by Ruthie Knox
The idea was to hire Sherpa guides to take trekkers around in the Khumbu and to Annapurna, pay them a living wage, and put them through continuing education so they would be at the cutting edge of ecotourism. The more credits they had, the more they got paid. The curriculum emphasized local expertise and traditional ways, combined with evidence-based international best practices.
Kal had done an internship for Brian in college. When he got the pilot project worked out, he’d pitched it to him first, and Brian was enthusiastic. Brian followed Kal’s plans and put the guides to work. Meanwhile, Kal took meetings with Nepalese government officials to push the adoption of a policy that would first incentivize and later make it mandatory for trekkers to hire one of these trained local guides rather than whoever they ran into outside the airport, or no guide at all.
The point was supposed to be to show how combining an official state commitment to ecotourism with empowerment of local guides could work for everyone: give the tourists a safe experience they could feel good about, protect the fragile landscape, put more money in the government’s coffers in the form of higher permit fees, and attract business to Brian’s operation in the bargain.
It didn’t work out that way. The government got snarled up with infighting and never delivered on its promises. The guides skipped training, worked side businesses, and asked for tips they weren’t supposed to get, which the tourists didn’t like. Brian lost money. A hundred other things went wrong. By the time the earthquake brought the whole thing to an end, it felt like a mercy killing.
But afterward, it kept getting worse for the people he’d tried to help. They lost their stake in the business, they lost their homes, Pasang had lost his daughter. Then his life.
Kal gestured at Rosemary’s plate. “Keep eating.”
He almost wanted to tell her about it, but that was stupid. Who wanted to talk about being a failure?
“Where’d you grow up?” he asked.
“Kent.”
“That’s in England?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“Green.”
“Try another bite,” he suggested.
She did, and he lobbed her a few more easy questions, which she answered in one syllable until she said, out of nowhere, “I gave birth to Beatrice at home.”
“Tell me about that.”
She was looking past him, lost in herself, but she’d gotten some of her color back. “I was a few days past my due date, and I woke up around midnight with a contraction. I knew I’d started labor. I got out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and very calmly vomited into the toilet.”
“That sounds like you.”
“And I worried, afterward, that I’d woken my husband, Winston, but I hadn’t. The worry told me I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to know.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I sent him off to London in the morning, to the office, and I couldn’t lift my arm to wave goodbye or he would’ve seen the circle of sweat on my nightshirt and known something was wrong. I took a pitcher of water upstairs to the bedroom. It took me an hour to climb the stairs—it seemed like an hour—but I made it to the bed and poured myself a glass of water. I unplugged the phone. We didn’t have mobiles then. Winston came home from the office at half-six, took one look at me laboring in the bed and went gray.”
“I’ll bet.”
She bit off half of another dumpling and ground it between her back teeth. “Beatrice was born an hour later.”
“Healthy?”
“Perfect.”
He shook his head and plucked the last dumpling off the plate. “You’re a piece of work, princess.” He dipped it in the sauce.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I’m not sure I know yet.” He met her eyes. “You look better. You feel better?”
“Yes, I think so. I don’t want to put my head down on the table anymore.”
“You’ve got some color back.”
“Are you thinking about it?” she blurted. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“The avalanche?”
She nodded.
“I never stop thinking about it.”
It was true. He never did.
He never stopped thinking about the Khumbu, the Sherpa people, Everest. He never stopped thinking about Brian, and wasted resources, and bodies on the mountain, the destruction he’d seen after the earthquake, the people he’d promised a livelihood to and then failed to deliver.
He never stopped thinking about his mom and what they’d gone through together. The awful day in the courtroom when the judge granted her divorce after Merlin got himself arrested for contempt. And that bloody afternoon at Base Camp when Merlin died and she’d turned around the next morning and hiked up the mountain to summit. How fiercely he’d wanted to protect her. How helpless he’d been to do anything but wait for her to come back.
It seemed perverse that he couldn’t just leave it all behind. Let the past be dead, move on with something else.
Even more perverse, how it had been good—really good—to see Brian’s face again.
Rosemary poked her index finger into the crumbs on their plate and ate them, one after another.
After a while, Kal stood, stretched, and gathered up his bag of clothes and her travel wallet. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I always thought you would have made it to the summit.”
Rosemary looked pleased.
He didn’t tell her his opinion was worth next to nothing.
Chapter 7
Kal picked up the in-flight magazine, skimmed through it, and set it down.
Then he retrieved the remote from where he’d left it on a table and flipped through the channels on the wall-mounted flat-screen monitor. One showed the airplane, an icon following a red arc from Abu Dhabi to New York City. The next three were live feeds from cameras mounted outside the plane—lights flashing in the darkness, now that they were high in the air and the sun had dropped below the horizon. After that, sitcoms captioned in multiple languages. Music videos, dancers whirling and singing. Hollywood movies.
He kept flipping, though he’d done this twenty minutes ago and found nothing to settle on after three minutes of news coverage had tipped him over sideways.
