The Ascent

by Jeff Long

  The Tibetan boy sat on a small carpet by the center post with white smoke wafting

  through the prayer flags overhead. One of the younger Sherpas, Ang Rita, was a lama

  initiate back in his home in the Solu Khumbu. He'd either smuggled in the carpet and

  the prayer flags for his own use, or else bought them from a yakherder. Kelly didn't

  know which.

  The tulku chanted and murmured while he turned the narrow pages of an old book.

  The puja had the gravity of a mass but the air of a carnival. Through the entire two

  hours, the Sherpas and climbers came and went, talking loudly and laughing and

  taking pictures.

  The ceremony had become more than a puja, Abe knew. It was a binding together.

  When Daniel had laid out the monk's sorry tale last night, the climbers had reacted

  with Abe's same disbelief, then personalized it. Kelly had teared up. Jorgens had

  objected to jeopardizing 'his' climb by harboring a fugitive. Carlos had ranted about

  the Chinese overlords. In the end they had agreed with Daniel, though. Silence gained

  them everything. The little tulku would have time to heal and finish his escape. The

  climbers could climb. And Li would be spared doing his duty.

  Carlos originally explained to them that their puja would address Tara, a goddess

  associated with compassion. As it developed, the tulku chose a different god for his

  ritual, Mahakala. Carlos passed around a small book on Tibetan culture, and Abe saw

  the picture of Mahakala. He was intrigued by the monk's selection.

  Black and ferocious, the god was a demonic creature with six arms and a rosary of

  human skulls. He held numerous weapons and his head was surrounded with a halo of

  flames. He was drinking brains from a skull. Abe tried to square the image with his

  frail patient. Carlos said it made perfect sense.

  'Mahakala – Gompo, to lay Tibetans – he's the Great Black Lord of Enlightenment,'

  Carlos said. 'He's a killer, but also a protector. He defends us against selfishness and

  slaughters the demons of ignorance. On the Tibetan hit parade of deities, this guy

  scores in the top three. He's the perfect symbol of killing the self to achieve

  knowledge. Rebirth out of destruction, all that good stuff. With this dude watching

  over us, we're double safe, man. It's a good choice. Excellent.'

  Nima and Sonam distributed puja strings, blessed pieces of red twine that were tied

  loosely around people's wrists or throats. 'You keep it on until it rots off,' Kelly

  explained.

  'What about Li?' Abe asked. 'What if he sees these strings?'

  'We'll just say the truth, that these are our lucky charms. Maybe I'll give him one,

  too.'

  Abe didn't get a string until the very end.

  Closing the long, wooden covers of an old prayer book, the tulku got up on unsteady

  legs and came over and tied a red string around Abe's throat himself.

  Abe didn't know the Tibetan word for thank you, and so he determined to give a

  present in return. All he could think of was a second stethoscope from his medical kit.

  But by the time Abe returned from his tent with the stethoscope, the monk was gone.

  'Where did he go?' Abe asked Nima.

  'I don't know, sir.'

  They looked for the boy, but he had disappeared.

  The prayer flags stayed up, flapping prayers into the blue sky. And the puja strings

  turned dark red from their sweat. Abe figured that he would never see the monk

  again. He had vanished outward into that idea called Tibet. He wanted for the monk to

  be more than just a voice and this puja string. But that's all that was left.

  6

  The siege tightened through May.

  Camps One and Two had fallen easily, as if the mountain didn't want them anyway.

  They took Three in a snowstorm up a long gully filled with slag and junk ice; nothing

  difficult, but it took some fight. Four was next, but first they had to pacify a wild mean

  narrows dubbed the Shoot, short for the Shooting Gallery. Rocks and loose ice

  bombed the Shoot at all hours. No one had gotten hurt yet, but people knew that even

  puja strings and prayer flags couldn't hold down the odds for long.

