Chapter One

I originally wrote this as a Prologue, but last year, among the literary agents I know in NYC, a woman who has been in the business long enough to know a thing or five, advised that it read more like a first chapter. I have tightened it at least a half dozen times. It's meant to deliver the lead character set-up. And now, it is Chapter One. Here goes the latest: 

Joanne Hallisey was breathing hard, the tightness familiar up under her ribcage. It happened every time she neared the summit of the mountain, that last steep scramble, the sharp drop when she looked to her left. Another ten minutes and she would reach the saddle, the eroded sandstone crest that bridged the eastern and western rock-strewn slopes. She picked her way between the boulders. The exposed geology revealed the enormity of time, more than sixty-five million years of orogeny, the uplifted layers of an ancient seabed, folded and thrust up, ages away from their supine origins. She thought that the geological terms sounded sexual. She stepped up, feeling the pull under her backside, the follow-through push-down across the front of her leg, up the last of the two hundred feet of the climb.

“Dammit,” she muttered, sweat dripping down her forehead.  She had slammed her shin against a protruding rock. A hardboiled egg bruise would raise itself oval, a light yellow halo around a dark center. It would be tender for a few days, before the discoloration and swelling receded. No one else was on the trail, at least within eyesight.  It was mid-morning, and the late September sun fired on her back. She pulled herself up, bent forward a moment, one hand on each knee. Then she straightened, took a deep breath, and looked out across the flat half of Colorado.

The wind whipped straight into her face. It blew hair into her eyes, where it stuck and stung. She pulled it away, and waited for the wind to dry her skin. 

She squinted and imagined the spires and skyscrapers of New York, as if the city was etched on the horizon, eighteen hundred miles away. She thought of her former colleagues, working at the Hudson River Earth Observatory north of the city, watching squiggles and lines on seismograms, measuring the vibrations of earthquakes and explosions all over the world, part of an international network.  Richter was obsolete.  Earthquakes were measured in magnitude.  Based on logarithms, it was more precise. Big ones in California measured over six on the magnitude scale.  A small temblor or an enormous bomb measured magnitude four.

Behind her, the Rocky Mountains extruded from red rock up through evergreen trees, to the snow-packed glaciers. The south-tracking sun highlighted the angles of her face, and glinted off the sunscreen balm she smeared over her lips.  She ran her hands along either side of her ribcage, down over each hip, checking the curve of the muscle over bone.

What am I doing here, she asked herself. Joanne was not yet forty when she had been recruited from a staid but rarified position at the city’s top university to run Science Media, a start-up, part of a larger, private communications corporation. The job opportunity tapped what she called her risk junkie gene.

“Go west and grow up.” Someone said that to her once, when she was in her early twenties. It took two decades for it to make sense. She owned her loft apartment, and figured she could rent it out while she worked and lived in Colorado. Her family was scattered across the country, she had no husband, no ex-husband, and no children. Indeed, she had never been married, and when people asked, which was often, she told them that she’d never been asked. She had friends everywhere, and she considered herself to be a true friend, maintaining regular contact and visits across continents and oceans. Lucky, in fact. Her career-centric life provided choices, from which over time, she made decisions, and built a life. Why not try something new? Inside of two months, she packed up and left.    

Now, three years later, she felt beat up. The previous week, she bailed her ex-boyfriend out of jail the second time in six months. Instead of rescuing him, she let him stay locked up overnight. The following morning, she registered for visiting hours and stood in line, surreptitiously eyeballing the Mexican cholo women and children there waiting to see their papis. They wore colored bandanas, and made secret handshakes. Once they shuffled through the metal detector, she took a seat in the visitor’s room. When the public address system announced his name, she walked to a cubicle. She talked on a telephone through glass, just as she feared and expected. She focused on his eyes, looked at no one else, and asked if he was safe, unmolested. He wore an orange jumpsuit. He was okay, he told her. Weird, she thought, he looked good, like a movie star playing a convict. He was charged with felony possession, holding marijuana, driving while his license was revoked from the earlier drunk driving offense.

She put up the couple of thousand dollars, sprung him, and ended the relationship, all of it, in a day. Driving away, she berated herself, “Hallisey.  You dumb ass.  He was nothing but a cute, wake-and-bake ski bum.  Shit.” She said it again, smacked the steering wheel with the heel of her hand, and hit the “t” hard, “Shi-t.”

Was that just last week? She stood on the high red rocks, a hand shading her eyes. Knots of tension clustered at the base of her skull.  She stretched her neck from side to side. The ex-boyfriend was one thing, the call from New York headquarters made her stomach knot.  She had lost her job. Almost forty and here she was, unemployed. Alone. Absurd.

Science Media had been sold to some larger conglomerate. She had had no inkling. The spurt in growth and profits that Science Media generated in its short, fast three years made it an ideal spin-off. Soon, she would take solace in her executive contract, the stock options, but standing there, she felt lost.

"I feel like a cliché." That's what she told Natalie, her best girlfriend. "A fucking cliché."

“You know,” Natalie started, after her pause, “We made bets to see how long you would last out there."

