Snowblind Read online

  “Absolutely,” James said. “Nearly dead twice, no progress made. Can’t be done.”

  Sam watched the two of them uncoil in their chairs, the sap rising through their veins. They seemed to be reinflating, as if the walls and candles had summoned their souls back into their bodies. He marked the signs. Failed or not, they’d crossed the line, hadn’t they? Seen the dragon and returned. What would that do to a person? He watched their eyes relight. The blank inwardness they’d walked in with burned off like a fog.

  “Did you two wait up for us?” James said. “Tell you what, that’s better than my last girl.”

  Tyson ignored him and plopped his magic bag on the table.

  “Now tell me, lad,” Nigel said, “and don’t be false. Is that her Royal Highness?”

  “None other.”

  “Well,” Nigel sighed. “I always was a believer in the monarchy.” He reached for the bag, but too slow, and a pair of crooked hands from the opposite direction snatched it out from under his hooks. Nigel roared and leapt full length across the table, sending candles cartwheeling and flickering, his hands reaching for his partner’s throat.

  “Fuck, Nigel, are you crazy?” James hollered before his chair tipped back and Nigel landed on top of him on the floor. They rolled twice over with the bag lost somewhere between them, until Nigel leapt back to his feet with a tightly rolled joint clenched miraculously, like a magician’s denouement, in his teeth. James remained on his back, making a honking noise through his misshapen nose that Sam identified as laughter.

  Tyson handed Nigel a candle, and he lit up and took a puff. “Cheers, lads,” he said. James, still lying flat and honking, built his own joint on his chest, and Nigel leaned over and lit his partner’s smoke. “Quickly now, watch the wax, there you go.” James propped his head up with one fist and took in three slow drags. Then he jumped to his feet and strutted over to the packs they had dropped by the door. He grabbed his two ice tools and one of Nigel’s, and spun them in the air, spike over adze, his hands in constant motion, the end of his joint glowing orange with each inward breath.

  “Better’n a juke-box, ain’t he?” Nigel said. “Put in a penny, and he’ll give you an hour’s entertainment.” The ice axes spun and flashed in the candlelight, and James spun underneath them, catching one behind his back, under his shoulder, between his legs. Nigel hummed a marching tune and clapped his hands in time to the beat of the twirling axes, while Tyson flapped his arms and shuffled out some sort of bent-legged dance, hopping up and down.

  “Here,” Tyson said, “throw one to me.”

  An axe flew toward his head, and he plucked it out of the air. In that curious way he had of transfiguring himself from loose-limbed awkwardness to graceful control, a moment Sam had witnessed every time they went climbing, Tyson took two measured steps toward the west end of the hut, then turned and threw the axe back across the room, over the empty chairs, and pick-first into the opposite wall, where it stuck with a knife-thrower’s precision at eyelevel in a pine timber.

  Maybe if he’d spoken up right away, Sam could have altered the course of the night, because he saw in that first moment of speechlessness not so much the destination as the shape of what was to come. But by the time he was ready to say What the fuck, Tyson? or to punch his partner in the arm, Nigel had already bellowed, “That was brilliant!” and grabbed the other two axes from James to try his hand. Looking back later, Sam wondered if that moment’s pause had come because he himself had enjoyed too well the puncture of the axe through the hut wall, had found the flying splinters of old, gold wood too satisfying.

  They were all terrible, except for Tyson, who could stick the same spot every time. But Nigel didn’t seem to care. He hurled the axes against the wall over and over again, ignoring Tyson’s suggestions as to how to make them stick. Eventually, he took a seat under the scarred wall and lit another joint. But he jumped back to his feet before the doobie was half gone and said, “James! Isn’t it cold in here?”

  “It’s a bit arctic.”

  “Well, shake a leg, then, and fetch me my north-wall hammer.”

  The hammer was in a rucksack, and James took it out and handed it to Nigel, who stepped over to the wall that divided the hut in two and brought the hammer crashing down. For a moment, Sam thought the timbers might have the laugh and the hammer would bounce back into Nigel’s face. Instead, the metal head burst through the panels, and Nigel bellowed, and white lines of spit stuck in his beard. Sam’s blood was up, but the smoke was in his head, and rather than tackle Nigel and pin him to the floor, he manned the stove and stacked the shards inside it and used a candle to set the old wood ablaze, while James smashed chairs into kindling and Nigel and Tyson carved up the walls.

