Snowblind Read online

  Morning came all at once. The night faded fast. The day mind banished and tidied until all those half-made thoughts and dreams existed in a grey, twice-lost past. The sky turned blue and then pink, and then the sun opened its eye on the horizon. From their outpost on the east-facing wall, the light hit them right away, pale at first, but then brighter and stronger. David felt shaky and paper-thin. But glad. The sun brought him back. He could feel it in the loosening of his spine and shoulders and mind.

  “Nights like that are the way to live to a hundred,” Ian said. “I feel like it added five years to my life—that’s how long it took.”

  They were all still alive. The Russian opened his eyes and took a long, startled-sounding breath.

  “That sun is like a thousand-calorie breakfast,” David said. “It’s amazing. Imagine what it must feel like to be a plant in the arctic when the sun comes back after the winter.”

  The sun bathed them in light. David truly felt he could suck it down like cosmic juice. He imagined a million-mile straw with the sun, a giant orange, on one side and his lips on the other. He began to work on his hands. They were coming back, too. This gave him hope. If he had his hands, he could keep on. He had faith in his hands.

  After the first reawakening, the fact that they were no longer frozen and benighted gradually became less extraordinary. The work of the day was the same; sunrise had neither brought the ground closer nor taken any weight out of the Russian. After a long hour of making water and untangling frozen ropes and feeling weak and spent despite the sun, David cast off again, groping for one more hundred-and-fifty-foot fraction of the distance down to the glacier.

  The first new anchor of the day was a gift. A spike of rock jabbed out from the wall, and David draped a loop of webbing over it, clipped himself to it, and shouted up to Ian. It was good to have the first rappel over with so quickly. It began the day with a feeling of gathering momentum. If they could build up some pace, they could actually make progress. David extrapolated his way down the mountain, feeling optimistic, thinking about minutes instead of hours. They were going to be all right. They just needed to get the machinery of their system humming along. He imagined what Ian would be doing with the upper anchor and the Russian. First he’d take out the extra pieces they had used in the bivouac—maybe he had already done that. That would take a few minutes. He would put himself on rappel and clip the Russian short to his harness. Then he’d use a long sling running through a carabiner off the anchor to hoist the Russian up to give him the slack he needed to unclip the man from his direct umbilicus to the anchor. Give him five, okay ten, minutes for that. Then he’d lower the Russian back down until the weight settled on his harness and the long sling could be released and the rappel begun. Which meant that Ian with his dangling Russian should appear just about—now.

  Nothing happened. Some morning updrafts swam past. David repeated the steps in his mind. He knew he was keyed up by the sunrise and the first rappel. He was probably sped up in his head, too, his thoughts moving faster than reality. If he ran the steps through once more to double his sense of the passing minutes, that should give Ian the time he needed.

  Nothing happened. The sun floated up off the horizon toward midmorning. David felt his optimism deflate. He shifted back and forth in his harness. He was stuck again, watching the passing day and the glacier through a half mile of empty air. Being motionless was sucking the oxygen out of his brain. His instincts told him to run for his life—to be charging down the rappels, each moment choreographed for speed. But here he was instead, stuck, hanging, doing nothing. No progress. No action outside of his head.

  Ian appeared a hundred feet overhead with the Russian slung between his legs.

  “What happened?” David shouted up at him.

  “What do you mean?” Ian said.

  “Something get stuck?”

  “No. What’s gotten into you?”

  “We’re going too slow!” David said. “We need to get moving.”

  “Hey, man, calm down,” Ian said. “You’re not moving so fast yourself.”

  When Ian arrived at the anchor, David clipped the Russian to the sling around the horn. Ian lowered himself another foot until the man’s weight passed to the anchor sling and Ian could unclip him from his own harness. Then he cranked himself back up to the anchor and clipped himself in. These steps happened automatically, the same each time. The Russian was always attached to Ian’s harness, or the anchor, or both at once during the transition back and forth. Ian began pulling their ropes, while David resettled the Russian and adjusted his chest sling to keep the man’s head upright and off the cliff wall.

