Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [115]
“You know, we probably should,” he said after thinking about it for a long moment. He pulled the phone book out from under the coffee table at his feet and leafed through the pages for the number of the Aspen police department. He dialed the nonemergency number and spoke with the dispatcher after the first ring. “A friend of ours was due back from a trip last night, and he hasn’t come home, and it’s been a day. I just wanted to let you know we think he’s missing. It’s pretty low-key—we’re worried about him, but we’re not freaking out. What can we do about it?”
“We can file a missing person’s report. You said it’s been twenty-four hours?”
“Yeah, he was supposed to come back from Utah yesterday, and he missed work today.”
“What’s his name?”
Brian provided my name, age, approximate height, weight, and description to the dispatcher, who typed the data into the police computer system.
“Do you have his license-plate information?”
“Uh, yeah, hold on, I think I can get it for you.” Brian went in my room and found an old climbing itinerary from when I had soloed the Bells two months earlier. It listed my license number—NM 846-MMY—and the year and model of my truck.
“Where do you think he went? You said Utah?”
“I know he was heading out to ski Mount Sopris on Thursday, but he was all packed up for a trip. I think he said he was going to the Moab area in Utah.”
“Anything more specific than that, or just the Moab area?”
“That’s it. He usually leaves itineraries, but he didn’t leave one this time.”
“All right. That’s a start.” They hung up.
What the dispatcher didn’t tell Brian was that I hadn’t been missing long enough for the police to do anything yet.
Eleven
Day Five: Trance Sanctuary
The real test of any choice is, “Would I make the same choice again?”
No one can see beyond a choice they don’t understand.
—THE ORACLE, The Matrix Revolutions
BEATIFIC IVORY FACES SMILE AT ME. They are half protruding from red womblike walls, surreally pale and bald, like contenders in a Patrick Stewart look-alike contest who have been doused in flour. The walls seem to form a scarlet tube of organic tissue, a fibroid tunnel pulsing in waves that could be an eight-foot-tall empty blood vessel, except that I’m inside it. In my dreamy vision, I reach out, brushing the tissue’s sponginess with my fingers. It responds to my touch with welcoming caresses. As though I’ve triggered a release, I sense I have begun moving along the tube, passed along by the wave motion. Stringy pulp drapes cling to my face and arms with the invisible softness of a wildflower petal as I float through the veiled twists and turns of the passage. Passing the saintly faces one at a time, I am vaguely aware of their blurred animations, like adoring mimes calling out to me, but I can’t hear their voices. An uncertain familiarity compels me to look more closely at the faces, but I can’t pause long enough in the tube, and they continue to drift past me before I can place any particular one. I can’t quite tell their sex, either, but they seem to be about my age or maybe a little older. In any case, I feel comfortable here, like the faces are my friends—or, more exactly, like the faces are the faces of my friends—but I can’t tell.
The forward movement continues for some time, relaxingly passing me along the placenta-like corridor. I feel like I’m enjoying a gentle crowd surfing, but I’m worried, too. What’s happening? What is this stuff around me? Where am I? Is this a dream? Where’s the canyon? My surroundings seem to respond by supporting me more firmly, and then the tube slopes up in front of me. Until this point, my journey has been strictly horizontal. I couldn’t feel the pull of gravity before, but now it’s like I’m riding the uphill portion of one very bizarre roller coaster. There are no more faces, just the lining of the walls slipping by in monotonous progression minute after untold minute. How high have I gone? Several hundred feet, I imagine. The grip of the fleshy waves on my body becomes subtler, with the exception of slight