This One Because of the Dead

by Laure Baudot

  One of Akash’s teammates is a petite Indo-Canadian woman with a dark-brown, pixie haircut. Like Akash, she is in her late twenties; they are the youngest team members. A necklace, a gold reproduction of Mount Everest, rests on her breastbone.

  Back in Kathmandu, she introduced herself as Ronda. “Raveena, actually. I bullied my parents into calling me Ronda.”

  “‘Beauty of the Sun’?”

  She stared. “Did you go to Gurdwara on Sundays?”

  “Plus Punjabi school.”

  They were in a Middle Eastern restaurant, Ronda shovelling down lentil soup faster than he did. Between mouthfuls she told him about her climbing history, how she hustled Indian businesses in order to pay for the expedition.

  “Not too many Indian ladies climbing mountains,” she said. “That made me highly marketable.”

  “Nicely done,” he said. “Tell me again about Himachal Pradesh.” It’s a Northern Indian route she mentioned she once took, trekking from Spiti to the Ladakh valleys.

  “I felt like I was the only person on Earth.”

  “Awesome.”

  “You’re wondering how I do it, with children?” she asked. “An organized nanny.”

  He’d been asking himself who gave her the necklace.

  Julie fills her evenings with appointments — dental, hairdressing, obgyn. She goes out with colleagues from the school, invited to nip out for ice cream. Hearing the teachers speak of mortgages and complain about the disparity between the numbers of holidays in the private system versus the public sector, she feels like she’s going to die of boredom and remembers why she rarely spends time with her co-workers.

  Melissa’s father calls her at home. Julie is used to students’ parents calling her; she works at a private school, and parent-teacher communication is expected. When she looks at her phone’s call display and recognizes Melissa’s family name, she is wary.

  Melissa is bored, Mr. Mackay tells her. He wonders if Julie can find something more stimulating for her, something geared to her zeal for dancing? Something that will dissuade her from wanting to leave this school, with its strong academic strain, for a ballet school? “Although,” he adds, wistfully, “I’m beginning to think it’s a losing battle.”

  Julie is touched by Mr. Mackay’s attention. He is a good man, invested in his daughter. She begins to feel bad about her refusal to let Melissa grow. She will do her best, she tells him.

  During acclimatizing forays up Everest, Akash is bowled over by Ronda. Climbing up and through the Khumbu Icefall, she finds footholds without hesitation, and takes only a second before she hauls her body up. When she reaches the ladders that are stretched over crevasses, she places her crampons squarely on each rung. Her instinct and flexibility are of a piece. He recognizes in her his own talent, an ability to see both an entire structure, as if from above, as well as its smallest topography. The skill to map a path through a maze, and the physique to carry out that vision.

  He prefers inborn talent to hard work, likes witnessing the casual way in which accomplished people wear their skill. It reminds him of when, early in his relationship with Julie, they watched an old video tape of her dancing in a school show. Julie was on a small stage, lit up by a spotlight. She appeared more muscular than the other dancers. As she leapt, her legs seemed to lift her body up by dint of sheer effort. In her bare thighs, which were the size of rugby balls, Akash saw years of training. “Look at you,” he’d said, and she laughed, called it a souvenir of youth.

  Ronda climbs fast. “I need to be speedy. In and out. No stamina.”

  It’s as though everything in her life slides away, crusts of snow rolling down an icy slope. She understands, as he does, that when she focuses on her goals, things go by the wayside.

  Julie is watching Melissa dance. She has given her music to dance solo, a piece she had choreographed herself. Over a few evenings in the school’s empty studio, Julie hustled her flabby muscles into movement and created a difficult piece for her student. It was not as hard for her as one would think; the body remembers, after all.

  Piqué, tour jetée, chassé, tour jetée. Melissa flies across the floor. When the music stops, Julie has to clear her throat before she can speak. She turns to the girls who are lounging against the studio wall, staring.

  “That, ladies, is called dancing.”

  Back home, Akash discouraged Julie from browsing for images of the bodies on Everest. “It’s morbid, what you’re doing.”

