I.
Our first day in the Valley of Marvels, and we were on our way to the falls. Everyone told us we had to see the falls. The falls were an absolute must. A trip to the Valley without seeing the falls would be self-harming and abject. The fog was lifting and everything was glistening with mist; vapor was rising from the forest like veils; I felt a wave of happiness rise into my chest, and rolled down the window to breathe in the air; Catherine started talking about a colleague she despised. He’s one of those people, she said, who abuses the little bit of power he has to compensate for his pathetic personal life. Everyone does that, I said. I might have said this too fast; I was eager to leave the city behind; I was agitated. In the parking lot we sat on the bumper of the car, tying our shoes. Catherine was appalled by the way other hikers were equipping themselves for their hike, with poles and tights and gloves and hats, sacks of water strapped to their backs, plastic tubes attached to their mouths, like land surveyors from another planet. It’s called walking, for fuck’s sake, she said. Several heads turned. Catherine was a brash, tactless person; it was one of the things I loved about her; I also found it intolerable. We started walking up the trail. The valley was lush and fragrant with flowers; doors were opening to hidden rooms of my past; I remembered playing in my uncle’s backyard as a child, torturing insects and small animals; I felt slightly nauseous. The second coffee had been unwise. I should have brought another bottle of water. Catherine was ahead of me, walking faster than me, her head down, her shoulders tucked in, her body in the shape of a bullet. She was not appreciating the abundance of plants, not letting herself be lifted and moved by the fragrances wafting from the flowers; she was still thinking about her colleague. She was always battling colleagues in her brain, always grinding her teeth in her sleep. The bills from the dentist were grim. She should wear one of those guards. I couldn’t believe I was thinking about this. At a fork in the trail we took the route to the upper viewpoint. There were fewer people at the upper viewpoint. We watched the smooth, sheer, glacial sheet of water accelerate over the cliff. The water shattered as if it were glass. Mist plumed. People down below were wading in the pool, coming as close as they could to the falls, getting their faces covered with mist. It’s so sex and death, said Catherine. I was thinking the exact same thing. Something within us had an urge to explode; we were all burning up inside out little brains; we had to find a way out. We continued walking up the path. The crowds thinned in the world beyond the falls. The river was calm. There were too many flies. We ate lunch on a fallen log. The turkey sandwiches were a little too dry. Insects were clicking, their shells popping open in the sun; the sound of the river was soothing and swift; I felt, for a moment, as if I’d already died and were living some kind of afterlife; the insects had something to do with this. We started back. We had to slow our metabolisms down, lest we grind everything to bits.
II.
Our second day in the Valley of Marvels, and we were on our way to a trail near the edge of the park, where the valley split into smaller canyons and ravines. There were fewer trees. The ones that were there looked scraggly and stunted. Slabs of granite stuck up from the ground like the tombstones of gods. I was feeling good after a full night of sleep; we’d had a nice dinner at the lodge; our waiter had been generous with the wine. On the drive to the trailhead, Catherine’s face had looked smooth, uncontentious, as if she’d finally vanquished her colleague once and for all. She was taking a break, enjoying a pause, before moving on to the next colleague. We set off on the trail. We were venturing beyond the crowds, into the unknown regions of the park, where celestial winds had smoothed the stones, comets had knocked the tops off of mountains, trees had been twisted by the light of the moon, the whole landscape like some colossal, ruined cemetery. Catherine was humming, holding her arms slightly away from her sides, her fingers wriggling in the wind; she was happy. Everything, suddenly, seemed possible; our futures were utterly unbound; we could quit our jobs, move abroad, become clothing designers or chefs; we could put our past lives in storage. The air at this altitude was electric and dry. Thunderclouds were building behind the mountains. The trail had begun branching in ways that weren’t represented on our map. Catherine thought the map must be wrong; I thought the problem was the trail. Don’t be absurd, she said. The trail can’t be wrong. I wasn’t sure why she was letting the trail off the hook so easily. As humans we made wrong trails all the time; I tried to explain this, using the atom bomb as an example; she accused me of pretending to be stupid. We walked on. Adulthood was a lie, like the idea that volcanoes are dead.
III.
Our third and final day in the Valley of Marvels, and we were unfit for the trails. The rest of our hike the previous day had been a series of minor cataclysms. Catherine slipped and banged her knee on a rock; a thundercloud burst and drenched us in rain; we were chilled to the bone by the time we got back. We sat in the car with the heat blasting, our teeth chattering, trying to take off our soaked clothes, getting stuck inside our own soaked clothes, thrashing around like animals that gnaw off their limbs. The clouds broke up as the sun was going down; a liquid orange light oozed into the surfaces of things; we were probably hypothermic. We drank too much at the hotel bar, then acted badly during dinner. I wanted Catherine to admit I’d been right about the trail; she wanted pity for her knee. By morning the knee was twice its normal size. I brought up a bag of ice. We sheltered inside our novels for a while, our silence like a tumor or a truce. At some point I closed my eyes, and set my book on my chest; the river came into the room, like a child that hasn’t learned to speak; I dreamed I’d found a button hidden in my armpit, and was pushing it again and again; nothing happened. Later we drove to the Valley of Marvels Museum, where we drifted into a darkened room with illuminated photographs of petroglyphs. The figures had weird, triangular heads, with antennae and enormous eyes. The teenagers who did these were definitely on acid, said Catherine. I read the placard aloud: “The extraterrestrial aspect of the figures has led several prominent scholars to surmise that the prehistoric people who inhabited this area believed themselves to be descended from the stars.” I liked the idea that humans weren’t from here. We were just dropping by briefly to ruin everything.
Michael Holt is the author of The Seaside Hotel (Sublunary Editions) and How We Got Into This (11:11 Press). He has a novella forthcoming from FC2, and his short fiction has appeared in Fence, Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. He lives in San Francisco. Website: michaelwholt.com
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