It was five until six and Furiosa had been sitting in the parking lot for the last fifteen minutes. She wasn't quite sure why she had gotten there so early, but here she was, and like hell she was going to wait inside where everyone could see.
The truck's engine was off, but she had kept the radio on, set to some classic rock station she tended to play just because it was the least objectionable of all the options. The tape deck was broken – she couldn't remember it ever working – so it was the radio or nothing at all.
On the other end of the bench seat were her old harness and climbing shoes. She was trying not to look over at them too much because it caused her chest to tighten in very restrictive and unpleasant ways. Instead, she stared out the driver's side window and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, keeping rough time with the beat, until the song began to fade out and another began.
She took that as a sign that she should turn the radio off and go inside, and then, with a soft breath, she heard the opening guitar chord. She leaned back against the napped cushion of the headrest and waited for the first lines, the words she still knew by heart.
"Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night
And wouldn't you love to love her?
Takes to the sky like a bird in flight
And who will be her lover?"
She was nine years old, living with her mom in some shitty thin-walled studio apartment in downtown Seattle, but even then her mom somehow made it magical, filling the place with creeping green-vined plants, jumping on the bed with her and dancing around the room with clasped hands as Fleetwood Mac warbled in the background. Her mom had loved Stevie Nicks, all that witchy woman, fringe-shawled bohemian mystery.
Mary Jo Bassa had always liked imagining herself as a free spirit, going where the wind took her, even if it had only ever been partially across the state of Washington. At seventeen, she had left the rural, off-grid commune where she had been born and hitchhiked her way to Seattle, first losing herself in the unmuzzled roar of the punk scene, and then finding herself alone and pregnant. Furiosa had never known who her father was, and always wondered if her mom hadn't either. But Mary had made do as best she could, scouting out cashier jobs, waitressing, cleaning office buildings at night. No job lasted that long, not with her blunt readiness to talk back to her supervisors, and there had been different apartments over the years, some worse than others. Everything had been good, though, in the tight circle of each other, up until one rainy day in February when Furiosa was thirteen.
A mugging gone wrong, they said. How the fuck does a mugging go right? her adult self sometimes wants to scream. Regardless, there were no leads, no suspects.
For a day or so, the commune had seemed a possibility, until the social worker discovered that it had disbanded years earlier, its residents scattered to places unknown, and so she was packed up to live with some distant relatives she had never met. But Furiosa had hated them, hated their dark house with its cramped yard and broken chain-link fence, and had split the minute she turned eighteen.
"Taken by
Taken by the sky –"
Most of what she remembered of her childhood – besides Stevie – was the green and the rain, the blurriness between sky and sea, the curtains of pine trees and the soft sweep of ferns, the slight give of winter-damp earth under her shoes.
Here, though, everything was brown, dry like a rattling wheeze, dust clouding the sky and sticking to every imaginable surface. It wasn't hard to believe that the entire state had been going through a drought for years. Rain, when it came, only appeared in potent blasts, and it quickly soaked into the thirsty ground, leaving little trace that it had been there at all.
She took a deep breath as the song ended, feeling a tiny shake in her exhalation. She shouldn't have stayed to listen, not when it brought back things she had spent too much time trying to forget.
Grabbing her gear, she stepped out of the truck and onto the black-top of the parking lot. For the past two days, she had tried not to think about the fact that she had agreed to meet up with someone – a man, one she didn't even know – so she could work on getting back on the wall. It hadn't been very successful. Yesterday, near to closing, she had gotten so panicky that she had even snuck a glimpse at the waiver book in the hope that he had left a phone number. Maybe she could just call, cancel the whole thing. Of course, there was nothing, no number, no email, not even a real street address, just a P.O. box in Indio. And Max Rockatansky? What kind of weird-ass name was that?
As she neared the front door, she could feel the familiar fear winding its way up her throat like a snake. It pulled at her, whispering at her to get back in her truck, to drive away and not look back.
But for some unfathomable reason, she kept walking, placing one foot in front of the other, until the metal of the door handle was cool and smooth against her hand and she pulled it with enough force to displace some of the breath she held tight within her chest.
