It is true that the days we spent together in Banff were crammed with activities, and that sometimes things happened with terrible speed, but there were periods of quiet ease, of a candor that enticed one to engage in just that sort of conversation. Perhaps now I am thinking this way because a person’s departure, his absence, prompts examination of his presence, brings up insights about what was missed and regrets that some words were not said instead of others and that some things happened at all. We live, it occurs to me, only so we can constantly rebuke ourselves for what we cannot change. The more a thing cannot be changed, one could say, the more we regret not changing it at a time when change was possible, even though nothing at the time showed us we should. In a certain sense, we expect of life that it changes in and of itself, more or less like the seasons, and therefore most people reach the end of their journey without realizing that they themselves were the real masters of their fate. That thought has always filled me with disgust, the readiness of people to follow the mob, to follow anyone but themselves, and there may be no better place to see this than here in western Canada, where everyone is full of talk about individuality while longing, at the same time, for a political program that will, under the guise of slogans about respect for individual differences, bring them all to uniformity. Perhaps I should have said that out loud, for, who knows, Ivan Matulić’s grandson might have recognized himself. Just then he began collecting the crumpled napkins, plastic bags, and water bottles and attempting to organize them in his backpack.
So while Ivan Matulić’s grandson was tightening the straps, while Daniel Atijas was picking up pebbles and throwing them at a nearby tree, while I was imagining unimaginable things, a black cloud suddenly appeared in the sky. It is really not clear to me where it came from: I looked up and there it was in the sky, directly overhead. It may be that on the plains I was used to storms rising slowly along the line of the horizon, to the upward thrust of a mass of dark clouds until the entire sky was covered, so the speed with which the changes unfolded here caught me by surprise. I looked down at the ground, still hunting for trash, and when I looked up again, the clouds in the sky were roiling as in a cauldron. I assumed they must have come along the same route as the first cloud, but there was no time for guesswork. Several hikers walked by us, moving quickly toward the trail that led downhill. We needed to go with them, I said, but for whatever reason Daniel Atijas and Ivan Matulić’s grandson held back. Just as the rain was beginning, it occurred to me that maybe they wanted me to be the first to set off, to leave them behind, which, of course, was the last thing on my mind, so then I began to find reasons to slow down — tying my shoelaces, pretending I had caught sight of an intriguing pebble. The rain pelted harder and the wind picked up, so we were quickly soaked to the skin. I don’t know about the others, but my teeth were chattering and my every muscle was shivering so that I could barely walk. We were still on the ridge, only halfway to the meandering trail through the conifer wood where the trees would offer at least some protection, and I suddenly thought we would never get there.
The gusts of wind picked up. They lifted the raindrops and flung them in our faces, reducing visibility and darkening the already-shriveling light. Head bent, moving only a step at a time, I saw rivulets of rain slithering through the grass, the low undergrowth, and the rocks. Daniel Atijas was walking a little faster than Ivan Matulić’s grandson and me, and he was about thirty feet ahead of us, perhaps, I thought, because he had no backpack. A silly thought, of course, because there was nothing heavy in either of our packs, and buffeted by the gusts, they were swinging freely on our backs. The capacity for one’s preoccupation with petty spite is astonishing, even at moments of enormous strain or excitement — preoccupation with the little loathings that have no role other than to poison the soul and erode morale, especially when they remain unspoken. I leaned over even more, as if I could shrink in size or turn into a snail and creep into my shell, and bent over like that, my eyes almost closed, I turned to Ivan Matulić’s grandson. I meant to tell him to speed up, that we should catch up with Daniel Atijas and that all of us together, as we had come up, should head down along the trail leading to Saint Julian Road, and it took me several seconds to notice, with my eyes blinded by the wind and rain, that Ivan Matulić’s grandson was no longer next to me, to my right, where he had been. I stopped, turned to look the other way, and saw him there. He wasn’t nearby but had somehow veered off diagonally with his arms up over his face. To this day I can’t be sure whether he left the trail because of his crisscrossed arms — they must have reduced his already-limited field of vision — or, as I am sometimes inclined to believe, he left the trail and then, when he had gotten far enough off, raised his arms to hide the truth from us and, perhaps, himself.
None of that matters now, because no matter what was on his mind, it changes nothing. In life, unlike in art, there’s no way to go back to the beginning; there is no page to tear out or canvas to paint over. That didn’t occur to me just then; nothing occurred to me. When I realized that Ivan Matulić’s grandson, whether intentionally or not, was making straight for the edge of a cliff, I drew a blank. I gaped like a fish on dry land, though I was drenched, and I looked over at Daniel Atijas, who seemed to be moving quickly away, then at Ivan Matulić’s grandson, also moving away, though more slowly, but in his case, as I now know, velocity was moot. What happened next happened in an instant: a shriek tore from my throat at last; I hurtled, crouching like a sprinter, after Ivan Matulić’s grandson; Daniel Atijas stopped, turned, brought his right hand to his eyes as if sun, not rain, were preventing him from seeing, and then he, too, sprinted our way; Ivan Matulić’s grandson also turned, perhaps in response to the shriek or maybe because he wasn’t certain of his intentions; my foot splashed through a puddle, and the spray, as if in slow motion, rose up fountainlike around me and mingled with the rain; Ivan Matulić’s grandson lost his balance or maybe tripped on a rock protruding from the low-growing shrubs, which, a little later, I hopped over, but by then Ivan Matulić’s grandson had crashed to the ground and begun rolling and tumbling toward the precipice; I threw myself after him and managed to grab his left hand; I held on to it with my left, but when it slipped through my fingers, I lurched around and grabbed him with my right, meanwhile groping with my left for a support or something to grab; with my chin to the ground I saw Ivan Matulić’s grandson’s eyes, aghast, and when I turned and lowered my left cheek to the wet earth, I caught sight of Daniel Atijas, pumping his legs high as he ran toward us, his mouth open, no sound reaching us; again I looked at Ivan Matulić’s grandson; his body was mostly over the cliff edge by then, out of my sight; I should say something, I thought; and then I let him go.
Everything after that happened very fast. Time caught up later. First Daniel Atijas reached me, panting; he touched his face and repeated that this was impossible, though he never once said what. Later it turned out that we had not been alone on the peak, because several hikers approached us, most of them drawn, as one later said, by Daniel Atijas’s cries. One of the hikers had a cell phone and called the police. While we were waiting for them, the rain let up, the clouds dispersed, the sun came out. A woman peered over the cliff edge, but there was nothing, she said, to see, or rather, she said, she could see all sorts of things but no body. I was tired, my knees shivered but I didn’t want to sit down. It seemed inappropriate somehow, and besides the ground was wet. When the police got there, they brought in a special rescue team, a group of mountaineers, who, after I showed them the precise spot where it had all happened, found the body of Ivan Matulić’s grandson. While we waited for them to prepare everything necessary for lowering the stretcher, I spoke with two police officers. Really, I talked with only one; the other did nothing the whole time but nod as if approving my every word.