by Jeff Long
The wind had stopped. The simplicity and friendliness were gone. Once again the tent
was a small, shabby space. The walls had grown dark.
Daniel looked at him. He wasn't wearing an oxygen mask. 'You okay, Abe?' he asked.
Abe nodded yes.
'You were singing,' Daniel said. 'We came in. You were out of oxygen. And you were
singing.'
Besides himself, Abe counted a total of three others in the tent, Kelly and Daniel and
Gus. Gus and Kelly were dozing, crammed in one corner, zipped in bags. Daniel was
minding the stove.
Abe started to decipher his long, bizarre afternoon. He must have run out of oxygen
again. He'd been hallucinating, that was clear. Maybe he still was.
'We couldn't find you,' Abe said. He lifted the mask off to speak. 'We thought you
were dead.'
'So did I,' Daniel said. 'We had trouble getting through the Band. The wind trapped
us. We were close. But we ran out of time. We had to come down.'
'Where's Stump? Where's J.J.?' Abe asked. He accepted that Daniel had lost them.
Daniel squinted at Abe, perplexed. 'They came in the tent for a while. You gave
them tea and talked. Then they went down the ropes. They made it as far as Three
before dark stopped them. I talked to them on the night call.'
'I don't understand.'
'It's nine o'clock, Abe.'
Abe frowned. So many hours had passed. There was still a disembodied sheen to the
people and things in the tent, and he realized his escape from the underworld was not
yet complete.
'What else?' Abe asked. 'Any news?'
'Robby and Thomas came up to Four. But Thomas is dog sick. Unless there's some
improvement, they go down in the A.M.'
'And Jorgens? He's still at One?' It helped for him to be locating the others. Already
he felt more composed.
'Still in One. Tonight he went on the record. Not guilty.'
'Not guilty?'
'Jorgens said it wasn't him who turned the kid in.'
Abe hadn't forgotten the monk. But he had to remember if Jorgens's treachery
really mattered to him. He couldn't say. It seemed to matter to Daniel, though.
'Jorgens hangs for this one,' Daniel said. 'Stump and I decided. He can explain this to
his precious AAC.'
Abe hadn't thought of that one. The American Alpine Club took itself very seriously,
and Jorgens's presidency wouldn't last the first round of cocktails at their next
meeting. That would hurt Jorgens where he lived, more than any curse or fist could.
But Abe's small pleasure vanished when he pictured the board members who would
vote. Most were lawyers and professionals used to savoring all the grays between
black and white. And besides, few climbers thought of ethics as anything but a set of
rules governing how much chalk they put on their hands or how many bolts they
hammered in the rock. Ten thousand miles and months or years from now, the
notions of guilt and betrayal would strike them as absurd. They would say what
Jorgens would say, that a climber has no duty except to climb. And so revenge didn't
matter, especially not tonight at 28,000 feet with the ghosts crowding in.
'What about the boy?' Abe asked.
'Carlos said they take him off tomorrow. He hasn't seen the kid since the one time.
Hog-tied in the Tomb.'
Abe would have sighed if there was the extra air for it.
'Also, Li wants us down.'
'I thought we had ten days.'
'Two more days, Abe. Then our ten are up.'
'I guess so.' People, days, even reasons for being up here: It was so easy to lose
count anymore.
'Carlos said one other thing. The yaks down at Base, they've run off.'
'So?' For all Abe knew, yaks regularly ran off.
'Carlos said the herders are all freaked. The yaks were fine until today. They they
started getting nervous and running around. Then they bolted. They headed north.
The herders say it's a bad omen. Something's about to happen. It's been a strange
afternoon down there.'
Right now Abe didn't have any room for premonitions and superstitious babble. 'It
was a strange afternoon up here.'
'Welcome back.' Daniel smiled. Abe liked that they could joke about their madness.
To Abe's side, Kelly whimpered. She mewled like a kitten inside her mask. Her eyes
were closed and Abe thought she might be having her nightmare again.
'How'd that happen to her eyes?' Daniel asked.
Abe licked his lips and frowned. His headache was back and it was hard trying to
keep up with Daniel.
'She's snow-blind,' Daniel said. 'I gave her a half tab of Valium for the pain.'
'Valium? At this altitude?'
'Abe. I asked you. It was your idea.'
Abe looked at his hands. He clenched and opened them. He wondered what else he'd
said and done that afternoon.
'So what's the program?' he asked. Daniel's team had misfired on their summit
assault. Kelly was blind. They were down for the count. There weren't going to be
enough of them left to push it. The mountain had scored another defeat. Their only
remaining mission was to get off the Hill in one piece. He only hoped Daniel didn't
want them to descend right away, tonight, in the dark.
'I know the way now,' Daniel said. 'We cracked the Yellow Band. I thought it would
be simple and it wasn't. But now I know the way.'
Abe was sorry for Daniel. To have come so far and learned so much, and now to
have to turn his back on it all. But Abe had no doubt Daniel would return. Someday he
would complete his cycle upon this mountain. Carlos had told Abe about a mountain in
western Tibet where pilgrims circled around and around. This was that mountain for
Daniel, only the circles moved vertically, up and down.