Nineteen deaths and counting in the avalanche. The journalist hadn’t said whether that included Sherpa people. It usually didn’t.
Kal couldn’t settle.
From Kathmandu to Abu Dhabi, he’d sat with Rosemary in first class. It was a normal plane, the kind of experience that wasn’t difficult to take in even though he’d never flown first class before. He enjoyed the free cocktail and rehydrated with four glasses of ice water. Rosemary fell asleep, but Kal watched out the window as they left Nepal behind, crossed India and Pakistan, and sliced over the Persian Gulf to land in the UAE.
Abu Dhabi to JFK was something else entirely.
He shouldn’t have let Rosemary purchase their tickets without talking to him first. If he’d had any idea she was going to spring for first-class apartments on this flight, he’d have insisted she put him in economy where he belonged.
What did it even cost to fly like this, with your own sliding doors shutting you away from the other passengers, your own leather seat big enough to fit four people, a foldout bed, a chef whipping up gourmet meals you selected from the menu whenever you took the whim to eat them, a signed welcome note from the cabin manager accompanied by hot towels and a bowl of dates?
He’d have to draw against every penny of his paltry credit limit to pay Rosemary back. Kal wasn’t sure it would even be enough—and that was if he could get her to say what he owed her, which seemed doubtful given that she turned into Fort Knox every time he brought it up.
He wandered into the bathroom and turned on the hot water tap. His flight attendant had given him a tour, pointing out the expensive toiletries, the toothbrush and toothpaste, the airline-branded pajamas he was welcome to wear after taking a hot shower.
Five minutes of hot water. She’d told him apologetically, as though five minutes of hot water would be some kind of hardship.
He washed his face, scrubbing with a cotton washcloth until his nose was pink.
He shaved.
He brushed his teeth, then took a shower and put on the pajamas. They were more comfortable than the clothes he’d bought in Kathmandu.
On the tray beside the sink, he found a spray bottle of aromatherapy oil. Sleep, it said in elegant script. He sprayed it into the air in front of his face, then inhaled.
He didn’t want to sleep.
Nineteen people were dead, with the search ongoing.
He wanted to break the mirror with his fist.
Kal looked at the provided slippers, lined with soft microfiber, and left them where they lay, padding to Rosemary’s compartment barefoot, sliding the door open only seconds after he knocked without waiting for her to answer.
The overhead lights were out, the room glowing blue, the sleep spray smell in the air. She sat up when he came in, pushing a silky black mask onto the top of her head. “What is it?”
“I woke you up.” He hadn’t even considered the possibility. He should go, leave her alone. He didn’t want to.
“No. I couldn’t sleep.”
He sat down on the leather sofa opposite her bed. Crossed his arms. Uncrossed them and wished he’d put his clothes back on. “Neither could I.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “It’s strange, isn’t it? All this luxury after…I thought it would feel like a treat, but I don’t know.”
“I watched the news.”
“So did I.”
Her hair was down around her shoulders again, falling in long, obedient locks. At Base Camp, she’d always kept it pulled away from her face, tucked under a hat.
She wore the pajamas, too. She’d had her five-minute shower.
“Did you order food?”
She pretended the question wasn’t inane. “I had snapper.”
“I got the same thing.” Kal rubbed the bridge of his foot back and forth over the carpeted floor. “It was good.”
“It was delicious.”
“I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“No.” She looked past his right arm to a table where her laptop sat plugged in. “I don’t either. I’m afraid to turn that on. I keep telling myself I have to, if only to check in with people who must be worrying about me, but I think if I lift the lid I’ll be on Google in a heartbeat, searching for the names of…” She looked at him, tears welling up. “I keep trying to convince myself it’s possible I won’t know any of the people on the list, and then I feel terrible, because it’s no better, is it? Whether I know them or not, they’re dead.”
“I’m sure you knew them.”
That made her start crying.
He shifted to sit next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No.” She sniffled. “I have to accept it.”
“I didn’t need to be so blunt. It’s not cool to Doctor Doom you when you’re down.”
“Why do they call you that?”
Kal sighed. “I grew up around climbers, because of my parents, right? And I was really into comics. I had some comics with me at Base Camp, X-Men, Fantastic Four, classic stuff like that.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
He’d been sixteen.
He didn’t want to lie to Rosemary.
After a moment, he tried again. “I was sixteen, actually. My dad asked me in front of a whole bunch of other climbers and Sherpa guides if I wanted to be an ice doctor someday.”
There he was, the son of Merlin and Yangchen Beckett. There he was, having survived his childhood, helped his mom get a divorce and encouraged her when she said she wanted to climb Everest herself, standing at Base Camp in front of his own fucking father who asked him if maybe he thought he could be an ice doctor someday, like that was some pinnacle of aspiration for a Sherpa kid like Kal.
Not, did he want to summit Everest himself?
Not, did he want to change the world?
