“You know, I have to leave the house right now, but that’s a distinct possibility. How can I get back in touch with you?”
Tetzlah gave her the contact number and reminded her of the time difference between Madison and Israel.
She hung up, considering the intriguing proposal. Just then the cat jumped down and started caterwauling, crouching low, as it half crawled, half scooted under the bed. Another tremor was starting—there had been a few lately, only 2–3 on the Richter scale, so slight they were barely noticeable. But the first time it had happened Anna and Jonathan had been in bed, each thinking the other was jiggling a foot. Then Anna noticed the ceiling fan shaking mildly, and said, “Is that you?” “No, I thought it was you,” he had replied.
So Anna had called in to the police department. Cold and precise, protecting the peace, they simply ascertained if she had suffered any property damage. When she had said no, they did divulge that several people had called in, and that she should not worry—so long as she hadn’t suffered any loss. The whole thing was peculiar, because Wisconsin was not exactly in a fault zone for earthquakes.
Anna looked up at the hanging light in the kitchen as it shook slightly this time. Global warming certainly was having odd and widespread effects.
After she’d run her calloused hands over the cat’s soft fur several times, Anna grabbed a cinnamon raisin bagel and gathered up her pack of climbing gear, alarmed the apartment, and took the stairs down two at a time. As she threw the climbing gear into the front passenger seat of the rattletrap Nissan, she groped for her cell phone in her shirt pocket so she could tell Jonathan about this most recent offer for work. She could already see his pursed lips and feel the weight of his silence. He had been trying to persuade her to let go of the out-of-state and overseas work, which took her away for longer than he wanted her to be gone.
“I have a geriatric car, a geriatric laptop, and a geriatric cell phone,” she muttered, as she fished out the phone, which had no photo ability and whose owner had no texting ability. “The least they could do is make a fake dial tone,” she groused.
For as often as she hated seeing other people using their cell phones when she righteously thought they should be focusing on their driving, she pulled away from the curb, punched in Jonathon’s number, and waited for his answer.
“Hey, luv, what’s up?” Her heart twinged when she heard his resonant voice, which sounded like it came from old oak caskets that had stored bourbon and been buried under a sunken vessel deep in the ocean.
“Hi! Just finished at the barn, and I’m on my way to the rock gym. Salvatore put up some new routes. Gotta check ’em out.”
“Can you call me later in the afternoon?”
“Sounds good. Then I’ll tell you about the new offer I just got in today. Pretty exciting, exotic—dangerous, even,” she dangled for him.
“Okay sweetie—hold it till later this afternoon. I’ve got an incoming call.”
As they hung up, Anna reflected on how much simpler life was before cell phones, and how much more in touch people had been. Cell phones certainly were useful in a number of ways, but people seemed to turn to obsessively calling one another even in a paradoxically arid landscape of personal contact. Cell phones had to be one of the most ironic technologies for communication in the twentieth century.
Dodging the ubiquitous bicycles of the campus town, she turned the car into what was locally known as the Cow Palace. For a number of years the large domed steel building on the southeastern side of the University of Wisconsin had housed cows for its agricultural program. Then it had been converted into an arena for music performances; a few years ago, a national climbing gym chain based in Baltimore had come in and purchased the building and built one of the premier rock climbing centers in the country. University students populated it, and it became a favorite of families wanting to entertain for their kids’ birthday parties, plus get their own kids exercising to combat the flood of obesity that had swept through America with burgers, chips, soda, and lattes. The nation was on a crash course with diabetes and resultant soaring medical costs, so the programs Anna taught were one way the trend was beginning to reverse, she believed.
She parked. Errant apple blossoms wafted on the air, settling like miniature lifeboats on the green sea-lawn. Anna kicked off her Birkenstocks and buried her toes in the grass as she floated towards the climbing center.
Entering, she called out, “Hey Charlie, how you doin’?” to the cleaning guy who was emptying out the paper recycling. Madison’s student population offered some diversity, but Wisconsin’s midwestern population was mostly white, barring some Hmong immigrants, so Anna always breathed a sigh of relief when she interacted with some real live people of different skin color like Charlie. The brief time she had spent in Baltimore checking out its rock gym she had experienced what it felt like to be a minority, and found it good for her soul.
“I’m arright, Miss Anna, ’n you?”
“Doing better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Any kids’ groups coming in today?”
“Them deaf kids due in today. Salvatore laid out some of the ropes upstairs.”
“Oh, right, forgot about that. Thanks.” She signed in her name and went in to the area with the lockers and toilets, took her harness and friction device out of the pack, and stashed them before heading upstairs to stretch out. She liked the set-up time in the gym because it gave her the chance to reflect, which she often didn’t have time for otherwise.
Sal, the climbing specialist from Spain whose parents owned one of the largest rock climbing harness companies in the world, was upstairs laying out ropes and hooking them up to the friction belay devices used for stopping someone’s fall. Sal secretly was the envy of every climber there, whether the employees or the regulars, because not only did he have a taut hard body, dark hair, and a delicious accent, but he was independently wealthy, so he could afford to travel the country and the world, designing rock climbing routes in gyms such as this. Whereas Anna liked creating climbing sites outdoors for organizations and schools, Sal preferred mapping out and bolting the specially constructed artificial rock holds people used for hands and feet on walls that were angled and textured with a spray-on concrete surface meant to mimic real outdoors rock. Apart from the occasional lustful eye they threw one another when they were bored or questioning their life choices, Anna and Sal had a high respect for one another and had given each other references often.
“Hey, Sal.”
“Hey, Anna.” He gave her a wan smile today.
“Sal, were you here just a little while ago? Did you feel that tremor?”
“Fon-kee, eh?” Correct vowel sounds occasionally eluded Sal.
“Yeah. It’s just weird. I guess we can’t have the rising sea level affect us here like in Bangladesh, but you’d think we’ve got our share of nature anomalies with the tornadoes and the flooding.”
“Where I am from, in Spain, it is very dry now, for several years. We have it in our fields and wells.”
“Maybe I’ll get there someday.”
“No, no, you should go to France, to Chamonix. I cannot believe you have not climbed it.”
“Don’t rub it in. Someday. Gotta come up with the money, or get a contract from someone over there. Hey, I just got a call to set up a climbing site for an experiential ed school in Israel, near the Dead Sea. Ever climbed in Israel?”
“Israel! Ha! What is there much to climb there, except on the heads of religious people? You be careful if you go over there. That is not a safe place.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for your concern. Now all I have to do is tell Jonathon.”
“Uh-oh,” he clucked at her.
“So we’ve got the deaf kids today?”