You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  The four of us husbands and wives had stayed at that pub until five in the morning. We hadn’t even had enough cash to pay the bill, so Agnieszka and Krystyna promised to return the next day to settle up. “Where we’re going to get the money, I don’t know,” Agnieszka complained once the unhappy bartender finally left us alone.

  The flight to Islamabad was leaving at eleven. Krystyna had taken to drawing patterns in the condensation rings on the table in order to manage her frustration, and Agnieszka every so often ran her hand through my hair, feathering it back and holding my eyes with hers.

  “It’s just so weird to watch the world celebrate their selfishness,” Krystyna said. “I can’t tell you how many times some interviewer has said that there’s not an ounce of compromise in him.”

  Jacek raised a glass in a bittersweet toast to himself.

  “They all believe some version of ‘Hey, I’m doing something unbelievably dangerous here; all you have to do is look after the house and kid,’ ” she went on. She seemed so worn out with sadness that she was unable to look at him.

  “At some point, the wife begins to get it,” Agnieszka said, her arms at her side. I could feel the absence of her hand from my hair. “Being away all the time just isn’t that hard for them.”

  “Leaving you is the worst thing I do,” I said.

  “Is it?” she said. She sounded genuinely touched that I thought this might be the case. “You know, you sign on for the ride, but then you wonder how long the ride can continue.”

  “I have to piss,” Jacek said morosely.

  “I never thought we’d be together this long,” Agnieszka explained. “I thought we’d either separate or you’d get killed.”

  “Teresa Nelec always used to tell me that being a winter mountaineer’s wife meant always being ready for the funeral,” Krystyna said. “She told me that when her daughter was three, she asked why so many women came over to stay with her and cry. That was her reward for all the weeks he was off in Chad or the Himalayas and she was home with a baby and no car and no money.”

  Jacek staggered off to the bathroom. The three of us just sat there. I helped Krystyna with her condensation rings.

  “You always say you want to stop climbing, but on your own terms,” she told him once he returned. “And those terms always turn out to be one more gigantic mountain.”

  “You know, when climber friends ask what you’re up to, everyone says, ‘Oh, I’m leaving for this’ or ‘I’m getting ready for that,’ ” Jacek said. “If you tell them, ‘Oh, I’m getting a job’ or ‘I’m just going to spend some time with the wife,’ you can actually see the respect leave their faces.” He looked at Agnieszka, who looked back.

  “And it’s not an experience you intend to repeat,” she said.

  Krystyna drove us home since she seemed the least drunk. I thought but didn’t say that the mountains seemed to us another chance, our attempt to understand ourselves and exorcise those aspects we detested. To become the sort of person we could begin to respect.

  Back in our house we looked in on the babysitter, asleep with Wanda, and I negotiated my way to the bathroom with my pants unbuttoned and soon found myself on my back in the tub, where I conceived of other insights it would be important to impart to Agnieszka. Mountaineering was the only life for which I was fit. I understood her despair: we spent every particle of energy we had to get off the mountain alive and return to our homes, then couldn’t wait to go back. We returned to be nursed back to health so we could dally in our marriages and resume our fund-raising. The difference between us and addicts was that you never got us to admit that anything was wrong with what we loved to do.

  Agnieszka appeared and shut the door behind her as if she’d heard me. She’d thrown on her gray sleeping shirt and shed her pants. She put a hand on each side of the tub and leaned over me. “Every morning when you were gone, Wanda and I would take down the calendar and cross out the previous day’s date,” she whispered. “Until we got to the day we were going to the airport.”

  “You’re not wearing any bottoms,” I said. I sounded appreciative.

  “I would cry, too, if I were you,” she whispered, and she pushed me back when I tried to get up and climbed on top of me in the tub. “When I think of the ten million things that could have happened instead of my meeting you,” she whispered, and I grew in her hands and she put me inside her. In her bedroom Wanda cried out in her sleep, and we both stilled for a moment. Then Agnieszka started moving again. “I can’t live without being part of the debate,” she finally whispered, easing us up and down. “With my options being either to support the team’s decisions or leave.”

