generation says. Do you know how much the oil and gas lobby spends to sway politicians? Do you know that industry is subsidized to the outrageous sum of billions of dollars?

“But here’s more sad news. You’re not angels. It would be so much easier if you were, wouldn’t it? To blame and point your finger at me, my generation. Unfortunately, you’re complicit too—our combustible engines, our heating systems, and the manner in which we grow food. Of course, your defense is that you didn’t build these systems; you inherited them. But you have no defense when it comes to changing things. I’m sorry. Denial is no longer an option. Really, I’m surprised you haven’t started a revolution to tear it all down and build something sustainable. I mean all of it, including the antiquated educational institutions—sorry, Richard. Especially the energy system. Oil and gas, we should have weaned ourselves off this awful stuff years ago.”

She went on battering him with awful facts and data as if she’d thrown him in an ambulance and taken a bat to his head to make sure he arrived at the hospital utterly incapacitated. After she was done, Professor Whitman thanked her—thanked her!—said she’d given them a lot to think about. The students who did go to class to dutiful take their notes closed their notebooks, put on their backpacks, and headed to the cafes or gossip with friends outside Stanley Hall as if Eleanor Gergen was talking about another planet.

Numb, shaken, the tectonic plates inside permanently shifted, Jake grabbed his backpack and waited for her. The moon was out in the blue sky. His body shuddered, a pit as large as a peach at the base of his throat. When she came out with Professor Whitman, he cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me.”

They stopped.

He had the urge to shove this woman, push her to the ground. He didn’t know what he wanted to do or say.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You look pale. Are you all right?”

“You said there was bad news and good news. So what’s the good news?”

She put her hand on her clavicle. “Oh, you’re right.”

He waited.

“I don’t have any.”

They went on their way, and he stood there, stunned, trying to think what to say, to yell at her. Go to hell? Fuck you? He looked at the students swarming around the plaza with bewilderment, awe, rage, and loneliness. Some students from the Environmental Science class huddled together, staring at a girl’s phone. Their laughter boxed his ears. Loneliness took shape, a lump under his ribs, making it hard to breathe.

He doesn’t make eye contact with anyone on the bridge but uses a soft gaze to look around. When he served on the bridge crew, they had one jumper. Before they could get to the skinny guy, he climbed the guardrail and leaped, feet first. At the time, Jake was under the bridge, inside the latticework, so he didn’t see the guy jump, only heard the stories, and maybe, out the corner of his eye, a flash of feet going by. The paint crew was shaken, and some men asked for the day off, but Jake was fine. Which meant he wasn’t: A sign, he knew, he was in trouble—that he viewed jumping off a bridge as an acceptable, understandable act because we are doomed.

After Ms. Gergen’s lecture, he couldn’t stop thinking about the end of the world. He’d experienced, in the philosopher Alain Badiou’s terms (thanks to Professor Scholund’s course, French Philosophers of the Twentieth Century), an Event—a Rupture in Being. After the rupture, according to Badiou, Jake was supposed to find realization and reconciliation with the truth. But the only truth he found was that he couldn’t sleep and barely eat, and some days couldn’t get out of bed. He tried to stop thinking about it and threw himself into Greek Mythology and Phonology. When that didn’t work, he signed up to take notes for Recombinant DNA, but that didn’t work. He quit the notetaking gig and got a job at a nursery.

Plants, trees, shrubs, dirt. Perennials and annual. How to prune a lemon tree. Pollinator plants. It was something, he told himself, caring for the plants and flowers.

A woman came to the nursery looking for a plum tree. She wore a sleeveless shirt, and her arms were ripped like Rodin had a field day, chiseling her biceps, triceps, and shoulders. As if every day she lifted heavy boards and steel pipes, like his construction worker buddies. Her ginger hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she had dirt on her hiking boots, jeans, and T-shirt. Her face was lightly tanned, a sprinkle of freckles, and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. He imagined quads and calves that popped.

