by Jeff Long
to account for this delirium and weakness. No, with this drooling, Abe's suspicion grew
that the boy had suffered a closed head injury. Between that and his wounds and
whatever damage lay beneath the abdominal bruises, the monk was in deep waters.
'What am I going to do with you?' Abe asked him in English.
The boy's eyes rounded onto him and he smiled at Abe.
'What are you going to do with him,' another voice asked. It was Gus over by the
water skull. She had materialized as softly as the monk.
'Start over again,' Abe said. 'Patch him. Drug him. Pray.'
Gus seemed frightened by the monk's presence in camp. 'Why did he have to come
back,' she demanded.
'I don't know. But he did. Now we have to get him squirreled away. It's going to take
me a few hours to clean him up and he can't be out in the open like this.'
'He shouldn't have come back,' Gus grumbled.
'It's okay,' Abe reassured her. 'The Chinese will never know about him. And in four
days we'll all be gone, us and the Chinese, and he can have the whole valley to himself.'
Once again they occupied the hut made of memorial stones, the Tomb with its
ceiling of cannibalized tentage. The boy lapsed deeper into inertia and finally a twilight
delirium that was close to the coma in which Abe had first found him. The word
passed among the climbers that the monk had returned, and they conspired to keep
his presence a secret. Lest the soldiers see people going in and out of the Tomb,
everyone stayed away except for Krishna, who brought Abe and his patient food and
drink. Abe slept in the hut that night, lying on the bare ground. The monk slept on
Abe's air pad.
And then something strange happened. With three days to go before their forced
departure from the mountain, Li came into the mess tent while the climbers were at
breakfast to make an announcement.
'Now what?' Robby grumbled.
'I have decided,' Li said. 'You may have ten more days to climb the mountain. After
that, I must obey my orders.'
When no one replied, Li expanded. 'There are things in life that require finishing.
You have taken many courageous risks. Now it is my turn to take a risk also.'
And still no one spoke, although Abe could see agitation blazing on every face. If Li
was waiting for them to thank him, he was out of luck. So far as the climbers were
concerned, the mountain had never been his to withhold. And this bizarre reversal
only reminded them of a power they could not ignore. It didn't seem possible, but Li's
generosity had made him even more unpopular.
'But why?' J.J. demanded.
'J.J.,' Thomas warned him off. They had just been granted a stay of execution, and
as rankling as the principle was, the fact of it gave them a second life.
'Even in difficult times, it is wrong to punish the innocent,' Li told them.
After Li had left, the climbers tried to fathom his sudden altruism. When Robby
tried to credit Jorgens's last-ditch request, Jorgens rebuffed him. 'It wasn't anything I
said. Li didn't look at me once the whole time I was talking.'
'What then?' Stump wondered.
'Does it matter?' Thomas asked. 'Now we got no one else to blame. That's as clean as
it gets in life.'
They left within the hour. With his sprained ankle taped and iced with a bag of
glacier chips, Carlos stayed down to man the Base Camp walkie-talkie. If necessary,
he could try to talk Li into an eleventh-day extension. The rest of the climbers surged
up the trail to finish off the Kore Wall.
9
Everest was a weather factory, so they said, but for a hundred days Abe had seen no
weather, no change. Day in, day out, the sky had seduced their eyes with its
blue-black constancy. What few clouds came had stayed in the distance, white
feathers that scattered in the wind. Abe had begun to believe it never snowed in
Tibet.
But on the afternoon they reentered ABC, the sky turned greasy silver. Daniel was
there, looming on the boulders, gaunt, irresistible, arms wide to them, and he
promised victory. But in the space of half an hour, the mountain wove a grimy cobweb
of storm clouds into the sky. By sunset, the cloud cover stretched from east to north
to west. The climbers took their meal early and scurried back to their tents just as the
first of the corn snow rattled down.
Bolts of lightning began igniting among the snowflakes, something Abe had never
witnessed before. He and Kelly zipped their door tight and crawled into their bags.
'What does this mean?' Abe asked. Kelly was lying beside him in the twilight,
propped on her elbow. It was too light to turn on their headlamps, but too dark for
much except talk. The wind loped through camp and their tent walls rhythmically
popped in and pulled out.
'It's the monsoon,' Kelly said. 'It's late.' She might have been talking about her
period, she was so morose. Her eyebrows were dark dashes in the failing light and her
golden hair black ink. Her nose was burned the cancerous red that only comes from
repeated delaminations.
'So we're finished,' Abe said.
'Not necessarily. It comes on in waves like this. There's usually breaks in between,
especially on this north side. We're in a rain shadow here. Chances are, we'll see a
window. The summit will open.' But she didn't sound pleased.
Above the rattling of snow pellets on their dome, thunder blossomed in the distance.
Without the lightning. Abe would have thought it was avalanches.
'I hope I can sleep tonight,' Kelly said.
