by Jeff Long
Only one thing could explain the repeating shutterbugs. I had died, and this was all a dream. I felt sicker. A whole new set of questions arose. Had my whole life been a dream, too? Annette Funicello, Jimi Hendrix, and JFK; that Mexican sunset when the girl I’d never kissed left her bikini top in the sand; my Irish setter puppy pointing butterflies, Yosemite, Makalu, Eldo, my mountains: all imaginary? Was there no rock left to kick?
“Maybe we should get help,” said Grieve. I was the one bleeding, which logically left him to descend the hill, cross the river, and wave down the next car. He tried to stand, but his knee wouldn’t bend. He started to lift it with both hands, but the pain defeated him. His face was turning blue from the cold and shock. “My turn,” I said and untied from the rope. The hand tools were cinched tight to my wrists, so I gripped each and headed downhill.
The Berkeley/Johnson debate swung in Johnson’s favor as I kicked and tripped on every rock in sight. It swung back to Berkeley once I reached the road. Three cars passed me over the next ten minutes. One stopped fifty yards lower. I started to say, “We need a little help,” but it was just another Kodak moment. The camera flashed, the man drove off.
I dialed it up a tad, stepping out into the lane. I performed my one-armed wave with more vigor and added some shouting. The cars veered and accelerated past me.
My possible invisibility did not explain the surreal phenomenon. Enough of me remained for them to steer around and photograph. It had to be a dream. I was trapped in a Twilight Zone episode.
As the next car flashed by I saw outright horror on the driver’s face. I did a quick zipper check, and it all fell into place. I was a monster. My t-shirt and one pant leg were soaked with blood, I was brandishing two weapons out of the Dark Ages, and the boots, crampons and helmet made me seven-feet tall. Off came the helmet and hand tools, but it hurt too much to bend for the crampons.
More cars sprinted by until finally one paused down the road with no photography interest. The engine stayed on, the brake lights bright. I was careful to walk on the far side of the road with my hands half raised. The driver’s window rolled down three inches at most.
The cops and ambulance arrived. Even wrapped in a sleeping bag, Grieve was blue and sinking. I wanted to lie down, but couldn’t. In their flat street shoes, a cop and medic took one step off the asphalt and nearly brained themselves. I took over the evacuation. Luckily the crampons were still on. I trekked to the top and fetched the rope to make a hand line and belayed the stretcher. With my good arm, I helped carry Grieve over.
They wanted to stick me in the ambulance, too, but I had no insurance, and the cut had stopped leaking. I didn’t want to leave my car, and I was damned if I was going to leave those ice screws behind. Two hours later I emerged from the canyon into sunlight and found the hospital. Grieve had snapped the ball off his hip. The surgery put him in debt for the next two years. The ER doctor took pity on me and sewed my cut shut. I went home, fell asleep, and next morning started writing The Ice Climber.
This non-fiction recount is meant to pull young writers into Berkeley and Johnson’s debate about the subjective versus objective. It puts a face to our challenge, the imagined versus the reality, the fiction versus the non-fiction. In choosing fiction to tell the story years ago, I had my reasons. You should have yours. When it comes time to tell your own stories, it may be useful to know which form has more power and toward what end and for which sorts of readers. The choice is yours. Seize it consciously. Then write what feels right.
The Ice Climber
In their midst was that boy, the enormous climber with wind harrowed hair and severe cheeks, his T-shirt pink with blood and crampons like weapons on his boots, barking hoarse shock, amazed. At his feet lay a head. And like a fetus crouched the body, his friend, rags and joints curled down in a green dimple of ragged river ice. A bald cop bent to touch the shaggy head whispering life away.
“He could have got killed,” yelled the climber to the cop. He yelled to the sky, to the ice, “damned ice. See where we fell there,” he pointed sobbing, while they huddled on the frozen river beneath a frozen waterfall, the unstirring corpse beneath them with wet rope tangling its limbs. The cluster of grave men waited in the shadows, waiting with the half-wild climber loudly shouting how his friend should be dead... should be dead. They hugged themselves in their windbreakers, cautiously shuffling for warmth where there was none. They were stunned by the surreal tragedy, the splintered icefall and blood. Finally, the cop rose among the cold canyon shadows and flipped the limp tip of rope onto the ivory river ice, a gesture of obituary. The man bent to the bald ground again.
