Too Close to God

by Jeff Long

  One incident among the many animals slaughtered and people killed had affected Corder deeply, and that was the death of a white tiger. I think, after piecing together Corder’s accounts, that I can understand some of his feeling of guilt. Up in their helicopter, from their vantage point of height and omnipotent fire power, the crew members had lost patience with the common and ordinary. The earth had become a topography for them, small and insipid. Animals and men were now nothing but targets, more to test the crew’s indifference than its weaponry. One day, near the border of Cambodia, Corder’s crew spied a watery white shape surging through the dark trees below. It was an albino tiger. The gunship dropped lower, hovering like an insect as the young soldiers fed their curiosity about the extraordinary animal. For such a long, long time they had seen nothing beautiful, uncommon.

  Beneath the thunder of the rotor blades, the pilot suggested the tiger be spared, and over the headphones the co-pilot agreed. They would show mercy. But just as the gunship started to lift away, the act was spoiled. Corder shot the tiger with his miniguns. I suspect he did it out of fascination, or maybe because of a desire to be completely free of that impoverished landscape or to commit a crime where there was no law. The reason doesn’t matter; it didn’t matter as the gunship throbbed above the white carcass, and it didn’t matter as Corder and I lay half-conscious at Camp VI. The tiger was dead.

  On the morning of October 29, our sixth straight day of storm and solitude, we lost radio contact with the British at Camp V, 800 feet below us. We waited until seven o’clock that night, assuring each other that their batteries must have frozen or their antenna broken, but they were gone. An avalanche took them, of course, though to Corder and me they’d been bluntly erased. I accepted their nonexistence without a second thought. The world had become a very plain and simple finger painting for me. Sunset, had we been able to see it, would have been a few broad stripes of color. The ice would have been purple. The summit would have been an inky triangle. The deaths of six fellow climbers fit quite naturally into this matter-of-fact tableau.

  Far from mourning the loss of the climbers at Camp V, Corder accepted it as unsophisticated destiny, part and parcel of his sin. I finally understood—his sin was the murder of that white tiger. But guilt no longer interested me; I was too hungry and exhausted to share Corder’s moods.

  “It’s happened like this before.” He was glaring through me again, a glare I was learning to equate with further confession.

  “Hey,” I said soothingly, “it’s okay.”

  Corder blinked and emitted a shy, repentant grin: white teeth in a black beard, black and white like a Dürer etching. Death’s-head. He lay back, quiet for a few minutes, then launched into his tale again.

  After Corder “fired up” the white tiger, the gunship had hung above the jungle for a moment or two, then arced away from the isolated clearing. The pilot and co-pilot were disappointed in Corder, but no one ever mentioned the tiger again. A week later the gunship was shot down, killing everyone but Corder. Corder put one huge hand on my shoulder as I lay in my filthy sleeping bag and swore to God that, just before he died, the co-pilot had looked him straight in the eye and coldly whispered, “Don’t blame yourself.” At that point, and with enduring guilt, Corder had realized he alone was responsible for the deaths of his friends. It had been he, after all, who had tampered with a pattern of mercy.

  Within five minutes a second and third gunship had tracked the distress signal from Corder’s ship and had come snapping over the jungle’s edge, laying down heavy veils of gunfire all around the craft. Two minutes later Corder was safely plucked from his burning gunship. But for seven minutes he was alone, surrounded by flames, gunfire, and his dead fiends, one of whom had accused him with his last breath. For seven minutes Corder was tormented by the belief that an animistic force had pursued and destroyed everyone but him—because he was the guilty one.

  After the crash of his gunship and the death of his crew, the giant gunner had encased himself in guilt and horror. He had a prostitute for a girlfriend who habitually dressed in white; she disappeared the same day Corder’s Huey was shot down. Even more ominous, he confided to me, every now and then one of his dead crew members would quiver into view on the streets of Ban Me Thuot in central Vietnam.

  “They wouldn’t say nothing, just sort of look at me like I done... well, the tiger.”

  He was reassigned to another gunship, and it was shot down the next morning. Corder survived this catastrophe, too, only to be haunted by the ghosts of two gunship crews.

  “So now you know.” He paused. “What do you think? Crazy, huh?” I knew what I thought, but didn’t know what to say. It was a strange story, I cautiously admitted. A terrible story. I was afraid to say any more. He was huge, and I was more than a little convinced that Corder was out of his mind. Eight thousand vertical feet from the foot of the mountain, I was trapped in a tent with a madman.

  There were a few edible odds and ends tucked deep inside my sleeping bag, but I felt justified in withholding them for myself. It had come down to that kind of deceit. We were dying. Lives had ceased to be but, as I said, the mountain made us all seem so insignificant.

