Kill Me

by Stephen White

  And I did. The first couple of runs made the entire long journey to Canada worthwhile. Fresh, virgin powder tracks—at times deep enough to tickle my nipples—squeezed between unforgiving rocks leading to almost vertical chutes, cornices, and big air. Lots and lots of thin air everywhere there wasn’t forbidding rock or welcoming snow.

  Once we’d crossed over timberline on the second run, we gathered together on a narrow ridge to select the next drop, the one we’d take into the forest for our first true run into the trees.

  A phone rang.

  Noticing a theme here?

  Everybody laughed at the incongruity of the sound. If there is one place that you don’t expect to hear a phone ring, it’s on the side of a mountain in the Bugaboos. One by one, each of my friends looked at me.

  Why? I was the designated big shot in the group. I was the guy with the plane, the one who got the calls that couldn’t wait.

  But the ringing phone wasn’t mine. No “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

  Grant Jacobs sheepishly slid his daypack off his shoulders and pulled a bulky black receiver out of a zippered compartment on the side. “Satellite phone,” he said apologetically. “Callie’s been sick. I promised Ginny I’d carry it.”

  Groans and laughter all around. I had the camera in my hand, so I took some footage of Grant and his phone to embarrass him with at the Memorial Day–weekend party. Then I led the rest of the group a little ways ahead along the ridge to scout out a route down into the woods. Grant caught up with us a few minutes later. His dark face was the color of freshly poured concrete.

  “Grant, is Callie okay?” I asked.

  “Callie’s fine. Her fever’s down. That was Ginny. It’s … Antonio. Marilyn just called her.”

  Antonio, a ridiculously handsome native-born Roman, was the lawyer friend who’d chosen scuba diving in Belize over heli-skiing in the Bugaboos. Antonio was the trusts-and-estates guy who could always make me laugh. Marilyn was Antonio’s wife.

  “What is it?” someone asked Grant.

  I felt as though I already knew. Not the details, but the truth. A pit formed in my stomach.

  Grant said, “He got caught in a cave. Something happened with his equipment. His BC, his regulator—something. She wasn’t sure. Then he … banged his head on a rock, some coral. Marilyn doesn’t really know the details. But it’s bad. It’s … bad.”

  I could tell from Grant’s robotic recitation that whatever had happened was much worse than the simple facts. “Is Antonio dead?” I asked.

  “He’s unconscious. His EEG looks like … crap. They were down pretty deep, apparently—a hundred and ten feet, something like that. He hit his head, he had the equipment problem, he was so out of it they couldn’t get him to take his spare air. They rushed him up to the surface. He swallowed a lot of water before they got him to the boat.”

  Someone—one of the divers in the group—asked, “Are you saying they did an emergency ascent? They didn’t do a decompression stop? How long were they down before the accident?”

  If Antonio had been down at that depth for any length of time at all, he absolutely had to do a gradual return to the surface with an interval stop to squeeze the accumulated nitrogen out of his body before he surfaced.

  Grant wasn’t a diver. He wouldn’t know about the necessity for decompression stops. He shook his head. “Marilyn didn’t say anything about that. Is that important? Is it? What does that mean?”

  Without a decompression stop, along with all of his injuries, Antonio might have suffered the horrors, and dangers, of decompression sickness. The bends.

  “How long was he down … after the accident?” I asked, dreading the answer. I left two words—without oxygen —unsaid.

  “Five or six minutes after the accident, they think. Marilyn told Ginny she thought they were guessing. But it took them another minute or two to get him on the dive boat to start CPR and finally get him breathing.” Grant could barely get the details of the story out of his mouth. Finally, he added, disbelieving, “He’s barely alive. Jesus Christ, Antonio almost drowned.”

  “No,” I said with disgust. “I think you have that wrong, Grant.”

  The picture I had in my head was of a vegetized version of my friend. He would have been flown by a chopper—to keep him as close to sea level as possible—to a facility with a hyperbaric chamber, a tiny tubular cocoon pressurized with pure oxygen. Coarse white sheets and too many plastic tubes, the hiss/whirr of a ventilator. Multiple IV pumps, gurgling drains. Monitors that told too much, and way too little.

