by Jeff Long
“What do you think I’m here for?” Augustine practically whispered it.
Lewis gaped at him, finally realizing that Augustine had not returned from Trojan Women to shepherd a frightened boy to safety. He’d come to trade him for a man. Lewis’s chin drew into his bull neck. “No.” He shook his head. “There’s a limit. Absolutely. Limits.”
Augustine released him without a word. He had already released the boy. He turned to Hugh.
“There are ropes running all the way across and up to our high point.” No invitation. No pleading. No demands. Just the necessary facts.
Hugh didn’t shy away from the blood-red eyes. Augustine was measuring him. In turn, he measured Augustine. He measured himself. “It’s night. You’re talking about a traverse. The smoke would eat our headlamps. We’d be blind.”
“We were blind coming across,” Augustine said. “That’s why it took us all day to get here. It didn’t stop us, though. And now the ropes are in place.”
“You don’t really think she’s alive?” Hugh needed to state his uncertainty outright. If Augustine blew up at the challenge, or fell to pieces, Hugh’s choice would be made for him.
“I know what I hope,” Augustine said. He didn’t begrudge Hugh’s bluntness. He didn’t fake the cold facts to try and win consent. “Maybe she’s not. But there’s only one way to find out.”
The two men stared at each other.
“Leave him alone,” Lewis said to Augustine.
Augustine ignored him. He was fixed on Hugh. They were driving a deal. It had nothing to do with Lewis. “Morning,” he bargained. “We rest tonight. Let the smoke thin out. Then jump on it, first light. Get it done.”
“Screw this, Hugh. You can’t bring Annie back.”
“Andie,” Augustine corrected him.
“I’m talking to my friend,” Lewis snapped, “about his wife.”
Augustine’s face clouded, then suddenly clarified. “Annie,” he said.
“I’m not trying to bring her back,” Hugh said to Lewis.
“Then rein it in, partner. This was a mistake. We’re off the wall.”
Hugh liked that, nearly a half mile off the deck, off the wall. He smiled.
“I’m not fooling. It keeps mutating on us. It started out one thing, then changed to another, and another,” Lewis said. “Face it. We were doomed before we left the ground.”
Hugh studied Augustine. He’d emerged from the desert with eyes as red as his, and lips as cracked, and a voice like rusted metal. But he wasn’t Augustine, and Annie—the idea of her—was not remotely present among these girls killed by El Cap. What Lewis could probably never understand was how unnecessary memory was in the end.
Something tugged at Hugh. Trojan Women whispered to him. Whatever it was saying, he couldn’t quite hear. The more he listened, the less he understood. But he felt drawn to go over. The mystery itself pulled him. It pulled him out of himself, out of his cocoon of solitariness.
He’d grown smaller since Annie’s disappearance, and that’s not how it was supposed to have gone. Where was the sense of liberation? Where was the fresh love, the unshuttered world, the second life? As it was, he did his job, went home to frozen dinners, watched CNN, and prepared for his next escape into the mountains. The drabness had become a relief of sorts, because it seemed to be the only punishment he would suffer for losing her in the desert. At the same time, it bound him so tightly that at times he could barely think. There had to be more. That’s what he wanted to hear in the whispering of Trojan Women.
Something, or nothing, was waiting for him over there. He’d reached enough summits to know the emptiness he would find, but it was better than the emptiness waiting below.
It came down to that. He was not finished with the abyss. Or the abyss was not finished with him. He shrugged. “All right,” he said to Augustine.
Augustine gave a single nod. Lewis screwed up his face.
There was nothing more to say. Each of them had made his decision, and all that remained was to wait out the night. Augustine called on his radio, and a ranger reported that the fire beneath El Cap had spent itself and that the floor was cooling. Also, they had located two charred bodies in a cave, presumably Joshua and Cass.
Augustine asked about a third body. Hugh respected him for that because he asked it outright, in front of them all. The third body would have belonged to his missing Andie, which would have eliminated this vertical dash for Cyclops Eye. Negative, said the ranger. But they would send a team to the base to search again in the morning.
