The bungee uncoils behind her as she falls, like an umbilical cord, like Rapunzel’s braid, and my stomach tightens with the certainty that it won’t hold, that it will break and then she will break too on the rocks that jut and crest from the river below, that the fast-moving water will dilute the blood that she will spill, that her skin will crack like an egg that can never be put together again. Yolk and blood and frayed rope. Rocks and water and nothing more.
But the rope is not made of hair. It’s not fragile like flesh or human meat. An umbilical cord would burst. Hair would fray. The cord holds. She reaches the end of its length and it stretches farther, its elastic slowing her. The tips of her fingers brush the river. For a fraction of a moment gravity doesn’t exist and she hangs upside down, frozen, a statue.
The crowd explodes in a cheer, and I’m yelling, too, all our voices yelling out together as she’s yanked hard back toward us. She flips over and flails now, out of control, her hips higher than her arms or legs or head, and she bounces once, twice, three times, and it’s a crazy thing to see. It’s a crazy thing to do, to jump off a bridge, to trust that harness and that cord and that guy, even, that he’s not stoned or something, that he’s really sure about how perfectly he’s latched all the things that need to latch.
She’s done bouncing now, she’s just kind of swaying there partway down, and they’re hauling her back up, and I’m thinking about the bridge, about how she has to trust that, too, not to crack or crumble into dust.
Then she’s back on the bridge safe and sound. The same guy undoes the harness and she steps out of it. It’s someone else’s turn.
Seth and I walk across the bridge and find a patch of shade where we sit down. He pulls a bottle of water out of his pack and takes a long drink before handing it to me, saving the other bottle for our hike out. I take it and put my lips right where his were.
“So, what do you think?” he asks.
I look around at the rocks and the people and the river and the bridge. “It’s amazing.”
“Would you do it?”
“Jump, you mean?”
He nods.
Would I? I shrug. “Would you?”
“Definitely,” he says. He reaches out for the water bottle. When I pass it back, he takes another long drink and I watch the way he tips back his head, the way his lips meet the rim of the bottle, the way his Adam’s apple moves up and down as he swallows. The shape of the nail beds on his fingers. The line up his forearm along the edge of his muscle. The darkened pits of his T-shirt, the way the neckline is stretched out. The hair on his legs and his feet in his shoes with no socks.
“I’d do it with you,” I say.
He screws the top back on the bottle. He looks at me straight in the eyes. He’s thinking something I can’t read from his gaze, but it feels really, really important. “Would you?” he asks.
My mouth feels dry even though I just drank water. I nod.
“Okay,” he says.
Okay? Okay what?
I clear my throat. “You probably have to be eighteen, right? I mean, they’re not going to just let us jump. There’s like, liability. We’d need parent waivers or something.” I’m backpedaling, and I hate that he can tell.
“Only if we want to use their equipment.”
I laugh. “What’ve you got in that backpack, Seth? I thought you just packed sandwiches.”
“Peanut butter and jelly,” he says. “And some pistachios.”
“So you want to just jump off a bridge? No bungee cord? Funny.”
But he’s not being funny. He doesn’t smile, or look away, or even blink. This feels like a test, and I don’t know the answer.
I’m not even sure I really understand the question. Or why he would ask it. He couldn’t really be asking me to jump off a bridge with him—to die with him. Is he really asking how much I love him? If my love for him is conditional on staying alive?
“Hey,” I say, “Do you want to walk down to the river?”
“What I want,” Seth says, “is to jump off the bridge.”
???
We don’t jump off the bridge. We don’t walk down to the river. We eat the sandwiches, we share the pistachios, we watch other people tie in and leap and scream and cheer and the divide between us widens into a chasm.
Then we hike back out.
I answered the question wrong. Following Seth, watching the muscles underneath his T-shirt move as he leads the way, I hate myself. It was a bluff, and I should have played along. I should have said yes, anything, let’s go, let’s jump, as long as we can hold hands when we go over. I should have said something different. I should have done something different. But now it’s too late, and though Seth walks no further from me on the way out than he did on the way in, the distance is impassable.
I follow and I think of a hundred things to say but none of them is the right thing and so I say nothing.
Inside Seth’s socks, inside my Tevas, my feet hurt again. I can feel the blisters peeling open, but I don’t mind. I put my focus there, on the pain, on the top of my big toes and the backs of my heels and across the balls of my feet, and I make myself feel it all the way through. I don’t let myself hobble. Each step, I press first with my heel, then articulate up through the arch of my foot and onto my toes, feeling the sting and burn and rip, and welcoming it.
We’re almost back to the car when I can’t stand it anymore. I jog-step to catch up with him. I take his hand, and he stops and looks at me. I can’t read his face. It’s like I forgot how, or maybe I never really knew how to begin with, but I thought I did, but I was wrong.
I pull him off the trail behind some trees, and I push him against a tall rock, and before I can worry if someone will come by and see us I go down on my knees like the guy on the bridge, except instead of tightening a harness I’m unfastening his pants.
I pull him out of his underwear and he’s soft in my hand. I don’t look up at his face before I open my mouth and pull him into it, and I pull and I suck until he grows hard and he makes sounds that mean he likes it, and I keep going and going and when he says, “I’m going to come,” I don’t pull away.
The jet of him is warm and salty and tastes like thickened sweat. He breathes hard and his hands are tight fists at his eyes.
There’s not much water left in the last bottle but what there is Seth gives to me, and I drink it as he arranges himself back into his shorts. We walk the rest of the way back to the car, still not talking, but at least now side by side on the widening trail.
I carry the empty bottle. We drive home.
???
Yet I, least of all souls
Take Him in my hand
Eat Him and drink Him,
And do with Him what I will!
It’s a real thing written by a religious mystic way back in the thirteenth century. She was talking about worshipping Jesus, but come on. She was talking about sex, right? Sex with Jesus?
That was what she wanted—to give Jesus head. And I totally understand it.
When you love someone the way that I love Seth—the way that woman who wrote the poem loved Jesus—you want to serve him. And you want to paralyze him so he can’t go away.