  “Antonio definitely drowned,” I said. “It sounds like he was almost resuscitated.”

  After the news about Antonio’s tragedy, on another day in the mountains—a day nearer my Ridgway home with us doing chin-high bumps or floating on waist-high powder through the spindly white aspen trunks at Telluride—we would have found our way down some safe, groomed cruising runs while cutting gentle S-turns in rough formation, descending methodically to the base area, intent on rushing home to hold Marilyn’s hand. But we were in the middle of the Bugaboos in the Canadian Rockies wilderness on the border between British Columbia and Alberta, only halfway to the rendezvous with the helicopter that was our only way back to civilization.

  Jimmy Lee was a good friend whom I’d first met through Thea, my wife, on our wedding day. He had been attending my nuptials as the date of Thea’s maid of honor. Jimmy was a law graduate of Boalt, in Berkeley, but had worked in the reinsurance business as long as I’d known him. He traveled for work almost as much as I did, and he traveled for adventure almost as much as I did.

  He said, “We have to ski out of here, guys. We can’t get distracted by Antonio’s situation, not yet. We keep our heads on straight, we do this right, we’ll be back home later tonight. For right now? The helicopter is due to meet us in thirty-five minutes. Three, five. We need to get down to it, and we need to get down to it in one piece. To do that, we need to keep some focus. Steady. Aggressive, but not rushed. The hurried-er we go, the behind-er we’ll get.”

  Jimmy was right, of course. He usually was. If our gang were a Mafia family and not a group of successful, middle-aged businessmen/ weekend athletes, Jimmy would be consigliere.

  Would I be the don? Probably, but not happily.

  I liked being in control more than I liked being the leader. In business I’d always seen myself emulating the young Steven Jobs, the one who founded Apple, not the older Steven Jobs, the one who came back to run it. Character-wise, I thought I had more in common with James Caan’s Sonny than I did with Marlon Brando’s Vito.

  I was capable of leadership, but it wasn’t my favorite thing. If someone else could run things well—“well” meaning in a manner that didn’t interfere with my interests or my freedom—I let them.

  My balance swayed and I felt the horizon jiggle side to side as I pulled my goggles down onto my eyes and cleared the pressure from my ears. I lost a moment wondering if my tears for Antonio would cause the inside of the lenses to fog before I skated down the flat ridge, pulling ahead of the group. I hoped my friends were thinking that I was scouting out the best path to take down into the trees; I knew I was creating some space to try to contain my grief.

  “How does this look?” I asked Jimmy a minute later as he pulled up behind me. I’d stopped on a snow-covered outcropping of jagged Bugaboo granite. Jimmy was slightly uphill from me and he was gazing past me at a narrow chute that funneled down about a quarter of a mile into a forest that was treed to just the right density for great wilderness skiing.

  The presence of two good-sized evergreens at the bottom of the chute was a reliable indication that this long narrow ribbon wasn’t traditional avalanche terrain. Frequent avalanches would have prevented the trees from ever getting to that size. The snow that was exposed in the narrows appeared crusty from the sun; farther down into the woods it looked invitingly deep and completely untracked.

  On a day that I hadn’t just learned that one of my dear friends was nea
r death, I would have been ecstatic about finding this spot and doing this run and being the first in our group to drop into the long ribbon of soft white down between those trees.

  That day, with Antonio’s situation so serious, it was just a good path across town.

  “It looks fine,” Jimmy said in response to my question. “Perfect. We can start over there.” He pointed to a spot nearer the trees where the initial drop down onto the chute was only fifteen feet as compared to the twenty-five or so it would be if we took off from the outcropping where we were standing. “Hey, guys,” he called back over his shoulder. “Over this way. Let’s keep moving. Come on, we have to get going.”

