The Ascent

by Jeff Long

  the long term, his dread of heights always simmered into a healthy fear. It was the

  short term that was so rough. He tried reasoning it away.

  They had lost the earth. They had thrown it down beneath their feet. Like monks

  they were giving up their place in the world and becoming anonymous. Unlike monks,

  they were striking pacts with their individual demons, honing a radical arrogance and

  rising upon their whims.

  Abe forced himself to stare into the abyss. See it, he told himself. Make it yours.

  Sometimes that worked for him, incorporating the physical void into the center of his

  soul. Today it didn't. He just felt sicker.

  Since looking down was a wash, Abe looked up. A line of ropes led into a dark icy

  gully and the gully led vertically into the unknown. Tomorrow and tomorrow and

  tomorrow, Abe thought. The higher they rose, the deeper the abyss.

  He'd always thought that a moment like this – a moment of crystalline reckoning –

  would be glorious and Zen-like. His mouth would drop open and his eyes would see a

  million miles and he would think, So this is what it is. Instead Abe carefully knelt by

  the edge and gripped the rope tight. Positioned just so, he took the liberty of emptying

  his stomach a thousand feet into the deep.

  Another week passed. Each morning the climbers wrapped themselves in Gore-Tex

  and polypropylene armor. They donned their helmets and goggles and glittering

  crampons, took up their sharp ice axes, draped ropes like ammunition bandoliers

  across their chests. They locked and loaded into their harnesses and onto their ropes

  and humped their backpacks with the grim pluck of grunts on patrol, infiltrating the

  mountain in tiny platoons, probing it for weak points, relentless.

  Some days the mountain just sat there like a titan's still life, not a color moving on

  the hot blinding canvas. Then again there were days of rage, everything torn to rags if

  you could see the Hill at all, the mountain reassembling its arsenal, shifting its

  defenses, readying for a kill. The mountain changed, but the climbers were just as

  metamorphic. Abe could see it.

  The fat was vanishing from their bodies, stripped out by the rigors of their journey.

  They were turning to bone and gristle. Abe could see it on warm mornings when the

  camp-bound stripped down to their T-shirts. Their muscles had thinned out and their

  arms were ropy with veins. Their hands had taken on the horny, banged-up look of

  roughnecks' hands. The pads were cut and fissures spread like drying mud and simple

  scrapes ulcerated. Their fingernails had quit growing or were just continually chipped

  and worn down. Every cuticle was split and bleeding as if their fingers were rejecting

  the very nails, spitting them loose.

  Abe tried in vain to remember what they'd looked like before. Like Himalayan

  deities, their skin had turned blue, the higher they climbed the lusher the blue. And

  their urine had turned the color of blood because the glacier melt was loaded with so

  much raw iron and minerals. At supper, pieces of fried skin fell from their faces into

  their food. Their eyes had grown huge and hungry behind their goggles and glacier

  glasses. The mountain had spawned a pack of maniacs, it seemed, zealots. The

  mountain will fall, Abe thought. To people like these it will fall. And he was one of

  them.

  Slowly, in bits and pieces, they were gaining on the beast. They prosecuted their

  ascent by inches, cannibalizing the remains of earlier expeditions to feed their upward

  journey. Their 'yak gap' had put them behind schedule, but through brute risk they

  were beginning to make up for it. By the end of two weeks of brilliant route-finding,

  most of it accomplished by Daniel and Gus, the climb was almost back on track.

  Morale rose high, but so, curiously, did the group's anxiety. Every one of them was

  feeling overextended, and no one could quite explain it, not for a climb that was going

  so well.

  'We're like casualties waiting to happen,' Robby said. 'You'll see. The machine will

  start to break down. Then it all becomes a matter of forward momentum, how far can

  we go before we stop.'

  The breakdown started soon.

