Snowblind Page 11

  “Do it!” Ian yelled. “Beast it!”

  His mind asked for time, but his hand, guided by his blood, reached out one axe and locked it onto the lip at the farthest end of the bulge. He pulled against his higher axe and reached blindly up with the other, and then his feet cut loose from their holds, and his legs swung out away from the mountain, and for a moment he was connected to the mountain by a single point, an inch of steel on rock, and his feet were swinging out away, and all he had left was his right hand. As the upper mountain rolled into view, he saw that the rock above was covered in holds, neat horizontal rails. He pulled hard—he could always trust his right hand for that—and his second axe locked into one of those perfect slots, and he hauled himself up. (What if the rock had been blank? But he pushed that thought out of his mind.)

  He climbed the easy ground above with exaggerated care, his muscles trembling from fatigue and adrenaline. There were ledges, a terrace of them, though none were very wide or long, and they’d have another night spent sleeping sitting up. He placed two pitons and a cam, clipped himself to this anchor, and sat down with his back to the mountain. He let his mind drift on euphoric waters, happy to be alive, happy to have fought hard and won. A few moments passed like this before the image of Ian, still hanging in his harness anchored to the ice down below, pressed hard enough into his reverie to bring him back to the present and pull up the rope and then shout down to his partner that the anchor was set and he could climb.

  Ian arrived at the ledges panting and cursing, the tight rope from above eliminating only the psychological trauma of the pitch. He flopped down next to David, who tied off his section of the rope to the anchor and then took him off belay.

  “Buddy,” Ian said. “Fantastic. Ridiculous. Psychotic bastard. I thought you were going to kill us both.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, I thought you were going to come off. We’d both have been yelling into the breeze then. For sure.”

  “But you told me to go for it.”

  “Well, sure. It looked like you were headed up anyway. I thought I might as well keep things positive. Yelling at you was better than sitting there and quietly crapping myself.”

  David’s adrenaline buzz was on the wane, the chemical triumph dropping out of his bloodstream. He still felt good, but the center had fallen away from his feeling of victory. The summit appeared no closer. He had allowed his hands to climb that pitch ungoverned, and now he worried about the degree to which he had become beholden to luck. Ian’s attitude bothered him. He had thought that his partner was cheering him on. And he noticed, for the first time, how cold the air had become, how few minutes of day remained.

  “Hand me your sack,” David said. The stove lived in Ian’s pack. “I’ll get the snow melting. The cold is coming.”

  “Good. Thanks. Here.” Ian handed it over and leaned his head back against the rock. “Don’t get me wrong. It was a beautiful lead. That’s what we’re here for.” David stood up—there was just room enough for that—and put his heels at the edge of the drop so that he could prop the pack against the spot where he had been sitting. He undid the buckles and loosened the drawcord. “Wait!” Ian said, and he jumped up so that they had to jostle each other for space. “I’ll take care of it. I’m recovered. Give it to me.”

  It was too late. David had already opened the inner compartment.

  “What the hell is that?” David said, staring down into the bag.

  “Come on. He always comes. You know that.”

  David stuck his hand down into Ian’s pack. “Not up here, man. Not when every bit counts. Your sick souvenir weighs two days’ fuel.”

  “You didn’t see me slowing us down. Don’t touch John. I’m telling you, fucker, keep your fingers off.”

  David pulled the shrunken head—he had never been able to call it John—out by the hair. It was the size of a baseball, brown skinned, the nose left disproportionately large and snout-like, the eyes and lips sewn shut. It dangled at the end of a foot of straight black hair, now brittle with age.

  “Put him back,” Ian said. “Put him back! He’s been with me at the top of every mountain. He’ll go to the top of this one too.”

