His sweat made the rock slick
for the length of a heartbeat,
then sizzled away.
It smelled of warm stone and baked bread,
dust, sun,
open air,
life and death.
Santana held his place there—
still,
suspended above the void,
fingers wedged into the wall.
Three hours, maybe more.
An eternity.
The tension in his muscles and tendons
had long since passed into the unendurable.
The signals from his body
stopped making sense after only minutes.
And from there,
his pain began its own journey—
beyond comprehension,
past any language for suffering,
like a deep-space probe
slipping past the edges of the solar system,
into regions no one had ever charted.
And yet,
this climb wasn’t impossible.
Not even hard.
For a seasoned climber,
it was routine.
Anyone watching Santana start up that rock face
would have thought,
He’ll be back at camp before lunch.
But—
by some impossible coincidence,
among the infinite combinations of movement
his body could have made to reach the top,
Santana stumbled on one—
this one—
that fit him like a secret he’d always carried.
It was, to him,
as if he had found
his place in the great machinery of things.
Here.
And nowhere else.
Here,
yesterday,
the day he was born,
now,
and forever.
The realization
flooded him with joy—
pure, inarticulate,
and he drank it greedily.
Then came the effort
to remain within the bounds
of this perfect alignment.
Then pain.
Then suffering.
Then a kind of madness.
And finally—
of course—
death.
But through it all,
Santana kept close to his heart
a ruinous joy,
a radiant yes
that never backed down,
even as the fog of agony
closed in
and took him whole.
