Death Grip (24 page)

Depression becomes despair one hot afternoon at a cliff called Kasteli, where Byzantine castle walls sit crumbling atop an exposed spit of maritime limestone. Kasey wants to try a few climbs here, but too tired to climb myself I come out merely to belay. You can hardly see civilization, tucked into a nook on the back of the hump, overlooking a deep-blue channel and the neighboring isle of Telendos, which broke off from Kalymnos in an ancient earthquake. I say little, holding the rope, lowering Kasey after each climb, sweating behind my sunglasses. By now she knows how anxious I get, but also, frustratingly, that she cannot help. We leave as the sun drops behind Telendos, casting orange light over the weathered crags of white stone. As we pass the neck of the spit, from where you can scramble up to the castle, I consider having a look. I've always done things like this, loved exploring. But this evening I can't bring myself to walk the extra hundred feet to the ruins.

Who is this person?
I wonder, and:
When did I stop being curious about the world?

And then it hits me: It's not me; it's the pills. I have them in my climbing pack, the whole goddamned bottle.
What might happen
, I ask myself,
if I simply hurled these fucking things into the ocean? Will I wake up tomorrow back to my old self again?

How lovely that would be. How linear and tidy. How convenient. But then something stops me, an interior voice saying, “You
don't
want to do that. You don't want a repeat of 1996. You cannot afford to go crazy again. You really aren't that strong.”

Two milligrams a day, Klonopin, Carbondale, Boulder, mid-June 2005:

I'm not sure if it's the hammer
through
the countertop or my fist
not through
the wall that will end up costing me more, though both happen in the same few cursed seconds. Kasey and I have returned to Carbondale to pick up Clyde at Lee's and pack up my things, and I've just finished a frustrating phone call. I'm starting to have no brakes on my emotions, feeling more suffocated, both physically and emotionally, by the day.

“You should see your dog,” Lee told me when I phoned from the Front Range a day earlier. “It's crazy, but he looks totally different, like his legs got longer and his face has changed. I'm not sure he's a pit bull. Man, you gotta see Clyde—it's hilarious!”

And Lee's right—in just the three weeks that we've been gone, Clyde has gone from a fat little dumpling to a stilt-legged adolescent with a werewolf snout. He still has his floppy ears and soft brindle coat, and his feet are still huge, but it's clear that Clyde is some other breed. Clyde is out in the yard playing with Lee's Australian shepherds when I go berzerker, so he doesn't have to witness my apoplexy like Kasey. I've just called the local motorcycle shop to see if they've been able to repair a Chinese motor scooter I bought some months earlier. The scooter is silver, cagey, plastic bodied, more often than not broken, and I've been embroiled in an ongoing saga of ordering parts from the scooter company, taking them down to the shop where the scooter has become derelict-in-residence, and trying to get the thing running again. I've spent $300 already trying to maintain a $1,000 scooter, and now it's still broken and not yet ready to move to Boulder. This trifle triggers a wrath attack well beyond any normal proportion.

I hurl the phone against the kitchen floor but that doesn't break it. I'm screaming it—“Fuck, fuck,
Fuck!
”—as I fetch a hammer we've been using to pull picture hangers from the walls. Kasey stands to the side mutely, wondering where this is leading. I place the phone on the countertop and rail down hammer blow after hammer blow, but I'm too frantic to aim properly and strike it only after a few attempts. Meanwhile, I've punched a ragged hole in the countertop—on move-out day. This infuriates me all the more, and I turn around and punch the wall, right on the stud, which resounds with a dull crunching noise as something gives in my hand.

I can't breathe, I'm anxious all the time, everything is broken, and I must punch this wall again. Then Kasey is behind me, clutching my arm as I recoil for a second blow, yelling, “
No, Matt, no, no, no, no, no
!”

I crumple to the floor, sobbing while Kasey holds me. She will tell me how frightened she was that day, as if I might have harmed her, and I will apologize profusely and tell her no, no, no, no, no, I will only ever hurt myself. The counter will cost $800 to replace, which I'll pay to Lee over two installments. My right pinkie finger, meanwhile, has sustained a spiral (boxer's) fracture. I don't get it looked at until two weeks later, by which time the bone has already healed crookedly. It dangles askew like a torn battle flag; to this day the finger aches whenever a storm front is coming.

