A Hundred Ways to Die by David Lerner Schwartz
Every day of the trip it stormed. We were supposed to be learning about the geology of Tampa Bay. Instead, the first afternoon we thirteen waited out the rain under a rubberized tarp. Most of us were young professionals, recently out of college or in between entry level jobs, unsure of our place in the world and looking at sediment in Florida to figure it out. A youth pastor with a rock hobby had come along. So had Magda.
She had a wide jaw and pitted eyes. Her voice carried between the crashes of lightning and over the cascade of the downpour. She told the group she was a storm chaser, not a geologist. She’d found the trip online: It was her goal to travel the world for the best bolts.
“I do believe in history, of course,” she said, blowing cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth. “But these trips are so much easier if you don’t have to plan them yourself.”
The tour group arranged for us all to stay in one large room in a hostel near Palm Harbor. We took most meals at the recreation center across the street. The plan was to visit by bus each day a different site along the Bay, at least, that’s what we were paying for. Our guides were unprepared for hurricane season; this was their first time running the trip. Maybe it would be their last.
That night, I told Magda I was going to play cards. I normally kept to myself, but I was a sucker for devotion. I was easily obsessed. All my life, I’d struggled to have her drive or direction, and so for me the vacation was a sort of Hail Mary. I had found the flyer in the lobby of the funeral home after Mickey’s service, geology the interest I kept forgetting about but knew I should remember, and a day before the application deadline I realized five years of my life had passed since undergrad and that would just keep happening until I did something differently. I studied earth science in school, but when Mickey died, my trust in formation slipped away. Maybe the Florida Platform could once and for all prove the realness underfoot.
My boss back home taught me card games in the occasional bout of idleness, when I wasn’t slicing turkey or pouring coffee or cleaning off the four tabletops in the store. I asked Magda, “Do you wanna join?”
“I’m tired,” she said. She had steep-arched eyebrows and a mean gap between her front teeth. “Besides—I’m producing a spot for BBC. I need to hit the hay now and get up later to see some strikes.”
“Strikes?”
“You know, beams,” she said. “Boom, then flash.”
At dinner, the youth pastor told me to think about our role on earth the same way a fossil gets formed. “The world happens to you,” he said, clearing the olives off his grouper with a fork. “Your self is what gets left.”
I could tell Magda didn’t bother with rules. I assume instead she wanted to live.
Later, I heard the scuff of her feet against the floor while the rest of us slept in bunkbeds. The door creaked. The others snored. Already, I’d forgotten most of their names. I thought to follow her, but I chickened out. It was sort of my thing, to be the stable, logical one. Mickey nicknamed me Oldie because I liked conservative clothes and always held the banister when I walked down stairs. I called liquor hooch and shamed him when he chased women. I didn’t like being the safe one, but I couldn’t shake the label. I was good at keeping distance, determined to grow slowly. Ever since his funeral, I felt wrong. Like: heartbroken. Like: wild, but boring all the same.
I was unsure about going on the trip until I learned Florida had the most deaths by lightning in the States. Maybe life would figure itself out for me so I wouldn’t have to. Like what the pastor said. I wanted to get struck.
*
When Mickey was having doubts about climbing El Sendero Luminoso, I told him in an email he should go. “You’ve been talking about it forever.”
He sent back, “But, is it worth it?”
I thought no, but wasn’t that the point?
His mom gave me his flask after they found his body. It was in his pocket, near empty with what smelled like rye. Instead of draining it in the sink, I poured what little remained into an urn. He didn’t have a problem with booze—he said it warmed him up. He climbed better, warm like that. I’d seen him take swigs when we practiced at the bouldering gym in college.
On the bus that second day, I tapped that flask’s large dent through my khakis. The wind whistled along the highway as the sky became ominous. We pulled over near Hudson to watch the setting sun. Magda went off the trail, her rain boots ankle-deep in the salt springs.
“Magda!” I called.
She turned around. “What?”
I was worried, though I hardly knew her. “Be careful.”
She coughed on her cigarette, misfiring the flash of her camera in my direction.
“I’ve seen isentropic lifts and downbursts, fogbows and the Fujiwhara. F5s. I appreciate it, man, but I’ve got my business to run.”
The sky shuddered. I felt the air grow humid and saw above as dark clouds bloomed like ink in water. From the concrete walkway, I wished I could will it to rain, my shame timed just right for the downpour.
*
Magda showed me pictures of lightning on her phone the third day, on the bus ride back from Charlotte Harbor. We sat by the bathroom, the seats upholstered in what looked like dingy disco ball carapace.
“Look at that loop. And those branches.” She zoomed in. “It’s not quite cloud-to-ground, but it’s close.”