  Just then the horizon jiggled again. But this time, I heard a sharp cra-ack and the shelf below my feet disappeared so fast that I felt as though I was suspended in the air like a character in a cartoon. The balcony on which I’d been standing hadn’t been snow-covered Bugaboo granite at all—it had been a simple cornice of snow and ice, and faith.

  Bad faith, it turned out.

  The cornice had given way, as ice cornices inevitably do, its wintry debris preceding me down the chute, and suddenly I was airborne. My arms flew to the sky to grab for a handhold on what turned out to be nothing, my legs flailed to reach for the security of the snow-covered terrain far below.

  I’d like to think that if you put me on that cornice ten times, and if it snapped free unexpectedly ten times, seven or eight times out of the ten I would somehow find a way to come down onto the steep slope below in some position that had some resemblance to vertical, and I would manage by luck or by skill to dig in an edge just a tiny bit, just enough to get the smidgeon of control I’d need to regain my balance and bring myself to a stop.

  Later that night, I’d end up telling the story of my miraculous recovery from the treacherous fall. I’d tell it once, twice, five times as I drank red wine or cognac and my audience drank whatever it was they were drinking. The perilous drop I’d survived from the cornice to the slope would probably grow gradually from twenty-five feet to thirty to thirty-five.

  That’s what I’d like to think.

  But that time wasn’t one of the seven or eight and I didn’t come down anywhere close to vertical, and when gravity completed its thing and the ground rushed up to find me, I didn’t manage to get any control with the edge of a ski. What happened instead was that I was thrown too far backward as I fell and came down on the tail of my left ski. From that precarious position all hope of recovery was lost, and I began to careen and bounce down the mountain not like a freestyle skier, but like a child’s jack tossed carelessly onto a playground slide.

  The binding on my left ski released with the initial impact, and my right ski, too, popped off obediently as I came back down after the completion of my first full rotation in the air. My poles, tethered lightly to my wrists, flailed wildly as I bounced high off the windswept snow. My mind struggled to sort through the sparse details and the geography and the rushed geometry of my predicament. Somehow, with each rotation, and with each fresh downhill exposure, my eyes managed to lock onto those two trees that were looming large at the bottom of the chute. Right from the start, they seemed to pose the greatest danger.

  Or at least the first, greatest danger.

  Up above me—high above me—I could hear Jimmy Lee scream my name.

  Once, twice, three times, he called me. Each sounded louder than the time before, as though if he called me loudly enough, or persistently enough, I would just stop this foolishness and roll back up that Canadian hill.

  The fact that Jimmy was screaming at me meant that he hadn’t fallen with me, though.

  As my heels went flying back over my head, I thought, Well, that’s good .

  SIX

  I tucked and tried to roll after that first spread-eagle spin but soon discovered the universal truth that bowling ball–shaped objects bounce downhill much faster than do mannequin-shaped objects. In my current predicament, speed, obviously, was not my friend.

  Tumbling out of control down a mountainside didn’t have the same sense of inevitability as that frozen-in-time sensation I’ve experienced at intervals in my life while awaiting the impact of an imminent traffic accident. Each downhill revolution was teaching me fresh lessons about my dilemma, and every few milliseconds I found myself recalculating the trajectory that was carrying me—inexorably? I wasn’t quite convinced—toward those two damn trees that were standing sentry like gateposts to heaven, or hell, at the point where the woods began at the bottom of the chute.

  Since I had the camera in my daypack, there would be no video to confirm for me what really happened when I reached the convergence at the end of the funnel, but Jimmy told me later that after some uncountable number of revolutions I eventually bounced high off an incline that was composed of a fallen tree topped with a thick cushion of snow. That mogul-like obstacle was about five yards in front of the trees. Flying again, I caught spectacular air—“hospital air,” Jimmy always called it—and sliced through a long bough about halfway up the tree on my left. I grazed the branch first with my left hand and wrist before I felt a calf-size pipe whip hard across my abdomen. After that brief contact, which flipped me from headfirst to feetfirst and back again, my momentum carried me beyond the two deadly evergreen obstacles. I continued my rotation in space until I came to a thudding, spread-eagled, facedown plop in the waist-deep powder just beyond the two trees.

