by Jeff Long
Ochs fell over the woman’s legs. He bellowed and raised up. His nose was mashed to one side. Blood sopped his whiskers and fanned across the front of his parka. Then a look of puzzlement replaced his rage.
Nathan Lee looked around.
Rinchen had vanished.
Nathan Lee leaned over the edge. “No,” he whispered.
Far below, Rinchen was careening down the slope. A leg broke backward, then an arm, flapping as if the bone had been taken out. Nathan Lee couldn’t take his eyes away. He was sure the broken puppet doll would go the distance, a vertical half mile. But four hundred feet down, Rinchen tangled in the handline. The pink rope cinched around his broken leg and he whipped to a savage halt. The long rope jerked and gave a bowstring twang. There he dangled.
Ochs peeked over the rim. Beneath the sunburn scabs and blood, his face was rigid with terror. “You did the right thing,” he gasped.
“What?” said Nathan Lee.
“He was trying to kill me.”
“He was trying to stop you.”
“He’s dead,” Ochs said.
But Rinchen wasn’t. That was the terrible thing. The man moved. He lifted his head. He raised an arm, then went limp again.
Nathan Lee hooked his pack with one hand.
“Now what?” said Ochs.
“He’s still alive.”
Rinchen thrashed briefly on the stretched line, then lapsed to stillness again.
“You killed him,” said Ochs. “We can’t change that.”
Nathan Lee heard the cunning at work. He felt a pull deep in his bowels. “The man fell,” he said more evenly.
“Sure,” said Ochs.
“It was an accident. You know that.”
“No one will ever miss him. Why would I tell anyone?”
Nathan Lee grew alarmed. Ochs was blackmailing him. He steadied himself. Time for all that later. There was an injured man down there. Nathan Lee balanced on the edge, peering over. “I’m going down after him.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’re done,” said Nathan Lee.
“How’s that.”
“I’m out. Leave me out, or I’ll expose you. Do you hear? It’s over.”
Softly, Ochs said, “I hear.”
Nathan Lee didn’t register the cleaving in Ochs’s voice. He barely felt the slight touch at his back. Suddenly he was just falling.
It was not like other times when he had fallen. On a cliff you dropped through open space, maybe barking the stone a time or two before the rope caught you. There was no rope this time, no free fall. The slope was pitched at an angle. Rocky slash and patches of ice flashed up at him.
Nathan Lee slid. He hit an outcrop, slowed, reached for purchase, then pinballed against a second outcrop and accelerated on a slide of ice. His only hope was to keep his feet under him, to stay face outward. It was like trying to run at terminal velocity. He tried grabbing for holds, and they only dissolved in his hands. He cartwheeled. A gout of his own blood spun in the air.
He felt the blows at a distance. He wondered how long it would take to lose consciousness, then realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. Those deafening cracks of thunder weren’t thunder, but his helmet clashing and banging. He was going to be a witness to his own execution.
The pain started coming through. It wasn’t specific to any one limb or rib, more like bolts of lightning filling his skin. In his mind, he saw himself breaking to pieces like Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses, all the king’s men.…He heard a voice. It came through the helter-skelter. Grace. Singsong. Sweet dreams. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
He reached a long funnel of ice. This time, instead of clawing frantically at the ice, he used it. With a palm here, a heel there, he could steer himself, however minutely.
Off to the left, bare instants lower, lay a band of grey rock. Beyond that, the slope fell away. There were no more chances after this.
He gathered his strength. He pushed with his hands and catapulted face out toward the dike of scree. He flew, arms wide, sacrificing himself to wild luck.
The rocks struck hard. They tore at him. He opened himself to their talons. Hold me, he prayed.
They did. He came to a halt.
In the sudden tranquility, arms wide, he felt pinned to the mountain. His ears rang. He looked, and the hungry glacier still waited below, its jaws wide open.
HE PASSED OUT and revived in waves. The earth seemed to rise and sink beneath his back. He didn’t move.