  “I love you so much,” I told her.

  “I know. We should talk about that more,” she said. And then she lowered her face to me. We woke an hour before we had to get to the airport, only because Wanda was stirring in her bedroom again and calling for us.

  After any prolonged stay above five thousand meters, the body begins to consume itself. Conditioning deteriorates. Fat disappears and muscle tissue follows. With each moment of acclimatization at altitude, strength decreases. Waking in Camp 4 is like waking in prison after having done something awful the night before. The wind seems to be ramming the tent’s nylon walls. I struggle to my knees and Jacek follows. We step out into the maelstrom.

  The tent is buffeting as furiously as white water rapids. The sky is clear but to the south the clouds form a wall rolling slowly toward us. When all of that air and moisture hits the base of the mountain it will have nowhere to go but up. And as it does so it will accelerate.

  Back in the tent we take final stock of the situation. We’ve now been on this mountain for twenty-eight days and have endured winter storms for twenty-two of them. Water vapor has begun to freeze solid even among the down feathers of the sleeping bags. At some point we lost the will to keep clearing the entrance, and snow has been slowly pouring in like sand through an hourglass. Every so often one of us takes a gloveful and eats it. A filling in one of my molars has cracked. But a needling pain in my fingertips suggests that my capillaries are still functioning.

  Jacek loads his batteries back into the radio and calls the other camps. There’s no answer from Camp 2, and from Camp 1 Kolesniak sings out “I’m so lonely without my zucchini!” and then goes silent. The batteries are already coated with frost. The moisture’s probably done the thing in.

  Bieniek has not moved since we awoke and we decide to consult with him later. Our thinking has slowed down. At altitude you imagine you’re thinking clearly, but you’re not. Urgency disappears. Sometimes you mistake the intention of acting for the act itself. Climbers have had the notion of hooking on to a belaying rope and then have stepped free-fall out into space.

  Above us we can hear the white noise of the gigantic air masses splitting around the peak. Crystals continue to spatter on the nylon over our heads. We try to work it out: the tendency when this close to the summit is to expend your last bits of energy to get there. But once on the summit you still have to climb back down, with only the shortest of pauses in which to recover.

  “I can do it,” Jacek says. And it’s as if he’s speaking for me. The plan becomes to go up and get back to the tent by nightfall. We’ll leave at three the next morning to get as far as possible before daybreak. We immediately set about trimming gear weight, so desperate to lose ounces that we tear labels from our clothing. We even leave the foil space blanket, which hardly weighs a thing. This activity exhausts us and after two or three actions we have to stop for a count of ten to draw some breath.

  We need to wake at one to get out of the tent by three. The wind is gone but we’re still shocked by the cold. Night and winter this high are like outer space. The other mountains below look like whitecaps on the ocean.

  After so much time in the tent, it’s like learning to walk again. Jacek takes the lead on ice so hard our picks ring off it as if it were a bell. We pant in the insubstantial air. For eight hours we traverse pinnacle
s and chop through cornices. On the ice walls we get our feet secure with the front points of the crampons and then move the ice axes and reverse the process. Every few minutes we rest, leaning into the slope, heads on arms.

  Then Jacek gives out a cry up ahead and I see that there’s nothing above him; he’s swung a leg over a summit crest so narrow that he has to straddle it like a horse. I climb up behind him and we pull ourselves forward with our hands, right legs dangling down the mountain’s north face and left legs the south. My boot punches through a cornice to provide a porthole view six thousand meters down. Jacek’s babbling something but I can’t make out what. I’m just relieved the wind is manageable.

  Even at this time of day—is it noon?—the sky above is indigo, fading into a pink upper atmosphere.

