Too Close to God

by Jeff Long

  “I’m staying with her,” Abe announced.

  The leader wasted no words. His broad face darkened. He took one step closer and shoved Abe hard in the chest, knocking him to the snow. “You damn cowboy,” he said. “I don’t take threats.”

  Abe wasn’t hurt by the blow, only surprised.

  “It’s no threat,” Abe said. But it was, clearly. And now he saw that he threatened their tranquility. They had already reconciled themselves to their forsaking the woman. The rescuers were good and decent men, that went without saying. But by staying, Abe seemed to expose them as something less or different or just more complicated.

  “Get your pack. Or leave it, I don’t care. But get your ass down this mountain. I don’t want you on this mountain. I don’t want you on this team,” the leader yelled over the wind. “You don’t know anything.”

  Without that last insult, Abe might have obeyed.

  One of the rescuers, an older man with bad knees, came gimping up to see what the disturbance was about. “The cherry thinks he’s staying,” the leader said to the older man. “He thinks he’s going to save the day.”

  Now Abe was angry. “You didn’t leave her food or water. You didn’t even talk to her.”

  “That’s because she’s already dead.”

  “But she’s not.”

  The older man took a minute to study Abe’s earnest face. There was no friendliness in his look, but no hostility either. He was measuring Abe the way he would a mountainside or an approaching storm or any other obstacle. “Leave that poor girl alone,” he counseled Abe. “There’s not a thing we can do now except let her go. Have some mercy.”

  Abe heard the logic there, but he had decided. “No sir,” he said.

  “Listen to me. All you’ll do is torment her. With food and water, she could drag on for days. Don’t do that to her.”

  “That’s not the point,” Abe said. “If it was me....”

  “If it was you, you’d pray to God I had a gun to finish you quick.”

  Abe shrugged. He was afraid to argue because he knew they were probably right. But he was staying.

  “I admire your chivalry,” the older man said, and Abe blushed because the man was talking about naïveté. “Just the same, you’ll put everybody at risk all over again, and all to rescue you. Not her. She’s gone. Now come on with us.”

  “No sir.”

  “Damn it,” the leader blew. “You see?”

  “I don’t want to leave her either,” the older man said. “If you ask me, it ought to be that one over there” —he jerked a thumb at the litter—”who’s stuck in the hole. As far as I’m concerned, he as good as killed that girl. All the same, it’s her who stays and him that gets saved.”

  “There’s no right or wrong in the mountains,” the leader added. “There’s just whatever happens.”

  “What’s your name?” the older man asked.

  “Abe Burns.”

  “Well, Abe, if we were down in the World, I’d have you tied up. But we don’t have the manpower to carry you out. So that’s no good. All we can do is rely on you to do what’s right.”

  “Yes sir,” Abe said. “I’m trying.”

  “Quit your jacking off,” the leader shouted. “We got an avalanche overhead and a storm and a hurt man.

  And no time for you to get a hard-on for a dead woman.”

  Abe didn’t hesitate. He knocked the leader backward onto his pack and would have kicked him, too, except he had on crampons and the teeth would have cut the man.

  “Jesus,” the older man hissed at the leader, “Jesus.” Then he turned to Abe. “You know, you can’t save her.”

  “I don’t care,” Abe admitted.

  “Then why?”

  Abe didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

  The older man looked around at the peaks. “Have it your way,” he said. “I just wish you wouldn’t do this to yourself.”

  “It’s your funeral,” the leader cursed Abe, struggling to his feet. He pointed at the hole. “She’s already had hers.”

  The older man shouted the litter crew to a halt two hundred yards down the glacier and Abe trailed him down. The team set down the wounded man, who was delirious with the morphine and warmth. The rescuers all went through their packs, donating food and an extra sleeping bag and a bivouac tent and a little kerosene stove for melting water. They did it quickly, with little respect for Abe but no discourtesy. They thought him a fool, that was plain, but no one said it out loud. They simply left him their surplus. To a man, the rescuers were sullen. Clearly they did not relish carrying Daniel down at the expense of the woman in the crevasse. But the decision had been made. One went so far as to wish Abe well. Then they were gone.