  II

  THE SUMMER SUN drifted south toward the horizon, and the air grew cold teeth that bit down into the mornings and evenings. Sam and Tyson made big plans for big climbs but always ended up on friendly routes instead. Tyson didn’t seem to notice. After finishing a climb early, he would go to town and drink wine dregs from abandoned glasses with the waiters behind the café, or go to the patisserie where the baker’s pretty daughter gave him day-olds, and a smile, for free. When the ice froze blue and hard in the couloirs, Tyson headed home to California.

  Sam stayed. He’d come into the mountains of his dreams, and he felt he hadn’t reached them yet. Like in a dream, they were always on the horizon. Even from a summit, he never felt he had found the climb he was looking for, the line that needed so much from him that it changed his words, his way of speaking about what had happened between the bottom and top of the mountain. Alone, the woods and wind were louder, and at first he chattered to himself to dampen the noise, but gradually he learned to still his tongue and let the sounds bury him. Sam’s visa expired and still he stayed, and the winter covered the mountains in snow.

  Sam felt his body turning to rails and stones, his skin stretching tight, a months-long metamorphosis fueled by cold air, work, scant food. He lived behind some trees in the prelude valley to the mountains, steep hills rising up on all sides, the sharp quills of the real mountains spiking the air above. He had a pull-up bar hung from a branch and a sheet of plastic lifted from a construction site that covered his little camp. For the first week, he worried he’d be rousted in the dark by flashlights and dogs, but the gendarme never came, and the expressions of the people he passed on the dirt trails and narrow cobbled lanes remained impenetrable.

  Each night as he put himself to sleep, he imagined the Aiguille de la Flèche and pulled cold air down into his lungs. But he never went up to look at the mountain because of the hut. He imagined the angry ghosts of old alpinists, there to visit the peaceful staging house of their glory climbs. He didn’t feel ready to face them in person. The struggle against the climb was hard enough without confronting the shambles of his part in the mountain’s history.

  Town was a mile away from his camp, and some evenings he’d go there because nights were long in the middle of winter. He saw Zapelli once in La Pierre d’Or—he was smaller and slighter even than Sam had imagined—sitting on his own at a round table, hunched over a glass. His skin and hair were beginning to grey, but his forearms still looked powerful, and the veins stood out in the backs of his hands. Sam imagined walking up to the table and having a seat and asking a few questions, about the mountains, about the route, but he didn’t. If he had been forced to explain, he might have said that he believed that when Zapelli opened his mouth, the words would come out in a foreign tongue, not Italian or French, but something else entirely.

  Sam acquired a partner, a Frenchman who spoke a little English. Every few days, the man would show up at Sam’s spot and say, “Tomorrow we climb Le Pilier” or “L’aiguille du Midi” or “Les Trois Dents,” and Sam would say oui, and sometime in the night, they’d ski up out of the valley and by dawn would be climbing through strange shapes of wind-sculpted snow and ice glued to vertical walls of cold dark stone. Some of these climbs scared Sam badly: a
pitch of unconsolidated rime on rock with a ledge below that would break him to pieces, an ice hose like a wineglass stem that vibrated when he swung his axes into it. Afterward, alone in the dark, he would swear off the mountains, or compromise and promise himself a good, black binge, though he had no money, so he knew this to be an empty offer. The day after would be hard because he’d feel shaky and thin, the wind off the mountains blowing right through him, but then the next day, he would force himself back up into the peaks to do something just as hard, usually alone. When his partner got scared the man unleashed monotonic rivers of profanity, mixing French and English, sometimes in the same word, hardly raising his voice beyond a low chant.

