Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  Maybe his attackers’ problem is that they’re not the directors of their own lives, so they hate the few people who are.

  “Turn that way,” Amaris says. “Toward base camp. Right. In profile. I just want a couple seconds here.”

  Proud of his profile, Lawson approves of Amaris’s instruction. In his view, most men worry too much about the muscles of their torso, and especially the arms, to the neglect of their legs and also, yes, their face. In the case of the legs, this is no mere cosmetic point—not for a professional athlete. The face is another issue altogether. For one thing, it’s the part of you that’s always visible. Few factors affect appearance like the bone and muscle structure of the face. Heavy brows, a strong jawline with prominent, almost equine jaw muscles—these are secondary sexual characteristics, markers of virility. Years ago Lawson read in some magazine that men who chew gum have stronger, more dramatic jaw muscles. He’d taken up gum-chewing and over the years has left a trail of colourful chewed nuggets down the cordillera spine of the western hemisphere and high up in the Alps, the Caucasus, the Himalayas.

  As Amaris films, he works his jaw slightly and gazes out over the valley. He doesn’t forget himself for a moment, yet he isn’t immune to the beauty. He has loved the high country since childhood, when, after his mother died, his father moved them from Vancouver to Nelson, B.C., to open a brake repair shop. Lawson and his big brother Clyde—passionate amateurs who improvised their equipment or went without, relying on strength and guts—summited Mount Gimli when he was just thirteen. He’s still proud of that.

  Something nabs his eye a long way down the valley, at the toe of the glacier by the turquoise thaw-water pond beyond the terminal moraine. At this distance—a few kilometres—he can make out nothing distinct, just specks of colour amid the grey scree fields and boulders around the tarn. Slight movement.

  “All done?” he asks.

  “For now.”

  He pats his windshell pocket for the binoculars.

  “Tashi! My binoculars. In the tent.”

  “Sahib!”

  Lawson shakes his head and grins. He feels that the young Sherpa’s antiquated salute, while no doubt sincere in its desire to please and impress an admired leader, is also a touch satiric. The salute pleases him anyhow. He doubts that viewers of the documentary will catch the wink of artificiality. So he grins on, with leaderly tolerance, while in his gut a twinge of concern delves deeper. There should be no activity at the base of the glacier. The Chinese aren’t due back to correct their border until after his expedition should be done and packed up and hiked out to Tarap. Few travellers or pilgrims, he has heard, still use this high and difficult pass. Lawson wonders if another expedition could be on its way up, from the Chinese side instead, but what are the odds? Kyatruk remains unclimbed not so much because of certain technical challenges above 7,000 metres, but because it’s so remote, so expensive. He’d remortgaged his house and his failing climbing gym to underwrite this assault and it still wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t convinced one of the regulars at the gym, along with his “nephew” Zeph, who works there, to enlist as paying climbers, and if Amaris hadn’t landed two film grants. As for sponsors, the big players won’t touch him now and he has landed just one, a credit renewal company called New Future that was attracted by the theme of the climb and of the film—“redemption”—and that seems to see Lawson, disgraced but still game, as a man their ruined clientele can relate to.

  Now he gauges the possibility that a team of his rivals has launched an expedition as a direct challenge to him. A wild idea, but for a moment his scalding sense of grievance makes it plausible and also lends a grim gratification, like any mental screenplay of victimhood, yes, and vengeance—because now he sees that they’ll be so far behind on their acclimatization, they can be no real threat. His little summit team will be ready to go in three or four days, if he and Mingma can get the fixed ropes in place by then. In fact, if he had to, he could probably summit within a day or two, solo, no ropes or oxygen, as he would much prefer. But he has to get both paying climbers safely to the top, along with Amaris—Amaris above all. Her and her little camera. Getting her up there past the Lawson Wall, as he already thinks of it—that’ll be the challenge.

  “The Chinese come back?” Tashi asks, bowing his head as he presents the binoculars with both hands, a fawning courtier. (Is that a slight smile?) Amaris has followed the young Sherpa to where Lawson stands. She flips her sunglasses up onto her toque and squints into the distance. Freckles on her small, sunburned nose. Her strong chin lends a hint of aggression to her girlish face, like a skeletal assertion of will and robust sexuality. Who’d have guessed?