Did he want to be an ice doctor?
“What did you say?” Rosemary asked.
“I told him I looked forward to the day when there wouldn’t be any such thing as ice doctors. Everest wouldn’t need them when I’d convinced Nepal to shut it down permanently to climbing.”
Kal remembered how full of himself he’d been, emboldened by his parents’ divorce and the fact that his dad couldn’t hurt him anymore. How good it had felt to brag in front of his father, puffed up with his own importance.
“I told him when it happened, no one would care about Merlin Beckett anymore. He’d have to learn how to do real work.”
It was one step too far, considering his audience. Merlin’s face had paled, his neck turned red and blotchy with his desire to lash out. He’d clawed at the neck of his jacket like he wanted to claw at Kal’s face. But there had been too many people around for him to do anything but storm off and find another outlet for his anger. Merlin’s usual outlet. Kal’s mom.
It was the last time Kal saw his father alive.
“I still don’t see where Doctor Doom comes in.”
“This Sherpa I knew, who I’d been showing comics to, joked I would put him out of business. He called me Doctor Doom. Diffused the tension a little.”
“And the name stuck?”
“Sherpa people don’t forget stuff like that. Years later, when I started working with the ice doctors, setting up the ropes and ladders in the icefall, they would send me to talk to the climbers—supposedly because I had the most English, although those guys all speak English just fine and understand more than they’ll show. It was because I was the youngest, and nobody liked giving those reports. Every day, it’s some asshole haranguing you in a different accent about how his clients need that route done yesterday. I got a reputation as Mr. Bad News. One of them heard me called Doctor Doom, and that was that.”
He still had his arm around her shoulder. She’d gone still, her eyes on her hands in her lap.
He liked how his arm fit around her. How they fit together.
Maybe in some other life, she was the kind of woman he’d have ended up with. If he believed in karma. Not this life, though.
“One of the women in my group said it was because you were always telling people to turn around,” Rosemary said. “As if you didn’t want anyone to get to the summit.”
He’d forgotten for a minute that Rosemary was a climber. She’d come to Everest with that British team, taken her acclimatization as seriously as any of them, all geared up and kitted out to check the mountain off her bucket list so she could move on to the next one.
She’d go back to Everest sooner or later. Drop another forty or sixty or eighty thousand dollars into the bucket as soon as Nepal reopened for permits.
Rosemary and him—they had next to nothing in common.
He could tell her he’d spent months on the mountain and off it trying to get the Sherpa guides to organize and convince the government to protect their interests. He’d pushed to make it mandatory for the expedition companies to buy life insurance policies for Sherpa workers, to pay them fairly, to take them seriously as experts instead of expendable labor available at the lowest market price.
He could tell her it had fallen apart, just like the project with Brian had. That the avalanche killed it, or that he had, because he hadn’t been smart enough or good enough to make it work.
Every year, Kal pissed off somebody new. The Sherpa stopped wanting to talk to him, worried they’d lose their jobs. Doctor Doom, they said, but they meant, Give it a rest.
He could tell her, but there wasn’t any point.
So why did he want to?
He got up and walked to the window. She’d put the shade down. He raised it, even though there was nothing to see outside but black. Thin air and cold that would kill him if he stepp
ed into it. Death.
Kal was sick of hanging out with death all the time.
Rosemary went into the bathroom, came out with a glass of water, and pressed it into his hand. “Drink this.”
“Thanks.”
She linked her arm into his loose elbow and stood with him, hunched over at the waist, staring out into the blackness like she saw something there, too.
“What did you do before?” he asked. He imagined her on a throne in a gown, pointing at some nothing peasant with her scepter.
“I was wallpaper.” She touched the plastic window with her index finger, pressing it until her nail bed turned white.
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true. I was a mum. I didn’t work. Winston worked. The car picked him up every day and drove him into the city. I walked Bea to the coach that took her to school. And then seven hours passed, during which I became wallpaper.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Rosemary moved closer to his side, pressed her mouth into his biceps through the cotton airline pajamas. When she spoke again, her voice was a barely audible mumble. “It means I did charity projects. I directed workmen in a ten-year renovation of the manor house my husband had purchased, which cost three million pounds when all was said and done, and that’s nothing to do with the upkeep, which could be anywhere between fifteen thousand on ordinary things like guttering and the gardens or half a million the year I had the roof retiled. I picked out paint colors. I ordered replacement china. And when my daughter came home, I served her an early supper, directed her through her schoolwork, put her to bed, and cooked for my husband—unless we had to attend an engagement, in which case I put on one of three tasteful frocks, pinned up my hair, and made polite conversation that could never be construed as improper, or distasteful, or either above or below my station.”
“I imagined you on a throne,” he said, “smiting peons with your scepter. You shall not pass, you know?”
Rosemary’s smile was gentle. “I believe you’re thinking of Gandalf.”
“He had a white horse.”
“As did I. So we’ve that in common at least.”