by Laure Baudot
It was only when he took her climbing at a local gym that she began to doubt she could fully enter his world. She could never make it to the top of a climb. At the base of each route, she would visualize her success and start climbing, and each time, when she reached the halfway point, her body would thwart her progress. Her legs trembled and her heart sped up. The only thing that could unlock her muscles and allow her to make the reverse journey was Akash’s voice, talking her down.
Once she was on the ground, he would turn his attention to his own ascent. He neither complained about her lack of progress nor encouraged her to improve, exhibiting a degree of ambivalence that worried her.
Singleton was the uncle of Akash’s undergraduate roommate. When he and Akash first met, Akash bragged about his prowess in investing his family’s education savings. Mostly mid-risk stuff, but when he tried high-risk ventures, he found that his stocks rose more often than they fell.
“It’s insane,” he said to his new friend. They were in a pub, waiting for Singleton’s nephew. “Everything I do works.”
“The gods are smiling on you?” Singleton said, and drank some beer. “You do some climbing. You’ll find your edge.”
So Akash went out west, and they climbed Mount Athabasca together. For the first two days, Singleton — a mountaineering guide — gave him lessons. By day three it was clear that Akash was a natural, hauling himself up the mountain face as though he were putting together a puzzle. Akash experienced the same sensation climbing that he did when he traded stocks: despite the possibility of losing everything, he was certain it wouldn’t happen to him, because he was that good, because of the God-given talents he spoke of when he’d first met Singleton.
Over time, however, he came to understand that the edge Singleton had been referring to was not Akash’s aptitude — at least not solely; he was referring to luck, and the fact that Akash needed to believe in it if he was going to climb mountains.
Over the years, they discussed the seven summits, including Everest, which all serious mountaineers wanted to ascend. Akash didn’t see the point of Everest. Too famous, too crowded. Singleton disagreed. In 1963, when he was nine years old, he’d witnessed the highly publicized news that Hornbein and Unsoeld had made the first ascent of Everest’s West Ridge. Everest hadn’t yet happened for Singleton. Now he wanted to climb it with Akash.
“Highest peak is highest peak. And the beauty? Seriously. There’s plenty of time for new routes. You’re a young buck.”
He finally persuaded Akash by telling him that it would make him marketable. “The sponsors, man. Think of this as an investment into your future climbs.”
In the end, however, Singleton is not accompanying Akash. Three years before, when they climbed Mount Elbrus, Singleton suffered serious altitude sickness and couldn’t recover in time to train for Everest. By then Akash had already spent months soliciting sponsors and training; he couldn’t afford to give up. For the first time in eight years, he will climb without his partner.
Julie tried several times to dissuade Akash from Everest.
“Not this one,” she said.
This one because of the dead. Those bodies that, along with human excrement and empty oxygen canisters, litter the mountain. She thinks of Mount Elbrus, and how Akash had come home with his extremities frost-nipped. They had joked about it. She had told him how, when she was in ballet school, the girls’ toenails blackened and fell off. He teased her about how she pronounced it “baaaa-lay,” lengthening and emphasizing the first syllable, which seemed to him to convey the upper-class-ness of that world.
Until she saw an Everest documentary, she had no idea of the extent of the carnage. One corpse was named “Green Boots” because his footwear stuck out of the ice like fluorescent hard candy. Another body, an almost-bald skull denuded by time, seemed to have acquired the colour and texture of a naked Barbie. The camera focused on this body as strands of hair lifted and fell in the wind.
Over several weeks, Julie tried to change Akash’s mind. Even as she saw that he was becoming annoyed, she kept insisting. She couldn’t help herself.
In bed, Akash turns away from Julie. He knows his coldness hurts her, but he can’t give her anything of himself. To speak means breaking his fragile self-containment. He holds his body and mind apart, hoarding their energy for the task ahead. He works to keep frightening images at bay. Each night before a trip, he’s haunted by mishaps that could be had on a mountain. The memory of Singleton, corpse-like, carried on a stretcher down Mount Elbrus. He blocks out the negative imagery by picturing the route he’s plotted to take up Everest. In his mind he realizes each step, all the way to the peak.
