text: Dad and I had wandered the infinitely-colored slopes of the Talking Mountains for seven weeks, begging them to give us the answers we had spent our lives not hearing. We had both been failures--not even colossal failures, just boring, unheard, unnoticed ones, although he had been a bit bigger of a disappointment than me--so we journeyed here to the Talking Mountains, where the side of every peak cracked and split and bulged into a mile-wide face, where some lucky few would hear the mountains speak to them with the voice of God if they wandered long enough. We are both old men now, him 95, me 67. He’s so shriveled and weak that I have to carry him on my back almost always. I was happy I was stronger than him, although I had always resented Dad for being older than me. No matter how much we wandered and begged the peaks to speak, to tell us what to do, the mountains’ many mouths stayed closed, always, and when we drew near they seemed to twist into towering scowls, their silence amplified into agonizing nothingness. I could hear my father struggling to produce saliva, could hear my joints rubbing together, could hear our miserable rickety hearts crying out to stop working for these ungrateful and unhappy bodies as we ascended and descended the dizzying slopes of magenta and scarlet and yellow and blue. On the 8th week, Dad got tired of me carrying him up and down the towering, shimmering peaks and begging the stone faces for answers, and he whispered in my ear, his frail, ugly, liver-spotted arms clasped around my neck. “Just throw me off that cliff. There’s nothing here for us. I don’t know what we expected. We’re just not people the world has anything for.” Suddenly there was a great cracking and chaos, and we looked high above us to see a mountain’s mouth opening. In doing so it knocked loose several massive boulders, which chain-reacted with several others, until a vast sheet of stone was flying down the slope at us. The mountain spoke but we couldn’t hear because of the colossal din of the boulders burying us, crushing my arms, my legs, trapping my father underneath me. Finally the noise ceased, and Dad’s chest labored to lift me and fill his lungs. I couldn’t move. We were trapped in a stone coffin together, chest to chest and nose to nose. The voice of the mountain boomed, so deep my ribs rattled. “The advice you need will always come *after* you can make use of it--and if it comes at the right time, you won’t listen.” Dad and I breathed as one, processing this, my breaths making room for his. “So my advice to you: Look out! There’s a rockfall!” The mountain laughed to itself a little. Then it fell silent. We breathed together in the absolute darkness, and we agreed that it felt like we were in the womb. After a while, as we approached a seamless transition from absolute darkness to death, my dad spoke, in a tiny voice I could feel killing him with every syllable. “We’re so stupid, John. We should have come so much earlier... what did we expect the mountains to teach us *after* we’d already messed everything up?” I laughed a little, then he laughed, and for a precious second the magnitude of the mistakes we had made was perfectly hilarious, that even in our final, desperate attempt to find meaning we were mistaken and lost and too late just the same. I had the fleeting thought that there was something worthwhile in even a completely failed life. I realized how beautiful the mountains had been--how much I loved my dad’s weight on my back. I realized how lovely it was to be dying in a colored-stone womb, stuck atop him, breathing together, laughing together, reflecting on two lives that we had mostly wasted by believing we were wasting them. The mountain shuddered and shook and opened a mouth to speak directly below us, and we and our stone womb fell into the hollow mountain’s endless blackness, my dad clinging tight to my shoulders as the wind rushed past us. I tried to tell him I loved him but the wind howled louder than I could hope to speak. I began to cry. The mountain stayed silent and uncaring, so I decided to scream, louder than I ever had, every bit of my life’s frustration and anger pouring out of me into the darkest depths of the great throat of the mountain. Dad heard me over the all-consuming wind and he began to scream too, first in fear, then in anger, and then the mountain began to scream with us, its monstrous voice vibrating every atom of the cavernous darkness as we hurtled through our own cacophonous harmony. God moved through us and out of us and we felt the earth shift as we expelled every ounce of accumulated rage we owned through our voices, and I had another fleeting thought that maybe we were put on Earth to fail and to build this rage and to scream, to serve as living testaments to the world’s unfairness, and once I had that thought I knew that the mountain was grateful we were here. I knew that our bones and our flesh and our failure would become part of the wisdom of these glittering slopes and cliffs, and also I knew that I didn’t really know anything and that maybe I was just talking out of my ass. I hugged Dad tight the best I could with my shattered arms and legs, and he hugged back. Then the mountain stopped screaming and said “If you let go of each other, you’ll both live.” The advice came at just the right time, but we didn’t listen. We stayed together, clutching each other’s shoulders, screaming goodbyes over the shouts of the wind and the shouts of the mountain, who yelled “Look out, you’re going to hit the bottom!” Before we heard the first word, we were already gone.