9 July 2026

Crux – Gabriel Tallent

Sitting at his desk at night, if Tamma wasn’t there, he’d feel this growing tightness in the pit of his stomach. Tamma kept all that at bay; she was surrounded by an aura of brightness and swagger. But with her gone, that tight feeling would suck away everything else, like a bathtub slowly draining, leaving him in this cold, bereft world-that-was-not-the-world, where each thing—the desk, the walls, the chair, his golden #2 pencil, the ashtray full of shavings—was a clever facsimile of itself. His room was not his room. The pencil in his hand was not his pencil. It was all ticky-tacky stage dressing. Like he had died and gone to hell, and hell was a perfect recreation of his childhood bedroom, in which he did his homework, alone, pretending everything was okay, when nothing was okay: The pencil, the bed, the walls, the concrete floor, all of it manufactured to deceive him, and beyond the paper-thin walls, it was a godless abyss into which he had been sunk, a hundred thousand miles from Tamma, and if he crossed the room and opened the door, the living room would be created from out of nothingness, a lie, about which he could feel nothing, because it was not real, and he knew it was not real, without being able to say exactly how.

They crack your sternum with a wedge and a hammer. Clamps to spread you open. Shine a light where god never meant light to be. There’re only so many times they can do it before the sternotomy doesn’t heal and nobody knows what that number is. They stitch in the pig valve and from the moment they put it in, it’s in you, deteriorating. They sew your chest up like a spiral notebook and every time you cough it feels like you’re going to split open along the front, like your heart is going to fall out into your lap.

Courage is not like a dicey highstep; you get to practice courage every day of your life. Just doing the dishes when you’re tired. Making the beds and folding laundry when you’ve got nothing left. These are situations where you think, I just can’t, but then you do, anyway. Speaking gently to a baby when you’ve been awake for thirty-six hours and you’re dying. Being nice to your sister when she’s a bitch. All of those are difficult acts of kindness and taking care, they’re on some continuum with taking a dying child’s hand, when you don’t want to face what’s happened. Sure, maybe Brad didn’t have the guts. Sure, maybe Alexandra couldn’t face her typewriter. My dad couldn’t hold his temper. But when a comp climber arrives on the mat and can’t solve the problem, we don’t say, ‘Oh, well, they couldn’t do it.’ We say, ‘They didn’t train hard enough.’ So do you say of that person, who arrives at the darkest hour of their life without the courage to face it down, ‘Oh well, we could never expect more of a person,’ or do you say that they had a thousand chances, it is not something that just happened to them. Day in and day out, they have been ungenerous assholes, they have not asked enough of themselves, they have not held their tempers against the hundred thousand small provocations any toddler will give you over the course of an afternoon, they had six thousand days to be more than they are, and they let each day pass them by, snapping at their children, not doing the dishes, not making the beds, not folding the laundry, not being kind or patient with those around them, never asking more from themselves than the bare minimum; a thousand small acts of cowardice have culminated, finally, in a life-ruining act of cowardice, for which we can hold them responsible, and so do we say, ‘Fuck them, fuck the weak?’ Like, the weak have allowed themselves to be weak.

Dan just barely held on to the counter. He had the old familiar feeling, that he was standing invisibly behind a cardboard cutout of himself. The Dan that those around him were forever talking about was a person unrecognizable to him, because what Dan really was, was suffering and afraid, privately laboring through a depression about which he could not speak, if depression might even be the word for the blank disinterest he felt for the life to which he was supposed to aspire, and the profound interior emptiness and feelinglessness that only ever broke when he was out on the rocks.

You grew up with security and material wealth. If bank accounts had dwindled, the feeling was still always that the Redburns were ready to return to their station upon the completion of a third novel. Alexandra was just procrastinating, as difficult geniuses were wont to do. Your folks were readers, and hers were not. Tamma lived in a trailer, and you in a handmade little house. Even just the way the families talked, the language they used, bore these differences. It was all that, and it was something more – your parents fundamentally believed that it was possible for you to go out into the world and succeed. That belief was built into your worldview. No one had ever believed that about Tamma. Tamma believed it about herself, against all evidence, contrary to everything she had ever been told, believed it provisionally, desperately, and it was an enormous psychological labor to keep that belief alive. You two walked out together – you, hoping to escape a mild feeling of aimlessness with which you were sometimes afflicted, and Tamma, fighting for her life. She had known the stakes and done it anyway – done it with an enthusiasm and panache that now appeared impossible, maybe immoral. Riven right through the center of the friendship, and invisible to him, had been a divide of class, privilege, and opportunity across which certain understandings had been lost.

The hospital was kept cold. Night shift turned the lights down as dim as they would go. After nine, the rooms were dark save for the monitor screens.

