by Jeff Long
The jewelry had been little more than baubles and crystals and cheap knickknacks; Ike had specifically instructed the trekkers to leave their valuables in the States or in the hotel safe. But someone had gone to the trouble of pilfering the stuff. And then to pay for it in gold coins worth a thousand times what had been taken.
It made no sense. It made even less sense to stand here and try to make it make sense. He was not normally the type who couldn’t think what to do, and so his confusion now was all the more intense. His code said Stay, like a sea captain, stay to sort through the crime and bring back, if not his wayfarers, then at least a full accounting of their demise. The economy of fear said Run. Save what life could be saved. But run which way and save which life? That was the excruciating choice. Cleopatra waited in one direction in her lotus position and white light. Kora waited in the other, perhaps not as surely. But hadn’t he just heard her song?
His light ebbed to brown. Ike forced himself to rifle the pockets of his dead passengers. Surely someone had batteries or another flashlight or some food. But the pockets had been slashed and emptied.
The frenzy of it struck him. Why shred the pockets and even the flesh beneath them? This was no ordinary robbery. Stopping down his loathing, he tried to summarize the incident: a crime of rage, to judge by the mutilations, yet a crime of want, to judge by the thievery. Again it made no sense.
His light blinked out and the blackness jumped up around him. The weight of the mountain seemed to press down. A breeze Ike had not felt before brought to mind vast mineral respiration, as if a juggernaut were waking. It carried an undertone of gases, not noxious but rare, distant.
And then his imagination became unnecessary. That scratching sound of nails on stone returned. This time there was no question of its reality. It was approaching from the upper passageway. And this time Kora’s voice was part of the mix.
She sounded in ecstasy, very near to orgasm. Or like his sister that time, in that instant just as her infant daughter came out of her womb. That, Ike conceded, or this was a sound of agony so deep it verged on the forbidden. The moan or low or animal petition, whatever it was, begged for an ending.
He almost called to her. But that other sound kept him mute. The climber in him had registered it as fingernails scraping for purchase, but the torn flesh lying in the darkness now evoked claws or talons. He resisted the logic, then embraced it in a hurry. Fine. Claws. A beast. Yeti. This was it. What now?
The dreadful opera of woman and beast drew closer.
Fight or flight? Ike asked himself.
Neither. Both were futile. He did what he had to do, the survivor’s trick. He hid in plain sight. Like a mountain man pulling himself into a womb of warm buffalo meat, Ike lay down among the bodies on the cold floor and dragged the dead upon him.
It was an act so heinous it was sin. In lying down between the corpses in utter blackness and in bringing a smooth naked thigh across his and draping a cold arm across his chest, Ike felt the weight of damnation. In disguising himself as dead, he let go part of his soul. Fully sane, he gave up all aspects of his life in order to preserve it. His one anchor to believing this was happening to him was that he could not believe it was happening to him. “Dear God,” he whispered.
The sounds became louder.
There was only one last choice to make: to keep open or to close his eyes to sights he could not see anyway. He closed them.
Kora’s smell reached him upon that subterranean breeze. He heard her groan.
Ike held his breath. He’d never been afraid like this, and his cowardice was a revelation.
They—Kora and her captor—came around the corner. Her breathing was tortured. She was dying. Her pain was epic, beyond words.
Ike felt tears running down his face. He was weeping for her. Weeping for her pain. Weeping, too, for his lost courage. To lie unmoving and not give aid. He was no different from those climbers who had left him for dead once upon a mountain. Even as he inhaled and exhaled in tiny beadlike drops and listened to his heart’s hammering pump and felt the dead close him in their embrace, he was giving Kora up for himself. Moment by moment he was forsaking her. Damned, he was damned.
Ike blinked at his tears, despised them, reviled his self-pity. Then he opened his eyes to take it like a man. And almost choked on his surprise.
The blackness was full, but no longer infinite. There were words written in the darkness. They were fluorescent and coiled like snakes and they moved.
It was him.
Isaac had resurrected.
Too Close to God
“Something quieter than intercourse, the mark of history all over his face.”
Author Note
Blame Nancy Reagan.
