by Pasha Malla
‘Was gonna say,’ said Dave-o, ‘I sound just like my old man when I sneeze too. This big harrumph. Can’t control it. Weird, right?’
Matt snorted.
‘What?’ said Dave-o. ‘You don’t sneeze like your dad?’
‘You guys are out of your minds,’ said Matt, and turned away. The disco lights refracted off his scalp in blues and greens.
To retrieve his friend, Ash changed the subject to the unfinished story he’d found. ‘Something about a guy climbing a mountain. Any idea what the deal is?’
Matt took a second, then nodded exuberantly. ‘It’s a book you were writing. Part of the reason you came here was to finish it. Research and that. There’s a hike in it, right? Up to a cave? We’re supposed to do that at some point.’ He looked at Dave-o for corroboration. But the Australian was shaking his head in awe.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to write a book. How d’you do it?’
‘I wish I knew,’ said Ash. ‘I don’t even have writer’s block. More like person’s block.’
‘Exactly why we’re going up to the cave,’ said Matt. ‘Unplug the toilet of your brain.’
‘And then?’
‘And then you write your book and find your way back to yourself.’
Ash tried to parse Matt’s logic. Failed, shook his head. Drank.
Michael Jackson faded into a bhangra number and a husband and wife (green shirt, green dress) moved onto the dance floor. Dave-o nudged Matt. ‘Shall we make a move?’
The room’s two lone white men sidled out under the disco ball, successfully separating the woman from her partner. Looking concerned but still dancing gamely, the cuckold watched Matt take his wife by the waist and dip her, hips grinding. Meanwhile Dave-o performed a faintly menacing judo of rhythmic air-punches and kicks. When she was vertical again the woman swatted Matt away. Playfully or not, Ash couldn’t tell.
The two men high-fived and returned to their table like a pair of linebackers to the huddle. Matt fell into his chair, shirt grey with sweat at the armpits. ‘Groundwork laid.’
Ash drank.
Turning to Dave-o, Matt lowered his voice. ‘What’s the deal with swinging and open marriages and that over here?’ He made a surreptitious gesture toward the green-clad couple. ‘Or even, you know, third-party interventions.’
‘Oh mate, have I got stories for you.’
Matt slung his arm around the back of Dave-o’s chair. They proceeded to one-up each other with tales of sexual deviancy and conquest. Then the talk turned to skiing: who had scaled the highest peaks, seen the fattest snow, broken the most bones. While Matt and Dave-o compared battle scars, Ash watched the woman in the green dress and her husband sit at their table staring blankly into the room. They still hadn’t spoken to each other by the time Ash finished his second beer.
‘Well, mate,’ said Dave-o, clapping Matt on the shoulder. ‘Sorry again if today was a bit of a botch with the Norwegians. Going to be a real treat seeing you out there tomorrow. Sounds like if it weren’t for your knee you could have gone pro. Might have met you a lot earlier out on the circuit.’
‘Yeah, definitely. Too bad my amnesiac buddy here can’t tell you.’
Ash offered a weak smile of apology.
‘State he’s in,’ said Dave-o, ‘we could tell him anything we want. Not just about you—about himself. Because what does he know?’
The suggestion inspired laughter, huge and cruel and boomingly full of itself. When it faded Ash felt himself examined with a new kind of scrutiny.
‘Only taking the piss, mate. Bet you wake up tomorrow morning with your brain good as new. So! Happy New Year, gents. Bottoms up.’
Another round arrived, prefaced with shots of rum. Someone cranked the sound system and the dance floor filled, husbands on one side and wives on the other; their moves seemed choreographed. Huddled knee to knee, Matt and Dave-o evaluated which women might be stolen from their husbands, while Ash drank as if beer were the elixir to restore his memory—or the poison to do him in for good.
Halfway through his third quart the night started to feel dangerous. Ash swayed in his chair and everything eddied around him, vaporous and indistinct. The two figures across the table, the music grinding away, the shadowy undulations from the dance floor, the hotel staff collecting empties—all of this melted into a slush of sights and sounds. Ash squinted, tried to focus. And a clear thought arrived: he’d no idea what year they were entering. He motioned to Matt, leaned over and asked. But the music drowned him out.
