High Wire by Ken Foxe

High Wire by Ken Foxe

 How many times did Ryan wish, pray, day and night dream he could take those words back? When the rain poured down, when the wind howled, and when the roof turned icy, his smart-aleck remarks reverberated like the taunts of a relentless schoolyard bully.

He was an ambitious young academic, enlisted at the last moment to provide left-wing perspective on one of those trashy TV panel discussions, a faux battlefield that generated only heat, and never light.

To his left sat an ultra-sincere columnist from a broadsheet newspaper alongside a professional contrarian, carefully chosen for diametric views intended to clash like thunder. To his right was an up-and-coming politician by the name of Bennett. He was fresh-faced, newly elected to parliament, well-versed in the vacuity of PR-speak. Bennett possessed an utterly insincere sincerity, appearing to measure his words as meticulously as a chef mixes ingredients in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Bennett was undeniably popular, and the words “rising star” seemed to be writ large in the many newspaper and magazine features that were written about him. Ryan despised him from a distance – not only for the vast distance between them on the political spectrum, but because of the young politician’s falseness, which seemed so blindingly transparent.

The television debate had circled pointlessly, dominated mostly by the contrarian. Occasionally, Ryan managed to get a word in, only to find himself interrupted or talked over. His way of speaking was deliberate and precise, because he always wanted to find just the right words. But it was the wrong thing for television, and Ryan didn’t understand that yet.

The clock was running down and his frustration was growing. He was uncomfortable, wondering if the make-up they insisted he wear would run under the glare of the studio lights. He noticed his jaw was clenched and that he was absent-mindedly tapping his fingers on the table in front of him.

The insipid answers of Bennett grated on him, irritating him even more than they usually did. Heard at such close quarters, they seemed even more hollow. Seen at close quarters, he seemed even more artificial, his crisp suit, his hair, messy but styled to the last strand, the smile that always seemed half-formed.

The programme’s host shifted focus to the audience, taking questions. A camera turned to a man, and in that moment Ryan’s intuition sparked, telling him that this audience member was a political plant.

“I’d like to ask the panel if they feel that Mr Bennett here would be a good future leader of his party?”

The host pivoted to Bennett, the young politician playing modest. “Well,” he began, “I certainly couldn’t provide a definitive answer to that question. I have full confidence in my party leader, the prime minister, the Taoiseach.”

Next was the contrarian, sitting back, shoulders wide, the buttons of his shirt straining, a smug grin.

“I think he’d be terrific; he doesn’t bow to woke nonsense and he always gives the truth unfiltered.”

Then the columnist, stoney-faced as always, her polished nonchalance.

“It’s really not for me to say,” she said. “As a professional journalist, we are duty-bound to detach ourselves from party political opinions.”

Finally, it was Ryan’s turn, the simmering resentment ready to boil over.

He hesitated, taking a brief pause to carefully measure his own words. “I,” he said, his voice now firm, “I see him as a snake oil salesman. I would sooner perch on a cliff’s edge than see him climb any further, and I have to confess, I’m absolutely terrified of heights.”

There was a solitary guffaw at first, which rippled through the audience like a warm breeze before turning to widespread laughter. Ryan turned to Bennett, knowing it had been unfair, his eyes asking for forgiveness. And that look, that look of quiet fury would patrol his nightmares on the roof.

“On that note,” the host interjected, trying hard to suppress a chuckle, “tune in next week when we will be taking a deep dive into gender identity…

& & &

Years passed, and Ryan found his forever home in the quiet obscurity of academia, painstakingly researching the intricacies of Freedom of Information law in Ireland. Afterwards, he politely declined opportunities to appear on TV or radio, primarily out of shame, because he knew he had let his emotions get the better of him that night. In time, the invitations dried up as his excuses for not appearing grew ever more tenuous.

He bought a house, became engaged and married Mairéad, took in a stray dog, bought a slightly bigger house. And then, two infants – Sadbh and Rónán – came into his life, filling his days with nappies and baby formula, 3am feeding alarms and soft lullabies.

From his cramped but cosy office in Trinity College Dublin, Ryan watched as Bennett’s fame and popularity grew. Bennett’s rise up the political ladder was swift, first as a junior minister, and then elevated to full membership of Cabinet. But well beyond the petty minutiae of Irish political life, the world was shifting far more quickly as the extent of the climate cascade became clearer day by day.

