“Come camping with us.”  Kelly’s voice is an echo in the phone; it makes me wonder if the Pentagon is listening.  I have the urge to talk about impeachment and paradigm shift.
    “Not a chance in the icy bowels of hell,” I say.
    A boy on the quad looks at me funny.
    “It’ll be fun.”
    “It’ll be itchy.”
    “Cool air.”
    “Windburn itchy.”
    “Green trees.”
    “Poison ivy itchy.”
    “Wildlife.”
    “Mosquito itchy.”
    “I mean fluffy bunnies.”
    “Rabid fluffy bunny itchy.”
    The boy’s friends have joined him.  They’re about to play a game of Ultimate Frisbee.  Wondering if Ultimate Frisbee was invented by one of my ancestor’s enemies to follow my family through the ages and torture us, I go behind a tree and plant my back against it.  The boys’ shouts reverberate through the bark.  I walk a few feet farther and sit on a rotting bench.  If I can see the Frisbee, I can avoid it.
    “You need a break, Jamie.  You’ve been acting even weirder than usual.  I’ve noticed it; Pam’s noticed it.”
    “Pam never notices anything.”
    “Okay, so maybe Pam hasn’t noticed it, but Pam wouldn’t notice a pterodactyl if it flew up to her and spoke Latin.  I’ve noticed it, though.”
    “Why would it speak Latin?”
    “Jamie.”
    “Who’s going?” I ask.
    “Just Pam and me…and you.”
    “Overconfidence is dangerous.”
    “You said campus was getting too loud.”
    “That doesn’t even make sense.”
    “You said it.”
    The boys’ guffaws shoot off like fireworks, sparkle through the air and hit my already aching head.
    “I think everything’s too loud now.  There was a fly in my apartment the other night – too loud.  It’s just the work.”  I massage my left temple.  It sends the headache to the right.
    “You’re weighing yourself down.”
    “Of course I am.  I’ve done it before.”
    “Not like this.”
    Not like this.  It’s true.  It’s time, time to leave.  I’m getting anxious in this place.  Three years, that’s the limit.  It’s time to move.  It’s been four, four a month ago.  There’s still work to do, though, just until I get my Master’s.  I should be able to wait that long – should be.
    “I haven’t slept for a while,” I confess.
    “You can sleep in the mountains.  Come camping with us.”
    “Yeah, I can sleep on the hard ground.  I like soft beds, thank you very much.”
    “I’ve sat on your bed.  It’s soft, but you’re still not sleeping.”
    A cloud moves, and the sun grabs my bench.  The wood crackles under the pressure of its grip.  My eyeballs pull back from the light, sending a knife of pain through my skull.
    “God, it’s too damn bright today.”
    “We’ll go to Linville Caverns.  It’s dark there.”
    “But all of my work…”
    “It’s just one weekend.”
    The sun is flying toward my face…or maybe just a bright orange Frisbee.  It hits the bridge of my nose, planting a dull pain, which blooms into a fiery tingle, which withers into a throbbing.  I faintly hear, ‘Hey, you hit that girl.’  The boys are running toward me.  I get up and walk away, hoping they won’t chase me down and accost me with their apologies.
    “What time are we leaving?”
   