Augustine explained the new plan. The radio crackled with static. Roger that, the ranger answered. Lewis and Joe could safely descend and walk out tomorrow. They could catch a ride at the road. There would be crews driving back and forth all day.
The climbers divvied up the gear. There was no haggling. Lewis and the boy needed three ropes, one haul bag, some hardware, and a quart of water for their descent. The fifteen or twenty rappels back to earth would require close attention—too many deaths happened on rappel—and time. But they would be down by midafternoon at the latest.
Hugh packed the remaining four gallons, some food, and bivvy gear for his journey to Trojan Women. Augustine said the extra weight would only slow them. Hugh didn’t argue, he just went on packing the haul bag. Augustine said, “We’ll do it your way, then.”
The climbers settled on different islands to sleep. The heat dissipated slowly. No more fever heat, it felt like a summer night now. There were no stars, of course. No summit. No nothing. Limbo.
Somewhat later, a hulking shape came over to Hugh’s ledge. It was Lewis, full of repentance and second thoughts. “Say the word, Hugh,” he whispered, “I’ll go up with you.”
Hugh heard the misery in him. Go back to your used bookstore, your poets and quietude, he did not say. “You’re doing the right thing,” he told him.
“Then why do I feel like a dog?
“Don’t do this to yourself,” Hugh said. “We’re good, you and me.”
“It’s just that the flesh is willing, but the mind is not,” Lewis said.
“There’s only room for two of us anyway,” Hugh told him. “You’d slow us down with your knee.” The phantom knee.
“There’s more to it,” Lewis said. “Something’s over there, Hugh.”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing good. It’s like all the bad shit keeps getting worse. The kid comes flying out of the smoke, and what does he say? ‘Keep him away from me.’ Augustine. And I’ve been thinking, maybe that’s the heart of it. Maybe Augustine is at the center of it all.”
“Augustine didn’t cause the fall. He didn’t tell Joshua to go berserk. He didn’t set the fire.”
“One domino falls, the rest fall, too.”
“You’re getting wild and woolly, Lewis.”
“But think about it. Guilt has a life all its own. It has legs and hands and a face. It runs amok. It screams in the night. What if this shit is following him around?”
“Like psychic manifestations? We’re seeing projections of a sinner’s soul?”
Lewis made a face. “Something bad keeps dogging him, you got to admit.”
“But I don’t believe in guilt,” said Hugh.
Lewis spread his hands, at a loss. His big muscles papered over a frailty he could not help. He was afraid. Rachel had left him, Hugh was continuing on, and he was in free fall. Full of guilt.
“I don’t have the stomach for it, Hugh, the climbing, the weirdness. Whatever you’re going to find over there. Those girls were my daughters’ ages.” Them, too, thought Hugh. His girls were gone. His house was deserted.
“You need to go down,” said Hugh. “You’ve got your head on straight. Think of the girls. Everything will turn out.”
“I’ve never bailed on you. I never thought I would.”
“I’m the one bailing on you.” Hugh tried to make a joke of it. “Only I’m going in the wrong direction.”
“Anymore, I don’t know
what’s up or down.”
“Look,” said Hugh. “You take care of the kid. I’ll take care of Augustine. Let’s get them through this.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“Down in the bar,” said Hugh. “Tonic water and free peanuts. We’ll torture the bartender.”
Lewis heard the farewell. The way Rachel obsessed him now, El Cap would obsess him later. But it was over. He retreated back to his own ledge.
That night Hugh dreamed a woman lay buried in the sand beneath him. He dug down, and it was Annie…alive. She was nude and young and ravishing. Her arms opened to embrace him. He called her name. When she answered, sand poured from her mouth. She aged. She withered to bone. Hugh tried to pull away from the creature, but she entangled his hand.
He woke with a start. It was cold. He was sweating.
His hand was sunk into the sand. Something was holding his wrist under there. He pulled frantically, and it was just one of their buried coils of rope.
SEVENTEEN
At dawn, the two teams set off from the Archipelago, one up, one down. Lewis gave Hugh a fierce bear hug. “Preserve thyself,” he said.
“I always do,” Hugh said.
“I’m serious, watch out. There’s something in the air. You can almost hear it, I don’t know. Bad jazz.”
