Above All Else

by Dana Alison Levy

  “Yoon Su!” he calls. “Take a photo for Amelie and your students! Regarde! The strongest Frenchman in the world delivers them Mount Everest!” He flattens out his hand to rest under the famous peak so that it looks like he’s holding it on display.

  Yoon Su laughs and snaps the photo, then grabs me and Luc to take a selfie. “Eh, your big head is blocking Everest. Try again,” she chides, pushing him over.

  Our laughter echoes over the empty sky.

  A panorama of high peaks—Nuptse, Changtse, and others—blazes through the clouds, ghostly and magical in the swirling mist.

  “The moon is changing, and so we have snow. But it will be nice weather for our trip to Base Camp,” Dawa says, watching the few flakes spin and fly around us.

  Dawa is the oldest of the guides, and Finjo’s uncle, even though Finjo is the boss. He has a web of wrinkles around his eyes, probably from squinting in the mountain sun, and he doesn’t talk a lot, but for me at least, his quiet inspires confidence. I catch his eye and smile.

  He smiles back. “We are almost there! This will be my fourth summit but my first time climbing with such young people. My daughter is only two years younger than you. Maybe when we return to Lukla at the end of the expedition, you will come to my home and meet her.”

  I nod. “I would love that.” I wonder if she wants to climb someday or if she wants to go away to school. I wonder what her choices are, but I don’t ask, unsure if I will say the wrong thing. What does it mean to have your father off on his fourth attempt to summit Mount Everest? Are you proud? Or terrified that his luck is going to run out?

  * * *

  —

  Slowly and steadily, we keep moving toward Base Camp. Finjo has us spend one extra night at Lobuche, and I think Yoon Su is going to deck him. Last night she announced her plan to go to Base Camp tomorrow, with or without the rest of us. None of us doubt her. She looks so tiny on the trail, and, when the wind blows, she bends almost in half to keep going. She is relentless.

  Luckily, Finjo agrees, and today we head up. The path to Base Camp is busy: yaks, porters, and other expeditions crowd the paths, all part of the massive machine that moves humans up and down Mount Everest.

  I watch the parade of gear and people to keep my mind from the fact that my lungs burn and my head throbs, and so far we’ve only been walking. The closer we get, the more it hits me: Everest. Everything I’ve read, every documentary I’ve seen is coming to life. I can’t tell if I’m terrified or excited or breathless from the lack of oxygen.

  But when we pass a memorial to the fallen climbers of Everest, the terror and excitement seem to curl into my chest and hold my breath captive. I put my head between my knees and breathe slowly. Tate walks away from me, turning toward the path behind us as though waiting for something.

  The memorial is huge, a pile of rocks and prayer flags and messages looming above our heads, stark in front of the perfect triangle of Everest. My eyes skim over the names that I recognize from climbing books and memoirs: Rob Hall, a guide who spoke to his pregnant wife by satellite phone as he sat dying on the side of the mountain, too far away to be rescued; David Sharp, the English climber who died on the main trail up to the summit, passed by dozens of climbers who could not or would not help him as he slowly froze to death; Francys Arsentiev, who collapsed on the trail and whose husband tried to return to save her and was never heard from again. I blink back the tears that threaten to overwhelm me. So many names.

  Paul puts a hand on my back. “You okay?” he asks. “It’s scary, seeing this. Really scary. And anyone who doesn’t think so isn’t paying attention.”

  He glances over at Luc, who, after a cursory glance at the memorial, is chatting away to Asha.

  “I miss my mom,” I say, then stare down at the memorial, avoiding Paul’s eyes. I’m mortified that I’ve blurted this out here, when my thoughts should be on the fallen climbers.

  But Paul pulls me into a hug. “Of course you do. This was her dream, and you grew up planning it together. I so wish she could be here with you.”

  I nod, trying to keep the sobs from building. My instinct is to take deep breaths, trying to control the sadness, but deep breaths aren’t possible here. Instead the air catches, and I gasp a little, coughing. So little oxygen, and we have so far still to go.