  The head bobbled in the wind, the dark skin-leather looking altogether foreign against the rock and ice. David thought of Ian working in the Guinean gold mines, trading with the natives, his broken Walkman for this head. Then he thought of wind scouring rock. “We don’t need it,” David said. “What’s it doing for us? You shouldn’t have brought it up here. Not if you wanted to keep it.” He held his arm out away from the mountain and opened his hand. It seemed to hang there for a moment, while the mountain itself rushed upward, but the illusion could only sustain itself for a fraction of a second, and then the head was rocketing downward. David watched it tumble with the stomach-sickening lurch that he felt whenever he watched the fall of a dropped object from up high. It was too easy to transpose himself and the head, to feel the wind whistling in his own ears. But soon it diminished and vanished, and all he could see were the places where the head struck the mountainside and knocked free little puffs of snow and falling rock.

  Next to him, Ian was leaned as far back in his harness as his rope tether to the anchor would allow, face turned down toward the drop. Slowly, he pulled himself upright, and David watched the gathering storm of rage ascend through his partner’s shoulders and mouth and eyes. Ian sucked in air, and David concluded that his own time had slowed, because this inward half of Ian’s breath seemed to go on and on, as if Ian would draw all the air off the mountain. David had a momentary vision of them brawling right there on that tiny stance, tied to the same anchor with nowhere to go. When at last Ian pushed all of that air back out, the sound was pure toothy anger, and David faced him silently with his head up and his shoulders high because he figured that this was a moment like facing a bluff-charging bear, when one needed to show force of will. So he let Ian’s growl wash over him without flinching, and Ian sat back down, took back his pack, and said, “Dumb fucking bastard, why do you have to be so serious all the time?”

  Necessity kept them moving. Certain things had to be done. The stove had to be lit and passed back and forth, sleeping niches had to be cleared, the sleeping bags and pads had to be taken out and arranged. Speaking was not necessary, and silence settled on them with the cold. In turn, they melted snow for their water bottles and for dinner. David ate his single-packet ration of chicken soup and watched Ian do the same. David’s stomach rumbled, but he was not yet hungry enough to curse his pack’s emptiness. The lack of weight was still too clearly a blessing, though it was disturbing to think of how little equipment and provisions they had to shield themselves from the mountain.

  When Ian finished his soup, he spoke again. “You’re an asshole, but I don’t care that much about that.” The flat evenness of Ian’s voice came as a surprise. “What’s pathetic is that you still don’t know how to handle your own mind. You’re strong as a roided chimp, but all that muscle is run by a five-year-old’s soul.”

  It was too much. David felt overfed on Ian’s voodoo, but he ended up laughing instead of yelling. “Man, you carry a severed head with you when you go climbing. And you call me the five-year-old? We’re this close to dying up here, and you brought your head. You should never have brought it up here. It’s got no place here. We could have each had a Baby Ruth for dessert instead.”

  Ian was quiet for a long moment, and David wondered if he had gone mute again, or if he was just silently sharpening his axe to plant in David’s forehead. But then Ian let loose a snort and a snigger, then a full-blown gale of laughter. “The man wants candy!” Ian shrieked. “The man wants candy. We’re in the land of the mind, and the man wants candy!”

  Now they were both laughing and whooping and hollering, for no reason that David could think of except that it felt good. Eventually their noise died, and the silence pressed back down along with the night. David buried himself in his sleeping bag, wedging himself in amon
gst the rocks as best he could, half curled, half seated. Somehow they had resolved nothing. He tightened the hood of his sleeping bag around his rope umbilicus to the anchor. He was exhausted enough that he figured he would get some sleep before his hunger and the sharp stones he was leaned against woke him. The laughter had been good, but the silence afterward had fallen crushingly. The next day, they would make for Yunshan’s third eye, and hopefully there they could pitch their tent and get a little more rest. As he sank toward sleep, he thought of John flying down the mountain and felt some guilt for what he had done to Ian. But he also felt clean, as if he had dropped ten pounds, and he knew that if he had let that ugly bit of magic stay with them, it would have festered in his mind and pulled hard against him. Now, though he felt wrung out by the day, he was light, and he drifted away.

