Ascension

by Steven Galloway

  Before leaving for this walk, Etel had confronted Salvo about the fire. “I forgive you,” she told him, and he didn’t have to ask to know what she was talking about.

  “I am sorry,” he said, clutching her shoulders.

  “I know. It is forgiven.”

  “It was a horrible thing to think.”

  “Yes. But the past is the past. We are through it.”

  Salvo had embraced his sister, and he felt thirty years of guilt and shame peel off his back.

  Though they never knew it, Daniel Ursari had seen Salvo walk on more than one occasion since he ran away from his adoptive family. He lived in Detroit, working as a parking-meter repair man, a job at which he excelled. Whenever he saw an advertisement for a walk of Salvo’s, he would attempt to get the time off of work and travel the country to see Salvo perform. He was always careful to stay out of the way of anyone who might recognize him. He would arrive as the walk started and leave as soon as Salvo’s foot hit the far platform. There was no point in hanging around any longer than necessary; he still had seizures, though he rarely had more than one a year.

  Daniel was in the audience for the Grand Canyon walk, and though it never occurred to Salvo to look, if he had it is possible that he would have seen the boy whom he had pulled from the fire, sitting in the bottom row of bleachers constructed specifically for the walk. Salvo’s mind was preoccupied anyway; this was a difficult walk, and his full attention was required to pull it off.

  He checked his watch and, seeing that he would begin in only moments, took it off and gave it to Anna. She smiled and put it in her pocket.

  “This is a long one,” he said.

  “This will be your last walk. Make sure to enjoy it.” She did not say this with malice. It was a fact both of them knew, and she genuinely did want him to enjoy the walk, though she worried for his safety. These skywalks had been getting progressively dangerous, and she knew that this was by far the most perilous yet.

  She did not know that only hours before, he had been asked to perform a skywalk between the towers of two of the world’s tallest buildings. Because he was retiring, he saw no point in telling her what would only worry her further. He would turn them down when he returned home.

  “I think I will enjoy it,” he said. “It is a nice day.” It was indeed a day to behold, the weather ideal for such a walk. It was sunny but uncharacteristically cool, and there was no wind to speak of.

  It was time for him to begin. He picked up his balancing pole and checked to make sure that the bottle of soda was secure in its pouch hanging from his neck. “Wish me luck,” he said.

  “You don’t need luck.”

  Salvo smiled and turned to the wire.

  “I never hated you,” Anna called to him.

  He paused for a moment before looking at her. “I know.”

  He stepped onto the wire and it was all gone. He thought only of his feet moving forward, his hands on the balancing pole. For nearly three hundred steps he moved forward slowly, steadily, inexorably. He was not aware of the people who watched from the safety of solid ground. Then a thought began to form in his mind. It was small at first, almost a whisper of a whisper, but it grew louder and stronger until it was all there was.

  This is your last walk.

  It was plain, it was simple, and it would not go away. Salvo tried to clear his mind, knowing that a thought on the wire, even a simple one, was a very bad thing. Still it would not leave him.

  He pushed on, head pounding, barely aware of himself. Finally he reached the centre of the wire, marked with a piece of red electrician’s tape. It was here that he was to sit on the wire and drink the soda that was suspended from his neck. He sighed, thinking this a bad thing to do on the wire. Then, out of the corner of his eye, something floated into view, and his heart stopped dead.

  The butterfly was blue and yellow and orange, quite large, and it fluttered past him, in no special hurry. For a moment it hesitated, then came to rest on the tip of Salvo’s balancing pole.

  Salvo clenched his teeth, waiting for panic to set in, but a strange thing happened: the fear that he expected never came. The butterfly sat, unmoving, and Salvo was not afraid. His balancing pole was weightless. He was calm as he watched the motionless insect for a long minute, and then it took flight, soon disappearing in the distance.

  A smile wound its way onto Salvo’s lips. Still standing, he took the bottle of soda from its cradle and dropped it, watching it fall until, like the butterfly, it was too small to see. He lowered his pole to the wire and raised his feet into the air. He held this handstand until his face turned hot with blood. Returning his feet to the wire, he reverted to a standing position.

  All around him he saw the desert, a million shades of brown with points of green and red, and he felt warm air rising from below and smelled nothing but himself and open space. His bones were strong and his mouth was wet, and his eyes were clear as ever they had been.

  Retirement receded from his mind as an idea that had never existed. He stood on the wire, and he knew that as long as he was standing, he would live forever.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THOUGH THIS IS A WORK OF IMAGINATION, I have drawn in places from history and the experience of real wire walkers. Ron Morris’s biography of Karl Wallenda, Wallenda; Paul Auster’s translation of Phillip Petit’s On the High Wire; The Tightrope Walker by Hermine Demoraine; Stewart O’Nan’s The Circus Fire; Budapest 1900 by John Lukacs; and Big Top Boss: John Ringling North and the Circus by D. L. Hammarstrom provided much of my picture of how things “actually” happened. Some of the Romany folk tales included are made up, and others are actual lore. The stories I have not made up myself can be found in a wide variety of incarnations, in books such as Diane Tong’s Gypsy Folktales; The Orange of Love, compiled by Lars Gjerde, and A Book of Gypsy Folk-Tales, edited by Dora Yates. For some interesting descriptions of Romany life, Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey and Jan Yoors’s The Gypsies were my favourites. However, being fiction, Ascension is mostly all lies.

  I owe an enormous debt to Marita Dachsel, Lee Henderson, Rick Maddocks, Sioux Browning, George McWhirter, Madeleine Thien, Heather Frechette, Karoly Sándor, Lynda Milham, Chad Hunt, Gary Tayler, Mark Abbott, Timothy Taylor and Jason Willows for reading and providing suggestions, complaints and comments about the manuscript. Thanks also to Kevin Chong, Tammy Armstrong, Anne Fleming, Annabel Lyon, Nancy Lee, Laisha Rosnau, Jennica Harper and Jeff Morris for their considerable lunching skills; to Isabel, George, Steve, Dina and everyone else at Helen’s Grill for feeding and caffeinating me; to the Galloway, Tayler and Haslett families and their extensions for support and encouragement; and to the UBC Creative Writing Program for employment and enjoyment.

  I am deeply grateful to my agent, Carolyn Swayze, and to Diane Martin, Noelle Zitzer, Louise Dennys, Astrid Otto, Deirdre Molina, Jennifer Shepherd, Gloria Goodman, Samantha Haywood and everyone else at Knopf/Random House of Canada for each of the million wonderful things they’ve done for me and this book.

  I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts; without their aid I would have been up a creek in a big way.

  Finally, thanks to my wife, Lara. Without her, none of this would be.

  STEVEN GALLOWAY teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. His acclaimed fiction debut, Finnie Walsh, was nominated for the 2000 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He lives in Vancouver.