Snowblind Read online

  “Is he talking?” Ian asked.

  “He looks Russian,” David said.

  “Speak up! What are you saying?”

  “It sounds like Russian.”

  “You don’t know any Russian.”

  They spread a sleeping bag—David’s—out over the man and pulled off his harness and the frozen layers of his clothing until they had him down to long johns and gloves. David felt better, whether from the oil or because his body temperature had stabilized, he couldn’t tell. He was sleepy and strongly tempted to lean back and catch a nap, but at least he knew that this was a bad sign, something to fight. He could squeeze between his thumb and forefinger now, which was useful when it came time to zip the sleeping bag up around the Russian. It was harder yet to get the stove lit, but he managed, and the blue flame had a hypnotic quality that seemed to pacify them all.

  “We’ll be dead from carbon monoxide,” Ian said, “but at least we’ll be warm and it won’t hurt as much as freezing to death.”

  “I hear it actually feels pretty good by the time you’re ready to die from the cold.”

  “He doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it.”

  The Russian moaned with every exhale. The ice had partly melted out of his beard, leaving him wet and matted. His eyelids were pinched into a shape that spoke of pain. When his eyes did occasionally flutter open, they were vacant. The pebble-sized blisters on his lips were filled with milky liquid. He would surely lose most of his nose. He took up one half of the tent. David sat at the back and minded the stove, while Ian sat at the other end, facing his partner. They had Ian’s sleeping bag draped across them as a blanket. Out of the wind, with the three of them in the tent pressed against each other, David felt the python squeeze of the cold unclench.

  “Ian, what’s he doing here?”

  “What do you think he’s doing here?”

  “He shouldn’t be here,” David said. “He doesn’t belong here.” David knew he wasn’t really right in the head. The storm, his hypothermia, the stove gasses filling the tent—he knew his thoughts were insensible, nightmarish. They scuttled around the dark corners of his brain. He was not making clear sense out of the sudden appearance of this misshapen, pain-blistered face. It sickened him. He wanted to wish it away.

  Ian shrugged. “Did you think you were the only one to ever hear of Yunshan? Hell, this is practically his backyard.”

  Ian fed the first pot of lukewarm water to the Russian. He dribbled it into his mouth with a spoon until half the pot was gone. Then he mixed one of their four remaining oatmeal packets into the pot and fed that to him as well. David said nothing, though he could not tear his eyes away from that oatmeal. One packet. That’s all right. We can afford it. We’re not Ethiopian. Not yet.

  “But what’s he doing here,” David said. “Alone. You know what we’ve climbed through to get here.”

  “We haven’t been able to see a damn thing all day. Maybe we traversed half the mountainside. Who knows where we are.”

  “Bullshit. We must be in the third eye. How did he get here?” David’s voice sounded accusatory, even to his own ears, though he did not mean it to be. Maybe he did.

  “Well, maybe he’s got seven friends frozen out there in the snow,” Ian said.

  The next pot of water was hot, and Ian filled a bottle and placed it under the top of the sleeping bag and against the man’s chest. Even though its grip had loosened, the cold still had David. A cupful of that hot water would be better than a Jacuzzi. He watched it disappear under the sleeping bag cover. The warmth liberated terrible odors: stale piss, flesh-rot. Occasionally, a spasm made the Russian’s whole body clench. David could only imagine what could be happening in the man’s extremities as his brain and nerves became reconnected. They hadn’t seen his hands or feet—they’d left his gloves and boots on for fear of doing more damage than good.

  Ian and David split the next pot of water to drink, and the plain warm water went down without touching David’s thirst. On the outside, David felt damp and ice-crusted, but on the inside, he realized, he was stone dry. The next pot was for soup, and it seemed to take an age for the snow to melt, and fisheye, and boil. When the soup was finally ready, it tasted thin, bloodless, without the oil. David could tell he was fighting a losing battle against lethargy. He could feel himself sliding down.

  A sharp, new odor reached David’s flagging brain and brought him back to the surface. Ian nodded against the front corner of the tent.

