Photo credit: Circe
I was perched on the edge of a cliff in a dusty Coloradan canyon, standing there by choice, despite the fact that I have a dizzying fear of heights. So clearly — I mean,
very obviously — I had no urge to jump.
And yet jump I did…
three, two, one, oh God no… This wasn’t exactly a case of facing your fear and doing it anyway. I jumped because I felt obligated to do so. Literature made me do it. I jumped because I owed it to several of my fictional creations.
The closest I’ve ever come to dying was when I was 19 years old. I was vacationing with a friend and her family in a villa at the top of a mountain in the south of France. To reach the house you had to drive along a dusty track, up and up through a series of perilous switchbacks. The night I nearly died, my friend’s mother’s boyfriend, an older man who had once been a professional rally driver, was driving us home in the dark.
This was only my second time abroad. The former rally driver had treated us to a night at a harborside restaurant in St. Tropez. I ate steak au poivre for the first time in my life, a thrilling, exquisite experience. Bombarded by several worlds I’d never experienced — bloody meat, the super yachts of the super wealthy, celebrities promenading on the jetties and boardwalks of the marina — it felt like a rite of passage, a step into adulthood, and I was dizzy with pleasure.
But later, as we raced toward the mountaintop, our erstwhile rally driver took one of the switchbacks too fast, or too slow, and all of a sudden a night of youthful discovery became a dark backward slide toward oblivion. The brakes bit into the wheels but the car kept on drifting back. When finally we came to a halt, I swallowed hard, opened the passenger-side door, and saw the car rocking like a seesaw in the darkness. I held up the rear of the vehicle as best I could and the other passengers clambered out. Everyone was silent, the mountainside lit only by the moon. When I picture it in my memory, it has the eerie feel of a scene from a David Lynch movie.
My friend and I returned to the villa along the dusty track. We smoked three cigarettes each in the space of five minutes, sucking them down so hard the tobacco crackled like brush fire. I wouldn’t be able to quit for another 10 years.
When we returned to the spot in the daylight, I saw the drop, the sharp sunlit rocks, the distant valley floor. This fall was not the kind of joyride one survives. My moderate fear of heights became heightened.
And then, 10 years later, I started writing fiction.
Down, down, down I plunged, falling like a stone, plummeting like something made of marble and shaped by someone else’s artistic vision.
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My first novel was
Black Chalk, my second
Grist Mill Road. Other than the fact that both were written by me and can be described as dark literary thrillers, in my own mind, they seemed mostly unconnected.
Except for one fact: In
Black Chalk, one of the characters has an unfortunate brush with a vertical drop. (Don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler. The novel’s tagline is “One Game. Six Students. Five Survivors.”) In
Grist Mill Road, set partially in the mountains of upstate New York, sharp rocks and terrifying cliffs are vitally important to the plot.
This fact only occurred to me recently, while in the process of writing my third novel, when I began absentmindedly plotting yet another scene in which yet another character falls from a great height. When it comes to creativity, who knows how the dark, musty corners of the subconscious work, but yes, it is clear that I’m obsessed with high places and the manner in which gravity works on the human body as an important plot device.
I immediately scrapped the earthward plunge from my third novel. As Ian Fleming writes in
Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” I refused to feed the enemy any longer.
Not long after this realization, I found myself on vacation in Colorado with friends. Unaware of my fear of heights, the friends had arranged a surprise zipline excursion. Not wanting to spoil the party, I gritted my teeth and zipped back and forth across the canyon until we came to an “optional” stunt, a vertical leap from a cliff edge complete with 50 feet of free fall.
“No way,” I said to myself, “there’s
absolutely no way in hell!”
Only then I thought about my character in
Black Chalk whom I’d forced over the edge of a perilous drop. I thought about all of the scenes I’d set at the tops of precarious cliffs in
Grist Mill Road. How could I possibly refuse to experience something I had forced upon my characters? Yes, the writer is god of the universe he creates. But just how Old Testament did I really want to be?
Ten feet back from the edge of the canyon, I got myself strapped in. The instructor led me to the brink.
I can’t do this, I thought. “Three, two, one…” said the instructor. If I were an eagle I would have soared away.
But I jumped.
Down, down, down I plunged, falling like a stone, plummeting like something made of marble and shaped by someone else’s artistic vision.
So how did I feel — terrified? Yes. Was it a rush? Absolutely. But did I exorcise my demons? Well, if former rally drivers were to start driving cars attached to cables that can decelerate 4,000 pounds of metal and human flesh at the tail end of a sheer drop, then clearly the answer would be yes. Let’s just say that right now my demons are in abeyance.
And meanwhile, I promised myself no more leaps from high places. Not for me, anyway. Of course, I cannot make that same promise to all future characters in my novels. But I will whisper it quietly to them: “You’re safe for now.”
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Christopher J. Yates was born and raised in Kent and studied law at Oxford University before working as a puzzle editor in London. He now lives in New York City with his wife and dog. His first book,
Black Chalk, was an NPR "Best of the Year" selection.
Grist Mill Road is his most recent novel.