  Near the end of April – he'd lost all track of the actual date – Abe headed up the

  line, this time humping forty pounds of rope, fuel, two sleeping bags, and five "hill

  rats" or two-man-day packets of high altitude rations that were fast-cooking and easy

  on the GI tract. The food, gas, and bags were for Three, the rope was for their

  continuing drive on Four.

  The camps were spaced a day apart from each other. Abe felt strong and could have

  pushed from One to Three in a day, but that kind of leapfrogging was a fast track to

  exhaustion and edema. He'd noticed how everyone else was saving their physical and

  mental reserves for the summit bid, and he saw no reason to ruin himself hauling

  heavy on a milk run. He wanted his crack at the top, too, though the closer D day

  approached, the more nebulous it became. Some people said a month, most just shook

  their heads and talked about something else.

  Abe arrived in Three alone. Thomas and J.J. had already spent a day and night

  there. It was midafternoon, maybe 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the two men were

  putting the final touches on two rectangular box tents. Thomas's crewcut had gone to

  seed, but not enough to shield his balding crown, and he had fresh red sunburn on top

  of old sunburn scabs. He looked like a thermometer ready to explode. J.J. was

  stripped to his muscle shirt: Gold's Gym. Neither man greeted him. They'd been

  watching his torturous coming for the last two hours, and by the time of his arrival it

  seemed like he'd been among them forever.

  This was Abe's first visit to Three, and now he saw for himself the problems he'd

  been hearing about. The camp was an aberration. There was no ice or snow to cut tent

  platforms into, and the rock lay at a 60-degree angle with no ledges. It would have

  been a hopeless site except for the multimillion-dollar Japanese expedition of '87.

  With portable drills, anchor bolts and aircraft tubing, the Japanese had constructed a

  metal ghetto here, or at least the skeleton of one. The result was four artificial

  platforms with flat floors and roofs and perpendicular walls. In its heyday, the camp

  would have accommodated up to twelve climbers.

  The wind had shredded the nylon walls of each box tent and falling rock had sheared

  some of the poles and smashed some of the infrastructure, but in three years Everest

  hadn't yet managed to shed this evidence of earlier colonists. Now the Ultimate

  Summit climbers had occupied the camp, cannibalizing platforms that were wrecked

  to repair and buttress the ones that weren't. It was a vertical shantytown, a

  sorry-looking place for such a magnificent abyss.

  'Where's Kelly at?' J.J. asked. As a rule, the buddy system was inviolate. It was

  peculiar for Abe to show alone.

  'Sick,' Abe answered. More and more their language was getting truncated, cut

  down to monosyllables their lungs could handle. Sometimes their dialogue sounded

  like single-shot gunfire.

  'At least she's not knocked up,' Thomas said. 'Let it flow.' His thin Yankee lips sealed

  shut again, no sneer, just the sentiment. J.J. gave a small shake of his head, less

  reconciled to the
tiresome misogyny than Thomas seemed to think. In a flash, Abe

  saw a whole lifetime of tiny mundane compromises in J.J., and realized the muscle

  man wasn't so much stupid as judicious. For the first time since meeting him, Abe

  didn't feel sorry for J.J.

  But Thomas was correct, if impolite. Kelly was having her period and that's why she

  hadn't made her carry today. By now Kelly's menstrual cycles were common

  knowledge, and her cramps were notorious. Still it was none of Thomas's business, or

  ought not be, and Abe almost said so. On the other hand, Abe was learning how every

  sneeze and hangnail along the route moved up and down to affect the other climbers.

  A missed carry could throw the logistics off for days.

  Abe contained his annoyance. 'She'll come,' he said. 'Tomorrow.'

  Thomas explored the hollow of one cheek with his tongue and looked off to the

  north. Behind the bulging grasshopper goggles, his face said, We'll see.

  'I'm hungry,' J.J. said. He was inhabiting his usual oblivion and Abe was grateful for

  it. Surprisingly J.J.'s simpleminded cheer, so grating at lower altitudes, had become a

  definite asset. One didn't want complications up here, and with J.J. you didn't get

  them.