    We leave on a Friday morning.  Pam is the only one with a class on Friday, and she has chosen not to attend, ‘just this once.’  We check in at the Grandfather Mountain campsite, set up the tent, and, boom, they already want to go hiking.
    “Let’s find a trail off the Parkway,” Kelly suggests.
    “Or we could see the waterfalls in Transylvania County.  Transylvanya in North Carolanya, not Romanya,” says Pam, butchering the accent of the Sesame Street Count.
    “Cute,” I say.  “Or, we could just stay here for a second or two.  Do nothing – absolutely nothing – especially not excessive walking on uneven terrain.”
    “Why did you even come, then?” Kelly asks.
    “The calm mountain air you promised.  I’d rather not be sucking it down into lungs starved by exercise.”
    Pam and Kelly work out daily.  They run.  I ran once.  A Doberman was chasing me.  They’ll either leave me behind on a trail to slide down a gravelly path and run into a tree, or they’ll push me up monstrous inclines at shin-shattering speeds.
    “We won’t leave you behind on a trail somewhere, and we won’t walk too fast,” Pam says. 
    The one time Pam demonstrates any incisiveness is when it comes to figuring out what her friends are thinking.  I’m still not convinced.  So we have a “debate,” and Kelly wins.  The Parkway it is.  I’ve never been any good at Rock, Paper, Scissors.
    We find a trail.  It has a Native American name, but I’m not careful enough to take much note of it.
    “Here we go,” Kelly sings.
    She hops off the curb and onto the path, descending into the foliage.  The plant life swallows her and burps up the sound of rustling leaves.  Pam and I follow.
    We hike for a good while before Kelly says, “Isn’t this beautiful?”
    All I’ve seen for the past three miles is a lumpy hallway of green and brown.  It’s not even time for the changing of the leaves yet.
    “Simply gorgeous,” I say with a whimper.
    “Come on, Jamie,” Kelly says.  “Can’t you feel that tension seeping into the ground, even a little?  It’s relaxing.”
    “Jiminy and Cricket are screaming.  How can I relax when Jiminy and Cricket are screaming?”
    “And just who are Jiminy and Cricket?”  Kelly stops walking and turns to narrow her brown eyes at me. 
    Stopping hurts more than moving at this point.  Kelly’s brown ponytail snakes down the front of her right shoulder.  I can see it raising its head to say, “Yeah, what’s your problem?”
    “Jiminy and Cricket are my legs.”
    “They hurt bad enough to name, huh?” Pam asks.
    I have this habit of naming various parts of my anatomy requiring due attention.
    “Yes,” I say.  “They’re angry…very, very angry.”
    “Okay,” Kelly says, “Well, I hear some water.  We’ll stop at the next stream and have some lunch so you can rest Jiminy and Cricket, and even feed your George.”
    “That would be wonderful.”  I sigh.
    At the next stream, Kelly and Pam hop across stepping-stones like fairies.  I watch them sit on a wide-smooth stone on the other side of the running water.
    “Why did the Jamie cross the stream?” Pam asks.
    “To feed her George,” Kelly says, waving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at me.
    Before crossing, I take a moment to look upstream.  The water is coming down softly, like silver hair.  A beam of light gives one spot twinkling dimension.  It looks like that section of water will rise into the atmosphere and leave dry dirt in its place.  The air smells like frost and earth.  I lean down and touch the water.  It’s cold, like snowy velvet pulling across my fingers.  I think this may be the first time I’ve had a chance to relax in months.  I skip onto the stepping-stones, and my right foot splashes into the stream around loose stone number three.
    “Fuck.”
    I find it difficult to enjoy my sandwich and juice box with water creeping up my pant leg and my shoe feeling like a swamp.
    “Can we please head back to the car after this?” I plead.
    “Actually, I think we should,” Kelly says.
    “Yeah, we’ve already accomplished a lot,” Pam adds.
    We start our hike back to the car, my foot falls sounding out along the way:  clunk, squish, clunk, squish….
   
    Later that night, as soon as we arrange our sleeping bags, I slide in mine and shut my eyes.  Finally, it’s time for complete silence.  It’s time for utter stillness.  One problem is immediately obvious.
    “I’m on some tree roots.”
    “Oh.  Well, we could try to move the tent,” Kelly says.
    “It’s dark,” says Pam.  “Maybe you could just scoot a little bit.  I won’t kill you for spooning with me, as long as you stay in your bag and I stay in mine.”
    I wriggle over, and manage to find a position where only one root is pushing into my back.  However, the trade off is Pam’s tight curls trying to coil their way up my nostrils.  I roll to the other side, but realize that a tree root poking your back is preferable to a tree root cracking your ribs.  I fight for an acceptable position most of the night.  When I finally find one, I hold onto it for 6.2 seconds before all of the wildlife of the mountain starts bitching about the coming sunrise.  Through the grayness seeping into the tent, I hear two birds.  It sounds like a domestic dispute – a violent one.  There is no chance for sleep.