  “You two making friends?” Ian said.

  Probably Ian meant this as a concession or peace offering, like the time David had said his soul was spotless. His tone was friendly, almost apologetic. David heard this, and knew it, and yet he was so strung out by their crawling escape from the mountain that he could not summon a bluff or brotherly answer to Ian or their situation. He dropped the sling he had been fiddling with, and the Russian listed toward Yunshan. “Ain’t no friends up here,” he said. He wanted to say more. How much are you willing to give for him? That was the question he wanted the answer to. What’s he worth? But he did not feel sane enough for that discussion, and maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. As far as he could tell, they were committed. Anyway, there wasn’t time for talk. They needed to move.

  Ian finished pulling the ropes, and they fell clear. They rethreaded them off the new anchor, and David put himself immediately on rappel. Finally, he was back in motion, though he felt stiff and clumsy from having hung in his harness for so long without moving. His mind raced ahead of his body. He tried to rein himself back in.

  The new anchor would not come easy. He found brittle ice and fragile, warty rock that shattered into dust and gravel when he tested it. He scratched back and forth, knocking away snow and loose stones, looking for anything solid to hang themselves from. To his right he found a groove that took an angle piton. But when he bounced it, the rock shattered and the pin tore out, sending David spinning out over the ocean of air washing the mountain below him. Each effort—each piton he hammered and block he trundled—took minutes, and the minutes multiplied and scattered on the wind.

  His mind ticked off the time. He swung back and forth, searching farther to the left and right, crampons scratching and catching. The ropes scraped snow and stones off from above, which rattled off his helmet. Forty feet to his left, a corner cut away and out of sight. He built up speed, practically running through the pendulum arc at the bottom of the ropes. He swung hard to the left and grabbed the edge of the corner, hoping for a miracle.

  Tucked away inside the corner he found a half-inch crack filled with loose flakes. It wasn’t a miracle, but it would do. He used the pick of his axe to scour its insides, hammered in a five-eighths pin to the eye, and clipped himself to it with relief that tasted strongly of panic. He looked back around the corner to where his ropes traveled a long slanted line up to Ian. Running back and forth with the Russian would never work. Even if Ian could make the horizontal distance, how would they maneuver the Russian around the corner to the anchor? David tensioned off the piton and leaned back around the corner to the main wall. He found a shallow pocket for a small cam. It was flared and overextended and David didn’t trust it a bit, but it might work for a temporary anchor while they passed the Russian around to the good piton.

  Ian began his rappel. He lowered himself and his cargo down while David pulled them over to the anchor with the trailing ends of the ropes. The two actions couldn’t happen at once—Ian couldn’t slide down the ropes while David pulled—so they worked out a pattern. Ian would drop five feet, and then David would pull him a short ways over, then Ian would drop again at the apex of David’s pull, and then David would haul him in again before Ian began to swing back the other direction. The sequence came naturally. They didn’t need to talk it through. They both knew what was needed. When Ian c
ame level with David, he was only a few yards off from the anchor. David pulled in hard, and Ian clipped his ropes through the little cam in the pocket.

  The cam held, but it was terrifying to see how it flexed and shifted. Rock turned to dust under the cam lobes, and it skated a millimeter closer to the surface. David tied Ian off short to the anchor so that if the piece broke free, Ian wouldn’t fly back across the wall.

