The Wall by Jeff Long

and cheap wine ran out, they made do with river water hauled up from the Merced. So long as the climbers stuck to their caves and burrows up here, the rangers had largely left them alone.
    Now, propped against rocks and with food in their bellies, Hugh and Lewis agreed that today had been a very good day. Neither mentioned their argument at the top of the ropes. Lewis could not get over the falcon kill. It had rejuvenated him. He was awestruck. He called it a sacrifice to the gods.
    “Now we’re gods?” Hugh said.
    “You know what I mean, the ancient ones. The avatars and devis. The anima mundi. The cosmic jet stream. Do I have to give it a name? We were meant to be there, Hugh. Right then at that very moment. That was no accident in time. We were supposed to see what we saw. You don’t feel it? Right before our eyes, an offering of blood. What else is waiting for us up there? I don’t know. We’ve got to find out. We’ve got to get up there as high as we can.”
    Here was the Lewis of old, the mile-a-minute, irrepressible, full-of-bull Lewis, lit with the spirit. He fired words like machine-gun bursts, not to destroy but to pierce, to get inside the moment and root for its meaning before it slipped away.
    Hugh remembered their pilgrimages to San Francisco in search of Lewis’s Beat heroes, his “subterraneans,” the hipsters, not the hippies who were just rip-offs. Lewis refused to accept that he was a decade too late, that the Beats had turned to rockers, or died off. He was sure they must still exist somewhere in the city. But the only thing left of them in the late sixties was City Lights, the bookstore where Ferlinghetti had been arrested for selling Howl.
    While Annie and Rachel went off to trade Yosemite wildflowers for incense or Moroccan kohl for their eyes, Hugh would follow Lewis among the stacks. It was there that Hugh had purchased the leather-bound book of empty pages that became his Bible. The one book Lewis wanted more than any other, the one he was sure would lead to enlightenment, was a copy of the Black Mountain Review, Issue 7, with William Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others. Year after year, he never did find it. His solution, ultimately, was to start his own bookstore. It will come to me with time.
    On the ride back from Frisco in Hugh’s blue VW beetle, worn out and happy, the four of them would share their discoveries and acquisitions, everything from Zig-Zag rolling papers to the latest on Vietnam to ayurvedic medicines. Inevitably someone would have found a Ouija board or books on the I Ching and the Kama Sutra.
    Hugh lay his head back against a rock. Annie’s face came to him, her young face, the one he’d fallen in love with, not the sandblasted mask with red eyes that stared from his nightmares. What a beauty she’d been. At times, he missed her so badly he ached. Tonight he merely ached, every muscle and joint in him. He put her image away. “Go to sleep, Lewis,” he said.
    Tomorrow morning, they would leave this world to go into another. For the next week, they would take shelter where they could, on ledges or in hammocks. When they surfaced at the top, they would stagger drunkenly, their balance shot. Well after the wall was finished, they would startle awake in the middle of the night, their bodies still vigilant. But for this final night before embarking, they could walk like Homo sapiens and piss freely and feel the ground against their backs.
    But Lewis wasn’t ready to sleep. The death of the swallow had him going. He recited the paradox of Kant’s dove, a bird that imagines how much easier flight would be without air to resist its wings, and ends up plummeting through empty space. It was an all-purpose parable for Lewis, holding various meanings depending on his need. Tonight the dove simply seemed a means of wrapping up the day. Nature was awesome. The Trojan women had flown too close to the sun. Tomorrow was his and Hugh’s