“Now he’s died, boy.”
But the climber shook his head, unsure who was dead or what it was they’d said. There’d been the rope cracking, snapping ice, and the screws had spat a single black pop as they rattled in sharp flight down. They both had fallen, both slapped the ground and slid heaping down the icy slide onto the frozen river. Now one was bruised and one was dead. Only one had crawled from their freezing embrace on the river, the other had inexplicably stayed on the ice, in the ice, sibilant and with eyes like fists.
They closed the eyes.
The tall climber hushed himself with a blink. He grinned. His fingers were broken and now they hurt, crooked little sticks. And Jack was dead, when just before Jack had trembled, Jack clinging to the bare ice with his hammer points and crampons. There’d been that ridiculous fart to punctuate the strain of climbing, a nervous giggle, and Jack wiggling the rope with his hips, a grotesque farce of copulation and vertigo. Perched below the sweating clown they’d seemed so deliriously invulnerable that they could parody fragility, teasing more mortality. The delirium was gone though. Jack lay coiled in the pocket of river-ice, no longer Jack. The tall climber grimaced as the cops and ambulance men levered at those legs and arms, as they flinched at the face, draped, strapped and lorried Jack away, though Jack was already gone, slipped away.
“Where’s Jack gone?” mumbled the boy to the shadows. It was only a Saturday morning, bland and unextraordinary. He turned around with a slow sweep. Had Jack seeped among the swells in the icefall or flow with the river? Fingers draped a blanket across the gray mask. Had Jack raced away with the gusts of spindrift on the highway... between what things, underneath what fabric of the plain day was Jack still being as he’d been? The broken body was mute and empty, its vitality, its Jack-ness was gone.
A feeling of dispersal blew all around the tall climber. He felt light and raw, sick with relief, and yet he sensed a dark hole, a pit in his heart as if there was no certainty to the Saturday morning he’d survived. Someone unbuckled his crampon straps.
At the hospital the climber began tentatively to reassert himself to himself. It was a mechanical chore, prodding the stitches and tape on his arm, flexing his swollen fingers. There was pain, real enough. There was reality, but he still addressed the nurses as if they were barely ghosts in a fiction, filaments surfacing and sinking, murmuring, all wafting on through the dark noon. Words circled and died wordlessly. Images quailed into impressions. Through a window the climber watched lackluster shapes edge between tall and vague trees then the trees fused into shadow, the world slowly wheeling visions drifting and recomposing. At last he was left staring numbly at the marbled reflection of his own face in the dark window. A glassy figure entered, uttered, smoothed his wild hair. He felt his limbs dressed, his joints aching. Beyond that ache in his arms and thighs, the afternoon was only a tone of flickering animation. Everything seemed remote and temporary.
The boy drove home on the snowy spine of the highway, past road signs and road shops, between half built houses and half housed shadows. He heard tire chains slapping asphalt and the bleating of a car horn, the skeleton of Saturday afternoon. There was a bad smell, sulfur decaying or a dead skunk. Here and there he noticed a patch of tar and fur on the highway, a dead dog, a flattened rabbit, animals stuck into things, things breeding things. He passed a damp pile of guts. He passed
a dry pile of bones. Passing and passed by rapid cars, the rapid landscape, the rapid air skirled into a false and rapid wind, the boy steered his way home.
On the vinyl seat where Jack had sat a thin string of carabiners and a few ice screws, a hammer, a wool hat. On the snowy walk where Jack had walked the footprints had pooled and refrozen. The door opened to him. The couch groaned. In the house where Jack had ambled... shadows.
When the sun dipped low a dog was still barking far away. The room turned gray and then dark. All the details of the furniture were gradually effaced. A photograph on the wall no longer cast colors or portraits; it became a flat plaque on the flat wall, then the wall itself was swallowed. Dusk ate everything. His legs sprawled in front of him, calves still cased in gaiters, his boots two dense hooves. They slipped fluidly into darkness too. The telephone rang dimly elsewhere and stopped, began again and stopped. He sat in the black echoes, still as a bone.