  The sun returned and the snow melted and the lupine and edelweiss ruled the high valley meadows. Soon the nights were fleeting and the days long and the Aiguille de la Flèche grew tall on the horizon. Sam slept little. Each time he shut his eyes, he found himself lying on his back in the shadows, staring straight up at the mountain, which leaned back over him. His brain fought in vain to come up with some sense of scale, to piece together the route to the top. On one climb, Sam tried to crack a joke, something about falling off and tidying the gene pool, but his partner just stared back, and Sam thought maybe he’d reached the limit of the man’s English. His fears—partly of dying, which he did not want, but also of not knowing enough, of not understanding what the mountains were telling him—lengthened his sleepless nights, and he raced around the mountains during the day through a somnambulant daze trying to outrun his scattered thoughts.

  And then the rope hung down out of the darkness, and Sam pulled hard toward the hut. He was not looking forward to opening the door, but he did anyway and walked into the scarred and gutted interior. The precedent they’d set that night a year ago had not gone unnoticed. The stove looked sleek, fat, well fed, but the hut looked near collapse. The chairs were long gone, the dividing wall reduced to stub-ends of splintered boards, the mattresses stacked in one corner to give access to the bunk frames. Wind gusts blew through chinks in the walls. Sam’s partner clucked his tongue and swore under his breath, but said nothing more. Sam had not spoken about that night, but he assumed the story had spread on the other side of the language barrier.

  The ghosts of mountaineers past refused to materialize, leaving Sam alone with the wreckage and his partner. They sat against one wall with their backs to the wind and lit the paraffin stove to cook powdered soup for dinner. Sam consumed his share mechanically and was sorry when it was gone. The mountain was massive in his mind, a Chinese scroll a mile long. He went to the window but did not want to see what waited outside. He crossed the hut, over the ragged fringe of wall to the corner where the mattresses were stacked, but the smashup was total, there was nowhere to hide. He knew he was losing the head game. His mind produced two superimposed images of Zapelli: one of the quiet little man sitting alone at his table, the other a fun-house caricature with a skull-splitting grin, banging his fist against the bar for another drink. Here was the wrathful ghost he had expected after all.

  Sam watched his partner as the man put away the stove and fuel bottle, then methodically packed his rucksack and leaned it against the wall by the door. Then he walked back across the hut, prodded Sam with his toe, and pointed at Sam’s own pack, which sat empty on the floor. Sam got to his feet and organized his things for the morning, which would really still be the night. And he felt better, at least for a moment. But then he lay down in his sleeping bag on the floor of the hut, and the mountain reappeared, two miles tall now, while the corners of his mind felt black without offering sleep and his body felt heavy without being tired.

  Sam had no memories of unconsciousness, but he couldn’t remember the whole night either, so his mind must have left his body at some point before the alarm from his watch brought him to his feet. They turned on their headlamps, took up their packs, and were out on the glacier before reality and sleep came to full disconnection. The moon was on the other side of the earth, and the mountains were flat shapes etched against the stars.

  The stone was still there. Soon enough, Sam could reach out and touch it. There at the base, half the sky was dark star-shadow as the mountain spread out above and before them. Their headlamps cast yellow cones up at the route, but the mountain swallowed the light without telling any secrets.

  The first pitches followed a strip of ice the width of a plate glass window for five hundred feet up to where the mountain bulged out past vertical. They climbed into the darkness, needing to put the delicate glass below them before the sun lit the air and the ice began to melt. At the top of the ice, they hung in their harnesses from a hammered piton and holstered their axes. Sunrise filled in the mountain above and the land below. Sam had the next lead, but he stared up at the mountain, trying to make some sense of where the route would go through the overhangs and dangling icicles. He felt his partner’s hand push down on his helmet, until Sam’s eyes pointed straight ahead at the handholds five feet in front of him. Sam followed these features with his eyes, up a hundred feet, then another hundred and beyond, trying to piece it all together. His partner rapped Sam on the helmet with his knuckles.

  This time, Sam kept his eyes forward and fastened his hands to the hold and pulled, and his body responded, surprising Sam so much he nearly let go. A hundred and fifty feet later, he stopped and brought his partner up to the belay. His partner climbed the next pitch, a wide, toothy crack that chewed the skin off their hands and forearms.