After he showed her the row of plum trees, he said, “Why do you want a plum tree?”

She smiled, and now her face arranged around her smile as if her entire being existed to make that smile. “I love plums.”

“I do too.”

She seemed to come from another world, outside the dominant strictures, as if she’d peeled back the veil, saw what was what, and decided she’d define her own way. He stroked the leaf of a plum tree. “Do you want to go out with me?”

“No,” she said.

He stopped touching the leaf. His hand in his pocket.

“But you can come to a meeting tonight.” Melinda was her name. She said the meeting was at a house on the corner of Shattuck and Blake at 7:00 pm.

She’s not human, or more human than most, more angel or more animal, hard to say.

On the bridge, the wind is blowing so hard the seagulls are having trouble flying. One gull hovers right in front of Jake, an arm’s reach away as if suspended on a string, wings not flapping, the bird not moving, just hanging in space, the space being a four-by-four-foot square. People pull out their cameras and click at the bird. Melinda has trained them in all sorts of weather, but only two days with wind, and it was slight, about 12 miles an hour. This feels like 30 mph. He knew about the wind. It was in his Recon Report.

Long meetings of Do’s and Don’ts. Don’t make eye contact with strangers. Don’t answer questions. Don’t stop walking. Don’t let anyone touch your equipment. Do go straight to your spot. Do be agile, quick. Do wear layers, the weather is erratic. Do wear a diaper—we don’t know how long you’ll be up there. Do stuff every pocket with food.

They have one focus, a singular concentration: stop the pipeline from Canada to the Bay Area; stop the pipeline delivering millions of gallons of oil; if there is one crack, one leak, the bay will be flooded with oil, killing unspeakable numbers of birds and sea creatures. Keep your focus.

The bay is shimmery blue; compared to it, they are minuscule, pressed against the deep blue infinite and all the life in the water, the seals and dolphins, the sharks and sting rays, the crabs and copepods. Bunch of crap to put humans at the top of the heap. How is man superior to a whale that knows to blow bubbles, encircling its prey, which won’t cross the bubbles, so they’re trapped; to a dolphin who can use tools, fitting a marine sponge on its nose to protect itself from sharp rocks as it hunts for fish; to a shark with its snout that can sense electric fields emitted by animals in the water; to the kestrel that can see ultraviolet light, enabling it to make out trails of urine left by moles. Like neon diner signs, these bright paths light the way to a meal.

Jake feels alive, at the edge, where he likes to be, but he’s also trembling. They are at the spot where the cable leads up to the tower. There’s a door made of wire, and it’s locked, standing between them and the cable. On recon, he learned the code. Melinda reties her shoelaces. Jake does the same, and so do the two others. On the other side of the bridge directly across from them, Jake sees the group mirroring what they are doing. It’s part of the ritual of preparation. Melinda checks her ropes, then Jake’s, then the two others. Through the crowd of tourists, he sees six members carrying what looks like a white sail. That will go in Melinda’s pack. Hundreds of members behind them, more on their way. Word was sent 24 hours ago. It’s a Go.

In a flash, Melinda is standing on the cable, her rope attached to one of the wires that runs parallel to the cable. Five hundred-plus feet above the glimmering bay. Jake doesn’t take his eyes off her, watching her exact foothold, her handhold, because he will do as she does, climb as she climbs. He tries to memorize her ease, her grace, her unbelievable mastery. She looks so fucking comfortable. They will ascend to 746 feet above the water to the top of the tower where there is a little platform, like a basket on a hot air balloon ride. Without looking, he knows on the other side of the bridge, Arjun is making his way up at the same pace as Melinda, and behind Arjun is Camilla, then Quinn and Alejo.

On Jake’s side, it’s Melinda, Baker, Katya, then him. He didn’t expect it to be so cold or wet or windy. The sun isn’t warm. Last night, he drove to the headlands and parked on the hill, imagining the climb to the top. The fog rolled in, but he could see the bridge lights like a necklace, 128 lights running horizontal and another 12-string running up each of the towers. In the fog, the lights looked like ghostly moons.