It became the campfire story of all times. After a plane filled with pot crashed in Lower Merced Lake above Yosemite in December 1976, local climbers salvaged a small fortune from beneath the ice. Freshly returned from the jails of Kathmandu, I heard some of the tales drifting smoke-like to Eldorado Springs.
Borrowing the machinegun style of Hunter Thompson, I wrote the bare bones into a proposal, took a deep breath, and sent it off to Playboy magazine. It was a long shot, and premature in my strategy of moving from climbing magazines to regional and then national magazines, and from there to books and film.
In those days writers sent their proposals with a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope, for rejections) by snail mail, and then waited… and waited. Superstition held that getting your proposal in front of an editor on a Monday afternoon multiplied your chances of acceptance. Friday afternoons were poison. Calling an editor guaranteed immediate rejection. I was ready to believe anything.
Twice a day, with all the low blood pressure I could summon, I sauntered across the bridge to the tiny post office to check my empty box. Knowing the torture could go on for many weeks, I made a habit of starting my next story immediately after a submission. The SASE usually arrived the third month. This time, Playboy called me the first week. I thought it was a prank.
They were putting together a drug issue, and my piece was perfect, a story with high adventure and rugged characters. They needed it in four weeks. I delivered it in two. A few days later they called again. They were killing my article. The whole issue had been scrapped because of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign. I thought that was craven of them, but was overjoyed with the kill fee, about $500. That was five times more than I made for a published piece. Kill me some more, I thought.
I couldn’t get the lake story out of my head. It felt big. I had never written a book, but this seemed a good debut. Properly budgeted, eating Hungry Man Chunky soup out of the can and finding cheaper rent, the $500 would give me six months of writing time. I moved to a chicken coop at Paul Sibley’s old homestead in Marshall, Colorado: $15 per month. The coop was legendary, practically a rite of passage. Smoke from a decades-old coalmine fire seeped up through sandstone cracks. Every night I dreamed about Soviet missiles raining down on the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.
The coop was the size and temperature of a deer hunter’s meat locker. Every morning I jumped out of my expedition sleeping bag and drove to the University of Colorado library. Convinced the Muse had to personally whisper in my ear, I shunned outlines as blasphemous. That’s like dead reckoning without a map or compass. Half the time I wandered lost or backtracking from cul de sacs and dead ends of my own making. I wrote longhand with a #2 Ticonderoga pencil until my head ached, about five hours, and then called it a day. I still shake my head at the wasted time. Telling stories is an art, but writing is a fulltime job. A proper workday is twelve hours long, and not uncommonly sixteen. The Muse has to sit outside my door. Inspiration has its place, but outlines have a greater place.
Angels of Light was one long, unbroken learning curve filled with firsts. It was my first book-length manuscript, but not my first published book. My first editor, one of the best in New York, had no interest in a climbing novel. Instead he wanted me to write a tru
e-crime non-fiction about a self-styled mountain man who killed two game wardens. The result, Outlaw, had a nice debut with national reviews, a book tour, and even a few bestseller lists. The director of a major TV-movie called Shogun, turned Outlaw into a TV-movie of the week. A group of friends and I clustered around a little portable TV with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil. Static destroyed half the airing, but the usual cheap wine tasted especially good that night.
Once again I showed Angels of Light to my editor, but now he wanted the Alamo history I had proposed. I dared to make Angels of Light a negotiation term, and received a generous two-book contract that, in reality, made Angels free. I would have paid to see it published.
An independent producer optioned the book and commissioned me to write a script. Things were perking along, with two published books, a TV movie, and now it seemed a feature film. Everything was in good order, with copyrights, registered film rights, contracts, and a years-long paper trail that included Playboy. But then the Morlocks surfaced again. In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Morlocks were debased cannibals lurking beneath our feet. I had already encountered one with The Soloist’s Diary and would meet more in coming years. They are a hungry bunch.
Unknown to me, my producer hired a messenger who claimed (and later denied) an active role at Lower Merced Lake. The messenger’s mission was to deliver my script to his buddy, the writer and director John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian) But along the way the messenger decided my script needed his expertise, and demanded money and co-author credit. When the producer fired him, the messenger disappeared with a copy of my script. Unfortunately, he would reappear.