  “What’s that smell?” David asked.

  “What?”

  “That smell, where’s it coming from?” David reached out and unzipped his sleeping bag from around the Russian. The odor nearly made him gag. He pushed the Russian over on one side, ignoring the man’s cries and Ian’s commands to be gentle. Brown fluid seeped through the back of the man’s long johns, the product of the relaxing of his rewarmed bowels.

  “Goddamnit!” David yelled. The oatmeal, the nearly bursting tent, the longed-for rest now gone, his frozen fingers, the wasted stove gas, the snow still swirling inside their tent, and now this, his own sleeping bag beshitted. “Why are we keeping him? How are we going to go up if my sleeping bag is full of Russian shit!”

  Ian stared, wide-eyed. “We’re finished,” he said. “Don’t you know that? We’re done. Tomorrow we’re taking him down.”

  “He’s already dead,” David said. “Look at him. You think he’s going to live through forty rappels? Out there? He’s not even going to live through the night. We’ll be lucky if we do.”

  “You want to just throw him out?”

  “I want to keep going. We can leave him here in the tent. If he lives until we get back, we can talk about taking him down. Look at him. There’s no reason to go down.”

  “If you want to keep going,” Ian said, “you’ll go on alone. Zip up his bag and get some sleep.”

  The night passed slowly. With the stove off and the three of them motionless, the tent grew cold and frozen. It was less comfortable, even, than their ledges of the previous nights, because David had nothing to lean against. Every time he shifted position, ice fell from the patchwork of rime layering the walls and ceiling of the tent. He listened to the Russian’s labored breathing and realized, with no small amount of self-revulsion, that he hoped that those gasps would stop. One after another, he found himself rooting against the next wheeze and disappointed when it came. It was horrible, and fascinating, but he could not stop it, could not help wishing that the man would desist here and now and relieve them of the burden (and that he could be there, and aware, as it happened). He thought, too, of Ian’s suggestion that he go on alone. The longer the night stretched out before and behind him, the more seriously he entertained the notion. Why not? he thought. It can’t be any worse than what we’ve put behind us. Without a rope, without stopping for belays, I would travel so fast. I would float. He could go up until he’d run out of mountain. But somewhere in his mind, he recognized the implausibility of this course. He was not that strong. He had too little left. He wouldn’t tackle Yunshan’s crown alone.

  When morning rolled around again, the Russian was still alive.

  “Are you going up or coming down?” Ian asked.

  “I’ll follow you,” David said. The disappointment was nauseating.

  Outside, the storm had passed, leaving only a ceiling of scattered clouds in its wake. Ice-streaked cliffs towered over the men and their tent. The rock kicked up out of the snow only fifty yards back, though David had not even sensed the presence of all that stone from within the storm. Above the cliffs, David could see sunlight on Yunshan’s last spires. We’d be on top in the sunshine. And for a moment he considered heading in that direction, not saying anything, just going. But he had already made words from his decision, and his spirit was pointed downhill. They cleaned out the tent as best they could, and Ian dressed the Russian in whatever could be salvaged from the man’s clothes plus an extra layer from his own pack. David’s sleeping bag was foul, but he packed i
t anyway and tried not to think about it. Disgusting or not, they would need it.

  The Russian was barely mobile and had to be hoisted and dragged by Ian, while David broke trail through the new snow left behind by the storm. David felt dazed and numb. His body did not understand their direction. For days (but really, for months), he had been clawing at this mountain. But now they were going down with mountain still above them, and he didn’t know why. His body had more to give. The mountain hadn’t exceeded him, not yet. Each step seemed to tear out a length of his innards, which remained behind, stuck to the ice-plastered stone. Above them, the final cliffs arched up out of the third eye. Below, the mountain curved and then dropped away.