I hadn’t really dated much, preferring girlfriends to flings but too late finding the former difficult without the latter. But Magda seemed to forgive my concern and enjoy the company. Besides, she was focused on much larger disasters.
“I wanna do a whole piece on this place,” Magda said, “with the photos. I could sell it to National Geographic or the Discovery Channel or something. People love this shit.” She told me she was going out again that night, to a nearby site she’d heard about from other chasers. There was supposed to be something called an anvil crawler, which sounded like it could off me alright.
“I’m kinda more an in-bed-by-ten guy,” I told her.
But she woke me in my bottom bunk that evening, anyway.
She said, “I need a photographer.”
Seeing her face hang over mine made me want to reverse the order. I felt riled by static, excited by my own stillness. I was addicted to resisting how inertia dared a change. I guess I most wanted to be chosen, though I worried she’d laugh if I pulled her into my bed right then, and so I didn’t, but I rubbed my eyes and let her linger. I never decided what kind of person I wanted to be, but was that even something you got to choose? I’d have to ask the pastor. I pulled back the sheets and let her lead me away.
“I lived in a village in Svalbard for a while,” she said in the foyer. The others tossed and turned in the bunkroom. I shut the door. “Nothing ever happened there. Can you hear it tonight, the storm? Florida’s not even a top ten strike zone, at least not in all the world, but it’s pretty good this time of year. I mean, we gotta see it.”
We grabbed our still-sopped rain gear from the hooks and walked out into the weather.
“Next on my list is Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela,” she shouted over the babble of rain, the bellow of thunder. Her cheekbones glistened in the soft white of the streetlights. “Then Assam, India, or this mountain village called Kifuka, in the DRC. But I also need a snow squall and a multivortex, so who knows.”
I walked blindly, my hand on her jacket. We kept slipping on the mud lining the causeway. I wondered if like her list I’d be another thing for her to briefly witness.
“I’m awful at composition,” I shouted. “You’ll do better without me.”
Over my shoulder, I saw our refuge in the distance. What would I have to give to make it back? And why did I want to go?
“Look!” She pointed to the sky. It was suddenly effulgent, the clouds buckling with terrifying bursts. The light erupted and splintered into white spikes I tried to grab, marks gone as soon as I looked down to see them mimicked in the lifelines of my palms.
“Look at those roll clouds! And the mammatus!”
It wasn’t safe, hiking toward Honeymoon Island, in the storm, in the night. I tried to find the tallest point to calculate our odds of being struck. But contrary to my plan, I now wanted to sound an alarm, head back without a scratch, my heart racing. Maybe I could save her. Maybe she would save me.
The wind whipped her hair out of her hood when she asked me set up her camera. “I’ll call to you,” she yelled. “Just keep taking the pictures—don’t stop.”
Once, Mickey had gotten our frat a strobe light, and the girls at our parties looked newly numinous, in slow motion, beyond us, which is how she moved now in the flicker of the storm.
Lightning struck in the distance and approached. It surrounded her. Magda planted her feet and raised her hands above her hair, dwarfed by the old pines. She lifted her head back toward the sky. Her features were niveous in between the blue-white shocks. Each time, the shrubs vanished and the world vanished, and there was Magda, spot lit by the storm.
After Mickey’s funeral, I wondered if I could ever risk anything again. He’d given his life to climbing. And what had I done? But with Magda, something stirred. I wanted to jump out of an airplane. I wanted to escape a sealed underwater safe. I wanted the heavens to try and take me and fail. Maybe instead of existing I wanted to survive, or at least get by. Watching her praise the storm was even better.
“Okay!” she said.
Life didn’t mean much without danger. I held the shutter button down and heard in its clicks a hundred ways to die.
*
Senior year, when walking home from a workout class at a place called Pontius Pilates, Mickey and I passed by a group of radical religious protesters. Their anger was horrifying, with their long white robes and angry faces. They waved painted signs that damned us, admonished us for being too loose, too calm, undevout.
Mickey shouted at them over his shoulder. “Fucking idiots!”
“You’ll burn,” they said back.
He turned to me. “This unshakable faith thing, man, it’s dangerous.”
“Just be careful, Mick—”
“Aw, go to hell.”
When we were farther away, I said, “Sometimes I think there’s got to be something out there. Like why else?”
He stopped me and put his hand on my shoulder, hard.
“That’s chicken shit, and you know it.”
“I—”
“That’s pussyfooting, Oldie. Agnosticism is pussyfooting.”
“How is believing in nothing worthwhile?”
“Fuck that,” he said. “I believe in climbing. You always fall. When you climb, you fall, and then you go up again. Over and over and over.”
