Climb.
The whisper woke Grease like the warm body of a lover sliding into bed beside him. Cass, he thought, and reached for her under the blanket. A car horn blasted in the early dawn, accompanied by the nearby clink and rattle of recyclables and the rustle of plastic garbage bags. Grease blinked, and Cass was gone. He groped for her with rough hands, the memory of clean sheets dissolving as the black crescents of his fingernails skated across the cardboard beneath him.
With a great deal of scuffling Grease forced himself upright, and he felt the press of cold brick at his back. He wiped the crust of sleep from his eyes, the blurred features of the alleyway resolving into depressing detail—dumpsters, their plastic lids thrown wide; broken bottles and reeking piles of excrement; the dark, unmoving lumps of the slumbering homeless with their blankets drawn tight against the wet, chill of dawn in San Francisco. Grease pulled the damp tatters of his own blanket closer. The coarse fabric scratched his nose, causing an eruption of sneezes that wracked his aching bones and startled a stray cat from an overturned garbage can. The cat fled, and someone in the alleyway cursed.
Climb.
It was louder this time. Grease stood, looking around him to find that others were stirring from sleep, their bleary eyes searched their surroundings, their brows knitted in mingled expressions of surprise and confusion. Grease turned to the street and saw people walking past the alleyway. There were always people walking in the city, regardless of the time of day, but these people were different, somehow—wrong. Frowning, Grease abandoned his pack on the cardboard mat. He stumbled to the alleyway’s entrance on feet numbed with cold, ignoring the pins and needles in his extremities as circulation resumed its reluctant flow.
A woman rushed past, her neck craned skyward, pink plastic curlers bouncing in her hair. She wore a silk robe and slippers, and it came to him then. Grease stared at the people on the street in disbelief, realizing that most were still clothed in sleep attire or were carrying souvenirs from their morning routines. A man dressed in boxer shorts and socks shuffled around a fire hydrant, his middle-aged paunch protruding from his untied bathrobe. The man’s arms hung limp at his sides, the handle of an empty coffee mug gripped in one fist. An old woman splashed barefoot through a puddle without taking notice. She wore a tee shirt that hung to her knees, and the green handle of a toothbrush jutted from between her teeth. Toothpaste foam rimmed her mouth like white parentheses.
There were children too, dressed in nightgowns and brightly-colored pajamas. They trailed behind their parents without complaint, glassy eyes fixed on some distant point above them. Those too young to walk were carried, though the adults hefted toddlers and infants with the dutiful detachment of mail carriers delivering packages.
His pack and cardboard mat forgotten, Grease joined the growing throng on the street. He felt a nagging sense of unease, although it was difficult to focus with the whispered imperative clouding his mind—Climb, Grease. Climb. It was not until several minutes later, when Grease turned the corner, that he realized what was bothering him: every man, woman and child on the streets of San Francisco was moving in the same direction.
Traffic within the city had stopped, and vehicles that remained on the road had been abandoned, many with their headlights still shining, their doors left ajar and keys dangling from their ignitions. Streams of people had flooded the streets, some still trickling from the doorways of their apartment buildings, coalescing into a river on the US 101—a procession flowing towards the bay with an unspoken purpose.
Climb.
The Golden Gate Bridge stretched across the bay, International Orange metal shrouded in fog. As those at the head of the procession set foot on the bridge Grease watched the fog at the bridge’s center begin to churn. He continued on, caught up in the river of upturned faces, and his scuffed boots left the safety of land to take their first steps onto the bridge. A collective sigh of awe rose from the crowd around him, and Grease heard his own voice join them in wonder. The air above the bridge had cleared, as though an unseen hand had wiped fog from a piece of glass to reveal a brilliant array of clouds in the sky above.
An explosion of neon light emanated from the clouds—flaming oranges, sunrise pinks, glowing purples—colors that Grease had never, in all the fifty-three years of his troubled life, seen displayed with such vivid ferocity. Tears sprang to his eyes, unbidden, as he felt a tug in his chest. It was a physical pull at the core of his being.
Climb, Grease. Climb.
Grease experienced a moment of doubt—he was terrified of heights, and his athletic years were far behind him—but then he reached one of the vertical suspension ropes and placed his hands on the cold steel. A surge of energy flowed into his palms, and Grease felt the graying hairs at his temples stand on end. He looked at the other cables along the bridge’s length, saw people of all ages and sizes already engaged in the ascent, and tilted his head up to squint at the cables high above. Several people had completed the climb, and were using the beams and cables to progress higher towards the towers.
Someone pushed Grease aside, and he looked down to find that an eight-year-old girl had taken his place at the suspension rope. The girl hooked her hands into talons and leaped like a monkey, wrapping her legs around the steel rope. Her weight carried her back down several inches, and Grease moved to help her but was rewarded for his efforts with a kick to the jaw as she caught hold and tightened her grasp. Grease saw three of her fingernails tear loose from the force of her grip, and then the girl was gone, shimmying upward with alarming speed.
