Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  “We’ll need to file a permit now if we’re thinking July,” Troy says.

  “God, is that lightning?” says Vida.

  Everyone looks toward the window. There is a long pause of quiet.

  “God does not answer,” Reddy says.

  Vida recognizes him again, recalls his wit, his attentiveness.

  Wilder says, “I’m still thinking about how we’re getting up this mother.”

  Reddy shakes his head. “There are no photographs available, at least that we know of or have seen, taken from the Sanctuary floor. We don’t know what we will have above us until we are to arrive.”

  “Mr. Adams has photographs,” Sara says. “He should bring them next time we meet.”

  “Photos from 1956?” Devin says.

  “August 17, 1956,” Sara says. “Day that Adams and Hilman made the summit of Mount Sarasvati. My birthday of all days.”

  “That is really something,” Devin says, smiling at her.

  “Being named for it, I suppose, you could say I know it by heart.”

  Wilder laughs an odd laugh. “Sorry to call it a bitch.”

  “You couldn’t of actually been on the mountain,” Devin says.

  “I’ve gotten an eyeful of her while trekking,” Sara says. “And I’ve heard stories from Mr. Adams, and have seen his pictures. Anyhow, a lot of what I know is by intuition.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

  Wilder says, “We should not be climbing by intuition.”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time in India,” she says. “And I speak Hindi, and too a bit of Nepalese. I’ve read everything there is to read about the mountain. It means something to me. I have a feeling, is what I mean.”

  “You need climbing experience is what you need,” says Wilder.

  “I’ve done plenty of trekking in the Himalaya, as well as a lot of technical climbing here, most all of it with my father.”

  “You’ve had a most excellent teacher, then,” the doctor says. Reddy knows from his years of climbing with Troy, starting back when they were college students. They had beamed their headlamps onto thousand-foot vertical walls together, had placed their spikes into ice of all kinds, hacked away at giant icicle teeth like men in combat, countless times. They had touched a gloved palm one to the other on dozens of summits. Reddy, more than anyone, knows well his friend’s excellence.

  “Sara and I have climbed Rainier together,” Troy says.

  “Rainier,” Wilder says. “It’s just a long slog.”

  “In the winter it isn’t,” says Troy. “Going up Cadaver Gap.”

  “Not so easy,” Devin says. “I’m impressed.”

  “Cascades are not the Himalaya,” Wilder says.

  “I’m strong,” Sara says. “Maybe stronger than you.”

  Wilder laughs. “Yeah, right.”

  “Careful,” Reddy says. “Easier to choke on words than on a plum.”

  “Or a fig, Father Doctor,” Devin says. “You’re not eating a plum.”

  “Reddy’s right. No one knows how any of us will do at altitude,” Troy says. “No matter how strong we are now, or will be by the time we’re there.”

  “Sara’s time living in India and her ability to speak the language will definitely help us when it comes to Sherpas and porters,” Vida says. “You hear so many stories about mix-ups and misunderstandings when you’re up there and susceptible and all.”

  “I promise to do what I can,” Sara says. “Not only as a tribute to my mother, most importantly, but to do all I can for all of us, for the party.”

  Wilder sinks into his seat with a look of soured impatience.

  Sara goes to the fireplace, picks her mother’s cinnabar beads out from the silver tray on the mantel beneath the photograph. She drapes the beads around her neck.

  “You, Sara, need to take full responsibility, you being the instigator and all,” Devin says, a big grin on his face.

  Sara puts her mother’s glacier glasses on, looks around, smiles.

  “Take care of yourself, Sara,” Wilder says. “We should each of us take responsibility for ourselves and we’ll all as a group be better off for it.”

  “Have a fig, Wilder,” Devin says. “They’re very sweet. Put something sweet into you, man.”

  Wilder laughs to himself, reaches into the bowl. “Why not?” He chews the fig slowly, his face softening. He puts the stem in a saucer with the rest of the stems. Then he picks the bowl up from the table and offers it to Reddy with a nod of the head. Reddy nods back, takes a piece of fruit, and passes the bowl across to Vida. Everyone makes noises of relish and pleasure, all in agreement as to the deliciousness of the sweet and fleshy yield of the ficus tree.

  Devin holds a fig in the air. “To Sara’s yummy offering.”

  Wilder reaches for the bowl again.

  “And to a marvelous idea,” Reddy says.

  Troy lifts a coffee mug up. “To the Sarasvati Party.”