  We have to descend nearly immediately if we’re going to reach the tent before sunset. It takes some minutes to communicate that to Jacek by shaking his shoulder and shouting into his ear. We dismount the crest and belay one another downward as if negotiating a ladder, taking turns as anchors with our ice axes. If we start sliding in the shape we’re in, we won’t be able to stop. At some points the slope is so steep that we can’t see the wall below us from above. Spindrift burns our faces. A cloud mist leaves us in a half-light, like a waking dream. But an hour after darkness we manage to grope back into the tent and fall asleep instantly, one atop the other.

  We wake to Bieniek’s alarm. His little boy is muffled under all of the layers. The boy repeats his good morning until we dig out his father’s wrist and turn him off.

  We shake Bieniek and ask how he’s doing but he doesn’t answer. There are ice crystals in his hair. His nose and cheeks are brown. We ask more questions and he follows our movement with his eyes, though otherwise no longer seems present.

  Once we’re sufficiently revived we make some tea with the last of the gas in the stove. There’s so little air in the tent that the flame is a small blue halo above the burner.

  We shouldn’t start this late in the day, but we have to leave nonetheless. We assemble what bivouac gear we can for the likelihood that we’ll spend the night out in the snow. Jacek climbs from the tent as I put a farewell hand to Bieniek’s shoulder. His half of the tent is caved in. I touch a glove to his face and he doesn’t stir, but when I remove it he asks for water. While I pour him a cup, he says, “It’s quiet out. You could go down.” I ask if he can stand and he doesn’t answer. He no longer seems to be breathing. I lean in close, and listen, then set the cup on his chest and climb out myself.

  Jacek leads on the way down. During a rest break in an ice gully he tells me to keep an eye on him, because he’s starting to hallucinate again.

  The storm blows in while we descend. Every few feet I’m surprised to find I’m still moving. It’s impossible to belay each other in these conditions but the alternative is to sit down and die. On less steep stretches I’m frightened by momentary blackouts from which I emerge after apparently having proceeded five or six paces.

  During another rest break Jacek informs me he can’t breathe properly and asks if his lips are blue. Our boots hang out into space off the ledge on which we’re sitting. The wind is such that it looks like we’re kicking with them.

  I tell him not so blue. The process begun in the tents is accelerating with the strain of all this agonized work: his lungs are filling with fluid, drowning the alveoli that absorb the oxygen.

  We keep plodding downward. Finally in the starlight I can feel how close we’ve come to the edge of a giant balcony and I force us to stop. We dig a shallow snow cave in a languid stupor and then spoon inside it, taking turns on the warmer side. Even only this much lower, the air feels richer and full of oxygen, a pleasure to breathe.

  The storm gets worse. A dull thundering rolls down from the summit pyramid. One of Wanda’s gestures sticks in my memory and I worry it like a puzzle. As my way of rejecting the notion that no more messages will get through, and that home has become an imaginary thing, I compose what I’m going to say to Agnieszka by way of apology.

  The morning after our first night together, she told me that her brother had died climbing. When she went through his things, his assets turned out to be his equipment, most of which was left on the mountain. He’d always told her not to worry about the trip they were discussing; the next trip was the one that was going to prove dangerous. She told me this on the living room floor, her legs still wrapped around me. She was weeping and I was inside her. I analogized the intimacy in electrical terms, thinking we formed a complete circuit. After she pulled away from our kiss she said she still didn’t accept that he was gone. That she’d told herself, toward the end of his memorial service, he still had five minutes to turn up.

  We should have been talking about all of this. But there’d only ever been time to discuss what had happened since I was gone, and where I was going next.

  The hand that was clutching Jacek to my chest seems to have disappeared. I hold the glove up to the darkness but the fingers refuse to move.

  He asks for some water and then doesn’t drink what I pass him. He recites my name and then, some hours later, Krystyna’s, until we pass beyond words some time during the night. We doze and wake and the difference seems hard to parse. When my eyes refocus there’s a strange shimmer all around us, as if the light is coming off the surface of the snow itself.