Right before Melinda went up, her face glowed, euphoric. What makes her unusual, he learned at the first meeting and later, is that she is mostly monkey. It’s in her DNA, her blood, whatever you want to call it. She spent hours in the warehouse in Novato, teaching them to climb the wall and a rope, talking to them, assuring them that they, too, have monkey woven into their fabric; they inherently know how to swing from limb to limb, to scramble up a tree trunk, rise above the dirt. They’ve just forgotten. “Jake, get out of your head,” she said repeatedly.

Jake goes up the stairs that lead to the cable when he hears a French woman say, “My hair is whipping my face.” He turns, looks at her (don’t look down, Melinda’s voice in his head, your goal is up; clear your head, focus on up). The young woman grabs the arm of the man she’s with and holds on. Her brown hair is thrashing, whipping her face, and the man is brushing it out of her eyes. Jake’s pulse is not where it should be. Not steady, not beating loud and strong, but quick, like a man who is fucking scared. Afraid of heights.

Melinda, Baker, and Katya are now on the cable. As he sat there last night, he imagined this moment, imagined being Melinda, born to go vertical, her feet designed with different sensory devices, little nodes on them, giving feedback so you find the slightest indentation for your big toe. Jake saw her climb freestyle halfway up Yosemite’s El Capitan. A beautiful, terrifying sight. She’s not human, or more human than most, more angel or more animal, hard to say. One night after a meeting, she told him that she started climbing when she was three years old: kitchen counters, ladders, bookshelves as if she belonged off the ground. At age five, she climbed their ten-foot apple tree. At age 11, she and her father climbed Half Dome.

Every substance speaks, she told him. Feel it, listen to your fingers and toes. Let them find the bends and nooks, it’s there for you, but you have to put your mind in your hands and feet.

He has to shake it, this fear, it won’t work. Got to release it because a tense body can’t glide, it missteps. A tight body panics, slips, falls.

“Let’s go, Jake,” Baker calls out.

Melinda isn’t moving; he knows she’s waiting for him.

It’s OK, he tells himself, it’s OK, OK, OK. He volunteered to be on this team in a moment of hubris. Or maybe to be close to Melinda. Or maybe because he’d spent too much time in his head, reflecting, brooding, he needed action—Emerson’s advice: “Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.”

He climbs on the cable, clips his rope onto one of the wires that run on both sides of the cable. Handholds, Melinda told him, grip the wire to steady yourself, but not too tight, or you’ll cramp.

They trained in Yosemite. Melinda pointed to a sheer rock face and saw what no one could see. Like magic, an invisible map, she saw the path to the top. Here and then there, and there, and cross there—she drew a line with her finger in the air, and like a photograph slowly developing, it emerged. At that moment, Jake trusted her completely.

Melinda looks at Jake. One eyebrow arched, half of a circle as if saying, OK? We are prepared, a murmur in Jake’s brain—Melinda’s voice, Baker’s, all the others, we’re ready. But the murmur doesn’t help. He’s not the best climber, never was. All that training, he never really took to it. He has to shake it, this fear, it won’t work. Got to release it because a tense body can’t glide, it missteps. A tight body panics, slips, falls.

He inches forward on the cable, the wind blows harder. The hood of his jacket flaps madly like a wounded bird. The wind scrambles the screech of a seagull, the roar and coughs of car engines. Then, suddenly slicing through the noise, the French woman says, “Look! Look at the people climbing the bridge!”

He looks down. A silent scream in his head ricochets, throwing him off balance. He yanks on the wire. She’s pointing right at him, her mouth open, eyes wide.

“Jake!” says Melinda.

“I’m OK,” he says. But he’s not.

“Good,” she says, smiling, her face calm as a still lake, an expression that says she’s exactly where she wants to be; there is no other place.