    While waiting in line to enter Linville Caverns, I yawn deeply and blink against the sun.
    “Do you have your sunglasses with you?” I ask Kelly.
    “No, I left them in the car.  We’re going into a cave,” she explains, as though talking to a particularly unintelligent toddler.  Can’t blame her; stupid question.
    “Right,” I say.
    “Are Jiminy and Cricket still hurting?” Pam asks.
    “No, just my eyes.”
    A little girl screeches at a boy who is holding a lizard up to her face.
    “And my ears.”
    “Come on.  You’ll like this,” Kelly says, grabbing my arm and picking me up off the bench.  The tour is beginning.
    My eyes are pleased to find themselves out of the sun.  My ears are happy to detect that the screaming girl is not in my tour group.  My skin bristles with relief at the steady 52-degree temperature in the cave.  The guide leads us through the various attractions of the caverns.
    “And this formation,” he says, indicating two amorphous lumps of cappuccino stone, “is the bride and groom.”
    I don’t really see a bride, or a groom, or any of the other imaginary shapes I’m supposed to see in the other formations, but at least it’s quiet.  I could see a bride and groom wandering in here to freeze in stone…to soak in the silence and rest.
    “I could marry this cave,” I say.
    “You’re so weird,” Kelly says, pushing me forward to keep up with the group.
    The guide leads us to a tight corridor of shining rock.
    “Now, I know I asked you not to touch the walls, but we don’t want this walkway closing up.  So, if you’re not claustrophobic, feel free to walk through here and run your hands across the walls as much as you want.  Those of you who don’t feel up to it can follow me, and we’ll meet them at the other end.”
    I step into the narrow space and place my hands on the wet wall, I can feel its milky whiteness moisturizing my palms, nourishing my skin, my body.  I side-step my way to the end, where the tour guide awaits.
    He leads us to an area in the cavern where we happen upon another group.
    “All right.  Now that we have a couple of groups here, I want to tell you a little something.  Now, if anyone has a problem with the dark, go ahead and tell me now so we can escort you out.”  No one speaks up.  The lights in the cavern go down, except for one lantern, hanging on a wall.  “A while back, there were two boys who found themselves inside this cavern.  Of course, at the time, there wasn’t this extensive lighting system set up in here.  All they could depend upon was one little lantern.  It put out about as much light as this one right here.”  The guide indicates the gentle, hypnotic glow emanating from the dim lantern.  “The boys got at least this far into the cavern when…”
    The lights in the cavern go out.  I hear a few sharp breaths drawn, but then nothing.  Wonderful, peaceful, dark silence, save for the gentle gurgling of water.  The guide continues.
    “One of the boys dropped the lantern into the stream that runs through here – total darkness.  There are only two places in the world you can find it, inside a cavern like this one or in an ocean abyss.”
    The quiet moves through me like a cold, dark stream.  It’s beautiful.
    “It took the boys two days to find their way out of here.  They had to trudge through this stream, to try to find their way back to the opening.  By the time they emerged, they were suffering from extreme hypothermia.”
    It would seem that stepping from a cave can be as traumatic as any childbirth.
    “If you were to stay in total darkness for more than three months, you’d go blind.”  Someone gasps.  “But don’t worry, you’d go insane long before that.”
    So, total darkness has its sinister side, but it feels good for this one moment.  So good, I almost feel guilty.  The tour guide brings the lights back up, and we continue on.
    “Okay,” he says, “Now here’s another tight space.  If y’all could step through, onto these bars here, I’ll show you one of the most interesting attractions in the cavern.”
    I step onto a grid over a dark pool.  A light comes on from under me, illuminating the water.  The walls of the pool are narrow and only seem to get narrower the deeper it goes.  I see what I think is glass separating me from the surface.
    “A lot of people ask if there is glass over this water.  There isn’t.  That’s just the light showing the film of sediment on the surface.  The only thing between you and the water are the metal rods you’re standing on.”
    These had better hold, I think.  I’ve already stepped in water once on this trip.
    “This is what we call the Bottomless Pool.”
    “Bottomless?”  I ask.
    The tour guide chuckles.  “Yes, well, there may be a bottom to it, but we haven’t found it yet.  We even fed a 250-foot cable into it.  It never touched bottom.”
    I stare down into the pool, and imagine myself squeezing into its depths.  Better than any sleeping bag.  No roots.  No birds.  No Ultimate Frisbee.  No sound.  No light.  No.  Nothing.  Beautiful, weightless nothing.