  Agnieszka! I want to tell her. The mountains have brought us together, as well. They’ve always been the authors of our development. They’ve allowed us to see what no other human beings have ever seen. They’ve siphoned away the warmth, down to our core and beyond, as payment. They’ve left you and our child the notion, never correct, that you were alone all along. They’ve ensured that we’ve progressed this far, and no farther, when constructing our connections to this wild and beautiful earth.

  Acknowledgments

  Most of the stories in this collection could not have existed, or would have existed in a much diminished form, without critically important contributions from the following sources: the Municipality of Rotterdam’s Waterplan 2 Rotterdam; the Royal Netherlands Embassy’s Pioneering Water; Deltapark Neeltje Jans’s The Delta Project: Preserving the Environment and Securing Zeeland Against Flooding; Rotterdam Climate Proof’s The Rotterdam Challenge on Water and Climate Adaptation; Leo Adriaanse and Tjeerd Blauw’s Towards New Deltas; the Netherlands Water Partnership’s Climate Changes and Dutch Water Management; Hans van der Horst’s Rotterdam Discovered; William Z. Shetter’s The Netherlands in Perspective; the Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat’s Storm Surge Barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg; Stadshavens Rotterdam’s 1600 Hectares: Creating on the Edge; Dutch Delta Solutions’ Made in Holland; the Dutch Research Program’s Knowledge for Climate 2008–2013; the Port of Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte 2: Space for the Future; Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change; Jan de Hartog’s The Little Ark; Colin White and Laurie Boucke’s The Undutchables; Willem Elsschot’s Cheese; Jules Archer’s Jungle Fighters; Eric Bergerud’s Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific; John Ellis’s The Sharp End; George H. Johnston’s The Toughest Fighting in the World; James Jones’s The Thin Red Line; E. J. Kahn’s G.I. Jungle; Samuel Milner’s The War in the Pacific: Victory in Papua; Ian Morrison’s Our Japanese Foe; Peter Schrijvers’s The G.I. War Against Japan; Stephen R. Taafe’s MacArthur’s Jungle War; and the Historical Division of the War Department’s Papuan Campaign; Richard Ellis’s Sea Dragons; Eileen Powers’s Medieval People; Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft; Reginald Hyatte’s Laughter for the Devil: The Trials of Gilles de Rais, Companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc (1440); Jean Benedetti’s Gilles de Rais; Marjorie Rowling’s Everyday Life in Medieval Times; Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière; Gareth J. Medway’s The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism; Frances Winwar’s The Saint and the Devil; Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; G. R. de Beer’s Early Travellers in the Alps; Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps; Colin Fr
aser’s Avalanches and Snow Safety; Fergus Fleming’s Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps; Ronald Clark’s The Early Alpine Guides; Nicholas and Nina Shoumatoff’s The Alps: Europe’s Mountain Heart; McKay Jenkins’s The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone; Betsy Armstrong and Knox Williams’s The Avalanche Book; Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos; Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages; Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos’s Skunk Works; Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me; Philip Taubman’s Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage; Freya Stark’s The Valley of the Assassins, The Southern Gates of Arabia, and The Zodiac Arch; Lieutenant-Colonel P. M. Sykes’s A History of Persia; Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Order of the Assassins; Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins; Jane Fletcher Geniesse’s Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark; Calvin Trillin’s “At the Train Bridge”; the Marinette County Jail transcript of the interview with Scott J. Johnson; Kurt Diemberger’s Spirits of the Air and Summits and Secrets; Anatoli Boukreev’s Above the Clouds; Maria Coffey’s Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow and Fragile Edge; Greg Child’s Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas; Mark Jenkins’s “Ice Warriors”; Noel Busch’s Two Minutes to Noon; Charles Davison’s The Japanese Earthquake of 1923; Frank Stewart and Leza Lowitz’s Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War; August Ragone’s Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters; Thomas R. H. Havens’s Valley of Darkness; Masuo Kato’s The Lost War; William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind; Soetsu Yanagi’s The Unknown Craftsman; and the Fujiya Hotel’s We Japanese.