The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  “Awesome,” Eric said. We high-fived. Medeina smiled, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  We untied our packs from our torsos and tossed them into the back of the cart. Eric took the lead, slipping between the bed of the cart and the crossbar, while Justin, John, and I took the rear.

  Medeina pointed. “Over to that road.”

  “On the count of three,” Eric said. “One, two—”

  We started to push. The cart creaked and groaned, and so did we. It wasn’t just heavy—with six packs inside, it weighed as much as a car.

  “Push!” Eric yelled. The three of us shoved with all our force and the cart edged forward about a foot. We pushed again, and it moved another foot. I turned to Medeina.

  “This is a joke, right?” I said.

  With an extraordinary amount of force, we managed to push the cart over to the road. It wasn’t paved with concrete, just worn down and jagged with rocks, small enough that an automobile would have rolled right over them but big enough to disrupt the movement of the cart. Along a smooth surface, it would have been easy, but the wheels weren’t designed to pass over any irregularities.

  We continued pushing, Medeina and JT trailing behind us, watching the struggle. Each time a wheel got stuck on a rock, we had to stop and wrestle it into rotation again, pushing from the underside to move it along. It bumped and skidded, stopping every minute or two. The sun beat hot and heavy overhead; my glasses steamed up. But still we pushed on, up an incline and down the other side, pausing to catch our breath. Eventually, the road flattened out and it got easier; then more bumps would emerge and it would get difficult again. Another hill, and then on the other side another.

  It went on like this for hours. My fingers were crushed between the wheel and the axle as I pushed; Eric complained of having welts on his hands from the crossbar; all of our shoulders and arms ached from pushing. By the time we reached camp, the sun was already beginning to set.

  “Carts sure are frustrating, huh?” Medeina said as we unloaded our packs, panting and bruised.

  “They’re awful,” I said. All my goodwill had been sapped out of me.

  “Does it remind you of anything?” she asked. “Having to work together as a team—learning to support each other when things get hard—being patient with the limitations of others?”

  I was silent.

  “It sounds like a family to me,” she said.

  “All of these metaphors are a little ham-fisted, don’t you think?” I said.

  Medeina laughed. “Oh, kiddo,” she said. “If you don’t like metaphors, you’re not going to do well here.”

  The third day on carts, passing through a red-rock desert, we reached a flat, straight road that led all the way down to the horizon, where the path stretched upward at a sharp incline. I looked over at Eric. Sweat poured down his face, ruddy and filthy with grime. He looked back at me and shook his head.

  “Fuck this,” Justin muttered.

  We edged closer to the hill, which loomed before us. I stared at it, not knowing how we would make it. Surely it couldn’t be done. The cart itself weighed five hundred pounds; with our packs, it felt like it was close to a ton.

  At lunch, we conspired. “We have to break the cart,” Eric whispered. “We can’t go on like this.”

  “But then what happens?” I said. “You think they’re just gonna let us hike?”

  “Yes, dude,” he said. “They’ll have no choice. If the cart doesn’t work, we can just leave it and keep going. We have to sabotage it.”

  “No talking out of earshot!” Medeina called. We returned to our dry noodles and chunky water.

  Closer and closer, we pushed toward the hill. As the incline got steeper, our progress got slower. We grunted and squawked, nudging the wheels over boulders and kicking up clouds of dust that made my eyes fill with tears. I spat a ball of dirt and phlegm. My hands were bloody.

  “It’s Hell Hill, dude,” Eric said.

  “Can’t we take out our packs, hike up, and then come back down for the cart?” I asked. Medeina shook her head no.

  As we approached the apex, the slope was getting dangerously steep. We pushed one foot forward, thrusting with all of our collective force, and if any of us stopped pushing for even a moment, we rolled back two or three feet. The road curved into the hillside, creating switchbacks lined with rocks. Painstakingly, slowly, we pushed over each rock. Justin was weeping.

  “I can’t go anymore,” he cried. “I’m so tired.”