  Abe trudged back up the slope with the supplies. In all, their charity weighed about twenty pounds, and suddenly that seemed very little against the dark mass of storm and twilight.

  Abe lay the things beside the crevasse and assembled the bivouac tent as best he could before the wind blew everything away or the snow buried it or he got too cold. He set the tent door inches from the mouth of the crevasse, which made for an awkward entrance. But it would facilitate communication, and that was the whole point. Once inside the tiny tent and burrowed into the sleeping bag, Abe felt like he was the one trapped. Only then did he call down into the hole and tell Diana what he’d done.

  The woman didn’t answer. Not a whisper issued up from the crevasse.

  “Diana?” he called. Abe had prepared himself for resistance, which was why he’d waited to set camp before announcing his presence. Her silence confused him.

  “Well, I’m here,” Abe said.

  Hours passed. The storm swallowed them alive. What light remained was scooped away by the wind.

  Abe fell asleep and began dreaming he’d fallen into the crevasse. He couldn’t move his arms or legs and it was hard to breathe except in shallow birdlike bursts. He woke from the dream to find himself smothering in complete darkness. The tent had collapsed beneath a heavy mantle of snow and his limbs were lodged tight inside the cocoon of the sleeping bag.

  It took all Abe’s strength to jackknife his body up and down and punch the tent and himself free of the snow. Frenzied with claustrophobia, he managed to claw open the door. There he lay with his bare head extending into the blizzard, gulping huge, searing lungfuls of air and snowflakes, overjoyed to find himself free of the dream, even if not the mountain.

  It was only then that he heard singing. The song was eerie and distant and sounded like nothing human, and Abe guessed the wind was playing through the high towers. That or some animal had been driven up from the forest. Or spirits were on the loose.

  Abe listened harder. Between the howl of wind and the hiss of corn snow guttering off his tent wall, he found a rhythm and a tune and a sunniness to it. It was a Beach Boys song.

  Even as he listened, Abe felt the storm layering him with snow all over again. He shook the tent hard but carefully, for after all his snaking around there was no telling where the crevasse lay now. Rooting through the folds of the tent, Abe found a flashlight and shined it outside. He was horrified and at the same time enchanted by how the falling snow actually devoured his light. The beam reached a few feet beyond his little nylon cave, then vanished.

  It took him several minutes to locate the crevasse. The hole had closed to a small circle, as if sealing its catch away from the world for good. Still lying inside his sleeping bag and tent, Abe edged closer. The singing became more distinct, but that only made it more alien because Diana wasn’t singing real words, only jibberish.

  Now Abe found the ice axe they had left him. In thrashing around, he’d landed on top of the axe. The pick had slashed his sleeping bag and down feathers had spilled everywhere. There was blood on the metal head, and for a bad moment Abe thought he’d cut himself and was too cold to feel the wound. Then he realized this was Daniel’s axe and Daniel’s blood.

  Reaching his arm outside, Abe poked at the edges of the hole to wid
en it. He began chopping, methodically cutting away at the snow even though the debris poured down the crevasse, adding to Diana’s misery. ‘’I’m sorry,” he shouted to her, “I’m sorry.” It was for himself that Abe cut at the snow. He needed to keep open this doorway to the underworld. He was afraid to lose contact, quite certain that without Diana’s company, he would never make it through this ordeal.

  When Abe had finally cut down to the blue rope and gained proof of his companion, he rested. He slept. When his eyes opened again, it was day, but it might as well have been night still. The storm was raging more fiercely than before. Abe couldn’t see anything outside the tent and he couldn’t see anything inside it, either, without the flashlight.

  Abe turned to rebuilding his tent. Section by section, he propped the walls up with the broken poles and taught himself to rustle the fabric every few minutes to shed the snow. And all the while, he listened to Diana’s mindless singing.

  “You’re going to make it,” Abe shouted down the crevasse. He found some cheese and a chunk of wet bread and a plastic bottle of mostly frozen water. “You want some food?” he yelled.

