The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “Nobody gets through life without being an asshole,” I said. “Once in a while you’re going to dig in over something and get it wrong and make a scratch on the world you’ll never polish off. Those scratches will define you more than anything else.”

  “Bingo. Because guess what my dad did? He was a journalist. A good one. Important stuff on Big Pharma and AIDS. He did his best to put the world right. He fought for truth. He made a mark on the world.”

  “Aha.”

  “So does that answer your question? Including the unspoken one about why I always want facts, not made-up shit?”

  “I guess so. How do you get on with your mom?”

  She poured herself another drink. “Not at all these days. Something else I hadn’t realized about my dad was that he was skilled at hiding the fact my mom drank. Our relationship got patchy after. She died in a car accident when I was twenty.”

  “Christ, seriously?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re both alive and well and I’ve just been pulling your chain.”

  She got up and walked away.

  Ken watched her go.

  “She’s fucking with you,” he said when she was zipped up inside her tent. “And not in a good way.”

  I sighed. “I know.”

  “Hey,” Feather said.

  Ken and I turned our heads, not having realized she was there, sitting on the sand a little way behind us. She got up and wandered over, looking diffident.

  “Could I have a look? At the Newspaper Rock thing?”

  I handed her the phone. She clicked on it inexpertly. “Wow. You’ve got a lot of notes. Do you mind if…”

  “Help yourself.”

  She scrolled up and down for a while, clicking things, reading, moving on.

  “When I was a little girl,” she said, “my grandma used to tell me, ‘Everyone needs something to believe in.’ And that’s what you do, Nolan. You give people something to believe in. But I realized years ago that not everyone’s like us. Some people are only happy when they’ve got something to disbelieve.”

  She handed back the phone. “I feel sorry for them.”

  Once again I found myself awake in the middle of the night.

  I stuck my head out of the bag and shuffled myself to a position where I could sit with my back against the wall of the canyon. There were no signs of life from the rest of the gang, and no sound but for water slipping by in the river, coursing from A to B as it had for untold years, with a persistence that had gouged out this bizarre environment.

  After a while I realized: I was nervous. Partly it was a reprise of what I’d felt the previous night, a sense that this wasn’t necessarily a good or safe place to be. There was also the prospect of the climb. I’m not super fond of heights. They can be very high. And there was also the prospect of not failing, for once. Of actually having found a thing, and having to deal with what came next.

  I tried to shrug all this off, but then realized there was something I wanted to do about my nerves, something that would have been my first course of action for a long time.

  I wanted to talk to Kristy.

  My mother died when I was thirty. In the years that followed I realized that in addition to losing her, I’d lost a chunk of myself. My dad simply hadn’t retained a lot of material about my early years—so it was now gone. If losing your mother is the burning down of your personal Library of Alexandria, no longer having the counsel of your wife is akin to losing contact with the fellow war correspondent with whom you spent years deep in-country, witnessing the bad times but also the good, together with the long, rich quiet of just-another-day. There will be serious journalistic bias in her notes, of course, and flawed recollection (which you won’t be able to prove is flawed, because yours is so much worse), but afterward it can feel like losing the third dimension, or a second soul. With anybody else I’d have to explain what I was feeling, and by the end of that process would have decided it was dumb or unimportant.

  Kristy would have just known.

  I got out my phone, but of course there was no signal. And just as well: Texting in the dead of night would have been a very bad idea. I remembered that I’d cached a blog post of hers back in the hotel, though, and decided I might as well be a dork and read it.

  It was good, direct, concise. Kristy had evidently landed in the far reaches of Alaska with a team of hard-core cryogeologists to investigate the impact of global warming on permafrost by measuring the temperature at various levels of the surface, including deep in some developing fissures. Kirsty is well-known for environmental stuff, being able to spin it in such a way that it doesn’t antagonize nonbelievers. By the conclusion of her piece I was immeasurably better informed on the subject, though not on its writer: She keeps herself resolutely out of the picture (something I’m not great at doing, as you may have noticed). I was pleased for her, too. She’d been trying to get something like this together for a long time.

  I was about to turn off the phone and try to get some sleep when I noticed smaller text at the bottom of the article. I turned the phone on its side to enlarge it, and read:

  The expedition would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsor, who made this research possible.

  Their sponsor’s logo was familiar to me. It belonged to the Palinhem Foundation.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  NEWSPAPER ROCK, UTAH (Detail)

  Chapter

  12

  Seriously?” Feather said, around a toothbrush.

  It was a little after eight and everyone was on their feet and getting their breakfast/coffee/ablution needs met quickly. We’d decided not to strike camp, on the grounds that whatever the alleged cavern did or did not hold (assuming we could get to it), we couldn’t be sure to have established the lay of the land in time to depart today. Dylan reckoned that so long as we didn’t leave anything worth stealing at the site it’d be safe, and that the chances of anybody coming down this side canyon today were around zero anyway. While valuables, camera equipment, bottles of water, and sandwiches were being loaded onto the boat, I’d found Feather sitting on a rock, brushing her teeth. When she was done I showed her the page on my phone.