She looked like that after they had sex. His face, he was sure, reflected hers. They had trained all day at the warehouse, propelling high above the ground, holding onto a rope, his feet learning the language of a smooth wall. They’d walked out of the warehouse together, sweaty, muscles tired in a good way, and she said, “Want to come to my place?”

She stripped off her clothes so casually, so easily, as if she felt more comfortable without them, and he followed, quickly unzipping his dirty jeans, pulling his sweaty T-shirt over his head, yanking off his socks, his underwear. She led him to the shower, he took the soap to her beautiful muscles, and he called her astonishing; it blurted out, “My God, you’re astonishing,” and she laughed, and she kissed him as the water pelted on their heads. “You’re not so bad either,” she said. He entered her from behind, and when she screamed her pleasure, he roared with her, and they laughed and laughed. They tumbled out of the shower and onto the bed, and soon they were all over each other, and she was glistening as though she had just risen from the sea or come down from a mountain covered in mist. The bottoms of her feet—in her apartment, in the warehouse, even after the shower—were still dirty. As if her feet must at all times be in contact with something.

They didn’t see each other for four days, and when they did, they didn’t talk about it. Then more days went by, and it seemed like a dream that might not have happened. But after a meeting, the same thing happened, though they didn’t bother to shower. Again, they didn’t speak of it. She didn’t avoid him; he didn’t avoid her. They talked about climbing and footholds and bumps in rocks that can serve as handholds, but not their naked bodies folded into each other. It was a secret life, buried under the planning and preparation for today.

Today, his face is the opposite of hers. The skirling wind roaring in his ear is determined to pry him off the bridge as if it thinks he doesn’t belong here, standing on a cable high above the water. And he doesn’t. He wasn’t the child climbing everything vertical. He was a land baby and didn’t walk for 18 months. When he finally stood, he was ready and walked as if he’d been doing it his entire life. His mother told him later he’s someone who closely studies things.

But where does he belong? Back at the nursery talking to the plants? In the classroom, listening to a professor pontificate on ontology? He did love the Heidegger course and the shimmering prose of Shakespeare. His mother was a sculptor, working in metal, marble, and concrete. Articulate and composed, she was; in his teens, he thought her beautiful, like a movie star. She never pressured him to become one particular thing; she never pressured him at all, and sometimes he felt as if he didn’t exist for her. His father was a financier; numbers spoke to him, and he spent most of his time on airplanes, flying to places to talk to people who wanted to hear the language of money. A loving figure, a daunting, distant figure. When he was 17, their plane crashed in the Sea of Cortez, the sea taking both of them. His mother did say to him once, almost as if she thought she should give something. “Do something that enlivens you, my love.” And: “We never wanted to get in the way of what is innate in you. If we suggested or pressured or directed, it would get twisted.” “Twisted?” he said. She smiled. “Into a reflection of us. The originality of you would be distorted. Be an original man.”

So, he’s become a man standing on a cable, each step will take him higher. But how much of this is truly original, and how much is it guided by unconscious forces? The force to be original? To do something enlivening, per his mother’s request? To follow the woman walking on the cable as if it’s a sidewalk, in an ecstasy he finds unattainable? His motives are overdetermined, too many to single out one and create a singular line of causation. What is he doing up here? is a refrain, a Greek chorus screeching in his head.

Whatever it takes, calm the mind. Sing a song, a lullaby, chant a mantra, ohm na ma ha, do mental math problems, 5 + 7 – 3 = ?

He only knows he’s the weak link in this chain of climbers. His fingers feel tight, clutching the cold metal, and he’s only managed five steps. When he was on the paint crew, Jake often stared at the little platform at the top of the tower. I’ll be sitting there someday, but he never really believed it. Not once did he think that would happen. More like a fantasy, something tucked into the corner of his mind so he could imagine himself closer to Melinda and he, someone else, a man who could climb to great heights. He thinks about Melinda’s strong fingers, remembers folding his lips around them. She told him she liked how his mind worked, not confined to one discipline but weaving them together, biology, language, mythology, and physics. A free-roaming mind, she said. “But it trips on itself a lot, doesn’t it?” she said. “Doubt can be deadly.”