  Ian leaned and strained and pressed himself and the Russian around the edge into the corner. David reached over and grabbed the Russian’s harness with his right hand, helping to relieve Ian of the weight while hauling them both in. That was when the cam finally pulled. Ian lurched hard to the right, but David held the Russian and pulled them both back to the anchor. Ian reached across and clipped himself to the piton. Now they were both on the anchor, and all they needed to do was get the Russian attached as well. Ian helped David lift the man higher. One of them would need to let go in order to anchor the Russian, and Ian said he would if David could hold the man, and David agreed. So for a moment, David held the Russian, and the moment stretched on and on because Ian fumbled with the carabiners and the slings and unclipped the wrong one. So now the Russian was not attached to Ian’s harness or to the anchor. David held the man with both hands on his harness. They were practically face-to-face because of the way David was twisted around to bear his weight. David watched the Russian’s grey eyes, inches from his own, and since there was nothing there to see, he saw instead the three of them sleeping in slings, stalled out and unable to move, his stained sleeping bag draped across shivering shoulders, days and nights of this, and Yunshan’s spired crown in the sun, and his own haggard, exhausted reflection. He had no faith in this, what they were doing with this man. He opened his left hand, and then his right hand, and the Russian’s harness fell out of his fingers, and the man went tumbling through the air, bellowing into the wind.

  Ian yelled, too, first a sound of fright, as if he wasn’t sure who was falling, then a punctuated thunder-burst of rage. The Russian was still gaining speed, though he had narrowed in size. “Murderer!” Ian shouted. He sputtered broken syllables but then found traction again. “You can’t hang onto anything.”

  David was tired and past caring. The Russian was gone now, and David’s guts resettled from their first lurch when he had felt as if he were falling too. “Wake up. We were going to die. He’s been trying to kill us since the moment he came out of the storm.”

  “No. We were going to make it. You were going to do something great. Now you’re all alone. You don’t believe in anything.”

  David thought this was insane. “What was there to believe in?” he said. “He never gave us a sign. He never lifted a finger to show us he was there.”

  David pulled the ropes from around the corner and threaded them through the new anchor. As soon as they were through, he was back on rappel. He had done what he needed to do to save them. He wasn’t heartless. The falling man wrenched at him. That was enough, wasn’t it? The remorse he felt seemed appropriate to what he thought he should feel. Couldn’t he also admit to feeling unburdened? He could feel the sense of momentum again, or at least the potential for it. Now they could move. In his head, the Russian kept falling and falling. David did not dig into this vision, or attempt to stop it, so it continued to run. He didn’t want to touch it, and he didn’t have time. He had work to do. He wanted the ground.

  The difference in speed was miraculous, as if they had been paralyzed and suddenly healed. At the next anchor, David shouted “off rappel,” and he could feel Ian come shooting down the ropes just a few seconds later. Rappel followed rappel just like this. They reached the hollows under Yunshan’s cheekbones, and the rock improved, and the anchors came faster and terrified them less.

  Ian had cooled off, but David found his new voice more uncomfortable than his anger. He was quizzical and curious and completely calm. David imagined him poking at the broken-up bodies in Yosemite. It was not a pleasant thought now that he was on the receiving end of that scrutiny.

  “I’ve never known a murderer before,” Ian said at one anchor as he clipped himself in. “What does it feel like?”

  “Cut it out,” David said. “That wasn’t murder.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “He was already dead. He shouldn’t have been with us in the first place.” This was asinine. David knew it. He should just stick his lips together and let Ian talk to himself. But there was also something calming about hearing words outside his own head. Watching the Russian fall had wigged him out, no doubt about it. His feeling of lightness also made him feel unanchored, as if he could drift off their latest piece and fall himself. He felt suddenly insubstantial. He found he was double- and triple-checking his connection to the anchor.

  “You wanted him dead?” Ian asked.

  “I wanted him gone. Look—admit to me that he was going to kill us. Him being here meant we were going to die.” Now, moving fast down the mountain, would David admit to himself that he wasn’t completely sure this was true? Yes. Could he have lasted another night? Probably. A third night hanging? He was less sure about that. But why? What for? How many toes did he need to lose for the sake of Ian’s fetish?

  “You wanted to deny him?” Ian said. “You don’t even believe he was alive, do you?”

  David was losing Ian’s track. “What the hell does that mean?” he said. “Keep pulling those ropes!” He had to keep them pressing forward.

