Ascension

  Praise for ASCENSION

  “This refreshing book has a quite fabulous quality … one of the year’s best books.”

  —National Post

  “Galloway has done his research, which, along with his soaring imagination, enables him to transport us to an exotic and spellbinding aerie.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “An astonishing literary achievement … The pace is perfectly maintained … a book that cannot be put down. This tour de force is the closest any of us will come to breathing at this altitude, much less walking there. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Ascension is a compelling and charming epic tale.”

  —The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

  “A feat deserving big top applause … Galloway has the power to move and astonish, seemingly without sweat or effort.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Galloway is a patient and agile storyteller … he immerses the reader in his story, his world.… He aims high, stays cool and never seeks the ground.”

  —Geist

  “Galloway is a master of suspense, dangling his readers by an elbow or foot from a sagging wire.… His narrative is so gripping that I often had to pause and take a breath before carrying on.… You simply will not put this book down until the final sentence.”

  —The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2004

  Copyright © 2003 Steven Galloway

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2004 by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto, in 2003. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Galloway, Steven, 1975–

  Ascension: a novel / Steven Galloway.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37540-7

  I. Title.

  PS8563.A454A82 2004 C813′.6 c2003-905691-0

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  FOR LARA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  There is a steady wind, and it blows cold on Salvo Ursari’s face and hands but does not deter him. He dips a hand in the pouch he wears at his waist, pinching out a clump of baby powder that he rubs onto both of his hands. Beyond the practical purpose of preventing the slippage of the seventy-pound pole he carries for balance, the powder has a distinctive odour that reminds Salvo of the past, of walks done half a lifetime ago, of his twin daughters when they had been tiny, shrieking infants, of his wife after bathing.

  Salvo smiles as one such moment floods into his consciousness. It is nearly forty years earlier, his daughters barely two years old, and his wife has just put them down for the night. Salvo is lying on his back, trying to stretch out a hamstring he has needlessly overexerted. Through a wince of pain he sees his wife’s legs as she glides by him, pale, ghostly apparitions, and his eyes follow her as she moves across the room and sits on the ledge of the window. The streetlight outside illuminates her from behind, makes her glow, and Salvo is reminded how breathtakingly beautiful his wife can be.

  A gust of wind brings him back to reality. Now is not the time, he tells himself. You are not a young man and you had better keep your mind on the task at hand.

  At sixty-six, Salvo has been told he’s out of his mind to attempt a skywalk between the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Salvo partly agrees with this assessment, but it makes no difference. Of course he’s afraid, of course he knows the danger—few have suffered more than he as a result of walks gone bad—but that is of no consequence. It is his fear that lets him know he’s sane; the day he’s not afraid is the day he won’t go out on the wire. He knows he can do this walk.

  Salvo is standing nearly fourteen hundred feet above solid ground. It is the highest walk Salvo has ever done, but height is unimportant; you’re just as dead if you fall from forty feet as you are from fourteen hundred. Distance-wise, Salvo has walked two and even three times as far, which is tricky because the longer the wire, the greater the danger that it will snap. A very long wire will sag in the middle, and there are few things more difficult than walking the downhill slope of a wire. At least Salvo has the comfort of this being a solo walk. He alone is responsible for the outcome of today’s endeavour.

  For his efforts Salvo will receive a sum of twenty thousand dollars, but the promoter’s insurance company has steadfastly refused to extend coverage to Salvo himself; the policy only covers damage caused should Salvo fall onto someone or something below.

  The area beneath the wire has been cleared. From where Salvo stands with his toes curled over the edge of the building, the mounted crowd-control policemen are barely visible, the crowd itself nothing more than a dusty smear. He dislikes that the audience is such a distant entity. Without the immediacy of the audience, without their energy to feed on, the wire can be a lonely place. The only consolation Salvo has is that he has performed so many times he instinctively knows how the crowd will react, can picture the people far below as clearly as if they were fifty feet away.

  Salvo receives the signal to begin. He takes a deep breath, collecting himself, and offers up a silent prayer. He’s seen enough on the wire over the years to know that skill and luck are not enough to get across. To survive he needs God on his side. At the very least he requires Him to be a benign presence; the last thing he wants is to have God against him.

  Hoping that he’ll have only earthly challenges to deal with, Salvo picks up his balancing pole. The wind moving across the wire creates a sound not unlike that of the highest string on a violin. As he steps onto the wire, the weight of his body momentarily silences it, before it resumes its singing. Each step Salvo takes interrupts this one-note song, but between steps it always begins again. It is as if this wire is trying to play me a death march, he thinks, and each step I take forces it to start over. As long as I keep taking steps, it can’t complete its song, and everything will be okay.

