by Jeff Long
echo, he added, 'Diana.' Her name sank down the hole, a pebble dropped into the
ocean.
But something happened. A single word came drifting back up the hole. 'Abe,' she
spoke.
The storm and the waiting went on for a very long time. Abe's watch had come off in
his struggles, so he had no idea how much time passed, only that he and his invisible
lover were both losing their faculties and blurring their memories and mixing in the
same dream.
At one point Abe turned his palms up and noticed that he'd rope-burned the pads
down to the white gristle. He didn't remember doing that, but the snow was pink with
blood around the blue rope, and the pink was fresh.
In the end, there was silence.
Dawn never broke, but an exhausted light did finally seep into the sky. Overnight,
Abe had taken ill from the water or maybe from the storm itself and the cold and the
sounds, and his tent had collapsed again. He was very cold and thirsty and tired. But
the storm had passed. The wind had quit. He flapped open the tent door. The
crevasse had pinched nearly shut. Nothing more could be done.
'Hello,' he called into the crevasse. The word emerged as blue frost.
There was no answer. No more song, no more jibberish. Maybe she was still alive,
just mute now, eyes wide, a zombie pinned in its crypt for the rest of time.
Abe shook loose from the snow and wormed out of the tent. The night and day and
night had bled him of his strength. It took his full concentration just to stand up. His
parka was soaked and frozen. His feet were dead blocks.
He faced the crevasse, which had puckered shut again. The hole was only a few
inches across now. The blue rope was buried deep again. The earth was sealing over.
'Good-bye,' Abe croaked. He said it to a memory, to the place itself. He said it to deep
part of himself.
Without another thought, Abe abandoned the tent and the torn sleeping bag and his
pack, which had blown away anyway. The water bottle was frozen solid and useless.
The thought of food turned his stomach. He simply backed away from the hole and
faced downhill and let gravity herd him off the glacier.
Abe stumbled and kicked and plowed his way out of the high cirque and across the
plateau, which was now scalloped with drifts like a hard, white sea.
He descended into the forest.
The path they had taken up the frozen river was buried under two and three feet of
snow, but he was patient. Every time he seemed lost, Abe stopped and listened for the
water running through its deep veins. He followed that song, humming to himself.
It took all day. Not once did Abe sit down, because then he would have lain back and
disappeared into the dream. He reached the trailhead at dusk and started down the
road into night.
Abe kept moving simply because he could. There was no other reason. Survival was
the furthest thing from his mind. Night came on.
The path turned black. The forest walked him in, squeezing him tight. After some
time Abe couldn't be sure his legs were still moving. He felt motionless and suspended.
Just before dawn on the next morning a single bright light appeared like a hole in
the darkness. It was a big truck with one broken headlight and it was filled with
rescuers. While the engine idled, Abe stood transfixed by the hard white light. One by
one the rescuers emerged to touch him.
When they laid him down, it was tentatively, not quite certain of his reality. They
had been on their way to retrieve Abe or Abe's body from the cirque. They dressed
the wounds in his hands and started on IV and zipped him into a sleeping bag in the
back of the truck and started the long road back to Boulder. The roof rocked back and
forth.
Two rescuers sat beside Abe to monitor his vital signs and pour him full of soup and
coffee and herbal tea, whatever hot liquids the group could muster. Abe's voice was
nearly gone from dehydration and the raw cold and his singing, so they filled his
silence answering questions they thought he might have asked.
Daniel was in intensive care, they said. He had gotten very agitated at the hospital
and kept repeating the woman's name until a nurse explained that someone had
stayed at the crevasse. After that he'd dropped into a deep sleep. He had multiple
fractures, but the doctors said Daniel would recover.
'That's the good news,' said the man pumping up a blood pressure cuff on Abe's arm.
'The bad news is the girl. She was a dropout from the university at Laramie. She
moved back to Rock Springs to take care of her sick mom, Alzheimer's or something.
Anyway, that's where she hooked up with this fella and he got her into the climbing.'
'She was getting good. But nowhere close to good enough for that wall,' the second
rescuer said. 'I guess the boyfriend's some local legend. First ascents all around here.
That's what this was supposed to be. A new route. New wall. New mountain.'
'Some wedding present,' the first man said.
'Yeah, that, too. They were supposed to get married. In the spring.'
Abe could tell they found their information poignant and moving. But he was
confused.
The two rescuers exchanged a glance.
'She's not still alive up there?' one asked in a low voice.
Abe looked from one to the other with blank eyes, wondering if he'd done something
wrong.
'Who?' he whispered timidly.
1
CHRISTMAS EVE – 1991
Abe reached home bloodstained and bone weary, with the song of sirens still
screaming in his ear. Two back-to-back twenty-four-hour shifts had left him so
empty it took a full minute just to recognize the living room as his own. He needed
some serious downtime, a bed, even just a flat spot on the floor so long as it was out of
the way and dry and warm and quiet. But he knew there was no way.
