Snowblind Page 8

  Bill and I took a day to move up to Camp 2 with a little extra food and gas. An Italian with a shredded nose—a falling brick of ice and the wrong moment to look up, as best I could understand—was being photographed grinning and bloody by his partners, and we passed them. We were caterpillars on the fixed lines, bobbing up and down on our ascenders. And everywhere below us was white and black with a little ice-blue. But up close it was the nylon web we’d made, with us caterpillaring up our strand of it, chunks of rock and ice banging down, a medium blizzard cranking away, the wind shaking the web, and Serbians coming up behind us and Japanese sliding down past us. We’d greet them and ask for news, and they must have known exactly what we were saying (Because what else would we be saying?), and they’d reply as if it were the most normal conversation in the world except they were panting for breath (just like us) and speaking Japanese.

  Above Camp 2 was the Black Pyramid, and that’s where the real climbing began. Steep black rock, curtains of ice pouring out between fracture planes. I don’t know how hard the climbing would have been at eleven thousand feet in Canada, but up there, I got pumped just unclipping gear from my harness. Testy, friable gneiss that flaked off under my axe tips. Ice like stone—something about the wind and the altitude and the alien star-ness of the mountain turned the ice into granite, and my tools dulled fast.

  Bill and I led in blocks. I’d take two pitches, and he’d take two pitches, and that’s generally all we’d get done in a day. I began to see what Luther had said about Bill. When he climbed, he was brutal—he imposed his will on the stone in his face. It wasn’t necessarily pretty to watch. He was an engine. He was relentless, just like the mountain. Legs pistoning, arms swinging. And he had a way of calling me up to account. He’d tell me to do something, and I’d jump to it and lose track of whether I was wanting to climb well to climb the mountain or to not disappoint Bill.

  The junk and people started to thin out, but in places, past teams had left cables with aluminum ladder rungs clipped to blank sections. Hauling them up that high must have cost more than what they saved. Anyway, they were incredibly scary. They bounced against the rock and creaked, and I had no way to know what they were attached to at the top. But I’m light, right? And they were way faster than climbing for real. So I just tried to think pixie dust thoughts—which was pretty easy because I felt stoned by hypoxia anyway.

  We never really stopped. We were moving so slow we couldn’t afford to. One of us was almost always in motion. But at one belay ledge, we ate a little food together and had some water. It was dead calm, which felt unreal. Bill was shining. He was in his place. He was seven feet tall. He looked out west and said, “See where the land goes brown?” We could just see the color change on the horizon. “That’s for the sheep.” He was a god, and he was welcoming me into his domain.

  We got passed by a couple of Chinese. They had simply snuck onto the German ropes and were fixing their own at each new anchor. Bill roared at them. I’m not sure he even bothered making words—maybe he figured they wouldn’t understand him anyway—but the meaning to the sound was something like: Dirty dogs, you’re cheating, and the summit won’t recognize you. The Chinese said hello and good afternoon in impeccable songbird English and went right on ahead. If they understood Bill at all, they must have been perplexed because we were using the ladders same as everyone and if we got to something really hard we’d use another team’s fixed lines for twenty or thirty feet, too. It was impossible not to. Who’s going to risk broken bones at seven thousand meters when there’s a rope dangling five feet to your right? It turned out that we were all pragmatists; the Chinese were just taking pragmatism to its obvious extreme.

  It took us three days to fix lines to Camp 3. Each morning we’d get up, spend an hour making water and an hour struggling into our boots, gaiters, jackets, gloves, and crampons. My vision would swim just bending over to put on a boot. That was the worst part of the day. By the time we were out and moving, I didn’t feel so clumsy or stupid anymore, and the climbing woke me fully up, not jittery, just wide awake. I was feeling good. The mountain couldn’t touch me: wind, blizzards, falling rocks, none of it got through below my skin. Inside I was warm and sharp. And Nick and Alan were stocking Camp 2 each day from Camp 1, so we’d get back, and there would be a new kind of soup or candy bar waiting for us, and sometimes they’d even leave us water so we could spend less time bowed down around the stove. I was no one’s donkey. I was high above the brown land and the brown souls. I’d been promoted—I was white-collar now.

  “Damn right,” Bill said when I finished out the last hard lead before Camp 3. “I’m making you dinner tonight.” Which he did with great ceremony, even though the preparations involved putting a soup packet in a bowl and it was his turn anyway. He said he had big plans for me. He wanted me to join his Makalu expedition in a year.

  Once we had the ropes to Camp 3, it was Nick and Alan’s turn at the front. Bill and I planned to drop down to basecamp for a day to get some oxygen back into our bodies. Bill headed down first thing and left me to melt water for Nick and Alan. It took all morning, but I didn’t mind because it meant taking my time and not worrying about the minutes I was fumbling away. The stove was as sleepy as I was, and the ice I wanted to melt barely budged. I stared at the flame in a totally enjoyable stupor waiting for the ice to give up and wondering how to distinguish high-altitude lethargy from carbon monoxide poisoning.

  When I had milked out a couple of lukewarm bottles and stashed them in a sleeping bag, I called it good and headed down. A trickle of people were on their way up to Camp 2, up fixed lines alternating with well-tracked snow, but I was in my own bubble and didn’t even try to talk. I passed maybe seven or eight people in ones and twos. Another guy came up ahead of me in the snow. He was tall, in a red jacket and black pants, badly scratched glacier glasses, black balaclava—no skin showing, not that any of us were showing any skin we wanted to keep. He was lumpy under his outer layers, and something opened up in my mind, like I had understood all along but just hadn’t bothered to look. The snow was steep enough that when we pulled up in front of each other, we were face-to-face. I reached out and pulled down the mask of his balaclava and found a blond beard and pair of loose, rubbery lips grinning back at me.