  The wire digs into his feet through the ballet-style slippers he wears, and he can feel the wind go right through the cotton of his jumpsuit. Salvo doesn’t wear conventional, tight-fitting costumes. He doesn’t mind them when performing under a roof, but on a walk like this one he prefers slightly looser clothing, the folds of his snow-white jumpsuit acting like antennae, a way to feel the wind’s strength and direction.

  For a man his age, indeed even for a man half his age, Salvo is in exceptional shape. He is thin and lithe and undeniably strong, his slight form belying a muscularity that is rare for his body type. His hair has turned from the darkest brown to a peppery silver with the utmost dignity, even if his hairline has slipped back a little. Thick, leathery lips lie on top of a set of teeth that, despite a minimal regimen of oral hygiene, are almost unnaturally bright. His face, still handsome after being weathered and beaten by sixty-six years of hard living, is quietly inviting, trustworthy. A person would, if they were to meet him on the street, be inclined to like
him. But the most striking thing about Salvo is his eyes. Set deep in their sockets and veiled behind thick, dark eyebrows, they are the colour of an emerald forest, capable of being cold and piercing one moment, calm and soothing the next. They can speak kindness or anger more loudly than words. Whenever people think about Salvo, they think first of his eyes.

  The sky is grey, gloomy, not at all the sort of weather that is good for a Fourth of July, let alone a wire walk, but Salvo would rather have this kind of weather than the bright sun and sweltering heat the forecasters had predicted. Hot air rising off the streets can create nasty updrafts, which are considerably more dangerous than a slight breeze. Still, he would not want to be up here in a thunderstorm.

  You old fool, he reprimands himself, here you are 110 storeys in the air and you’re worried about getting struck by lightning. He pushes such thoughts out of his head, ignores the fact that here, almost fourteen hundred feet above the ground, carrying a large, conductive pole and walking on a steel wire, he is the human equivalent of a lightning rod. He takes another step forward, again silencing the wire.

  Salvo settles into a state of intense concentration. He is barely a quarter of the way across, and the most difficult part of the walk is yet to come. The balancing pole is getting heavier with every passing second, but instead of becoming fatigued he makes it an extension of his body, its weight holding him steady. The fabric on the left leg of his jumpsuit snaps taut as he is buffeted by an unusually strong gust of wind. He uses the pole to correct his balance and makes a mental note to pay closer attention to these gusts. There is a fierce way the wind whips between these buildings that both frightens and invigorates him.

  Once, a newspaper man asked him what it felt like to walk high above the crowd, with death looming beneath him and success a long way off on the other platform. Not knowing how to answer, he had told the man that it was like being a bird, an eagle, but he knew that wasn’t true at all. An eagle has wings. When an eagle flies, it knows it will not fall. He is a man, nothing more, but he is a man who dares do things other men merely watch and admire and envy. He used to walk for these people as much as for himself. Today, however, he is walking only for his own fulfillment. That is the difference with these solo walks. All the past successes and failures and problems of the world below are erased from memory. When he is among people, he is one of them, with hopes and fears and memories of things gone wrong. Here he is timeless, one man on a wire far above it all, in a separate place. He is not free, but he is as free as he will ever be.

  Salvo is nearly halfway across now, making good time but not hurrying, and things are going very well. The wire is holding tight, and the wind isn’t bad. At the halfway point there will be a piece of red tape marking the place where Salvo has agreed to do a handstand, a special bonus for the crowd below. The promoters had also asked him to unfurl an American flag from his leg. He refused. Not only is such a stunt unnecessarily dangerous, but Salvo is a performer, not a politician. Besides, he isn’t even American.

  For Salvo, a handstand on a wire isn’t that difficult, and the height of this wire will actually work to his advantage. Because the audience is so far away, he has decided not to bother to “sell” the trick. Ordinarily, if he were working at a lesser height, he would waver and wobble his handstand slightly, not so much that he would lose control but enough that the audience would wonder if he were about to topple. At this height, however, there’s no point in such theatrics, which is too bad. The selling of the trick is the real essence of it, but from a safety standpoint, at fourteen hundred feet, it’s a good thing he doesn’t have to bother.

  Salvo lowers his body to the wire, bending at the knees and placing the pole perpendicular to his path. He bows his head and thrusts his legs skyward. His hands hold the pole on either side of his head, allowing him to correct his balance from side to side and to use his inverted legs to control his back-and-forth movements. Only the slightest of corrections is possible: if he over- or under-corrects he will fall. That gets most people, he knows. Once you over-correct, you have to compensate on the other side for your mistake, and more often than not that gets you wobbling from side to side until you lose it and you’re gone.