  Carlos had arrived with chronic tendinitis in both ankles, and to compensate had

  taped them tight like a Super Bowl halfback's. That stabilized the ankle but cut the

  blood supply to his feet, causing some minor frost nip on his toes. Abe prescribed

  warm socks and nixed the tape. Two days later Carlos stumbled and wrenched his left

  ankle, and Jorgens sent him down to Base Camp to recuperate.

  On April 14, Robby and J.J. got food poisoning at Camp Two. They'd been pinned in

  their tents for two days as a cold front moved through, and neither man was known

  for his fastidiousness. While the storm buffeted them, they did what everyone else

  was doing on the mountain. They lay low, slept, BSed, and cooked. The water for

  cooking came from melted snow. The snow came from outside the tent. Robby and

  J.J. didn't bother reaching very far outside their tent, and ended up ingesting their

  own feces. Their violent bout of vomiting and diarrhea had abated by the time the

  storm lifted, but each man was left seriously dehydrated. Since the combination of

  dehydration and altitude sickness could be deadly, Abe sent them down to Base Camp

  to rest.

  Abe had read about winter-long science expeditions to Antarctica which became

  disease-free while in isolation. After sharing each other's flus and colds in the first

  month, everyone's immune system adjusted and the incidence of viral infections

  plummeted. Only with the introduction of a new arrival was the stasis violated. In

  theory, Abe knew the Ultimate Summit Expedition could become disease-free also.

  But the reality was that time was against them and they weren't a truly isolated

  population anyway. The yakherders had exposed them to a host of Asian viruses that

  were still waylaying the climbers a month later.

  For a while everyone suffered sore throats and packed sinuses. Some went on to

  develop the infamous high altitude cough, a persistent wracking hack. Stump got the

  worst of it. A few days after chipping his front tooth on a frozen chocolate bar at Camp

  Three, he descended to ABC doubled over with 'cough fracture.' It was not unheard of

  for Himalayan climbers to break their own ribs in coughing fits. Abe examined

  Stump's beer keg of a rib cage and said the 'fracture' was probably not a break, but

  that he'd definitely separated some ribs. He put Stump on Cipro, an all-inclusive

  antibiotic, and sent him down to Base Camp to recover.

  About the time Carlos returned to ABC from his convalescence at Base, limping

  gamely, Thomas keeled over with a high fever, chills and wet rales. Abe was carrying

  up to Camp Two at the time. When Jorgens brought the news up at four in the

  afternoon – they still had no radio contact – Abe immediately descended to ABC.

  From Jorgen's description, Abe guessed Thomas had developed HAPE, or high

  altitude pulmonary edema, a frequent killer at these heights. An indirect result of

  dehydration, HAPE had a terrible irony: It drowned its victims in their own fluids.

  Abe reached ABC at eight o'clock that night. Daniel was already there, sitting beside

 
; the patient. He seemed much too relaxed under the circumstances. Thomas had

  glazed eyes and cold perspiration, and Abe could hear the bubbly sound of wet rales

  even without his stethoscope. Thomas coughed and colored sputum spattered the

  front of his sleeping bag.

  'HAPE,' Abe said. 'We better send one of the Sherpas down to Base for the bag.' The

  Gamow 'bag' was a portable pressure chamber made of plastic. You put the patient

  inside, pumped it full of air, and basically dropped him to 12,000 feet elevation in a

  matter of minutes. It had saved many lives in the past few years.

  'You're right and you're wrong,' Daniel said. 'We definitely ought to get the bag up

  here. But there's no hurry. This isn't HAPE.'

  'Of course it is. Look at him. He's got all the symptoms. Rales, the sputum.'

  'Almost, not quite,' Daniel said. He was kind in his contradicting. 'I would have

  thought the same if I hadn't seen it before. With HAPE there's no fever. And look at

  the color of this stuff.' He tore a page from a magazine and scooped some of the

  sputum up. 'See? It's rusty. Not pink. Pink's HAPE.'

  'Pneumonia,' Abe said. And it was. The good news was that the pneumonia sounded

  confined to the left lower lobe, and lobar pneumonia responded well to antibiotics.