Across Ireland, the rain just fell, and fell, so that the summers almost felt colder and damper than the deep midwinter. The storms grew more violent and the sea began to reclaim what once was hers in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Galway, and every other port town and village on the island.

It was a problem in search of someone to blame and it was on the climate refugees that burden fell. Bennett was right at the heart of it. He deployed gunboats in the Irish Sea, an exercise in absurd futility given how few people attempted that perilous voyage. He built camps to house asylum seekers, appointed his cronies to hear their cases, and flew them off to a partner country in West Africa for resettlement.

Whipping up a frenzy on TV and radio, in newspaper op-eds, and through his well-oiled social media machine, Bennett would then call for calm. He was a maestro of stirring the pot, yet had always vanished by the time it boiled over. His ascent to the office of Taoiseach became an inevitability.

Ryan watched on from a safe distance, his life consumed by the demands of Sadhb and Rónán, his teaching, his research, and the occasional temporary escape to an international conference on information access law. He was quiet about the injustices, much more silent than colleagues in academia and the intelligentsia. And so, when some of them started to disappear, there was no compelling reason to think he would join them.

& & &

The first thing Ryan noticed was the bitter cold wind. He started to come to, groggy, the back of his head throbbing, in some sort of a shed. He was lying on a damp mattress, swaddled in his dirty, bloodied clothes, and a military jacket.

He could remember footsteps at the front door of his semi-detached home, then the thunderclap of the enforcer ram they used to break it down. He thanked god his children were not there.

“Knees now,” said one of the riot police.

He knew enough to do what he was told.

His heart raced, he prayed Mairéad and the kids would not arrive home. His mind swirled. Was this a mistake, were they after somebody else?

Ryan fumbled in the darkness, his hands scrabbling around on the rough concrete floor. The wind whipped outside in the darkness, and he came upon a heavy flashlight. He searched the rubber surface for a power button, hoping it still worked, that it would have batteries.

A beam of light scythed through the darkness. He was in a semi-cylindrical room, a roof of corrugated iron covered with an inch of insulation, at least a quarter of it missing, or hanging loose. There was rust between the ridges and it was clear the hut was decades old. Ryan made his way to the exit, the door flanked by two windows that were glued over with old newspaper. The door flew open, caught by the swirl of a gust.

Where was he? Through relentless drizzle and a hazy smog, he could see lights in the distance, maybe half a mile or so away. It was impossible to tell for sure. The glare of the old electric torch lit only a few yards in front of him and he walked forward gingerly, his bare feet sploshing in puddles of dirty rain.

He moved forward, the illumination of the flashlight inching onward with him. And then its scant light fell away, and Ryan was struck with an awesome anxiety as he realised another few steps and he would have gone over the edge. He was far above the ground, how far he could not say, but far enough that he ran in blind panic back to the relative haven of his corrugated hut.

Whether Ryan slept that night is difficult to say. He found moth-eaten blankets stashed inside the hut. He lay down on the mattress, curled himself into a ball, sobbed, and shrieked, and shivered, his body still aching with the cold. And perhaps for ten minutes here or there, with his eyes closed tight as tight can be, he may have drifted off.

Morning came and the hazy smog cleared from the blighted Dublin Bay. The wind died off and the rain, at least for a time, ceased. Inside the hut, Ryan kept wondering when he would wake, but he was awake, and he was hungry, and his stomach hurt, and his bladder felt full. But he could not bring himself to reopen the door. Everything was telling him he would have to face it, but that sharp memory of the building’s edge cut like a razor.

Ryan could not remember when he first began to fear heights. Even as a child, crossing bridges, he remembered clinging to his father’s hand, asking: “Dad, how do you know it won’t fall?” It never left him, morphing and metastasising as the years passed by – escalators, tall buildings, high bridges, anything with an edge. Airplanes he could barely manage with five milligrams of Valium and a double gin and tonic.

It was his bladder that betrayed him, the idea of urinating within the hut enough to briefly overcome his vertigo. He pushed open the door, sunlight briefly blinding him. He came out on his hands and knees, crawled around the corner of his shack, and dragged himself to his feet. He closed his eyes, tried to pretend he was somewhere else, and peed.

Back inside the hut, the anxiety gnawed like a dog with a pig’s ear. Even seated, he had this relentless feeling of falling. But some little voice of inner strength told him he was going to have to do something, that he could not hide here.

