Point of Law Read Free Page A

further.
    “Do you have a strategy for dealing with your brother when or if he shows up?” he asks.
    I take a deep breath. This is something I’ve been thinking about for weeks, ever since my suspension and the news about the pending development of Wild Fire Valley as a part of a Forest Service land swap. I’d convinced my father to fly in from the Pentagon to meet Roberto and me for a last climb here together—and an attempt to save my brother’s life. Despite a lot of mental effort, I’m still uncertain what our plan should be. A hard-core user like Roberto needs confinement and careful medication, something he’s not likely to submit to voluntarily. One thing I know for sure is that my father’s unconcealed animosity, born out of the impending termination of his career, won’t help things. Nor will my own distaste for the hard drugs I’ve devoted my professional life to combating. Persuading Roberto to swerve away from the path of self-destruction he’s speeding down won’t be easy, and there’s no place in any strategy for anger and recrimination.
    Climbing has always been the Burns family’s first drug of choice.
La llamada del salvaje,
as my mother describes it. The call of the wild. According to her it’s a sort of genetic flaw on my father’s side that has descended to Roberto and me. It’s a hunger we learned to feed by getting lethal amounts of air beneath our heels. The fear you feel free-climbing, hundreds or thousands of feet off the deck, and with just a skinny rope as backup, is like an illicit substance—once ingested it makes the sweet stuff called noradrenaline just ooze out from the adrenal glands. It blows through all the panic that comes from deadly heights, replacing it with a tingly sensation. Ecstasy. Exaltation. Rapture. The negative side effect is that it’s a little harder to replicate that feeling after each session. You have to push it a little further. Dad and I have learned to control our addiction—we’ve learned that there’s pleasure in just crawling up into the heights without needing to lay it all on the line for that hormonal surge. Roberto hasn’t.
    He reached for something even stronger. Starting in his early twenties he turned to pharmaceuticals to pump up the volume. He began with pot, mushrooms, and acid, then moved on to methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin. He was chasing the dragon, looking for a better and louder amp. On the frequent climbing trips we used to take together in my college days, he would sometimes offer me some. I’d never been interested. Even then, before having really seen the damage those drugs could do, I preferred a natural high, although I had occasionally smoked marijuana with him in my teenage years (something I still consider no more dangerous than beer). Roberto once told me he’d discovered that cocaine mixed with heroin—a speedball—could push him beyond climbing’s natural rush. It could take him places far further than the thrill of fighting ordinary gravity.
    “It’s just an ice cream habit,” he’d explained when I’d given him a hard time about the hard drugs. “I got it under control, bro.”
    Right.
    But it isn’t just the drugs, although they’ve become the center of Roberto’s life. It’s the way he interacts with people, the way he thinks, even the way he climbs. Roberto has become addicted to living on the very edge. If he isn’t climbing, he’s slamming a needle deep into a vein. If he isn’t surrounded by the circle of fast-living friends who worship him as the fastest of them all, then he’s brawling with anyone he perceives as having done something unjust. And if he isn’t utterly free, then he’s caged in a county jail somewhere. Recently there had even been a brief stint in a federal prison. Roberto has happily danced so far out on the edge and for so long that it’s a miracle the void hasn’t yet sucked him in.
    Do I really believe we can change that? It would require almost a