I Go Up, I Come Down

Pyramid

Freytag’s pyramid is, by all accounts, the cleanest model for writing fiction. A novel, as it happens. Start low. Ascend. Reach a climax. Descend. Oh, I said, in middle age. That’s easy enough. And I set about writing a book in which a group of teenage distance runners climb a mountain. I mean, look, there’s the map. Up, up, up they go. Scramble over brambles, tangle with branches, shins skim rocks. 

Disaster. 

Friendships wrecked on riverbeds. Dirt streaked with tears, and the inverse. Girls and boys simply too, too much together. The wrong thing kept happening. I couldn’t figure out how to get down. I was exposed.  

The piece-of-cake book. Bake it from the box. Time towers over me, and I still can’t grab hold of it. What action? What climax? What, tell me, is a resolution as you understand it?  

Matterhorn

New Year’s Eve in Davos. We spill out of the hotel to see the fireworks over the snow. Hotel? It was a former sanitarium, the model for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, though I don’t know this at the time because I’m in second grade and besotted by music boxes and bread. I am here simply to be here. Bombs are Bursting Beautifully above us, breaking open the night to let the Matterhorn through. It’s too polite a mountain to barge in. We invite it, and without moving, it is punctual. On its face, shadows mask black ice, rock is softened by drifts. Fall through one and you’ll shatter your femur.       

Hand to God.

Inside, music swells. Or are those the guests, swells all. Heat rises, light lifts, brightness grazes the ceiling. Sound is a balloon filled with helium; the crowd ascends with it. I never want to come down. My father says of me now, “You peaked at six.” Seven, actually. But who’s counting?

Nose

Three years after Switzerland, I am defending myself on a school blacktop south of LA against a colossus of a kid called Joe Kittredge (five-five in fifth grade) who doesn’t like me for having seen what he hasn’t, and, more accurately, for scoffing at his puffed-up pride over the fake mountain at Disneyland—the ersatz—which he’d ridden, he claims, backwards. When I don’t back down, he throws an encyclopedia at my head. “Ta-To.”

I am a child snob, and proud, too. At last, on the soccer field, he breaks my nose. Against a wall of the afternoon classroom, I bleed, my white shirt sporting a red cravat. 

Did this happen only once, or is it forever happening, forever breaking, forever bleeding, forever never finished?

Skyscraper

10 Sheridan Square in New York City. For seven years, I lived in apartment 7A. Symmetrical la la. My bedroom window faced north, and from it, I could see the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. A range of metal mountains lies between my aerie and Midtown. Under my window, on the rooftop next door, an old woman in a caftan slept on a chaise, her years finalizing here surrounded by pots of geraniums. Still, her rest drew me like the lure of a peak. How did she do it? Just, rest. For those seven years, I turned at right angles. You don’t go around in circles; you go around in squares. Thinking my thoughts nightly, I walked home. I looked up and saw it. I could prove that I had a home by pointing to it.

Steeple

British actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Jeremy Brett have both played Sherlock Holmes, and both “steepled” their fingers. Fingers coming to a point. I see temples dedicated to this one idea: comfort within their skins. They’re not acting, are they? They are pure being. Can’t you just see them inhaling the perfume of sheer knowing? 

This is a state I just can’t reach. No matter how hard I try.

The line between trying and inhabiting is the lining of a jacket. Emotionally speaking, it’s always the right weather for what they put on. 

Heavens, what succor. 

I might always be acting, or possibly perpetually working on my character. Glimpses come. Swaggering one day, succinct the next. Sullen, 

severe, 

aristocratic, 

awkward. 

And then, ideally, nothing. Still working on the non-self.

Parabola

In a London elevator, one night in the nineties, I said, “Down, please.” From street level, I was taken to a point so low I walked under water. A foot tunnel below the River Thames dips downhill from the man manning the elevator. (What else would he do?) I’ll watch you, he said, all the way to the other side to where the walk bends back up. What nonsense. Once the slope slipped a few chilly degrees, I’d be out of sight. At the center, I’d be unseen by either elevator operator, north and south. Alone at that lowest point on the parabola, sunken, cool below the river, far away from the glare of the world. Away from eyes, away from notice. The air smelled green with murk, the tile walls casual with condensation, concrete striking my heels. Young, painted, panting. Everything amiss. The phrase is “drop out of sight.” But I didn’t start out on top. 

Recline

“You can see the laser beam from space.” That’s how you know the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas is there. Today, I wish I were the Luxor, visible from space. I once spent a night in a room near the point, sleeping under a severe angle. From a pool set into the center of the floor, I sat soaking and saw the desert drying out from a long drunk. It was a contrast, I’ll say that. I stood at an angle to meet the ceiling on its own terms. Elevators run at a slant. “Tell the truth but tell it slant,” wrote Emily Dickinson, who never sat in a jacuzzi in a pyramidic casino hotel, nor drank a margarita as long as a leg. It came with its own neck strap in case your arms got tired holding it. After working so many angles, I think I’ll tell the truth and tell it straight.

Triangle

A horrible event. Flunking Geometry 2 for the second time. There goes college. There goes the neighborhood. There goes old so-and-so again. The triangle bedevils me until I am convinced it is the work of the devil himself. I can’t prove anything on paper. The Statement and the Reason elude me. Nothing is a given. Not in this life. The diagram is one thing, and the talking is another. I can talk my way out of it if I have to. 

It transpires that I do. 

Summit

And my point appears to be that life boils down to climbing — or boils up to collapsing. “Ascent narratives” tell us it’s just as hard coming down. So why go up? It’s the variety we require, isn’t it? The range. Up feels good. The climb is attended by meaning. “Summit” is also a verb. But everything in modulation. The stock market can’t only rise. Spikes may prove fatal. Crests fall. Waves build expressly to topple over, or they wouldn’t be waves. They’d be swells, tides, surfaces. Nothing to hang onto, and it is all about hanging on.  

ξ

Alison C. Powell is a fiction writer, essayist, and critic based in Dallas. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorado Review, Typishly, Interview, The Guardian, and others. She has a BA in English from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and once interviewed Nina Simone.