by Jeff Long
Later we found several pairs of men wrapped in homosexual postures... tender deaths. And there were some signs of brutality, as in the case of one climber who’d been thrashed with a hammer. And brawls, verbal destruction, even two lynchings, all strung as twilights of inconsummate longing upon the rearing, unspeaking rock. Several of the journals mentioned tales that a certain climber, upon reaching ‘a summit plateau,’ kept on climbing, hanging slings and carabiners on tree limbs, playing out his few remaining meters of rope through ascenders as he crawled immortally over rocks and tree roots that carpeted his horizontal stone. At times he grew desperate as he maneuvered upon the ground, at times he was confident of his safety. He slowly perished that way, carrying the wall with him.
Toward the bottom many complained of banshee whispers. But gradually the individual ascents, each one toward the lassitude of varying degree, forced upon them all the realization that much of what was thought to be external (ghosts and screams) was in fact internal. However, it was hardly a soothing realization. Each climber had become an isolate, a centered organism with its own pantheon of unsharable, internal phenomena, accumulating a private transparency, echoes reshaping a convulsing and writhing world, effecting interior disasters (or salvations) whereby the climber would untie and return quickly to the blurred ocean and the soft humus below.
We continued on up the headwall. The months of progress over it were like research through vague tombs, daily efforts to recapture a past figure’s deeds and character in some prehistoric network. Gareth began assembling biographies, Aaron began compiling a grammar of linguistic cores. We read of men, of the signs they had used to appease their restlessness, and then we destroyed their diaries and the scraps of the wall’s history have long since blown away.
Except for the idea and reminders of our solo climber. Nearly every journal we read included two separate passages regarding this gentle creature. Everyone on the wall seems to have acknowledged him at some point. His story is like a branch.
Crudely put, he began as a beginner. Some of the journals swear this climber had never climbed before. Apparently he just approached the wall, then simply banged his way up the rock, a process variously interrupted for food, rest, and night. His style was comically inadequate, as testified to by journal italics. He was slow and an early doom was predicted for him by the many climbers who continually passed him. He was described as friendly and impeccable. Several climbers urged him to retreat from the wall. He didn’t. One party had to revive him from a coma brought on by exposure after a short fall. They stayed with him on a ledge for two days, urging him to get off the wall, and then climbed on. He followed slowly. In time he crossed the first great overhang and was thereby committed for the rest of his life to climbing the rock wall. His history becomes a blank for some time until a record of terrifying notice about his transformation. Perhaps he had found some hidden couloir with its own crack system and meditated there. It’s not unlikely that he came into contact with the legendary Taoist climbers, or the yamabushies. I don’t know. No one knows. The next mention is of his ease and his beautiful style, and awed descriptions of his smooth speed. He was said to have climbed naked, even on cold days when everyone else was suffering in their down jackets; one or two journals spoke of him climbing without the use of hands. One climber swears to have seen him ascending without touching the rock at all.
There are tales of cryptic chanting and footlessness. Some say he required no water but fed instead upon sunlight and his own saliva. One passage speculates with rather extreme detail and rhetorical treatment on the possibility that the soloist reached a top. The fragment is abstract but painstakingly defines the soloist lodged in a landscape of ascension ‘serenely reflected.’ After hopeless deliberation I considered it highly probable that the summit had indeed been reached by the soloist. I stared up the wall to its governing horizon of rock and sky and was pleadingly thrilled. If the summit truly existed, and if the soloist had reached it, then obviously there was a chance that we too would find it. It had a tremendous impact on our morale and pace. We covered large stretches of rock each day for many weeks, believing we could almost see it, but soon enough our excitement was played through and the tedium we had grown used to again resumed. We slowed our pace, climbed more methodically, hauled the food-sacks and water, the hammock, winter gear, our pens and paper. Little by little our newfound energy was sapped and expended. In its place we were left with a transient faith. That was enough, to believe there was a summit.... Years seemed to have seeped into my core... the delirium of past-ness, an impetus beyond memory.
Many climbers were left abandoned when their partners died, and for a while they’d carry on. Not as well, but at least for a while. We found traces of one climber who had taken off horizontally, knowing his suicide, seeking desperately perhaps an edge or corner to the wall. His packet of notes described the pathetic ambition; we know nothing about the actual attempt. He questioned the value of upward ascent and bravely, we thought, separated from the vertical flux. He left the traffic of the wall and became alone twice over, first he was cast into hermitage by his partner’s death (a sliced rope, we read), and then he tossed away all hope of reaching anywhere on the regular route, climbing sideways, wandering across the face. The cracks were few, though, and doubtful. His notes could have been anything: diversions, a dirge, dreams, a hoax. We wondered if he ever reached an edge to the wall. And as we wondered, we too began to sense the ritually fatal power of our dreams.
We climbed and found no summit. In winter it was too cold to climb so we settled on a huge corklike outcrop. Each winter morning we would wake coldly and everything around would be frozen. The lichen would be frosted, and the thin bed of water made into streaked glass. I later learned how to concentrate on the particles of sunlight and fire myself with their semblance of heat. We had nothing to burn. So we emerged from our bags and gathered close together to talk. To make warmth, or at least collectively to forget the cold.