  My helmeted head was resting no more than eighteen inches from the fat trunk of tree number three.

  My friends, phenomenal skiers all, arrived at my side within seconds and were digging me out of my powder grave before I’d even begun to process the reality of what had just happened. I suspected I wasn’t dead because I could hear Grant on his satellite phone, arguing with someone about how to get me immediate medical care. And I could hear Jimmy Lee: He was shouting at me not to move.

  Not to move.

  I was so bereft of air that I wasn’t even able to spit out the words to tell him that I didn’t think I could.

  The possibility that I couldn’t move terrified me. Oddly, it horrified me much more than the possibility that I was about to die, because at that moment I also seemed to be unable to find a way to suck oxygen into my lungs. The terror of paralysis was much worse than the sudden panic I’d experienced when the cornice collapsed under my feet, much worse than anything I’d felt as I’d been lolloping down the mountain totally fucking out of control.

  My friends argued among themselves for what seemed like most of a month while, avalanche shovels in hand, they continued to dig frantically around me. Jimmy finally managed to forge a consensus that lifting me out of my hole was a medically risky option. They focused first on getting a wide trench open in front of my face so that I could have unfettered access to some of the Bugaboos’s thin air. They were motivated and efficient; it didn’t take long for them to remove enough Canadian powder that a depression had been leveled out all around me to about the same depth as my body. From my awkward vantage, they looked like a crew of arctic gravediggers feverishly trying to reverse a mistaken internment.

  Jimmy dropped down into the newly dug pit, put his lips close to my helmet, and said, “Hey, buddy, you there?”

  I wasn’t sure I could talk, but I blew some snow away from my lips to prove I could at least do that.

  “Good, good, you can hear me. That’s great. Can you move? I don’t want you to, but I’d like to know if you can. Try the fingers on your left hand. Just wiggle them for me, can you do that?”

  He had no way to know that my left hand was the one I’d tried to use to stop the tree. And failed. The tree was still standing. I wasn’t.

  I felt the pressure of Jimmy’s hand on my glove. Instantly, I also felt a bolt of pain shiver up my arm and down into my fingers.

  That was good. I had enough of my wits about me to come to the conclusion that pain was good.

  I did try to respond to his touch. I tried. Nothing happened. I tried once mor
e. Nothing happened that time either. I wanted to tell him to check my right hand, that it hadn’t just gone ten rounds with a tree.

  But I still couldn’t talk.

  So I blew some snow again. My parents had taught me that if I ran into something in life that I couldn’t do, I should always do something I could.

  Well, apparently I could blow snow.

  One of my other friends, not Jimmy, muttered, “Holy shit. I can’t believe this. First Antonio, and now …”

  I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to hear the words that had been muttered, but I did.

  My ears were fine.

  That’s good, I thought again. I can hear. I’m such a damn optimist.

  “Help me up,” I said, surprising everyone, including myself.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Jimmy replied, as though I were a spirited horse trying to break out of the corral. “Have to be careful.”

  “Help me up,” I said. “I just had the wind knocked out of me. Get me up.”

  Jimmy said, “We’re not going to help you. You need to stay still until we figure out what you’ve broken, what you’ve hurt. Don’t make things worse for yourself, come on. Listen to me now. Don’t be stubborn.”

  I thought about Jimmy’s counsel for about the same amount of time it had taken the cornice to disappear and me to go topsy-turvy down those few hundred yards of crusty ice chute.

  Then I stood up. “There,” I said. “See?”

  My parsimonious, yet dramatic, soliloquy would have had a much more profound impact on my friends had I not immediately collapsed back down onto the snow like a marionette after someone had snipped its strings.

  SEVEN

  It turned out that the collapse was a momentary setback. Though less impressive, my next move was more reasonable; I raised myself to a sitting position, elbows on my knees. My friends huddled together in a semicircle in front of me, as though they were waiting for me to draw the next play in the snow and tell them which one of them was going long.