This was the afternoon of Christmas Eve and Jamie had charged him with making
his special sour cream enchiladas for the dinner party that night and there were still
gifts to wrap and the faucet to fix. Abe found some orange juice in the refrigerator and
the aspirin in the cupboard. He wondered why. Why fix it. He'd promised her a long
time ago, but the faucet was really the least of their worries anymore. Besides, drop
by drop, the slow leak had come to provide a clockwork to their discontent. Like an
old man, he had grown used to hearing it in the middle of their cold nights.
Abe pulled out his toolbox from under the stairs and rummaged for a pair of vise
grips. He rattled the eighteen-cent washer inside its little white bag, then went up to
the bathroom. By the time Jamie returned from work, the faucet would be silent. She
probably wouldn't even notice.
Abe's pager started beeping.
Abe sighed. He laid down the wrench. It had been too much to hope for that the
street would be done with him. Even without this snow in the air and glare ice on the
highways, there was something about the holiday season that always invited extra
chaos. More car accidents, more cardiac arrests, more domestic violence and suicide
attempts. More loneliness. More need. More overtime. So much for Christmas Eve.
Jamie would say nothing when he told her. She would simply turn away and bu
sy
herself with the salad or eggnog or something else. Anymore that's how they managed
together.
Abe straightened and stretched and there in the mirror, move for move, the
cannibal rose up into the electric light. Long ago, twelve years next May, back when
he'd first become a paramedic, Abe had seen the cannibal inhabiting his universe of
ambulance crews and emergency room staff and cops and firemen. Since calling it
burnout only half described the living deadness, the off-time wags had cooked up the
cannibal, this voracious eater of the heart. Abe had sworn to leave the pain business
before it got to him, but here he was, thirty-five years old and still riding shotgun for
Boulder Ambulance and packaging disasters for Rocky Mountain Rescue. And the
cannibal had caught him.
He knew, because of late his work had turned into a sort of cheap pornography, less
for its voyeurism than for its repetition and the predictability of his responses. When
his pager went off, when the siren turned on, when he smelled the blood, Abe could
almost stand back and watch his body react – patching and splinting and injecting the
afflicted. Jamie saw it in him, too, though on another level. 'You don't love me,' she
pitied him. 'You don't know how to love anymore.'
Abe turned off the pager and called in.
'You ever hear of some guy named Peter Jorgens?' asked the dispatcher.
Abe hadn't.
'He's called about you twice today. A pretty pushy guy. He's in some kind of major
sweat. Says there's no time for reference letters. Some kind of emergency. He makes
me hook whoever's closest to the phone and he pumps them for your rep, your
experience, all that.'
'Med school,' Abe said. Like the faucet, that was something else he was finally
getting around to. Of the four schools he'd applied to, two still seemed interested. He
wondered which school Peter Jorgens would be with and what kind of war stories the
other medics had probably fed the man, not that Abe was worried. He had a good
reputation. Better than good. He'd seen some of the references people gave him and
they were good. They called him their best, with over a dozen years of experience in
both the city and the mountains. Rock, snow or ice, day or night, he was an
all-weather, all-terrain, one-man scoop. Someone had stenciled ST. BERNARD on Abe's
locker at work. Underneath someone else had taped a piece of movie poster:
Terminator. A lot of death, as well as life, had passed through Abe's hands in the last
dozen years.
'He just called again,' said the dispatcher. 'Says he needs you to contact him. And not
tomorrow. Tonight. Right now.'
All Abe could guess was that one of the schools had accepted him and wanted to give
him the word before Christmas closed their offices. What would Jamie say? he
wondered. Probably not much, they were so wounded by each other. Once upon a
time, he'd thought they would celebrate just such a moment. But those days were
gone.
Abe placed the call to an area code he didn't recognize.
A game-show voice answered, female. 'U.S.U.S. Expeditions,' she singsonged. 'Merry
Christmas.'
Abe's anticipation fell to pieces. U.S.U.S. Expeditions? This was no med school. They
were peddling something, American flags or adventure-travel tours or what? Worse,
they were peddling on his one night off and after snooping on him at work.
'May I help you?' the woman said.
Tired, his temper short, Abe nearly hung up. On second thought he decided to
confront their trespass.
'Yes.' He made his voice flat and statutory, a lawyer's trick. He wanted their full
attention, their fear of litigation or at least a promise to stay out of his life. 'I want you
to tell Peter Jorgens...'
'Oh, wait,' she interrupted. 'Pete just walked in the door. You can talk to him
directly. May I ask who's calling?'
Abe gave his name. He checked his clock. Thirty seconds. That's all this got.
'Burns?' a hearty man boomed. 'Abraham Burns? Do I have an offer for you.'
'Yeah, well I started to tell your secretary...'
'Wife,' Jorgens said, 'that was my wife. She didn't tell you yet, did she? I want to be
the one.'