  The others in unison raise cups, a fig, a map, a stem.

  “To us,” they say, “the Sarasvati Party.”

  “To Mount Mysterium,” all say.

  PART II

  4.

  THE GORGE

  They arrive to a modest guesthouse within the dusty purlieus of New Delhi, greeted by the blistering weather of early July and the tonnage of chattel they had freighted ahead. Surrounding them are mountains of boxes, knolls of piled rope, the obstacles and toils and quarrels to come. They work to untangle lines, sort out clothing and tenting, nutriment and equipment, tools and kits for navigation and first aid. They guzzle sweet bottled drinks beneath a dull aluminum sky. They slap at biting flies, cough and wheeze the soot and fumes of the city, work through moods and lassitude as best they are able; sudoriferous wayfarers, the spent and destined lot of them. Nights they toss restlessly, grateful for a ceiling fan and the last hours upon a mattress for the next few months to come. In dreams they flail beneath monstrous bodies of snow that mute their cries in silence, or they cling desperately to the edges of precipices, struggling for a foothold or a handhold and breath enough. They are cartwheeling. They are falling. They are flying.

  They had yesterday boarded the aircraft, spirits high, all laughing and talking easily, ebulliently, calling one to the other as they made their way down the narrow aisle. “Truly more hysteria than humor,” said Professor Troy after a particularly bad pun from one of their coterie. They settled into seats and buckled in, music streaming through the earphones, turbines humming in the cowlings, a soft chattering of captain in the loudspeakers overhead. There came the sudden thrust of velocity and weighted press against their chests, the rush of takeoff and thrill of the lift, their hearts propelled, breath quickened, an unconscious clenching of bones and flesh. The jetliner leveled out and was throttled to cruising, and soon pictographs and colored lights signaled safety and release as voices from above spoke of regulations, obligations, duty-free. The seekers closed their eyes and rode the waves of their imaginings, minds in flight, moving through darkening clouds and the vortices of turbulence, veins of lightning rending the black nimbus, their daydreams unsteadied, thoughts disturbed by reflection and questioning. The why was different for every climber; a few answers being reasoned, other rationales myth or easy utterance; some claims blank as a blank page and offering no grounds at all.

  Hillary Adams and Vida Carson sat side by side in the middle of the cabin, window and aisle. The bumpier the ride, the more determined they were to converse. They talked old pets and new boots, use of pills for altitude, hygiene while traveling, the perplexities of fashion, the dilemmas of accumulated waste. They spoke of families, upbringings, histories, their ways of seeing, their why-they-are-heres, their beliefs, their wishes, their fears.

  In Vida’s story the desire to climb was linked to the desire to be with Wilder. “I fell in love,” she said, “and was willing to follow him wherever he wanted to go. Learn to do the things he liked to do. I admired his drive, his strength, and his courage. I’ve never be
en interested in pessimistic loser types. What can I say?”

  “What can you say?” Mrs. Adams said. She sipped her cocktail.

  “Who ever thought I’d see the tops of snowy volcanoes, among so many other places I’d never travel to without him as a guide,” Vida said. “Amazing, being out there in the middle of all that wildness together. Wilderness, wildness, Wilder, jeez, who knows what it means? I didn’t find out he was really a Walter until later.” She paused. “Would I have fallen for a Walter?” She smiled, put a few peanuts into her mouth, chewed. “Well, story is I fell in love with the mountains as much as I was with the man who ended up being my husband.”

  The past tense of Vida’s last sentence did not go unnoticed. But Hillary Adams would not speak of the slip, or the mistake, or the hint, or whatever it might have been. Nor did she mention the sway of her own christening, sharing a name with a coeval who happened to be the first person to stand at the top of Everest. Instead the well-mannered Mrs. Adams went on to explain her passion for adventure as it related to her mate as well. “We found a way of being together outside our domestic routine that was akin to lovemaking,” she said. “Together we use our bodies and our minds and our instincts. And when we stand at a summit we stand as one.” She reached between the seats in front of her to give her husband a poke on the shoulder. Mr. Adams turned to his wife and peered over his reading glasses, only to see her gesturing him back to his book.

  Such romantic notions are not shared by everyone, both women agreed. They pushed the attendant light and ordered more peanuts and gin.

