One night I pick up my phone and I’m about to text any of thehundred people who could cure my loneliness, or at least aid in my procrastination. But I can’t do it for some reason, so I go outside and walk backward laps around the block until Knickerbocker Bagel opens. I talk Fred the owner into giving me a free egg bagel with extra scallion cream cheese because of what an integral member of the community I am and all that.
Sitting on the curb, I lick all the cream cheese off first, then go for the actual bagel. I like the feeling of separating two things from each other. It doesn’t inject me with joy but it extracts a bit of the venom, so that’s something. I’ll take it. I’ll take anything I can get these days, so long as it’s free.
Chapter 34
I stop going to church pretty soon after I start.
It wasn’t like that phase was ever going to last long—it was about the same duration as my mullet chapter back in college. But I still can’t shake the gaze of that little old woman. How she looked at me like she knew me. The past me, the present me, the future me, all curled together in one ribbon of smoke. And the real kicker was how it didn’t look like the truth shocked her or scared her like it should. It just seemed to affirm that she was glad to see me.
One day on the blurry border between spring and summer, I decide to take the woman’s advice to go out into the wilderness, because why not, really? You can’t get lost if you’ve never been found. Maybe that’s me being an overdramatic artist but it feels true, truer than anything has in a while now.
So I write that quote on the ceiling of the Inn in black Sharpie, signing my name larger than the quote itself so the attribution isn’t missed. Then I load up a backpack with granola bars, water, pepper spray, and edibles. On my way out, I pass Tara. She sizes me up in my athletic clothes and sneakers, asks where I’m off to.
“I’m going hiking,” I tell her. “I’ll be back in a day or five, don’t worry.”
“Hiking?” Tara says, like I’ve just announced I’m boarding a spacecraft to Mars or something.
“I just need to get out and move my legs,” I say. “I’ve been so restless lately.”
She probes some more, tells me to be safe, and asks if I have a portable phone charger.
“Yes, Mom.” I roll my eyes but actually like how she’d miss me if I was gone. She’d probably be the only one.
I head off to catch the L train into Manhattan. The geography feels too close to Chris. We still haven’t had any contact since New Year’s, five months that might as well be five years. I don’t think of him often anymore, unless you count the times that I think about how I’m not thinking about him. But I don’t count those. Why would I?
Transferring to the 4 train, I head up to the Harlem Metro North station so I can skip over the chaos of boarding at Grand Central. Clambering up to the aboveground tracks, I get on the first train that pulls up. It’s headed for Poughkeepsie, apparently. I don’t buy a ticket. It’s not just that I’m trying to save money. That’s part of it, but I also haven’t decided which station I’m going to and I like that feeling, the open-ended possibility of it all.
I snag one of the last window seats and sit there watching the dirty-looking Hudson. The sharp buildings start to swap themselves out for rolling foothills in the valley. Clouds bandage the peaks in cotton, like they know the earth needs protecting from humans, that parasitic species that doesn’t handle anything with care except their own egos.
When the ticket collector comes by, I slip away to the bathroom. It’s the oldest trick in the book but it still works, which makes me kind of disappointed that I didn’t have to stretch my creativity to find a loophole. But it’s also satisfying in a practical sort of way. When I get back to my seat, it’s occupied by this repugnant couple, cuddled up and sharing a pair of earbuds, the cord all tangled. I wonder what song they’re listening to before remembering that I don’t care at all.
I could demand my seat back but it’s not worth my breath, so I just find a new one and have some fun trying to decide what stop to get off at. I pick Cold Spring, but as I’m about to get off there, the conductor announces that Breakneck Ridge is next. I’ve heard of it before but haven’t been, and who could resist that name?
Breakneck Ridge wins me over right away. It’s such a ratchet little station that you have to hop off the very back of the train to get down to the platform. I leap down like a ninja, and a group of other hikers follows me, picking up on my leader vibes. They’ve all got those intense hiking boots and high-tech hiking poles and all that other fancy gear like they’re climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
I don’t want to follow anyone and I don’t want anyone following me. The whole point of this excursion is to be alone, so I storm on ahead.