‘What?’ screamed Matt.
Ash repeated himself, tapping his wrist—the wrong move.
‘Still nearly an hour to go!’
Ash tried again with a full charade of actions: the banner over the door, hands lifting and exploding like fireworks. He even tried miming a calendar, the flap of pages.
Through it all Matt nodded and frowned.
Ash paused, waiting for recognition. He was drunk and adrift; knowing the year would anchor him to something. But Matt just stared blankly, shook his head, then leaned over to Dave-o and whispered in his ear. The Australian cracked up, slapping Matt’s knee. Everything about Ash’s tablemates consumed so much space—their bodies, their gestures, their gazes trawling the room. As they drank they seemed to expand. Ash, meanwhile, cowered in his drunkenness like something caged.
Matt patted Ash on the shoulder and with Dave-o returned to the dance floor. Ash tried to watch but his vision reeled. The music slurred and thumped. He had no thoughts. His presence in the room felt marginal and vague. Though he did have beer left. So he drank, the bottle upended and his eyes on the ceiling.
And when he set it down, empty, he realized the music had stopped.
He sensed the night turning itself inside out. Something was happening. Something was wrong.
Things clicked into focus: at the edge of the dance floor Dave-o held Matt back from someone screaming in a shrill, nasal voice—the green-shirted husband.
‘Easy now,’ Dave-o said. ‘We’re all friends here.’
But Matt was livid too. He bounced on his heels, jutted his chin, widened his eyes, roared. Something had loosened within him and threatened to unspool catastrophically into the room. For now only Dave-o kept it at bay. Some of the other men hid behind their wives; others fled to corners. The woman in the green dress pushed her shrieking husband aside and levelled a finger at Matt.
‘You’ve no business behaving that way here,’ she told him in a steady voice.
‘Who the frig do you think you are?’ Matt thundered. Bulging veins corded his neck. ‘Disrespecting me? I don’t care if this is your country—’
But the woman was undeterred. ‘Take him away,’ she ordered Dave-o.
‘Mate,’ said the Australian. ‘Forget it. Come on, let’s go.’
In a bear hug Dave-o maneuvered Matt to the door, murmuring into his shoulder. The room was hushed; nothing moved save the disco ball, still whirling its chaos of light around the room.
‘Go,’ ordered the woman.
Dave-o kneed the door open, nudged Matt outside. As he left Matt told the entire party he’d see them in hell. And then he was gone—into the lobby, maybe beyond.
With Matt’s beer unaccounted for, Ash took it and drank. Behind the bottle Dave-o loomed into view. ‘Guy could probably use a friend right now.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. You’re his best mate, aren’t you?’
Ash, feeling at once assessed and challenged, struggled to his feet, steadying himself on the back of his chair.
‘Whoa there! Gonna be okay?’
‘Going to be okay,’ said Ash. And then, to himself: ‘Okay.’
He staggered across the bar and out into the lobby. The concierge eyed him warily. ‘Looking for your friend?’
Ash nodded.
‘Outside.’
The night was another universe. The frigid air and open space smacked him sober. Enough, maybe, to shock the past back into him? Ash stood shivering
on the steps of the hotel, breath steaming from his nostrils. But nothing returned. All that existed was the gaping, hollow present.
And there was no sign of Matt anywhere.
Beyond the empty pasture the black humps of the mountains blotted the horizon. A low-slung cloud cover obscured the stars. Under it, the snow looked mauve. The only signs of life came from inside the hotel: the party had resumed—though tentatively. And that swamp of sound, drizzling feebly from the hotel only to be stifled by the icy night, accentuated the massive silence.
In the middle of the pasture was a little island of trees. Ash stared at it and felt a tug. It eased, then surged again: the view twanged some chord of recognition. Maybe even a memory. He stilled his thoughts to allow whatever it was to settle. But the sensation fled and that old desolation returned. His mind was like a half-frozen pond over which life had skimmed and sunk. Ash spat—a snaking wad that carved a divot into the snow. Turned around, stumbled inside.