The next morning Akash appears calm in Julie’s eyes. He’s speaking to her again.
“Be good, eh?”
“Pfft.” She makes a dismissive motion with her hand. By now she’s used to the whole routine, and it’s never good to part on a bad note.
Akash smiles. “I’m hoping something happens to the Creature while I’m away.”
The Creature is Akash’s name for Julie’s cat, Nureyev, who is very sick and who, Akash has argued, needs to be put out of its misery.
When the cab pulls up in front of their house, Akash kisses her on the temple and pulls her to him briefly. He bounces as he walks to the car. Julie goes back into the house and sits down on the living room knotted rug. She listens to the car’s thrum turn into a roar, and then fade.
When Julie was ten, she watched Larissa Lezhnina as Princess Aurora dance in a video production of Sleeping Beauty, watched during the grand pas de deux as Lezhnina spun en pointe, her supporting leg strong, her extended leg so long it seemed to float off the stage. She didn’t recognize what Lezhnina had inspired in that moment until much later, when she read a reproduction of Karen Kain’s childhood journal in which the eight-year-old had written, I’m going to be a famous ballerina. It was the naïve certainty of a child for whom a goal and a desire for the goal weren’t yet separate concepts.
She auditioned for the National Ballet School, but didn’t get in. She attended the lesser known, but still rigorous, George Brown School of Dance. Every day after school, her nanny would take her there on the streetcar from King Street subway station.
When she turned eleven, she started going to ballet alone. She stopped off at McDonald’s to eat a carton of fries before class. Skinny and careless, she downed the fries every week-day for a year, not associating her chronic constipation with the four pounds of potatoes consumed weekly. When the other girls started pointing out the layer of fat that had developed on her hips, she forced herself to stop eating the fries, replacing them with a daily consumption of muffins from a corner store. Then she heard the girls gossip in the change room about her new choice of food, and she started throwing out the muffins after eating a few bites.
Now Julie teaches dance at a private girls’ art school, where she sought refuge after what she considers to be her wasted years at the call centre. Here the girls sidle up to her in the hope that she can help them achieve careers in dance. They always seem to crop up during Julie’s lunch hour.
This time, a girl named Melissa stands at her office door. Julie puts her fork down. The smell of fish and chips and vinegar — which she now consumes, carefully, once a week — fills the tiny, airless room.
“I was wondering,” says Melissa, “if I could get into George Brown?”
Normally Melissa is plain-looking, with small, almond-shaped eyes and pale parchment skin. But when she’s dancing, Julie can’t take her eyes off the girl. Melissa is miles beyond her classmates. Julie watches her and forgets that effort is involved, that she has mass — muscles, bones, tendons.
Julie remembers a girl who went to her ballet school. The teacher would always point her out. “Watch,” she would say. “The extension, the feet.” And the other girls, who moments before had felt airborne, would then experience the heavine
ss of their limbs, the work involved in the dance.
Julie runs through some calculations. Three more years at four hours per weeknight, plus six hours of class on Saturday. With the help of some open-minded teachers, Melissa has a chance of becoming a company apprentice.
“My parents think it’s too much pressure.” Melissa says this coyly, as if she expects Julie to contradict her.
Julie remembers the rounds and rounds of food talk that took place in her old change room. Waists were measured with tailors’ tape, half centimetre by half centimetre. The girls were watchful for the dangers of carbs. The fries Julie eats today are saturated with that tang of guilt. On the night her beloved-and-feared principal asked her to leave the school forever, Julie stopped at McDonald’s and bought an extra-large fries. Bending the fries until they splintered, she saw her own self break. But the fries were delicious, despite being broken: the salty crunch of the crust; the starchy, steaming mash; the aftertaste of oil lingering on her tongue.
“Your parents are right,” Julie says, and hands Melissa a tissue.