His thoughts were interrupted by a whirring sound, like the faint buzzing of a machine. He pushed open the door, the noise intensifying. And then an object appeared in the doorframe, a small basket with a tiny parachute on it. It landed softly on the roof a few metres from him. Ryan could see it contained food, two bottles of water, two books, but the red envelope on top – like some sort of Valentine’s Day gift parody – sent an electrifying pulse bubbling through every sinew.

Ryan crept out on all fours to retrieve the wicker basket, extending his right arm so that he would not have to move even one inch closer to the edge. A drone flew off in the distance. He greedily opened one of the water bottles, drank almost half of it; it was lukewarm and stale, but he didn’t care. He scoffed a croissant, doughy and tasteless, but at least it might ease the rumbling in his tummy.

He held the red envelope up between his thumb and forefingers, almost as if the paper might poison him. The answer, he assumed, was within. But did he want to know? Did he already know?

Ryan could wait no longer. He tore it open, momentarily puzzled as he looked at the picture. He knew what it was – that famous image of Philippe Petit, the balancing pole in his arms, man on wire, poised as if time had stopped, hundreds of metres above the ground, a familiar skyscraper behind him.

He opened up the card. Scrawled in fountain pen was just one short sentence. “You’ll soon figure out what you need to do,” it said. It was signed: “The snake oil salesman.” Memories of that TV debate all those years ago came streaming back. Ill-chosen words that were immediately regretted. And in that moment, Ryan realised where he was.

There were two adjoining towers built in what once was Dublin’s docklands. A Chinese investment group, involved in a cash-for-passports scheme, had begun construction even as it was clear the land would soon be inundated. Each was thirty two storeys tall, but only the skeletons had ever been completed. They stood now, two hulking beacons in the engorging bay, fifty metres apart, silty water lapping at their foundations.

Ryan gulped down a deep breath. He surveyed all that was around him. Out in the bay were Bennett’s gunboats on their pointless patrols. He could see downriver towards the old city, the latest hopeful set of sea walls, the hungry delta of the Liffey, the island of Howth off to his right and the mountains of Wicklow far away to his left.

He more closely examined the roof itself, his eyes caught by a glimpse of his most vivid nightmare, a high wire slung between the two buildings. The mere sight of it was enough to set off a deluge of vertigo within him so intense that even as he sat cross-legged just inside the frame of the hut’s door, it was as if he was teetering at the edge.

He felt exhausted, scrambled back to his mattress. He wrapped the coat around him to cushion him from the dampness. He considered moving the bed outside to let it dry but the thought of being out there was simply too terrifying.

Hours unknown had elapsed and Ryan awoke in a fugue, his skin clammy with sweat. He had a headache as if he’d been out drinking in a seedy wine bar until 4am. He remembered the lukewarm taste of the water, the hint of bitterness, and realised he must have been drugged. But why?

It was still light, but the evening sun was low and its glare was like a tire iron for Ryan’s throbbing head. It was obvious somebody else had been on the roof while he lay unconscious. He looked outside his open door, could see more packages had been delivered. There was food and water, multivitamins, fresh blankets, and everything he needed to start a fire. But the real reason they had knocked him out – they had erected a practice tightrope on the roof.

This was the gauntlet the snake oil salesman had thrown. Ryan would be kept alive on the roof for as long as they wanted. They would feed and water him. They would try to keep him healthy. He had three choices, life in the shack until the elements claimed him, the high wire, or the edge.

& & &

Day by day, he managed to venture a little further from the corrugated hut. At first, it was always on his hands and knees. But eventually he summoned the courage to stand on his own feet. He always made sure to keep a distance of at least two metres from the edge.

He racked his brain, trying to think if there was another avenue of escape. Tentative schemes and half-baked escape plans would suggest themselves, feel almost tangible, only to dissolve like an effervescent pill. As night would fall, he often found himself screaming into the wind, as if anybody could hear him. There had once been an access point to the roof but it had been welded over with an impenetrable iron lid.

One night, rain teeming down, in a rage, he kicked and kicked at one of the metal posts that was holding up the unused practice tightrope. It didn’t budge so much as a millimetre as Ryan’s toe began to throb. The bitterest of tears streamed down his face as he limped back to the shack, wondering for the ten thousandth time what Mairéad and the kids were doing. Had they been told anything? How had Mairéad explained daddy’s sudden disappearance?