Nathan Lee wasn’t quite sure if he was alive or not. There were reasons to believe he might have died. For one thing, the limbo sky was dropping ash. Squinting, he realized they were snowflakes.
Next time Nathan Lee opened his eyes, he saw Ochs in the long distance, descending the switchbacks at a brisk pace. He’d gotten himself to safer ground and was practically trotting through the storm. Nathan Lee didn’t call out. The man had already done his best to kill him once. After a few minutes Ochs vanished down a rise.
The horizon dimmed. Rock and ice, heaven and earth, everything was merging into one. The snow began to stick. He opened his mouth and it seared his tongue. The melt ran from his face like teardrops. Body heat, he comprehended. He was alive.
At last he made the effort to raise one arm. It lifted slowly. The glove had skinned off. Some of the skin, too. He brought it closer to his face and stared at the fingers, flexing them. Bit by bit, he assembled himself. He struggled to sit. He freed the strap under his chin and the red helmet was scraped and battered, with a crack running from brim to crown.
His left leg was bent and bulging at the knee.
Nathan Lee groped at his leg. He tried pressing it straight. Each time the pain drove him back. He cowered from his own body. Finally he lodged his foot between two rocks and pulled. The joint gave a meaty pop. The knee came together again with a scream.
WHEN HE OPENED his eyes again, night was coming on. Snow was falling in thick curtains. Lightning slid overhead like electric serpents. Nathan Lee dozed off.
His next awareness was of the sound of snow hissing off plastic. A few minutes later, the sound repeated, unmistakable, the slither of snow shedding off a tent wall. For a moment, he thought Ochs must have repented and come and carried him down the mountain and laid him in their tent. Then he saw that he was still stranded upon his dike of stone. He was very cold.
Off to one side, a ghostly shape moved in the gloom. Snow hissed off fabric again. He pulled himself closer to the thing. It was the body bag, still partly inflated, tethered here by a few ounces of snow. It looked ready, in a moment, to fly off again. Nathan Lee snatched at it.
Nauseated and shocked, with fingers like thumbs, he pawed at the zipper and it slid open. With the last of his strength, he crawled onto the plastic and laid it over his legs. He zipped the bag closed, leaving a hole for air.
* * *
HE WOKE GASPING for air and blind in the darkness. A monster was crouching on his chest tearing him with claws. In his panic, he had no memory, no idea where he was or what had happened. He thrashed. His hand caught on the zipper hole and he ripped it open. He flailed at the covering of snow, and there it was, open air. Light. He filled his lungs.
He dug wider through the covering of snow and elbowed his way to sitting. Blinking, he found himself in a netherworld pitched at a tilt and paved with leaden snow. The sky was greasy. There was no color. None. Mountains hulked on every side. Their summits ran into void. The light was so flat he felt blind. His watch read one. It was after noon of the next day.
He sat there with his arms resting on top of the ruptured snow. His head pounded. His throat was raw. The fingers of one hand were fat as sausages. He tried moving his leg under the blanket of snow, and the pain nailed him flat.
He quit testing things. He began weeping for himself. Remembering a snapshot of Grace in his shirt pocket, he fumbled inside his jacket. Most of his fingernails had pulled away. It was clumsy work. He got the photo from his pocket.
Suddenly the world took on color. She was standing in a field of yellow sunflowers and wearing tights with red hearts. The sky was clear blue. The day came flooding back.
He’d asked her to smile. As usual Grace had chosen grave intensity. Her slate blue eyes seemed to stare right through the lens. There was no mistaking her heart.
Nathan Lee brought the picture closer. He swiped at his tears. He touched her face, then looked down at himself. Was this the legacy he was going to leave his daughter? Half buried, baked black, a jack-in-the-box mummy. All because he’d quit?
He carefully returned the photo to his pocket, then began chopping himself loose, furious at his self-pity. One handful at a time, he excavated himself. It took two hours to open the tomb and roll himself out.
His knee had swollen to the size of his thigh. Nathan Lee started crawling. He arranged the body bag under his bad leg as a sort of sled, and pulled himself along.
