Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  “Don’t say that. Everybody says that.”

  “What do you say?”

  I admit, reluctantly, “Banzai.”

  She nods and keeps her gaze steady, being tough, betraying no awe or excitement or fear.

  At 12,500 feet a jump doesn’t even feel like falling—more like being at the center of a cold explosion. You can see the curvature of the planet, the spherical surface that tugs you down. I watch her body tumble, bright red jumpsuit, limbs arched back in perfect form. She shrinks, breaks into white clouds, and I lose her. My arms go straight at my sides and I dive. At about 140 miles an hour, I see her canopy, a ruffled red square below me. My cheeks billow with wind.

  On the ground, she can’t stop smiling, looking up at what we traversed. She cheers and laughs and suggests we go do some shots. I explain that it’s just the adrenaline rush and that I don’t drink.

  May’s air is thick and heavy, trapped under this purple vapor we’re enduring. At night I worry. Surveying the park grounds, I wonder who’s out there, watching for me. Erica’s told me about a Web site: “Bird Man of St. Louis.” There’s a picture on it of a fanged black bird with burning, phosphorous eyes, along with message boards and testimonials from people who have seen me. You can order a T-shirt.

  Skydiving doesn’t compare to BASE. Out of a plane you’re too high and have no real sense of the bottom. Mu, the void, is not so immediate; you can’t even glimpse it, and gravity’s embrace is more like a languorous tug than a violent slam. I press my hands against the glass and ponder the fall, and the dream life of a sleeping city seems awfully far away as my reflection looks back in the window and parallel light beams shine up from the arch’s base like a Zen ladder.

  Five jumps later Erica tells me her mother is an artist who gives lessons at their home, and who lost her left breast to cancer three years ago. We’re eating ice cream, walking in the mall because she wants to get new shoes. She says, “You know, I was really hoping you were some undiscovered animal, like a ghost bird.”

  “I know. You believe in that stuff?”

  She shrugs and licks her cone, swinging her bag from Foot Locker. “I guess. Probably. There’s always stuff we don’t know about. Once, in the 1920s, in Texas, there was a series of sightings of a black bird as big as a city, perched on the moon. I love that.”

  She wipes caramel off her lip with a finger that she licks while grinning at me and my chi thrums against my diaphragm like I’ve swallowed a tiny bomb.

  Her school lets out for the summer, so we start diving more. Three times a week. Evening sets in as we walk off the airfield. She says her father is working long hours now. The EPA is giving Dowling Industrial hell.

  “What is that stuff, anyway?” I ask, tracing an arc across the lavender sky.

  She takes my hand, and we stop walking. “I don’t know what it is.”

  At first I’m embarrassed, because I don’t have any furniture in my apartment, and my bed is a bamboo mat with a single thin blanket. In fading light from a window the fuzz on her chest and stomach is lucent and blond. Sweat gathers in a salty pool at her navel. Her skin is darker than Mabel’s, and she weighs less.

  A certain anxiety dissipates as we progress. Touching is fine. Like I remembered, but different.

  “Tell me about your first time,” she says, face flushed and glistening, tips of her hair sticking to my chest.

  I tell her about jumping off Bethel Bridge in Cypress Park. I don’t mention my perverse curiosity that cold morning, the clear idea I had as I dangled my foot off the bridge, to hold onto the bundled chute the whole way down and never release it from my hand.

  “Really,” she says. “Why did you start doing this?”

  I shrug and feign sleepiness. I don’t mention the time four years ago when I bought half a gram of heroin, or the night Mabel used it, passed out, and slipped under the bathwater we were going to share when I got home.

  I want to explain that I’m not just some thrill-seeker, that the arch is the nexus of civilization and wilderness, and there I inhabit a space between spaces, where city and forest are separated by a perfect geometry of solid steel. But we don’t talk, and when I close my eyes, burning scarlet fissures erupt and crack the perfect symmetry of my Blue Triangle.

  The next morning I call my father at Green Grove. He asks the same two questions four times.

