The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  “You have to learn to take responsibility for your own behavior,” Kathianne said. “He got you here. Isn’t that enough of a sign that he cares?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Is there some part of you that sees that he is right?”

  “Yes,” I lied again. I was flushed hot with self-righteous anger.

  Hadn’t it been my father’s job to make sure that I was safe? Hadn’t my father been the one who had failed?

  That week, around midday, as we were hiking across a meadow, Medeina stopped us suddenly.

  “What?” I said. She held a finger up to her lips, then pointed out toward the horizon. There, a few hundred feet away, was something lumbering toward us. As it got closer, I could make out what it was: a brown bear, smaller than I had expected and predictably cuddly, bounding through the tall grass. After it had passed the group, all of us standing silently and shaking, I cleared my throat to speak. But Medeina shook her head.

  “That was just a little guy,” she said.

  “So?” I said.

  “That means Mama Bear isn’t far behind.”

  And indeed, a few moments later, a second bear easily twice the size of the first came blundering through the field—but unlike the baby, which had been crawling on all fours, the mother was walking two-legged like a human. She was fearsome, dark-eyed.

  The thought struck me like a bolt: What if I run toward her? She would maul me. She might kill me. But surely they wouldn’t make me come back out to the wilderness if I was mauled by a bear. It was too ridiculous. I tensed my body. I was ready to run, to see what might happen. Would she run in the opposite direction? Would she see me as prey, smell my flesh, rip into my belly with her jaw? Adrenaline coursed through me, making the hair on my body stand up. I tensed my legs, then—

  I felt Medeina’s hand on my shoulder. She had seen my posture shifting, read my body language—or maybe she was just psychic.

  “Don’t,” she whispered.

  A strange energy passed between us. I obeyed, and the impulse left me.

  After the bears passed, we hiked to the far edge of the field and began pushing up the side of a mountain; it was greener there than it had been in the desert we had just walked through. In the deafening quiet of the woods, I heard an unfamiliar noise—a quiet whooshing that turned into a burble as we approached it.

  “Running water,” Eric said. His eyes were electric.

  We reached a brook that sliced through the terrain, water slapping euphoniously over slick gray stones, pushing downstream with satisfying velocity. It looked so perfect—it was a movie creek, a prop. I emptied the contents of my water bottles onto the ground, then dipped into the stream. The water was fresh, clear, ice-cold—otherworldly blue. I drank from it gluttonously, like I hadn’t had water in years, until my stomach was swollen. The trees created a canopy of cool shade overhead. We sat quietly for a moment before we got up, tied our packs to our bodies once more, and began to climb another mountain.

  After seven days, I still couldn’t bust fire. Each night, I worked the bow and the spindle, twisting it into the branch of supple, flaky cedar as it blackened and smoldered. But the top point of the spindle skipped along my top rock, which was a piece of gray stone with a slight indentation in the middle; the more I put pressure on the top rock, leaning into it to maximize the friction generated by the spindle, the more the spindle would slip off the rock, unfurling from my bow with a vengeful snap and sailing across the campsite. It wasn’t working to spite me.

  Eric wasn’t having any of this trouble; his top rock had a more pronounced indentation that made it better suited for fire starting. Quickly he was spinning away at his bow, bent down on one knee like a marriage proposal, creating fat orange embers that he blew gently into a nest of dry grass, then built into a satisfying blaze that roared as he whooped and hollered, dancing through camp. But better still was JT, who used for his top rock an anklebone he said once had belonged to an elk; he called it a talus.

  “Is this, like, a Native American thing?” I asked. “You have to use all of the parts of the animal’s body after you kill it?”

  JT laughed. “Nope. I’m a white dude from Salt Lake City. It just makes for the best fire starting, that’s all.”

  I held the bone in my hand. It looked like a hinge: slightly smaller than a fist, smooth and curved, with four bulbous quadrants. It almost resembled a miniature loaf of challah bread. In the center of those four bulbs was a natural depression that fit the point of a spindle perfectly, and when I held it in my hand, my middle finger and thumb wrapped nicely between the grooves, creating a firm grip.