Around three, Nathan Lee reached flatter terrain. By holding the knee with both hands, he could manage a sort of shuffle.
He found the gully leading down to camp and came within sight of the yak herders’ stone windbreak. He armed himself with a rock and made himself resolute. If Ochs threatened him, he would break the man’s leg. Then they could both exit as cripples. If that didn’t stop him, Nathan Lee was ready to brain the bastard.
He reached the windbreak. He peered over the wall.
Their blue tent was gone.
IT TOOK HIM five days to cross a half-day moraine. Nathan Lee found a porter’s stick among the boulders, and that became his crutch. Even as hunger whittled him down, his knee swelled larger. The first tide of monsoon weather receded, and the snow melted, providing him thousands of rivulets to drink from. The threads of glacier water braided together to form a stream, then a small torrent.
The sterile, bony moraine gave way to a valley with wildflowers. He covered six miles in three days, steadily losing altitude. The air grew rich. Rhododendrons glistened among pines. He sampled the green leaves and strips of pine meat. It made him sick. He filled his stomach with milky glacier water. Despite his famine, Nathan Lee felt more and more lucid. That was a bad sign, he knew. The visionary’s conceit.
On the next day, the hermits’ cave appeared on a hillside. It was empty, of course. Ochs had looted their cache, resting and gorging on their food before heading on. The one thing Ochs had not taken was a five-pound sack of tsampa. Early on, he’d declared Rinchen’s roasted barley meal inedible. Mixed with water, it formed a sticky brown paste. Nathan Lee took it like a sacrament.
One more pass loomed. Shipton Pass was less than 18,000 feet high, but Nathan Lee was weak and his head ached all the time. It took a week to climb through the cold fog, another week to descend. He could judge the altitude when the leeches began bleeding him. Hirudinea suvanjieff did not live above 7500 feet. They would reach out from the leaves and branches like slick black fingers. Every half hour he would scrape them from his ankles and arms and eat a few, tasting his own blood.
On the last day of July, he reached a chain footbridge swaying over the raging Arun River. Makalu was the headwaters of the Arun. The beginning was the end.
He came to a village called Khandbari. The street was vacant. It turned out they were busy killing a rabid dog, which was done by setting out big leaves with poisoned rice and then everyone waiting indoors. As he limped through the middle of the village, people came to their windows. There was no question he made a strange sight with his beard and wood crutch and rain jacket made of a body bag. Nathan Lee was so starved he picked up one of the leaves of rice, but they cried out to him.
He sat on a bench in front of a small schoolhouse. After a while, two policemen in brown uniforms and Nikes approached. The younger man looked frightened. At first, Nathan Lee thought he was scared of the lurking dog. Then he realized he was the source of the man’s fear.
The older policeman was armed with a small bamboo baton tucked under one arm. “Please show me your passport, sir,” he said.
“Gone,” rasped Nathan Lee.
“Are you the gentleman, then, from Makalu?”
They knew him. Suddenly the last of his strength drained away. Ochs had come through here, of course. He had started weaving his cover story, and it was clearly one of his own survival from great violence and deception. Nathan Lee was too tired to try to repair the damage. “May I have some chai, please?” he asked.
The interview was interrupted while the younger policeman scampered off for tea. It took several minutes. While he was gone, Nathan Lee asked, “What happens now?”
The officer said, “Everything will be fine, sir.”
The young policeman returned with a thick glass of milk tea dosed with sugar. In his other hand was an ancient set of shackles.
Nathan Lee accepted the tea. He calmly watched them cuff his good ankle. None of this seemed real. None of it. He had a daughter back home. He was not a bad man. They would straighten matters out. Everything will be fine.
Out of kindness, they didn’t shackle his swollen leg. The chain and extra cuff lay on the ground, unnecessary. It was plain for all to see that the beast had been captured.
4
Sunday
KERKYRA, CORFU
After mass, the faithful milled in the square, chatting with their neighbors, enjoying their last quiet hour before the tourists arrived. Easter was over. The mummified body of the island’s saint had been paraded through the streets and returned to his church. In the town museum, a 2,600-year-old statue of the Gorgon Medusa with serpents for hair had been dusted off. The money season was about to begin.