  'How's it going up above?' Abe asked, indicating the Shoot's entrance.

  'It's going,' Thomas grumbled.

  'Daniel won't let go of the lead,' J.J. expounded. He seemed pleased J.J. had entered

  into a fruitful bondage under Daniel, happy to harness his strength and courage to this

  mountain, happier still to be serving under Daniel.

  Thomas was just the opposite. A general contractor from northern California, he was

  both older than Daniel and more serious about his chains of command. He seemed to

  regard Daniel's brilliance in the mountains as an accident, and accidents could go

  wrong just as easily as they went right.

  'I've seen this before,' Thomas said. 'High altitude kamikazes. You try to keep up

  with them. But nobody can. A guy like Corder can use up a whole team before people

  say enough. Slow down. And by then it's too late.'

  Abe didn't much care for Thomas's certainties and glumness, but the man had

  climbed on a dozen expeditions and it would be foolish to discount his authority. 'So

  we're going too fast?'

  'Too fast?' barked J.J. 'Man, we're short. You can about smell the monsoon. We got

  to go fast. We'll go bust without some pedal to the metal.'

  'We'll go bust with it,' Thomas said. 'Another week at Daniel's pace, we'll hit empty.

  You'll see. Kelly's just the first. He'll waste us all.'

  Abe started to say that Kelly was having cramps, not bailing on the climb, but that

  didn't change Thomas's basic point. Then he started to say it was all a matter of

  degree – to most other people they were all kamikazes up here.

  J.J. spoke first, though. 'We came to climb.' He shrugged heavily. 'We're climbing. I

  want the Hill. Daniel wants the Hill. We're together.'

  'Together?' Thomas squeezed a pair of pliers around a wire clip. 'Corder doesn't care

  about together. He couldn't care less about you or me. Or even himself. He's a freak.

  And he scares me.'

  Just then a slight cloud passed across the sun, instantly reminding them of what was

  what. The temperature plunged in a 70-degree gulp. Then the cloud passed and they

  were panting and sweating once more. They quit talking. Soon voices came trickling

  down from above and the limp orange rope looping across from the Shoot suddenly

  came alive, jumping and jerking. People were descending. Daniel would be among

  them.

  'We've got to take it on our terms,' Thomas closed. 'That's all I'm saying.' Then he

  clammed up, and Abe knew the man was more intimidated by Daniel than by the

  mountain. Given the mountain's perils, that was a major league fear, and Abe

  wondered how many others doubted or feared or maybe even loathed Daniel, too.

  As the climbers rapped down, the orange rope twitched and curlicued like a dying

  snake. The voices grew louder and Abe heard the tinkling of hardware on a sling. The

  climbers sounded close because the Shoot funneled their sounds down, but their

  descent took a while. Finally Gus appeared, running rope through the brake at her

  belly.

  'Hi guys,' she said, and blew a pink bubble of her private stock of Bazooka. She

  snapped the bubble hard.

  Thomas grunted at her and went back to fine-tuning the guy wires holding the

  Japanese platforms together. J.J. greeted her with a lift of his chin, but then his chin

  just stayed aloft and J.J.'s mind wandered off in some other direction. The altitude

  had whittled their attention spans down to thin parentheses.

  They had taken to using Swiss Army knives on their hair, at first snipping away

  with the little folding scissors and finally, impatient, opening the long blade to saw

  away whole hanks of hair. Under her scratched white helmet Gus's red locks looked

  spikey and tattered and for some reason it brought to Abe's mind the scar along her

  back. That in turn reminded him of her beautiful silvery front, her round, round

  breasts. It seemed long ago, that night in his tent. He dug for some sort of context,

  trying to remember if it had been warm beneath the moonlight, how her belly had

  been muscled, if perhaps behind her warning there had not been the slightest of

  invitations. But none of that mattered, not at these killing heights.