Knuckles came clapping on wood. Words flattened through the glass. The screen door squeaked and a woman stepped in cautiously, her face pale with the dusk. From the doorway she stared into the dark room and after a moment found the boy. He sat soundlessly. He noticed a single star glittering behind her shoulder, then looked away. Her voice quavered, betraying a knowledge of Jack, exposing her tears and questions. But he shrugged, fiercely disclaiming all riddles and pity.
At first she stammered, husky and sad, piercing the dark room with her noise. Then very slowly she affirmed his silence with her own silence, and her arms circled the leonine head. Slower still he raised a hand to touch the lines of her unseen face. By the bed she was soft, unbending her body, cloth dropping, her nude gently assembled piece by piece. The night softened. Later she fed him soup and bread, brought wine and crawled back into bed. Her long hair was a familiar veil on her chest and shoulders, silver in the stray moonlight.
Sleep was difficult. The woman was warm, but his fingers throbbed in their splints and now and then an image would displace the drowsing boy. It was an image like Jack which would lie as the boy was lying, curled, an image quiet like the boy was quiet. The boy snapped awake each time, afraid he was dead, that he was the ghost and not Jack. But it wasn’t Jack. The face of the image was changed enough to look like many faces. Jack was gone, his face was vague. Each time the image dissipated the boy lay shivering and speechless in the moonlight. Something was missing inside him. He drew in a breath, beyond melancholy or fear, and felt the empty thing inside him, a wordless confusion. Benighted things set all around him, inarticulate and staid: a table, a black mirror, his bound hand. The woman warmed him in her sleep. It wasn’t a cold emptiness or a physical one. It was a breathless cavity. Something was gone.
Before the trees became brief stalks in the east the boy edged from bed, aching and sleepless. The woman slept on as he hobbled from the room. Morning, cold and purple, was still too young to illuminate the room. The woman disappeared into the lingering night. The bed, the bottle of wine, her crouched clothing all sank into the blackness. He eased the willowy screen door shut and limped to the car. Frost starred the windshield. The tires crackled as they rolled from their shoes of brittle ice. There was no traffic in the canyon, it was very early. There was little light. The climber parked and picked his way down from the road, here and there pausing to gingerly warm his bare, taped hands beneath his parka. The river was animal beneath its sturdy shell.
And the icefall still loomed, steepled coldly, a gelid monolith. The climber approached carefully and pressed his hands to the ice. He peered into its dark, watery bulk. There was no chamber back in there, there were no cells to the ice, no place for ghosts to hide. It was a cold and sterile massif. Nothing had changed in a day and a night. It was still murky and full, as thick and depthless as yesterday. And yet when he tried to retrace tiny scars of their crampons on the ice he couldn’t find them. The lesions had melted and refrozen. Something had changed.
The ice had absorbed the memory of them. The climber frowned. He tried to recall the path of their ascent, but couldn’t. It was gone, lost into yesterday. The climber closed his eyes and tried to see again the faces of the bald cop and the nurses and doctors who’d drifted through his Saturday, but he couldn’t, not exactly, almost not at all. They were gone. And the breakfast yesterday, the radio, their jokes, gestures, the color of rope, the hat he’d forgotten on the car seat... he forgot. He couldn’t recall them as they’d been, the rope red or the rope blue, the yogurt and bran, the radio yammering, tea sweet, trees hiding snow, upturned stones, a scurvy deer bounding back into the forest, and them lashing tight their crampons, the worried-on straps, sharp hammers hefted, taped shafts shifted hand to hand and slammed in ice, the hard spring ice green, clean, unriddled, and though it was smooth it was fractured, the memory was fractured. Something had changed. Something was lost. The climber grunted. He couldn’t recover the exact details of the memory, there were too many and they were too fast. Yesterday’s morning had spun on, passed forward and bred the memory of another morning, this morning, the frosty windshield, this old down parka, fingers stiffly splinted, palms numb against the ice, and Jack melting, Saturday fading, while the ice climber shivered unwillingly. High above the icefall’s flank a blue star grayed into day. A slight chinook wind exhaled with the dawn, a whisper of incoherent warmth that would thaw the canyon and purge the shadows, a wind that would melt the ice, scourging the brief immortal.