  “Come on, Justin!” JT shouted. “Almost there!”

  Every part of me was soaked in sweat. I had put my glasses in my pack because they kept steaming up, though I couldn’t see three feet in front of me without them. Blindly, I pushed, crying out in frustration and pain.

  And then, suddenly, we were at the top. There was nothing more to push against. We had reached a plateau with panoramic views of the valley, one lone acacia tree providing a little shade. I collapsed onto the ground, heaving.

  “All right,” Medeina said. “Five minutes. But we’ve gotta keep going if we’re going to make it to camp by nightfall.” I looked at her with what I knew was unmasked loathing and she smiled at me.

  We unloaded our packs and sat for a minute, hydrating. I looked up at the sun inching its way across the Utah sky; that was the only way that I could tell time. The cart was perched on the edge of Hell Hill. I looked over at Eric, who looked back at me. I nodded and he stood up.

  “I think I left my hat in the cart,” he said, walking over to it. I saw him looking in the bed, busying himself with its contents.

  “Hey, JT,” I said. JT and Medeina, in conversation a few yards away, looked up at me. “Can I have a bandage? My hand is bleeding.”

  Then, while they were distracted, a creak and a rapid-fire thudding noise. The cart was sailing down Hell Hill. We sprinted over to the edge, where Eric was standing, feigning horror. The cart skidded and bounced down the incline until—he couldn’t have planned it better—it collided with a boulder set off from the path. One wheel popped off and went spinning down through the dust, landing a few yards away.

  “Oh no!” I yelled. “The cart!” It felt good to get back to my roots—melodrama and lies.

  Medeina studied Eric for a moment, then Justin and John, who looked aghast. Then she turned to me. I was waiting for her to blow a fuse, to yell or shout, but instead, she smiled and pulled out her walkie-talkie.

  “This is Medeina with group eight. We have a broken cart up here. Where’s the nearest cart parked?” She waited as a lo-fi murmur on the other end spoke. “Ten-four,” she said.

  “There’s another cart a mile south of here,” she said. “So we’re going to carry this broken cart to the drop so it can be repaired. And then we’re going to load up a new cart. And then we’re going to keep going.”

  Eric and I blinked wordlessly, mouths agape.

  “So—so we’re going back down the hill?” Justin said, incredulous.

  “Yup,” Medeina said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And in case it wasn’t clear,” Medeina said, flashing a nasty smile, “we’re going right back up it.”

  The wilderness staff had made several opaque mentions to “solos” over the course of my stay at Aspen, but didn’t expand on what that meant when asked. But I had heard of it from Seth, who had gone out on solo at the wilderness program in Oregon he’d completed three years earlier. We had been on carts for about a week when we arrived at one of the prettier sites we had visited—at high elevation, the grass yellow-green with plenty of shady trees. There we were told we would be on solo for two days, or maybe three: in complete isolation in the woods. This didn’t intimidate me. After so many weeks of traveling in a group with no privacy, the idea of a little solitude was appealing.

  I was camped on a grassy hillside, with a fallen white aspen tree that served as a perfect bench for sitting. They had given me a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous and a workbook; plus, I had two blank stenographer’s p
ads to fill up.

  I wrote.

  I read the AA book from cover to cover, then read it again. I built a fire. I sang songs to myself, strange wordless lullabies to snatches of melodies. I walked to the top of the hill and surveyed the landscape. I could see gray smoke rising in the distance where someone else had taken shelter.

  I wrote letters to my father and my mother, who each had sent me several more pieces of correspondence.

  My father’s, again, had infuriated me; he had described my recollections of sexual abuse as “very troubling,” and then, one sentence later, began discussing the marathon that he and Jennifer were preparing for. He had vacated the apartment where we’d lived for the past two years, he wrote, and was now living full-time with her.

  How could he gloss over my pain? I wrote in reply that I was excited to hear about his marathon, and that I was glad he’d been able to move out of the apartment on Eighty-eighth Street, and that I hoped Jennifer was well.

  All lies.

