Free Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) by Sloane Crosley Page B

does not present a challenge.
    I explain that I am a novice climber, by which I meant very. It’s a miracle I haven’t spontaneously fallen on the floor in the time we’ve been speaking. On her phone, I encourage her to pull up a photograph of the mountain I used to hike every summer in New Hampshire. Last I checked, it was the most frequently climbed mountain in North America. I was only 9 years old the first time I went up. I used to play freeze tag on the summit.
    “Is the mountain on the next page?” she is genuinely confused, moving the screen closer to her face, tapping it and broadening her fingers.
    “Exactly,” I say.
    Convinced of my greenness, she knows just the person to escort me up the mountain.
    “He is a climber who is a very good climber.”
    Edgardo is set to arrive early the next morning and has agreed to take me up for a somewhat reasonable fee. He doesn’t normally like to take beginners with up with him. At this point I know so little about mountain climbing that I don’t think I’m skimping by avoiding a larger and more official expedition. Actually, it’s the reverse — I reason I must be paying more than normal to limit mystranger quotient. While my assignment within city limits is to befriend my fellow man, the magazine made no such stipulations for outside the city. In fact, before she suggested Edgardo, I asked the receptionist if I couldn’t just handle the trip on my own. I had designs on trading in the forced loneliness of influency for the intentional loneliness of nature immersion. I imagined plateaus and wildflowers and glacial streams. Maybe a unicorn. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Whatever I thought, it has since been corrected. Painted over. Like Dogs Playing Poker . But right then, the concept of climbing a mountain alone did not strike me as any more perilous to the psyche than buying jeans alone.
    When Edgardo shows, I am sitting in silence with the few other foreign guests dotting the spare hotel dining room, the soft morning light shining though the barbed wire on the security gate outside. I left my book in my room and my phone doesn’t work. I am pretending to read a newspaper in Spanish and polishing off a breakfast of tomatoes, eggs and humitas . Suddenly — and I mean suddenly, nothing in Quito moves this efficiently — a petit man walks in the room wearing what appears to be the mountain climber’s answer to the scuba suit. It’s all black with an internationally recognized sports logo on one sleeve. A coarse but extremely long braid swings over one shoulder and connects at the top to a round head. The braid is so thin at the end, I am amazed its owner managed such a delicate procedure with such calloused hands. Edgardo carries with him a backpack nearly half his size and plops himself down across from me. My coffee sloshes onto the table. I can feel it drip through the cracks in the wood and onto my knee. I sit still, holding the newspaper, using it as a shield. Every set of eyes in the room watches as Edgardo leans back in the chair like he owns it.
    “Is your name Sloane?”
    No.
    “Yes.”
    “Do you eat beans?”
    This is one of maybe five questions Edgardo will ask me in the entire time I know him. The first being the confirmation of my name. I nod.
    “Good,” he says. “I’ll go get food and meet you outside in one hour.”
    And that is the longest comprehensible string of English I’ll hear from Edgardo. It’s as if he memorized it for effect, same as if the only sentence I knew how to say in Spanish was “It seems this remote control only takes double-A batteries.”
    He pushes his chair back from the table.
    “Okay,” I say.
    “One hour,” he holds up his pointer finger in a stern fashion as if he knows I have an issue with lateness. Because I do have an issue with lateness, this otherwise rude assumption has a positive psychological impact. I feel like Edgardo and I have known each other forever.
    “Got it,” I say.
    “Oh.”