One and three-quarters milligrams a day, Klonopin, Boulder, July 2005:

“I really think we should head up here, into this chimney,” I tell my friend and climbing partner, Lizzy.

We stand below the north ridge of Spearhead, a 12,575-foot granite wedge in a tarn- and tundra-stippled alpine basin beneath Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. I've climbed some of Spearhead's more difficult east-face routes before, thin slabs of burnished knobs and wavy stone cut by fingertip seams. Because of the peak's altitude and pointy summit, you want to be up and off by noon, before the thunderstorms build. Today we've come to simul-climb a 5.6, the North Ridge, which I should be able to do even with my splinted right pinkie since the low-angled rock means you barely need your hands.

“I'm not sure. Look … here, the description says start in a ‘left-facing corner' and head into a box feature, which to me looks like this crack out right,” Lizzy says. Lizzy is a strong climber, an attentive listener, an intense and thoughtful writer with curly brown hair, often died henna red, who once worked birthday parties as “Frizzy the Clown.” We've been friends for five years.

I'm not convinced. “I don't know—that's not much of a corner, and then how do we get back to the ridge?” I ask. “I'm pretty sure the upper pitches are right on the edge”—where the east face meets the north.

Lizzy looks down at a xeroxed guidebook page again, looks up at the wall, scratches her head. We walk back and forth a couple more times between the route I think we should take and Lizzy's selection. I had been hesitant about coming, worried about the breathing troubles and how they'd affect me on the approach hike, but it's July—
the
time to climb in the high country. And besides, my psychiatrist, concerned about my rising anxiety levels, has just added a “mood stabilizer,” an expensive antiepilepsy medicine named Trileptal that has helped with my breathing, if only because it sedates me. The doctor is prescribing “off-label,” exploiting a legal loophole through which doctors can prescribe a drug for conditions other than the one it's indicated for. I feel mixed emotions about adding another medication when all I want is to quit Klonopin, but Dr. Porridge insists that I need to approach the taper from a “place of strength.” We've also reverted to Paxil from Lexapro, as the Lexapro stopped working—“pooped out,” in the doctor's terminology, as psychiatric medicines are known to do. I'm on 12.5 milligrams a day of Paxil XR, a time-release version.

Because of my finger, Lizzy will take the lead position, placing the gear as she climbs and making the route-finding decisions. In the end I defer to her when she says she wants to start out right, where the climbing looks steeper and more interesting. We can, she points out, traverse left to the ridge once we're up a few hundred feet.

Lizzy starts up a thin crack midway along the north face, placing small cams; around eighty feet she slows to pass a black water seep oozing from a steep layback crack. She hollers down to be careful on the wet rock, and then continues. Soon Lizzy hits the end of the rope, tied in at my harness, and I start climbing. We move in unison: I adjust my pace to match Lizzy's so that no extra slack enters the line. I'm in approach shoes, a hybrid between a tennis shoe and rock boot with climbing-rubber soles. They slip a little on the water-washed granite. The climbing is harder than I'd bargained for—5.8 or even 5.9—but by relying on my left hand and staying over my feet, I skitch up the layback without falling. Four hundred feet up we enter an obtuse gully-like depression right of the ridge. I call up to Lizzy, 150 feet higher on a big ledge, to ask if she doesn't want to head to the ridge now, but she says we should climb higher first. We have only one piece between us, a wired nut thirty feet below Lizzy. She heads right on her ledge, the rope running along the lip.

Then:

“Rock!”
Lizzy yells. “
Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock!!!
” This is the word no climber wants to hear, a warning of some inbound lithic projectile. I'm not wearing a helmet—a boneheaded move on a mountain route—and my first thought is that I'm going to get brained. I look up, trying to anticipate the rock's trajectory, but see nothing.
Why is Lizzy yelling so much? I don't see a damn thing.…

The horizon separates: One of the castellated points along the edge of the gully breaks free and is suddenly in motion. My mind tries to make sense of this—it seems impossible that such a big piece of mountain could come detached. Directly, the block comes crashing end over end into the bowl, a granite tombstone the size of a refrigerator.

Jesus CHRIST!