'What do you say, Abe?'
'First thing in the morning,' Abe said. 'We can start at seven o'clock.' That would give
them a full day. They could descend most of the face in that time, maybe all the way
to ABC.
'I was thinking more like six.'
'Fine, six.'
Daniel grinned. 'Don't worry, Abe. This time, I know the way.'
Abe grimaced. He was appalled. They were talking about two different directions.
Daniel meant to go up.
'I thought you meant down.'
'He meant up,' a new voice intruded. It was Gus. She had been listening. She looked
broken to pieces by the combat. The sun and wind and fatigue had cut her face into
separate parts, and the parts were coming unglued. Everything was.
There was no possible way he could go farther. Now that the afternoon was over,
now that he was learning how lucid he'd been in his craziness, Abe was frightened. He
had to get out of this zone of illusions before it consumed him. But instead of risking
his hard-won alliance with Daniel by telling him no, Abe pointed at Kelly. She lay
asleep in a pile of down gear and gold hair.
'But Kelly's blind,' he said. 'I have to take her down.'
It was true, but also it was a way of cutting his losses. This way he could descend
and still have Daniel's respect. But his gambit failed.
'Negative.' Gus sounded a hundred years old. 'I'll take care of Kelly tomorrow. You
go up. I'll go down.'
'But Gus,' Daniel faltered.
'I'm whipped.' She stated it categorically,
with no pathos. 'I can't go on. And I know
it.'
'Gus,' Daniel protested. But they knew she was right. Once a climber turns her face
from the mountain, there's nothing more to argue. Without faith, without obsession, a
climber was no more than bait for disaster.
Abe watched the gravity steal into her eyes. It was like watching a person die, a
terrible and private twilight. Yet Abe felt he'd earned this voyeurism and Gus didn't
turn from his gaze nor clothe her pain. Watching over Daniel had exhausted her.
'I'm sorry, Gus,' Daniel said. At the same time, Abe noticed, Daniel wasn't offering to
retreat. He didn't propose to descend with her, hand in hand. They weren't going to
stroll away from the mountain into a happy ending. This wasn't Hollywood. Nor was it
pity. Daniel's words were a simple, dry-eyed acknowledgment of her loss.
Gus was not particularly touched. She shrugged. 'I'm not sacrificing myself,' she
said. 'I'm making way.' Then she looked at Abe. 'I had my run. Now you have yours.
Get it over with.'
It was remarkable how she managed to bring it off. Here she was setting him up and
yet it sounded so benign. But the facts stood. Having exhausted herself trying to
deliver Daniel his summit, Gus was simply making certain her lover had a
replacement. Regardless of what had just been said, Gus was definitely sacrificing. She
was giving away her second try with the calculation of a kingmaker, and she was
giving away Abe's fear and maybe his life and, who knew, maybe even Kelly's life if it
depended on his medical know-how. Gus was willing to sacrifice them all, herself
included, in order to get Daniel to his salvation. And yet Abe could not resent her.
'Leave him alone,' Daniel said to Gus. 'You made your decision. He made his, too. I
misunderstood, that's all.'
Her eyes stayed locked on Abe's. 'He talks like you're blood, the two of you,' she said
to Abe. 'You act like it, too.'
'Stop it, Gus.' Daniel hissed at her.
She faced him. 'If Abe goes down, will you?'
'That's beside the point.'
'But it is the point,' Gus said. 'You can't do this alone.' She turned to Abe. 'And you
can't either.'
She quit talking. If she had said one false thing, Abe would have turned away. But
he'd felt the night in his heart for too long, exactly as long as he'd known Daniel. It was
time for them to escape, together. A thousand more feet of climbing and they would
break through to the sun.
'You're right,' Abe said.
'Damn it, Gus.' Daniel's shoulders looked thin beneath his parka. He was at once
angry and defeated.
'Shut up,' Abe said to Daniel. It surprised them both. 'I'm going. We're going.'
'Listen,' Gus said. 'The wind. It stopped.'
And it had. The tent walls were no longer buzzing. The thunder was gone. They
were talking at a normal volume.
'We should sleep,' Daniel said.
'It's so quiet,' Abe noticed. It was more quiet than just the absence of the wind. Now
he touched the still tent wall and found that it was solid and heavy, like cold wet
concrete.
Daniel zipped open the top of the door and shined his light outside.
'It's snowing,' he told him. 'Snowing hard.'
'It will stop,' Gus said. 'Like the wind, it will stop. Now you should sleep.'
11
Long ago, drinking straight shots on flat land at the end of a sunny day of rock
climbing, Abe had held forth that a mountain is nothing more than a pyramid of
memories and dreams. He had insisted. No mountain exists without the climber to
perceive it.
There was the opposite possibility, of course, that every climber is simply the
invention of long geological slumber. Just as climbers can manipulate their dreams, a
mountain can manipulate its own ascent. And when the mountain wakes, the dream
ends and the climber evaporates.