Nancy Reagan now paid another visit to my story. Her Just Say No campaign had gathered steam, and my producer decided the hidden treasure should have nothing to do with marijuana. In my seventh draft, I erased the drugs and inserted a set of Treasury Department plates for printing money. That draft went off to a film agency where it went to a script reader who promptly vanished, like the messenger, with a copy of my script. Two-weeks later a script called Cliffhanger appeared under a pseudonym, featuring my Treasury plates and still bearing the names of some of my characters. The only thing I don’t want credit for is the bizarre notion, in draft one of the movie, that crampons are worn on your hands for climbing a roof.
By the time it hit theaters, I was writing my fifth book, a climbing novel called The Ascent.
- JEFF LONG
Too Close to God
Like that wild boy who flew too close to the sun, there was no way the climber was not going to fall. The difference was that John’s wings were melting under the moon, and that for him ascent was not escape but captivity itself. It was too soon for him to admit desperation, though, and so John Dog Coloradas worried his hands—taped, raw, and smoking with a fresh coating of gymnastic chalk—tighter and higher in the cold granite crack, grimacing because there was no pain and there should have been. There would be time enough once he and Tink hit flat land to thaw their fingers and check for frostbite. For now he bit a lungful off the night breeze, smelling pines so far below you couldn’t hear them. Moonlight seared the wide, stark acres of stone, starving his shadow, beckoning him higher with its quicksilver. He could taste the chalk powder in the back of his throat, and from much farther away, perhaps a cave or a stand of timber on the summit, the scent of moss crossed his tongue, too. And beneath all the smells of Yosemite Valley he smelled the storm.
It was going to snow but not before it rained. And so he kept twisting and fusing his hands and feet into the indifferent stone, wrestling against the tyranny that hung on him like a monkey in heat. Nasty as it was, the threat of getting wasted by a Pacific cold front didn’t astonish him. In the pantheistic order of things, it made perfect, dust-to-dust sense. If he could have spared the motion, he would have shrugged. Maybe they’d make it, maybe not. Since they had departed the earth five short days and long nights ago, the climb had been freighted with miscalculation and fuck-ups: too little food, too much water, some important pieces of equipment dropped from numb fingers, a half-day spent following the wrong crack. Any big-wall climb magnifies such venial errors. A big-wall climb in winter can make them downright carnivorous, and here it was Christmas Eve. The Duracell batteries in their blaster had given up the ghost, robbing them of Talking Heads and the Himalayan climber’s standard Pink Floyd, and John’s sole wish was for an end to this combat with gravity one way or the other. He was, as they say, running on the little red ‘E.’ When you pull off a close one, climbers call it an epic, as in radical. When you don’t, you’re stuff, so much meat for the chop shop of mountain lore. Sometimes you can swing in the wind for a full season before they get you down.
John could feel the continent drifting all around him, and he wondered again about hypothermia. His mane of thick, black Apache hair weighed 50 pounds tonight, or so it seemed every time he bent his head back scanning for signs of the summit. Summits are elusive things. Ever protean, they shift around, encouraging false hope, defying prediction. Sometimes they leak farther away even as you watch. Other times they suddenly drop away under the tips of your toes. You can fight a mountain almost to your coffin, lose fingers to frostbite, your mind to despair, and finally reach the summit only to find not a damn thing there, just a slag heap without a chin. Or top out with great élan, only to discover the true summit stands across and then up a ten-hour knife ridge. The temptations in mountaineering to cheat—to quit and lie—are abundant; as always in matters of faith, it’s between you and yourself. Tonight there was no such temptation. Since sharing a palmful of peanut M & M’s for supper while the sun went down and the wind picked up, John and his partner, Tink, had been stalled on this final stretch of unyielding rock. They’d taken turns failing on it, and now they were out of time for failure. First would come sleet perhaps a few degrees above freezing, then the temperature would show some real downtown hostility. Soaked, they would lose core heat, turn foolish, get sleepy. By morning they’d look like two dragonflies shellacked with Superglue. John had begun to hate the summit, which did precisely as much to bridge the gap as loving it would have. The galling thing was that it hung almost within reach. Just a half-pitch above—40, maybe 50 feet more as the rope stretches—the summit was radiant in a spill of moonlight. All that divided John’s darkness from a safe, flat haven was that silvery line. And all he had to do was touch it. Then he heard the noise. And again, elbow askew, hips dry-humping in close to the rock, he cowered from the monster.