  Ian could barely move the Russian, and David had to give in and help after a while. After all, this was where David excelled, at lifting and hoisting dead weight. He clipped two lengths of webbing to the man’s harness and put one over each of his shoulders, like backpack straps. Then he had Ian loop another piece under the man’s armpits and around David’s chest. With the Russian tied to him, David ended up bent halfway over, a hunchback with a body-sized tumor or a shadow made of flesh. But he could lurch along in Ian’s tracks. Between thoughts—because he couldn’t spare any air between breaths—David taunted himself. He could not think what else to do. Your lists were off. You forgot to include one hundred and thirty pounds of dead Russian. You came to China to be an undertaker—no, a meat wagon. But the Russian wasn’t dead. That was the thing. Pressed against him, David could feel the bump-bump of the man’s heart and the bellows-action of his lungs.

  Before long (though David wasn’t sure how much farther he could have lasted anyway), they ran out of walkable ground. Up ahead, the curve falling out of Yunshan’s third eye steepened. A few steps more, and the ground slid away. David let himself fall backward into the snow and felt the Russian flinch and suck in air after they landed. Ian untied the strap around his chest, and David got back to his feet. Spasms ran up and down his legs and back, and he stumbled because he suddenly felt light and unanchored. Ian dribbled some water into the man’s mouth and then squeezed in some GU, followed by more water. “I think his eyes are starting to focus better,” Ian said.

  They cut a bollard for their first anchor. They cleared the loose surface snow and then began to carve a turtleback shape in the hard snow below. The day was bright, and the sun was on them and the summit, too. “Ian,” David said, still chopping the snow-ice with his axe. “You’ve got to help me. This hurts too much. Why are we doing this? What the hell am I supposed to be learning from this?”

  “When we’ve got him down on the ground and he’s walking around and laughing like a newborn, then it will make sense. You’ll feel the higher purpose then. I guarantee it.”

  “How’s he going to walk? His legs are frozen. They don’t work.” David reached over and lifted one of the Russian’s boots, then let go. The leg boned into the boot flopped back into the snow. A sound came out of the Russian, something between a grunt and a yowl. “If we wanted to do good and save strays, we could have stayed in Oakland and wandered the docks at night.”

  Ian winced. “Buddy, you’re hard. You know that? The bums on the docks aren’t our people. They’re not our business.” Ian sat back and pointed his axe at the Russian, who remained flat where he had landed, face toward the sky. “He’s one of us.”

  They finished the bollard, notched its uphill side, and threaded their ropes behind it. Ian would go first and find the next anchor, then David would follow with the Russian in tow. They did not have to discuss this; they knew their jobs. Ian backed down toward the edge and paused there.

  “What do you think he’s thinking?” Ian asked.

  “Get going,” David said. “If we’re going to do this, we need to go. He thinks he’s dead, and there are two ghosts hauling him to hell. Yeah. He’s probably not far off. Maybe we’re dead, too, and the three of us are being packed off together.”

  Ian disappeared, leaving David and the Russian alone together. The Russian’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, heaving air in and out. “Why are you doing that?” David said. “Don’t you know you’re already in hell?”

  Ian’s voice drifted up from down below. David threaded the ropes through his belay tube and clipped the Russian to a short loop attached to his harness. At first the Russian slid along in the snow like a sled, but as the ground cut away, more of his weight hung down off David’s harness. David straddled the man to keep the weight centered and clipped a sling back under the Russian’s armpits to keep his head clear of the wall. David could feel the strain of twice his usual weight in his brake hand.

  When he arrived at the next anchor, he found Ian clipped to a single piton hammered sideways behind a cinder-block-sized rock. David made no comment. They had nine ice screws, fourteen cams, and eight—now seven—pitons. Each rappel would eat a fraction of the rack; they could not afford redundancy. They had played this game before. David found it best not to think about it, to simply trust Ian’s gear implicitly. Of course, in the past, they had been two and had used stances to reduce the weight on each piece. Now they would have at least two bodies on every piece, every time. Ian clipped the Russian’s harness sling to the piton, and David lowered himself until the pin took the Russian’s weight. David watched the eye of the piton flex microscopically under its load, but the body of the pin held its crack without complaint. They pulled their ropes, which tumbled down in a cloud of snow, and rethreaded them on the one piton keeping them all attached to the mountain.

