176 days after they pronounced my brother, Brian, DOA—the result of blunt force head trauma sustained in a single vehicle collision on NV-431—I’m bent in familiar prostration over my nightstand, trying to get high. It’s not, technically speaking, that I can’t get high. I’m still able to create the particular biochemistry or whatever it is within my body that produces the internal sensations adding up to being high, but I can’t lean into it anymore. I don’t know what it is. I know some people that have ended up with bad pills, and I was there one time when this dude Taylor I used to hang out with zooted a thirty in one go and immediately started puking all over the linoleum in our friend’s little kitchenette. Taylor’s skin went pale and clammy, and instead of calling an ambulance or even asking if the guy’s okay, I basically just froze and stared and imagined all the “Rest in Peace, Taylor” posts we’d see over the next few weeks. Taylor ended up being fine, more mad about the wasted pill than anything else, but that night I googled “fake pills” and “signs of opioid overdose,” and I stayed up until something like four in the morning snorting lines and reading articles about pressed M30s and test kits and dealers cutting phony percs with fentanyl to increase profits.

            Now, I take an old receipt off the nightstand, drape it over a pill, and crush the blue tab with the butt-end of a mason jar. I gather the powder into a mound, using my driver’s license as a sort of broom, and I bend the ID over the powder and press into the nightstand to break up the remaining clumps until the pill is reduced to acceptable snorting texture, all the while monitoring the pill’s consistency for possible abnormalities. I gather up a bump, a little tester line to gauge the stuff’s potency, snort it through a section of cut up straw, and wait to see if any of the preliminary symptoms of overdose start coming on. I press my forefinger into my thumbnail until the skin under the nail turns white, release the finger and make sure the skin turns pink again—an analog method of monitoring oxygen levels. I hit half of the remaining pill and scroll through my YouTube recommendations. The effect is somehow both gradual and immediate, a high-res time lapse of a blooming flower. 

            I finish the pill and scroll through thumbnails. I watch my vitals and make sure to stay conscious. I tell myself to try to relax, to just sit back and enjoy it. “If something was going to happen, it would have happened by now,” I tell myself. Dumbass Taylor survived the worst-case scenario (even though, really, if I’m honest, Taylor’s being able to drive home that night probably had more to do with his humpback-sized tolerance than actual danger of whatever dose he ended up snorting). I try to let the high just lift me up and take me out the way it used to, but the warm barrier of can’t-touch-me-not-in-here opioid stupor now has this darkness underpinning it.

            I can’t stop thinking of what my brother would say if he could see me. It’s on the tail end of this thought that I’m able to be honest for a second and admit that this whole charade isn’t because of hypervigilance or practical harm reduction strategies or anything like that. It’s right there on the ass end of this thought that I know that this whole thing is about real, low-level, felt-in-the-gut fear. I think of my brother and realize that I’m barely holding on—that I’m truly, honestly afraid. The high peaks and ebbs in waves, and every time the warm sense of rightness starts to dip, I want another line, another pill, a whole team of steel-nerved hospice nurses brandishing calm smiles and high-caliber IV pharmaceuticals, yet it’s in wanting more that  realize I may have already taken too much, realize that the next nod might be the one to kill me.  I can’t stop because I can’t handle the fear, but it’s precisely in the attempt to salve the fear that I really feel afraid. It’s like the higher I get, the more the fear grows, like it grows somehow in proportion to the pleasure, and the better I feel the more I’m certain there’s something going horribly wrong.

            I’m at Devlin’s Bar the following Thursday, staring into a post-shift beer and smoking. I’m pretty sure that, based on my current tolerance, a second drink would probably amplify my dose later without much risk of verging into dangerous, respiratory-depressant territory, but that’s supposing my current batch is comparable to the previous few and hasn’t been pressed or otherwise tampered with. 

            The jukebox goes quiet and I look up from the bar in time to catch Reggie walking toward me, pantomiming.

            “What’s up, Reggie Boy?” I ask, extending the light his way.

            “Well if it ain’t old Sketchy Pete. It’s—thanks—it’s, wow. Goddam Petey. It’s really good to see you, dude. Do you go by the gym much anymore? We’ve all been going to that new one south of town lately. Mostly, like, bouldering bros down there. Guys that climb with their shirts off but leave their beanies on for some reason. It’s nice, though, and Michelle’s actually assistant manager or something down there now . . .”

            The crack of a break shot on the pool table. A closing bathroom door. Hands patting pockets. Lighters procured and Marlboro 100s pinched between thumbs and forefingers and admired on the inhalations of first drags, just like in the movies.  

            “. . . and anyway, I’m actually glad I ran into you. Jess and Dave and I are gonna climb Cathedral Peak next weekend and we’ve been looking for a fourth so we can do it in teams of two. Do you want to come with us?”

            Devlin’s is probably the best bar on the dwindling list of spots in Reno that will still let you smoke inside. 

            “I’m honestly tragically out of shape right now. I’d just slow you guys down,” I say.