But Abe hadn't thought of that one that sultry twilight in a Mexican restaurant, and
now it was too late, for the Kore Wall came alive. It caught Abe, booted and spurred,
in the very act of checking his watch.
None of them had slept a wink, not once Kelly's Valium wore off and she started
begging for more. Abe had refused, saying she needed to be coherent for her descent.
She had cursed him and wept, but the tears only hurt her burned eyes more.
At 3:30 in the morning, Abe and Daniel started arming for their final assault by
headlamp. Gus and Kelly stayed in their bags to make room in the crowded tent. After
the men were gone, they would gear up for their own departure.
For a hundred days, they had forgotten time, living like exiles. Yet this morning Abe
couldn't remember it enough. Like a condemned man, he tracked every minute. His
destiny seemed to have become a matter of seconds.
At 5:15 Abe started working into his boots and super-gaiters. He snapped shut the
heel clips on his crampons at 5:40, strapped on his helmet eight minutes later, and
five minutes after that double-checked both his and Daniel's oxygen regulators. The
last thing Abe did before pulling on the wrist loop of his ice axe was check the time
again: 5:57 A.M., 6/12.
That was the moment the earthquake struck.
It was subtle. Kelly felt the trembling first. She said, 'What's that?' Then Abe felt it,
too. Then they heard the snow.
Like a giant serpent loosening its coils, the first of the avalanches let go with a hiss.
Each of them knew what it was with hair-trigger wisdom. Like the snow itself, their
awareness of the danger had collected heavier and deeper overnight. The Yellow Band
overhead was loaded with dry snow shingled with wet snow and they were in the cold
white field of fire. The first avalanche missed them. Eyes wide above their oxygen
masks, they listened to it empty down the limestone tiles and hit their plateau with a
boom. Moments later the backdraft blasted their tent with a roar of air. Spindrift the
texture of beach sand was pressure-injected through the closed zipper and the air
turned white.
Daniel started to yell something. But the mountain had its range now.
The second avalanche did not miss them.
The door blew out – not in – and a tremendous suction dragged at Abe's lungs and
heart and bowels, threatening to gut and empty him in one sweep.
An instant later the vacuum reversed. The tent walls collapsed. The fabric wrapped
Abe's every contour tight. The whiteness went black. Sound turned to silence. All
perception stopped.
Abe's first thought was that he'd died. He thought. I can live with this. It was so
peaceful. He felt warm. Nothing hurt. Paradise was rest. He'd been laboring to find
this calm since birth.
But then he drew breath. It was a wracked, burning suck of air, and with it he
plunged into hell. For half his lifetime, Abe suddenly knew, he had been dreading this
moment, when he would face the fate of the lost girl Diana. Yet now, like a wasp
capturing an insect alive for her young to feed upon, the Mother Goddess had
enclosed him in her core. The mountain was going to feed upon him through eternity.
Abe tried to move his arms. He was not surprised by their capture. But the
claustrophobia spasmed through him anyway. All his strength poured into thra
shing
and bucking and tearing a hole through his imprisonment.
He had to move, even if it was only a fraction of an inch. He yelled and shouted, but
that only made it worse. He had the voice of a human being trapped inside a
mountain. Finally he passed out.
When Abe returned to consciousness, his throat hurt. There was no telling how long
he'd been out. Not long enough. He went mad again. Again he passed out.
When Abe came back this time, he tried to reason with his horror. But in trying to
picture his position – up or down or flat or sitting – or his location upon the mountain,
he lost control and consciousness again.
This time when he revived, Abe was too tired and ill to struggle. From a far distant
place, he felt pain. It was the stitched laceration on his right arm, he knew. But it came
to him simply as pain, without reference points. This was life then. Stripped of its
compasses and timepieces and sun, life reduced to a mere sensation. Abe no longer
wanted it.
Locked inside his coffin of snow, Abe felt inspired. If he couldn't control the
directions and movement of his life, then at least he could end it. The simple fact of
having a choice, no matter how final it was, calmed him. He didn't debate the issue.
One way or another he was going to gain his freedom.
Suicide was easier said than done. Abe slipped toward panic as he realized how
helpless he really was. It occurred to him that he could pack his mouth full of snow
and drown, however slowly. But upon opening his jaws for a bite he learned that the
oxygen mask was still on his face. He couldn't even honestly suffocate, it seemed. He
was doomed. Just before the avalanche hit, his oxygen regulator had showed a full
tank, and he hadn't yet cranked the flow rate from a half-liter per minute – his sleep
rate – to two liters per minute for climbing. A quick calculation told him another eight
to nine hours of air remained, and he couldn't even move his head to push the mask
off.
Abe's last hope was to go mad, then. But he no sooner invited the awful
claustrophobia to take him off into madness than it completely vanished. He was left
feeling calm and horrified at the same time. He remembered someone telling him that
Tibetan tulkus could select their moment to die. Through meditation they could