Slicing through the wind yelling in his ear, for the first time he hears people shouting below.

“Block fossil fuel projects! Clean energy only!”

A quick look down. Hundreds of people with signs crowd the middle of the bridge, in between cars. Traffic piling up in both directions. Suddenly sharp, jubilant energy charges through him. He takes five more steps, moving higher. What was a mere idea has materialized. Those long meetings, the arguments, the best way, the method, the message, the risk, and the benefit have led to a new reality. Interrupt the habitual action, unglue society, rip apart the habitus, that’s what’s happening, open up potential outcomes. There is always the part of yesterday in us, yesterday’s man predominates since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which—

The wind pummels him. He looks down. A violent shiver lacerates him, and the wind climbs under his collar. He can hear Melinda’s voice in his head: Relax, stay loose; if your mind seizes, your muscles follow and then you’re using twice as much energy. You’ll lose your grip, your hands turn into claws, can’t move. Legs quiver, shake uncontrollably, fatigue. Whatever it takes, calm the mind. Sing a song, a lullaby, chant a mantra, ohm na ma ha, do mental math problems, 5 + 7 – 3 = ? He’s always liked math. 7 + 9 – 4 = 12, 13 + 6 = 19 – 5 = 14 + 2 = 16 -9 = 7 + 5 = 12 – 5 = 7 + 11 = 18 – 7 = 11.

But his arms are still violently shaky, and the muscles in his body seized like a frightened animal. Sticky dread like a wound oozing. “Melinda?” he shouts. A gust of wind tears the words from his mouth.

“Melinda!”

“Yeah, Jake.”

He can’t get the words out. Jaw locked.

“What’s going on?”

“Little shaky,” he rasped.

“Deep breaths, Jake. We’re fine. It’s beautiful up here.”

He focuses on breathing, trying to soften his body to settle into the natural contours of himself. The wind flails him.

“You’re roped in,” she says. “You’re good.”

“I hear sirens.”

“Sure. They’re coming.”

“Then what?”

“We sit tight like we practiced.”

“My arms are shaking.”

“You’re holding too tight. Using your arms too much. The rope has you.”

A seagull blows by.

“The wind.”

“Yeah, the wind’s strong,” she says. “But we’ve got the rope.”

“OK.”

“Take one hand off the wire. Shake it out.”

“OK.”

“Did you do it?”

“No.”

“Do it.”

He looks at his hand and wills his fingers to let go of the metal. Nothing happens. He probably should have admitted he’s terrified of heights. He thought all that training they did in the warehouse would help. Desensitize. Baker had complimented him, telling him he was a natural at climbing. “You took to it, man,” said Baker. “Ate it up.” But it’s not true. This relentless wind—and it’s so far down. He doesn’t want to die. He has to release his hand, but what if he falls? What if the rope doesn’t hold? What if he falls and yanks the wire so hard that the others fall with him? He’d have to live with that. A murderer. If he killed the others, he’d have to kill himself. The guilt would be too much. He knows if he doesn’t let go, eventually, his hand will be so tired, it will release on its own, and maybe at the wrong time.

“Did you do it?” she calls out.

One finger loosens, another—they are quivering, a life of their own. He’s never been part of a group; he avoided them because he wanted to think for himself. Think only about himself. Not selfishly, but his own way of going about things. An original man.

His hand is off the cold metal wire. He stares at it, an entity standing free in the air. It looks miraculous.

“I did it,” he says.

“Good. Do that every so often.”

Her soothing voice melts him inside.

“Hey, look out at the water,” she says. “See how beautiful it is.”

His mouth is dry like he ate chalk. “Yeah.”

“No, Jake, really look,” she says.

He looks up at her.