He understood, in a distant and obscure way, that he needed to be reaching out to her, that he ought to be seeing her, that he had better be texting her back, but his grief, and something other than grief, this world-annihilating numbness to things, this profound sense of dislocation, it felt like something he had to carry around, everywhere he went, in every waking moment, and it took everything he had just to keep ahold of it. There was a way that the biggest moves in climbing whited out all thought. A one-arm pull-up, or a big throw to a micro-edge, moves like this had a way of wringing everything else out of your brain, so that only single-minded effort remained. And the suffering was like that; every faculty, any capacity he had to notice, understand, think, or feel, was recruited into his enormous, mind-annihilating grief, if it was grief at all. And he knew. He was acutely aware that it was stupid. He had walked out through the wash with Tamma however many times wondering why Alexandra could not just get the fuck out of bed, and how unfathomable it had seemed, how alien, how sure he had been that he would never, in his own life, come to such a pass. But now, on the other side of it, when he thought of reaching out to her, it seemed like so much work. Sometimes, if he were on his laptop at the hospital, he might see her messages spooling in, and he would watch them come, and find that he didn’t know what to say, didn’t know where to start, couldn’t imagine how he might respond.

Tamma, and Tamma’s friendship, these were half-remembered things from some long ago dream, and he could recall that there had been a joy to them, and an importance, but he could not now make the joy and importance real to himself, not at all, and he could not attach any urgency to their recovery. It was all beyond him, and besides, he did not care, could not care, his suffering was all that was real and the work of suffering, the terrible labor of carrying it around, was all he could manage.

And this anger, it’s really fear. It’s fear all the way down. It is a blank terror at the life that stretches before her. And this thing she says, “I could’ve been a writer if I’d had the chance,” is a bid for comfort. Tell me I am not nothing, she is saying. Tell me I am worthwhile. Tell me I can do this. Tell me there is some chance in all this hopeless hell. Tell me I am not just fucking doomed. Tell me my life isn’t useless, the way it feels useless to me, every day. Tell me I have some dignity left. Tell me that we can still be friends. Tell me that I am not alone.

All my life people have called me gifted and I sometimes wonder if really what I have is anxiety and depression, if my giftedness isn’t really a terror, which I carry around, all the time, and which spurs me to perform at high levels. Terror that the world is fundamentally insecure. That the bottom could drop out of it, at any time. That if I am not brilliant and high performing, my parents will stop loving me. But also, terror at myself, at who I may become. So maybe my giftedness is not going to a translate to a great life, after high school. Maybe the ordinary thing, the normal college-and-a-career thing, it’s not gonna work for me. So, maybe I need to turn back and face it. The terror, I mean. When I look around, it’s everyone living these purposeless lives they don’t understand, lives they don’t enjoy, forced from one thing to the next, broke and afraid of being broke, working jobs they hate for a life in which they find no meaning, and it looks like there’s nothing else, no hope or beauty anywhere, in anyone’s lives, no one knows how to find it, no one knows where it went, or why it’s gone, everywhere you turn there’s no chance, no hope, no way forward, no one I’ve ever met sees any point in it, no one thinks anything is possible, and at the same time, they can’t stop grinding for money, and I don’t want that for myself, I don’t want to go to school and have people tell me what things mean so that I will be content and effective working whatever job comes after. I am suspicious of the well-accepted answers. I want to go out there into the desert and see for myself; I want to stay up nights in the back of a truck reading Plato, George Eliot, Melville, Toni Morrison, Thomas Hardy, Mavis Gallant; I want to reread Proust, because I didn’t understand it.

You can sleep in canyons and washes at night with other climbers, all with campfires and beer and weed, frying up tacos beneath cottonwood trees while people play guitars and read poetry. There are risk-takers, misfits, and weirdos out there. People searching for meaning, measuring their lives not by how insulated they are from the vicissitudes of fortune, but by their incandescent proximity to the real.

What happened, Danny, is that I chased a dream, and when I caught it, I discovered what maybe everyone else already knew: That meaning and purpose are not real things; that there was no secret to be discovered in life; nothing beyond the reality we see. The rugs, coffee cups, and typewriters with which we furnish our everyday lives, that’s life. There is nothing more to it.

There was a way he wished he felt; that was not the way he did feel. He looked at his student portal. Then he clicked accept. The next page required his bank account information for the $500 nonrefundable acceptance deposit. He finished entering his bank account information and submitted it. The next page just said: Congratulations! He stared at it, hating himself with a profundity akin to pain, a visceral recoiling from himself so strong, so gut-churning, that it was a private, drawn-out, interior suffering. He rose, backing away from the computer, running his hand up the back of his neck. He backstepped and backstepped again until his calves met the bed and he sat down. He wished he had the strength to just go with Tamma. But he didn’t have it. He was going to have to let something other than himself decide.

I wanted a guarantee. But that’s not how it works. You find out by trying. And for sure, whatever is out there for us, it’s gonna be scary, but scary is part of it. Think about it. You had the best nights of your life projecting the Princess, but if you ever started to believe that the summit of Fingerbang Princess actually meant something, you’d die unhappy, because the top was a barren, godforsaken, useless stretch of rock. You’d get there and think – What the fuck? All that for this? What have I done with my life? Right?