  While collecting wood for the fire—another one I hadn’t built—I searched the forest floor for rocks that might work better in my bow drill. I turned them over one by one, running my fingers across each smooth surface in pursuit of the perfect stone. But I knew what to look for, and the rock they had given me was still better than anything I found. I hurled them to the ground, loading my arms with fallen tree branches to take back to the camp. I sat apart from the group, eating the food that had gone cold after they had finished. I felt sorry for myself. I imagined my father having dinner at a chic downtown eatery with Jennifer, then enjoying a leisurely walk home.

  I bit my lip so hard it started to bleed.

  The next day, we walked along a path that cut through a large open field. The yellowed grains, tall and sharp, slapped against my arms. It was hot, brutally hot, so hot that my glasses steamed up as I walked, a cloudless sky split only by the white-hot sun. The seat belt webbing that kept my pack tied tight to my body was digging into my side, chafing painfully. As we turned a corner, I caught a whiff of some fetid smell, rank and skunk-like.

  Eric smelled it, too. “What is that?” he asked.

  As we approached a whitish form that lay motionless on the side of the trail, the stink grew stronger. Eric and I groused and groaned while JT and Medeina laughed at our disgust. It was a dead cow, collapsed on its side, and it had been dead for a while by the look of it: its stomach had rotted or been torn out, revealing the tines of a rib cage curving like long, macabre fingers. That warm carrion stench filled my mouth, and I gagged reflexively.

  “Circle of life,” Medeina said.

  As we started to move past it, I stopped suddenly. “JT,” I said, “would the anklebone from this cow work as well as your elk bone does?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Will you help me?” I asked.

  He studied me skeptically. “Are you serious?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, sucking in a big gasp of breath before I closed my mouth tightly and walked closer to the cow. Flies buzzed and snapped in the air, crawling along her Dalmatian hide, perched on the line of mauve-brown decaying flesh. I grabbed her rear right leg and tugged at it, half expecting it to just snap right off, but it didn’t give. I looked to JT for support.

  “Please?” I asked. He approached the cow, stepping hard onto the joint where her leg attached to her decomposing belly. Bones snapped. He put pressure on it while I pulled, and the leg bent a little, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Move,” I said, circling the cow. Bending at my knees like a gymnast, I jumped onto her body, stomping my feet down as hard as I could. More bones crunched. The flies hissed around me. With my hands, I leaned down and detached the leg, wrestling away the sinuous threads of rotted tissue, maggots squirming away from the activity. I cried out, triumphant, as it tore away from her belly.

  “I want one, too,” Eric said. He raced over to the carcass and began working on one of her other legs.

  With the right leg successfully detached, I began wrestling out the bone in her ankle, beating it against a boulder until a fissure formed just above the foot; I broke it at that point with a sonorous crack. Once it was split open, I could see the bone that connected the leg to the hoof—and then, just below, the white curve of a talus. I peeled away the hide and pressed hard on the underside of the leg with my fingers and out it pop
ped—the talus, still sticky with gray-pink flesh, my holy grail.

  I looked over at the rest of the group, paused in the path, watching this scene take place. I was caked in dirt and sweat, and the stench of the cow’s festering carcass was all over me, on my hands, in my mouth. But I lifted that bone over my head, victorious, and laughed out loud, the hardest I had laughed since I got to the wilderness. It was mine.

  That evening at camp, under a silvery Utah moon, I made a fire so big and blue that I thought it would burn for a thousand years.

  Seven

  I was beginning to give myself over to the program, piece by piece. Kathianne asked me pointed questions about my childhood and, without much difficulty, she teased out of me the story of my first sexual experience with Brooks. I understood cognitively that what had happened was wrong and that I was not at fault, but I surprised myself by how emotional I became when recounting it—or maybe I was just trying to earn her sympathy. She seemed satisfied by my tears, which were sincere, but I also suspected that I’d given her a nice, straightforward causality to why I was the way that I was—something she could write in her notes that made me simpler to crack.