I'm on a sliver of ledge barely two feet wide that opens to four feet on my right. I'm about to leap that way and cower at the back when a voice pops into my head:
GO LEFT!
I obey, strafing left, still looking up, seeing the rock somersault in great leaps and crashes, the smell of ozone preceding it on the air it's displaced, a microburst of wind. The block bounces again, arcing high, gaining speed, then alights to fracture into a surging stone avalanche. Hundreds of pounds of rock thunder by on the right, at head and chest level where I would have been had I traversed in that direction. Simultaneously a briefcase-sized hunk nails me in the left leg, below the knee. The force of the blow whips me around 180 degrees and I teeter on the lip of the ledge, flapping my arms like a fat kid on the high dive, trying not to let momentum win. If I fall now, I'll pull Lizzy off and she'll drop at least sixty feet onto the lone piece that separates us. If the piece holds, maybe we'll live; if not, we'll both rocket straight to the tundra. The ground is a painting, distant and unreal, a flat mosaic of green tundra tufts and tan and gray boulders so far below. We're the only climbers up here. If I don't recover and
NOW
, we could crater in seconds. That's what separates life from death in the mountains: seconds, milliseconds. You're dead even before you have to time to consider your imminent demise. You make a decision and you live—or die—with it.

I recover my balance and take a halting step backward, doubling over as my left leg gives out. A grotesque lump has formed there, looking like a compound fracture.

“
Oh, Jesus,
are you okay, Matt?” Lizzy yells down.

“I—I—I think so. I'm alive.… I might have a compound fracture.
Fuck!
” I roar with the pain, the adrenaline.

“Thank God you're alive!” Then: “I'm so, so, so sorry,” she says. “The rope—it hung up and when I went to free it, it cut that rock loose. It was just sitting there on the edge of the ledge and I didn't see it until…”

“I think you—should climb back—down here, Lizzy—and take a look,” I tell her, my breath hitching. “I need to—sit down right—now.”

I'm prone, groaning on the ledge when Lizzy reaches me, massaging a knot the size of an apricot on my upper left shin, the skin broken and bloody but no bone peeking through. I've taken an extra Klonopin to calm my nerves and built a small anchor with the extra gear on my harness; I sit there shocky, shaky, sipping water, wondering if I can stand. Lizzy beefs up the belay, ties herself in, and helps me slowly to my feet. By making Gollum-like crab-shuffle moves and weighting my good leg, I can get around. We're able to self-rescue over the next two hours by climbing up and right to escape the face. The hike out is endless, hot, excruciating, the knot on my shin turning bloodier, black and blue, swelling to the size of a softball. My leg is floppy and limp, able to sustain only 20 percent of my body weight. I'm in a pissy mood—if only I hadn't abused narcotics, I could take some Vicodin for the pain.

One and a half milligrams a day, Klonopin, Boulder, August 2005:

“Matt, I'm not sure what's going on with your anxiety, but I don't think we should rule out anything in terms of medication,” the psychiatrist is telling me. We're in his office in town, in an upstairs suite with wraparound vistas. I had to limp up the stairs to get here: The rock that clobbered me on Spearhead caused compartment syndrome, internal pressure within the muscular compartment on the front of my shin. The swelling is very slowly going away.

“I'm not so sure, Dr. Porridge. I guess I—I just don't feel like taking another drug when all I want to do is get off the first one,” I say.

“Well, I'm still not entirely certain that the Klonopin is the real problem here,” he says. “It seems like something else could be going on, a mood-cycling disorder or a flare-up of your underlying depression and panic disorder.”

Really?
I've told the doctor more than once that each cut has been progressively harder and that I'm beginning to suspect the Klonopin, but never elicited more than a noncommittal “Huh…” or “Interesting…” I've even asked if other patients of his have gone off benzos, and what he saw of their experience. He's adamant that he's seen them all quit “without severe anxiety problems like you seem to be having,” but also concedes that one, a Vietnam vet with PTSD, has unsuccessfully tried to taper a few times but always “ends up freaking out” below a certain dosage. For me it's become bad—evil bad, sad bad, unmanageable bad. Kasey now does all the grocery shopping, as I'm often too nervous to leave our duplex. I want an explanation for this fear so I can understand and confront it. I feel that I'm approaching the Klonopin taper slowly and deliberately, a fact the doctor readily confirms at least every other week—I've been checking in with him more often. So why am I so terribly anxious?