Abe said, 'That thunder's loud.'
But Kelly shook her head no, it wasn't that. She was agitated, and her worry was
more complicated than thunder or a mere threat to her summit bid.
'Is something wrong, Kelly?'
Her white eyes flickered at him, then darted away, and she dropped her head. A
moment later she looked at him again, weighing some enormous risk, judging him.
'Yes,' she started. 'But I don't know how to tell you.'
'Don't tell me.'
'Just don't laugh.'
Abe nodded his assent.
'To tell the truth...' She faltered, then found the words. 'The other night I had this
dream.'
'Tell me,' he said.
'It's not like me,' Kelly quickly had him know. 'I don't believe in dreams. I don't talk
about them.'
'But this one...' He opened the way for her.
She looked him straight in the eyes. 'Something's going to happen up there.'
Abe let her finish.
Her voice turned timid. 'Abe. I think I'm going to die.'
For a minute, the snow clattered against the drum-tight walls and the poles creaked
under the wind's weight.
'There was a woman in a storm. She was trapped on the Hill, tangled in a rope,
upside down. Her hair was long. It was blowing in the wind. Her eyes were wide open.'
She whispered the woman's identity as if telling a ghost story. 'It was me, Abe.'
Abe didn't know what to do, argue or agree or touch her or otherwise make it all
right to have premonitions of death on the eve of danger. He suddenly seemed very
young to himself and Kelly very much older.
'I know what that sounds like.' Kelly grinned mournfully, and Abe sensed she was
about to detour into a j
oke at her own expense. She didn't, though. She just quit
talking.
In another setting, Abe might have tried snuffing Kelly's anxiety with some sort of
label – cyanotic hysteria or rapture of the heights, something poetic or at least
polysyllabic. But an unusual somberness had been afflicting the other climbers in the
last two days, and now he realized that it was apprehension. Except for Daniel, who
had been spared Li's vacillations, they had been plunged into their own futility and
had resigned themselves to leaving the mountain. They returned to the mountain
with all the joy of a chain gang off to hard labor.
'I want a child.' Kelly spoke it with a certain grief. 'I wasn't sure before. Now I am.'
'It was just a dream,' Abe tried to reassure her.
'I saw it.' She was clear.
Then Abe had a bright idea. 'Maybe you shouldn't go up,' he ventured hopefully.
'Don't think I haven't thought about it.'
Abe had no other solutions, so he pursued this one, even though it would not satisfy
her. 'It's okay to stay down, Kelly. You've pushed it. Nobody will say different.'
'You know that's not true.'
'It doesn't matter. Nobody has to know why. Just stay down.'
'I can't. You know that.'
Abe did. Maybe a man could have stayed down. Not Kelly. She was healthy and
strong and proud. And blond. Eventually it would get out that she'd had a bad dream.
The word would spread. The men would expect nothing less than for her to bail. She
would hear the worst from Gus. Kelly swallowed hard.
'Damn it, Abe.'
Abe heard the need. He laid aside his hesitation and slipped his arm under her
shoulder and wormed closer to hold her tight. Kelly came into his embrace with the
familiarity of a longtime lover. She settled into the crook of his arm and placed one
bare hand against his chest. It was one of the few times on this mountain when two
people could comfort each other. Usually the bad times and fear came when you were
critically alone, at the far end of a rope. This embrace was a luxury.
'Unzip your bag, Abe.' They had learned, through someone's joke about them one
night, that the expedition-style sleeping bags could be zipped together. Now they
made a common bed. It was the first time they had lain together, unhampered by
separate cocoons.
They didn't make love, that wasn't the point, and besides it would have been
ridiculous in this tent at this altitude, a cold, short-winded fuck, hardly the way Abe
wanted it. Maybe they would make love someday, he thought. Maybe not. Tonight, at
any rate, they didn't even kiss because their lips were so shredded by the sun.
What they did do was more precious still. They just lay there, Abe with Kelly in his
arms. On the verge of sleep he was full of wonder at what this virtual stranger was to
him and what he might be to her. She could have been practically any woman – Jamie
or Gus or some other – a softness against his hard rib cage, a warm weight where her
thigh dangled across his. But she was Kelly, and he held the thought of her as he held
her long back and big shoulders. He tried to imagine what he was to her just now
beyond a heartbeat and whiskers like sandpaper against the tip of her forehead. She
could be thinking of anyone else. But Abe hoped it was him she thought of as she
drifted off to sleep.
'There's something I've wanted to say to you,' he started to confess.
But she stopped him. She knew. 'Not now,' she said. 'Another time. Please. Another
time.'
There was only a trace of her coconut shampoo left.
Her hair smelled almost entirely of smoke and sweat and human grease and Abe
inhaled it. She smelled like an animal. Before this, he'd never thought about how much
mountain air smells like a mountain, like snow and still rocks and ice sweating under
the stars. Nor had he ever craved human company so fundamentally. Up here it was
the sight of blood or the smell of raw humanity or a simple embrace that married you
to what you had become, an animal on a mountain.