  III

  AT LAST THE black turned into grey, and David knew that morning had arrived. Sometime after midnight, the cold had fully infiltrated the loft of his sleeping bag, and he had been trapped in a shivering half sleep since then. So it was a relief to commit to wakefulness, even though he hardly felt rested and the day looked grim. No sun would light this dawn. Black clouds ripened in the sky, their lowest shreds and vapors close enough to hit with a thrown stone. It would snow, there could be no doubt—the only question was when and how much.

  The thought of a blizzard hitting their tiny ledges sent David’s mind to work, but his hands were slow to follow, stiff and cold-hooked as they were. He unzipped his sleeping bag enough to reach out one arm and fumble for the stove. The small manipulations of the stove parts: the plastic pump, the ridged wheel, the cigarette lighter, took an age, and David felt ridiculous to be stationary and fiddling when the snow might start dropping at any moment.

  Ian stirred inside his down cocoon and said, “It’s an evil-looking day, ain’t it, buddy? A good day. It’s what I expected. We’re going to get what we deserve.”

  David was relieved to hear his partner’s voice, and he laughed too loud and long in response. “Come on out of that bag, voodoo man. I’ll have water ready soon. We should hurry.”

  “Today is going to skin us alive,” Ian said. “I hope you’re ready to have your soul exposed.”

  “My soul is spotless,” David said, purposefully trying to load his voice with sarcasm, hoping it might come across as an acknowledgement or apology.

  “Sure,” Ian said. “Spotless like an alligator.”

  Taking care that nothing slipped through wooden fingers slowed them further, and an hour passed before they were ready to climb. Periodically, Ian would turn out away from the mountain and say, “Hold on, just hold on a damn minute,” or, “We’re not ready. Come back later. Pushy old witch.” The clouds congealed into a single bloated mass the color of lead, and stray flakes of snow floated by, though it was impossible to tell whether they had fallen from the sky or been blown off the mountain by the escalating wind. The temperature showed no sign of rising after its overnight drop.

  When they began at last, they found tedious, dangerous climbing through unconsolidated powder. There was rock (or was it ice?) down there, somewhere, below their feet. But a two-foot layer of fine, loose snow covered the solid surface, and when they brushed it away, more would slough into place. So they felt along blindly, with eyes wide open but unable to see the layer that mattered, using axe-spikes and crampons to search out holds under the powder. David could imagine the holds well enough, mental images of brittle ice sticking loose rocks together. With each upward step, he waited for the crunch and lurch that would signal the fall’s first moments, then acceleration and the clatter of stones.

  But it was better to be climbing than waiting at the anchor with nothing to do but watch the darkening sky and Ian’s struggles to keep them attached to the mountain, or to look inward and feel the invasion of the cold as his blood retreated toward his core. In the later morning, the snow began in earnest. Ian, already a formless shape under his red unisuit and helmet and scraggly blond beard, became blotted out behind the falling snow. By the time he reached the two-hundred-foot limit of their rope, David could hardly see him at all.

  When David rejoined Ian at the next anchor, he tried to be enthusiastic and positive. “That was a good lead,” he said. “Spooky loose rock. Nice work.”

  “Cut it out,” Ian said. “You’re using your baby brain. You’ve been acting like that all goddamn morning.”

  David felt lame and slow for being called out. “Fine,” he said. “Your gear was crap, and you took a year to turn the roof above the groove.”

  “That’s better,” Ian said. “Now you’re talking like the mountain. Better grow up fast. I can feel the knife under my skin already.”

  David couldn’t tell whether Ian meant his words lightheartedly or otherwise. The wind snatched away intonation and whole sentences, and Ian’s face was masked behind numb lips and the tightly drawn hood of his jacket. David felt like they were being dragged over rocks. They were coping all right, he thought, trading words that were mild enough to still be friendly but sharp enough to offer some release, but then one of them would say something that jabbed too hard, and they’d be back to spitting glass at each other.

  “Just give me the rack,” he muttered into the wind, “and go fuck yourself.”

  “Quick now, little beaver,” Ian said. “Cut your teeth.”