  Here, he can’t avoid them. There are so many. Mummified remains. A bit of skull, a patch of hair. The Gore-Tex horrifies him. Bright pink and stop-sign red jackets found in high-end sports stores, coats worn by housewives and alpinists alike. They speak to him of lost promises, of wealth or adventure. Here they are shrouds. He himself wears a yellow down jacket, which he will never look at in the same way again.

  After passing seven corpses, Akash stops counting. From then on, he registers bodies with only a flicker of shock.

  On the night of May fifth, they climb with intent to summit. The gap between he and Ronda grows. He likes that she’s faster than him. He’s not jealous in the way he would be, were she a man. There are words he wants to give her, words that have been flying around in his mind for weeks. Talk of love and admiration and a promise of a life lived together. He will say, “I know it’s crazy.” He will say, “We are a match.”

  He hears echoes of his grandmother’s talk of marriage being a joining of two souls. Although he’s not religious, this idea comforts him. He had always felt cossetted, sheltered by the two principal women in his life, his mother and grandmother — now he feels in himself something that is in step with them.

  After ten hours, Akash reaches the Hillary Step, the sheer rock face just before the summit. There is a ladder to climb the Step, and people on each side wait their turn. There are lineups in each direction. He recognizes Ronda by her lime-green jacket. She’s coming toward him, stepping off the bottom step of the ladder. Behind her oxygen mask, her eyes seem angry.

  “Nice solitude, eh?” Akash pulls down his mask and whispers, chopping up the words with laboured breath.

  A smile slits her eyes.

  Akash can only imagine feeling elated. Fatigue, oxygen deprivation, and the presence of so many climbers bar the way. He stores this feeling up for later, for when they reach the base — for when they’ll be able to talk for real.

  One late evening, Julie takes the subway and a streetcar to the George Brown School of Dance. She has come deliberately late so that the classes will be over. Nevertheless, she catches a glimpse of girls filing out of one of the studios, and smells a combination of rosin, sweat, and clementines, scents so familiar that tears prickle the inside of the bridge of her nose.

  On the way to the administrative offices, she hesitates. Instead of taking a right turn, she takes a left, down a hallway, toward the old studios, the ones used by students of the non-professional program. The girls used to call these the “garbage studios” because of the nearby recycling bins, with their stench of soured chocolate milk and orange juice.

  She’s surprised to see one of the studios is equipped with perfectly respectable bars and mirrors, as well as a grand piano. It has a well-worn wooden floor, the kind no longer found in newer studios. She takes a few tentative dance steps. Plié, degagée, piqué. She tries a fouetté à demi-pointe. Even though she’s wearing blue jeans, her body remembers the motion. Her leg scissors out and in, thrusts her around and around. Her tears are flung out, dried by the speed of her spinning. The image of her long, blonde ponytail flies across all three mirrors.

  When she finally stops, it is to hear, above her galloping heart, a familiar voice coming from the doorway of the studio.

  “The mistress of fouettés,” says Angelina, a huge smile cracking her narrow face open as she stares at Julie.

  Akash waits in line for his turn on Everest
’s thirty-square-foot apex. Once the climber before him heads back toward the south ridge, Akash takes his place. He moves his oxygen mask aside so he can feel the wind on his face. He strives to experience the moment by exposing as much of himself as possible to the elements. In front of him the blue sky is darker than he expected; there are cotton ball clouds and grey-blue peaks patched with snow. At his feet, brimming over the peak, are lines of flags. Below him is a queue of waiting men and women.

  He snaps some photos of himself and the view. He’s aware he should be elated, but doesn’t feel it. How are all these people here? he asks himself. This peak belongs to me.

  Julie sits in Angelina’s office, a china teacup on the heavy oak desk in front of her.

  “I want to hear everything,” Angelina says. She looks the same, but older: her bun, now dyed reddish-brown, rides high on her head, and her huge eyes are lined with kohl that looks ghoul-like. Crows’ feet spread out from the sides of her eyes.