Love reduced to this quiet possession, then, this touch and shared warmth.
By dawn, the squall had passed, leaving behind six inches of snow. The sky hung
gray, but nothing was coming down out of it, and that was worth a day more of hope.
Daniel was the first to strap into his crampons, of course. He alone seemed unaware
that the mountain had entered a new configuration. Six inches of snow wasn't much in
the way of armor, but another storm or two could sheathe the mountain with lethal
defenses. Between Li's deadline and the invading monsoon, they were definitely
running out of time.
Kelly's head appeared from the tent door and she smiled at Abe. Not once through
the night had they disentangled from each other's arms. There had been no more
mention of Kelly's bad dream and Abe had let it drop. It came to mind that maybe his
embrace had exorcised her premonition, and he snorted at the notion. What a journey
that would be, from ambulance cowboy to full-fledged physician to shaman and
exorcist. At this rate he would end his days droning prayers in a Tibetan monastery
cell. It was time to quit believing in his own magic.
Even as he watched her, Kelly gave Abe a surprise. Unfolding her long limbs from
the tent door, she stretched to her full height wearing a skintight, powder blue Nordic
ski racing uniform. It had bold white stripes up each leg to the armpit and down from
her neck to her wrists. Lithe and streamlined, she was spectacular, which Abe already
knew. What really puzzled him was where this outfit could have come from.
But then he looked around and saw that most of the other climbers were emerging
dressed in the same powder blue uniforms. He remembered. It was product
endorsement time and all through camp brand-name costumes were surfacing clean
and new, saved especially for the camera and their summit bid. The uniform looked
Olympian on some, silly on others. Bird legs and chicken breasts stood pronounced,
and Abe was glad no one had remembered to issue him one of the suits. The uniform
had its merit, however. For the first time since Li had undercut their morale, the
climbers had the look of a team bent on tagging the earth's highest point. Shaking the
snow off their equipment, they got to work peopling the Hill once again.
Over the next five days, the climbers took up their positions in the forward camps
and prepared to rush the summit. It was a slow and orderly rush. Spaced a day apart,
they moved up. The weather got no better, but at least it got no worse.
By the end of the fifth day, Abe found himself once more at the cave camp
designated Four. To his delight, the foul weather seemed to have locked the mountain
tight. Not so much as a single rock had bombed the Shooting Gallery all day long. He
took that as a sign of good luck, and told Kelly so at each of their rest stances along the
fixed ropes.
Abe was now as fully acclimatized as he was going to get, with the result that he
actually felt strong as they entered the cave near three o'clock. His last time here with
Daniel and Gus, he had been gasping and hurt, but his rest at lower elevations had
restored him. He was hardly a superman – at 26,500 feet, there was no way not to
/> gasp for air and his entire being hurt – but he was functioning quite well this time
around, and the idea of going higher was not at all mind-boggling.
Two teams of two – Daniel and Gus, and Stump and J.J. – had stayed here the night
before, then gone on to occupy Five. Someone, probably J.J. judging by the
elementary school scrawl, had left them a note: 'Big E or Bust.'
The plan was for Abe and Kelly's team to spend the night here, then move up to
Five in the morning. They would occupy Five while Daniel and his bunch made its
push to the top and then descended as far as possible. On the day after tomorrow, if
all went well, Abe and Kelly would repeat Daniel's success. Behind them by a day, the
final team of Robby and Thomas waited at Three, poised for their turn to rotate up
and have a crack at the summit. The two men were realistic. If the weather didn't
scotch their summit bid, their sagging health probably would. Thomas had never fully
recovered from his pneumonia, and Robby was suffering through his latest rampage
of diarrhea. Thomas had dubbed Robby and himself the Lost Patrol, astounding them
all. It seemed impossible that Thomas might have a sense of humor.
Jorgens was far below at One. He had 'Four-F'd' himself, bowing out on medical
grounds. In theory he was a support climber in case someone got in trouble above.
But it was no secret that Jorgens was incapable of going much higher and his presence
was strictly as a cheerleader to the rest of them.
And all the way down, with Li for a chess partner, Carlos was manning Base Camp.
The expedition was spread thin over the huge mountain, but this time around they
had the advantage of radio contact. Just being able to hear other voices had given the
various teams more confidence.
The sky stayed dense and leaden. It was so uniformly overcast that no one could
predict the next storm. They hadn't seen the sun in nearly a week, and that was a
mixed blessing. They didn't have to fight the noonday heat, but for the last five days,
everyone had been complaining of a chronic lassitude that made them feel heavy. Abe
was starting to wonder if the change in barometric pressure might be responsible.
Others in the team decided on a different scapegoat.
It was Li's fault, they said. The L.O. had shackled them. He had derailed their