  “Do your parents know?” she asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “It’s probably time you tell them,” she said, “that you were sexually abused.”

  Was it even something that was appropriate to categorize as abuse? He wasn’t much older than me, and I’d participated willingly in some of it; it wasn’t as if I’d been molested by a priest. Still, it felt like that was what she wanted, and so I wrote each of my parents long, emotional letters, explaining that I had been secretly suffering for years as a result of childhood sexual abuse. It felt reductive, but it was what Kathianne wanted me to say, and it was certainly much tidier than trying to parse out any other reason.

  Still, as I lay under my shelter at night, waiting for sleep to take me, I did wonder how things had gotten so out of control. Surely there was something profoundly wrong with me, even if I couldn’t name it, exactly. That big emptiness inside that clawed at my throat when I awakened in the morning until I went to sleep at night—the emptiness that I was always trying to fill.

  There was no way to fill it at Aspen, so I tried to cherish the little things. A hot meal. A stunning vista. The camaraderie of the group. The moments when I woke up as the sun was rising, before the morning’s chores, and let myself flash back to how things had been. The sound of Jerick’s laugh. The splendor of Dean’s loft. The smell of Seth’s skin. The people I had loved, if I was even capable of that. Maybe they were just people I had tricked into loving me.

  We hiked nine miles through a hailstorm, little shards of ice beating down in stinging tides, volleying into my skin like needles. We huddled under a tree for warmth, shivering, freezing from the odd anomaly of a summer ice storm; a nurse was helicoptered in to check our vitals, then promptly left upon establishing that none of us were going into hypothermic shock. My body was covered in mosquito bites and grime. I was blistered and strained; my head pounded constantly; my feet were calloused and bloody.

  Yet I was pleasant and compliant. What had started off as sheer manipulation—pretending to be taking it seriously in order to expedite things—had transformed, through no effort on my part, into something much more sincere. Eagerly, I fetched wood for the fire and helped to organize breakfast in the morning. The program had its own logic, rhythm, and parameters; before I realized it, I had internalized them.

  Two new boys, Justin and John, joined the group. Justin was from Indiana, and young—fourteen, maybe—and he had a bad temper; after punching a hole through a wall, he had been given the choice between Aspen and juvenile detention. He liked what I considered boy things—dirt bikes and hiking—and so he had decided to try wilderness.

  John was my age, from Marin County, and had a laid-back, surfer-stoner demeanor; I got the sense that he was a pretty normal kid, just with conservative parents. All three of the other boys had at least a passing interest in the outdoors, and I felt that my father had been particularly spiteful in sending me to that program, given my manicured affect and propensity for quoting Fran Lebowitz: “To me the outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.”

  I said this to Medeina once. She just rolled her eyes.

  Justin and John looked at Eric and me as if we were experienced veterans, which—having been there for a few weeks—we were. I taught them the ropes, patiently teaching them how to make their packs and even how to bust fire. They were almost as pissy as I had been during my first week, and I understood their frustration, but the program was straightforward: The more upbeat and acquiescent you were, the sooner you got to go home. Refusing to go along with it only protracted the stay unnecessarily.

  Once a week, for hygiene, we filled the billies—old tin cans about a gallon large—with pond water; a counselor would squeeze a dollop of soap into the water, and we would set off to the edge of camp, with a shield of trees providing some semblance of privacy, shouting our names all the way. I stripped, trying to wash myself with the soapy water—but I was standing in the dirt, with nothing to dry myself other than the dirty clothes I’d already been wearing for days, crusted with mud. It felt like a fruitless exercise, and so eventually, I just gave up trying.

