Chapter 11
I wanted to talk to Sarah about what had happened on the mountain.
I wanted to hear what she remembered from those hours under the rubble.
Had she felt any cosmic messages? Had she seen any mystical light?
I felt like I couldn’t truly understand what had happened until I heard her story, but unfortunately I had to wait.
For days, she was stuck inside the hospital, with Phil and the doctors guarding her every movement.
She was prohibited from having any visitors, or even access to her phone, because the doctors didn’t want her taxing her brain while it healed from the concussion.
Phil kept me updated on her progress and assured me she was getting better all the time, but for the moment, she remained unreachable.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said. “She can’t wait to thank you for all you did, Arthur. Both of us feel that way. We owe you everything. She’ll tell you herself soon enough. But not quite yet.”
“I’m glad she’s healing,” I said. “Does she remember anything? Has she said anything about what happened?”
“Not very much,” he said. “And we’re not pushing it. She just needs to rest right now. All I can say is, she’s getting stronger. It’s incredible, isn’t it, what the body can do. God, we were so lucky. We’ll never be able to repay you, Arthur.”
During those days, she became a kind of Schrodinger’s cat, alive and dead, depending on my mood and train of thought.
She was a miracle; she was an invalid; she was my lover; she was Phil’s wife.
She’d been resurrected; she’d been lucky; she was now; she was then.
She was my destiny; she was my tragedy. I still didn’t think I’d performed a miracle, but at the same time, I was curious to know what she’d experienced.
Had she floated into a tube of light? Or encountered any dead family members on a hazy beach? Just how closely had she grazed death?
And then there was a part of me that didn’t want to talk to her at all because I didn’t want to break the compact.
It was silly, I knew, but the old stories were pretty clear on the failure to obey a divine command.
In all the fables, the disobedient one was left broken and alone.
I didn’t want either of us turning into pillars of salt or getting cooked in a witch’s oven.
I didn’t want my wings melting or to fail to recognize Buddha on the road.
Over and over again, the ancient wisdom agreed: obey the order, even if you don’t understand it.
Humble yourself before the mystery, no matter what.
On the third day, we finally spoke. I was sitting at my desk, working on the book, or pretending to work, when the gentle bell tone of my phone struck and her name appeared on the screen.
An immediate flare of dread went through me.
Here it was, my first test. Was I going to breach the contract and accept the call?
I had to think that talking to her on the phone wasn’t such a big deal.
Giving her up would be something that happened in stages, even in the most severe case.
You didn’t sell your house and evacuate the same day.
You got a few weeks to implement the task.
And how bizarre that I was thinking this way at all.
“Hi,” I said, and no lightning hit me.
“Hi,” she said. “Where are you now?”
“I’m at home,” I said. “How about you?”
“In the hospital,” she said, “but I’m alone. Finally. Phil went to the gym. I told him to stay a while.”
Her voice was an immediate balm. She sounded so normal, so unambiguously alive. Whatever worries I’d been nursing receded to the edges of my mind. There was nothing more natural than talking to Sarah, the woman I loved, listening to that lovely little timbre of amusement in her voice.
“Are you doing okay?” I said.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I mean, this bed rest kind of sucks. But they’re taking really good care of me here. Phil’s been incredibly sweet. He says you saved my life. Is that true?”
“You don’t remember?” I said.
“It’s pretty vague,” she said. “I mean, I was pretty out of it up there.”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” I said. “It means your brain is healing.”
“It’s not like I forgot everything,” she said. “I wish.”
“What do you remember?” I wanted to hear the story, but at the same time I didn’t want to press too hard. I definitely didn’t want to plant any thoughts.
“God,” she said. “I mean, where do you want me to start?”
“From when I left you.”
She told me her version from that point.
She began with the moment of waking up in her cabin on the day I left.
She said she’d gotten up feeling the need for some space to think about everything that had been happening.
She was happy about our conversation in the yurt, and the plan we had, but also sad about Phil, and it seemed like some kind of ceremony was in order.
