Above All Else

by Dana Alison Levy

  * * *

  —

  I lose track of time, not quite awake but not sleeping, when the tent flap opens, bringing in a scream of icy wind and snow.

  “Hey. Ang Pasang. We may have a problem.” It’s Cam, and he doesn’t sound happy.

  I stand up so fast my chair falls over. “What’s wrong? Is it Rose?”

  He doesn’t look surprised to see me. “No. They’re fine. Waiting out this wind, which is way worse than the forecast called for. But I was monitoring the forecasts—and it still looks like it’s going to end in an hour or so—when a radio call came in. It was garbled…Couldn’t tell who it was. But…”

  A spike of terror, as sharp as if I were the one on the mountain, hits in my chest. “Do you think…Is someone in trouble?” I ask.

  The radio in his hand crackles. Cameron jumps.

  “Hey, it’s Cameron at Base. Who’s this?”

  “Allo? Anyone?” A voice, faint and static, comes through.

  Cam presses the button and brings it up to his mouth. “Who is this? Is this Dawa?”

  There is an unintelligible crackle, then silence.

  “Dawa! Are you there?” Cameron says.

  The radio comes back to life. “It’s Luc. Dawa is trying to help Yoon Su. We’re—”

  Silence again.

  “Luc! Luc, buddy, what’s going on? Aren’t you at Camp Two?” Cameron’s voice is calm, but his knuckles are white on the radio. I don’t realize I’m digging my own nails into the table until one of them breaks with a crack.

  “No! Ah…somewhere on the South Col. I do not know. We had tried to get back to Camp Three, but we got lost and the radio would not work. Bishal went to find help. Now we’re—”

  Abruptly it cuts off again.

  “Fuck. FUCK! Luc! Come on, man! Give us some landmarks. Can you keep talking to me?” Cameron says.

  An agonizing moment of silence, then more noise. “I don’t know. It is bad. Yoon Su, she has collapsed, and Dawa is trying to give her a shot of Dex to keep her going. But we don’t know where we are going. We are just moving.”

  For a moment the radio is so clear we can hear his rasping breathing and the howl of wind around him.

  “Okay, Luc. Can you remember if you went left or right over the ridge?”

  Silence. Crackle.

  “Luc?” Cameron’s voice is loud.

  “Oui?”

  “Keep looking for landmarks, mate. See what you can see.”

  “Alors, on ne vois rien!” Luc’s voice is stronger, for a minute, and he sounds annoyed. “It is black out here.”

  My heart rises a little at his voice; he sounded normal, like he was pissed off at a bad hand in Uno. But a look at Cam and Ang Pasang makes it clear there’s nothing good here.

  “Tell you what,” Cameron says finally, “I’m going to stop using the radio now so you have some juice left when the wind breaks or the sun comes up, whichever comes first. And I’ll keep trying to raise someone at Camp Two or Three to come out and look for you. I’ll radio you at the first chance to mobilize and guide you in. Sound all right?”

  His voice is upbeat, but his eyes look haunted. It doesn’t sound all right, and we all know it.

  Luc’s voice comes through faintly. “D’accord. But…this is…not good.”

  I have to turn away from Cameron’s face as he answers. But his voice is bad enough. “I know, man. I know.”

  The radio crackles once more, then goes quiet as Luc disconnects.

  The silence in the tent is thick and awful.

  Chapter Thirty:

  Rose

  May 16–17

  Camp Four/South Col to Summit

  26,000–29,035 feet above sea level

  For the first time, I wonder if I will die here. We are thirty minutes above Camp Four, a barely-there camp at 26,000 feet on the edge of the mountain where the winds pound us constantly, threatening to pull the tents right off the edge. And that was before the storm.

  We arrived there in the last of the afternoon sun, planning to try to nap for a few hours, force some calories down, and prepare for our summit bid. I thought we might see Yoon Su and Luc as they descended, but we missed them. Finjo heard from Cameron that they were safe down at Camp Two. We left as planned at 11:00 p.m., heading out into the darkness with our headlamps glowing, hoping to see the top of the world shortly after the sunrise. But now the wind is rising fast.