Blinking her eyes against the sharp florescent lights, she looked over and saw Nux behind the front desk talking to two guys, both with shaved heads… fuck, it was Slit and Morsov.
Her own concerns momentarily forgotten, she walked towards them, not saying a word, not even when they all looked up at her and Morsov pulled his arm around Slit's shoulders, grinning.
"What d'you think?" Morsov asked. "Awesome, huh?"
Furiosa raised her eyebrows. "I guess this means you both did it on purpose?"
"Not just us," Slit said. "Elvis, Coil, a couple of the other guys who were here last night."
"You all shaved your heads together?" she asked, unable to keep the derision from her voice. As she spoke, she noticed Nux had angled himself slightly away, his gaze dropping down towards the counter.
"Yeah, well, after closing we went out, had a few, and after last call ended up at Morsov's place," Slit replied. "It was my idea, though." He grinned like a little lizard and then rubbed the top of Morsov's shiny head. "And chicks are into shaved heads. That's why you did it, huh, Furiosa?"
For a brief moment, she contemplated jumping over the desk and breaking his jaw, just so it would knock that disgusting, lewd smirk off his face, but she knew that Slit was just the type to press charges.
"You guys shave your balls too, while you were at it?" she sneered. "Oh, wait, you'd have to have balls to do that."
"Damn," said Morsov. "Why you gotta go from zero to bitch in, like, sixty seconds?"
She could feel the rage curdling through her body, tingling, itching into her legs and down the length of her fingers. At this point, she was truly regretting walking in the door at all.
"You two need to get the fuck out of my sight," she said, her eyes narrowed into icy furrows. "Right now."
"Why should we leave? We're working," said Slit, crossing his arms in front of his chest. "What are you doing here, anyway? You don't work today."
"Get… the fuck… out… of my sight," she repeated, emphasizing each word as if she were speaking to five-year-olds. Horrible, repulsive, man-sized five-year-olds.
"Fine," said Slit. "We'll just leave Nuxy here to cover the desk for the next hour or two." He sidled up behind Nux and gleefully mussed his dark hair so the ends stood up in multiple directions. "Give us some time work on our grips."
As Slit and Morsov walked off, Nux tried – unsuccessfully – to flatten down his hair against his head.
"Can't believe they did it without me," he mumbled.
"What?" she asked, nearly snapping at him; the anger was draining from her, but not quickly enough.
"I mean, they could've called me. I would've come over to Morsov's."
She remembered that Nux didn't work yesterday, so he must have missed the whole thing.
"Really? You want to shave your head?" she asked in disbelief.
"It looks cool," he replied, looking over at her with his wide, ridiculously blue eyes. "I mean… doesn't it?"
"Don't do it, Nux," she said. "You're just going to look like someone stuck a marshmallow on top of a popsicle stick."
"But you shaved your head… kind of…" he said, his voice trailing off. She could tell he was unsure about stepping into the realm of her personal details.
"That's different," she replied. She could sense a why? about to form in his mouth, and she wanted to cut him off before he wandered any further into the topic. "Look, just don't do it, okay? And why would you want to look anything like those assholes?"
He didn't say anything, just nodded sheepishly, but she knew he would probably end up doing it anyway. Boys like Nux, they wanted to belong to something, and weren't always very picky about what it was. It was unfortunate that he was going to end up attaching himself to that whole crew with Slit and Morsov, but working here there weren't many other options, not unless he wanted to follow Furiosa around all the time. And there was no way she was going to let that happen. Nux was a harmless enough kid, but she had her own problems to deal with. She wasn't going to be responsible for him, too.
Pulling himself out of his thoughts, he looked over and glanced at the harness and shoes she had dropped onto the desk.
"Oh, right, that's today, huh?" he asked, a smile starting to creep across his face. "You excited?"
All she could do was glare at him and hope that it was enough to convey her current level of excitement.
"Uh, okay... But where's the guy?" he asked, craning his head around the gym. "You think he forgot?"
Shit, maybe he did forget, she thought. Oh, please, let him have forgotten. Then she could sprint out of here and pretend the whole thing never happened. She wouldn't have to think about Seattle or Slit and Morsov or getting back on the wall. Everything could just go back to… well, normal wasn't the right word, but whatever the hell her life was at this point.