  Paul stares up at the memorial. The wind is strong, and all around us the prayer flags snap and flutter against the deep-blue sky.

  “You know you belong here, right?” Paul says. “It’s as much your dream as hers, and while I don’t have kids, I know, from all the parents I work with, that seeing your child succeed is truly a parent’s biggest dream. Bigger even than Everest.” He falls silent, and we both stare at the list of names. A knife-twist of fear hits my stomach. If something happened…If Mami got a phone call about me and she hadn’t been here, it would kill her faster than this disease ever could.

  I am grateful Paul is here, but his words open up a hole in my chest. Do I belong here? The closer I get, the more I want this, whether for Mami or me, I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I want this. But staring at those names, I want something even more than the summit: I want to survive this mountain and get home.

  * * *

  —

  Base Camp is chaos. It’s the Tower of Babel with a million different languages all being spoken at once. It’s the highest, most exclusive party in the world.

  Luc turns to me. “Incroyable! It is a small city!”

  I nod, too out of breath to speak. The camp is colonized by small outposts of different colors, each climbing outfit sporting their own flag with their logo as well as the logos of their corporate sponsors. Unbelievably, the Starbucks siren waves merrily from one of the big tents. While I know I should be rolling my eyes at the thought of their corporate reach, I can’t help dreaming of real coffee.

  We get settled in our tents, then quickly regroup in the Mountain Adventure tent, which is enormous and houses dining tables, computers, thick rugs, and even a stereo system. We greet Ang Pasang—who acts as head cook and sirdar, or head Sherpa of Base Camp—and the rest of the Sherpa staff who will be supporting our climb. There are assistant guides, porters who carry endless loads of oxygen tanks and tents and food up to the higher camps, cooks, and more. It’s amazing how many people it takes to get the six of us to the top.

  “Can you believe this place?” I pull Tate’s arm.

  Tate doesn’t answer. He’s been moving faster than me today, staying ahead with Yoon Su while I walk with Jordan and Paul.

  “You okay?” I ask, peering at him.

  He gives me a quick grin and turns away, moving toward the food. “Sure. All good. Just, you know…soaking it in,” he says.

  I stare at his back as he walks off.

  “Going to grab something to eat,” he says, over his shoulder. He lets his eyes catch mine for a second, and his smile shouts at me, so loud I look around to make sure no one else is watching us.

  Once he leaves, I head to the computers to check email for the first time in days. There are dozens of new messages, ranging from flash sales at my local sporting goods store to e-cards from my grandmother. Seeing them all is like a wave of surreality—in my inbox, my life is flowing on, uninterrupted by the fact that I’m not there. There’s one email, almost a week old, from Dad, and I open it eagerly. He’s not much for email, typing badly and usually only forwarding terrible jokes. But this time he’s written his own words. Words that tell me Mami is doing great, that the physical therapist is really impressed with her strength and that she walked two miles on the treadmill the other day. I know he means this to be good news, to cheer me up, but the image of Mami struggling on a treadmill, when she used to climb up rock walls like gravity held on to her less than most people, feels sour and wrong.

  “Everything okay? You look as though you got bad news.” Yoon Su has come up behind me, so quietly I
didn’t notice.

  I look up from the email. A churn of guilt and worry and anger washes over me. How am I supposed to answer this? Should I try and sound excited, like this isn’t a horrible consolation prize that feels more like a punishment? I look from Yoon Su’s concerned face to the busy tent around me, then back to my email. With a click I close the browser.

  “No, everything’s fine,” I say.

  Before she can answer, Finjo walks in and claps his hands until we all fall silent and gather around him. He is grinning, his mirrored glasses reflecting back our patchwork of colorful Gore-Tex.

  “You’re here! Excellent. Now it’s time to start the real work. I hope you are ready because your best night of sleep was sometime before you arrived here. Here, you get used to being tired, cold, breathless, constipated, and bored. Enjoy.”

