by Jeff Long
Camp. With them the expedition would move two solid tons of rope, shelter, food,
oxygen and film equipment up to 21,700 feet in the span of two days. Without them,
the climbers would simply waste their strength humping loads. Worse, they would
waste their time. Using a laptop computer, Jorgens estimated it would take
sixty-three good-weather days for the climbers to pack the gear in and begin
climbing... and by then the monsoon would be looming and they would fail.
And so they waited. They sat and tinkered with gear. They read novels and snacked
on popcorn and grumbled. 'It's like being an animal in a zoo,' J.J. complained. 'Every
time I look up there, it's watching us.' It was true. All morning long the mountain
taunted them with its silence and light. At sunset it smothered them in shadows.
Whenever they turned around, Everest was there.
Ten miles shy of their grail, the climbers stewed. Li Deng quit showing the glum
Americans his dog-eared, rubber-stamped CMA contract with the yakherders. He
quit making promises or inventing excuses or cursing the 'minority nationals,' as he
called the Tibetans. He even quit playing chess games with the climbers, and that had
been his one pleasure.
April approached. Jorgens soured. Everything seemed to rankle him. From what
wags were calling their 'yak gap' to the manner in which they pitched their tents,
nothing pleased him. He had visualized setting camp in something like an iron cross,
with straight lines and right angles that would speak to their souls and declare that
here in this netherland, under the hand of man, lay order. But the only tent sites
available were on patches of soft tundra which projected above the rocky floor like
small islands. This archipelago of tundra patches rambled here and there, and as a
result Base Camp resembled less a cross than a mutilated starfish with arms cast out
in every direction.
Every morning Jorgens was freshly assaulted by the camp's chaos. Every morning
he scowled and cursed and his displeasure would orbit his head in a puff of frost. It got
so that every morning Robby or Carlos or J.J., each to needle or fawn or just find out,
would ask, 'What's wrong, Captain?' or 'Problem, Boss?', and Jorgens would glare at
them, then wheel around and walk off into the distance to take his morning relief, a
tiny figure squatting on the immense valley floor with his bare ass turned impudently
to the sun.
Along one of these starfish arms, on a yellowed tundra patch, Abe set up his big
'hospital' tent, a peach-coloured dome with an eight-foot ceiling. His site was remote
enough from the mess tent for him to suppose there wouldn't be any neighbors, which
suited him fine. But he got neighbors anyway, and that suited him fine, too, because
who he got were the women and Daniel.
Daniel and Gus set up their dome to one side. Farther out, in a direct line between
Abe's front door and the morning sun, Kelly pitched her own tent. Abe knew he was
lucky. But he didn't appreciate the other climbers' envy until one drowsy afternoon
when Thomas paid a visit.
He came into Abe's tent the way everyone did, without announcing himself or
asking. The hospital – and Abe's services, for that matter – were considered public
property, like the mess tent and Krishna's cooking. It wasn't unusual for people to
enter Abe's tent at strange hours in search of drugs or surgical tape or just some
company. For all his love of privacy, Abe was actually enjoying his lack of it. He'd
heard how some expedition doctors could be completely ignored for months at a time
by fanatical climbers who considered their diagnoses bad omens. So far, this bunch
was having no trouble assimilating their shaman, and Abe had found the impromptu
visits a chance to try to figure out what – if anything – made these Himalayan
climbers different from ordinary humanity.
Abe was lying on a ground pad flipping through his big Principles of Internal
Medicine when Thomas entered. 'Hey, Doc,' he said, 'you got any good stuff for a
headache?' Even before Abe could answer, Thomas was on his knees in front of a box
that had been pawed through by others. Judging from the looks of it, the climbers
seemed to know Abe's medicine cabinet better than he did. Abe went back to his book.
'Talk about a room with a view,' Thomas said. He was looking out the door at Kelly's
tent. 'Your neighborhood's a lot cozier than mine.'
'Lady luck,' Abe joked.
'Lady luck,' Thomas muttered to himself. 'You know,' he said more loudly, 'you
better watch out for that one.' It was a warning, Abe could hear its tone, and it took
him off-guard. 'What's that?' he said.
Thomas rummaged idly through the supplies. 'I'm talking about her.'
'Kelly?'
'Call it the fruit of a bad harvest,' Thomas said. 'I'm just suggesting you want to
watch your headset with her around, Doc.' Thomas tapped his skull. 'She'll dial the
tune on you. Before you know it, you're on her program.'
Abe didn't know how to respond. He was still sorting out the group's braided
strands. Some of these people had climbed together before. All seemed to have heard
of one another. They shared a powerful, interwoven history, all except Abe, who was
new to it.
'You two were on the South Col, weren't you?' Abe seemed to recall that connection,
a failed attempt a year ago on the classic route up Everest's sunny side. 'You climbed
with Kelly?'
'Carried Kelly is more like it,' Thomas snapped. His reaction made Abe suddenly
cautious. There was something raw here, and he wasn't sure he wanted to be an
audience to it.