  They talk for an hour. Angelina is still the principal of the dance school. “Until they kick me out,” she says. Julie recognizes that old stubbornness, though it doesn’t seem as frightening as it used to be. Less like a stone wall and more like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike.

  “I felt so bad about letting you go,” says Angelina. “You tried so hard. I just thought, why go through all that if it’s not the right thing for you?”

  An old hurt, but it doesn’t devastate her in the way she expected. There is a kind of lightening. Space opens up, a parachute billowing from air underneath. Angelina was trying to save her, then, by expelling her. It is possible that what Julie mistook then for spitefulness was actually relief on her behalf.

  “But you’re happy,” Angelina says.

  Julie remembers watching Melissa dance the piece she had created and finds that she is, if not happy, then not unhappy. “Actually,” Julie leans forward. “I’m here to talk to you about a student.”

  On his way down, Akash reaches the Hillary Step again. He rubs his nose with the back of his hand, looking down to make sure both nose and hand are still there; he hasn’t been able to feel them in the last hour. A crust of blood from a nosebleed crumbles on his glove. He is colder than he has ever been in his life. Clipping into a fixed rope, he descends over the lip of the spur.

  A few metres below him, on the near-vertical slant, is a red object. The slumped figure of the Utah businessman, held in place by his clip attached to the fixed line.

  You gotta be kidding me, Akash thinks.

  On the ice below, climbers proceed down the mountain. Above him, a line of waiting men and women forms. He feels the line as something substantial, a giant hand pushing him forward. He flicks his eyes toward the Utah businessman, looking for humidity inside his mask — a telltale sign of breath — and finds none.

  Keeping the figure in his periphery, he unclips himself. The man’s coat scrapes his own as he climbs over. Akash wants to close his eyes, but can’t for fear of falling. A chasm lies on either side of them. The winds buffet his body, and he clips himself in again on the other side of the figure. He wants to get down as fast as possible, but is thwarted by the climbers below him. Akash starts to hyperventilate and, staring straight out at the white vista, tries to quiet his breathing so he doesn’t panic. Once he puts some distance between himself and other climbers, he accelerates his descent slightly: only his training prevents him from running all the way down to the next camp.

  Julie got Akash to agree to call her, forty-eight to seventy-two hours after he reaches the peak. On the day he is supposed to return to base camp, she stays home. She doesn’t know how she’ll react when she hears his voice. She could burst into tears, or she could feel a vice of rage — at times like this, she doesn’t want to be exposed to the world. She doesn’t dare leave the house.

  She scours the Internet for news and learns from Wilson’s team’s blog that his team has successfully summited and is on its way down the mountain. The ordeal is not over, she knows; many climbers die on their descent. For the next few hours she returns to the Internet, but there are no more updates.

  Akash doesn’t call.

  Twenty-four hours later, Julie calls in sick to work. She scours the Internet, refreshing and refreshing Wilson’s site. That night she sleeps on the couch, her laptop on the floor, within arm’s reach. On day three, a few lines appear on Wilson’s blog stating that the team is back at base camp. She busies herself in the house, takes a shower and applies makeup, as if by preparing herself she will behave on the call the way a girlfriend should — as someone who shores Akash against calamities. When he still hasn’t called by mid-afternoon, she pulls a frozen puri out of her freezer and puts it in the microwave, watches it turn in lazy circles.

  She is still at the table, her half-eaten puri on a small plate, when Akash’s mother calls. Her strong Punjabi accent gives Julie a rush of familiarity. “Isn’t it fabulous?” she says. She chatters about the climb, and Julie slowly comes to understand that she has heard specific details from Akash, that she has been contacted by him, that she has spoken to him.

  Julie is so confused by this knowledge that she doesn’t respond save for a few “Uh huhs.” It’s possible that his mother senses this because she asks, sympathetically, how Julie is holding up. As women they need to be okay with their men going off, she says, which strikes Julie as old-fashioned, though typical of his mother. “He has always done what he wants.”