At the door to the bar he paused. From within came hoots and hollers, the steady thump of bass. Though the night had been wounded, the partiers were doing their best to revive it. Maybe Matt had even returned to do a pass around the room, offering sheepish handshakes and drinks. Ash sensed he would be forgiven, had likely enjoyed a life of forgiveness, of second and third chances. Of fucking up and making do.
A new year was close. A new beginning—of what? Ash had no idea what he was leaving behind. He pictured Matt and Dave-o falling into each other’s arms at the stroke of midnight. The confetti, the streamers, the kisses, the cheers. All these people bidding farewell to the last twelve months and hailing the potential of what was to come; all of them with someone else. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, they’d sing, and never brought to mind…Too much, too much.
Ash went to his room.
He paused at the door and listened, heard nothing inside, and opened it cautiously. Empty.
On the bed was his half-written story. Ash lay down with it and tried to read a few lines, but the text went skipping around the page. He tossed the papers aside, closed his eyes. Music pulsed from the hotel’s first floor and the room careened, swirling Ash away with it. But halfway to sleep a clear thought interrupted: the music had paused again—replaced with human voices. ‘Ten!’ they cried. ‘Nine, eight…’ But the countdown was like a song overheard from a passing train, flashing past and fading, and Ash passed out before the finale.
—
AT SOME POINT IN THE NIGHT Ash was shaken awake. Something disruptive was happening to his body. Strong hands turned him face down and tugged his legs straight. Ash resisted and was held there. A voice whispered, ‘Shh, shh,’ until he stopped struggling. Next his jeans wriggled free from his legs, and then he was being lifted at the hips, his backside hitched. The pillow stifled him. Raising his chin to breathe, he looked over his shoulder just as the pale dome of a head, silver in the moonlight, ducked down out of view. A sugary scent of alcohol—carrots and pine—lingered in its wake. Ash faced the headboard. Felt himself clutched at the hips and parted and—was it? Yes, blown upon. Nudged. And lapped. This continued for a while, a wet tickling that darted back and forth, round and round, stabbing sometimes inward. Deliberate and medical, something to tolerate. And then it stopped and he was released and a sort of quaking began. The bed shook; the headboard rattled the wall. Ash, no longer held in place, lowered his pelvis to the mattress, pressed his face into the pillow, clutched the sheets in order not to topple to the floor. Things accelerated; that big figure behind him juddered and seized. And then there was a gasp, a grunt, and warm jelly splashed on Ash’s feet. The bed shifted. The weight was gone. ‘We do that sometimes, don’t worry,’ said a voice from the darkness. Ash’s feet were patted dry. Footsteps moved away, and then there was a swish of bedding, the creak of bedsprings. ‘Goodnight, bro. Happy New Year.’
5
ASH WOKE TO DAWN lightening the window, a strange window. Beneath it slept a strange man in a strange bed—Matt. Ash’s old friend. His bro. His best bud. They were here, in Kashmir, on a ski trip, and a new year had begun. But that was all Ash knew: previous to that his life did not exist.
And now Ash’s bowels were rumbling and he had, desperately, to shit.
He rushed to the bathroom, dropping his shorts and straddling the toilet mid-stride. What followed was sputtering and noxious. Though maybe his shits were always this way, he thought, as another surge galloped from his backside.
Washing his hands Ash studied himself in the mirror. A face that was his face and yet a mask stared back. Whatever life it had led seemed to exist in the world beyond the reflection, unknowable and unseen.
Ash opened the bathroom door and caught Matt’s eyes flutter open, register him and snap shut. The mound beneath the sheets heaved like a beached whale gasping its last. Ash watched him sleep or pretend to. An eerie, hazy memory sifted out of the murk of the previous evening: his body used in the dark, his feet wiped dry with a sock.
Ash spun, knelt at the toilet and puked.
Eyes watering, he propped himself on the bowl. But the sensations returned, that same feeling of abjection and disgrace. Another hitch from his guts rose to the back of his throat. He vomited again. Flushed. At the sink he splashed cold water on his face, drank from cupped palms, spat. Looked at himself again: the face that looked back, unfamiliar or not, was at least real. That other thing had the wispy edges of a dream.
And so, Ash decided, it had been a dream.
