Death Valley by Melissa Broder

Author:Melissa Broder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty

I lie there for a moment on the mountain, stunned under the sky. It is an undeniably beautiful sky: cyan, with white clouds; huge, a huge sky, the same sky as everyone else’s sky; always the same sky; no matter what it looks like, in any weather or any time; whatever I am doing beneath it—falling down the side of a mountain or visiting my father in the hospital—it’s always the same sky. Everybody is under it.

My mother is under this sky. My sister and her baby are under this sky. My father is under this sky. My husband is under this sky.

Still, such a big aloneness.

I sit up abruptly, then make a move to stand. My right ankle caves under me, and I fall right down.

I take off my sneaker and examine the situation. My ankle is swollen—so swollen that it’s the same girth as my calf. There is no bruising, but it looks bad, almost as bad as it did when I first injured it two years ago (broken tibia and acute sprain; a democracy-related injury: running to the ballot box; fell in a hole).

“Fucking idiot,” I curse myself.

The blood on my scraped thigh has already begun to dry in the sun. It looks like a murder scene, but it doesn’t hurt. My ankle hurts worse.

“Help me,” I say in a whine that is almost a blubber, but not quite.

Then I do begin to blubber. I call out my husband’s name, and my voice sounds hollow under the big sky. My voice sounds separate from me: the way my arm feels when I fall asleep on it and it loses feeling and it’s no longer my arm for a while. This is how my voice sounds.

Then the voice that is no longer mine gets louder, more desperate. It’s a shameless voice.

“Help!” yells the voice. “Heeellllp!”

I recognize the timbre of this voice: its notes of shamelessness and desperation. It is the voice of a lost person (or an actor replaying a lost person) on a show my husband watches on the ID channel, called I Should Be Dead or How Am I Still Alive, or something.

Each week, the show features the story of a different man (almost always a man, and way more outdoorsy than me) who finds himself in peril in the wilderness—he’s separated from his group, or has an accident, or gets caught in a natural disaster—and the next thing you know he is clinging to a raft, or stuck between two rock faces, or trapped on a glacier.

At the very last minute, the man is always rescued. But he “should be dead.”

I’ve seen this show three or four times, but I can’t recall what any of the outdoorsy men did to help themselves be rescued. All I remember are the screams of one rugged replay actor, then a commercial for Pepcid, and then the show returning from commercial, and the narrator (deep voice-over) saying, “It’s been five days, and Blake is still clinging to the glacier for dear life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.