  “Wow,” she said. “What a super-cool coincidence.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No idea. The Foundation’s kind of big. Or broad. There’s not many staff, but lots of little departments in different cities. This is the more science-y end of things. I’ve never even met someone who’s involved.” Suddenly her face fell. “Oh, Nolan, I’m so sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “Being dumb. I didn’t stop to think—this might feel weird to you. Or hurtful. And here I am just being excited about it.”

  “It’s fine. Just a little surprising to come upon in the middle of the night, that’s all.”

  “I’ll bet! But it’s a totally different kind of expedition anyway. And kind of boring, don’t you think?”

  “Climate change is boring?”

  She laughed. “Of course it is. Everybody knows it’s supposed to be a thing, and they either believe in it or they don’t. Whatever they find in Alaska isn’t going to change that. But what we might find today…that would prove to the establishment—and people like our cynical friend Gemma over there—that the entire human narrative is skewed. And you will have done that, Nolan. You, and nobody else.”

  She smiled brightly and hurried off to go help put stuff on the boat. I watched her go, feeling curiously as if I’d had a chance to talk to Kristy after all.

  An hour later we had the raft at the foot of the canyon wall. Over half that time had been spent trying to get it lashed securely in position. Through some fluid mechanics complexity I wouldn’t pretend to comprehend, the side of the river up against the wall was seriously bumpy in parts and weirdly calm in others. Dylan, Pierre, and I eventually got front and back ends of the craft tethered to outcrops in a way that Dylan thought would hold.

  “Give me your shirt,
” Pierre said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He took off his T and held out his hand for my shirt. As always on shoots, I was wearing the billowy creamy-white number. Don’t blame me—Ken says it looks the part.

  “We’re both wearing jeans,” Pierre said. “And have brown hair. I put on your shirt, Molly points the camera, and we’ve got footage that’ll make it look like you were the—”

  “Christ, Pierre,” I said. “I don’t need to be the first up there. Or to look like I was.”

  “You found it,” he said, hand still out. “And you’re the man.”

  “Do it,” Ken said.

  I took off my shirt and swapped with him, reflecting that if Pierre kept being this unannoying I might have to confront the possibility that I found him annoying merely because he was young and affable and unnecessarily handsome. “Thanks.”

  He conferred with Molly over the camera, then squared up to the wall of the canyon. Timing it for when the rocking of the water brought the boat right up against the wall, he stepped out confidently—landing so his hands and feet were immediately secure, already scanning the climb ahead with the professional gaze of someone who knew what he was doing.

  “Be careful,” I said.

  “Yes, Dad,” he said.

  And so we watched. It took a while. It soon became clear that Pierre’s assessment of the canyon wall was correct, however, and it didn’t represent a technically challenging climb. He moved quickly and surely.

  Once in a while he paused and appeared to make choices, sometimes avoiding what looked like the straightest route, I presume because there was a longer alternative that would make for a more feasible ascent for the rest of us.

  Molly filmed enough of it that the shirt-clad figure slowly getting closer and closer to the opening could be cut into the show to look like me. Especially as Pierre got higher, there was no way of telling the difference. Meanwhile, the real me started to feel queasy and had to stop watching.

  “Yeah,” Ken said, accepting a cigarette. “I’m simply not seeing this as credible, mate. You, maybe. You jog and stuff. But me? I mean, fuck’s sake.”

  “But so what was the plan?” Gemma asked. “You knew this place was supposed to be halfway up the canyon wall.”

  “Be honest with you, love,” Ken said, “and I don’t think I’ll break Nolan’s heart by saying this: I did not for a moment think we were going to find this thing.”

  “Mind blown,” I muttered.

  “And according to the Kincaid article it’s supposed to be a lot higher than this. I know Nolan said he thought some of the details might have been changed, but Nolan does talk an awful lot of bollocks. So my thinking was, if we found something, then we’d cliff-hang the show as a ‘To Be Continued,’ and come back with some proper climbers with ropes and all that jazz.”

  “So this is great news,” Gemma said with a sly smile. “It means you get to go up there yourselves. You must be delighted.”

  “Yeah,” Ken and I said, unconvincingly, in unison.

  “Piece of cake,” Pierre said as he jumped back onto the boat. He was sweating but not much out of breath. “And the last section is the easiest, which is great, because people will be tired by then. I could see a way straight up. So I didn’t bother. This really is not hard.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s more than hiking but most of it’s barely climbing. Which makes sense, right? Kincaid doesn’t mention it being tough. Despite claiming the cavern was three or four times higher than this. Kind of a giveaway in retrospect, huh?”

  Ken and I glanced at each other. “Seriously,” Pierre said. “Nolan, my mom could do it.”

  “Didn’t you tell me your mom once free-climbed El Capitan?”

  “Years ago. And she barely got halfway.”

  “Lazy bitch,” Ken said.

  “It’s actually kind of hard, dude.”