The kick her student executes against the doorjamb causes only a muted thud because of the fireproofing. “You don’t know what it’s like to want something so bad,” she says as she leaves.
“I do,” Julie says out loud, her words empty in the vinegary air of her office.
At base camp, faced with the sun, cobalt sky, and the laundry line of prayer flags flickering in the wind, Akash feels possessed by the place. The hard snow crunches under his boots. Wafts of dry powder from the grey rock and needles of cold air hit his nostrils. His stomach cramps as the altitude shunts the blood away from vital organs; for him, this means nausea and loose bowels. He appreciates this first, familiar assault on his body, for it makes him more self-aware, present in the moment and in his skin.
Akash is staring up at the mountain when Wilson, the guide, walks up to him. He’s an American with fifteen years’ experience. Two years ago, he summited both Everest and Lhotse in a twenty-four-hour period. Wilson started climbing as a teenager; since Akash didn’t start until his late twenties, he figures he has another ten years to go before he measures himself against Wilson.
In front of them is the Khumbu Icefall, seagull-white slabs of icing on a cake.
Wilson follows his glance. “Haven’t lost anyone yet.”
“Wasn’t even entertaining the thought.”
Wilson looks back at the camp. “Why Mr. Weekend Warrior chose to make Everest his first, I don’t know. Plenty of good basic peaks where he’s from.” Weekend Warrior is the name they’ve given to a middle-aged businessman from Utah.
“But it had to be Everest.”
“It had to be Everest.”
They smile at each other.
“With my help. And that of the gods.” Wilson points to the sky.
Akash longs for Singleton’s companionship. They have a joint climbing history, with triumphs and disappointments familiar only to them.
After Singleton recovered sufficiently from Elbrus to be able to talk, Akash apologized for proceeding without him.
Singleton was pragmatic. “It had to happen eventually.”
Secretly, Akash had worried; if Singleton’s luck had failed once, it could fail again. Or was it Singleton, the man himself, who had failed? If something were to happen to him, he — unlike Singleton — would have recourse. He had family. He had his parents, his mother. He had Julie, his eternal blonde who, after an initial few stuttering advances, would embrace him when he returned.
Julie’s dad was a corporate lawyer, her mother a charity volunteer. Hers was a solitary childhood; the cat was her main companion. She used to sit in front of the television after ballet, her legs in forward splits with Nureyev in front of her, burying her nose in his fur and woodsy scent.
At the animal hospital, Julie watches the vet listen to Nureyev’s heart. The vet has silver hair and high-riding, compassionate eyebrows. The stethoscope bangs onto his chest. “I always leave it to the mom and dad.”
Julie tells him that she’ll give it a day or two to see how things go.
He shows her how to push an intravenous needle under Nureyev’s skin, in the spot between his shoulder blades. “Are you squeamish?”
The dancers’ toenails used to fall off, revealing pinkish-green stamps underneath.
“One thing I’m not,” Julie says to the vet. She pays the bill and leaves his office.
But she can only hold on to the cat for one more day. Nureyev’s fur has started to fall out, he can no longer walk. She cries, blows her nose, picks up the phone. “In the end, I can’t watch him suffer anymore,” she explains.
In the office, the nurse holds Nureyev and Julie strokes his head. The vet brings a sliver of a needle toward the cat’s right foreleg.
Julie stops breathing at the exact moment Nureyev goes still. She is shocked by how little time there is between the injection and his death. The vet leaves her alone with him, and she runs her index finger along his side and his bony back. For what must be a long time, she stands next to Nureyev on the clinic table, eventually sensing his body stiffen. The fur under her fingers suddenly belongs to a taxidermist’s model: his torso a cage of something long-ago stuffed.
How quickly a decision is made, thinks Julie. How rapidly things are lost.
Unlike Wilson, Akash does not carry a satellite phone; it would interfere with his immersion in the expedition. Base camp is his last chance to talk to Julie until after the assault.