  It seemed strange to imagine my father going about his life just as he had before: bicycling through the park, picking up takeout, waiting for the subway. I wondered how much they told him about how I was doing, and what the progress reports from Kathianne revealed. I thought of how I’d looked on the day of my graduation, the day he sent me away—shiny black shoes, crisp black suit. Now, in my well-worn fatigues, covered in dirt, I was an urchin.

  The two days passed, and I returned to camp with the rest of the group, unfazed. Eric seemed swoony.

  “I didn’t think I could do it,” he said. “But I did. It really makes you think about, y’know, the choices you’ve made and where things went wrong.”

  Justin, too, seemed altered. “Man, I thought I was going to go crazy toward the end of the first day,” he said. “Just pacing back and forth, stuck in my head. I had no idea how hard it would be.” I tried to read both of their faces, to see whether they were performing it for the counselors’ benefit, but they both looked sincere.

  “How was it out there, Sam?” Medeina asked. “All alone, with nothing but your thoughts?”

  “It was fine,” I said. “All good.”

  Medeina and JT exchanged a look.

  “That’s it?” JT said.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t trying to be deliberately blasé, but I didn’t want to fake it, either. I didn’t know why whatever effect solos were supposed to have hadn’t worked with me.

  One night later, at the campfire, we were just finishing dinner when JT tapped me on my shoulder. On carts, we could carry more food with us, which meant better meals: the previous drop had included a pound of bacon. We cooked it in a skillet over the fire, then made macaroni and cheese. Normally, that was beyond our ken since we had no milk or butter; here, we poured the bacon fat into the macaroni and cheese with a half cup of powdered milk. It was delicious, the noodles greasy and smoky and decadent.

  “Follow me,” JT whispered in my ear. “Bring a thermal.” I dropped my blue spackled tin cup by the side of the fire, returned to my shelter to grab a warm layer, and met him back at the center of camp. The other boys looked confused. I raised my hands—I was as bewildered as they were.

  I followed him up into the forest, the bobbing beam of his flashlight marking a tenuous path through the trees. I stumbled over the gnarled roots of aspen trees, with their distinctive oviform markings like eyes. In the shadows of the night, the exposed roots looked like ghostly tentacles. After what felt like hours, we stopped in a clearing. There was only darkness around us, and eerie silence. He dropped his flashlight onto the ground, then knelt. I heard the whistling of his bow drill and then, quickly, the neon glow of embers.

  “Blow this into a fire,” he said, “and keep it burning all night. If it goes out, you fail the test.”

  And then, in a ballet of hushed footsteps, he was gone, and I was left in the night with only the flickering flame and nothing but darkness around me.

  “Oh God,” I said out loud. “Oh God.”

  I was alone, and it was dark, and I couldn’t have found my way back to camp if I tried. There was truly no way out, not even the security that I’d felt on solo, of knowing approximately where the other boys were, of being able to crawl into my shelter after the sun went down. I was alone. The aloneness spread through me until it felt like it was possessing my body. I gazed into the inky beyond. A gust of air galloped through the clearing, and the hairs on my arm stood up on end, saluting the night. The fleece of my thermal stiffened against my sunken chest. I could feel the drumming of my quickening pulse. Dread prickled at the nape of my neck.

  I got onto my hands and knees and blew into the fire, a bud of orange-blue flame now waning in a wispy nest of dried grass. Mercifully, it grew. Twigs and bark fueled its strength, but there weren’t enough pieces within arms’ reach. I stood and hurtled forward into the darkness, tripping over my clumsy limbs, groping madly for kindling. I snapped a branch off a tree and tossed it into the fire, spraying embers to and fro. Pain needled in my eyes. The wind scattered embers and ash all over the clearing.

  Good, I thought. Some rage turned white-hot within me. I wanted to burn down the forest, burn down every lying teenage dream that I’d been stupid enough to have.

  Then, as the fire waned, I began to cry. I sobbed and blew ashes everywhere, and the world crumpled around me—there was nothing but my breath. How many minutes had it been? How long would I be out there, alone in the darkness?