"Maybe," she replied, leaning against the front of the desk. "If he doesn't show in the next two minutes, though, I'm going to –"
"Mhmm, hey." There was that deep growl again, this time right behind her ear.
Furiosa swiveled around in surprise, catching a brief flash of him, before she accidentally knocked the elbow of her stump against the hard laminate of the desk, feeling a crack of pain deep against the bone.
"Oh, fu…" she muttered, quickly rubbing the elbow with her right hand. She looked up at him, realizing he had just seen all of that happen. Could this day get any fucking worse? "I mean, uh, hi… You're here."
"Mhmm-hmm," he replied, and then nodded towards her elbow, still cradled in her palm. "You okay?"
"Uh, yeah," she said. The pain was starting to dull, fading into a residual sting. "Fine."
He was wearing a black t-shirt, dark-inked tattoos coyly peeking out underneath the hem of his sleeves, along with athletic shorts and some pretty banged-up looking flip-flops. He still had on the knee brace and his haircut was still ridiculous, but it looked like he had shaved down some of the scruff, even if what remained might charitably be described as an eleven o'clock shadow.
He was standing closer to her than she normally would have preferred, although she didn't move to step away. They were about the same height, but even so he had a solidness about him, a quiet presence that seemed to say something more than anything that could be spoken out loud. She swallowed, feeling strangely aware of the space between them.
With surprising difficulty, she tugged her gaze away, gathering up her gear on the counter and then turning back to face him. "You ready?" she asked.
"Mhmm, yeah… Just need to, uh…" – he pointed towards Nux, still standing behind the desk – "…get my pass." He dug his hand into his pocket, presumably for his wallet.
"Don't worry about it," she said, throwing her gear over her shoulder. "Nux, can you just put him down today as a guest on my account?" If he was going to take time to climb with her, the least she could do was make sure he didn't have to pay for it.
"Sure thing," Nux replied, sporting a wider grin than Furiosa would have liked.
"Okay, then," she said. "Where should we start?"
"You got somewhere quiet? With some space?"
It was Friday night, so the place was pretty busy; there wouldn't be a ton of places along the wall where they could spread out and not get in the way of other people's climbs. But she realized she wanted to stay as far away from public view as possible, without having to worry about random people – or, fuck, even Slit and Morsov – wandering through.
"Yeah," she said. "We've got something like that."
She took him around to the side of the gym, a little past the locker rooms, where part of the wall wrapped around into an alcove. They normally reserved this space for classes and large group lessons, but there was no one there now, just a large posted sign telling climbers that this part of the wall was off-limits. The alcove wall was all intro routes – nothing harder than a 5.7 – and she could feel a part of herself screaming at the idea that this was where she would have to start from.
She found a spot by the wall and dropped her gear on the ground, taking her harness in hand so she could start detangling the straps.
"You won't need that," he said.
She looked over at him, not letting the harness drop from her hand. "Why not?" she asked.
"Start small at first," he replied. "Near the ground. No ropes."
"So just traversing?"
Whatever she had envisioned as her first step in this process, just going back and forth across the wall a foot or two off the ground definitely wasn't it. Traversing was just a warm-up exercise, not normally the main activity. She looked up at the wall, with all its big jug holds, not understanding how the prospect of doing something so easy could be equally insulting and terrifying.
"And some drills," he added.
"What drills?" she asked, skepticism creeping into her voice.
"We'll see… First, though… you get back on the wall."
Get back on the wall. Fuck.
She dropped the harness from her hand and then swiped her bandana from where it lay in the pile by her feet. If she was going to do this, she was at least going to do it with her war paint on.
As she found a seat on the ground, she reached behind her for her shoes. She had only ever worn them the one time, so they still looked brand new, without any of the normal scrapes and scuffs she associated with climbing shoes. Although she had always preferred lace-ups, this pair had velcro straps across the top, making it easier for her take them on and off with just one hand. Once on, they felt stiff against her skin, the leather still young and tight, the narrow rubber soles offering barely any give as she flexed and pointed her feet. The familiarity of the feeling was painful, a rough scour against her heart. She was already on edge tonight, after thinking so much about her mom, and all of this was only making her feel more raw and unsteady. She sat there for a moment, not moving, waiting for the mixture of emotions to pass through her.