  The memory closed itself off. The image of a mysterious moonlit nude vanished. In

  its place Abe found himself staring dumbly at this wild, primitive female gnawing gum

  and shaking ropes and now picking at a knot jamming her figure-eight brake. She

  could have been his sister or his mate or his mother. There was nothing spiritual in

  the recognition. She was part of his tribe, it was that simple.

  Edging out of the Shoot, Gus undipped from the rope and peered up at activity Abe

  couldn't see. She shouted up that the rope was free, then picked her way across to the

  precarious campsite.

  Close up, Gus looked cooked and shaggy and beat. Her energy and insouciance were

  a mascara, Abe saw. They were aging fast up here, and no pretenses of youthful

  vitality were going to change that.

  Gus wasted no time resting. She poked her head through the door of the uppermost

  box tent. Seeing it empty, she slung her pack in and claimed it for her and Daniel. She

  got to work firing up a hanging stove to melt ice.

  'Jorgens flamed out,' she remarked to anyone listening.

  Thomas gave Abe the look: I told you so. Daniel's push was too extreme. 'Spell it

  out,' he told Gus.

  Gus goosed the butane flame hotter. It would take an hour to melt the ice into

  water. Even boiling, the water would only be tepid, a function of the loosened air

  pressure.

  'No biggie,' Gus said. 'Jorgens needs some drink. Then down. All the way to Base.

  The sooner, the better.'

  'What happened?' Thomas pressed.

  Gus made it short and sweet. 'It was a long day. He's an old man. He won't be back

  up again. It's rough as hell up there.'

  Abe knew more than the others did. Jorgens had come to him a fortnight ago,

  complaining about having difficulty urinating. Though it could have been any number

  of things, the problem sounded like an enl
arged prostate to Abe. Jorgens had been

  crushed by the possibility. 'Why don't you just de-nut me while you're at it,' he'd told

  Abe. Then he'd made Abe promise not to tell anyone else, as if Abe wasn't already

  keeping everyone's secrets.

  'How about Carlos?' Carlos had gone up, too. Now Abe remembered.

  Gus pointed down, down, down. Down the Hill, away from the front, out of service.

  'He gave it a go. But you know Carlos. He never belonged high in the first place.' Her

  glib obituary ignored the sprained ankle hobbling Carlos. Then again, they were all

  impaired to some degree. What it came down to was that Carlos had finally

  acknowledged his own mortality. And that scared Gus.

  'So what I'm hearing is we just lost two guys in a single day?' Thomas said.

  Now Gus caught his drift. She cocked her head over. 'No problem, Tom. We still got

  you, right?' She went back to feeding ice chips into the pot.

  It took another hour for Carlos and Jorgens to show up. The two were in sorry

  shape, gray under their blue and sunburn. Jorgens looked dazed and Carlos had no

  voice left, and each moved with loose, sloppy duck steps. Daniel was shepherding

  them, keeping a sharp eye on the details: what they clipped and unclipped from the

  ropes and anchor, how they managed themselves, where they placed their feet. That

  was good.

  Jorgens and Carlos sat where Daniel sat them, hunched and bleak like famine

  victims. Gus brought them the lukewarm water with Kool-Aid and extra sugar in it.

  Abe took his cue and checked their pulses and eyes and asked them to count his

  fingers. Carlos's helmet was tipped to one side. Jorgens had been drooling into his

  beard. Both were in disarray with zippers unzipped and clothing untucked. It was

  easy to tell when a person was falling to pieces in the mountains; they came apart at

  the seams.

  'You guys ready?' Daniel asked the two. It was kindly but stern. There was no

  question that they would continue down the mountain.

  Carlos gave a game thumbs-up. Jorgens set his jaw, revived enough by the sugar to

  realize that he was out for the count. There was bitterness in his eyes, but it wasn't

  directed at Daniel. Jorgens was coming to terms with himself.

  'You want me to go down with them?' Abe asked Daniel.

  Jorgens rejected him instantly. 'The day I need a babysitter...' He winced and looked