The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(88)

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things;

A twisted branch upon the beach

Eaten smooth, and polished

As if the world gave up

The secret of its skeleton,

Stiff and white.



She couldn’t get Eliot’s poem out of her head. The music of the syllables. The permanent stillness of that calcified branch. Once, she sat down and tried to write about it, to work out her obsession:

The image of the branch on the beach represents…

The branch on the beach is important because…

She stopped. Out her bedroom window was the old, familiar view: the undulating lawns and willow trees of Bayfront Park, where a lifetime ago they’d run the mile in PE. Mount Tamalpais loomed above, bluish in the fading light as if it had been dipped under water. She wrote: The branch on the beach means nothing.

The end of junior year was Elisabeth Avarine’s party. Cally went with Jess and Kai and Alessandra. They showed up high, then shared bottles of beer on the crowded deck. When the storm hit, most people ran to take cover inside. But Cally danced with her friends in the rain, stretching her neck to it, drinking it, letting it batter her shoulders, wet her hair till it glistened and curled. Then she was led down a hallway, to a purple bedroom and the promise of a better feeling, and this she did want: the capsule that Jess dropped in her palm. There was one hit of Molly for each of them. She moved to place it on her tongue, as she’d always done before.

“Wait,” Kai told her. “It’s better if you rail it.”

“Real,” Alessandra said, and tapped her nose.

Cally nodded. She set the capsule on a precalculus textbook on the floor. With a kitchen knife Jess chopped her capsule into three clean lines of powder. Cally leaned over the first line, closed one nostril. Just a second’s hesitation and she forced herself to do it: inhaled fast and sharp so her sinuses burned—she cried out from the shock and the pain of it. Alessandra knelt beside her, offering a glass of water. Cally drank it fast, prepared to disappear.

After a few minutes, everything was clear. Alessandra climbed onto Jess’s lap at the edge of the bed and Kai wrapped his arms around Cally, his body warm against hers. On the bed Jess whispered into Alessandra’s ear; her giggles floated weightless in the air. Alessandra’s power came out of her body, the arcs and shapes she made as she disentangled from Jess and stood and swayed around the room. They wanted to see her bare arms luminous against the walls of purple, her pupils wide and dark as she exclaimed, “I love you guys, all of you, everyone!” They laughed. Their laughter had a movement of its own, a texture—together they created a soft, supple space in the world. Cally curled on Kai’s lap and it was expansive, a throne. She found balance in her flimsy dress, rough denim against her thighs. Shifting sideways, she looped her arms around his neck and tucked into a ball. She was so small and he was so big. This feeling familiar and warm. She could lose herself in him if she wanted to—he would give her the gift of completely overtaking her. She pushed closer, her head against his chest so she could watch Alessandra at an angle, skewed. Cally was part of him and part of them, all of them one being. Here she was, here here here. This moment was the only moment there was, this place the only place.

They needed to move. So they were up and running to the living room, where music burst upon them, a joyous crowd of noise. Oh, the rush of those guitars, electric, the singer bratty and loud. The room was crowded and hot, so they ran out to the deck to dance. Reaching for a hand, Cally found one, Alessandra’s, tiny dark freckles scattered along the fingers. They were dancing, singing, though they didn’t know the words. Jumping and dancing and shaking their hair, bodies strummed by the song. They were holding everybody’s hands. Cally’s body turned liquid. Her heart was beating harder and nothing would ever stop it. Nothing new would ever happen. Everything in the world was exactly right now.

Later, as the drug’s effects began to fade, Cally climbed onto the narrow redwood railing of the deck. Stood shaking, winged her arms. The rain slowed to a patter along her naked arms, but she didn’t feel the cold. In fact she felt a warmth that radiated from inside, and as her friends cheered and hooted below, she began to walk the rail. On one side was the safety of the deck, and on the other, nothing: canyon that yawned into the black mass of redwood trees, smashed tracks of deer, the creek whispering over stones and dirt and chokes of weeds below. A strange thought took hold: the whole creek was moving, not just the water on top but the water beneath and the fish and the pebbles and sediment and dirt. All of it was moving, all the time, and never stopped. This thought distressed her; she wasn’t sure why. There was something unrelenting, cruel, in the water itself. How it could break a person’s bones, or slide inside and drown the lungs. How soft it sounded. How hard it was.

Cally stood on tiptoe and teetered left and right, shifting her weight, pulling herself up again. To her friends on the deck, it was a game. They believed that she was like them, careless and brave. To her it was a thrill to stare down the canyon, to know that if she were to fall into it, no one would think that she’d jumped. They’d consider it an accident, a tilting of her body into blackness. It was a joy to think of it, a relief to think of it. A relief to think it could all be over in an instant, that she might fly from her guilt and evaporate to nothing, and no one would blame her.

Arms extended, Cally pirouetted on the slick and narrow beam. Across her field of vision swept darkness from the canyon and light from the house. She closed her eyes and listened to the whooping of her friends. Wavered once but held her center. This was it, she felt: the time to let go. She took a breath—air fresh from the rain—and released it. As she began her slow tiptoe across the beam, her mind was very clear. She thought, If I am going to do this, I am going to do it now.