*
We gave the lightning names on our last evening from the safety of the tarp behind the hostel. Its crinkled blue reminded me of a lake back home, the one I hadn’t yet thought to miss.
“That was an Osvald,” Magda said. “The way it was tall like that, don’t you think?”
We lay side-by-side on the bricks of the patio, our hands propping up our heads. The others were at some lecture. I started naming people who’d died, grandparents, kids from high school.
“Kenneth, Calvin.”
“Emanuel,” she said. “Or Frey, since it’s a pulse storm.”
“What about Bret? Goes with the boom. Sean, or Mickey—”
“Erik and Britta.” She pointed. I don’t know who she named, but I nodded every time in case these were their eulogies. “They really cracked.”
I touched her hip. My fingers inched under the nylon of her rain jacket. A flash of light went unnamed. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me closer.
We kissed to the rhythm of the rain. I felt the weight of her waistband against my fingernails and then that coarse, muggy wetness of her. She pushed herself against my mouth and there were grand flashes—Osvalds, Calvins—I saw as light through closed eyes. I moved myself up and put a strong hand on her back to pull her against me. I wanted us to be hermetic, to compress and heat and become diamonds. I was tired of loss. A gale rolled through. She said my name. Another surge. She gripped my neck as a thunderbolt ripped the sky apart. She exhaled. She pulled back. She watched the storm. I saw her blink away the breaking of our spell.
Once, my boss at the deli told me about the Tzadikim Nistarim, thirty-six people around the globe without whom the world would end. They don’t know how holy they are. And anyone who says he’s one of them cannot be. I wanted to tell Magda.
“I lost a friend,” I said, instead. “Before I came here. He fell. He died.”
“I’m sorry,” Magda said.
I bit my finger while the storm sapped my vigor. “I told him he should do it, that it’d be okay.”
They think he found a loose hold three hundred feet up and that when he went to grab it, he lost his balance. I heard this when his mom gave me his flask. “They don’t know if he was drunk,” she’d told me. He wasn’t; I was sure of it.
In the gym at college, we had practiced some of the holds El Sendero Luminoso was known for. I watched as he tried and missed and hit the black mat, as he got back up on his feet and chalked up his hands. He told me he’d use ropes for the real thing, but instead, he free-climbed, and so he fell freely, too.
Magda now only looked toward the sky.
“We do what we love,” she said.
“I keep hoping to find him somewhere, waiting somewhere to tell me it was all a big joke, that it’s not my fault.”
She smoothed out her rain jacket and pulled up her pants.
“It is all a big joke. So you laugh along with it.” Magda hopped into a squat and finally looked at me. “You live.”
*
The morning before our flights, we went to Mobbly Bay. Magda sat in the front of the bus in the single passenger seat. She edited pictures on her phone hooked up to an external battery that dangled into the aisle. I sat next to the pastor instead.
I couldn’t see any clouds out the window, at least not yet. I tried to remember the statistic—if you were more or less safe with a buckled seatbelt in a toppled-over bus. The pastor and I learned we lived in the same town, had likely been on the same flight together.
“We’ll have to keep in touch then,” he said.
He gave me his number, and I gave him mine. He leaned in. “I love this stuff,” he said. “Rocks, oceans—they’re the story of what was once here, but without the moral.”
I thought at first he said “coral,” but when I understood, I smiled, agreed. Who didn’t want to be remembered once gone?
After we looked at algae in the preserve, I walked back with Magda. We lingered behind the rest, though they’d learned to leave us mostly alone. I took out Mickey’s flask.
“This was on his belt when he fell.”
“Oh.” She looked unsure for once. “He was drinking?”
She had watched the storm when I first told her about him. Now, I wanted her to understand.
“It doesn’t matter how prolific you are or how much they love you,” I said. “You’ll pull the wrong hold, get the wrong strike. Then? It’s done. That’s it. You’re done. Just remember that.” I found taming the surge inside her almost natural. Maybe the trip had changed me. Or maybe it’s what I was doing to myself all along. Instead of ending it for me, I could end something for someone else. “Just remember you can go, or that you will go. It doesn’t matter what you love to do.”
Meanwhile, I couldn’t seem to follow through with anything.
*
At her gate, where our routes diverged, Magda told me, “Till next time.”
“This was fun,” I said.
She yawned.
I wanted to leave with her and abandon grief. I wanted to commute from her walk-up in Stockholm, brave boredom in Svalbard. I wondered how I’d switch my flight, what the visa process was like, if I’d miss the deli.
“Do you have an email or phone or anything?” I said. “So we can keep in touch.”
“We’ll find each other when we’re meant to,” she said.