Calling her creates a sense of intrusion; she is imposing herself into his aspirations. She has no idea what he’s feeling right now. The way his colon is wrecked. His gathering sense of focus. His vision of himself standing on the mountain’s peak. She can’t understand his addiction to success. At this point, nothing can persuade him to give up this expedition.
She leaps from one worry to another and back. “Do you know anyone there?”
He too repeats himself. “Everyone’s alone. Look at Herzog. Simpson. Everyone.”
It feels as if another Akash is speaking. He recognizes this other man, who tries to justify his longing to be alone. At the same time, he trembles with the desire to hold Julie, to smell her neck.
“I’ll be okay,” he says, his voice echoing, doubling itself through Nepal’s telecommunications.
When Akash calls her from base camp, it takes Julie a minute or two to connect his voice to the person she knows, and for her to resume the intimacy of their relationship. It is always like this when they haven’t seen each other for a period of time.
She won’t tell him about Nureyev. It’s too fresh, and she can’t bear what will surely be his quick acceptance of her cat’s death.
“How’s the guide? Do you know anyone there? I kind of wish Singleton were with you.” She doesn’t like Singleton, but in her absence, Singleton’s presence would be comforting. As if he could prevent Akash from hurting himself, or doing something stupid.
The phone line stutters and his sentences are spliced. “One…Herzog...One.”
She guesses what he’s saying, about everyone being alone. “I’ve always hated that.”
That week, in dance class, Melissa barely makes an effort. Her movements seem to parody themselves. Only once is she gripped by the dance and forgets that she is supposed to be angry with Julie. When Julie asks the accompanist to stop playing, Melissa looks bewildered, then glares at her teacher.
For God’s sake, thinks Julie. Let’s put things into perspective. Your partner is not on a mountain. Your pet is not dead. Your loves are not disappearing. “Girls, if you can’t concentrate, think hard about why you’re here.” She is astonished to hear an echo of the old George Brown principal’s voice in her own.
Julie remembers the day she was called into the principal’s office and was told she could not stay in the program. The principal, Angelina, seemed relieved,
as if she had just struck Julie off a list of her competitors.
Akash’s team is having dinner in the mess tent. At the end of one of the long foldout tables, the Utah businessman talks with another climber. The WW, as Akash has come to think of him, is a large guy with sand-brown hair. He wears an army-green vest with eight pockets, from which he has, at various times, pulled out two kinds of Swiss army knives, a lighter, a ballpoint pen, and a small notebook, on which he takes careful notes. “For my kids,” he says. “Hopefully not for posterity, right?” His laugh booms. Then he addresses the group at the table, telling them about his training. “I ran every day with twelve kilograms on my back. Cross-trainer, rowing, biking. Then my trainer would say, ‘It’s time to start!’ All that other stuff, it was only the warm-up!” He leans toward them. “My wife got fed up.”
The WW, Akash thinks, probably got his vest at Tilleys. Yet he feels some respect for him growing. Their training is almost identical. And, like the American man’s wife, Julie had pressured Akash about the time he was committing to the climb. By January, when he was running through the snow, she had started asking him whether he really needed to run “every single day.”
Wilson approaches the table. “Ready for day one?”
“About time,” says the Utah businessman.
“Take it easy. We’ll get you up there but you have to listen to me.” He looks around. “Goes for all of you.”
He looks nervous; his business depends on ensuring everyone’s safety. But people know what they’re getting into. Everybody talks. Everybody reads the biographies of old mountaineers, the blogs of climbers whose teammates didn’t make it.
Akash would rather give up mountaineering than become a guide. It’s hard enough to get yourself up and down in one piece without worrying about someone else. The day of Akash’s first summit, on Athabasca’s peak, he and Singleton had stood under a layer of cloud puffs. The afternoon’s light illuminated Singleton’s face, its recently reddened skin, and its grey-stubbled chin. At the thought his mentor was getting old, Akash felt sorry. He also thought about being on his own, of being alone in conquering other peaks, and felt a faint throb of triumph.