He walked slowly over towards her. "Okay?" he asked.
"Yeah," she answered quietly. If there had been words to describe what she was feeling, she still wouldn't have been able to say them.
He leaned over and lifted out his hand, his palm open, fingers curled in a little. At first, she couldn't figure out what he was doing. A moment passed until she finally realized, but even so he hadn't pulled his hand away.
It was nothing, really. Why did it seem like so much?
She reached up and grasped his hand around her own; it was warm and solid, rough calluses lining the creases of the finger joints. A second later, he had hauled her up to her feet, their bodies coming to a stop in sudden proximity to one another, and then he dropped her hand and took a step back.
He waited, his eyes on her expectantly, and then he nodded towards the wall behind her.
With a quick nod of acknowledgment, she turned back towards it, watching as all the different colored holds swam into and out of focus, like a map with too many landmarks. Her heart was beating faster, the sound of blood starting to echo in her ears, and she tried to take a few deep breaths, willing herself to calm down even as she scanned the wall for a starting point. A little to the right of her line of sight was a sturdy red-colored jug and she reached out and curled the tips of her fingers into it, the lightly chalked surface smooth against her skin. Lifting her right leg, she placed her toes against the edge of a low foothold and began to ease some of her weight onto it. As she raised herself up off the ground, her left leg lengthened and her foot searched for the ideal spot on an adjacent hold to land.
But there was something off, something in her positioning or her ability to keep herself stable against the wall. Without the support of her left hand, she couldn't get a feel of how she ought to move. Her right hand was gripping hard, too hard, against the hold, but even then she had no purchase with her left foot and her right was losing its stability entirely. There was the awful feeling of knowing she had to let go, and then she did, a curse of words dying in her throat. She had only been a foot and a half up, but even still it was painful, the jarring sensation of her feet thumping against the ground.
Out of sheer frustration, she slung her hand onto the wall again, pushing her feet onto low-lying holds, but even as she did it, she knew she wouldn't be able to stay up, to find the position and strength to keep herself against the wall. As she fell for the second time, it was less of a surprise, but even still she couldn't help smacking the side of her fist against the flat surface.
"Shit," she said softly. She had prepared herself for this, playing out this scenario in her mind, but the feeling of it was so much worse.
"Mhmm," he murmured behind her. As her heart sank into her chest, she realized what was even worse was knowing someone had watched the whole thing.
"Yeah, I'm sorry," she replied, even as she continued to stare at the wall. "It's just… It's been too long. I've gotten really weak." She paused and sighed. "This was a dumb idea."
"Hey," he said, and she turned towards him, watching as he nodded his head towards the ground. "Sit."
She eyed him cautiously, not sure what he was up to, but even so she followed him as he crouched down and lowered himself onto the floor.
"If you don't climb much," he said, crossing his legs in front of him, "what do you do?"
"Do for what?" she asked in confusion. Was he asking her what she did outside of work? She didn't understand: he couldn't possibly be hitting on her, could he?
He nodded towards her, canting his head a little. "Training. You do something."
"Oh," she replied, relief flooding into her brain. "Yeah, well… just basic conditioning. Some running. And strength exercises."
After years of climbing, her body had simply become too accustomed to activity, too used to the gratifying sense of going all out and being completely spent. Within a week of moving here, she had joined one of those anonymous corporate gyms where she could come and go without anyone really noticing, run out her miles on the treadmill until her legs shook, sweat her way through endless sets of crunches and lunges, weighted squats and machine-aided chest presses.
"How often?"
"Five, six days a week."
"For how long?" he asked. Normally, this many personal questions would have started to irritate her, and she wondered why she didn't really seem to mind.
"Hour, hour and a half. Sometimes I lose track of time."
He pursed his lips and nodded, taking a moment to rub his hand against the scruff of his jaw. "You're not weak," he said.
"What?" she asked.
"It's not strength. It's balance. You're not balanced."