  Lawson slots the barrels into his eye sockets and scans the blurred landscape impatiently.

  “What is it, Sahib?”

  “Give me a second,” he snaps.

  “Oh…I see it now, Sahib.”

  Lawson figures this is a lie. He has concluded that the kid needs glasses. A fresh wave of grievance swells up in him. The best Sherpas are too expensive for him and the best climbers, or best known climbers, now shun him. Jake and Zeph are respectable rock climbers but lack high-altitude credentials. His head Sherpa is a drunk and the rest are raw teens. The team medic, cheerfully social, weirdly unserious, belongs to some outfit like Doctors Without Borders, so he’s used to working for pocket change in war zones and sweltering African clinics but knows zero about high-altitude medicine. Plus he’s brought along his daughter, with her nose ring and her snowboard—another mouth to feed.

  “I see it too,” Amaris says. “I’m getting my camera.”

  “Your camera?” Lawson says. “But this has nothing to do with the climb!”

  The rustle of her parka as she walks away. He finds his target zone and focuses. A group of people, twenty-five or thirty, filing up a rough trail over the gravel of the moraine, nearing the toe of the glacier. They’re dressed as variously as folk in a big city multicultural parade—some in bright parkas and jeans, others in layered purple robes (monks or nuns, he guesses), a few in heavy, weathered-looking coats he dimly recognizes as traditional Tibetan wear. On a man’s shoulders, a bobbing toddler. Further niggles of motion catch his eye in the unfocused valley behind the group. He adjusts the lenses. A second, smaller group leaps to clarity: Chinese border guards and soldiers armed with automatic weapons. For a moment he wonders—hopes—could the armed men be some sort of escort—maybe for pilgrims? As if. He shakes his head. This air slows the brains of even the people most used to it. It’s hard to estimate the space between the groups. Not far, though. The first Chinese trooper, or officer, has reached the shore of the tarn. Lawson refocuses on the Tibetans. He can feel the pulse in his temples and at the root of his tongue.

  “Sahib?”

  He doesn’t care much about politics, but he’s roughly aware of the situation in Tibet; one of the attractions of Kyatruk is that the border up here should be too remote for refugees. He can’t look away. He’s willing the Tibetans to hurry and escape, although escape, naturally, will bring them across the border and into his base camp, and possibly draw the Chinese with them. “Oh, fuck,” he says under his breath—“why now?” And he sees, now, that it will probably be best for the Tibetans to surrender where they are, to go back with the soldiers, before anybody gets killed.

  A brief, concise clattering beside him. He turns his head. Amaris has set up her camcorder on the tripod and stands tensed behind the lens.

  “They’re Tibetans, I think,” she says.

  “Yeah.” Lawson guesses she hasn’t seen the Chinese yet. Her camcorder’s zoom lens will lack the range of his high-power binoculars. Good thing.

  “I’m going to have to go down to base camp,” he announces. “You two stay here.”

  “I’m coming too,” she says.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mari—you’re exhausted.”

  “Wait!” she says, “there’s something else…Oh, wait…I think it’s those soldiers we saw last we
ek. What would they…?” Her voice dries up.

  He juts his jaw as he lowers the binoculars. “Right. I better just go down and make sure everything’s okay.”

  “I’m coming too,” she tells him in her hard, argumentative tone, turning her face to him, the camera still running.

  “You’ve got to rest, Mari. We’ll be going back up to Camp Two in—”

  “Wade, are you serious? You think I’m not going to go to base camp now and shoot what’s happening down there? This is what I do.”

  “But this is not your story. Look, we’ve come halfway around the world …”

  “It’s a story, Wade!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “And stop shouting all the time!”

  She flicks the camera off, unhitches it, roughly collapses the tripod.

  “But the Tibetans,” he says, trying to confine his voice, “they have children and baggage. They’ll arrest them way before they get near base camp and you’ll have made the trip down for nothing. It’ll take, like, maybe two hours…if it’s both of us.”

