Skiing
by Grace Glass

Rachel realizes how much she hates herself as the Uber, a dented Mercedes with a stick shift and a mazy profusion of scratches, lurches up the mountain road. It’s something to do with how the driver, Anatoly, mutters unintelligibly, how she’s squeezed in the greasy back seat between Rusty and Patrick, how the ski trip, which wasn’t her idea, is becoming more real than any other journey she’s taken. Sunlight burns her eyes and she’s strangled by shoulds. She should know what language Anatoly’s speaking. She should have the courage to break up with Rusty, whose arm around her shoulder is a hot implacable burden. She should be more than a suburban white girl with a badly concealed eating disorder and a chattering mind that jumps from her makeup to the scuffs on her shoes. And there’s the drop-off beside them, thousands of feet, a swarm of shadows that calls to her in a magical voice, because it’s possible obliteration could lead to absolution. Or at least it would provide an ending, which would transform mistakes and stupidities into a story. Imagine there’s no heaven, John Lennon croons through her thoughts. Well, she’s pretty sure there’s no heaven. That at least has the ring of truth.

So I inherited this bird from my grandmother, says Patrick. He pokes Rachel in the side. You listening to me, Rachel? You look a thousand miles away.

Course, says Rachel. Go ahead. Tell us about the bird. The car jerks. Sweat effervesces up her back. A blurred thicket of pines appears, disappears. Anatoly shifts back up to third and the engine roars beneath them.

Well, I can’t stand the thing, says Patrick. His name’s Eugene and he’s got a foul mouth. You know what he said to the FedEx dude the other day? Fuck the police.

Ha, says Rachel. At least he’s a fan of the classics.

He shits everywhere. And joke’s on me, because I thought a bird was like a dog, might live ten, fifteen years, but no, apparently they live decades. Eugene will probably outlive me.

Man, shut the fuck up, says Rusty. He tightens his arm around Rachel’s shoulders. It’s only bones and skin, she reminds herself, just particles and energy. You and your stories. Every one of them’s a movie starring you. Set pieces, funny interludes. Next we’ll hear some majestic orchestral accompaniment.

I don’t hear you trying to help pass the time, says Patrick. And Rachel here hasn’t said a word since the airport. So why don’t you just go fuck yourself.

Anatomically impossible, my friend, says Rusty. Plus, I like to save that pleasure for the ladies. Who am I to rob them of their dreams? Right, baby? She doesn’t look at him but she can hear him smiling. He has this alligator smile. He should have been something else–something with scaly skin, slithering through swamps, dreaming of easy prey.

Does he fly, she asks Patrick.

Of course. Sometimes I let him fly around the apartment. And gotta admit, he’s beautiful when he flies. Spreads his wings, they’re red and orange and this vivid leaf-green. Then afterwards I have to clean up all the birdshit. Bodies, right? Whether they’re animal or human, you never live it down.

I quite like mine, says Rusty. Maybe you should work out more. Patrick laughs. Rusty laughs. They’ve been friends since college and the insults they trade always end in companionable laughter, like a wasp nest tied with a satin bow. It’s a rhythm Rachel’s never been able to penetrate. She’s hopeless at it, a child whose fat fingers can’t find the right chord.

There is the lodge, Anatoly says. See the sign. He raises his arm to point. Rachel catches the dry-onion smell of his pits. She squints into the relentless light. No sign emerges, but there is a smudge of black in the landscape, and then they are in a triangular parking lot, unloading suitcases and skis. Rusty gives Anatoly a ten percent tip and Rachel, who never carries cash, can’t erase her embarrassment.