'She cost me my summit,' Thomas added darkly. He had lean-cut pilgrim jowls, good
for deep dimples when he was smiling, which was seldom.
He looked over at Abe. 'Don't get me wrong, Doc. I'm a consenting adult. I should
have known better. But she has a way, you know. Like a witch.'
Abe decided to make light of it and snorted. 'A witch?' The man was obviously
talking about love, or maybe just fornication. It didn't escape him that Kelly had
placed her tent far from Thomas's. Abe didn't even try to guess at the meanings.
'Yeah,' Thomas said. 'You'll see. A woman like that can wreck an expedition. She
needs a man. That's how she works it, on the backs and heads of men.'
'Well, it won't be me,' Abe said. 'I'm already carrying around a broken heart.' That
wasn't exactly true. It was just something to say. In spite of himself, Abe felt a touch
of championship toward his solitary blond neighbor. She was pleasant, a welcome
contrast any day to Thomas's sour moods.
'Tell me,' he asked. 'I thought you were a taken man.' They had all been treated to
Thomas's photos of the woman he was going to marry upon his return to the States.
'I am,' Thomas replied.
'So what's the beef?'
'We're not in the World anymore, Doc. We're on expedition now. And that's my
advice.'
This could only get worse, Abe decided. 'Find your medicine?' he asked. End of
conversation.
'Screw it,' Thomas said. 'Don't listen.' He stood up and left.
As a matter of principle, some climbers had a fierce aversion to women on big
mountains, reasoning that Fay Wray never belonged in
the jungle in the first place
and had only accomplished getting a natural-born climber killed off in the end. Women
couldn't hack it, lacked mountain sense, and threw an expedition's clockwork off. Abe
had seen the same logic work among firemen and Colorado miners, and he passed
Thomas off as one more dinosaur.
But while the man was wrong, he was also right, for the very sight of Kelly was
starting to do something to Abe's heart. At night, Kelly's lithe silhouette trembled
against her tent fabric as she readied for sleep, and in the morning she emerged to
unfold her beauty like an angel in the clear dawn light.
She was a fraction of an inch shy of six feet tall, half of it blond hair, the other half
Hollywood legs laced with childlike scars and bruises. Abe had heard how Kelly
treated her masterpiece body with dreamy recklessness, and each time he saw the
scars, it struck him as a sort of vandalism. But that was just how Kelly proceeded
through life, bumping and tearing and scraping her way up climbs, through brush, and
across the lava fields and coral reefs and hot asphalt of countless triathlons.
Abe had seen the advertising shots of Kelly and heard the stories about how she
sometimes played to her appearance, donning slit skirts and painting her nails with
fuck-me glitter. But, like a snake shedding its skin, she would plunge into the
wilderness all over again where her nails would be broken, her hair tangled with pine
needles, her arms and legs bruised and torn.
Their other women, Gabriella Gustafson – Gus, as she preferred it in her clipped
British Columbian manner – lived with Daniel on the opposite side of the hospital, and
she was a different concoction. Abe thought of her as night, in part for the color of her
cropped hair, but more because Kelly so completely inhabited what he thought of as
day.
Gus was all business, Kelly all play. Gus had the green eyes and carved cheekbones
of a Highlander princess, but a stern homely slash for lips, and she was notorious for
her hair-trigger readiness to compete at the top levels, what was known as 'punching
out the guys.' Her résumé as a hard-core mountaineer included some of the wildest
routes in North America. She and Daniel had once pioneered a new line in the
Karakoram range of Pakistan, and two separate parties had suffered casualties trying
to repeat it. Abe had heard of Gus, though always in terms of her machinelike
strength and endurance. No one gossiped about her being a girl climber or a husband
hunter or a black widow. She was a climber – a climber's climber, and she belonged to
Daniel, or Daniel belonged to her, Abe couldn't quite tell how it was, not until their first
night of the full moon.
It was after dinner. The afternoon winds had died early, giving them a respite from
the cold. Their garden thermometer, tied to a ski pole beside the mess tent, was
registering a relatively balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit. In the distance, Everest
hovered like the ghost of an Egyptian pyramid, triangular and alabaster and remote.
No need for his headlamp. When he entered his tent it was in darkness. It took a
moment to see that someone was already there.
Stripped to the waist and bent over in the semidarkness, the climber was busily
scrubbing his face with one of the hundreds of surgical wipes Abe had made available.
The moon was cutting the tent's interior into black and silver tatters, and that made it
impossible to tell who the person was. He studied the bare glittering back, sorting
through the possibilities, and decided it was probably Robby.
Zebra-striped with moonlight, he had one of those precision-built climber's bodies,
95 per cent fat-free. Flaring latissimus dorsi joined at the spine in tightly knit
striations. An ugly lightning-shaped scar scuttered off one trapezoid and across the big
rib cage. And a tattoo of some kind peeked insolently above the elastic waistband of
his surfer pants. His physicality was branded sharply. He belonged to the wilderness.