    I find my sunglasses in the car, and they stay on my face all the way back to the campground.  My legs are a little wobbly from yesterday’s hiking, but I still attempt the descent to the bathrooms using some rather treacherous-looking wooden steps.  I get cocky around step number three, think, “Wow, I’m a trooper, six miles of hiking and-.”  My foot slips, and I have that moment in the air when one thinks to one’s self, “This is going to hurt.”
    I crack my head on what I assume is a piece of wood embedded into rock.  I impact my tailbone. The pain is a school bus…That doesn’t make sense.  Coccyx is a funny word.  It’s funny; only room for one thought, “Stay conscious!”  There is an orange-brown film over the world, but I stay upright long enough to make it to the bathrooms, where I slap around the wood paneling as long as possible.  My moaning is a conscious decision…semi-conscious.  I want a tether to the bathroom’s fluorescence.  The light is fading.  I can’t go toward the light if I can’t see it.  I’m losing.
    Wait, another thought.  Room for one other thought.  More of an impression, really:  I don’t have health insurance.  Not the thing to be worrying about, but it’s one hell of an impression.  It forces me to the sinks and shoves my face toward the mirror so I can look myself directly in those green eyes to say, “Don’t pass out.”  It comes out more like “Uuuuuuunnnnnh,” but I get the gist.  Green and red: complementary, right?  I guess that’s why I notice her.  Looking in those green eyes, her red shirt just pops out at me.  Actually, I think it’s the reflection of her red shirt, but it doesn’t matter, does it?  Mirrors don’t deaden hues.  Back to the point.  Get back to the point.  I see a red shirt.
    It asks, “Are you fainting?” The question reaches me, echoing through a cheese grater.
    “No.” I’m adamant. 
    Blackness hits me like a falling wall.

    I open my eyes as wide as I can, but I’m still seeing through the eye of a sewing needle.  A black fog is swirling in my peripheral vision.  The few things I can see are like photograph negatives.  I think I see a negative of Pam leaning over me.  I hear her voice through a tin can.
    “Did she fall?” Pam is talking to someone.
    “She fainted.  I caught her.”
    The fog starts pulling back.  I’m even beginning to discern color.  Pam is talking to someone in a red shirt.  I’m looking up at them, which means…I’m on the bathroom floor.  A bathroom floor.  I sit up.  The bathroom starts receding again.
    “Don’t try to get up,” Pam says.  Her voice is dying.
    She doesn’t understand.  I have to get up.  I have to start moving.  If I stay on the ground any longer, the world will pull away again.  Everything will go….  I try standing up.

    Total darkness.

    I don’t know how I got outside, but I’m here, holding onto Pam’s neck.
    “You need to sit down,” says Pam.
    “No.  I’ll pass out.”
    “You’ve fallen five times now.  Jamie, listen.  You need-.”
    “I fell down the steps.  I…”
    “Okay, then.  You’ve fallen six times.”
    “I need to sit down,” I say.
    “Okay,” says Pam.
    “I need to sit down.”
    “All right.”
    “I need to sit down.”  I know what I need; I’ve forgotten how to get it.
    My brain, stuck in the bottomless pool.
    Pam helps me to the ground.  About halfway there, I lose the sound of a squirrel throwing acorns from a tree.  I lose everything.

    I become smaller and smaller, reversing from light into deep black water.  The lights of the cavern are off, total darkness, total silence, total weightlessness.  Something shifts.
    Enough.  Enough of being crammed into the cold water.  Enough of the silence.  Enough for a lifetime, I think.  I would give anything to feel the pain in my legs again, to feel the pain of light cutting through my eyes, to hear the arguing of rodents.  I swim upwards.  I swim until I see a light shining on the filmy surface.  Just a few more meters, I tell myself, and I’ll break through that milky substance. 
    I become aware of cold ground beneath me.  I try to sit up.  Something pushes me down, and pain shoots from my throbbing head, to my aching tailbone, to my cramping legs.  I hug the pain to myself.
    “Dammit, Jamie, stay down!”  Kelly’s voice is shrill and welcome.  It accompanies a concert of raspy-throated birds.
    I open my eyes to the bright afternoon bleeding through the leaves above me, and I laugh.