A second person tried to shove past him—fights were breaking out along the bridge as would-be climbers vied for position at the ropes—and Grease threw an elbow behind him, hearing a muffled snap. It was a woman, her broken nose dribbling blood into the fine, golden hair of the baby clutched at her breast. “Hey, lady,” Grease said, “you can’t climb with that. Go home.”
The woman stared at him with hollow eyes. Her mouth drooped open, and a thin string of saliva trembled on her lower lip. There was a brief spark, an idea in the depths of that vacant stare. Grease watched as the woman turned and began to make her way to the next suspension rope. When she had almost reached the rope the woman stooped and placed her infant on the ground, ignoring the desperate wail that rose from the baby as it extended its pudgy arms towards the breathtaking beauty of the clouds above. The baby’s mother shouldered past an elderly woman and began to claw her way skyward.
“Hey,” Grease shouted, as the throng of people pressed forward and the infant disappeared from sight. “Hey!”
The wail intensified to a piercing shriek, then cut off.
Climb.
Grease forced himself to look away from the red smears left behind by the climbers on the nearby suspension rope.
Climb, Grease. Climb.
Grease seized the steel rope in his calloused hands, feeling his muscles thrum with strength as he heaved himself upwards. The ease of his ascent was shocking. His feet, in their old, leather boots, found purchase of their own accord. Grease felt buoyant. The weight of his tired bones had vanished, and his body moved like a well-oiled machine. After several minutes Grease realized that he could climb more quickly if he kept his gaze fixed on the sky, and the vibrant colors danced in his vision. They were reflected on the dark surface of his dilated pupils. The clouds throbbed, pulsated and beckoned him closer.
A flutter of movement distracted him, and Grease glanced at the suspension rope to his right where an overweight man had lost his footing, his pale legs thrashing in the air. Grease saw the man’s grip on the steel slip, and he slid three feet down—a temporary arrestment that caused the thick folds of his belly to shudder—before his hold failed completely.
The man plunged three-hundred feet to the crowded bridge below in utter silence. Grease watched the people directly under his falling body—a pair of middle-aged men and a family of four, the father and mother guiding their two children to the base of a suspension rope—their eyes fixed on the sky. The distance of the man’s fall lent the scene a slow-motion effect, and Grease had time to wonder why the people made no effort to flee. They continued to gaze up, past the man’s descent, even as his bulk collided with their upturned faces. Grease heard the sickening crunch from his position, hundreds of feet above the pavement, and winced. The man’s body exploded on impact, crushing those beneath him into a compacted mess of broken bones and jellied viscera. It splattered the surrounding crowd with the glistening pulp of his liquefied organs. The crowd shifted, moving around the tangled bodies, eyes staring white from their blood-drenched faces.
Climb.
Grease reached the top of the suspension rope, only aware that his climb was complete when his hand made contact with the thick, metal cable above. With a sigh of angst he looked away from the alluring clouds—where green had begun to appear in bright, emerald flashes—long enough to scrambled atop the cable. He followed the examples of others and proceeded along the cable towards the closest tower. Grease continued to stare at the sky, his arms outstretched, undaunted by the frigid breeze that caused his balance to sway. It was as though the soles of his boots possessed strong magnets, his feet moving along the cable’s rounded surface with steady progress as long as his focus did not stray from the clouds.
The population atop the bridge had swelled. When Grease reached the tower, seven-hundred and forty-six feet in the air, he felt a rush of triumph. He had an absurd urge to gloat about his privileged position to those who could no longer squeeze atop the towers, to those who were forced to arrange themselves in a precarious row atop the bridge’s sweeping cables. Their balance, like his own, remained steady if they kept looking up. Soon they cluttered the length of the cables like ants. Those who still sought to climb tugged at the legs of those standing on the cables, distracting them from the sky and sending them tumbling to the freezing water below.
The sky above was changing, the colors so bright that they hurt Grease’s eyes and left burned after-images on his retinas. New colors boiled from their depths—dark crimson, bruised purple, jaundiced yellow—and the whisper in his mind, the imperative to climb, had gone silent. Grease held his breath and sensed that every person on the bridge was doing the same—waiting, watching the clouds churn and roil overhead, listening.
STEP OFF.
And they did, the population atop the bridge shifting from thousands to none with a single, unified movement. Grease kept his eyes fixed on the clouds above, felt his weight shift forward as his scuffed, leather boot left the hard metal of the tower and stepped into the open air. There was no accompanying pull of gravity in his gut, no sensation of organs rising within his body cavity, no sound of air rushing past his ears. For Grease the anticipated plunge towards the icy strait below, the fatal impact like striking solid pavement rather than water, did not happen, although it did happen to some—those who looked away from the sky in that crucial moment when they stepped from the bridge in unison.
Later, Grease would think of them as the lucky ones.