Joanne listened to the noises in the background of Natalie’s call. Traffic, sirens.

“Come home. Bunny, it’s time.”

Natalie had dozens of affectionate monikers for Joanne, and they changed as often as the clothing she styled for the endless parade of fashion shoots to which she was assigned. “Bunny” was the latest. Natalie described her work as spending hours on her knees, eye-level with men’s crotches, adjusting the fit and drape of trousers. She and Joanne had known each other their whole lives. Natalie chain-smoked in doorways, on fire escapes, and roof decks. She would tuck her dark, thick hair behind one ear, then pick a strand of tobacco from between her teeth. She told Joanne everything. They were second cousins.

“Cosmic background radiation.”

“What?”

“Something from astrophysics,” Joanne said. “Scientists say that it’s a remnant from the Big Bang, a kind of faintly glowing, cosmic memory.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I just think sometimes. If I could live a day at a time, simple. Except that I have this life. Money. It’s like cosmic background radiation. It glows in my background.”

“Hey. You’re going to be just fine. They have to pay you, right?”

“Pay me?” She stopped. “Wait, Right.” She laughed. “My brain skipped a second there. Yes. I know. I have stock options, and a final cash payment.”

“See that?”

“I just can’t get not working. Not having to work. Not yet.”

“Joanne. Maybe the time is now. To take a break.”

“You’re right. I’m coming home.”

Joanne looked down from the mountain top. She could go back down the way she came up, or pick her way down the eastern, sun-blasted face, the loop, the long way around. This might be the last hike she would take up this mountain. She grew calmer, and picked her way down the narrow face, into a stand of evergreens.

Her phone rang.  She reached into the deep pocket of the stretch cargo shorts, pulled it out and answered, “Hello?” It was Mikhail.

“Hello. Joanne. Joanne? Hello?” He was shouting. Mikhail Kolmogorov, she called him the mad, white Russian. His English was awash in excess saliva and consonants, especially “y’s.” He pronounced her name so that it sounded like “Zh-yoanna.”

“Mikhail.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes.” He repeated his words rapid-fire.  “You are where? You are still in those mountains? Yes? In Colorado?”

“Yes, I am still in those mountains.  Right now, I am on one of the trails looking across the Colorado plains.”

“Wow.  Great. Mountains! I miss the mountains! I am here. In Paris. Why don’t you come? Why?”

“Mikhail, we talked about this just last week. Seriously, I’m not sure I can right now. Remember? I told you this. I told you everything.”

“But Joanne.  You have no more office! You are free! So you come. I wait for you!” He was relentless. She could almost feel the photons spraying into her earpiece.

Was she free? She wondered about that. The idea of a quick trip tempted her. 

“Yes! Yes! You come. This weekend. I buy an apartment. It is the red light district. But beautiful.”

An apartment. She thought of her loft. It waited for her. In seven to ten days, the moving company told her a truck would pull up to her building just off Seventh Avenue and a moving crew would off load her possessions back from where most of them came three years ago. Her place in Colorado was empty.

“Joanne!”

“Wait,” she half-mused, then, “Hypothetically.  I could come. I could come Friday, and return to New York the following Tuesday or something.” She could be back in time to meet the movers at the loft.

“Yes! You do that. The first weekend in October, it is very special. You will see. You call me to confirm, yes?”

“Hey. First, I have to get down off this trail.”

“Okay. You promise me, yes?”

“I promise,” she’d capitulated. “Yes.”

Joanne returned her gaze to the steep drop-off, and felt the grippy tread of her trail shoes as they hit the flats of the rocks, the forward pressure steadied the ball of the foot, kept her from skidding on the loose gravel and sand.  She thought about Mikhail.  They’d known each other for years. Few people could rival Joanne’s levels of energy and interests, but Mikhail’s dwarfed everyone. He could suck the air out of any room. From the moment they met, they became a strange brother and sister. A funny thing, she thought, a flicker of sexual tension, but she couldn’t remember, too many years had passed. Mikhail was a big man, tall, strong, with fair hair, light eyes, and classic Russian cheekbones. Joanne told him she could hang her clothes on those cheekbones.  He hadn’t understood exactly, just said, “Yes! Yes!” A Soviet-trained scientist, he left research for banking. He moved to Paris the same year she moved to Colorado.

She was almost off the trail. It made sense, a trip, a reprieve. She would go. She would visit Paris. She called her travel agent. Then she stopped on a shaded promontory halfway down the trail, leaned back against a giant granitic boulder rendered smooth from millions of years of extreme weather and erosion, called Mikhail, and got his voicemail. 

“All right,” she started. “I’ll be there Friday morning. I’ll stay for a few days. I’ll grab a cab and meet you at your place. Probably around ten in the morning. Even if you are hung over. Call me back.”

She scrabbled a bit further, when her phone beeped.  She read the text message, it was Mikhail’s address followed by, “I am ready 4-U.  I kiss and hug-U.”

Comments

[Jeff]

Hey Holly

Great start and i want to read more - when can we get to Paris?