The next morning, Ryan looked down at his foot, an angry bruise already spreading around his big toe. He hoped he hadn’t broken anything. He stood up, tested it out; it was a little tender but he could walk without too much pain. Frustration welled up within him as he moved towards the practice tightrope.

Gripping the balancing pole for the first time, its unexpected weight caught him off guard. He had purposefully never laid a finger on it until now. It dawned on him how it worked – the intentional heaviness, how each extra pound would help keep him steady were he ever to set foot upon the high wire.

It was a light metal like aluminium. There was tape in two places where he guessed he was supposed to hold it. He wondered if you were supposed to hold it under or overhand? Underhand felt more intuitive. He could feel the small counterweights at either end, imagining how they might help in a sudden gust of wind.

Ryan stepped up on the tightrope, immediately tipped over onto the other side. He wondered if he might be better without the pole, just to get started. He stepped up again, and again, and a countless number times more in the weeks and months that followed.

As time passed, he grew comfortable balancing, began to take his first baby steps along the rope. In one of the parachute packages came a guidebook, for a person looking to understand slack-lining. It made him suspicious, aware that they were watching his every move. He pictured Bennett in his office at Government Buildings, feet on the desk, watching drone footage, eagerly awaiting his prisoner’s next move.

Ryan practiced so much that his feet blistered. In the baskets that dropped from the sky came unguents and antibiotic creams, so that he would not stop. But there was another half to his task, one that was proving even more stubborn. He had become used to living on the roof but he still couldn’t bring himself any closer than a metre from the edge.

He remembered how visitors to the Cliffs of Moher would crawl along on their bellies on the soft grass, so they could look at the Atlantic crashing on the rocks below. So on the roof, he would lie prone a few feet from the precipice, moving forward millimetre by millimetre, until vertigo sent him scrambling back to his hut.

The days seemed to pass more quickly. The seasons shifted but the changed climate had made it so that you would hardly know the difference. A storm was as likely in the height of summer as it was at Christmas. It rained almost every day, sometimes soft drizzles, sometimes downpours that pooled across the roof. In the coldest of the nights, Ryan had to be especially careful not to slip on the black ice that would form.

Further and further he moved, so that he could lean forward and rest his fingers over the side of the roof. As winter became spring, his confidence had grown so that he could stand within a foot of the edge, without feeling like he would fall.

He began to approach the high wire itself, all the while thinking of what crossing might involve. It would have to be a perfect day, almost windless, no clouds on the horizon. This would be no circus act, no piece of performance art. Once he started, there would be no turning back.

There was nothing more Ryan could do on the practice rope. He used the balancing pole even though he did need it. He used it to put himself off balance, to test himself, to try and recreate how it might feel if hit by an unexpected gust.

There was a day, he managed to sit with his feet dangling over the side of the roof. His eyes were shut tight and he could not look but he lasted thirty seconds or more before retreating and collapsing on the mattress in his hut. Did he feel proud of himself, or did it only reinforce the impossibility of what he had to do?

Summer, or what passed for it, arrived and he knew the time had come. He was strong, lithe, in ways that he could never have imagined. If the highwire were four foot above the ground, he knew he could cross with ease. But it wasn’t four foot, it was at least four hundred to the murky shallow water below.

There were countless nights when he promised himself that tomorrow would be the day. But then a sudden rain shower, a wind that whipped up from nowhere, a painful blister, or most often, paralysing terror would intervene.

It was August 17 though Ryan had long since lost track of the exact date. He awoke that morning, telling himself there could be no more excuses. The weather gods  were in a generous mood, the sun rising behind him, a clear blue sky, barely the merest hint of a breeze. He could see for miles in every direction.

He bid farewell to his sorry shack, shutting the door on his solitary life beneath the corroding corrugated roof. He walked across the roof, retrieved the balancing pole from the ground. He tried to make his every move confident, how he picked up the pole, the steps he took, as he walked towards the wire. This was it.

The steel cable, perhaps two centimetres in diameter, was strung between two iron anchors, with guy lines running off it for stability. It was at least fifty metres across. Whether the wire was too taut or too slack, Ryan would have to take that on trust. There was only one way to find out.

He steeled himself, mouthing words of encouragement that no one else would ever hear.

‘I know I can do it. I know I can do it. I know I can do it. Can do it. No, can’t do. I can’t. I can’t do this. I did …’

* * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Ken Foxe 2023