It sounded like bones loosening as a huge, immaculate sheet of ice peeled loose from the summit. Ninety feet long, 30 wide, but only a few inches deep, the glassy slab glinted once in the moonlight as it drifted away like a fat man swan-diving, it sucked at the sky for six, then ten heartbeats. The free-fall was downright delicate. Then a corner touched against the girdle of rock 3,000 feet lower and the ice exploded with a roar. Crystalline shrapnel scourged the spidery forest that crowds El Cap’s prow, decapitating Jeffrey pines and mangling the manzanita that each spring and summer perfume rock climbers who dot the walls, indistinguishable at a distance from the wild blackberries few tourists dare to eat. The shrapnel would have been a killing rain, but no one and nothing was dying tonight, not yet anyway. Frogs, rodents, and fox bats living and hibernating in the granite cracks were slotted deep and safe; the peregrine falcons that nest on the dawn-facing wall weren’t due to arrive for another five months; and what Coyotes remained in the Valley were off sampling mice in quieter coves.
Except for John and Tink, then, all was well. Ironically, they were in danger for precisely the reason they were momentarily safe—because the headwall upon which they dangled was so severely overhung. The overhang meant that most of the falling ice whirligigged out and away from them. The overhang also meant they could not retreat.
“Fuck,” breathed John, a brief anthem of relief. His fingers were blown, and he was tiny, a slight creature willing itself up the hard space and colors that form the vertical boundar
ies of Yosemite. It didn’t matter that no one belongs 3,000 feet above the dark soil of California on Christmas Eve in the path of a blizzard, any more than it mattered that John did belong because he’d chosen to leave the ground in search of dragons or in flight from the common mud or on fire with whatever else it is that propels ascent. He had a soul, he had his reasons, and he was frightened. All that really mattered was the Valley spread below—half a mile wide, half a mile high, gashed deep into the harsh earth by not-so-ancient glaciers. The Valley had its own terms.
“Watch me,” he groaned. Frost poured from his mouth. Ten stories below, Tink couldn’t quite hear the command, but he heard the groan and was already watching as best he could, a vigilance more of touch than sight. He was reading the rope’s vibration with his palms, listening to John’s desperation. Tink was scared and his wide white eyes stared blindly toward the summit. It’s always worse waiting for disaster than fighting it, but he was patient. He loved John, though he was still too young to realize you could admit that about another man. That he was here on this wall in these circumstances was a testament of that love. John was the only friend he had, and when he first suggested climbing the Mosquito for Christmas, Tink accepted because it was John, not because it was the Mosquito Wall. Agape has its limits, however. Tink knew that if his partner fell, all their protection, including the belay anchor, would probably rip, dumping them into forever pronto. In a way that only a white suburban American boy can be, Tink was presently optimistic about their situation. He was optimistic for both of them. Fervently optimistic.
John grappled his weight a body-length higher. The hardware slung from his racks tinkled musically, the sound a horse makes shaking its bridle. He stuffed his fist into the rock and cocked the flesh against whatever flakes and crystals might catch it. The hand stuck with satisfactory firmness, and he pulled up against it, releasing with his lower fist so he could jam that, too. The smoothness of the move pleased him. If only the rest of the crack would go this well. He was taking things one inch at a time, and his frown ebbed. Except for the hunger and cold and impending storm, and those two fingernails he’d torn clean away yesterday morning while opening a fisherman’s knot, and the sapping ache in both knee joints, this was where he loved it most, on the far, jagged edge of the world. True, you took more pain up here, what with the sun and the wind and the god-awful sheerness picking you bare, but then again, where else was everything so obvious? It wasn’t so much easier to see—especially for John with his talent for finding the labyrinth in each and every event, even this straightforward, squared-off crack in the rock—as it was just plain easier to do. Up here it was like a Clint Eastwood movie, where the metaphors are always blunt. Physical. Where what you touch—and nothing but—that’s what you get.