But silence came. One bitter morning something happened. We gathered, shivering, standing in a tight circle, our hands tucked in the bellies of our sweaters, and we tried to talk. But terrible day, terrible sun... my first word became a white vapor, a netherness. Our winter breaths were marked by clouds of frost, a common fact of winter, one about which we’d never before cared. Until this day. “Gareth,” I said. And there Gareth hung, there he vanished in a puff of frost. We started, then gaped as it hung and drifted a little higher, finally evaporating. Before our very eyes the word withered. We all heard me say the word, each of us understood what I meant by it, but suddenly, breached by our space, it was emptied of inertia, of its semantic value. It was no longer the same, it was humiliated by the vaster elements, condemned to limbo. (Aaron later added the phenomenon to his grammar.)
We were astonished. We blinked.
“Gareth,” I said. This time we tracked the punctured cloud anxiously. The breath of frost rose again, but again it came apart. Our eyes deepened. The word was for a moment, but then it wasn’t. It went nowhere. It was inaudible music, a particular cadenza which was for us an artifact, an instant of locality beneath the compromise of matter. The whole affair is almost not worth mentioning, but... you see?
Strange. As we got higher and left below us the mist, and eventually the clouds too, and as the sun was less and less filtered, colors disintegrated. I can’t make distinctions between particular colors anymore. There is the sky color, no matter what color. And the rock is constantly the color of rock. Even we climbers and our multihued gear have lost color.
One day we would be in a gigantic chimney-crack, or again we’d find ourselves coaxing holds from an incipient groove, or squatting upon a ledge or hanging lazily beneath small, shading overhangs. But it was all the same rock, and only our experiences and perceptions fluctuated. After a while it seems the world froze and that the flux we sensed was merely internal and practically unreal. For a moment time has fallen asleep. At some other point we were born. Now, solidifie
d like rock, time is ethereal and volatile as the sky. We climbed upon time as though it were mineral, and as we did we breathed it and our bodies exhibited time’s marks. Our grayed hair dozed in lengths.
We had long since escaped the pit, when suddenly it stirred and rose up after us. Some of the very old journals we’d collected had records of the mist ascending the wall. Those earlier men had described demons and angels that flew about within it, hunting, haunting climbers. The mist, it was recorded, was filled with music and scents, and now and then the sound of heavy objects fluttering down through thick air, or banshee screams of other climbers. They described peculiar agonies and frequent suicides. Gareth and Aaron and I meticulously read the accounts, but none of us could understand why the mist should be of such consequence. It seemed to us that the tracts concerning the mist were more like fairy tales that wearied climbers had invented for their survival.
But the day came when the wet smoke rose. Serenely it rose up, fathomless, extending for miles up into us, swirling about our ankles and knees, then drifting on high above, swallowing us on our wall. In it were the brilliant wet colors we’d known below, and there the agony began, for the vivid colors wrought memories we’d forgotten. Images flooded and exhausted us. After the first desperate days we became more and more vacant, and climbing was at last impossible. We found a large, flat tower of rock and made our camp there and for a long time hovered in our opiate, the mist, engulfed in the past, moist nostalgias, its rich texture even softened the callouses on my hands, ruining them. When I touched the rock they shredded like springtime fingertips. Aching, limbs would collapse not just from weariness, but from emptiness.
In the morning we would wake and excitedly begin chattering to one another, trying urgently to relate each valuable detail of our night’s dreams. The excited lesions of speech would quickly fall away as we collected ourselves in sad dissipation and sat closer together, one by one describing our nocturnal utopias. It was private territory and we each knew it would be a violation of the dreamer’s sacred cosmos if we dared offer a word of interpretation. Instead we’d nod ambiguously and wait several minutes before the next would set in with a dream, eager to spin it out.
Frequently, by the time our dreams had been told, half the day was gone. Though the sun was layered with heavy mist, we could still discern its relative position by its lighter aura in the murky sky; thus we could mark our days. After the dream-telling was done, we would retire to separate parts of the ledge, maybe to exercise on the rock or to sleep, but usually just to sit and remember. And later, when the sun was going down for the night, and the mnemonic afternoon was expended, we were visited by spirits. Those which other climbers had called demons and angels came to hover by and talk to us individually. We each had a personal conclave that hung by us; as mine was invisible to Aaron and Gareth, so theirs were to me. They were pit phantoms come to convince us to return to where we’d risen from. Mother phantoms came, and various succubae, and old friends showed their tender concern for me. Even philosophers and poets would come up to talk with me. They appealed to my passions and my reason, arguing and cajoling, debating, kissing my head. I sat hunched up, my eyes squeezed tight, listening and sometimes crying a little, envisioning past loves and duties, recalling ideals I’d once championed. They were sweet echoes, but I felt a need to deny them all. “What of the future?” I would ask the phantoms, and they would flicker hesitantly before ignoring my words. My firmness would dissolve and I’d remember all the good things, all the fine pasts, just by sitting there against the wall, sighing. At last I flailed my arms against the phantoms when they demanded I dance in the air with them. My knuckles began bleeding where I’d knocked them violently against the wall.