            A laugh rises for a second above the rest of the din (someone’s playing Alice in Chains now, something off Dirt) and recedes back into the small sounds of the bar. Reggie blows smoke.

            “Look,” he says, “I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen you. I know that you don’t want to talk about any of it. I’ve known you long enough to know there’s no talking you out of this pity party you’ve got going on here. But honestly man, you’ve got people around that care about you whether you see it or not. People that are worried about you.”

            I was afraid this would happen. I watch Reggie’s hands as he gestures, climbing chalk still stuck in the cracks of his knuckles. No one I know climbs like Reggie. He moves with the sort of artistry reserved for the really good—the seemingly transcendent, so competent at what they do that people who have no idea about the particulars of their craft can still appreciate it intuitively. His every move seems inevitable. Intentional, the pop psychologists would say. I watch his hands, beautiful and graceful and precise in their movements, even here, and I remember, after our first botched attempt on the Zodiac route on El Capitan—when me and Reggie and my brother had basically sworn up and down that we’d never leave good old terra firma and risk our necks like that ever again—that, as we staggered down the banks of the Merced river beneath El Cap bridge and Reggie took his shirt off, my brother noticed Reggie’s torso in a not-so-objective, more-than-purely-matter-of-fact kind of way. My brother did not notice my noticing this. It was a blip, a single frame in the placid, unshakeable stoicism he projected at everybody all the time. And I thought of all the times I’d asked him how it was going with the abstracted “ladies,” or whether he’d fucked any of the girls we went to the gym with, or if the particular beauty of Phoebe Bridgers’s face made him (like it made me, especially then) want to commit treason, and I felt this horrible, gut-level bottoming out, felt like I’d betrayed him in a way I’d never be able to understand. But his face went back to normal, and really that probably wasn’t the right time to say something anyway, and months later I figured that I’d misremembered what happened by the bridge that day and was reading way too far into it. 
            “Some time outside would be good for you. It’ll be fun,” Reggie says.

            “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve just been busy.”

            Reggie tilts his head down. Reggie isn’t buying it. I realize that what my brother’s face really did by the river that day was signify the external state of an internally sad person. They did a tox screen after his accident, and it was the coroner’s or whoever’s professional opinion that Brian had a significant amount of cocaine and alcohol in his system at the time of his death. He wouldn’t go near pills. I never told him how nervous his motorcycle made me.

            “Come on, man,” says Reggie.

            But what about when my brother came home from the third grade with nail polish on his fingers, and our father caught him and my mother attempting to wash the polish off before our dad got home? When the old man sent mom to their room and sat both of us boys down in front of the muted TV with the Weather Channel on and had my brother scrub off every last fleck of that purple glitter nail polish while our dad just sat above him, silent and blank-faced, save for the twitching vein in his temple, me watching the whole time as my brother started crying and shaking, the crying and shaking getting progressively worse and our dad just sitting there, silent and still, until he was satisfied, then getting up and slamming the door to our parents’ room and kicking a hole nearly clear through the bottom of it—what about that?

            Reggie says something. I say something. Two brothers pass each other in the hallway of their parents’ house. There’s a hole in a door that neither of them will look at. In fact, they won’t really look at anything, shuffling off to their respective rooms and closing their respective doors.

            “I miss him, too,” Reggie says.

            I don’t know what Reggie wants from me. I don’t know if the lump I get in my throat thinking about what it might be like to run my hands along the trained striations of his stomach has anything to do with what I really want or don’t want. I don’t know if I actually want to jump him right here and now or if my thinking I might want to jump him actually results from the instinctive assumption that I couldn’t possibly want to jump him. I don’t know if the nausea I can barely keep from representing on my face results from not wanting him or what it would mean if I really did want him.

            “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” I say. “I really do. I’m lucky to have people like you in my life. I know I am. But honestly, I’m fine. Once I get back in shape, I’ll hit you up and we’ll go.”

            Reggie doesn’t say anything.

            I order a shot. And another.

            Someone’s playing Slowdive on the jukebox now. “Alison,” their big one. I can almost taste that first line.

            I don’t know what my brother thought of Reggie. I don’t know because I never asked him. I don’t know because I never really asked myself.

            I had the dream again about the doctor’s office. The doctor holds a chart. I sit on butcher paper, my legs dangling like a little kid’s. I know, in the self-evident dream sense, that the doctor has bad news for me. She seems upset, like she’s having a hard time breaking this news—whatever it is—to me. I’m kind of touched by this.

            The doctor holds a chart but doesn’t look at it. She already knows whatever the chart says. The chart is irrelevant at this point. The doctor holds the chart and nods like she knows that I know that whatever comes next isn’t going to be good. Her eyes get big and her eyebrows arch. People call what her face does “softening.”

            I’m kind of touched that, after all these years of being a doctor and breaking bad news, that she is this concerned, that she cares enough about what’s going to happen to me for her face to soften. I want to tell her that it’s okay, that I can take it. I want to tell her to tell me, but my mouth won’t move.