In forty minutes the ferry from Italy would arrive at the New Port. The first of hordes of pasty white British and Germans would descend into their midst. Before the summer was out, the visitors would number tens of thousands, some on their way to other islands, many just planting themselves on Corfu’s beaches. All had to pass through the island’s capital. The town was ready. The rembetis had tuned their bouzoukis and electric guitars. Cafes and bars were well stocked. The prostitutes and taxi drivers and hotel keepers could not wait.
It was a pretty morning. The sun was warm, the sea blue. The hills above town were bright green with basil and rosemary and thyme and oregano seedlings. Drugged with sun, sleepy cats watched from windows and flower boxes.
Suddenly there was a shout from up the narrow street, then another, a bark of outrage. “Slow down, fool,” someone yelled.
A wild-eyed young man came careening down the winding lane, scarcely able to control his bicycle. A big fisherman reached out and caught him before he ran into the Sunday crowd. The bike struck a wall. He dropped the young man onto his seat on the cobbles.
“Ah, it’s only Spyros,” people said. Half the men on Corfu were named Spyros after their saint, the mummy Spyridon. But something in the inflection distinguished this one. He was Spyros the simpleton, a laborer on a farm.
“Madonna, Madonna.” Tears poured down his face. He was dressed in coarse, patched trousers and a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt.
“What is it this time, Spyros?”
Spyros scrambled to his feet. He began shouting about an apparition.
“Hush,” a woman said, “you’ll scare the children.”
But he went on. An angel had appeared to him in the hills above town. “The Virgin herself.”
A local tough strutted up. He shoved Spyros. “Don’t be sacrilegious,” he said.
The big fisherman pushed the tough away. “Leave him alone. He’s simple,” he said.
“Then shut him up. He’ll drive the tourists away.”
“She is coming,” said Spyros. He cast fearful glances up the street. Others looked and saw nothing.
Someone threw a small stone at him as if driving away a dog. Another stone followed. People clucked or hissed or spit.
“She comes from heaven,” said the young man.
“Go back to your goats, Spyros.”
“I never trusted
his family,” a man said. “Look at those blue eyes. He comes from the Turks.”
Only slowly did they become aware of her. She appeared from the lane’s deep shadows and descended into view. Perhaps she had followed the simpleton downhill. Perhaps she was drawn by the church bells. Maybe she had simply obeyed gravity on her trek to the sea.
“Dear Christ in Heaven,” someone whispered.
She moved on two legs, but did not look human. Naked as a ghost, she seemed made of glass. From a distance, as they squinted into the shadows, her body seemed to flicker in and out of reality. She drew nearer, but haltingly, with the pace of a sleepwalker.
As she passed, Spyros put his hands to his head and cowered against the wall. The fisherman stared in disbelief, then took off his cap uncertainly. He crossed himself. She swayed past them without a glance.
“What is this?” someone murmured. The square opened to her. The crowd pressed back against the buildings. Who could she be? Where did she come from?
She entered the sunlight and became even more fantastic. For her skin was nearly transparent. Her veins showed clearly. Backlit by the sun, her organs were a silhouetted mass. One could see the limned bones.
And yet she was not a gruesome sight. Quite the opposite. Despite her condition, the woman’s beauty was evident. Her hair was long. Except for the transparent roots, it was black and tangled with flowers and vegetation. Her figure was voluptuous, with luminous breasts and flared hips.
She came to a halt. Some noticed her lower legs and feet. The skin was torn. Shepherds’ dogs had bitten her. Thorns stuck from the edges of her soles. Even if this transfigured being had descended from the heavens, it was clear she had also walked a long distance.
It might have been the smell of the sea which stopped her, or the warmth of the sun or the flatness of the square, the fact that she was no longer being pulled downhill. Or it could have been the sight of the church. No one knew why she stopped in their midst. She had a slight cough.