  Erica wants me to come meet her mother and “see something.” I can guess what.

  Her mother, Carol, has hair the same color as Erica’s, but much shorter. She asks me what working for Park Services is like, and looks at me softly when I explain myself as a nature lover. Erica is quiet. When she faces her mother, they don’t make eye contact long, and I find some similarities in their faces. Carol asks me about my hobbies and has a distant look in her eyes. Her voice seems to tremble when she speaks; she absently fingers an earring, as if she’s worried about something but doesn’t want to trouble anyone. I remember that she lost a breast when she was ill.

  A garden in their backyard is elaborate and well pruned. A tiny creek burbles through it. I take a deep breath and confess: “I don’t want you to do this.”

  Erica’s mouth opens, but before she can answer I say, “It’s too dangerous,” and I reach for her hand.

  She crosses her arms and steps back. “I’m good. What are you talking about?” In the kitchen window the back of her mother’s head is visible. “Where’s this coming from?”

  “It’s too soon. It’s too soon and it’s too dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” What I don’t mention is that I can’t possibly handle killing another girl.

  The little creek sloshes between us. “No,” she says. “I’m still doing it. Forget it. I’m going.” Then she breaks our date at 10,000 feet, and I know we won’t be up in any more airplanes. She leads me to her bedroom, where her equipment is sprawled on the floor.

  “This is what you wanted me to see?”

  It’s an ACE 240 canopy and a Perigee II container. Black. “Just like yours,” she says, moving toward me. “I know how to do it,” she says. “And I will. But I’m asking you to.”

  “Please, Erica, c’mon.” I’m allowed to hold her hand.

  “I’m doing it regardless, okay? Whether you do this for me or not. But I trust you.” She puts her head on my chest. “I’m still doing it, but I trust you, okay?”

  I nod.

  I rotate the Perigee II on the floor, harness down, and stow the break lines solemnly. It is grim business. I divide the line groups and run the slider up toward the canopy, observing that the leading edge of the canopy is hanging at my knees while the trailing edge faces away from me. She sits on the bed, watching over my shoulder. The room smells like her, like a young, living girl: some combination of flora and powder, lotion and fruit.

  I work the fabric between the line groups to the outside of the lines, and continue flaking it that way for all sections of the canopy. It’s like folding an accordion. The idea is to keep all of the line-attachment points toward the center of the packjob, with the fabric folded to the outside. The bed squeaks behind me, and her fingernails rub the back of my head. I carefully redefine my previous folds, bring the center of the trailing edge up and hold it under my thumb. Next I dress the tail and fold it around itself. I stow the lines in the tail pocket and place the canopy in the container. Then I breathe.

  She kisses the top of my head. “Thank you.”

  We sleep apart tonight, and I spend two hours in a straight-backed lotus, mentally defining my circle of power, trying to reconstruct my Blue Triangle.

  The very beginning of sunrise. False dawn after the moon vanishes. By now the gases in the air have finally begun to settle, so while the sky is a fairly normal indigo, a thick fog under the Bethel Bridge is opalescent, glittered with pinks and purples. She wears loose black pants and a tank top, with the Perigee hunched on her back, pads on her knees, her hair tucked under a helmet. I’ve got my gear on too.

  We both look down at
the fog, which twinkles and undulates beneath the bridge. Pine trees and shrubbery are hushed.

  “You can’t even see the bottom,” I tell her.

  She’s looking down. “So? I count off three seconds, right? I’ll see it when I get down there.”

  “I wouldn’t do this.” My hands start twitching as she climbs onto the railing. “Erica—”

  “You don’t have to do it. I am. I’ll see you down there.”

  She’s taking quick, shallow breaths and can’t stop looking down. Her eyes are panicked, and remind me of her mother’s. Then, when I see that similarity, I understand what it is between us, what must have drawn her to me and why we’re out here.

  “Erica, wait. If you think this will keep you from being afraid—it won’t. The fear doesn’t stop. It never does.”