  Thomas would recover quickly, provided he went down to Base Camp.

  'We're starting to look like a ghost town up here,' Abe said. 'And we're not even

  halfway.'

  'I don't hear the fat lady yet.' Daniel smiled.

  On April 17, Pemba Sange fell down a crevasse above ABC during a routine carry.

  Thirty feet down, the Sherpa landed on a false floor of snow. Happily the floor held

  and he was safely extricated, but two days later two other Sherpas came down with

  severe headaches, which Jorgens insisted was 'Himalayan AWOL.' After accidents or a

  death, he said, hypochondria sometimes ran rampant among climbers or Sherpas or

  both.

  'Treat them like they're real patients,' Jorgens advised. 'Give them aspirin. Inject

  them with vitamins, whatever it takes. Just get them on their feet. They'll get over it.

  That or we pack them off to Base for the duration with no pay. We can't have slackers

  up here. They'll kill our morale and eat us out of supplies.' He instructed Abe to stay

  down for the day and play doctor with them.

  In fact, the two Sherpas were really sick. Abe found them in their tent suffering

  fevers and severe diarrhea and mildly disoriented. One of them had even started up

  the glacier with a fifty-pound load before surrendering to his illness. No slacking here.

  Winging it once again, Abe put the two on a five-day course of Cipro and told them to

  go down to Base Camp when they felt strong enough.

  The accidents and near misses left them all jumpy and fitful. They were stretching

  their limits up here, and there was a growing sense that they were going to need

  something more, some extra auspices. Otherwise the mountain was going to take a

  victim.

  When help arrived, it came from an unexpected quarter. It was the third week of

  April and Abe was crossing the last of the crevasses in the north bowl, descending

  from yet another tedious load hump, when he chanced to spy a kite floating in the

  thermals above ABC. It was a box kite, the color of lemons and pomegranates, and

  someone had nursed it a good two hundred feet into the air. There was no great

  mystery who the someone had to be. Robby had brought three kites from the States,

  hoping to stage a calendar photo of kites flying against the Himalayan backdrop. So far

  he'd been too busy climbing or being sick to attempt more than one launch, and on

  that occasion the winds had been too fierce. Today, apparently, he'd achieved takeoff.

  With its tropical colors and alien weightlessness, the kite practically shouted its

  presence, and judging by its height, it must have been up there for quite some time.

  But it was only now that Abe happened to take notice. The rest of his way to camp, he

  rode on its swoops and Promethean trembling, enchanted by its coltish delicacy.

  Every moment the string seemed ready to snap, taxed by the wind, and the sky's

  blueness alone looked enough to crush the toy.

  At the edge of camp, Abe sat down on a rock to shuck his crampons, and Thomas

  came up. He was swearing by a full recovery, but Abe could tell the man was still

  weak. 'You got a visitor,' Thomas said.

  'You're kidding,' Abe said.

  'Nope,' Thomas said. 'Showed up this morning.'

  For one crazy instant, Abe imagined that Jamie had somehow made her way to

  Everest and trekked the long trail up to ABC. Just as quickly he dismissed the

  thought. Even if Jamie had been the type, there were too many twists and turns in

  this adventure, too many borders. He decided his visitor had to be Li Deng, in the role

  of a patient or a bureaucrat or just in search of company. If so, he was definitely

  unwelcome. The last person they needed up here was a liaison officer badgering them

  about rules and deadlines and watching over them. They had a hundred days for this

  climb, but counting them out bean by bean wasn't going to get them any higher.

  'Hey,' said J.J., who had just come straggling down off the glacier. Others were

  coming down behind him. 'Isn't that your idiot?' The story had gotten around about

  Abe and his epileptic yakherder.

  It was indeed the Tibetan boy. He was standing in mid-camp with the spool of kite

  string in both hands, wearing a clean expedition T-shirt and quilted pants and dirty

  animal skins.

