Silent Count

The Summit stayed open all night but nobody used it after midnight. Mikaela knew that better than anyone, because she was the one who scheduled the events, and the overnight slots had been empty on the calendar for three months straight. So she had started doing her inventory at 1 a.m., when the place was hers and nobody wanted to chat about the mixer social that got cancelled.

She sat in the gear room with a clipboard and a bin of rental carabiners, counting them by hand because the scanner had died in October and nobody had fixed that either. Fifty-two. She made a mark, dumped them back, picked up the next pile. Fifty-two again. Her back hurt from leaning over the bin and she had a paper cut on her thumb from the rental forms she'd filed that afternoon.

That was when she heard the thud.

It came from the bouldering cave, a dull flat sound, like a body hitting a crash pad. Mikaela frowned and put the clipboard down. She walked out through the dark gym, past the treadmills nobody ran on, and stood at the mouth of the cave. The safety lights were dim and grey. Street glow came through the high windows.

A man dropped from the top of the black wall. He came down clean, bent his knees, and landed soft on the pad without a sound except the one she'd already heard. He was maybe six feet, arms bare, and he shook out his hands like they ached.

Mikaela should have gone back to her clipboard. She didn't. She stood there staring like an idiot, and he noticed, because of course he did.

"You locked or something?" he said, sitting down on the pad and pulling a chalk bag toward him.

"Sorry. I work here. I'm doing inventory." She held up the clipboard like it proved something. "I didn't know anyone was in."

"Nobody was. Now there is!" He rubbed chalk on his fingers and looked at her. She guessed twenty-seven, maybe older in the face, hands that looked like they did real work. "You climb?"

"Used to. I'm out of practice. Two years, give or take."

He nodded at the overhang route on the black wall, the one he'd just come off. "One route. I'll belay. If you hate it, you go back to your carabiners and we never speak."

"That's a weird offer."

"Yeah, well. I don't like climbing alone and you don't like counting carabiners. Pick a rope."

She didn't know why she said yes. Later she would tell herself it was because the night was long and the gear room was cold and he had a voice that didn't ask anything of her. She dug a harness out of the rental bin, size medium, and stepped into it in the yellow light by the front desk while he watched with his arms crossed.

"Name's not important," he said as they walked back. "Rule for tonight. We don't ask. You get to be nobody for a few hours. It's better than it sounds."

"That's the strangest rule I've ever heard."

"Try it. Most people like it more than they expect."

He clipped her in and ran the rope through the ATC with hands that had done it ten thousand times. Mikaela put her hands on the first holds and started up. The wall was warm from his session and the holds felt greasy with chalk. She got ten feet up and felt okay. Then fifteen. Then the angle kicked back over her head and her arms were wrong and everything felt wrong, the holds, the distance, her own shoulders.

She froze.

Her right hand was on a crimp that felt like a razor edge and her left foot was skating on something slick and she could not make her body move. Her breath went fast and shallow. Below her the rope went slack, then taut, and she hated herself for the little jolt of relief when it caught her weight.

"You okay?" he said.

"I'm fine. Just. Give me a second."

He was quiet for a moment. She could hear the rope creak and a truck somewhere out on the industrial road, gears grinding through the intersection.

"You can come down," he said, "or you can trust my voice. Your call."

"That's it? Those are the options?"

"That's it. I'm not going to talk you up the wall. That's not what this is about."

"I can't even see the next hold."

"No. You can't. You're going to move anyway, or you're not. But decide. Don't hang there halfway."

Mikaela looked down at him. He was standing steady on the mat, rope in his right hand, not smiling, not frowning, just waiting. She realized she was shaking, arms burning, and that some small broken part of her wanted him to just tell her what to do so she didn't have to decide.

"Down," she said. "Take."

He lowered her slow and smooth, no jerk, no commentary, and her feet found the mat and her knees nearly buckled. She sat down hard on the pad and put her head back against the wall and breathed. He coiled the loose rope and didn't touch her. She noticed that. He hadn't touched her once, not a spot on the hip, not a steadying hand, nothing.

Then he sat down cross-legged across from her on the mat, forearms on his knees, and looked at her in the grey half light.

"Okay," he said. "So here's the thing I figured out about you in about four minutes. You're not scared of the wall."

"Thanks, doctor."

"You're scared of not being in charge of the wall. You froze because you couldn't control what came next, so your body just stopped." He shrugged. "I've seen it a hundred times. Better climbers than you."

Mikaela laughed, short and ugly, because it was true and it hurt. "Great. So I'm defective."

"You're normal. And I'll teach you one thing tonight, since you're stuck here anyway. How to fall properly, and how to give up control properly. They're the same lesson, mostly."

"That sounds like a line."

"Maybe. Does it matter?"

She thought about the clipboard and the fifty-two carabiners and the empty apartment she'd go back to. It didn't matter. She was twenty-two and tired and this stranger with rope-callused hands was offering her something she couldn't name and didn't want to examine.

"Fine," she said. "Teach me."

"First, stand up."

She stood. Her legs were still a little wobbly from the hang.

"Kneel on the pad."

She blinked at him. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me. Kneel. It's just a pad, it doesn't bite. If this is wrong for you, say so and we go back to coiling ropes and I'll leave you alone. But you asked for the lesson and this is the lesson."

Mikaela's heart was going again, different this time. She looked at the door, the empty parking lot, the clock above the desk that said 2:07. Nobody was coming. Nobody knew where she was, which should have frightened her and instead made something go loose and warm in her stomach.

She knelt.

The pad was firm under her knees and the mat smelled like rubber and old chalk. She started to put her hands down for balance and he made a small sound