by Ellen Datlow
Two months ago, in a trekkers’ lodge close to the edge of The Sanctuary, he laughed and sang along to Fernando while mixing terrible Brännvin cocktails. He had a boyfriend in the Swedish navy who’d bought him a house, but wouldn’t tell anyone he existed. He struggled to grow a beard, always trying: every morning he’d roll his eyes and tug on it, still sexy ass fluff, my friends.
So I stay. In the disorientating white-dark, I kneel in the snow over where I think Acke is, and I keep him silent company. I hear him coughing again. Maybe he’ll drown instead of suffocate; which is worse, I don’t know—don’t want to know. I reach round for my O. I don’t know when I last drank or ate something either. These are the things you must fight: numbness, confusion, lethargy. Mercy. What good will staying here do? How can Acke know he’s not allena, and what does it matter if he does? But I think of him shouting stay with me to the mountain, the snow, the sky, and so I stay.
I’m always exactly where I’m supposed to be.
It’s no longer snowing. It’s no longer gloomy either. It’s dark. Night. I can’t hear Acke anymore. I wonder how long he fought. How long he pretended. If he’s pretending even now. Because denial has to be better than acceptance, if one side of the coin—the mirror—is death and nothing else. I shudder hard enough to again crick my neck.
When I try to get up, it feels as if I no longer exist below my waist. It takes too long to locate and change out my headlight, and the reward does not justify the effort: the thin revived glow casts only slow and frightening shadows. The drifts are high, unwieldy; the terrain is entirely changed as if I haven’t made it back through the mirror at all. The couloirs are gone, their scars and fissures hidden under the weight of so much new snow.
I shine my light down on my harness. Its main carabiner is bent and twisted out of shape, probably when the avalanche wrenched me free of the line. It takes another long time to replace it with a spare; my fingers are slow, my mind slower. Finally, I move the light wider, over smooth swathes of black and white, searching for the way down. It takes the longest time of all for the truth to sink in. The fixed ropes are gone.
My panic is too slow. There’s even something close to relief in it. The thin air whistles around me like I’m an obstacle, a rock in a stream. Now I’m fucked, there’s no way I’m not. How can I ever negotiate my way out of the Death Zone alone and with no fixed lines? This is my worst Bad Thing. After years of dread, of anticipation, this, here, is how it happens. This is the way it happens for me.
“Sarah? Why you here?”
I swing around, slow like an astronaut; at the same time assuming the voice is inside my head. It’s a not unfamiliar question.
Pasang is standing less than ten feet away, looking none the worse for wear at all. He’s half-crouched, as if readying himself for a starter’s gun. He doesn’t look afraid or fucked—more startled. Because he never expected me to make it this far? I feel the pinch of familiar resentment when I should only be feeling relief. Pasang will help me. He has to.
“Jakub Hornik and Acke Holmberg are dead,” I say, and my voice sounds strange, thin, like the air. It’s very quiet, I realize. Nearly silent. After the storm and the avalanche, it’s still enough that I wonder if I’d hear one of those blunted pins drop.
Pasang doesn’t react. Chongba isn’t with him, so he must have left him behind with the Slovaks, while he’s come down the mountain to see how bad it is; if they can still make it down without having to bivy or call for an evac that’ll probably never come. How long did I stay kneeling in the snow waiting for Acke to die? It must have been hours. Pasang’s eyes scan the terrain ahead and then he looks back at the mountain behind. He never wears goggles and he never carries O. I sometimes wonder if he even needs to eat, shit, or fuck either.
He asks, “Who was higher than them?”
“Holmberg means Island Mountain. Did you know that?” I feel numb, but I no longer know which kind of numb. Something tugs at my mind, puckers my skin. Makes me remember to be afraid. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.
He blinks. “Sarah. Who was higher than them?”
I know why he’s asking. It’s because I’m the first person he’s seen. And everyone else between us is gone.
“Bosse. Benoit and Savane. The Australians, I think. I don’t know.”
Pasang curses. This will be the end of the 8000er Experience, I think, and I feel a guilty spark of hope that must show in my eyes because Pasang straightaway narrows his.