  “He was joking, Pierre.”

  “Oh. Well, not my mom, then. Your mom could do it.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “Even before she died.”

  “Christ, sorry. I’m going to stop talking now.”

  “So how would we tackle it?” Ken asked dubiously, peering up at the wall.

  “We all go together,” Pierre said, taking off my shirt and handing it back to me. “Couple yards apart. That way the person behind me can see what I’m doing, which holds I’m choosing. There’s a few bits where there’s a hard way and an easy way. I’d make sure we all went the easy way.”

  Ken thought about it. “Fucking hell,” he said, turning to the assembled. “Okay, look. Mountain Goat here says he thinks it’s a go. Obviously I’m not going to tell anybody they have to do this, or even ask—and that includes you, Nolan—but…”

  “I’m not missing it,” Feather said immediately.

  “Let’s do it,” Molly said, with the gameness only a sporty Cali girl with two older brothers can muster.

  Gemma didn’t look much more enthusiastic than I felt, but she shrugged. “Sure. YOLO, right?”

  “I’ll have a crack at it,” Ken said. “But I’ll go last. That way I’ll only be killing myself if I plummet like a sack of bricks.”

  So then all eyes were on me.

  “Christ,” I said.

  Chapter

  13

  Pierre went back onto the wall and climbed up far enough to give room for Feather to follow. Then Molly, then Gemma. Then me. I was half expecting to hear Ken shout, “So long, suckers,” and see him merrily untying the boat and instructing Dylan to take him back to all the vodka. Within a minute of scooting up out of the way, however, I looked down to see his face a couple of feet below, meaty hands gripping the rock.

  “I hate you,” he said.

  We all wore backpacks, contents disproportionately spread in terms of weight and importance. Pierre had the camera and batteries, Molly the sound gear, and so on. I was allotted the sandwiches. Make of that what you wish.

  On Pierre’s advice, we took a moment to get settled.

  Then we started up the wall.

  The lowest portion was barely more than a tough hike, with less margin for error on where you put your feet. After about fifteen minutes this gave way to something more like actual climbing. The surface of the wall was uneven, however, with plenty of extrusions and crevices. Pierre took it slowly, stopping every five minutes to give people a chance to shake their arms and clench and unclench gloved hands.

  I’d heard people describe climbing as a kind of physical chess, which doesn’t help, as I suck at chess. But yes, for a while, I kind of understood the appeal of choosing which outcrop to put this foot on, and then that, shifting your weight from hand to hand. As we moved higher and higher I even had a chance to revisit the feeling I’d had when we first got on the river—a surprised awareness that I was doing something intrepid and cool that, left to my own devices, wouldn’t have made it onto any realistic bucket list.

  From time to time I took a few moments to turn from the wall and look out across the canyon, down toward a river that was an increasingly significant distance below, sparkling in the sun. Ken was gamely keeping pace. He let loose with an occasional burst of profanity, but as time went on it became clear that this was part of his process rather than an indication that he felt in imminent danger.

  I was glad to have him there, and glad we were effectively climbing together. It helped, for some reason, and not just because he was the most self-evidently unsuited to the undertaking. This probably meant, I realized with something of a shock, that he had become, like, a friend.

  That hadn’t really occurred to me. I wondered if I should mention it at some point, found it easy to imagine the weapons-grade irony with which the observation would be met—I would do exactly the same, of course—and decided not.

  When Gemma fell, I had half a second’s warning.

  We were more than two-thirds of the way up and my arms and calves were feeling it, but I’d settled into a rhythm and the whole escapade
had stopped feeling unfeasible. To be honest, it looked a lot worse from the river than it was when you were in the midst. I still kept checking below once in a while (Ken doggedly replicating my every step and handhold) but had stopped looking around at the view—we were a little too high now to do that with equanimity. Instead, part of my mind had moved toward working out what I’d say to camera when we eventually made it up there. A lot depended on what we found, of course, but I wanted to be at least slightly prepared. I was deep in this train of thought when there was a short, squawking scream.

  Then the sound of scrabbling.

  Before I’d had time to consciously process these noises, Gemma was sliding back toward me. Fast.

  Even if I’d known the recommended response to this kind of event there wouldn’t have been time to do anything except what I did, bracing my feet and tightening my grip with both hands.

  Gemma had only a couple of feet to build up speed, and was grabbing at rocks on her way down. She still hit me like a freight train. The impact knocked all the air out of my lungs and I felt my lower right back muscle snap straight into spasm.

  But there was enough room between me and the wall for her to slide into, and somehow my hands held.

  She quickly got handholds on the wall, too, and her weight came off me within seconds.

  Then we both just held tight.

  I was very aware of the heat of her skin through her shirt, and the perspiration on the back of her neck where she’d tied her hair up. That, and my heart beating like a jackhammer.

  “Shit!” Molly shouted. “Are you guys okay?”

  “Let’s not do it again,” I said, my voice a little unsteady. “But yeah, we’re good. I’m good, anyway. You okay?”