Altitude
by Zach Wallis
On our summit, I meet a pika swaddled in a desolate nest of scree. It stares at me, black bean eyes reflecting the caution endemic to 14,000 feet above sea level. The pika does not move as I approach, just flicks its round clamshell ears, watching, and I look away—away from its tawny, almost auburn fur—to the ravine beyond.
Snow-shark-finned and vast and built of poems for someone else to write, the San Juan Mountains bracket the world. I try to place my feet where we were before, by the lopsided cairn you made, but there’s no trace of it now, and that’s good since we’re supposed to Leave No Trace, but it means I’m guessing, fingers clutching at a nothingness beside me that maybe never held anything, that wasn’t the spot we stood shoulders flush, anchored to each other’s palms, our Great Plains legs bent into wobbling Slinkys, but you couldn't stop smiling at the horizon and I couldn't stop smiling at you smiling at the horizon and how your expression in those suspended seconds was a landscape nobody but me had ever seen.
All I can do is lie down, press my body into the pointed stones, touch as many as possible, grasp the ones that feel like foundations, caress them and roll among them and ignore how they bite me with their icy teeth, bruise, burrow, falter short of blood, and see the pika unblinking, unmoving.
I wipe the grit from my jacket, sit up on my knees. “You’re still here.”
I am not here, the pika does not say.
You’d tease me for this.
“Do you remember that cairn? It was awful, like seriously bad.” A sharp laugh that doesn’t leave me travels hot up my throat.
I am not here, the pika does not say.
You insisted on marking our first 14er with something tangible and real. The cairn fell over twice before you found the right rocks. Your tongue stuck out as you stacked them one-by-one.
“A Polaroid might’ve been better.”
I am not here, the pika does not say.
“Well, you hated having your picture taken anyways.”
I am not here, the pika does not say.
“I know that.”
The words are split, exposed, dry as the banded walls of a canyon. I speak them into the wind and talus and pray they land someplace where the earth is soft, forgiving, where there might be bluebells and blanketflowers and two men in rocking chairs, weathered skin, Whitman beards, a cabin where the telephone never rings, never goes ring ring ring until the receiver sways back and forth on its ugly, endlessly spiraling beige cord and then never rings again.
I am not here, the pika does not say.
My nose prickles, that fuzzy burn before a sob, and I blame the weightlessness inside me—the gravity of those black bean eyes—on air with forty percent less oxygen than Topeka.
Less oxygen than the dive bar where we met, sticky bathroom floors, American flags, denim and plaid boy packed, and you in the middle, dopey Bass Pro hat and a smile I needed to steal.
Less oxygen than all the nights I came back, and you were there and the night we finally spoke, talked about football until we realized neither of us gave a shit about football, so we talked about everything else instead.
Less oxygen than weeks later in your friend Seth's basement, huddled on the sofa beneath his Cindy Crawford pin-up, I told you I didn't belong here, that we didn't belong here, and suddenly your river-long grin was against my lips and the scruff of our chins tangled together and Seth said something from the top of the stairs and his voice flung us to opposite armrests.
Less oxygen than the cab of my truck, trading glances one part terrified, all parts yearning, headed west with our lives tossed into the bed, and you said to me, to yourself, “Fuck Kansas. You're right, Colorado will be perfect.”
The pika stares at me and me and only me, I breathe in and in and maybe out, scoop handfuls of stones, find the flattest, the sturdiest, and stack the others upon its back. They teeter, collapse, I start over, gnawing on my tongue, pushing it past my teeth, my lips, trying to balance these rocks, they keep tumbling down, the cairn is lopsided, so lopsided.
I reach toward the pika, beckoning, elbows locked and joints popping, because it waited, didn’t run or hide even though I could be dangerous, deadly, a creature pikas should fear not follow, but the pika is here, it is, and I think that if it comes closer, bursts through the cairn and into my chest and its fur brushes along my jaw, hair that’s tawny and thick and tinted auburn in the light, I’ll get to go home with the pika tucked between my ribs, nestled in flesh and sinew rather than scree, fused there at every elevation, and one day I will turn gray and the pika will turn gray and we will climb this mountain again and we will be perfect, but the pika doesn’t move, no matter how many times I say his name.
Zach Wallis is a writer and graphic designer from Missouri. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review, Does It Have Pockets, trampset, and elsewhere under the pen name Robin Wilder, when he identified as non-binary. Accepting himself is an ongoing journey, and thankfully, life accommodates living.