  The storm revved up until it seemed like the jet stream washed directly over Yunshan. Pockets of turbulence struck at them, heavy fingers of air that seemed to want to pluck them right off the mountain. David hunkered down, gasping for breath, commanding the fragile holds to stay attached for a few more seconds and bear a few more pounds. He flailed and hacked at the mountain, and sometimes he imagined it was Ian, but other times he looked down and a gap in the blizzard showed how carefully Ian tended his rope, and he felt, again, the corded assurance that bound them—and sometimes, when the wind seemed to drive bits of ice right through his brain, he thought nothing at all.

  Imperceptibly, at first, the angle decreased. But then David found that he was crawling as much as climbing. He plowed ahead through the snow on his knees, in order to stay low, in order to give the wind as little leverage as possible. He lost feeling in his hands, but he could still move his fingers and hold onto his ice axe.

  The mid-afternoon was as grey and murky as their starlit nights down on the glacier. The ground leveled out to the point that they could stand and walk unroped in the wind lulls. They did not explore the boundaries of this area but dropped their packs and immediately began to dig down toward the hope of a stable layer to which they could anchor the tent. The wind blew sharp points of ice into every open seam of their clothing, and soon they each wore undershirts of slush. They worked feverishly, at first, so that the snowfall would not undo what had already been dug, but then Ian stopped and stood up.

  “What’s that?” Ian said.

  “What do you mean?” They had to shout at each other nose-to-nose in order to be heard through hats and hoods and above the avalanche of wind noise.

  “That sound,” Ian said.

  “It’s the wind!”

  “No. Listen. Over there.” Ian abandoned their partially constructed platform and staggered off into the gale. The outline of his body fuzzed out, as if the reception were fading away on an old television, and David hardly knew whether to follow his partner and risk losing their spot entirely to the blizzard, or to stay and lose his partner. But then, as he strained his eyes through the static dropping out of the sky, he saw that Ian had stopped and was waving at him with one bent arm. David followed, ready to hogtie Ian and drag him back.

  “What the hell are—” but then David stopped as he pulled even with Ian.

  There was a man on his back in the snow. His nose was charcoal black. White frost-craters dimpled his cheeks. Ice cased his thick dark beard. His mouth was open and, David realized after a moment, from between his cracked and blistered lips came a sound which David’s brain had been filing away as wind noi
se but now clearly separated into a scream.

  They grabbed the man under the armpits and dragged him back to their packs. As they lifted him out of the snow—his lower half had been buried by a drift—they caught sight of shreds of nylon and pack cloth. Ian swiped at the snow with one foot, but he turned up nothing more than wreckage and fragments: bent tubes that could have been tent poles, a stiff, frozen ball that could have been a jacket or a sweater, red slices of tent fabric. All worthless.

  With the man lying by their packs, they attacked the snow again. David worked by instinct. They needed shelter, and for that, they needed to dig down. When their platform had at last been flattened, they spread out the tent and pushed the man inside as ballast against the wind. They staked out the corners and linked the poles and guyed two lines on each side before giving up and piling their packs and themselves into their thin nylon shelter.

  The inside of the tent was a sopping mess. It had filled with snow when they loaded the man, and more came in on their packs and clothes. The tent was barely big enough for two—with three they couldn’t move without hitting each other and knocking snow around. Every time they bumped the man, he screamed. David had lost most of the functionality in his hands, and he began to shake as his now-stationary body cooled further. He curled up against one end of the tent and tried to shiver himself warm. “What the hell do we do with him?” he yelled.

  “Snap out of it. We’ve got to warm him up.”

  “But where did he come from?”

  “Ask him. Fuck! Stop mumbling and answer the question.” Ian kicked the man, and he screamed again. “Witch, stop blowing,” Ian said. “Hell mouth.”

  The vapor in their exhalations froze immediately to the fabric walls, then fell in showers of ice whenever the wind shook the tent. Ian used his teeth to open one of their packs, and he spread the contents out over the top of the man, who thrashed weakly from side to side and moaned. David caught their squeeze bottle of oil—which they had carefully doled into their nightly soups—between his hands and sucked down half of it because he remembered a story of an Antarctic climber who drank olive oil to keep from freezing. He passed the bottle to Ian.