But it didn’t come. He was hanging from his two fingers, frozen over a seventy foot fall, the cam tearing through the air towards my face. I thought myself small, my teeth tight, as I hunkered in, and watched Dade, faster then I could comprehend, stab his right fingers back into the seam to freeze his cartwheel off the wall, his two hands and one foot sucking at the Tower’s hard skin while his last limb flagged the rock for balance.

The cam just missed me, landing on our pack with a waspy buzz, and when I looked up again I saw the puffing white of his hand as it snapped out of his chalkbag. Dade let out an unearthly cry then–almost a roar–from deep down in his belly, and then he was fighting as hard I’ve ever seen anyone, his elbows winged out to the side, his whole body trying to suck itself to the rock.  With each move it seemed he would fall, my own body bracing over and over, but then his hand or foot would snap back into rock–punching the clock in the Devil's Workshop–screwing another lid onto another jar of gravity.

If I thought of it I would have been yelling but I didn’t have room for anything else but my heart beating don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall and the sadness that swelled out of my bones that even if Bev and the baby could live without him I didn’t know if I could. I powered my love for him up the rope, pulsing and pushing him upwards, trying to bubble him off from gravity by wishing he were light as a feather, strong as a ape, and though I could barely stand to watch him I had to because he was amazing and if I didn’t focus my spell of don’t fall up the rock then he really might fall. I squeezed this thought dry until he reached the top 110 feet above me, his feet skittering and almost popping one last time just before his hands caught the sloping ledge and mantled him out of sight.  I choked once, lost to the wind, and then Dade’s head came into view.

 “Fuck meeeeeeee!” he screamed out over Wyoming, “I am a bad man! I am a fucking monster of the earth!"

 “You are, my man, you are!” I tried to yell but I couldn’t say it right because my heart had filled my throat, beating thankyouthankyouthankyou 

thankyou  thankyou  thankyou    

thank you     thank you         thank you

 until it had dropped back into my chest, splashing down in a sea of adrenaline.

"Seven Seas here we come!" I said, breathless, when I arrived at the sloping, bench-sized alcove.  I clipped myself into the belay while Dade tied me off, and then reached out to shake his bleeding hand.  It was so heavy with what he'd done it felt like I were grabbing the rock one more time. He didn’t reply, though. His eyes were glassy, the calm after the storm, and I could smell the bitter scent of panic that must have washed over him when he barndoored.

"We need to re-name this whole route Dade's Workshop," I said, sitting down next to him, our feet dangling over the edge. I was psyched, partly because I had climbed it (albeit on top rope) and partly because he was such an animal, but I only got a thin, forced smile out of him.

"You still want to take it to the top?" he asked flatly.

"Dude, you flashed it! X-rated! Who else will have flashed the hardest route at the Tower and taken it to the top? It’s…it’s historic or something.” 

I slapped him on the chest just to touch him again and this gave him a weird face, like he had a smile laid over a frown, so that he looked intensely proud and also terrified.

He held out both hands so I could see his fingers, which jumped and shook like he was playing boogey-woogey piano, his forearms still hard with their pump: "I'm bonking."

My own arms were unbelievably pumped, too, and it was an effort just to get the water bottle open and pass it to him. Then I pulled the fruit roll ups and a small bag of gorp out of the pack. Every single one of my first knuckles was raw, with ghost-white flappers of skin curled away from the flesh, and I had to lick the drops of blood up before I put my hand in the gorp bag. I handed him the bag but he took a roll-up instead, peeling a Tyrannosaurus off the backing before biting its head off. I wanted to talk about the killer crux section where the rock felt like it had been cut with a great scalpel the exact width of my fingertips, forcing wild tensioning and insane footwork—but he cut me off just as I was about to speak.

"I’m never doing this again," he whispered to himself, and then, loudly, to me: "I'm a fucking idiot. If Bev could have seen me right now she would have died from fright—or divorced me. I've convinced her that I never get into trouble. That I'm always safe. That I'll always be there for the Crackmeister...and I almost took the way-whip again. I'm Oh for two right now."

I started to protest but he slapped the ledge we were on and said, “I almost popped on this last, easy mantle move.”

"You’ve always said that if you didn't fall you weren't pushing hard enough."

"Not on deathfalls! Christ, what are you thinking? I couldn't get any gear in."

"It’s just that I can’t believe you did it! That I could even follow it….”

“After that barndoor—believe you me, you would have had enough juice to follow it…” he said, taking a swig from the water bottle and handing it to me, "And you’d be just as mad at yourself."

I went to take a sip and froze when I saw a thin snake of blood from his cracked lips swelling in the water, diffusing until it magically disappeared. Then, too parched to care, I took a swallow and stared out into sky.