  He smiles his big wide Cheshire Cat grin, and it’s hard to say if he’s joking or not. Regardless, I smile back. This is what I came for. To be here. To climb. And to get home again.

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Tate

  April 23

  Everest Base Camp 17,600

  feet above sea level

  Everest Base Camp. Launchpad for hundreds of elite-level dreams and final destination for tens of thousands of tourists, who haul themselves up here to be within touching distance of the glory of Everest. I have no idea why they’d bother, unless they’re impressed by a giant garbage dump with oxygen canisters flung everywhere and dozens of tent villages. It’s massive, like multiple-football-fields massive, and we walk for twenty minutes through a city of snow and wind and tents to find our spot.

  Altitude-wise, I’m rocking it. As always, altitude bothers me way less than most people. I barely have a headache, and unlike Rose, who lost weight she really couldn’t afford to lose, or my dad, who looks downright skeletal, my appetite’s all good. Ang Pasang, the head cook, loves me.

  Still, even with the good food, loud music, internet, and party vibe Finjo and the other expedition leaders try hard to keep going, it’s freaking brutal here. Wind howls constantly, and a shitty icy fog swamps us every few days, blocking all views of the mountains and making it an actual legit danger to get lost between the main tent and our sleep tent. With temperatures way below zero with windchill, you could die of exposure trying to get to your tent, which is honestly not the way I want to go.

  Over the next few days, I try so damn hard to make myself belong here. Rose is distracted, focused on the summit and the training: climb up to higher elevations to push our bodies to acclimatize, then descend again to sleep at lower altitude to recover. Then push higher the next day, then rest; repeat. Repeat again. Finjo’s schedule, like all the other guides up here, is pretty locked down: they’ve got a system of acclimatization, and we follow like breathless, exhausted sheep. But Rose has turned inward, talking less, and when we are alone, she curls against me in her sleeping bag, shivering and quiet. I get it—EBC isn’t what anyone would call romantic, what with the cold and the thin air and the stank. But it’s not only that we’re not jumping each other like sex-crazed monkeys. We’ve both gone into our own heads, our own thoughts too loud for much else to make sense. She’s super focused on the climb ahead, like she’s already halfway up the mountain, pushing forward against obstacles only she can see. And me? I’m stuck, every day making it clearer that I want to be anywhere else. It’s like a nightmare where something’s rushing toward me and I can’t move my feet to get out of the way, except I’m awake. And what’s rushing toward me is a once-in-a-lifetime climb that I used to want. But no matter how many times I tell my mind to shut the fuck up, to remember when I was so pumped for this, I can’t seem to convince myself to want it anymore.

  * * *

  —

  Today’s another slog across the Icefall. We’re trying to get to Camp One, a temporary setup of tiny tents at 19,500 feet where we’ll acclimatize for a night before heading back to Base Camp. The camp’s grim and freezing, but it has to be better than getting there. The Khumbu Icefall is infamous, a frozen Niagara Falls of ice, booby-trapped with crevasses and strung up with rope and metal ladders set by Sherpas at the beginning of the climbing season. They’re the Icefall Doctors, the ones who lost four of their own before the season even started. Apparently, they had enough workers to get the ropes strung up and tidy before the big-money climbers showed up.

  The Icefall is fucking treacherous, always. Seracs, chunks of ice larger than houses, can break off, dropping with a wrath-of-God crash on whatever’s below. Finjo told us the Icefall moves several feet each day, a slow churning of ice and rock, which to me is straight out of a horror movie—the idea of a slowly creeping killer wall of ice. The Sherpas check the ropes and ladders, making sure the shifting ice hasn’t collapsed a ladder here or left one hanging over a newly widened crevasse there. But that’s no guarantee there hasn’t been a change since they last checked. There’s no being safe—there’s only being lucky. And the Icefall’s at the start of the climb. We’re going to go through it again and again and again.