  “Buddy, just because you want something to not exist doesn’t mean you get your way.”

  It went on like that. Ian was shamelessly persistent. The day sped by faster than them, but the ground kept coming closer. Night arrived, and they didn’t stop. Neither of them even suggested it. They turned on their headlamps and carried on. The cold sank into them again, but David didn’t feel it as much—maybe because they kept moving, maybe because he had run out of energy to shiver. He wrapped his sleeping bag around himself like a poncho and tied it there with an extra sling. They were alternating leads on the rappels now, leapfrogging each other down the mountain. The world disappeared once more, leaving only looming shadows outside the light-cones of their headlamps. David switched his light off at the anchor when he was waiting in order to conserve the batteries. Then the world disappeared altogether. The fragile spark in his own mind seemed to flutter and wink in all that blackness. He wondered where the moon had gone. Was it new already? He drifted off, only to jerk awake, blind in the dark, clutching for something to grab hold of until he found the mountain and his harness and remembered where he was. Ian had yelled him awake. The new anchor was set, and it was his turn to rappel. David switched his headlamp back on, and the world of his light-cone reappeared. From then on, they had to yell each other awake after every rappel.

  When morning relit the mountain, they discovered they were only a few hundred feet above the glacier. David began their second-to-last rappel and reached the top of a broad ice sheet, a hard skin over the root-bulge of the mountain. He anchored them with a screw. A few feet to his right, a chunk had been broken out of the ice, and David saw streaks of red and black. His eyes wandered back there whenever he forgot to look elsewhere. Ian arrived, and when he saw the stain, he said, “I guess we did a good job of following the fall line, huh?”

  Ian disappeared down the last rappel. When the ropes went slack, David followed him down to a short ramp of sixty-degree ice where the rope ends dangled. Ian was nowhere to be seen. David pulled the ropes, and they went skittering down to the glacier proper. He down-climbed the last few yards of ice, front-pointing carefully with wooden feet. He couldn’t remember when he had felt his toes last. Yesterday? The day before? When he reached level ground, he felt unsteady. The earth had tilted ninety degrees, and he had no equilibrium for flatness. Behind him, the mountain wrenched up out of the snow, sheer and broad. The glacier magnified the sun and filled his eyes with white noise. The air seemed painfully saturated with light. Black crevasses cracked the top laye
r, playing tricks on him, making it difficult to tell between the sunspots crawling across his retinas and real gaps in the snow.

  Ian appeared from around an old avalanche cone, his red suit fuzzing up out of the brightness and then sprouting arms and legs. He had something dark and battered in his hands. “This is all I found,” Ian said. “It’s all there is.”

  What was he carrying? Bloody fuck. The Russian’s head. The man’s nose and one eye socket had been crushed. Bone poked through the ragged collar of his neck.

  “You’re sick,” David said. He felt like vomiting, but his stomach was a dried-up void.

  “Don’t you understand?” Ian said. “There’s nothing else here. I’ve looked.”

  “The rest went down a crevasse,” David said. He refused to acknowledge Ian’s implication. He wanted no part of that. He had no intention of following Ian any further.

  Ian pushed the head toward David. It was black, lopsided, bristly. Dried blood scabbed its ragged parts and crusted Ian’s hands. “Don’t turn away from this,” Ian said. “Here’s your chance to see below the surface. He’s come back.”

  David was revolted. “Stop it. Throw it down a crevasse with the rest of the body. Give it some peace.”

  “He’s yours,” Ian said. He put the head down in the snow, faceup toward David and the mountain behind him. “Do what you like with him.”

  It looked foul in the snow. All David could think of was to get the head down a crevasse, out of sight, so the mountain could be clean and bare again. He took one step forward and punted the head toward the nearest crack. But the front points of his crampon stuck in the Russian’s face, and the head stayed stuck to his boot—as if it were eating the front part of his foot—no matter how hard he kicked and swore. And Ian laughed and laughed at him, a sound like ice moving over rock.