  Devin Reddy and his father had seats together several rows behind and were ignoring the choppy ride, though both had given up trying to read. Devin had lugged along Shipton’s Mountain Travel Book, despite his father’s pestering him about its bulk and its weight. Reddy had carried with him but a slim volume of the American Alpine Journal, edited by their esteemed leader, Virgil S. Adams. The doctor was doing his best to make this trip a restorative treatment of sorts between himself and his son, at the very least a palliative reprieve, the father even going so far as to insist they be seated together. But he could not at times hold back certain harsh remarks, a habit of criticism that had begun soon after his son was born. For Devin had been his wife’s wish, no matter Reddy’s opposition to having children. She knew this before they had married: Reddy had made clear his ambition to work and to climb. He had begged Maggie to continue her photography, to know life’s value in this, but she had at some point decided differently, having realized other aims and needs.

  Reddy lectured his son about mountaineering strategies and routines, unaware of how he sounded now. He left off at anchoring all belays, a dictate he repeated too many times, before going on to speak more generally of historical climbs and famous climbers, about what went right and what didn’t; subjects that included neither mother nor wife. If Maggie came up, which sometimes she did, he let her name fall away and quickly got back to the topic. Each, without the other knowing it, had brought a wallet-size photo of Maggie to affix somewhere on the summit. It was too sentimental a gesture to admit to, even for father and son. But if they had cared to discuss it, it would likely have been said that leaving something of Maggie behind was a way of moving on without her, as grown men know they must do.

  Nor did Doctor Reddy allow himself to think much of Vida Carson, though here she was and would be in closest proximity until they had mastered the peak and retreated. He could see the top of her head from where he sat. She had cut her long brown hair into a boyish style he found unflattering, and for this he was glad: he did not want to want her again.

  The aircraft soared on, rafting through particles of higher atmosphere, the earth’s vaporous layers pressing the expanse of wings upward, as flight attendants packed steaming aluminum dishes into the slots of rolling trolleys. A smell of brewed coffee drifted throughout the cabin. Sara’s father had fallen asleep in the seat next to her, so she unbuckled and walked the aisle in search of her people, riding through passages of rough air agilely. Stopping to visit with each, she would stand and chat with an elbow planted on the seat ahead, or she would crouch down onto her haunches in the aisle, arms rested on the armrest. Her fingers were ringed with silver rings, her feet were pink and bare, her manner calm, her voice serene as she talked about preferring a turbulent ride as opposed to nothing exciting, and how heartening the talk of the captain was, how she heard the command in him, heard the reassuring certainty in him.

  “Yeah, even when the engines bonk out and you’re about to plunge into the sea,” Devin said. He put on his best airline pilot voice for her: “Well, hey, folks, looks like we’re heading down real quick all of a sudden here. You all might want to reach up and grab one of those yellow plastic masks dangling over your heads. Hope you were paying attention during the demonstration. Only kidding—don’t really need to bother with those gadgets anyway, just something to fiddle with to get your minds off the horror of plummeting through the wild blue. May as well just sit back and relax now and make the most of the rest of your life.”

  Devin liked making this girl smile. She had a slight buckling of the incisors, one tooth that winged out over the other. He was bewitched, just as he was the first time he saw her striding across campus that spring day so many months ago with all those cherry blossoms snowing down on everyone’s heads. She was the call of a bird, is what she was, would always be. He sat smiling and restrained in his seat, his heart ballooning in his chest. He thought of the next few months ahead, how every day he would be with her; whatever happened would happen to them together.

  The pilot had cut through the weather, and the ride began to smooth out. Passengers tipped their seats back and struck a variety of poses intended for sleep as they sailed on through the sky. Sara went on talking. She said flying in an airplane made her all the more eager to climb. She said she was aware of herself moving on a rising trajectory, bound by an incredible force beyond one’s knowing. “I love the sensation of ascension,” she said. “It makes me feel ever more bold and free.”

  “Bold and free,” Devin said. “Who was it said that?”

  “My mother,” Sara said. “She said that.”

  “You smell cinnamony.”

  “Like cinnamon?”

  “Like something.”