  “You aren’t going to eat me, are you?” Corder joked, cocking a wasted grin at me. I looked long and hard at his face, at his black beard and his ragged mane of hair, at his nose scabbed with old sunburn. I thought he could survive on the flesh of his memories. Corder glanced at me. His eyes hungered for forgiveness. Utterly convinced of his sin, he was, in confessing to me, inviting death.

  On October 31, my suspicions that Corder was deranged were confirmed when he began to repeat his stories of the white tiger, his helicopter crashes, and his young whore in immaculate clothing. I was lying beside him, my back pressed up against the great wall of his rib cage to absorb every possible bit of warmth.

  For the eighth straight day he was talking when I woke from my nauseous doze. The blue and orange tent fabric was coated with our breath, which had turned to hoarfrost. His deep, gentle voice was repeating the story. At first I was groggy, ill from the long frozen night, and I was irritated that Corder was echoing himself. Then I noticed that his tale was more severe and cogent this second time around, it made a little more sense. As Corder droned on, I envisioned the floating gunship that had laced the humid skies. I could feel the miniguns shudder as the tiger leaped high and dropped. I understood the graceful white curve of his young whore’s hip.

  Throughout the day I lay against Corder’s back, delirious from the high altitude, starvation, and his tale. I ached because the snow was hard and cold, and I couldn’t move except to face Corder. The tent wall was sucked in and out as the storm respirated. Near dusk I stealthily chewed a piece of cheese, savoring the strength it would give. As quietly as possible, I sipped from a bottle of water I’d kept thawed inside my sleeping bag. Corder rambled on, crazy as a loon.

  I had two hopes. One was that Corder would weaken enough so that, even if his madness turned physical, he couldn’t hurt me. I was praying that his arms were already too heavy to move. With very little effort Corder could have pushed me through the side of the tent. The drop was a mile and half. My other hope, so primal one might call it a drive, was that by nibbling at my hoarded food I could outlive the storm and descend to safety. Of course, if Corder had discovered my deception he probably would have killed me outright.

  The end came as suddenly and innocently as the first avalanche ten days earlier. The tent wall turned dark blue at sunset. In tides the wind relaxed, then slapped at the mountain, then relaxed. Dropping off to sleep, I wondered again when the storm would stop, when Corder would be quiet. He had begun for the fourth time to retell his story of the white tiger. It was all like a dream: the storms and deaths, Corder’s immaterial story, my deception with the food. That thought was still with me when I woke up in pitch darkness, unconsciously groaning to protest an absence, a blank spot.

  The storm had stopped. There was silence.

 
“Corder,” I rasped, my voice unfamiliar. “Corder, you can shut up now.” But he kept talking even after I’d turned on my flashlight and clambered over his rib cage. His eyes were as motionless as his jaw. His powerful features were locked and blue, hollowed by the cold. Corder was dead.

  In prying the giant’s body from the tent floor that night, I realized I was going to have enough strength to descend. When I unzipped the door, I saw the stars were glittering. The storm had truly broken. There was a long, chilling moment as I hesitated, unsure whether the corpse in my hands was dead or just pretending to be while it continued talking about the white tiger and eternal guilt. Then, with one decisive shove, Corder was gone and I was left alone inside that bony, sagging tent.

  I can still feel his heart in my ears, beating, his voice like mine. You should believe me when I say I am not the cannibal. But Corder is inside me.

  Ike

  (The Descent)

  “Ike picked up one of the coins. ‘Where’d you find these?’”

  Author Note

  What some call a Spartan streak in climbers, I consider monastic. Climbers and monks: both share a cloistered, tribal detachment from the world; both live by an arcane code that strikes outsiders as mystical; both commit body and soul to scarred gods with 0% body fat; both perform brute labor free of charge; both practice intense contemplation; both know the cold hours of night and the prayers that draw each dawn. Not least, both observe the sacrament of wine.

  So I learned that semester when a professor gave me three hours of philosophy credit for attempting a winter solo of El Cap (three whole pitches before total failure.) Barely back from that fiasco, I joined the professor and the rest of our class on a retreat to an old fashioned, Gregorian-chanting monastery in the Sangre de Christo range. It was there among the gaunt brothers that I plunged into hell, all thoughts of heaven merrily jettisoned.

  We are surrounded by stories all day and night long. Every now and then one of them rears up, a fully formed giant… if you have the eyes to see it. One reason young writers need to read everything in sight is to learn the difference between a yarn and a short story and a book, and between a non-fiction and a fiction. It is up to each of us to construct a personal radar. Without it, the whispering stories are nothing but a snaky hiss. With it, though, you can start to recognize worlds waiting just beyond ordinary human perception. Only then can you begin to judge if an idea really merits the years of exploration, research, and obsession it can take to write.