  I hold on to the fixed line, knowing Paul is right in front of me, Finjo in front of him. But I can see nothing. Nothing but blackness cut with white when gusts of icy snow blow into my face. The next gust is so strong it knocks me over, and only the rope holds me to the mountain. Fear grabs me, and an icy sweat burns me through the freezing night.

  “Stop! STOP!” I shout, but no one can hear me. Asha is right behind me, and she wraps an arm around me to keep me upright. After a moment she releases me, gives me a kind of thumbs-up, and pushes me to keep walking. I check my altimeter: 27,000 feet. Taking another step, I try to move forward, but once again the wind pushes me off-balance and I nearly fall.

  We have barely been climbing for thirty minutes, and it will take hours to make the summit. I squint into the blackness, and a hideous, nauseous horror begins to sink inside me.

  I cannot climb this mountain. I won’t even get close.

  Trying to push away all thought, I take another step. My promise to myself replays in my mind. I will get down from here. I will get down. But a burning, gnawing part of me wants so badly to get up it first. Step. Step.

  Finjo and Paul halt above me. Asha and I climb until we are right up against them, pushed together by the storm.

  Finjo pulls his oxygen mask away from his face and speaks, his words barely audible in the howls. “Okay, I am changing the plan. This is too strong, this weather. We go back.”

  Paul nods, his face invisible through his goggles, hood, and mask.

  I pull my own mask away. “Back? Back to camp? What about the summit?”

  “No way to summit now. The wind is getting worse. We have to get down. We will wait a few hours and see. If the storm blows out quickly, we may be able to try again.”

  “And if it doesn’t? What then? Do we have to go back to Base Camp?” The Sherpas stock a generous number of oxygen canisters at Camp Four, enough for us to wait out the weather and make a summit attempt, but the supply isn’t endless. At some point we have to go back down. And if Cameron’s right, if the weather window is really brief this year…Could it be over? A wash of panic overrides my exhaustion at the thought. We’ve come so far!

  But Finjo ignores me. “Don’t worry about that now. We’re going down.” He puts his mask back on and turns to head down the mountain as though there is no more to discuss.

  And there isn’t. He is the leader, and we paid him to make our hard decisions for us. But I want this summit so badly that I am tempted to push past Finjo and keep going. Some animal part of my brain is telling me to go, to pursue this at all costs. The idea of waiting in the tiny, wind-battered tent at 26,000 feet is almost unbearable. But there is no alternative.

  We all turn around and carefully, painfully, try to retrace the steps we just took. Step, clip, hold. And again. Again. My brain slips into a kind of robot mode, only noting the strange rasp of the oxygen in my ears as I continue to move. I might as well have my eyes closed for all I can see. My goggles are coated with a rime of ice, and I stop to rub them with my mitten to clear them, but it only lasts a moment.

  Slowly, slowly, we make our way along the rope. The wind pushes me down the mountain again and again. My eyes are heavy, and more than anything else, I want to sleep, to rest. My steps get slower and slower.

  “Keep moving!” Asha says, her voice muffled. “You have to go faster.”

  But I can’t, not now that we are walking straight into the w
ind. It somehow whips through tiny cracks in my goggles and manages to blast ice and snow inside against my face. My toes are wooden blocks in my boots, making it hard to know what I’m stepping on.

  We have been walking far more than thirty minutes back to camp. A sliver of panic cracks my robot brain, and I scrub my goggles again and peer around. Finjo and Paul are two lumps ahead of me on the line, and there—mercifully—in front of them are the dim, rounded shapes of the tents.

  We’ve made it.

  I stagger into the tent behind Paul, pull off my crampons, and lie down on my sleeping bag. The wind is barely diminished by the thin nylon walls, and the whole structure bows and billows in the wind. I look at Paul.

  “That was bad,” I say. “That was really bad.” I have taken my oxygen mask off for a moment, somehow giving in to the illusion that I can breathe better without it constricting me. But after a few minutes, the sick, breathless feeling builds and I replace it.