Their room is like a hole drilled in splintery wood. A tight dark space with small dangers–sharp corners on the tin heating unit, a slippery, just-washed floor. Rusty fucks her on the hard bed that smells of sweat and mold. He comes on her stomach, flushes with well-being. She extricates herself from the fleshy tangle and stands under the shower, breathing in time with her hunger pangs, tasting Rusty’s kiss in her mouth. Tooth decay, the menthol cigarettes he sneaks when no one’s watching. He doesn’t like to be seen indulging in bad habits. Rusty, she thinks, the man and the creation of a man. Who cares which you end up with, really. She puts on a robe and leafs through the brochures fanned on the dresser. Skiing, more skiing, steak dinners and chocolate martinis. A museum made of logs. A pair of moose, staring blankly into the camera. How did they get them to stand there to be photographed, she wonders, but maybe the moose just aren’t afraid, she’s heard that they can kill you easily, if they want to. If it’s worth their while.

The three of them, puffy in ski gear, stand on the glittering slope and await the lift. It descends, they board, and the crowd falls away, humans blurring into unintelligible dots, trees flattening into paper copies of themselves. The sun and the snow, the rush of bitter air, it’s like Patrick said, a kaleidoscope, a whirl of colors devoid of patterns. She wonders if even now, the bird is winging his way around the darkened apartment. If he senses the limitlessness in his wings and the walls and roof that make it meaningless.

Oh I forgot to tell you! I sold another painting, says Patrick. Beneath his goggles there’s a smile, slow and amazed, showing all his sharp white teeth. You know, I never can believe it when it happens.

Rachel feels envy flower deep in her stomach. Another poisonous outgrowth, as if she isn’t constantly weeding, spraying useless pesticides. Her mouth tastes of bile and wintergreen chewing gum. Before she met Rusty, she used to write. She used to have things to say, even published a few terse, careful poems in journals. She’d started a novel that began with a woman just released from prison, toiling down the shoulder of a deserted highway, her meager belongings in a plastic bag. It’s too hot and the woman discards the bag. Then she met Rusty and around the same time she realized she couldn’t get any further. The scene was too resonant to discard, too pedestrian to keep. And she couldn’t decide what the woman had done. Everybody writes about murder, but that’s because it’s such an easy secret to tell. She wanted the heroine to be murkier, more generative, but her face wouldn’t come into focus. In the end she had to delete the files.

Thought your bird shit on all your paintings, says Rusty. It would most likely be an improvement.

They reach the top of the slope and gaze down the trail. It’s a bedeviling thing, coiling like a snake, dotted with obstacles, so steep its end vanishes into the whiteness. Patrick puffs, his breath emerging in a series of fading rings. You asshole, he says to Rusty. Why did I let you pick the slope?

You’ll be fine, says Rusty. Challenge yourself for once. What’s the point of coming up here if we just meander down the bunny slopes?

There’s a big fucking difference between bunny slopes and this. You’ve always been this way. This one time, he says, turning to Rachel, Rusty got drunk at a party and jumped out a third-floor window because he thought he could fly. I’m serious! Legit, he actually thought that!

Rusty laughs. See, he says, Patrick never tells the whole story. He leaves out the beginnings that explain the endings. Before the party he scored all this coke and got me ridiculously fucked up. If there’s one thing coke does it’s make you think you’re Superman. I don’t do coke anymore, I learned my lesson.

Did you break anything, Rachel asks.

I don’t remember, says Rusty. Probably? Anyway, we’re holding up the crowd. Let’s get going.

He gives Rachel a hard shove and before she can regain her balance, she’s swallowed by a raging, animal velocity, twisting and turning down the slope, avoiding each tree and rock with less than a second to spare. Icy air hisses, screams in her ears. Her legs ache, burn, then go numb. Time slips aside and she falls into a pocket of forever, the moments stretching and thinning like taffy. The run has no analysis or metaphor, it’s too fast, too clear, for language’s meandering machinations. She’s going to throw up, she heaves, but then instead she starts to laugh and can’t stop, it’s so ridiculous that this is how it all ends, she’ll probably crash into a tree, lose consciousness, maybe die, maybe wake in a hospital without the use of one or more of her limbs, or possibly just endure a month of headaches, and she doesn’t care which, she’s free of future and past. Then it’s over, as quickly as it began. She fetches up at the bottom, breathless, blood singing in her veins, stomach growling like a large animal stalking something small, warm, and most of all fast, maybe even fast enough to escape.

