Synesthesia: Chapter Forty-Four

serial fiction

Image: Isabel Wright, Pexels

By some miracle, we managed to find one of the last available parking spots at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center. We spilled out of the car onto the dark asphalt, which felt refreshingly cool after Tucson and Phoenix. It was still hot here, but it didn’t feel like the inside of Satan’s oven.

I was grateful for that.

Amber took Jacob’s hand and set off in a direction she seemed certain was the right one, so I locked the car and followed behind her. We soon caught up to a wave of other people trekking toward the edge of the south rim—families with two or three or six children; elderly couples wearing zip-off hiking pants and khaki hats with fabric hanging down to shade their necks; groups of excited twenty- and thirty-somethings speaking languages I didn’t recognize; young, fit-looking couples in brightly-colored running shoes that reminded me of Daniel.

Within minutes I could see our destination. Up ahead, just beyond the trees, brown ribbons snaked horizontally in the distance. The shadows of clouds passing overhead sent long, dark patches of shade creeping across the carved, meandering rock.

I felt my heart doing little jumps in my chest.

The crowd became more dense as we approached a dramatic stone lookout point, and for the first time since leaving Indiana, I felt like I was drowning in thin air.

In that moment, I regretted the whole idea of coming here.

The stench of hundreds of people’s reactions to seeing the Grand Canyon was overwhelming, debilitating. Spicy, peppery, eye-watering awe; wood-smoke boredom dripping off of teenagers and children; warm cinnamon excitement wafting toward me from the tourists still too far from the edge to get a view of the bottom; even hints of boredom—the scent of fresh, green grass cut and left to dry under the Arizona sun.

I felt my stomach threaten to eject the steak I’d just eaten.

No, this wouldn’t do at all. I had to get away from the crowd.

“Hey, let’s go look over there,” I suggested, pointing to an area where it looked like the crowd was a bit thinner.

Amber shook her head. “No, we’re almost to the viewpoint. I want to make sure Jacob sees this. It’ll be a core memory for him.”

Not wanting to lose them in the sea of human bodies, I clamped my hands over my nose and mouth and followed behind as closely as I could. I was desperate to get out of this miasma of other people’s emotions, but I was just as desperate not to lose sight of Amber.

I followed her through a maze of arms, legs, faces, and smells, all the way to the fence-rimmed stone precipice, trying to force down my disgust at the stink, the noise, the people bumping into me, pushing past me, touching me.

Behind me, some women were giggling in a language that might have been European—French? German?—and suddenly erupted into gasoline-fume laughter tinged with dog shit.

I was on the verge of throwing up.

I wanted to see the Grand Canyon. I wanted Jacob and Amber to see it. I wanted us to see it together, as a—dare I say the word?—family.

But not like this.

A hand grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward. My hips bounced off a metal fence as a wide vista opened out in front of me.

The Grand fucking Canyon.

For maybe two seconds, I held my breath and marveled at it.

Then Amber leaned over and whispered a spray of Louisiana hot sauce up into my face.

“It’s fantastic!” she squealed, the stench of feces joining the hot sauce. “Isn’t it? I mean, this is so much better than just seeing pictures of it.”

I wanted to agree with her, but the smells were too much.

“Please,” I choked out. “Please, can we go where there aren’t so many people?”

It was a mistake. Amber’s cocktail of shit and hot sauce got a generous sprinkling of rotten egg on top.

“It’s the Grand fucking Canyon, Zodiac!” she lectured me. “There are gonna be people here!”

I heard her swear under her breath as she turned back to enjoy the view some more. I looked down at what lay on the other side of the fence and felt my head start to spin. We had to be at least a mile or two up in the air.

I couldn’t hold on any longer.

Before I even realized what was happening, my mouth opened and I retched. Muscles spasmed from my stomach up to my esophagus. I felt the hot acid rise, felt it hang in the air a moment too long as it hurtled out of my mouth, then watched it freefall a mile or two down into the massive chasm below.