  Paul nods. “Yeah. God, I didn’t enjoy that at all. I’m glad we’re back here, safe and sound.” He smiles and rolls his eyes at his words, and I try to smile back.

  Safe and sound. Not how I’d describe being in a tiny piece of nylon lashed to the side of the mountain at 26,000 feet in a blizzard. Still, compared to the icy, screaming blackness of the open path, it does feel like some kind of safety, no matter how illusory. I pull my sleeping bag hood over my head; even in the rated-minus-forty-degree bag, I am freezing, my body refusing to stop shaking.

  “Luc and Yoon Su were lucky. They hit the good weather,” I say. “I can’t believe they’re already at Camp Two.”

  “Luc was even talking about paying one of the Sherpas to bring some beer up. The bastard,” Paul says, and we both laugh for a second, but it peters out quickly. They’ve done it. They’ve climbed Mount Everest and will be back at Base Camp by tomorrow. I am so jealous I can’t bring myself to say anything because it will be sour, whatever it is. The tent is silent other than the scream of the wind.

  It is frightening, the weakness of my body. We barely left camp, but my toes are freezing, my muscles painfully tight from clenching them against the force of the storm. And here we are losing brain cells every minute, even with the supplemental oxygen. We are in the death zone. To some extent, our hope of getting to the top is a race against the clock: How long can we hold here, brain cells and muscle dying off, until we scramble up there?

  “That was way worse than I expected,” Paul says. He has turned off his headlamp, and his face is in shadow.

  I nod. We are more than eight miles up in the sky, at an altitude where planes fly. We don’t belong here. As if in answer to my thoughts, the storm lashes against the tent more strongly than ever, pushing the nylon against me and sending a flurry of ice crystals falling on my face. I blink them away.

  Realization floods through me that this thing we’re doing, this climb, is beyond hard, a challenge almost no human on Earth would want to do. Finally, a knot of hurt deep down inside me relaxes, and I let go of my secret thought that Tate should have been here, that he should have done it for me, just because he promised.

  Nobody should be here for someone else’s dreams. It’s too vicious. Everest is for people who know how much they will have to suffer and choose willingly to do it. Whatever his reason was, Tate made the right choice for himself. As I lie in the darkness, shaking from the cold, all I can think is how desperately I want to be one of the few who make it. I think of Mami, asking me again and again if I’m sure I want this, then pushing me to train harder. She understood me, sometimes better than I understand myself. I do want this, more than anything. Does she know that? Did I ever tell her? It’s a guilty, slippery thought. I think Mami would love it here, that she’d gladly suffer this punishing place for the reward waiting at the top. She’ll never have the chance to know. But at least I know why I’m here.

  * * *

  —

  Asha rouses us at 1:00 a.m., not that either of us managed real sleep. We will head up again. I don’t ask what will happen if we have to turn around. I don’t want to know.

  Finjo is a mummy in his yellow down suit, but I can see a smile crinkle his eyes. “I cannot get Cameron on the radio; the winds are maybe still bad farther down. But I talked to the guides from Adventure Consultants, and they said the storm is finished. We have a small window. So up we go!”

  Squinting at the ink-dark night, I can see he’s right. The storm has blown out and the weather is perfect, bitterly cold but the wind is dying fast.

  Once again we push up the slope in the blackness, Finjo and Paul in front, Asha behind. Crunch, stomp. Crunch, stomp. I move my crampons slowly but steadily up the ice. We are higher than I have ever been, probably higher than I’ll ever be again. It’s hard to care. I keep moving only because of that law of physics: a body in motion remains in motion. And of course the corollary: a body at rest remains at rest. If I stop here, I don’t think I can start climbing again. If I stop here, I will die.

  Of course we do stop, periodically. We suck on snow to try and rehydrate ourselves, and I jam handfuls of peanut M&Ms down my throat. I try to give Paul some, but he looks at me with empty eyes.