She’s gazing out to the water, a big grin as if she’s high. “God, it’s stunning.”

“Yeah,” he says, still looking at her. She’s smiling like mad, as if the madness below them, the shouting, the cars honking now, people gunning their engines, as if preparing to ram through the protestors, isn’t happening—or she’s transfigured all the madness into some sort of glory.

“Wow! I think I saw a whale,” she says. “Look northwest.”

Something floats down from the sky and lands on his coat. A pigeon feather. He stares at it, the perfect pattern of filaments, each one precisely spaced, letting enough air pass through for flight. White with a hint of metallic blue. His father’s voice comes to him now, “You’re a dreamer, my son, living in your head.” He remembers his parents arguing. His father’s voice, “How will he live? How will he ever make a living?”

“The traffic is backed up for miles and miles,” says Melinda. “We’ve got people’s attention. We’ve got them. They’re awake. They’re angry. Good! Time to get angry.” She laughs. “Listen to that howling, angry wind.”

He’s getting used to the wind. With his heart thumping less viciously, he finally sees the Pacific Ocean, the stretch of blue for as far as the eye can see, a blue watery drape wrapping around the curve of the earth. His mother loved the color blue. A pattern of ripples, of waves, a small sailboat in the distance, a white sail. Farther out, a grey ship the length of a football field. The water glistens endlessly.

A fragment of music floats from a car window and finds him perched here like a bird. “You’ll find it in the strangest places,” sings a female voice.

They talked about this at the meetings. The anger, the unleashed anger that will be directed at them…

He looks out to the horizon and breathes in the view, though in the back of his mind, there is still a voice screaming—you’re up so high, one swift kick of wind or the rope unravels or— he yanks his mind to the horizon, to the tiny sailboat. Puts himself on that lovely little boat and whisks along the surface of the sea at a tilt, the white sails puffed out like a big balloon, and he imagines the polished oak wood of the cabin inside, the small bathroom, two twin beds down below, each with dark blue blankets tucked around the mattress—thin, but thick enough not to feel the stiff board below— yes, he’s on that boat—interesting, he’s alone—and he’s saved the world. Halted it in its mindless tracks as it barrels toward destruction, stopping it so it can take a long, deep breath and a look at itself. At the madness, at the inexorable obliteration—the dirty air, the dirty waters, the polluted dirt—

“Fuck you!” yells a woman from below.

His right foot slips. His rope tugs, pulls on the wire.

“Shit,” shouts Baker.

Her voice cuts through the wind. “Fuck you and all of you!”

Jake grips the wire, looks down.

The screaming woman, her head tipped back as if screaming at the sky. She looks like a little baby bird, her mouth open, waiting for a worm. Her face is lined, her brown hair dried out from too many dye jobs. And with those bared teeth, she now looks like a vicious bear that wants to rip his head off.

“You asshole! I’ve got to get home, and you, you motherfucker!”

His body starts to shake. He looks to the horizon to calm down, but in his mind, he sees her, and not only her, but other people who are out of their cars, yelling and shoving people holding signs. He glances at Melinda, who is staring peacefully at the sea. He follows her gaze to the stretch of deep blue, and he keeps going to where sea meets sky, the horizontal line, but he can’t shut out the woman, and he glances down again.

“Yeah, you, I’m talking to you,” she says, looking right at him.

He is the closest one to her. A deep tremble in his body. They talked about this at the meetings. The anger, the unleashed anger that will be directed at them—they are angry for millions of reasons, and they should be because of the destruction of the planet, but it will be projected at us because we’re an easy target, because we bring change, and we’re an obstacle preventing them from continuing on their mindless ways. You got to weather it, man. Got to let it fly by you; imagine it’s a punch coming right to your face. Step aside.

“You fucking moron! I’ve got to get to work,” she says. “I’ve got my kids. I’ve got to get my kids. You lazy ass piece of shit.”

“Jake,” Melinda calls out. “Don’t listen to her.”