  “I can’t do this!” I shouted into the empty night. “I can’t do this.”

  I could hear my hysteria escalating, feel my heartbeat rising, but it didn’t matter—there was no one around.

  “How the fuck did I end up here?” I shouted. “What am I doing here?”

  And then, instantaneously, my tears stopped. The night was still.

  “God,” I murmured. “Please help me. Please see me through this.” I hadn’t prayed since the first night in the wilderness, and even that prayer had been half ironic, a plea for catastrophe to befall me. But this prayer was sincere. And as I prayed, I felt a calm settling—not the presence of God, in whom I didn’t really believe, but the presence of some notional feeling that I wasn’t entirely alone out there after all.

  I counted the minutes until morning, blowing into the fire to keep it alive.

  Then, at daybreak, there was a rustling behind me. I turned slowly and stared into the watery umber eyes of a fawn. Her ears perked up as she studied me. I inhaled and exhaled slowly and deliberately. She looked at me for a long time until I realized that I’d forgotten the fire. I turned back to blow in it to keep it going, and when I turned back around, the fawn was gone.

  When JT came back for me, the sun now shining brightly over the forest, I was dumbfounded and motionless, the fire still shuddering a sooty pile at my feet.

  “You did it,” he said, with something like pride.

  I looked up at him. I felt a new vitality coursing through me.

  I was different.

  He led me back down to camp, where the boys were gathered around the fire pit, eating breakfast. Eric looked at me funny. I could feel it in my movements—I was standing up straighter. Things were graver.

  I knew myself, knew what I was capable of.

  “You aren’t a Coyote anymore,” Medeina said. “You’re a Buffalo.”

  In my previous life, this would have been laughable, but Medeina was serious. She touched my arm. The moment felt sacred.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am a Buffalo.”

  Things changed after that, some division between me and the rest of the group. We weren’t in it together anymore; I was separate from them. Even Eric, with whom I’d grown so close, felt like a stranger to me, like I had waded in over my head. I could still see my friends on the shore, but they were too distant to touch.

  By this point, more boys had joined the group—first as Mouse, sitting silently, gnawing on their peanuts and raisins, then howling triumphantly at the moon. I didn’t get close to any of them�
�I didn’t know quite how to relate. Their brusque resistance and occasional good cheer, both of which had been my primary modes just days before, felt altogether foreign.

  When we were at camp, I stayed in my shelter, journaling. I cried several times a day. I prayed feverishly, begging anything that might resemble God to take my pain away. Over and over again in my notepad I wrote: “There is only clean, there is no in between,” a paraphrase of a line from an Elliott Smith song I had always loved but never really understood.

  So, I decided, if part of the purpose of Aspen was to strip away the ego and defenses, that piece had worked. I felt vulnerable, cut open: a mass of exposed nerve and tissue, all tender to the touch. All the ways I’d medicated—from the drugs all the way down to sarcasm—had been taken from me, but nothing had been resolved. I was just as sick as I’d ever been, but I had no medicine; everything hurt all the time.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do about it, or how I could possibly be fixed.

  Neither did Kathianne.

  When she came for her weekly visit after I had been in the field for about six weeks, she told me that my parents were working on formulating an aftercare plan—determining where, exactly, I would go once I left.

  “I think your work here is almost done,” she said softly. “You’re ready to move on to the next thing.”

  “But where?” I asked.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “First, you’ll go to the graduation week. Your family will be there.”

  I grimaced. We were so fractured.

  “I’m not ready for that,” I said. “I mean, I’m ready to go, but I’m not ready to see them. They’re going to be disappointed by where I’m at.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “I just— I know them,” I said. “I know my dad. He expected me to come out of this fixed. That’s what it was supposed to be—a fix, somewhere he could send me off to and they’d return me all better. And I’m not. I feel so ugly. So messed up. Who wants to see that in their kid?”

  “I know you don’t feel ready, but I think it’s time,” she said.