On the floor beside his bed was the story he’d written. Ash retrieved it, stood there with the pages for a moment. Matt sighed and curled away to face the wall. Slipping from the room Ash eased the door shut, obliging the illusion of Matt’s sleep.
In the hotel lobby, he sat with the pages in his lap. He read at random:
In places the frost where it had been warmed by the sun had turned the ground to slush and here his feet sunk and were suckled by the mud. Now the grass and rubble gave way to bigger stones and boulders and he came to a one so huge that he had to haul himself over it with his fingers gripping gnarls in the cool wet stone while his feet scrabbled for purchase below and pebbles went skittering down. And then he had surmounted the boulder and stood atop it with the land spread out below all green and grey and gazing up the slope there it was: the cave. And what lay inside he knew would change everything. And so on and on and up and up he went.
A book he was writing, Ash thought, flipping to the end and that interrupted last line. His words. His voice. Yet so foreign—where was it all meant to go?
An hour later Ash had read to that unfinished end, and with no better sense of either it or himself, headed to breakfast. From the doorway he spotted Matt and Dave-o in line at the buffet, both wearing the same grim and haggard look as they shuffled from cereal station to fruit bar. He was spotted. ‘Little Canuck!’ cried Dave-o. ‘Join us for some brekkie.’
Matt didn’t look up, just loaded his plate. With tense caution the other guests gave him a wide berth. Even the clink of silverware seemed restrained, as if a knife scraping a plate risked being interpreted as a provocation. Speech happened in whispers. Matt, as stoic as nobility passing among the unwashed, seemed either oblivious to all this or to be treating it as reverence. Ash snuck past him to spoon instant coffee into a mug and douse it with hot water.
Dave-o gathered the Canadians under his arms: ‘Did we all hit the turps last night, or what, boys? You were smart, Ash, to cut out when you did.’
‘Feel like I got ate by a bear and shat off a cliff,’ said Matt, tearing a banana free from a bunch—and keeping the bunch. ‘Barely remember a thing.’
Ash eyed that bald head. The bulbous gloss of it.
Dave-o guided them to a table. ‘So, gents, today. Chopper anywhere you like. Untouched powder in pretty much any direction.’
Matt forked eggs into his face, spoke through a mouthful. ‘How about Pahalgam?’
‘Not really much skiing over there, mate.’
‘No, Amarnath,
I mean. The temple. The pilgrimage. Right, Ash?’
Ash looked up from his coffee. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He paused, realizing he’d left his manuscript in the lobby, and half-rose to go fetch it.
But Matt seized him by the arm. ‘Bro, I wasn’t sure how to tell you this, but we’re not just here to go skiing. Or for your book.’
Ash lowered tensely into his chair. Another tempestuous stirring in his gut passed only when Matt let go.
‘That grey box in your luggage. You know what it is, right? That’s’—Matt gulped back a sob—‘my dad.’
‘Your dad?’ said Dave-o.
Matt closed his eyes. Opened and trained them on Ash. They were watery. ‘I didn’t have room in my backpack so you were holding his ashes for me. And I almost didn’t tell you, because honestly? It was nice to forget for a while.’
Ash nodded.
‘Guy was a big traveller, real spiritual, my dad. Always dreamed of coming to India.’
‘So, Amarnath,’ said Dave-o.
‘ “Holiest site in all of Hinduism,” you told me, Dhar, back in Canada after the funeral. And since you’re the closest thing to a Hindu I know, obviously it’s important for you to come with me. That’s what you promised, anyway. That’s how good a friend you are.’
Here were the tears now, streaming down Matt’s cheeks.
‘Well, Pahalgam’s not too far from here,’ said Dave-o. ‘Just the other side of Srinagar. One hour max in the chopper. Easy enough to head over this avo. Can’t imagine in January that we’ll run into any pilgrims. July would be a different story.’
This trip made sense now, Ash thought. But still the knowledge didn’t quite settle as fact, and the spectre of something murkier and unsettling lurked behind it.
‘It’d mean a lot to my dad.’ Matt put his hand on Ash’s shoulder. ‘And me, too.’
Ash smiled: a mechanical twist of the lips. ‘Sure, yeah. Of course.’