The clock showed forty seconds gone. Abe meant to register at least one profanity
before hanging up on the man. 'Listen,' Abe tried again.
'Are you sitting down? It's the kind of thing that makes strong men weak,' Jorgens
barreled on. 'Even a bull like you.'
Abe said 'piss off' and hung up. He got as far as the hallway before the phone rang. It
was Jorgens.
'At least hear me out,' the man said.
'Whatever you're selling...'
'No, no.' Desperation came over the phone line. 'This isn't for contributions. Our war
chest is full. We're totally solvent. We're going. And we want you to go with us. We
need you.'
Abe was more mystified than annoyed by the man's persistence. This had to be the
worst sales pitch in history. 'Hurry up,' Abe growled.
'You're the one,' Jorgens said. 'Your buddy Corder said so.'
The name Corder tickled his memory, but not enough. Abe decided to finish this.
'Look, mister,' he told Jorgens. 'It's Christmas Eve, and you're not making any
sense.' Sometimes that worked on the Gomers, the get-out-of-my-emergency-room
riffraff destined for detox. A single moment of definition sometimes provided them a
floor to stand on. The screamers would shut up. The wild men would calm down. But
it only seemed to inspire Jorgens.
'You've heard of us,' he declared. 'The U.S. Ultimate Summit Expedition? The
Nordwand '92 team? That's us. We're in the latest Rolex commercial.'
'Rolex commercial?'
'The one with the ice climber, the backdrop...'
Abe's amusement expired. 'Time's up,' he said. 'Don't call here again.'
'Wait,' Jorgens shouted. He sounded shocked. 'Everest. I'm talking about Everest.'
It worked, that single word.
'Everest?' Abe breathed.
Now they started over again.
'My God.' Jorgens sounded chastened. 'I thought we'd lost you before we even had
you.' Abe could tell Jorgens was the nasty sort who believed in jumping out at people
to test their reflexes. Maybe next time he'd remember this backfire.
'I better start from square one,' Jorgens said. 'You've really never heard of us?'
They were a team of Americans going to the Tibetan side of Mount Everest. Three
days ago, their physician had fallen on a training climb and rebroken an old rugby
ankle. Almost on the eve of its departure for Asia, the U.S. Ultimate Summit
Expedition, a.k.a. Everest Nordwand 1992, was suddenly without medical backup. No
major expedition could afford to go without a doctor, not to a country as remote as
Tibet. But time was short. Their departure date was early February. A burst of phone
calls had failed to produce a single physician in all of North America willing to climb to
five miles high, commit to a hundred-day absence, and leave in five weeks.
'I've hunted hard these last three days. Days and nights,' Jorgens said. 'I've been
calling hospitals all across the country. I even hired a computer search of med
students and physician assistants and paramedics. And it all comes down to you.'
/>
'You need a doctor,' Abe observed. 'An M.D. Not a paramedic.' He was too realistic
about mountain medicine to be modest. Whoever they took along would have to be a
walking hospital, capable of tackling everything from tropical parasites to compound
fractures.
'We've got you,' Jorgens said.
'I've never been to the Himalayas.' As much as he wanted to shout Yes, I'm your
man, these things had to be said. If they were going to disqualify him, he wanted it to
be now, not halfway up a mountainside. Not even next week. If there was any chance
they would extinguish this dream, he wanted it over with. 'And you're weak on ice
experience,' Jorgens said. 'Don't worry, I've asked. But you can lead 5.11 on rock,
which is solid, not hot. Then again, I'm not looking for any more ninja, Mr. Burns. All
we need is a good bones man who can make house calls to eight thousand meters.
That's you.'
'What about the mountain?'
Jorgens filled him in. Over the last ten years, three different teams had attempted
the route, a vertical chimera of rock and ice known as the Kore Wall. It was known
among mountaineers as a severe creation – 9,000 vertical feet from top to bottom –
that approached the summit straight on, a direct or direttisima up the right centre of
the vast North Face. The first try back in 1984 had been all British, with the exception
of one American climber. After pioneering to 27,000 feet and surmounting most of the
geological barriers, they'd gotten mauled and surrendered. In '89, half of a New
Zealand expedition had vanished on the upper reaches in a storm. And last spring,
two Japanese and a Sherpa had been killed by an avalanche.
'So it's the Kore Wall three, climbers zip,' Jorgens finished. 'She's had a lot of suitors.
But we own her cherry.'
Abe didn't trust the overstatement.
'What about other lines?' Abe asked. He was already trying to visualize alternate
retreat routes for injured climbers, because that would be his job. But Jorgens took his
question to imply second-choice lines for ascent.
'Not interested,' Jorgens said. 'There's three other routes on the north side, but
they've all been done, especially the North Col. Frankly our team's too damn good to
be pulling a repeat. It's the Kore Wall or bust.'
Like most climbers, Abe had dreamed of Everest, tired and exaggerated as it was.