“Why you here?”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I look down at the snow under my boots, my crampons. Already my escape route has filled in as if it never was.
“You hate the mountains. Always.” His voice is not cold, though his words are. They sound angry. “Why you come back, every time?”
I swallow because even if I understand the question, I don’t understand why he’d ask it now.
“You don’t belong here.” His gaze grows softer. “You never belong here.”
But I don’t want to argue with him, because he’ll never understand. He’s never understood why any of us keep coming back, not really. Most of the time he manages to hide his contempt. Just about.
“You know why. I’m here for Nick.”
The way is treacherous, of course. I’m clunky, a functional climber, Nick has always said, though I’ve never taken offense. It’s true. But now, clambering down barely settled snow, with no protection beyond my own gear, my own judgment, I wish that I loved it, I wish that I felt it. I wish that I could reach Nick by sheer force of want, of will.
Instead my descent is anything but functional: I stumble and I fall and I fuck up my handholds, my footholds. My rope snags and burns; my overhangs and hitches and anchors are poor—I move too slowly because I have as much confidence in my abilities as I do in the new ground beneath me. I only have the distant lights of Camp IV and Pasang’s directions to guide me, and I keep thinking of that cold, blue space and blunted pins, but I’m still doing it. I am doing it. And whether that’s down to his help or his scorn, I suppose hardly matters.
I knew Pasang would never come with me, but when he turned back to the dark shadow of the mountain, my belly clenched all the same, and I wanted to beg him to stop. Though I didn’t. His job is to look after the Slovaks. The fucking Slovaks who didn’t manage to get out of their fucking sleeping bags until 2 a.m. He has to trust that I can look after myself, and that Nick can look after his group. Alone. Just as I have to trust that Pasang will be okay, even if that suffocating dread behind thick, heavy curtains suspects better.
Nick. He’s all I can think about now. Not me or Pasang, Jakub, Bosse, the French Canadians, the Australians—not even Acke. Except to wonder if Nick has suffered the same terrible fate. I don’t think about the others in his group either. I don’t care about any of them—these idiots with too much money and too little of everything else. In that, I understand Pasang’s contempt. If my reasons for being here are stupid, then theirs are moronic. Nick despairs of their inexperience: their lack of knowledge, training, equipment; their sheer bloody self-entitlement. They’ve paid Nick and Pasang to get them to the summit and back, and nothing less will do. They haven’t paid for any kind of Experience at all. They’ve paid for a photo-op, a flag; Nick even prints them out a certificate. When Tomie Nà refused to stop after the docs at Camp II told him he could die if he climbed any higher, Nick rubbed his hands through his hair, spat into the snow, and then carried on preparing for the next section.
For all his faults—and I’m aware of them all, despite what everyone, including Pasang, believes—Nick loves these few places high above the rest of the world with a passion that could never be faked. And that’s why he’s here too. That’s why he puts up with everything else, all the other shit that he hates. Because he has as much choice as I do.
But it isn’t Nick I find first. It’s Kate. Her sobs creep up through the darkness like the wind around ice pillars; I only realize it’s her when I see head
lights less than fifty yards below. I don’t know how long I’ve been descending now, or how much longer before I leave the Death Zone behind me. The lights of Camp IV look hardly closer, though the moon has moved far enough to disorientate me completely. I’m struggling to breathe, and my O is getting too low. That slow, creeping paralysis is back; a numbness inside and out that’s nearly seductive. It makes me want to stop asking myself if I’m about to dive-bomb the deep end of a swimming pool. It makes me not want to care if the answer is yes.
Kate’s sobs are nearly hysterical. I shout, but she doesn’t hear, doesn’t stop, barely draws breath. I try not to move too quickly as I edge down over still-shifting snow. The drifts are higher here, creating precarious peaks of their own, but overall the terrain is flatter, more glacial. Here is where most of the avalanche came to rest, I think. Here is where deep, dark crevasses will be hiding, waiting, beneath all that treacherous new snow. I try not to hesitate, to stop, to look for Nick, to waste precious breath of my own in more shouting. Instead, I carry on descending, descending, fucking descending, and praying a little too, for good measure. He has to be all right.