  “You saw those soldiers and you weren’t even going to say.”

  “The view’s better from up here, anyway. You’ll get better shots from up here.”

  “Are you coming, Wade, or am I doing this alone?”

  Lawson is good at altitude, as good as anyone he knows, has summited Makalu without oxygen—he knows it for a fact, even if the Others dispute it—but now he feels a keen need for bottled gas.

  “Amaris. You are exhausted. You look exhausted. You haven’t slept in days.”

  Tashi lets a chuckle slip, then channels it into a cough. The goggling sunglasses on his bony little face made him look like an anthropoid housefly. Lawson shoots him a glare. The kid looks down, turns on his heel and flits back toward the camp, where Mingma stands staring and Jake’s face, with its bushy, pale moustache over beaver teeth, peeps out of a sagging tent.

  “Dude,” says Jake, “what’s up?”

  “If you push too hard,” Lawson goes on, “I have to warn you, Mari, you can get really sick up here. You don’t want to get sick up here.”

  “You don’t want me to get sick up here,” she says, and turns and stalks toward the trail.

  “Well…of course I don’t!”

  She’s marching with the tripod over her shoulder, a petite, purposeful form: coat-puffed body, boyish hips and thin legs in Lycra, nothing on her feet but yellow boot liners. The altitude is getting to her, all right—normally she’s so organized and composed.

  “Amaris, wait!” he calls with a quaver in his throat that distresses him very much. Deepening his voice he says, “At least get into your boots.”

  And he adds, in his mind, I knew you’d fuck me over too.

  VOICE OVER, SCENE 4?, with slow pan upward from base camp to the peak, maybe with Dutch tilt?, then series of stills: Albert Murloe with Princeton rowing team, 1921/ a copy of a Murloe pamphlet/unknown solo pilgrim with yak/second slow pan upward, but of camp 1 and camp 2 part of slope:

  Lawson claims he is drawn to Mt Kyatruk by the story of amateur climber Albert Murloe, the only other person known to have attempted the peak, who disappeared somewhere on its upper slopes in early September 1924.

  A young American who flees Princeton in 1922 in the wake of an unspecified scandal, Murloe drifts through various towns and cities in Western Canada, including Lawson’s own home base, Nelson, where he becomes an amateur mountaineer and also writes and hand-sells pamphlets endorsing his peculiar theories about health and stamina. Murloe’s basic theory is that meats, fruits and vegetables in their natural, fresh condition “over-liquefy” the body, therefore “diluting and draining its strength through diuresis”—and that such foods should only be eaten in a preserved, dried state. He writes, “Let a man subsist on nothing but such desiccated fare, he shall have the stamina and will force of our remotest ancestors, that is to say, of ten modern, civilized, men.” It’s an idea that will convince Murloe that he can achieve what others can’t.

  Like Maurice Wilson, Earl Denman, Aleister Crowley and other mystical amateurs of the early and mid-twentieth century, Murloe is drawn to the Himalayas for spiritual as much as physical reasons or for reasons that exist in the place where the spiritual and physical overlap. In fact, his original plan is not to climb mountains at all, but to trek north from Dehradun, India, and then slip across the border into Tibet, at that time an independent country closed to foreigners. Disguised as a pilgrim, his face darkened by means of henna and walnut juice, he will then hike a thousand kilometres to the forbidden city of Lhasa, subsisting on jerky, raisins, prunes and seeds. But in Drongpa the Tibetans catch him and escort him under guard to a pass on the border of Nepal. There, struck by what he describes in a letter left with his guards as “the most sublime and lovely mountain in the world,” he declares an intention to climb Kyatruk, as the Tibetans tell him it is called, with only the clothes on his back and his now sparse store of dried food. His guards try to dissuade him, but Murloe is adamant, and anyway the face of the mountain he means to climb is on the Nepali side of the border. The Tibetans, though they have no obligation to help Murloe, nevertheless lend him a sheepskin coat and set up camp on the glacier at the top of their side of the pass, near where Wade Lawson’s base camp now sits. They expect Murloe to come down off the mountain in a day or two, and figure he will need assistance when he does. He never comes down. According to the guards, who later deliver his letter and their account to the regional governor in Drongpa, he is last seen climbing up the extensive snow-fields high above the glacier, probably near Lawson’s own camp 2.