Jake turns his ear to the rushing wind, and her jagged words bounce right off. He’s lived long enough to see people crack—anger pouring out of them like hot lava. He feels sorry for her, in a way, so much rumbling anger inside. At the same time, he’s getting a little pissed off.

His muscles tense, and he hears Melinda telling him not to listen to the woman, but this woman is yelling louder, this angry, black T-shirted, wiry woman with her gravelly, baritone voice cutting through the car horns, shouting voices, sirens—this woman who has pinned all her problems on him. She can’t see beyond her own sorry little life. She thinks she’s got it hard, just wait, it’s going to get a hell of a lot harder. It’s people like her who are the fucking problem.

“Go to hell!” says Jake.

“Jake,” Melinda calls out.

“Losing my job because of you, asshole.”

“That’s all you can think about?” says Jake.

“Go screw yourself!”

“Take the high road, Jake. Take the high road,” says Melinda.

Jake looks up at Melinda, who is looking down at him, her face knitted with concern when he’s hit with something hard, sharp, right on his temple.

He loses his balance, his right foot slips off the cable. He grips the wires hard, but the wire is now bouncing.

Baker screams, Katya yells. “Jesus!” says Melinda.

The rope stops him from falling, but he loses his water bottle from his pack. He turns, watching it fall, like a pinwheel turning over and over, all the way down to the water. The woman looks like she’s hunting for another rock. He scrambles onto the cable. Reaches up to this temple, and his finger comes back bloody. He wants to smack her right on the jaw. He’s never hit anyone in his life, but he’d like to punch her in the face or the gut, make her double over, so he doesn’t have to look at her.

Melinda is talking to him, her voice full of reassurance. “Jake, we’re OK, we’re all OK, it’s fine now, steady, hold steady.” He won’t look down, won’t give her the satisfaction, won’t even touch the bloody spot again. Melinda tells him to look at the far distance. He looks at the long stream of cars, idling, in both directions, and sees more people coming with signs, hundreds of people from both directions streaming onto the sidewalks on both sides of the bridge, weaving in between the cars. A strange thing is happening, and he can’t quite figure it out. There’s the shouting of his fellow protestors and the woman, and angry drivers, and the wind, and the seagulls and the rustle of his coat. But something is gone. Something different. He tries to figure it out, the thing missing under the roar of humanity. That woman is shouting for him to get the hell down.

It’s gone, the roar of engines, that’s what’s gone. They’re turning off their cars. A thrill runs through him. At the meeting, he asked, “How long will we be up there?” More engines go quiet. He has his answer: as long as it takes. He’s up here for as long as it takes to change minds. Nearly impossible, said Professor Grassley, who teaches Contemporary Social Issues. Belief has long roots.

He can’t imagine having any sort of conversation with that raging woman. Can’t imagine doing anything but taking her by the shoulders and shaking her and calling her a fucking idiot. She almost killed him. He wants to let her have his big hot roiling ball of rage. But it won’t solve anything. The world is in a bad marriage, but there can be no divorce. He’s stuck with her and her kind, and she with him.

Jake looks down. The woman is no longer shouting. She’s sitting on the sidewalk, weeping openly, tears streaking her face. He knows what she feels, though they might not be suffering over the same thing. He has the urge to sit beside her and weep, too; he wouldn’t say anything, there’s nothing to say except sit side by side and wish the pain would end. Then she is up, pushing and shoving protestors, her wet face bright red. He has a flash of admiration for her—to dust herself off and come up swinging, got to respect that. She pushes a woman holding a sign: STOP FOSSILIZED THINKING! The woman with the sign falls to the ground.

“You’re a hot mess,” he shouts, though with the noise, he knows she can’t hear him. He takes five quick steps, moving closer to the top, his hands trembling.

Nina Schuyler’s novel, Afterword, was published in 2023. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California. In This Ravishing World is her newest book.

Header photo by Pexels, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Nina Schuyler by Bryan Hendon.