“Just the wings of angels,” said Hugh. Another of their chestnuts.
“Be careful.” Lewis paused. “With him.”
“Augustine?” said Hugh. “He’s obsessed, not crazy.”
“Have you seen what he’s wearing on his wrist? You haven’t. You’ll see. Ask him what it is. Because I think I know.”
“Yeah?”
“It could be nothing.” Lewis frowned at his own fretting. “You’ll probably say to yourself, so what’s new? How’s Augustine any different from old Lewis, you know, our thing for women we thought belonged to us. You’ll probably think that.”
“You worry too much,” Hugh said. What Lewis did was talk too much. He flashed his mysteries and premonitions like card tricks, rarely the same one twice, and normally Hugh found it entertaining. But now was not the time.
There was a tug on the doubled rappel line from below. Joe was waiting. “Train’s leaving,” Lewis said.
“Chin up,” said Hugh, “knots tight. Into the stone. The breach. All that.”
“Vaya con Dios.” Lewis gripped Hugh’s shoulder. “For real, man.”
Lewis backed into the maw. As he melted into the smoke with his head shrouded in strips of cloth, he reminded Hugh of the old goatherder who had plucked him from the desert, a figment of a mirage inside a dream. Or a nightmare.
For one barren instant, Hugh wondered if he was making a mistake, and whether or not he should go after Lewis and get away. So far, events had only gotten stranger by the vertical foot. And Lewis was spot on about sharing with Augustine an obsession with women who left them empty. In that sense, Hugh was simply swapping one man’s loss for another’s.
It was worse than that. Step by step, by coming to Yosemite and going up El Cap, and now by crossing into the unknown with a stranger, he was climbing back into his own loss. Descend now, and he could wash off the smoke, drive away, and be clean of it all. But again he felt it, even more powerfully this morning. Something was waiting for him over there.
Hugh scanned the Archipelago’s ledges a final time. Nothing remained of them except for a few footprints, and their buried thermos of mementoes. Even the dead insects and birds were disappearing into the sand, slowly being consumed by El Cap.
He lifted the slack of Augustine’s rope, feeling for its pulse. When the trembling finally stopped, he knew Augustine had reached the far end of the first rope, and it was his turn. He clamped on his jumars, stepped into the stirrups, and began climbing away from the Ark.
Through the first few hours, Hugh was essentially alone on the ropes. Visibility was ten feet at best, and Augustine stayed a full pitch ahead of him. At each anchor, Hugh found the haul bag waiting to be lowered across so Augustine could pull it into the heights. Once the bag was gone, Hugh would continue on.
It was his idea, last night, to leave their ropes in place as an emergency backup. If the rescue litter got lost in the smoke, or the route to Cyclops Eye turned out to have fatal flaws, or the radio batteries went dead, or any number of things went awry, the fixed ropes back to the Archipelago would give them a ready exit.
Augustine had agreed to it immediately. He’d fought his way through two traverses now, the first time in crossing over to Trojan Women, the second time in returning to Anasazi. A rescue from the summit would be easiest and quickest. But if all else failed, the fixed ropes would allow them to retreat to the ledges and call in a helicopter, or descend to the ground. Augustine’s quick consent had dispelled any doubts Hugh had about his common sense. Within those Tarzan muscles and sleepless drive, the man was steady.
Hugh let Augustine gallop ahead on the ropes. Because they were heading diagonally, he had to mind the jumars with special care. The “jaws” had a habit of torqueing right off the rope at certain angles, and so he added a prusik loop to the rope, which further slowed his progress. The smoke was his biggest obstacle.
He felt like a hospital patient, or a hostage, with white gauze taped over his mouth and nose, and a rag tied over that. This was industrial-strength pollution, thick with ash and particulates. The first time he tried to hurry the tempo, it left him hunched in his stirrups, gagging and coughing.
It was eerie snaking through the gloom. If not for the rope, he would have been lost. He could have been ten feet above the ground, or ten thousand. A layer of soot coated the wall. Where their haul bag scraped the rock, it left long, white arcs, like the shadows of atomic particles. Hugh passed handprints where Augustine had pressed against the stone.