  Three of the Sherpas were sitting on rocks, offering jokes and helpful comments

  while they watched him pilot the kite. Pemba's near brush in the crevasse had

  sobered the Sherpas, but the kite, or its handler, seemed to have returned them to

  their usual animation. Nima caught sight of Abe and immediately stood up and said

  something to the Tibetan.

  'Well look at who's here,' Stump said, kicking off his crampons. 'It's Abe's little stray.

  I thought he'd disappeared.'

  Abe saw the boy turn to view the growing knot of climbers and a wide, bucktoothed

  smile splayed across his broad face. He had the look of a child with all the time in the

  world. He bent and lodged the kite spool under some rocks, then made a slow beeline

  toward the climbers. Nima trailed after him.

  Abe's fatigue fell away. The last he'd seen him, the boy was a write-off. Now he'd

  recovered enough to walk ten miles and fly a beautiful kite in the lap of the Mother

  Goddess. There was something so simple and wonderful about it that Abe smiled right

  back. After a dozen years of emergency work, he'd seen his fair share of so-called

  miracles, but never so poetically rendered.

  The boy walked haltingly, with a left-sided palsy, and it was plain to see that he'd

  suffered neurological damage somewhere along the line. Once again Abe wondered

  about a head injury that might have predated or even caused the epileptic seizures.

  He wanted to take another look and ask some questions now that the patient could

  answer for himself.

  As the boy struggled across the gray and white debris, the climbers talked baldly

  about him. 'What a gimp,' J.J. said, astonished. 'How'd he ever make it up here?'

  Robby sauntered over in moonboots and a pair of
purple polypro pants. He looked

  like a rodeo clown with fuzzy chaps and two cameras slung around his neck. 'Can you

  believe it?' He beamed. He turned to photo-frame the kite between his fingers.

  'Will wonders never cease,' Stump cracked. 'You finally got it up.'

  'Look at it,' Robby said. 'I'll tell you what, though. This Tibetan kid definitely missed

  his calling. He's born to fly. He could have been an aviator the way he works the wind.

  You should have seen the way he sent my kite up, just kind of opened his hand and it

  took its place.'

  'These Asians, man, they love their kites,' Carlos said. 'Down in Kathmandu, they get

  so excited with their stringwork, they'll forget where they are and run right off of

  five-story rooftops.'

  'Maybe that's what happened to this guy,' J.J. suggested.

  'Or a yak stampede,' Gus said.

  They made a few more jokes. The boy continued laboring across the loose rocks

  toward them. The afternoon's late rays cut him out from the shadows, making him

  hard to look at for his radiance.

  'You didn't tell us he was a tulku,' Daniel said to Abe. He had one hand shading his

  eyes and was squinting at the boy.

  Abe had never heard the word. He faked it. 'Yeah, one more yakherder.'

  'A tulku?' Carlos said. He pulled his goggles off and looked more closely. 'Jeez, Daniel.

  You're right.' He was excited and hushed in the same breath. 'He's no yakherder. Look

  at that round face, and those pointy elf ears sticking out. And the eyes. And look at the

  Sherpas, man, they're blown away. They look like disciples waiting for the body and

  blood. Nah, nah, this guy's beaucoup holy, you can tell. Doc, you saved a tulku.'

  'What the hell's a tulkoo?' J.J. asked.

  Carlos sighed and tried again. J.J. thrived on reiteration, though even on the second

  and third explanations there was no guarantee he'd get it. ' Tulkus are holy men.

  They're like a monk and a prophet all rolled into one. And they can tell the future.'

  'Yeah,' Daniel joshed, 'and tulkus can fly, too. And they fight demons.'

  Carlos grew cautious. 'That's what they say.'

  'All I know is I thought he was a dead man,' Abe said.

  'Oh, they can do that, too,' Gus threw in. But whereas Daniel had been gently

  teasing, she meant to sting. Gus had her virtues, but suffering credulous dharma