'It's a warm night,' Abe greeted the climber.
'Doc?' the climber answered, straightening up and turning around.
It wasn't Robby. It wasn't even a man. It was Gus.
Abe didn't know what startled him more, her quicksilver nipples or the corrugation
on her stomach or her indifference to his shock. Indeed her attitude seemed to dare
him.
Gus made no attempt to hide her nakedness. She just stood there, her white eyes
locked on Abe's. He felt paralyzed by Gus's metamorphosis from man to woman. Her
red hair was bunched up beneath a baseball cap. Abe saw that now. And her skin was
gleaming.
'I was just washing up,' she said. Warshing hoop.
'I didn't know you were here,' Abe said. 'I'll step out.'
'Why? It's your tent,' Gus dryly observed.
So it was. She was telling him to stay.
Abe passed his eyes down her body. He did it quickly, trying to disguise it as an
afterthought. She had a bodybuilder's pectoral ridgeline, and to the sides stood her
breasts, almost supernaturally round.
Gus was watching his eyes. She was letting him look. For a moment, a vain instant,
Abe thought she was trying to seduce him. In a way she was.
'I know about you,' she said, then started to towel herself off. 'Daniel told me.' Still
facing him, she took her sweet time with the towel, but the eroticism was gone. If it
was his attention – or confusion – Gus had wanted, she had it.
'What did Daniel say?'
'No big secrets. I've known about his dead Diana ever since I met him. And I've
known as much about you as Daniel has, which is next to nothing. You did the
death-watch with his girlfriend. Your name is Abe. That's all we knew.'
All? Abe wondered. He wanted that to be all they knew. He wanted the past to be
done.
'So you buried her,' Gus said. She reached for an undershirt and pulled it over her
head. For all her seriousness, she could not help but luxuriate in her cleanness. The
shirt slid across her bare skin.
'You could say that.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'Anyway, I have a favor to ask.'
Abe felt oddly exposed. This stranger had just washed her body in front of him as if
his desire were irrelevant. Something close to contempt laced her attitude, and that
threw Abe because he'd done nothing to deserve it. Not if she knew nothing.
'What do you want?' Abe asked.
'Between you and me, okay?'
'Fine.' Was that her reason for presenting her nakedness then, to create a precedent
of secrecy between the two of them?
'Good,' she said. 'I know this is the very beginning of the climb. But I want you to
stay away from Daniel. And I'll keep him away from you.'
Abe gawked at her with a mute farmboy look. First Thomas had warned him away
from Kelly. Now Gus was taking her turn. Maybe they were freezing him out.
'Nothing personal, Abe. But you have no right to him, no more right than you had to
her. Okay? So I'm asking you, just stay away.'
Abe took half a step backward, speechless. 'Gus...' he finally said, but nothing more
came to mind. It was she who had no right here, not he. She had to be kidding.
'I know Daniel,' Gus explained. 'He's not like the rest of us. He can't afford
memories,
not that one anyway.'
Abe recovered enough to be stung and then angry. 'But that's between him and me,'
he said. Gus had nothing to do with that long past matter. It was he who had lived all
these years with the voice in the crevasse, and it was Daniel whose girlfriend had
furnished the voice. Together they had sealed the dead girl in ice. Then it occurred to
him that Gus might be jealous. She could be jealous of Abe's connection across time
with Daniel, he considered. Or jealous of a dead girl. But he didn't say so. It was too
juvenile.
'I don't understand,' he said.
'You could kill him with all that shit.' Gus's white eyes flared in the darkness. 'I mean
it. There's something about this wall. And you. Of all people, he gets you invited. I
don't know what he's thinking. But I do know this. If he can just make it past the Kore
Wall, everything's going to smooth out for him.'
Abe saw the sense she'd made out of the same coincidences he'd already noticed.
But he didn't agree with her. 'Once the monkey finds your back,' he said, 'things don't
ever smooth out.'
'He wants peace, Abe. Is that so bad?'
'So do I. So do you. Who doesn't.'
As quickly as she'd flared, Gus grew soft again. 'I want to get old,' she said very
simply. 'And I want Daniel with me.'
'Gus,' he started to say.
Abruptly she was gone out into the blinding full moon. Abe was left standing in the
big dome tent by himself, smelling her smell. She had seen his desire and turned it
back into itself, forming a circle for him. In the middle lay his emptiness, a surprise.
The memory of Gus's silver flesh stayed with him for hours. Her demand stayed with
him for longer. But the more he thought about it, the less he agreed. They had come
to climb, not act out old history. And besides, as Thomas had put it, they were all
consenting adults.
And still the yaks did not come.
Day after day, Abe preoccupied himself. He arranged his library of medical texts in a
line on one side of his tent. His medicines and equipment were assigned boxes neatly
labeled with a Magic Marker. One morning, he moved everything out of his tent and
took it down, then spent an hour smoothing out the ground and put the tent back up
again and returned his possessions to their previous order. He stacked rocks on the
south side as a windbreak. Next day he took the break apart and stacked it