Free The Inner City by Karen Heuler Page A

rules here; for left to right, top to bottom, no plane is straight. The wind takes part of the rope and pushes it, slow motion, as if to shake me off. But I can resist the wind.
    It’s so high up here, with the rope stretched between the Twin Towers, that I know the truth: distance is the secret at the heart of things.
    I am afraid of heights; I am in love with heights. Only someone this terrified would climb so high, so far, so free, so pure.
    I never look down. Looking down has the fatal flaw of attraction in it. I like the moment when the rope is set, when it slides in the wind, and I pause on the edge of the roof. The sound of the air blows every other thought away and all I see around me is space without confines, just space—and the rope—and there, appearing just in the centre—Gabriel.
    Damn smack on the rope, riding it, his hand outstretched as ever, expecting me. The wind at a pitch, the rope swaying, and Gabriel, his wings folded flat against his back tight as a fingernail, or outspread partly, never as large as you’d think and light and densely etched, each feather sometimes moving like a living thing as he unfolds, unfolds.
    I walked the first rope because I needed to overcome fear, because the things you fear control you, and the second rope—ten stories higher—to prove my resolve. Every rope has been higher, longer, more inhabited by height and I won’t lie, I can no longer tell the difference between love and fear.
    I know I’m always afraid that this will be the last rope my nerves can handle, or that I’m now more enslaved by the need to triumph over fear than I was by fear itself. It’s possible, always possible.
    I suspect my fear is no longer pure.
    The third walk—at a height of roughly 500 feet—was the first time I saw a figure on my rope, turned and waiting for me.
    I stood on the windowsill, my fingers backed against a pane of glass, trying to place him, who he was and why he was there. I already knew enough to look only out—out, never down—so my eyes were trapped by him and I thought at first it would be impossible to step out, that two people on the rope would be a disaster, that I would force him down or it would be—at the least—a breach of etiquette I knew nothing about, because every rope I had stepped on I stepped on alone.
    It was the flutter at his back that decided me, the sly protrusion of his flexing wing. My foot stepped out, the arch of it fisted on the rope, holding it like a hand grasp, so that when the rope swayed I held on to it with my foot. The trick is not to fight it; the trick is to believe that air is the floor of your life.
    Gabriel was naked. How was it ever possible to pretend angels would be clothed? Are birds? How would a hummingbird fly in a gauzy white gown?
    The naked, winged man on the rope had a casual air. He stood at ease, with grace and friendliness, with interest. I moved slowly on the rope.
    There was a slight wind and I was still relatively new to ropes then. I was grateful in a way to keep my eyes on him. When I first stepped out I saw the buildings behind him, framing him, but as I reached him the space around him freed up, so there was air. All ropes seem curved that way, their centres independent of their moorings, as if the bridge a rope makes is itself the impossible country, Oz in the sky.
    Gabriel, that first time, let me approach without saying a word. Surprises are so much more impressive in silence. He had dark, straight heavy hair parted in the center, falling down to the point where his jawbone turned up to his ear. His eyes were brown and direct, not quite almond-shaped, and his nose was almost Indian, strong and sharp. There was no crease anywhere on his face, nor on his body, which was muscular, narrow at the hips and dark in the loins. His feet were beautifully formed, resting almost without impression on the rope.
    The wing that had flexed when I first saw him opened and I caught a faint ripple of muscles on his shoulder