She sees Rusty and Patrick in the bright yawning distance. They seem to be skiing very slowly, spidering carefully down the slope. It’s several minutes until they reach her. She sees a patina of genuine fear in Rusty’s eyes. They’re very blue, those eyes, but not as blue as the wide impossible sky.

That was fun, she says. Let’s do it again.

Fuck that, says Patrick. You crazy, Rachel? Let’s go get a drink at the bar. I need it after that.

They shower and change and sit at a scarred bar, drinking hot whiskey with lemon. Rusty and Patrick argue over the menu; Rusty wants Peking duck, insists he can convince the kitchen to make it for them even though it says clearly that it must be ordered forty-eight hours in advance. Patrick once again calls him an asshole. In the end they order dumplings with hearts of red, sticky pork and plates of steaming noodles. Rachel eats and eats. Her holes can’t be filled like buckets but who says she can’t dance in the nothingness. She imagines the proteins and carbohydrates liquefying in the rancid basement of her stomach, in humid, stupefying dark.

I meant to ask you, she says to Patrick. What was the painting?

Who the fuck cares, says Rusty. Don’t encourage him, baby.

Fuck off, says Patrick. Listen, Rachel: it’s a man, or something like a man. Really it’s more like a homunculus. Deformed, stunted. Like an infant but thousands of years old. He’s trapped in a butterfly. Not in the wings, but in the body, the part that’s still mostly caterpillar. Or it’s supposed to be, you know, I’m not sure I really captured it. For weeks I sat with my phone by the window, taking photos of every butterfly that flew close enough. But the photos were all so blurry that in the end I just kind of imagined it. But these tourists from Chicago gave me fifteen hundred bucks for it, so who cares, right?

That’s great, Patrick, Rachel says. On impulse, she leans over and kisses him on the cheek. His eyes go wide and a flush creeps through his freckles. Can I see the picture of it?

Sure, he says, swiping through his phone. He lights a cigarette and hands it over. Here.

She studies the pixelated image. She searches but can’t find the man, or whatever he is. He’s lost, erased, there’s something tilted and strange about the scale. If she squints she can just see an amoeba of peachy-pink, but it disappears when she looks at it straight. She asks Patrick, but eventually he’ll get out, right?

Oh, says Patrick, blowing smoke in her face. That’s really not up to me. Not up to any of us, is it? You have to love your cage, don’t you? That’s what I tell that damn bird anyway.

But does he listen, says Rachel.

Probably not, Patrick answers, cheerfully.

Thank you, she says, handing him back the phone. I really think you should be proud.

For God’s sake, Rusty says. Fuck, Rachel. Don’t encourage this bullshit. He needs to get a real job, stop acting like a little kid. Painting. I swear.

She smiles at Patrick and shoves a boiling clump of noodles into her mouth, swallows without chewing. She whisks Rusty’s hot hand off her knee, then removes it again when he replaces it. She keeps eating, she knows she’ll be sick but it’s all she can do to make the night last, make the red lanterns and the tinny music imprint themselves on her brain. Rusty and Patrick get drunker and start to sing songs she’s heard before but can’t remember the lyrics to. Their wet pink mouths, the freckles on Patrick, the olive sheen on Rusty, she’s seeing clearly without thinking about it, and she motions the waiter over.

We want to order the duck, she tells him, for day after tomorrow. She’s sure she’ll be extra hungry then. She thinks of the glistening skin and the thin pancakes and the rings of green scallion, and she’s happy, and she thinks maybe the woman in the book might find something on the road, something that makes the journey worth it. She can even see it, a tiny thing refracting the sunlight, something that might cut or bruise if you stepped on it, but of course her heroine won’t step on it. Because in the moment she found it, it was both desire and fulfillment, beginning and end, and when Rachel sleeps that night she dreams of the alligator in the swamp, riding low, assured of his hunger’s satisfaction.