  Despite the insanity of what we’re staring at, the Icefall doesn’t really require much technical ice climbing. The ropes and ladders change it from a serious climb to a fucked-up tap dance across open crevasses. We’re not roped into each other, responsible for keeping our partners safe. Instead each climber clips into the fixed rope that’s anchored along the route and moves as fast as possible in a deadly game of musical chairs, hoping to be far away from danger when the music stops.

  “God, it’s beautiful,” Paul whispers as we trudge across the gravelly moraine to the edge of the ice. “It’s almost painful to look at, like some mythological sight that bewitches all who see it.”

  Dad snorts and tries to reply, then coughs before he can say anything. He bends over double, resting his hands on his legs and coughing until he chokes. He swears he feels as good as new.

  Paul wraps an arm around him. “Easy, there. Take slow, shallow breaths. Don’t try to breathe too deeply.”

  Dad manages a small smile. “I thought you were a shrink. What are you doing imitating a real doctor?”

  Paul laughs and claps him lightly on the back. “Real enough for you. Med school is med school, even if I did sleep through most of the pulmonary stuff.” He steps away. “You ready to keep going?”

  Dad’s smile is gone, and he looks like a sick old man. But he nods and starts forward again.

  Paul looks at me, and even with his goggles and hood, I can tell he’s worried. “What do you think?” he asks.

  What do I think? I think my dad looks brutal—like those medieval paintings where a skeleton’s there to show Death at the feast. I think this place is hell on Earth. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I think I want to leave, now, and never come back.

  I glance over at him. I want to call bullshit, point out that Dad’s dying by inches, and Rose is distant and withdrawn, and we should all call it and go down and drink tea and play Uno instead of trying not to die on what’s barely the first step on this treacherous disaster of an idea. But I don’t say anything. I give him the thumbs-up, plug my earbuds back in, and start to move.

  My head’s hunched to keep the wind from blasting me off the ladder. We’re near the most dangerous part, known as the Popcorn Field, where the four Sherpas died earlier this season. Speed is the only thing that can help at this point; it’s just a matter of moving faster than the ice so that we’re out of the way whenever the next big crash comes along. I push ahead fast, grateful that my lungs are strong. For a minute I don’t care that Rose and Dad and everyone else is slower than me; I want to get myself out of here. Now.

  I taste how humanity dies in this place. I can’t make myself care about anyone but myself, and I just want to get through this. Fixing Camp One in my sights, I forget everything and everyone. My world narrows to ice and snow, blue and white and endless and deadly, and I mov
e fast, faster, until my muscles scream.

  I don’t care. I want to move even faster, to get out of this shit before it swallows me, before I become another corpse along the route.

  I need to get out.

  Faster.

  I get so far ahead that I barely hear Rose screaming.

  Screaming for me, screaming about Dad collapsing on the ice.

  I turn, and way behind me, he’s down, a small crumpled dot on the ice like something dropped from way up high. There’s a screaming in my ears, and suddenly I am fallingfallingfalling

  inmyhead

  butalsohererighthere

  “Tate! Can you hear me?”

  It’s Rose, and she needs me, but

  fallingfallingfalling

  I drop to my knees.

  Press my head against the ice.

  fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckwhatthefuck

  iswrongwithme

  breatheinbreatheout

  breathe in breathe out

  flower candle

  in out

  in

  out

  I catch my breath. I get back to my feet. My neck and back prickle with sweat, and spots dance in front of my eyes, but I stay standing. I look back, and Finjo has an arm around Dad, lifting him up.

  Flower. Candle. Breathe in. Breathe out. I move my feet, nightmare-slow through my panic, rushing to get to them but really rushing to get away from here, to get away and never ever come back.

  Chapter Twenty:

  Rose

  April 23–25

  Khumbu Icefall

  18,000 feet above sea level

  Jordan is standing in front of me, then he’s not. He sinks to the ground like he’s fallen asleep, the clatter of his gear hitting the ice loud and terrifying.