  On this particular afternoon at the monastery, the abbot was talking to us about higher matters in a room with whitewashed walls. He spoke the name Dante, a hopeful moment, only to return to the difference between existential and mystical nothingness. Unfortunately the warm sunlight, mixed with exhaustion from keeping monk-hours, had caused most of our bunch to doze off. Desperate to stay awake, if only as a courtesy, I cast around for some saving distraction.

  How many times have I survived a symphony by battling a terrorist in the violin section or leaping for the ballerina in mid-topple from the stage? Alternate realities, strangers from strange lands, wild adventures not yet launched: they beg for our voice. Buried in sunshine, I found one at my feet.

  The floor was made of big terracotta tiles dry laid on a sand base. That was a start. One glance at the joints and the stonemason in me recognized a good and patient craftsman. I pried at the joints for the conquistadores and rancheros lying underneath. But the joints were too straight and regular for creative profit. The tiles, though, were crazed with hairline cracks. Chaos is my garden.

  Tracing one crack to another, I abruptly found myself on an nameless big wall with a hundred vertical paths to select from. Here waited a dihedral, there a jam crack. I discovered a bivy ledge, retreated from face holds breaking my fingernails, and feasted on eggs from a rookery of turquoise- and lemon-colored parrots. My fantasy stalled, though, as I realized it was a sorry excuse for my weaknesses on El Cap.

  Once again my eyelids grew heavy. Behind me the yoga girl with beads in her hair was snoring. The abbot’s drone was relentless, a meadow of bumblebees. Flailing to stay awake, I resorted to conspiracy theories. Surely he knew his audience was asleep. Was it intentional? Satanic, perhaps? Once we were all sedated, would the monks dance around our bodies? Pick our pockets? Did the abbot notch his conquests in the adobe above his pillow? The conspiracy angle lacked action, though. I was nodding off again, brought low by a failure of imagination.

  Then came a miracle. Hell appeared before me, a sprawling, tubular frontier of mythical horrors. My eyes shot open. The revelation electrified me. I had misread the terracotta topo. The cracks were not leading up a mountain, but into the bowels of the earth. Spread below my feet was Dante’s and Verne’s real estate, though not without strong help from the likes of Whymper and Robbins.

  Down I went, rappelling from a ledge of the Inferno into the leaden Greek underworld, softly traversing above fiery medieval horrors, and sneaking through H.G. Wells’ realm of cannibal Morlocks. The list went on. The deeper I looked into the tiles, the vaster and darker the subterrain spread. The mouth of hell yawned wide, ready to swallow the scientific expedition I was already constructing.

  For the rest of our retreat, monk-hours paled next to my sleepless state. No more chapel by candlelight for me, I wanted unpolluted night. I exempted myself from clearing the fields, fasted like a penitente, and took to the desert at night not to defy temptation but rather have a meet-and-greet with Satan. I needed to know him, his language and octopus flesh and primal eyes.

  The clock was ticking. Visions evaporate. Every notion and detail, every whiff of a word, I threw into my notebook. I couldn’t wait to read this book, but also recognized it was a book not yet ready to be written. Bluntly put, I needed permission.

  Permission is the single biggest obstacle an artist faces, at least in the beginning. It’s one thing to concoct a street level hero or heroine with a made-up name, and something completely different to dare reviving Sam Houston, JFK, or Elizabeth I. In the space of a moment you can nail together a countertop for Joe’s deli. But to lay claim to public property, to confiscate the Little Big Horn, the Santa Fe Opera house, the chalkboard in Einstein’s patent office, or the commons known as Hell, requires permission, and the only person who can grant that to you is you. First ascents are like that, and first descents, too.

  IKE (The Descent)

  It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub...

  —VIRGIL, Aeneid

  The Himalayas,

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  1988

  In the beginning was the word.

  Or words.

  Whatever these were.

  They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating against the mountainside outside.

  With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He’d never heard of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.

  “Runes,” gushed a knowing female voice. “Sacred runes left by a wandering monk.”

  The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave’s cold bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering Dylan’s anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl....

  “Those are no runes,” said a man. “It’s Bonpo.” A B
rooklyn beat, the accent meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were easy to keep straight.

  “Bonpo!” one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly. Fine with him.

  “But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist,” the woman expounded.

  The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These things mattered very much to them.

  Their goal was—or had been—Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of the Indian border. “A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim” was how he’d advertised the trip. A kor—a Tibetan walkabout—to and around the holiest mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The problem was, somewhere along the trail he’d managed to misplace the mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history. The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call. He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.

  Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora, wanting a private word. “How bad is it?” she whispered. Depending on the hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate. Of late, it was a challenge estimating which came first for her, the business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their little trekking company was no longer charming to her.

  Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. “We’ve got a great cave,” he said.

  “Gee.”

  “We’re still in the black, head-count-wise.”