“We can’t go! How can we fucking go?” After an avalanche, mountain air gets thicker and sounds flatter; Kate’s voice is a hysterical monotone. “What about Tomie and—”
“Tomie, Jìng, and Lì are already gone, and you know it.”
I allow myself the luxury of stopping, of staring at the second headlight. His voice still echoes. Nick.
“Jesus, how can you be so cold?”
“We’re both pretty cold, Kate. And getting pretty fucking colder. It’s not them you care about. It’s the fucking serac between us and fucking freedom, and I can’t help you with that.”
By the time I reach them, I’m close to collapse. I can’t feel my legs, but I know it all the same. I feel hot when I should feel cold—or nothing at all. And all I can see is Nick. He’s hunkered down under a high overhang of rock, head low, gloved hands dangling between his legs. Kate sits close alongside him, and I try—and fail—not to care about that. They’ve been there too long, I care more about that; about the stiff, tired threat in their bodies, their voices.
“We can’t free-solo around a fucking serac with fuck knows how many tons of snow weighing down on it!” Kate’s digging in. Her voice is calmer, stronger. Once she makes her mind up about something, that’s usually it. “We need to stay here, wait for an evac. You’ve phoned our position in. We can’t—”
“We’re still in the Death Zone. No one will be coming for us.” Nick’s voice is just as calm, as confident, but I know he’s horrified. I know he’s blaming himself. Even though it’s the fault of the bloody Slovaks.
“We can’t—”
“I will leave you behind, Kate,” he says.
“You’re a bastard.”
“No,” I say. “He’s what’ll keep you alive.”
Kate gasps, looks in my direction, and her breath catches formless in the air. I wonder if she can read something in my expression that I’m usually better at hiding. I’ve been free-soloing since Acke, but it would be pretty petty to say so. Though I want badly to bask in Nick’s uncommon approval.
Nick’s head drops further between his knees, and I hear only his chattering teeth. Still none of us move. Up here, we’re statues: half-frozen, half-thawed; half-numb, half-crazy. Half-alive, half-dead. It’s a miracle we feel anything at all.
Nick gets back on his feet with grunted effort. He swears again; coughs. The latter rattles down inside his chest. “Let’s go.”
The serac is a block of glacial ice as big as a three-story townhouse. Near to the start of our summit ascent, the route alongside was lit by flare lamps and set with fixed ropes. Now, its threat is magnified by darkness and formless new terrain. And all the death and weight that we’ve brought back down the mountain with us.
Nick wedges a metal nut into one of the rocks close to the serac’s beginning. He clips a quickdraw to the wire, threading the rope through it and his own carabiner before feeding it backwards in generous loops. “We’re not decking out, okay? Not fucking today.”
Some color has returned to Kate’s cheeks. She picks up the rope, locks into the belay. I do the same—muscle memory triggering too many other less welcome memories: me and Nick, Kate and James climbing rock faces, ice pillars, mountains. Trekking and hiking and camping all over the world. Getting shit-faced in dodgy bars and on deserted beaches. At James’ funeral, Kate clung to Nick as if he was the only anchor on a Grade V vertical climb. She and I had been friends since high school, but she never again dragged me to karaoke bars or treated me to spa weekends in wanky Essex hotels, as if she’d lost me over the same sheer cliff as her husband. When I asked Nick how I could help her, he told me I’d be best leaving her alone until she came to me. And she never did.
The serac radiates a different kind of cold than the mountain. It’s breathless, sharp, and thin. Fragile. Silent blue dark looking up into an icy white space and sky. Endless shadow.
Nick edges along the base of the serac too slowly. The ledge is narrow—less than a foot across in some places—and the drop on the other side is big; even in the dark it has the power to squeeze my stomach, water my eyes. And it’s always been Nick’s cautiousness that frightens me, never his selfish recklessness. He feeds back more rope in slow turning loops, but he doesn’t look around. “Don’t stop,” he says.