  Near the end of the long flight the pilot flew the jumbo jet close to the Himalayan range and announced what was in sight. People tipped heads to their windows. A few from the Sarasvati Party hurried to the rear of the cabin and bent over to peer out the waist-level porthole. They saw before them an unbroken chain of icy pyramids, a thousand or more miles of snow-capped masses, like floating temples they seemed, with valleys of deep blue pooled among the flanks and the crests. And then there she was to behold in all her magnificence: Mysterium, a giantess, splendid, luminescent, at these heights her snowy coating pearly and moist as flesh, with scarves of clouds draped down about her girth. To see her shapely shoulders and head rising to the level of the airplane was astonishing. To know they would walk to a point as high as they now soared, even more mind-boggling: they were staggered by the sight of her. They stared, they coughed, they babbled, they shivered with cold fear in the lakes of their hearts. Sara said she had a sudden crazy urge to weep, but it wasn’t fright that brought on her tears. She didn’t know what it was.

  If you’re going to cry, take it outside.

  Wilder laughed aloud now at the thought of his brother Lucas’s words. People looked at him and went back to their seats, but not Sara, who stayed on her knees to gaze out the porthole. Wilder remained crouched behind her, looking out the window too, watching the airplane’s contrails vanish into the icy face behind them. Then he went back to his seat and buckled up. He rested his head against the headrest, fingered the little stone brought from home he carried in his pocket, closed his eyes in the endless drone. He understood why Mrs. Adams and his wife would remain at Base Camp, and was grateful for it. He knew too he had to get to the summit of Mysterium for t
he sake of his brother. Maybe, in all honesty, for himself, and so for Vida’s sake. Whatever. He would let the do-gooders put up their prayer flags where they may; he had brought Lucas’s ashes to toss off the top of the mountain.

  Why do climbers climb?

  “To be somebody,” Lucas had said. “Why else?”

  * * *

  THE TWO-STORY guesthouse is an elongated rectangle of tall soot-colored walls. A rusted wrought-iron door yawns open to a dusty inner courtyard with an enfilade of small rooms cubicled into the cinder block on either side inside. Each room has a single bed, a bare light bulb, a chair, a sink, a dusty Shiva seated cross-legged in a dusty niche. The latrines are out-of-doors, as is the wash stall and the shower spigot.

  The advantage of the chosen quarters is the outdoor space procured for the party’s hundreds of cartons of gear; a narrow confined area along a wall fit into the lee of the guesthouse and enclosed by another soot-colored building that rises beside it. Vultures circle and drift in the vapory char above. Midday there is a smattering of shade from a sad-looking mango tree; otherwise a hot steamy light beams down upon the weary. All day there is a stench of rotting vegetables and sewage, with whiffs of urine and feces from the nearby latrines all mixed with the odor of body essence the work party themselves exude. Hardly a breeze passes through the courtyard; more often squealing pigs, dirt-pecking chickens, roaches, and mice go skittering by.

  Hillary Adams has the master list, her husband the task of the logistics of revising. For several days they will all unbundle, sort and classify, number and order, catalog and allot, then bundle the chattel back up again. The containers will be resorted into no more than sixty-six-pound loads, limits issued for the sake and assent of the porters. Before repacking, clothing and bedding will be sealed in waterproof bags, as will medicine and edible goods.

  As to nourishment, their comestibles, their victuals, their eats, there had been arguments aplenty among the group prior to leaving the States as to what should be purchased and hauled. Doctor Reddy argued for relying mostly on local foodstuffs once they had arrived, but others complained that potatoes and cabbages and goat meat and ghee were heavy, adding too much weight to already weighted loads. Professor Troy insisted they keep the menus basic: rice and dal for protein, dates and oatmeal and tea for a day’s beginning. Virgil Adams encouraged the addition of luxury items such as chocolate, nuts and dried fruits, biscuits, cheese, a bottle or two of brandy, all of which would boost not only one’s energy but one’s spirits as well when truly needed. Devin Reddy claimed freeze-dried rations and powdered drink mixes were all that were necessary, supplemented, of course, with plenty of bottles of hot sauce. Vida Carson will bring a special blend of coffee with her, and with it extra jars of peanut butter that she aims to hide among the clothing in several of the still-to-be-sealed loads. Wilder, fiddling with the rock he carries in his pocket, said he would eat whatever, not being as fussy as everybody here has unfortunately turned out to be, and now he tucks into his pack a few special mood-elevating macaroons recently bought on the street, preparing for those more difficult days on the road ahead. Hillary Adams adds to her daypack a tin of biscuits, a package of hard candies, and small envelopes of vitamins K and C for muscle fatigue. Sara carries nothing extra, knowing food and drink will be plenteous enough and that all will be provided for, though she understands the hoarding needs of frightened people.