  Sam’s lead again. No cracks split the face, which meant no pins or cams for protection. The rope hung free below him, and a fall would already be a whistling dive into empty space. He held onto a crystal with his right hand, and he could see the next hold, but nothing above that. He called down, “It’s blank up here,” and his words were loud because the air was calm and they so rarely spoke to each other during a climb. His partner said nothing, but paid out more rope from the belay, as if to say, you may as well go up now, you’ll fall the same distance either way. So Sam crimped the hold above the crystal, committed his weight to it, left the crystal behind. He reached up, and another hold appeared, a shallow, creased water track that took the ends of two fingers. The entire pitch unfolded like that, each new hold emerging from the stone only after Sam moved toward it, each move supported only by the conviction that he would make do with whatever the rock provided. When at last he found a crack for a piton, he stopped and hung and brought his partner up to join him. Sam looked down and saw how far the rope hung out from the wall, with no pitons for protection, and he knew that a fall would have ripped out the lower anchor and that his partner had made a leap of faith as well.

  After that pitch, the rope came alive between them. An electrical current seemed to hum along the nylon thread. They urged each other on through deep black chimneys locked in ice, up overhanging fingercracks, out through hanging forests of blue icicles that creaked and groaned. Reversing what they had climbed looked impossible—the ropes hung too far out into free air. They were utterly committed to the line. And though the summit never seemed any closer while the ground was wrenchingly far below, Sam didn’t struggle against their position.

  It was a surprise to reach the top. Sam hadn’t even noticed its nearness, so focused had he become on the holds directly in front of his face and the flow of small moves linking one to the next. His surprise at running out of mountain to climb did not prevent a swelling joy, pure and sweet, from rushing through him and carrying his eyes over all the mountaintops in the uninhibited space on all sides. His partner smiled, a wide crack in the man’s thin-boned, sun-browned face, something Sam realized he had never seen before. They shook hands, wrapped their arms around each other, then raced the setting sun down the far side of the mountain.

  Back on the Gesner, the twilight winds were a noisy river above the ice, but Sam couldn’t stop at the hut. It was too shameful, he did not want to think about what had happened there, so they put on speed and ran down the Gesner, working within the narrow b
eams of their headlamps. By the time they reached the valley below the mountains, it was deep into the night, but Sam didn’t want to retire to his plastic hovel either. So they went down into town, which was dark and filled with sleep except for La Pierre d’Or. The bar was mostly empty, but even the few people there threw Sam’s mind into confusion. He had not realized how far he’d retreated into his interior, that his body had been working mechanically through the night unguided. He stopped in the doorway and stared out through dazed eyes at the human shapes inside: arms, eyes, hands, mouths. His mind struggled to reconnect with the surface. He realized everyone was staring at him and his partner, waiting for the inevitable question to be asked and answered. It came from across the room. “Did you succeed? Is it done?”

  Images, like startled birds from the alpine meadows, flew into Sam’s mind. The route put down on paper and in magazines, passed from hand to hand. People there on weekdays and on weekends holding those pieces of paper up between their eyes and the mountain, chopping it to size, bleeding it dry. Zapelli coming to La Pierre d’Or to be slapped on the back and told tales about his route. The mountain of history behind the mountain of stone dynamited with a word.

  “It’s impossible,” Sam said, and it sounded clear enough in his head, but distant and flat to his ears. “It can’t be done.”

  His partner clapped him on the shoulder and took him to the bar and bought him a drink; the barman poured, saying, “Yes, yes, the mountains are better from here.”

  DOWN FROM THE COLD

  IT HAPPENED IN the same place each time. Up near the top where the snow got a little steep and the air a little thin, where the mountain curved round them and squeezed out the lower world. That’s where clients got scared. Where they started huffing and chuffing like mired horses and leaning into the ice, which was the worst thing they could do. Lisa felt for them, but it was no joke to catch a 250-pound galoot whose crampons had sheered out because he wanted to give the ice a hug, like the ice would hug him back. Catch him with no running belays, because they were guides and guides were freakin’ omnipotent mountain demigods who hadn’t needed running belays since the eighteen-whatevers in the Alps. Of course, those guides got pulled off and killed just the same as the current batch of pros, and if you did get pulled off, you might as well just let go and tumble yourself down into the bergschrund, because any guide who got yanked by a client must die of shame—it was written in the bylaws. Ice axe seppuku, right there in the snow.