Close to the halfway point, Kate falters, one gloved hand getting caught in the gear as she tries to navigate Nick’s hastily improvised line. I dilute my impatience with the memory of the couloirs, the dread and relief of now I’m fucked, there’s no way I’m not when the avalanche stole the fixed lines. It’s too easy to stop thinking past doctored routes, too easy to start shitting yourself whenever you have to unhook from their security for even a few seconds.
Kate goes on fumbling, hesitating, trying and failing to free herself, to move. Powdered snow falls through the gap between us. The serac was never stable, but now fuck knows how many tons of avalanche threaten to overload it to the point of collapse. And if that happens, it doesn’t matter how careful and slow we’re being; how many ropes and anchors we do or don’t have.
“I’m scared,” Kate whimpers, and her hands still, shoulders hunch.
Nick is far enough ahead to be nearly out of sight, so she can only be talking to me. I remember the puja twelve hours before we left base camp: a Lama and two skinny monks bent over a stone altar, the smell of juniper reminding me of the gins from the night before; equipment spread around us and waiting to be blessed: harnesses, crampons, ice-axes, and helmets, even our expedition flag. Pasang chanting alongside the monks, placating the spirits, making his offerings of yak milk and chocolate and rice as the Lama talked to the mountain, asked it to let us climb to its summit. Kate, hungover and dull-eyed, her smile scornful as she stifled a yawn: Mountain says no.
She doesn’t know I hate her. She doesn’t know that less than six months after James’ funeral, Nick got down on his knees and told me how many times they’d fucked; that he held onto me so tightly I was nearly glad that they had. She doesn’t know that he would never leave me. She doesn’t know him.
“It’ll be all right,” I say, and her shoulders drop, she finally tugs her glove free, clips back into the line.
And at the halfway point, I start to think it might be. That maybe—just maybe—the sheer number of Bad Things that have already happened are enough. But then I feel it: the air changing just like it did before Jakub came sliding out of the gloom on the other side of that mirror—a hush, a breath too close to my ear—and I know that I’m wrong. Again.
I unclip myself from the line, and I’m no longer slow, no longer afraid. My crampons find little purchase; my left foot slips off the ledge into dark space more than once, but I keep on going, faster, faster. Until I reach Kate.
“Go!” I push her so hard she shrieks—but either she can sense the danger in my voice or in the slow deadly shifts of the wal
l of ice against us, because she immediately obeys, abandoning the fixed line even as Nick is screwing in another anchor up ahead.
“Go!” I scream again. “Nick! Go!”
He turns just as my headlight finds him, his face slack and pale, and then he looks up at the serac in the very moment that it starts to scream.
We run. And run. And the world collapses around us.
Kate is who I hear first. She’s sobbing again, but she can’t catch enough breath—the result is an oddly comforting squeak. She only stops to shout Nick’s name, and a sob comes out of me too when, finally, he answers in a hoarse shout.
I sit up, struggle to get to my knees. When I look back, the line is gone, the ledge is gone, the serac is gone. I’m finding it hard to breathe myself—I hear the thin air wheeze through my lungs—but my O is gone too.
I stand up and sway, but there’s nothing to hold onto. When Nick struggles to his feet a few meters further down, his headlight glancing off Kate’s helmet, her suit, I see a long streak of blood running from his temple to his jaw.
“Oh my God, Nick,” she says. She sounds exhilarated and broken at the same time. “Oh my God.”
He doesn’t answer, just keeps staring up at all the destruction behind us, eyes still wide and wild and black.
And I stare back, but even though we’re the closest we’ve been since the summit, I know I can’t reach any closer. My dread is exhausted, heartbroken. He’s safe. He’s alive. But it isn’t enough.
“You felt her too, right?” Kate grabs hold of his upper arms. “I know you fucking did. She was there! She was—”
“Don’t touch me,” he says, but he’s already shrugged her off, already backed away. He keeps on looking, looking, looking, and something in him finally breaks as he drops to his knees, as he howls into the black, the vast ocean of white.