            I understand that the reason for my being here with this doctor is that one of us, either me or my brother, is completely fucked. I understand, but she won’t tell me. She’s having a hard time breaking it to me, like she’s afraid that what she’s trying to say is way beyond the upper limits of my processing ability. Like she might kill me just by telling me. I want to tell her to just let me have it. I want to say that I’m a big boy, but I can’t move my mouth. Really, it’s more like the thing on my face where my mouth’s supposed to be is meant to stay shut, like it serves a function entirely separate from opening. Same principle of indiscernible function goes for my arms and fingers. Same goes for everything, really, except apparently my brain. Nothing moves except the doctor’s mouth, her mouth’s corners beginning to spasm.    

            The dream normally ends here. This time is different. I don’t know what happens exactly, or how long it takes, but there’s a certain logic to how the dream flows from one place to another, something I understand at the time but later seems ridiculous, a logic whose meaning is predicated on its being witnessed.

            I’m in a small bubble of light. The light comes from a headlamp. The headlamp is strapped over a helmet. The helmet contains my head. My feet push off of vertical Sierra granite, and I’m attached to neon rope by a rappel plate, lowering slowly. Where the light from my headlamp fades is where the world ends.

            I’m convinced that whatever holds the rope above me is steadily failing. I’m convinced the anchor’s bunk and I’m going for the long one.

            I hear something. Two syllables in irregular intervals. My name. My name is coming from somewhere out there. I know my name is coming from my brother. My brother is out there somewhere, calling my name, but the sound doesn’t come from anywhere. The sound is everywhere. I try to call back, try to get my mouth to form the sound that means my brother. I try to get my mouth to say “Brian,” try to get it to say that “I’m here” and “It’s okay”— but nothing comes. I emit no sound and my mouth is useless, like I never learned how to use it.

            I swing out left and right, penduluming from the fixed point above. The wall rushes by. I feel the pull of everything beneath me. The wall is a streak flecked with neon after-image. I swing and reach, but the more I move, the more I’m sure the anchor’s going to pull from the cliff and send me falling forever. The stiller I stay, the more that Brian’s voice fades. A metallic crack echoes from somewhere above. The rope goes slack. The rope coils all around me. I know somehow that Brian’s falling, too. Please, I think. I know that we’re falling, but there’s a part of me that thinks I can still save this. Part of me that thinks that if I just ask and really believe in what might result from that asking that we’ll be okay, that we’ll make it.

            Please. If you just let us out of this, I’ll never be so stupid again.

            I called in sick that next Monday. I still don’t know why. I told myself I’d just go for a hike, but I brought my chalk and climbing shoes with me. I must have known.

            I drove up to Snowshed at the Donner Summit crags. Walked right up to the base of Composure, the first route Brian and I ever did together. I didn’t even feel the first twenty feet or so. About a quarter of the way up the route I stalled. There’s a little friction move there where the footholds are pretty marginal and you have to trust the rubber on your shoes to stick to the granite so you can shift your weight over onto your right foot and stand up and get your hands into the relatively secure crack system above. It’s an easy move, really. Something I’d done probably twenty times prior without thinking about it.

            I stalled. Maybe someday what happened in that stalling will coalesce into the moment I’ll use—someday, eventually, when I’m better—to differentiate between how I was and how I (hopefully, eventually, someday) grew to be. It might sound good if, in that moment of solo indecision maybe thirty feet up a beginner’s climbing route, I realized for the first time that what had really been destroying me about my brother’s death—what was really eating away at a deeper part of me than I could even admit to conceiving of—had nothing to do with how much I missed hearing, through the basically translucent walls of our old apartment, his tenuous attempts Killers covers. Had nothing to do with anything I was missing or my own culpability in what happened or even the lingering and unanswerable question of whether or not he meant to clip that guardrail and fall some three hundred feet down the highway embankment, whether it was a tragic accident resulting from a heightened sense of confidence and dulled inhibitions or a convenient coverup for the sort of grand exit he’d been planning in his head for who knows how long.

             I remember my left foot shaking, the ground’s magnetic distance distorted and out of focus in my periphery. That must have been the moment when it really hit me. When I realized that the most unacceptable and un-integrate-able piece of Brian’s absence was that he never got the chance to stop and look around and ask himself whether he was doing what he really wanted to be doing. Never really got to notice or look at what he was doing enough to question it. Never got to imagine, even for a second, that maybe the particular web of memories and feelings and habitual modes of thought making up the particular and inexpressible shape of his daily pain was bigger and more complicated than what he could blame himself for. That what he felt was not his fault.

            I stalled. Those moments should have marked when everything clicked and changed for me, but I don’t think it happened like that. I don’t think I felt much of anything outside of the desire to get down. I don’t think I really thought of anything, except maybe to hope that—if I could keep it together enough to really focus on each hand and foot hold—that I might be able to get back down, might be able to call Reggie or somebody and ask, “Can I talk to you about something?”

*