The trail is flat at first, but then the incline starts and quickly escalates into a full-on rock scramble. I realize why it’s called Breakneck Ridge. One wrong slip and I could easily plummet to my death, off the rocks and into the river. Looking back, I spot the other hikers just starting up. They’re going slowly like they’re paralyzed by the fear of falling, like they’re terrified to contemplate death and therefore terrified to contemplate life.
I increase my speed, leaping up from rock to rock, ledge to ledge. My hands and knees get scraped up, just surface cuts, and finally I reach the top. There’s this lookout point over the gray-blue river, the deep green hills undulating for miles. I’m pretty impressed with myself for how far I’ve already climbed, especially since I never do this kind of thing. It reveals my natural talent or willpower, maybe both.
There’s a flagpole at the lookout, and it makes me want to fly a Redstocking flag up there, a banner with the red fist pumping through the air. When I get back to the city, I’ll make one for meand Tara, maybe even a couple extra for Hal and Jenni to keep as relics from their rebel days. I probably won’t gift them to the defectors, but you never know. It’s hard to feel spiteful right now when I’m wheezing so much from the hike.
Drinking some water, I dangle my feet over the side of a particularly jagged rock, like the game I play on the Williamsburg Bridge, only better because there are no guardrails here. This time I don’t think about where my shoes would go if they fell. I contemplate the outcome for my whole body. It would scrape its way to the bottom, my head thumping against the rocks. I’d be a goner by the time I reached the river. I wonder what Tara would think when she heard the news, and Hal and Jenni and my family too. I hope they’d know I want to be cremated, my ashes scattered from a hilltop like this. They can’t know that, though, because I’ve never realized that’s what I want until right now.
There’s a tickle of creative energy in my nose. It feels like a big sneeze is coming, so I open the Notes app on my phone and release a bigachoo. I type up an outline to a play right there. It’s about a woman who tumbles to her death while hiking. The entire play takes place in the seconds between when she falls and when she hits the water, but the audience doesn’t know that until the very end. Everyone thinks they’re watching the woman live out her life after the hiking accident, until it switches back to the woman falling elegantly through the air and then—smack—into the river she goes, dead as can be.
The sobbing audience is left to wonder if all those scenes they saw were flashbacks that she was remembering or things that never actually happened that appeared as regrets in her final moments. It ends very abruptly and that’s what gives the play its impact: the finality of it all.
It feels good to have a plot like this flow out of me so easily, even if it is kind of a downer. It’s progress at least and affirms mysuspicion that my mysterious friend at Mother Zion knew what she was doing by telling me to go into the woods.
The other hikers reach the lookout too and pose for noisy photos. A couple of them look like they’re about to ask me to take a group picture but then think better of it. They all scamper onward. It turns out the trail keeps going, a bit inland. I’m only halfway up.
I keep hiking toward the actual top this time. It’s cloaked in evergreen trees, and there’s this great big boulder in a small clearing, so I shimmy my way up and sit on it. I can’t see the river through the trees, but I don’t mind. The forest feels like a cocoon, except without the suffocating feeling because the oxygen is so fresh.
Other hikers pass by on the trail, but no one sees me. In no mood to talk to myself, I strike up a conversation with the character I’ve just invented and then killed off. Peyton, I name her. I dive into her regrets, roll around in them until they rub against my own, sticking like putty.
Shapes start to form in my head. Hal and Jenni and Chris and even my mom and dad and sister. I don’t like how they’re invading my retreat, so I stamp them out and rummage through my backpack for the edibles. I can’t find them even though I know I put them in the outside pocket. Someone on the train must’ve stolen them when I was looking out the window. I detest the criminal but I also know I would’ve done the same, so I’m kind of impressed with their stealth too.