  Diana made no answer. She just sang on and on.

  While Abe ate and drank, he listened. It was essentially the same tune over and over. The words weren’t real words. They were sounds to mark a path. Locked in place, Diana was circling around and around. Soon the vortex would suck her into its deepest part. Abe knew he was listening to the sound of death.

  Finally Abe joined in the singing. He’d heard this song many times before, but he couldn’t remember what the words were either. With the woman’s same abandon, Abe threw his voice out into the void all around them.

  After a while Diana seemed to notice the extra voice. Somewhere in her benighted skull, Abe’s singing freed Diana to depart from the song and actually talk. She began to emit bursts of story. Abe labored to hear what she had to say. It was a freewheeling autobiography, woven together from memories and fictions and pleas for her mother’s comfort. It made Abe weep sometimes, and other times just bored him.

  The stormy day passed. Night moved in again.

  As the darkness stretched out and Abe drifted into delirious catnaps, it was hard to tell what was real anymore. He grew colder and a little crazy himself, and it was hard to know what was even spoken. Much of what Abe heard he may have imagined. Diana may or may not have been a college student with a bad job and a drafty trailer-home and allegiance to some crazy woman. She seemed to have three brothers named John and Wes and Blake, which Abe began to suspect because those were his own uncles’ names. Her talk about mountains was probably real, because she described spring wildflowers Abe had never heard of. She wanted to climb Everest someday, though that might as easily have been Abe’s overlay. Abe gave up trying to keep the woman—or himself—lucid with questions or dialogue.

  Abe finally concluded that the name of her dogged savior was completely lost to her, for she’d quit saying his name altogether. He accepted that she had ceased to understand he was lying on the surface above or even that she was caged inside the mountain. Abe’s presence had not loaned one ounce of dignity to her long and ugly dying, and he resigned himself to anonymity. It was then, during a lull in the gale, that she cried out.

  “I love you,” she yelled.

  Abe knew she meant someone else, yet all he could think to reply was the same. “I love you,” he shouted into the crevasse, and so she wouldn’t think it was just her own echo, he added, “Diana.” Her name sank down the hole, a pebble dropped into the ocean.

  But something happened. A single word came drifting back up the hole. “Abe,” she spoke.

  The storm and the waiting went on for a very long time. Abe’s watch had come off in his struggles, so he had no idea how much time passed, only that he and his invisible lover were both losing their faculties and blurring their memories and mixing in the same dream.

  At one point Abe turned his palms up and noticed that he’d rope-burned the pads down to the white gristle. He didn’t remember doing that, but the snow was pink with blood around the blue rope, and the pink was fresh.

  In the end, there was silence.

  Dawn never broke, but an exhausted light did finally seep into the sky. Overnight, Abe had taken ill from the water or maybe from the storm itself and the cold and the sounds, and his tent had collapsed again. He was very cold and thirsty and tired. But the storm had passed. The wind had quit. He flapped open the tent door. The crevasse had pinched nearly shut. Nothing more could be done.

  “Hello,” he called into the crevasse. The word emerged as blue frost.

  There was no answer. No more song, no more jibberish. Maybe she was still alive, just mute now, eyes wide, a zombie pinned in its crypt for the rest of time.

  Abe shook loose from the snow and wormed out of the tent. The night and day and night had bled him of his strength. It took his full concentration just to stand up. His parka was soaked and frozen. His feet were dead blocks.

  He faced the crevasse, which had puckered shut again. The hole was only a few inches across now. The blue rope was buried deep again. The earth was sealing over. “Good-bye,” Abe croaked. He said it to a memory, to the place itself. He said it to a deep part of himself.

  Without another thought, Abe abandoned the tent and the torn sleeping bag and his pack, which had blown away anyway. The water bottle was frozen solid and useless. The thought of food turned his stomach. He simply backed away from the hole and faced downhill and let gravity herd him off the glacier.

  Abe stumbled and kicked and plowed his way out of the high cirque and across the plateau, which was now scalloped with drifts like a hard, white sea.