  3:46 p.m.

  HOW CAN THERE BE so little oxygen up here? Here, where there’s so much sky, and air—huge blue volumes of space seeming so cleansed, fresh, ecstatic with energy…so breathable. She and Wade are pounding down the switchbacks worn into the dense Styrofoam slopes above base camp. Already this morning, all but sleepless, she spent two and a half grinding hours applying her brakes to descend the steep trail from Camp Two. Now every few switchbacks she needs to rest, bent double, hands braced on her quivering knees. Her lungs seem filled with vaporized glass: with each deep breath, she hacks until she half expects to leave a crimson froth on the snow.

  This pace is unnatural but she will not ease up. Easing is not Amaris’s way. She will not ease up, yet she’s slowing down and Wade is close behind her, casually overtaking her. It’s humiliating to work so hard and be overtaken. At Camp One, starting out, she vowed she would beat him down and half believed she could do it, could draw on her years of triathlon training, along with this spike of professional adrenaline (she keeps glancing over at the glacier to see how events are playing out, but she can’t focus, her vision slurred, head trembling)—and her deepening dislike of Wade. Now, at a hook in the trail, he grazes past her, his elbow making the slightest contact with her breasts, and this contact is more insulting than either a rough jostle or a squeamishly complete avoidance would be. She knows, of course, that he’s too crudely direct to plan so sly an affront. His breathing has a brusque, chuffing sound, like a man in a gym kicking a heavy bag. He slows to keep pace with her from the front, as if to be helpful.

  “The Chinese might mistake you for a Tibetan,” he booms.

  “Very funny, Wade.” Seconds pass before she can finish. “A Tibetan with a high-tech video cam?”

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody’s brain works up here,” she says in a breath.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Like we’ve all got Alzheimer’s.”

  “It’s not too late to go back, Mari.”

  “Amaris,” she says.

  “It’s not far.”

  She totters, rounding the next switchback, thrown off by the tripod on its strap over her shoulder, a green steel Manfrotto, indestructibly solid, a bit heavy for up here, but then with the Sherpas around she has rarely had to carry it anyway—though she has tried. She should have asked that Tas
hi or Mingma come down with them, but she set out in a huff. Wade, she knows, is aware of her struggle and is trying to capitalize on it to change her mind. “Here,” he says, “let me take that for you.” He says it as a command and she always declines commands. She hates what people assume about her from her size, coupled with her race. She sees it in their complacent looks; she speed-reads it in the lingo of their smallest gestures. How salesmen will spice up their pitches with a hint of smirky aggression. How barflies figure it’s cool to hit on her harder and longer than on, say, a lofty, forbidding blonde. They assume (or so she assumes) that she is pliant, pushable, eager not to offend, gratified by the slimmest attention, and she relishes those little scenes when she debunks them.

  Now she surrenders her Manfrotto, coughing hard, refusing to meet his eyes—or the machine-sleek facets of his aerodynamic shades. His black bodysuit, designed by himself, resembles a wetsuit, and this enrages her too. Her fuse has always been on the quick side; up here it’s instantaneous.

  “We should have roped up,” he says, shaking his head tragically. “I had no idea you were this tired.”

  “Walk!” she tells him, too winded to shriek the word.

  Having staged this scene of his own, he pelts away down the switchbacks as if to levy interest on her humiliation, or maybe to run off and pitch the Manfrotto in a crevasse. That pounding swagger—it’s like he’s trying to stamp indelible footprints into the mountain. Can’t he see that whatever’s happening down there could add to the story, his story? True, it might also be the key to another story. Maybe a better story. She doesn’t know how much more time she can spend with Wade John Lawson. Even the sex is mediocre now, though she can admit that’s largely because of her own fatigue, this dredging cough and a thumping headache like a nonstop hangover. Getting closer to him wouldn’t be good for the film, anyway—or for her. Always best to be the one who feels less, who can scramble clear of the smoking crater when things implode.