  “Paul? You okay?” My tongue is thick and stupid in my mouth. “You should eat.”

  But he shakes his head. “I don’t. Not sure. No.”

  I stare back at him, almost unable to understand his garbled words.

  He looks at me like I’m a stranger. “Can’t. I can’t. You go.” He sags on the ropes.

  Above him, Finjo motions me to pass him and keep moving, but I stay.

  Paul is done?

  He’s quitting?

  There is nothing left in me, nothing except the deep animal drive to climb. I am ready to keep moving, to walk away and leave him behind.

  My climb.

  I want this summit. So badly.

  But it’s Paul.

  Keep. Moving.

  Selfish.

  We hold each other’s lives in our hands.

  I want to climb.

  Who am I in this place?

  I reach for his shoulders. “Hey, come on, we got this! You can do this!” I say, and my voice sounds high and panicked, even to me.

  He stares, his eyes hooded. I grab his oxygen mask and bang it, hard, with my mittened hand. “It’s blocked with ice!” I say. “Asha, he’s not getting anything!”

  Asha nods and comes over. Paul crouches, his head down toward his knees, and I watch him, barely aware that a parade of other climbers are passing us now, not even acknowledging our group huddled off to the side. She smacks his regulator hard, once, twice, and a huge chunk of ice falls out. His breath has frozen it.

  “Better now,” she says and puts it back over his face.

  But Paul barely moves, even after taking a few breaths. He seems to have sunken inside himself, the exhaustion taking over. I think again of the corollary: a body at rest stays at rest.

  I pull off my own mask again. “Paul! Think about the kids who are waiting to hear about this! Think about…” I pause. “Think about the hero’s journey. Moana wouldn’t quit!” I try to sing, even with my throat dry and painful. “ ‘And the voice isn’t out there at all, it’s insiiiiiiiide me! And no one knooooows how far I’ll GOOOOOOO!’ ”

  His eyes blink, and it’s like someone turned on a dim light in an empty room. He coughs a little. “It’s the call isn’t out there, not ‘the voice,’ ” he says, pulling his mask aside. Then he nods and puts the mask back on.

  He’s back. He’s with me. A surge of relief and gratitude almost sends me to my knees. We will do this together.

  But we still have far to go.

  Paul gives a thumbs-up, and we start again. Climbing with oxygen doesn’t mean it feels like sea level. It doesn’t even mean it feels good. It gives us just enough to feel like we’re a few thousand feet lower than we are,
just enough to keep us going.

  “We need to keep moving,” Finjo says. “It will be crowded on the Balcony.” He starts back up, clipping into the fixed rope in the brief moment before the next wave of climbers arrives. We follow.

  The snow level is low this year, and there is bare rock under our crampons, making us slide and clatter. It is exhausting. The darkness still presses against me, and I am frightened that the sun will never rise, that the summit will never appear, that I am in some endless loop of cold and dark, stuck putting one foot in front of another.

  I am slowing again, barely moving up the rope, when Paul stops and points. I gaze up, almost too tired to bother. The wind presses me against the bare rock, screaming in my ears. It reads -40 degrees on my thermometer.

  “The moon! Clouds are gone!” he says triumphantly, and his voice is stronger now.

  He’s right; a beautiful waxing gibbous moon is out now, low in the sky. It adds more light than I would have thought, enough to see our shadows on the snow.

  He points the other way. “And the sun’s coming soon.”

  Again I look, and this time it is harder to see, a barely there stripe of something. Not light, but less-dark, a tiny bit of hope that the sun might rise. I smile beneath my mask. We are getting there. Step by step.

  We arrive at the Balcony, a long, steep run that means we are close. The Balcony is famous, among other things, for the crowds. There are horror stories of climbers waiting two hours or more to hook into the fixed ropes and make their way up. Today is no different. Dozens and dozens of climbers line up, slumped against the rock, stomping their feet to try to ward off frostbite. I stare around me while I wait, the darkness fading imperceptibly. I have no idea how long we are there, only that it is getting lighter.