She looked down at herself, at the empty space where her left forearm and hand ought to be, and then stared back at him, her gaze narrowed, the only message written in it consisting of yeah, no shit. But even her glare didn't seem to faze him, as he simply shrugged his shoulders, florescent light catching in his blue-gray eyes.
"You need to find your balance," he said.
She understood what he was saying, but she didn't entirely buy it. There was no way anyone could go more than a year without climbing and not lose a ton of strength. She could see it in her own body, in the loss of definition around the muscles of her shoulders, along the lines of her quads and calves. And she was more inclined to trust herself, not the five-minute diagnosis of some guy off the street who apparently saw himself as some kind of climbing Yoda.
"So…" he said, directing his eyes back towards the wall.
"Fine," she replied brusquely, pushing herself back onto her feet, and she walked back to the same section of the wall, filled with a growing determination to stay attached to it for a while longer. Failing that, she was also more than willing to come back with a sledgehammer and pound the whole thing into ruin.
She placed her fingers against the red hold again, trying not to over-grip, and then stepped up onto the first foothold, making sure it felt secure before she started to lift.
"Shift your weight to the right," she heard him say behind her. As she extended her stance, she moved her body in that direction, until she was standing entirely on one leg, the other foot flagged out, toes tracing against the wall for balance.
"Find a hold for your left foot, then shift left," he continued.
"Wax on, wax off," she muttered under her breath, but even so she followed his instructions. She was just happy to be stable on the wall for more than a few seconds.
"Reach for the next hold," he said.
"If I let go, I'll fall," she groaned. She was already beginning to feel an uncomfortable pull in her right biceps and forearm.
"Keep balance with your left arm. Press the end against the side of a hold as you lean."
Her grip on the right was already shaky, and once he started talking about her left arm, it only made her more self-conscious, distracting her from what he was asking her to do. She lost her concentration, and slipped backwards a little, catching herself in a crouch just before she landed ass-first on the ground.
"Fucking… fuck," she cursed again, this time louder, not really caring who heard her. She had gotten just a little bit closer, thinking for a second that the whole thing was actually going to work, only to fall off yet again. It was killing her not to be up on the wall – she wanted it so bad – but she knew enough of life to know that just wanting something, however desperately, was never going to be enough.
"Again," he said.
She glared back at him.
"It's up to you," he offered, with a slight shrug in his shoulders. She knew he probably wasn't trying to be purposefully irritating, but damn if he wasn't succeeding at it. Who the hell did this guy think he was, anyway? What kind of weirdo just offered to help total strangers like this? What did he really want with her, when it came down to it?
She was still bristling as she went back up on the wall, frustrated beyond belief as she continued to make a few moves that looked for one brief moment like progress, then falling right off again once she lost her grip or position. Over and over again, she struggled and shook, trying to regain some sense of balance, hoping to remember who she was and what she had been able to do before the accident. He stayed behind her, mostly watching, offering some advice on the movement of her limbs, the placement of her feet, and every time she fell, he told her to go back up again. It was all too much, too much to ask of her. He didn't know her – why was he pushing her like this? Everything was exhausting, and after a while she couldn't bear to think about how it had been, before, and everything that had happened in between that was making this so hard. There was no joy in what she was doing, none of the excitement and purpose she had lived for before, that she had thrived on. For every step she took, there was a misstep, one tiny moment where she felt entirely defeated, not just by gravity, but by her own weakness and sense of failure. She wasn't making any progress at all, just failing again and again, her sliver of hope extinguishing like a sputtering flare in the darkness.
What had ever made her think that this was a good idea? Not climbing at all, as awful as it was, was nowhere near as bad as thinking she might be able to do it again and then realizing it was never going to happen.
She had been going for nearly two hours. Her legs were shaking. She felt tired and weak – fuck his stupid diagnosis – too weak to keep doing this. She needed to get out of here, to go home and forget everything and everyone. She needed to be alone in whatever this was she was feeling, some awful mixture of disappointment, sadness, and rage.
"I'm done," she said, rubbing her right hand against her leg, hoping to ease some of the rawness where the holds had pulled against the skin.
"Mhmm," he replied, nodding. "So… next time we can –"
"No," she cut him off. "No next time. I can't… I'm not doing this any more."