I laughed. I thought it was a dumb thing for her to say. She couldn’t be one of the Tzadikim Nistarim. Or at least not to me. So, I let her go. She waved as I walked toward my gate. I flew back home, drove to my apartment. I woke up the next morning to get ready for work. I showered. I ate. I lay face-up on my bedroom floor beside my full-length mirror, my windows open. From the construction by the highway outside, I heard the Florida thunder ricocheting against the rush of rain. I stared at the overhead light and saw bright bursts. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t get it all out of my head. I didn’t want to lose anything more.
*
I went to a sermon at the pastor’s church. The walls were made of great stones, the carved niches filled with busts of angels. After, unsteady on my feet, I approached him at the pulpit.
“You came,” he said. He smiled so that his mustache pointed my eyes away and above.
“How have you been?” I asked. I wanted our time to have meant something, though I’d forgotten most of what we learned. The trip had transpired too quickly; instead of memory, I perseverated on where it went. How I was still here. I hadn’t heard from the tour group, hadn’t really made any friends. Of course, I hadn’t heard from Magda, either.
He cocked his head. “Back to the real world, my man. The youth congregation’s starting a new reading group. Somehow busy, overloaded, but I love it.” I imagined him breathing in the spirits cased in the stained glass around us. He pantomimed being encaged: “Take me back!”
I had taken swigs from Mickey’s flask throughout his funeral. I was most moved by the officiant’s ending line: “Be strong and of good courage, and do it: fear not, nor be dismayed.” I looked it up on my phone, in the bathroom, and was livid to find it was a quote of King David’s. Mickey would not have wanted those kinds of words at his service. It goes on: “God will be with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”
I found Mickey’s mom at the reception. “Fuck you,” I slurred. “Mickey said no religion, no anything.”
Her mouth hung open in what must have been absolute disgrace.
“That isn’t even how it works,” I said. “Being forsaken.”
How could I say that to a grieving mother? And how could I do what I did next?
“This funeral,” I said, “it was a waste.”
*
A year later while opening the deli, I saw Magda on the TV. I turned up the volume. She was talking about her time in Venezuela. She wore a pantsuit and had her hair done. She spoke in a trained voice and posed with a keen awareness of being watched.
“Fire and brimstone,” she said, “I never understood that until I saw Maracaibo.”
They cut to a photo of her on a boat in the middle of the lake, with lightning all around. She was the only thing standing out in the bright white of the phlegethon. It made her look like a genie. I wondered who had taken the picture, if he was an Oldie, or someone more like Mickey.
“I’m heading to Assam next,” she said. “You can read all about it on my blog. But there’re gorgeous storms everywhere. I went to Tampa, in Florida, in the States. It has these fascinating beams. Long strikes, with wide branching. You know, boom, then, flash.”
The image changed to the photo I’d shot, with Magda in the storm on the island. The image was unedited, uncredited, otherworldly. Her rain jacket and the spindly pines were fulgurant from the flash. Blurred raindrops stalled mid-air, each bursting with a light overshadowed by the bolt divaricating in the distance.
I expected her to say something about needing me of all people to take the picture, or at least poke fun at how she’d signed up for a geology trip to wake up in the middle of the night to capture the lightning.
“It was cool,” she said instead. “But compared to Maracaibo, it was nothing.”
My boss walked in.
“Change it to the news,” she said. “Have you been reading about these damn floods?”
Later, a business would buy out Magda’s blog, and she’d quit storm chasing to become an extreme surfer. She would set up a new website, her portrait large on the homepage, her bleached hair beach-salted with a text overlay reading, Make waves.
The worst part of the Tzadikim Nistarim is that you can never know who is one. Their holiness is anonymous, because that’s what holiness is. I remember a sadness when my boss told me. It was another life not to have. They were the one secret I kept from Mickey, just in case.
I wouldn’t quit, not for a while. I wouldn’t join the EPA. Eventually, I stopped hating myself for it. It was my nature. My friends would get married or divorced or move away. They would ask me how I was so stable, when really I was just slow going. I would shrug off the ache that seeped into the seams of years of routine, of getting up and doing the same thing forever. I’d blame it on Magda, or Mickey, or my remaining in their stead.
I picked up the remote and did as I was told. There were six dead in a shootout at a mall. The pandas still failed to copulate. I pressed a button, and there on the screen was another tragedy. I barely had to lift a finger. Like so much else, Magda was a light and a sound, and then she was gone.
David Lerner Schwartz is a writer who teaches at the University of Cincinnati where he is a doctoral student. His work has been published in Witness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Hub, New York magazine, The Rumpus, and New Ohio Review. His writing has been supported by grants and fellowships from UC, St. Albans, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, from which he holds an MFA. He serves as the fiction editor of Four Way Review. davidlernerschwartz.com
Love this story!