  She looks confused and shakes her head. “What? I don’t—I never said that.” Her eyes remain fixed on the fog. “I never said that.”

  Background noises rise: twittering birds, things scraping in trees and rustling the grass. The trestle begins to rumble from far-off automobiles.

  Atop the railing she grips her pilot chute with white knuckles. She glances at me and fakes a smile. “Okay. I’ll see you at the bottom.” She takes one giant breath and steps off, leaving a splash of fog lingering where she pierced it.

  I rush to the rail and look down. No, listen, I want to say, what we think is a gesture of freedom, see, is a symptom of our cage. But she’s gone. I can’t see beyond the mist, already closing the hole she made, and I climb on top of the railing.

  What can I do but follow her down?

  Before human beings, a deep river lived here, carrying tons of life between oceans. Now fog below the bridge conceals only a pebbled canyon of cool, dry stone. A garden under purple gas. Rocks thump against my feet as I stick the landing.

  At the bottom she’s on her knees, the canopy flapping around her. My chute trails like a black flag. We’re small among giant ferns and ivy growing inside the jagged walls of this chasm. I lift her and start undoing her harness. She’s shaking. She reaches around my back to undo mine. A tear streaks behind her goggles. She says she thought she was going to die. The straps slide down, and I feel the dead drag of my own chute drop away.

  We promise never to do it again.

  I purchase a gel-filled mattress that promises to conform to the contours of my spine. I buy cotton sheets. Erica brings me more pillows than anyone could ever need. I change my schedule so that I’m only working three graveyard shifts.

  Erica wants me to teach her martial arts, so I use my empty living room to show her what aikido I know. All the kokyu nage body throws end up with us wrestling and then getting pretty dirty on the carpet.

  At work, I still appreciate the view, but when I contemplate Mu and the bushi’s goal of joining the void, my feet feel heavy. There’s slight vertigo as I gaze down from my office window. Concerning my relationship with gravity: I start to wonder if it even exists, since “gravity,” after all, is just one name ascribed to a particular phenomena. Instead, I ponder isolation as the governing physics of this universe: mass attracts mass because singularity isn’t natural, sentience or no, and the basic unit of life isn’t one, but two. Planets and moons form, and people stick to them because something in the cosmos is trying to keep itself company. Below the arch a slight lilac tinting of air is all that remains of the once heavy cloud that distorted our skies these last two months. Dowling Industrial ended up settling with the EPA for five million dollars and a new system of air vents that could suck the eyes out of your head.

  Near the end of July, Erica’s father leaves her mother.

  The lobby at Green Grove is antiseptic in a deceitful way. The rosy wallpaper and carpet are okay, but the plants are plastic, and Muzak plays at a hushed volume. Ms. Teschmaucher, the head nurse, approaches me sympathetically. The nurses at Green Grove wear light-blue uniforms with navy aprons, and they smell like nurses, like Ivory soap and rubbing alcohol.

  She takes my arm as she escorts me past the smiling elderly who gaze up like I might be someone they once loved. “I just want you to be prepared,” she says, patting my elbow.

  My father’s room is an eight-by-fifteen space with beige walls and salmon-colored carpet. Two tall chairs form a V to the left of the television, which sits on a standard wooden dresser. A bookshelf stands against one wall with pictures of my mother and me, his own parents, a Bible, and some flowers. His bed is made in military style, sheets so tight you could bounce change off them. He made his bed like that my entire life, and I wonder then if certain things never go away, movements so right that they can never be unlearned.

  He sits in a rocking chair, wearing his robe and pajamas, staring out the window at the far side of the room.

  “Jacob?” Ms. Teschmaucher says, guiding me toward him. “Ethan’s here. Your son, Ethan.”

  He turns from the window and looks up at me. My father’s face is a lost expanse of wrinkled flesh and liver spots; he has a still-noble jaw and a white crew cut thinning at the crown. His blue eyes search the space where we stand. He smiles slowly and nods. His hand, dry, stretched taut, reaches out and takes mine.