The smoke had thinned overnight. As the hours passed, the sun regained some of its size, lighting the world in tobacco hues. Now that the fire was dead, the smoke held no heat. The air and rock and the metal hardware at each anchor were all the same hard cold.
At the end of three full rope lengths, Hugh had no idea where he was going. The topography was wildly beyond his memory of even two days ago. He couldn’t gauge the heights or depths except by adding sums in his head, and he was suddenly having trouble remembering distances on Anasazi, which was now invisible to him, and translating those to the equally invisible Trojan Women. He and Lewis used to take turns embellishing an old fiction about a team trapped on an infinite wall. Now Hugh felt like one of those castaways.
It was not that he feared El Cap. To the contrary, he still craved the thing. It still made sense to him even though, the further he committed, the less sense it made. He was crossing lines drawn in his head, leaping old borders. It was like straying into Yemen that time, except now he was consciously trespassing.
The wall changed. He could feel the metamorphosis. It seemed more alive than ever as he angled toward Trojan Women. Brilliant neon green and red lichen patches showed through the film of smoke, some shaped like aboriginal petroglyphs…palm prints, animals, and dream lines…and some like satellite images of great cities and lakes. Black mica freckled the grime. The granite surged and rippled, painted with layers of soot.
Hugh had never seen El Cap like this, so embellished. It was ugly, and yet exquisite. Patterns and exotic tracings wove across its surface. The wall was a gigantic blank tablet, faintly written upon.
Riding on updrafts, insects had landed and traipsed about, marking the wall with tiny, cryptic messages before they died and fell away. A leaf had left its perfect imprint on the powdery surface. Hugh traveled across oscillating bands of soot, across the very rhythm of the fire.
About then he saw, or imagined, a shape in the smog. It moved with reptile stealth, crossing the stone to his left, headfirst. But the instant Hugh stopped to stare at the thing, it froze and seemed to stare back at him.
He rocked ever so slightly on the rope, and the creature wavered in and out of view. Ten or
twenty feet off in the smog, everything about it was indistinct. Was that a hand arrested in midpace, or a bulge of rock? It crouched tightly, like a lizard, but with certain human aspects. Rust streaks, surely, became the possibility of hair, long, wild hanks of it hanging down.
For a bad moment, Hugh thought he’d come upon the body of Augustine’s lover dangling on the tip of her rope. What if this was the dead woman? Worse, in a peculiar way, what if she wasn’t dead? The idea of her still struggling for survival after so many days appalled him. He’d seen it in Annie, the urge to live no matter how degraded and subhuman you became, an urge that positively had no mind.
He stared and tried to penetrate the smoke, unable to make it out. Had Augustine miscalculated so badly? Had he passed right beneath her without knowing it? If it was her, then they’d reached the fall line of Trojan Women. But that couldn’t be. The ropes kept angling off to the right, and Augustine was nowhere near. Cyclops Eye lurked distant and higher, much higher.
It had to be some sort of animal. Those were ribs, pulsing in and out. Or were they? Maybe it was just the drift of smoke. He couldn’t feel any breeze, though.
A lizard, he decided, something small and primal. He jugged a few feet higher, pushing closer, mystified. The thing suddenly lurched away. That or the hallucination retreated to stone again.
There were markings over there, more markings. He leaned left, expecting a tiny alphabet of footprints at most, or maybe the sinuous line of a tail.
The footprint was so pale—and human—he disbelieved it. It wasn’t the whole sole of a foot, but rather the ball and five toes. It was positioned downward, matching the stance of the creature. Which was completely absurd, of course.
Fighting the rope, he craned sideways and touched the print, barely, just the surface of it, and his fingertips went right through to the white stone beneath. The soot fell away where his fingers had run.
Only a shadow could have left a print so fragile, and there were no shadows in this murky land. He tried to think what could have made the mark. A climber’s fist, perhaps, with knuckles for toes? But that made no sense, not in the middle of nowhere, with no surrounding prints…and upside down. He tried to re-create the print with his own hand, pressing it this way and that, and nothing matched. His curiosity tugged. A gust of superheated air yesterday? The scuff of a falling rock? That had to be it. He was seeing things. He had rushed to read humankind into the bleakness.