  After they hang up, Julie continues to sit in the kitchen. The puri dries and curls at its edges. She has realized two things in the last few minutes: one, that when Akash speaks of staying in town for his family, he is really speaking of his love for his mother. Two, that one day, when he leaves, he will not return to Julie.

  Akash and Ronda are back in Kathmandu, in the same Middle Eastern restaurant, sharing a meal and drinking Tuborg. Ronda, whose stomach has not recovered from the altitude, wants soup, soup, and only soup. Akash, who has frost nip on his nose and toes, drinks to dull the pain.

  There are images he can’t shake. He sees himself unbuckling his harness from the ladder. His stiff hand undoing the clip. There is the figure of a man he can’t see clearly. He wants to give these images to someone else, to relieve him-self of them, but he’s afraid to open his mouth.

  There is a commotion in a corner of the room. Someone has entered the restaurant, and people are rising to pat him on the back.

  “Who is that?” Akash asks.

  Ronda looks over. “Didn’t you hear about the Weekend Warrior? He ran out of bottled oxygen and collapsed. That man,” she gestures with her chin, “saved his life. Gave up on the summit to unhook him from the Hillary Step and carry him down. He must be crazy strong.” They watch as a group invites the man to sit with him. “You gotta hand it to him. Everyone else passed without doing bugger-all.”

  Akash puts down his bottle, relieved for an opening, but not sure where to start. “I couldn’t see a breath.”

  Ronda stares at him.

  He says, “All those bodies. I needed to get out of there.” He’s whispering now.

  For a moment he thinks she sees his point, until she pushes her bowl away.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “Home,” she says, her eyes avoiding his, looking everywhere but at him.

  When Akash finally calls, Julie — who is trying not to believe that his silence means he is thinking of leaving her — is astonished. The call is from a regular phone. He is back in Kathmandu, and the reception is clearer than it has been for weeks.

  She tries to decide whether she wants to bring up his mother. Julie wonders what will happen if she accuses him of putting his mother before her in the hierarchy of his relationships and, as she does so, she starts a few sentences without completing them.

  Akash doesn’t notice. He’s preoccupied, speaks vaguely of the weather and his fatigue. After a m
inute, he launches into a mangled explanation of something that happened on the mountain. He mentions extreme chill, danger, and the need for quick decisions. He speaks of responsibility to oneself. He uses the second person pronoun, which confuses her more than she already is.

  She tells him to start again with his explanation. “You stepped over a person?”

  He asks her to understand why he did what he did. He is a wild animal surrounded by humans, one torn between looking for a way out, and staying because it finds that, after all, it wishes to be tamed.

  The beseeching in his voice is new to her. She is filled with desire — not sexual, but a yearning to pull him in and comfort him. Her body, which a few minutes ago was slack, tautens. She feels powerful, magnanimous. At the same time, she wonders how long the note of pleading in Akash’s voice will last, and if it will dissipate before he returns to her. She half-guesses that his appeal for help now may shame him into leaving her in the future. She tightens her grip on the phone, as if to postpone the moment when she must surrender her control over him.

  “Just come home,” she says.

  Siblings

  The black-green water lapping at the rocks lets no light in. Two girls and a boy stare down at it.

  “I’d rather not know,” says Sonya.

  “What?” Charles asks.

  “What’s below,” she says.

  Charles squints at the lake through his bangs, long despite his father’s best efforts. “This year we’ll do it. We’ll swim around the island.”

  The rough rock warms Sonya’s bare feet. The sun is a hand on her nape.

  “You think so?” asks Vee, Charles’ younger sister. She’s looking at Sonya.

  The island swim is a rite of passage for kids whose families cottage there. “I’ll get you there,” Charles tells Sonya.

  Charles made grade nine swim team last year, and Vee aims to do the same in two years. Sonya, on the other hand, hates swimming lessons and only just passed an orange badge level several years ago. While brother and sister dove for pucks in the deep end of the pool, Sonya splashed around in shallower water.