The Soloist’s Diary
“Later we would know that they had descended while there was still a way back, an equally fatal course to take.”
Author Note
I wrote The Soloist’s Diary with the shyness of a leper, shielding it from scorn and amusement until all 80 pages were done. Even then I barely dared mention it to my friend “MT”. Handing him my one and only copy, I fled to brace for his judgment. Two weeks passed without comment. He seemed to be avoiding me. It was that awful. Then he admitted that it had disappeared. I was devastated, but blamed myself for burdening MT with it in the first place. I tried laughing it off, in keeping with those early Taoists who wrote poetry on scraps of tree bark and tossed them into streams. That sort of thing was big in Tree.
Tree was a sort of commune that existed mostly in our heads. It consisted of a handful of university renegades scattered around the world, though the numbers rose if you included the crazy monks of Cold Mountain, a few brothers in one of those monasteries built into Greek cliffs, Byron’s ghost, Rene Daumal’s ghost, the widow of Kazantzakis (whose ghost apparently wasn’t available,) and probably a hermit bricked away in a cave in Bhutan. We viewed ourselves as literati of the wilderness, both its children and voice.
We were writers and poets full of wild nonsense that sounded pure and right to our ears. We climbed, drank jugs of ice melt from local glaciers, and read copiously, from Finnegan’s Wake (over my head, and probably the others’, though no one admitted it) to Calvino and obscurities like Palm Wine Drunkard. Thanks to MT, I read every word in an abridged Webster dictionary from A to, well, part of G.
I had come to Tree’s attention because I had just returned from Nepal, 19-years old and scrawny from parasites, and was giving away—to anyone, for free—all the hash I had stuffed inside my ice screws and sealed with bubble gum. No one in our circles had ever visited the Himalayas, much less languished at a remote monastery, too ill and lamed by a blown knee to descend. It didn’t hurt either that, like MT, I didn’t smoke. It made my risks absurd to the point of enlightenment or just plain pointlessness, little different from the use-once-throw-away poetry of those carefree Taoists, or of climbing itself.
Months passed. MT was moving to San Cruz to study for his PhD. The day before his departure, he shared a secret. My manuscript still existed. “You found it,” I said. “It was never lost,” he responded. In fact he had sent it to two editors, Steve Roper and Al Steck, the visionaries responsible for Ascent magazine. He made no apologies, and was even offended by my ingratitude. My shyness had made the deception necessary. Also,
the ruse was meant to spare me the pain of inevitable rejection. “But the thing is,” he said, “the manuscript wasn’t rejected. We’re going to be published.”
I was speechless. I wanted—needed—to write for the rest of my life. It went far beyond book tours, fame, bestseller lists, and big money, which rarely happen in mountain literature anyway. Rather it was a matter of survival, my only remedy for a non-stop imagination. Everywhere I looked stories sprang from the soil fully ripe, only to go to rot for lack of a proper harvest. The waste gave me headaches, hurt my grades, and plagued my sleep with more stories born to die. I took to jotting fragments into a notebook, not so I wouldn’t forget them but so that I could.
My one respite came from writing an entire story. As hallucinogenic as The Soloist’s Diary is, it confirmed my sanity. The infinite wall was my wilderness of dreams, the climb a portable sanctuary. Those fragments of other diaries left by climbers lost or mummified stood, in part, for the wreckage in my notebook.
If writing brought me temporary peace, then how much more permanent would publication make it? It was a decade too soon, though. I was unproven and probably unreadable and this was moving so fast. I needed time to think. I remembered to be excited for MT. We’d both hit the big league at the same time, an incredible coincidence. I asked which of his poems or short stories Ascent would be printing, and rattled off a few titles. He shook his head at my stupid question. “The Soloist’s Diary,” he said, and proceeded to educate me.
He was embarrassed for me. My story had been so shabby that his light edits had quickly turned into an extensive rewrite. For that reason Steck and Roper were insisting that he be a co-author, and moreover the lead author. I was going to be a sidekick on my own story. “It’s the common practice,” he said.