  I looked tan, but it wasn’t just the sun: I was covered in a thin layer of dust and grime that sweat made adhere to my skin—we called it permadirt. A can of cold water and soap were no match.

  One morning, I awakened in my sleeping bag with an unfamiliar stickiness at my groin. I’d had a wet dream—my first ever. Sex had been far from my mind for weeks—it was almost impossible to be aroused in those conditions. But I felt strangely enlivened by this: I’d always assumed that I had never had a nocturnal emission because I’d been sexual at such a young age. It felt like my body was restoring a boyishness that I had assumed was lost forever, like the first normal teenage thing I had done in a long time. I wiped myself clean with a dirty T-shirt, hoping that a laundry drop would come before I’d have to wear it again. There were no tissues, no towels, only the single bottle of hand sanitizer that was dispensed to us when we returned from busting a hundred.

  A few days later, I noticed a sharp, painful stinging when I urinated. It wasn’t going away. I panicked. Which sexually transmitted disease was it? I wondered. I didn’t know what to do.

  I told Medeina, unsure whether she would believe me—would she think this was just a ploy to get me out of the field?

  “We’ll call a nurse,” she said. “But you’re not going anywhere.”

  And indeed, later that day, a field nurse arrived. (They must have driven staff to within walking distance of our campsites and had them hike in; I never saw a car; people just seemed to materialize out of nowhere.) In a circle of trees, she knelt before me, examining my genitals with plastic gloves.

  “Is it gonorrhea?” I asked. “Or chlamydia?” I shook my head. Fucking tweakers. I wondered who had given it to me.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a urinary tract infection. Happens sometimes.” I hiked my pants up. “We’ll get you on some antibiotics.”

  The field staff seemed accustomed to the sickness that accompanied living in nature, and this was unfathomable to me. JT had been terribly sick with giardia from the drinking water years earlier; now, he said, the bacteria were dormant in his gut, which meant he didn’t need iodine. At one particularly rank cow pond, he bent his head down to the surface of the water and gleefully lapped it up, chunks and all, as we recoiled in disgust.

  Justin fared worse still. Much later, I heard from him that a few days after he finally left Aspen, he was hospitalized with horrible stomach pains, shitting blood with a violence that terrified the emergency room doctors. He had E. coli from the water.

  But there were good times, too, as I beat back my cravings and grew more facile with the survival elements of the program. We sang as we hiked through the mountains, songs that
had been ubiquitous on the radio or old animated movies we had all watched as kids.

  Justin, who was pretty handy, borrowed a penknife from Medeina and carved us all spoons from branches he picked up along the way; as we sat eating our beans and rice with actual utensils for the first time in weeks, we all felt like kings. We talked about home, what we would eat when we got out—Eric wanted Little Debbie Nutty Bars; I craved tuna tartare—and the television shows we missed watching the most. And we studied the stars, which gleamed like jewels in the sky.

  Suddenly, three weeks had passed. I still wanted out, but staying wasn’t impossible.

  One afternoon, we hiked down to a field that looked more developed than our typical terrain. In the distance, I could even see something that resembled a road.

  “It’s gonna be a big day,” Medeina said, rubbing her hands together. Her face shifted: she knew something that we didn’t.

  We approached a fence. Behind it was a large wooden contraption. It looked like a big wheelbarrow—a deep bed with two enormous wheels taller than the wagon itself, built of sturdy wooden spokes. In the front was a rectangular wooden crossbar that created a space big enough for two people to fit into.

  “This,” Medeina said, resting her hand on one wheel, “this right here is a Mormon handcart. We’ll be traveling on these for now.”

  “For how long?” Justin asked.

  “No future questions,” Medeina said.

  “So does this mean no more hiking?” I asked. “We’re just going to push this thing?”

  JT nodded. “You load your packs into the bed,” he said. “One or two of you will take the front, and the rest of you will push from the back.” This sounded straightforward enough.

  “And we’ll be on roads,” I said. “This whole time?”

  “Yup,” Medeina said.