Her idea had been to hike to the Zendo near the creek and spend the night as a ritual of gratitude, or maybe just a period of silent contemplation.
Something to mark the moment, which was significant.
“I was feeling a lot of guilt about Phil,” she said.
“I mean, I still am, obviously. He deserves a lot better than what I’m giving him.
I know people get divorced all the time.
It isn’t a big deal in a way. But it doesn’t really matter when it comes to your own marriage, it turns out.
You know? It’s like it’s never happened before.
We’ve spent a lot of time together. And to hurt a person who really loves you, and who you still love, too, is really hard.
It’s really fucking complicated. Anyway. I just needed to take a walk.”
“So you went up to do some kind of penance,” I said.
“Maybe a little,” she said. “More like a purification, or at least some kind of acknowledgment.”
“Were you having second thoughts?” I said.
“No, no!” she said. “I wasn’t doubting anything at all. I was only feeling it. It’s a big deal, what we’re doing.”
She told me she’d hiked to the creek and found the Zendo and had sat down on the creek bank and listened to the branches thrashing in the wind.
The wind had been crazy that day, she said, the way it kept attacking the trees, bashing them from every direction.
It’d seemed appropriate somehow, the violent, all-over-the-place wind.
It was how she’d felt. She’d sat there thinking about me, and Phil, and all the things they’d been through, and all that we had ahead, but in the end she hadn’t gotten very far in her thinking because, suddenly, the fire was all around her.
It came on so fast, she said, she barely understood what was happening.
She’d tried running down the trail but already a wall of flames was blocking the way.
The wind was so strong, whipping sparks all over the place.
The fire was jumping from branch to branch, bursting the trees into candles. She was trapped.
“I can’t stand to think about it,” I said.
“I was thinking about you the whole time,” she said, “and about everything we’re about to do. It was so horrible, Arthur. I’ve been telling myself for so long that I don’t want a family. And now, after I finally met you, and made the decision, to die in this fucking fire. It seemed so idiotic.”
“Did you pray?” I said. For some reason, I wanted to know if another channel had been opened ahead of mine, not that I knew what that would have meant, exactly.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t have to, because I knew I wasn’t going to die up there. I wasn’t going to let it happen.”
She’d gone and submerged herself under the water, just as I’d guessed.
It’d taken a while to find a spot where she could get all the way under, and she’d waited there, in this pool, going under and coming back up, as everything around her burned.
This had gone on for what felt like hours.
The air became so hot the whole world seemed to warp and ripple behind its waves.
The flames roared and reached out, trying to grab her, but they couldn’t quite get there.
She’d gone under, come up, breathed the scalding air, gone under again.
The water had filled with ash and twisted branches still on fire.
She had no idea how long it went on. It’d seemed like a year.
And then, eventually, the fire had started burning itself out.
She’d been able to get out of the water and sit on the bank.
The sound of the fire was still like thunder, all the wood and needles evaporating, but she’d felt safe for a moment, like she was going to make it.
And then she remembered this other sound, this sudden roar.
It was like a sound inside of a sound. She’d been looking at the fire whipping in the wind and then… she didn’t know…
“You don’t know what?” I said. We’d come to the very moment I most wanted to understand, but I could hear her voice faltering, leaving the next passage blank.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “It goes black.”
“You don’t remember anything at all?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I guess that’s when the rocks and tree hit me?”
“And then, when do you start remembering again?” I said.
“I remember you,” she said tentatively. “You were sitting on the rock. In the smoke. I could barely see anything through the smoke. But that’s what I remember next. The sound, and then you. It’s fuzzy.”
“But you don’t remember anything while you were out?” I said. “You don’t remember the rocks and everything actually hitting you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t remember it happening at all. Thank God. It’s all so mixed up now. I was on the bank, and then you were there, and it was morning. And I was all banged up.”
“No dreams?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember getting out of the pile?”