  When his legs reach their apex he arches his back, and the handstand is complete. There follows a brief moment when the wind catches his body at an unfortunate angle, and he’s not sure if he will be able to right himself. His arms tighten, and his stomach and thighs strain to halt his momentum. A streak of pain shoots through his hip, but he ignores it and struggles to undo the damage. His torso has twisted slightly and he rotates it back into alignment, almost going too far, barely saving it. His left arm, exerted to its fullest capacity, begins to shake, but he continues to struggle, pushing his body so that it screams in protest, then pushing it still further, until he is balanced again and the danger has passed. He holds the handstand for several more seconds, partially to make sure he has fully regained his equilibrium before attempting to dismount, and partially to assert his control over the wind, to show it that it can’t blow him over that easily.

  Satisfied that he has conquered the handstand, Salvo gingerly returns his feet to the wire. He pauses and lets the blood rush through the capillaries emptied by his inversion, feeling his flesh tingle as sensation returns, his face hot and red. When he has recovered completely, he stands, heaving up the balancing pole and continuing his journey. Salvo knows that what has just happened would have caused most wire walkers to crumple. He has seen others in less trouble give up, and if they hadn’t fallen they’d held on tight to the wire and either dropped into makeshift nets or were forced to traverse the rest of the way hand over fist. No matter which, the walk ended in defeat and disgrace. The difference between Salvo and other wire walkers is that Salvo has long ago learned to tell his body to keep going, even when it seems that he has reached the end of his endurance.

  He imagines what it must be like on the ground, how the street would be so quiet that you could hear the person next to you breathing, except during his handstand, when some would have been unable to stop themselves from gasping. When he’d teetered to the side it must have seemed like something had burst; the whole crowd would have erupted into shouts and cries. After he’d righted himself and returned his feet to the wire, people would have applauded without reserve, smiling at the stranger beside them as if to say they’d known all along that this was how it would turn out.

  His confidence and strength renewed, Salvo steps forward, glad to feel the wind across his face, glad for the cool freshness of the air, glad for the busy smell of the city and the solid, steady beating of his heart. Salvo knows that if he were to fall he would stand absolutely no chance of survival. After only one second he would be over 160 feet from the wire, travelling at a speed of twenty miles an hour. After five seconds he would be four hundred feet down, going nearly 110 miles an hour. At this point he would reach terminal velocity, the highest speed at which a human body can fall. That he would hit the ground a mere seven seconds later, twelve seconds after leaving the wire, he knows because he read it in the paper this very morning, a not so encouraging piece about today’s skywalk.

  Salvo has long maintained that most people do not want to see him fall. Perhaps one in twenty do, and perhaps nine in twenty come so that they are present if he should fall. The other half of the audience is there to see him face death and make it. It is for these people that Salvo has spent a lifetime performing. He has fear, but he’s not afraid. He likes to think that if people see him face his fear, they will in some small way be able to do so as well. That’s what he thinks when he’s being most optimistic. Newspaper articles like the one that ran today do much to deflate him.

  It doesn’t matter now, however, because he is advancing steadily and feels certain he will not fall. He is three-quarters of the way across and moving at a good pace. The wind has died down, stopping the wire’s singing. Sweat covers his face, and he licks his lips, savouring the salty taste of his hard work. His hip i
s throbbing a little, but Salvo doesn’t mind the pain, having grown used to it long ago. He pictures the crowd below grinning with anticipation; he has completed the handstand and, he believes, even managed inadvertently to sell it. He has visions of his wife, Anna, down on the ground below, pouring rye whisky over ice—one for her, two for him. He always drinks two ryes after a walk; to him, the smell of whisky has become the smell of success.

  With his next step he feels the wire slacken. Not a lot, but a little, and that’s how trouble starts. He is not overly concerned; his crew can tighten the guy lines and winch up his wire, and everything will be fine. But as he takes another step the slackening grows, and for the next three steps it continues to worsen. He is now more than a little worried and contemplates stopping to wait for the wire to tighten. Just as he is weighing his options the wire does begin to pull taut. He breathes a sigh of relief and picks up his pace.

  There is still a little slack in the wire when Salvo is hit hard from the side by a gust of wind, the strongest yet. He strains against the force of the blow, dipping his pole precariously low to one side, legs and arms and stomach fighting for equilibrium. A split second later the wire beneath his feet drops at least three inches. Salvo drops with it, aware that the worst is happening.

  Because of their massive height, at their summit the twin towers of the World Trade Center can sway as much as four feet in any direction when confronted with a hard wind. Although Salvo had no intention of walking in any wind capable of blowing an entire building four feet to the side, even a slight movement could threaten him. To compensate, the wire has been mounted onto large, stiff springs at either end. The springs are strong enough that it would take a fair amount of force to move them, only barely less than it would take to snap the wire in two.