  He descended into the forest.

  The path they had taken up the frozen river was buried under two and three feet of snow, but he was patient. Every time he seemed lost, Abe stopped and listened for the water running through its deep veins. He followed that song, humming to himself.

  It took all day. Not once did Abe sit down, because then he would have lain back and disappeared into the dream. He reached the trailhead at dusk and started down the road into night.

  Abe kept moving simply because he could. There was no other reason. Survival was the furthest thing from his mind. Night came on.

  The path turned black. The forest walled him in, squeezing him tight. After some time Abe couldn’t be sure his legs were still moving. He felt motionless and suspended.

  Just before dawn on the next morning a single bright light appeared like a hole in the darkness. It was a big truck with one broken headlight and it was filled with rescuers. While the engine idled, Abe stood transfixed by the hard white light. One by one the rescuers emerged to touch him.

  When they laid him down, it was tentatively, not quite certain of his reality. They had been on their way to retrieve Abe or Abe’s body from the cirque. They dressed the wounds in his hands and started an IV and zipped him into a sleeping bag in the back of the truck and started the long road back to Boulder. The roof rocked back and forth.

  Two rescuers sat beside Abe to monitor his vital signs and pour him full of soup and coffee and herbal tea, whatever hot liquids the group could muster. Abe’s voice was nearly gone from dehydration and the raw cold and his singing, so they filled his silence answering questions they thought he might have asked.

  Daniel was in intensive care, they said. He had gotten very agitated at the hospital and kept repeating the woman’s name until a nurse explained that someone had stayed at the crevasse. After that he’d dropped into deep sleep. He had multiple fractures, but the doctors said Daniel would recover.

  “That’s the good news,” said the man pumping up a blood pressure cuff on Abe’s arm. “The bad news is the girl. She was a dropout from the university at Laramie. She moved back to Rock Springs to take care of her sick mom, Alzheimer’s or something. Anyway, that’s where she hooked up with this fella and he got her into the climbing.”

  “She was getting good. But now
here close to good enough for that wall,” the second rescuer said. “I guess the boyfriend’s some local legend. First ascents all around here. That’s what this was supposed to be. A new route. New wall. New mountain.”

  “Some wedding present,” the first man said.

  “Yeah, that, too. They were supposed to get married. In the spring.”

  Abe could tell they found their information poignant and moving. But he was confused.

  The two rescuers exchanged a glance.

  “She’s not still alive up there?” one asked in a low voice.

  Abe looked from one to the other with blank eyes, wondering if he’d done something wrong.

  “Who?” he whispered timidly.

  Cannibals

  “Enough chocks, pins, and ‘biners to ring like a Swiss cow when I walked.”

  Author Note

  That first time, I landed in a subterranean night, moonless and blind. Unsure if this really was Yosemite, I stood where the grape farmer and his wife had dropped me. A breeze rushed through the trees, drugging me with cedar.

  I woke on a picnic table to those molten gold walls lighting the mist rags and giant trees. It was deep winter and frost coated my sleeping bag, but the ground was bare, not a snowflake, much less the head-high drifts my climbing partner had warned about. I glanced at the brand new yellow plastic snowshoes jutting from my pack. Something was off.

  We had spent months appealing to Kiwanis, Rotarians, Shriners, and Lions to support our “expedition” to Patagonia over Christmas break. It was a silly fantasy. We knew about as much as they did about Cerro Torre and other monsters on our tick list. Moreover, Vietnam was raging, these were Nixon men in golf slacks, and we were damn hippies from Berkeley East, aka the University of Colorado. Our sole take was the plastic snowshoes from a sports merchant eager to get the tax write-off. Scratch Patagonia, insert Yosemite. By thumb.

  Camp 4 was empty except for a single tent. The door unzipped. A man my age, a kid, climbed out. He had long Viking hair, blonde and thick as straw. We made some hot tea. It was Dave’s first trip, too. He had a good heart. We teamed up for some jam cracks, built a fire, shared a jar of Jiffy peanut butter for dinner, and retired to our separate tents.