I stared at my blood and many things rushed into place. Rough hair, nails broken, hominidal fears at night, and hungers, yes, the bloodness being the great hunger. I licked my knuckles clean and watched as more of my own blood welled up. I began lapping the scrapes, drinking of myself. Hunger seeped through me, and when the phantoms circled again I croaked at them to leave me. “Look at me now,” I warned them. They reformed out beyond the ledge. You rest, they whispered, well leave. But I knew they’d return. Dreams and seasons have no evolution.
I glanced about. There were Gareth and Aaron, one lying in his bag, the other sitting in a corner smiling. I wanted to scream to them of the danger. Instead I went to Aaron, shook him gently, and pointed to the wall. His eyes were glazed in distance and his smile seemed permanent, but he nodded his head and murmured assent... “Tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll climb.” When I shook Gareth he struck at me, weeping.
So with pieces of sling and old rope I lashed him fast to the wall. He didn’t mind much. He struggled, but not with meaning. He was too possessed by the mist.
And next day, early in the morning I shoved and pushed Aaron awake. I was frightened that he might continue his depthless smiling, so I beat him. That morning we began our escape.
The first day we ascended only a short distance, but most importantly we began bleeding again and feeling ourselves as bodies and not as dreams. Each afternoon we’d return to the mist-enclosed ledge. Gareth recovered day by day, but still tended to collapse into reverie, so we kept him tied to prevent his suicide. We climbed each day, surrounded by the mist, shoving our way through its melancholia, fixing ropes for the coming day when Gareth could sanely join us.
I sat on a ledge for a long time, the rope draped around my waist and piled at my feet in loose coils as Aaron led above. Somewhere far below me Gareth was waiting for us to come sliding down to him with food. But I came awake instantly. Something about the rope insisted an end to my stupor. No words had been spoken, no warning, but I was suddenly alert to a tension burning down from above. Maybe the rope conducted the tension, maybe it was the air that was adhesive and saturated with urgency. And suddenly it came in an eruption of space. The ropes tension collapsed on itself as I clenched it anxiously. One moment there was tautness and demand streaking down into my hands, in the next I was left holding a limp substance, useless and without strength. Aaron was falling. The stillness woven deeply in the fibers leapt and the rope jumped fiercely; my palms screeched, taming the motion, searing, stopping the serpentine speed into sluggishness and final stasis of smelt flesh and inertia. I heard a distant slap high above me. Aaron had finished falling. The rope began pulling insistently at my waist, weighted on its far end. I set against it and wrapped it about my thigh, wondering why and how long the fall had been. In a minute there was the grappling sensation of lessening pressure, followed by a vibrating tug, and then a relaxation of the invisible pressure pulsing through the cord. Finally the hard pull eased, its tautness properly restored, fluid rather than enmeshed in the drastic sleekness of weight. I began working in the slackness as Aaron revived himself and started up the crack again.
From somewhere I remembered how immediately before the fall the air had been warm, the sun directly above me. But I was beginning to shiver with the coldness, and the sun was low by the time the rope released itself once again. Another crashing. This time the slap came two times quickly as I held the fall, then sounded twice more just before I felt his total weight pulling violently against my waist. This, I could feel, had not been a good fall.
I waited for Aaron to call something down, but he didn’t. He said nothing, just his weight. Invisible, existent only by the proof of the rope, he revived himself again. I could feel the rope jerking and releasing as he tried to pull himself into a prehensile position. Again I forced pain away from my burned hands, oblivious to the chill about my throat, demanding the same patience that dominated our life on the wall. I waited. Finally Aaron found a hold and the rope became unweighted again. I waited more. And while I lurked in my shadow (the pre-night), I heard what I had never dared to hear, an end to hope. It came like a small, dry bat through the fog; a groan, a tiny, bleached noise, muffled, half-sheltered by its shock, smothering. It was a memory, stars blowing hilted, stars in their cobalt flood of f
ear and aloneness infecting me in the night. An acute hum. I hit out, thrusting in every direction at the frightening blindness, and by chance my hand struck the rock. The spell snapped; there was rock, and my consciousness was restored, transfigured. My eyes came open. I could feel the rope again, and bit by bit I let the rope slide through my hands, running it as smoothly as my braking palms would allow. I worked him down through the mist gradually. Our sun was pallor, buried in the universe, already hinting at its usual bile black. One knew simply that one was; if he heard voices, or groans, he was conscious, and nothing more, of another, less verifiable existence. Aaron didn’t answer. I continued letting out the rope.
At last I could hear his feet scraping weakly at the rock as he tried vainly to keep his balance against the arcing wall. And his hands kept slinging against the opaque, moonless stone. I continued lowering him. Finally his slumped body materialized, all wet and dark. On his head was blackness, a frigid blue shimmering, and his sleeves were also wet and bloody. I pulled him onto the ledge and laid him out. The mist became verglas and illuminated his epileptic form. The gray cold was at its margin. Drained by the night, I knelt and manipulated him down an overhang toward insomnial Gareth.