  Now that they were back in the vertical, David took the downward lead, and Ian took charge of the Russian, a relief for David. It was easier to block out the present without the Russian gasping in his ear. David set off on rappel, sliding down their dangling cords, searching out the next link in their chain down the mountain.

  The rappels were brutally slow. Maneuvering and resettling the Russian took hours of benumbed persistence. The sun passed over the summit and left them in shadow, though the cloud wisps scattered and the sky remained blue. David froze. The cold invaded his flesh and stroked his bones. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do to stay warm, so he hung from his harness and shivered and waited for Ian to arrive with the Russian slung below him. The anchors were horror shows. David had to clear away yards of snow and scrappy ice to search for solid placements. Even so, the anchor piece was usually jigged into disintegrating rock spider-lined with cracks and fractures. David tried not to look. Staring wouldn’t hold the rock together. The mountain dropped away under their boots, long cliffs and curtains of ice tumbling down and down. David tried not to look there either. He could get lost in all that distance.

  The Russian never fought but never helped. He hung limply from each anchor, a sack of flesh connected to a diaphragm that worked on and on like a metronome. His breathing remained a steady pained gasp. His inner workings—what was going on inside of him, if anything—remained a mystery. He babbled sometimes, though maybe it was only air bubbling up through his throat. For the first time, David began to think the man might live through the day. “You might be the luckiest stiff to ever end up in a snow bank,” he told the Russian at one belay while Ian pulled their ropes. “How are you going to explain to your friends back home that two Americans dropped out of the sky to pull you off a mountain in south China?” Ian chortled, and the ropes whipped through the air. David readjusted the sling around the Russian’s shoulders to keep his head from slumping into the snow. One of his lip blisters cracked, and clear fluid leaked out. David tried to blot it with the man’s jacket collar but thought he might be doing more harm than good. “What is keeping you going?” David asked him. “I’d like to see your genes. The mountain can’t stamp you out, the blizzard can’t blow you away, the cold can’t shut you down—though it’s sure trying, isn’t it?” But if he lived, then they would certainly not reach the ground today or tomorrow or even the day after that. By early afternoon, they had only completed five rappels.

  Twilight dimm
ed into dusk, and there were no sitting-ledges in sight. David had spent the afternoon expecting this. He tried not to struggle against it or the darkness that was coming for them. They arranged slings to stand in and hung the stove to start melting snow for water. They draped the tent fly over themselves in the hopes of trapping some body heat and cutting the wind. They raced to secure some kind of foothold against the night, but already their hands and minds had lost their grip, so it was a slow, fumbling, maddening race. Under the fly, their headlamps seemed to cast more shadows than light. David mostly saw the black, crisscrossed lines hanging behind their rats’ nest of slings and ropes and sleeping bags instead of the objects themselves. The Russian’s blackened and blistered face floated at the center of the mess, where they had trussed him to the anchor. He seemed to sleep. His eyes were closed and his breathing even.

  David withdrew. He gave up his feet and his hands. Dimly, he hoped he might have them back someday. He was too exhausted to force his blood out to those distant places. Sometimes he stood in the slings; sometimes he hung from his harness. Those were the poles of his existence. Moving caused the tent fly to crackle and slough ice on them all. The Russian gasped, and Ian shuffled through his own cycle of hanging and standing. Even though they were pressed together in a knot of flesh, David felt miles away from the other two men. He barely held onto his own consciousness. Imagining the consciousnesses of the other two flesh lumps to his left was not a feat his brain could perform in its state. He could feel all the leaks of night air through the sleeping bag wrapped around him—though he could do nothing about them.

  The night tunneled on.

  At times David caught a few minutes of feverish sleep slumped over in his harness, but then he would wake, trembling, suffocating either from the harness cutting through his middle or the tent fly on his face or the cold. His half-asleep and half-awake thoughts ran together in a maze of grotesque and insensible impressions. One small branch of his mind tried to calm him and gather him apart from what was happening to his body, but this faint voice was plowed under by a waterfall of brain noise.