  “It’s good to see you. Really good,” he says, with the kind of emotional tone you wouldn’t use unless you were faking it.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He turns back to the window and watches the bucolic, parklike area that exists at the heart of Green Grove’s compound. Ms. Teschmaucher and I exchange glances, and then my father looks back at me.

  “I’m worried about the grass out there. It looks dry this season.”

  I crouch beside him and stare out the window. “It’s not so bad.” He smells the same: musky traces of the Brut cologne he splashed on every day I ever knew him. I put my arm around him.

  He asks, “Do you know Susie Frenesi?”

  “No,” I say.

  He turns back to the window, then looks down at me again. His eyes blaze with sudden joy. “Bill? Where have you been?”

  I used to have an uncle named Bill, my father’s younger brother.

  “Around. You know.”

  “I’m worried about the grass out there.”

  On the way to the lobby, Ms. Teschmaucher says this deterioration will continue and I shouldn’t let myself feel hurt by his inability to remember me. I don’t feel hurt. He’s the one who’s having everything gradually peeled from him, his identity falling away, years dropping like skin being shed in preparation for a new spring. As I pull away from the building, I glimpse my father standing at his window, inspecting the grass, and I have a sudden vision of Mu claiming him, its bright void drawing him closer with the most deft and sinister grasp, taking everything he ever was into its light.

  It’s a time when things are taken away.

  A time when I find a brochure for Bridge Day among Erica’s textbooks. Bridge Day is an annual gathering of BASE jumpers in Fayetteville, West Virginia. For one day in October, BASE jumping is made legal off the New River Gorge Bridge.

  She walks into her room wearing a black tank top and jeans, her hair tied back and cheeks slightly sunken. She’s thinner.

  I brandish the advertisement. “You’re not really going to do this, are you?”

  She shrugs and starts picking things up, moving loose clothes around and stuffing them into drawers.

  “Hey. You’re not doing this, are you?”

  She looks at me and plops on her bed, throws an arm over her eyes. “I don’t know. I was thinking about it.”

  “I thought we stopped all this. I thought we talked about it.”

  She keeps her arm over her eyes. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” she says. Not changing position, with one hand she uses a remote control to turn on her stereo. The Pixies start playing too loud for conversation.

  That night I toss and turn on my new, obscenely comfortable mattress. My thoughts center on a girl’s body falling through space, on a chute that opens a split second t
oo late to slow her fall. Her body breaks on rocks and stone, the canopy drifting delicately down upon her. People crowd around, and when that shroud is pulled away, the face I see is Mabel’s. My stomach hurts, a cramping I haven’t felt since I first went cold turkey, four years ago.

  I sleep on the floor.

  It’s a time of transition, when the eyes of summer close and open on autumn. The I Ching says my dominant yin is Earth over Fire, which means “Injury to the Enlightened.” Confucius advises, “It will be beneficial to be steadfast and break through distress.”

  Because she asked me to, I pack Erica’s chute in preparation for Bridge Day. Then I explain that we can’t see each other anymore.

  She gets angry. “What? Are you serious? Just because I won’t do what you tell me?”

  That’s meant to goad me, but in my mind I am a perfect Blue Triangle, and my heart is the steady, slow lapping of waves on an inner shore. “Because I don’t want to be there when you die.”

  “What? When I—” she raises her arms. “Nobody’s ever died at a Bridge Day.”

  “That’s not true: 1983 and 1987.”

  Erica puts her hands on her hips and stares with mock disgust. “Whatever. I’m not going to be, like, some mad BASE jumper. I mean, look who’s talking. What’s your problem?”

  My Triangle holds. I am three lines of perfect order, pulsing with a cool sapphire glow. “I can’t handle losing anyone else,” I say, and what I’m thinking is, I am so tired of everyone disappearing.

  “So, okay, wait,” she sits on the bed and makes a tiny box with her hands, “To keep from losing me, you’re breaking up with me?”