"You want to quit?"
"Quit?" she sputtered. She could feel her body beginning to grow warm with pinpricks of anger. "You call this quitting? I've been falling on my ass all night. I think that's enough to know that this was all a big fucking waste of time."
"Mhmm," he mumbled, raising his eyebrows with an air of skepticism. She wanted to wipe that stupid expression off his face.
"What?" she said, the volume of her voice rising. "You have something you want to say to me?"
He looked straight at her, his eyes calm and focused, as if he was taking her all in, and when he spoke it was quiet, the sounds clipped like they had been sliced clean away.
"You think you're the only one that's broken."
The words snapped at her, unleashing waves of anger and hurt, until she was entirely blinded by the emotions clawing into her chest.
"Screw you!" she hissed. "You think you know how I feel? You think you know anything about me?"
She couldn't take it any longer, looking at his fucking face, him just standing there as if she owed him something. Anger coursing through her, she swiped her harness of the ground and stalked out the alcove, not knowing where she was going, but through the fog of it all knowing that she needed to be somewhere far away from other people.
The sign for the women's locker room appeared on her right and she slammed the door open, seeing no one inside. She dropped onto a bench, feeling her ribs so frozen within her chest she could barely move. Her face felt hot and tight and there was a seizing pressure against her eyes, holding something even stronger and more dangerous at bay. She dropped her head between her knees and tried to breathe for a while. Eventually things loosened, and air slowly found its ways into her lungs, her anger waning as the minutes passed in stillness. She swiped her hand across her forehead and pulled off the bandana; it was still damp from all her effort on the wall.
Her shoulders were heavy, weighted with fatigue. Sometimes it was too much, all the things she carried on them.
The door opened and she could hear a mix of feminine voices. They seemed to be moving towards the other side of the locker room, but even so, she knew that she should probably leave.
"Hey… are you okay?"
Furiosa glanced over to see that one of the women was talking to her. She recognized her; it was one of the younger Amazons. She was standing next to two others, older women with white hair. Furiosa felt a flush of embarrassment; if someone was stopping to ask how she was, she must look awful.
"Yeah…" she replied. "It's just been a hard day."
The Amazon nodded, pulling her long, dark hair out of a ponytail. She didn't seem to need any further explanation, and for that Furiosa was grateful.
"You work here, right?" she asked.
Furiosa nodded.
"Yeah, I've seen you around a bunch. I'm Val, by the way," she said, and then pointed towards the other two women. "And that's K.S. and Giddy." Both women nodded at her, offering small smiles.
"Furiosa."
One of the older women – Giddy, she thought – unzipped her long-sleeved top layer, revealing a dizzying array of tiny tattoos placed across her arms and chest and up into her neck. Furiosa couldn't help but stare; she had never seen anything like them. They were like tiny lines of text, scripted writing so small she couldn't even make out the words.
The older woman caught her glance and looked right back at her, a coy grin reaching across her mouth. "You gotta remember the past somehow," she said.
Furiosa offered a tiny smile back, her first of the night. She wasn't sure what kind of past might require you to write it all down across your body, but it must have been impressive. She didn't want to think about what hers would say. It wasn't anything she could ever imagine wanting to keep with her all the time, visible to everyone, there when she looked in the mirror each morning.
"Nice to meet you," she mumbled. "Sorry… excuse me."
She jumped up quickly and shot out of the locker room, first checking around the corner in the alcove. It was empty, no evidence anyone had been there at all tonight.
The bouldering wall was full of the regular crowd – tons of shirtless dudes, as always – and Slit and Morsov were still lingering around the angled wall with all the grips, the florescent lights shining off their bald heads. But she didn't see him there.
After making a full circuit of the gym, she found her way back to the front desk. Nux was leaning against it, thumbs scrolling along the surface of his phone, and he looked up as soon as he saw her approach.
"Hey," she said. "That guy I was climbing with, did he leave?"
"Yeah," he replied, nodding. "Ten minutes ago, maybe."
She stared out the front windows. It was full dark outside; there was no one coming or going, just the parking lot lights illuminating rows of empty cars. Shit.