He couldn’t say that the thing was the thing and the picture was pointless, not even worth a memory, that what had become most important
to them, beyond the fly or the climb, was the choreographing of it, he
couldn’t say any of that because he was in all the fucking photos, he was
the one being photographed, and Blake had even started to tell him how
to climb: Reach here, this is a good shot. Try to get that left leg swung
up. Wait, wait, let me come around to get you from here. Ian never did
this. Ian climbed and didn’t bother about it either, but they had both
spoken and said, Blake is taking this shit too far. He’s making us pose.
I don’t want to pose, Kieran had said, as if opening himself up, finally,
to someone. I don’t want to be a thing. It was the same with Anne, just
her being known as Anne the granola-girl, she was Anne this thing, and
already Maddie, their child, was known as Maddie the hatter, because
she always wanted to wear hats like her father wore beanies.
Snow now, higher up, the Sequoia thinning out and taken over by
lodgepole pines, the needles brown and slipping underfoot. Over that
stream he’d slipped on the ice once and sprained his ankle and worse
than any whipper: out for two months, in a boot, fucking around the
house. Breath visible in front of Ian, Blake too far ahead singing a song
which the wind couldn’t quite wipe from the world, its stupid droning
falling back. Shut the fuck up, Kieran yelled. Blake turned and paused,
thirty yards up, and said, Pouty panda pouts onward and upward. The
burn in quads and calves, the land rising and steady breathing in of
cooler and thinner air.
What the fuck, his four-year-old girl was already now not known as
a little being but as this thing, this labeled thing, just as all things were
labeled: Maddie the mad hatter and her mommy Annie the granola-girl
and then Kieran the brave, they say, ha ha, let’s take a picture of the fam,
the fam all smiling, happy fam always happy. When first with Annie
there was a whirlpooling freedom to everything: her riding rapids as
a first-timer with only him as her guide, and good she was gone into it
and loving; putting on a squirrel suit and jumping down for flying, again
only him as her guide; and the promises they made, not to speak more
of the events, of sex in his office or sex almost anywhere they pleased,
not to speak of that, so as not to corrupt or lose it, they always ended up
overtalking it, overshowing it to themselves so that they made it flicker
out or simply burst out, burned out, like a firecracker smacking out on
pavement, leaving a burned black scar.