  “Chase, my man,” he said.

  He was happy to have someone to talk to, happy to be able to share his little joke. He had been going up and down the mountain with us all along; there had been an extra climber up there after all. I asked him about the bodies. “Fishing,” he said, but then he stopped and looked uneasy, like he didn’t know whether I’d find that funny. He needed boots. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. “Shouldn’t have left them out,” he said. “They were hard to get at, and I didn’t know what else I’d need.” He perked up. “Got my jacket that way, too. I haven’t really stolen very much.”

  I didn’t care that much about the bodies. I mean, what good were they doing anyone down a crevasse? It really was pretty funny. But what was his plan? I wanted to know how far he was going to take this. Did he know where he was? He might as well have been in Islamabad or San Diego. “Never knew mountain climbing was such a cinch.” That’s what he said. “Once you got the clamps on the ropes, there’s nothing to it.” Everything he did he just copied. He didn’t understand anything.

  I didn’t have an answer for him. One part of me wanted to turn right around and follow him up the mountain, and the other wanted to kick him back to Askole myself. He’d cut off all his hair so it wouldn’t show. Which explained the yeti fur, too. I asked him whether Bill and the Captain had hurt him. He laughed—remember, it was more like a whinny coming out of him, a balloon squeaking. He said that was just some theater. He’d gotten tired of being watched all the time. I wanted to topple him backward out of the steps. I had felt bad for him! I could see his body tumbling down off the ridge and going airborne off the South Face—and that’s what he should have been imagining, too, because I never stopped seeing th
at happen to myself the entire time I was up there. I noticed that his harness—another item he’d stripped off a corpse, I presumed—was on all wrong. I bent down and rethreaded his leg loops. He stood there at attention like I was doing him up for school.

  “Thanks, bud,” he said. “Gotta go—more guys coming.” He crushed me with one arm and then pushed past. Just another Gore-Tex lump lurching up the mountain on the steps we’d all kicked in the snow.

  He couldn’t be gotten rid of. Bill and the mountain were relentless, but so was he. How could you push back against him? He slipped through your fingers without you even knowing he’d done it. The mountain didn’t touch him. He was taking boots off the bodies the mountain had made and then going right back up to where the mountain had made them! If the mountain couldn’t drive him off, how could the rest of us be expected to? He had said that some Italians shouted at him at Camp 1, once, but he couldn’t understand them, so he just ignored them. And what were they going to do? Throw him off the mountain? Haul him down themselves? We could barely drag our own bodies up and down—none of us were going to pull him down, too.

  I descended—I was dazed. I was dumbstruck by Wind. Somehow, he was bigger than any of the rest of us. He was nobler, truer to the fuck-all roots of alpinism. In his own way, he was the only purist among us. He wasn’t constrained by anything but the desire to go up high and see the world. Which is what climbing mountains should be all about, right? But I had made my place in Bill’s machine, and I wasn’t ready to give that up. So I couldn’t follow Wind, and I didn’t want to. He was a rubber-lipped hippie, and he made me queasy: the sight of him, the fact of him. I was opposed to him. I had to be. The higher he got up the mountain, the cheaper my efforts looked. He didn’t know anything about what he was doing, and I was supposed to be a badass. But I also knew that maybe he had more of the genuine spirit than the rest of us.

  So I was in a foul mood when I got back to basecamp. Gregor came out and met me a half hour outside camp. His knee was improving; he wanted to hear all about the climbing on the Black Pyramid. He brought me hot curried rice and dahl, and I had been living on powdered soup for ten days, so it tasted amazing. And I tried not to be too much of a bastard to him because lord knows he of all people didn’t deserve it, but I was in a dark place. I felt alienated in the basecamp hubbub. I was like a newbie to a big city, who’s more isolated because of all the people than he would be on his own—I’d never felt alone on a mountain, but I’d never had to share one with so many people. And that just made me feel worse because Wind was up there thriving on feeling alone, and I was luxuriating in my own basecamp with my cook and big tents and partners, feeling more than a little psychotic.

  The oxygen went to Bill’s head. He baited Luther into a push-up contest, right there in the snow, no gloves. They went at it face-to-face, and each time Bill came up, he had something to say: “Toy,” “Limp dick,” “Flower,” “If you stop now, I’ll have you hauling to Camp 1 for another week.” When he won, he jumped up, clapped his hands, turned his back on Luther, who was flat-out in the snow, tipped his head back, and hooted—at us? At the mountain? How should I know? Luther tried to laugh it off, but he looked shaky and had to go warm up his hands in one of the tents.

  Bill was happy. He was making speeches. “I’ve seen the mountain. She’ll kill the weak. So get to your weakness first, and kill it before she does.” He was frothing over. “This is living. Brothers fighting a monster. We’ll have ballads pissed out about us.” Ballads! That’s what he wanted. But maybe he’s done it—bought himself a starving poet who can urinate in cursive. He wrapped an arm around my neck. “You boys are making me proud. Best team I’ve had.”

  But I think he was an only child, just like me. I don’t think he knew what it meant to be a brother. I watched the Serbs drinking together around a metal cassette deck, Dark Side of the Moon coming out sounding stretched and tinny, speaking more with their eyes and hands than their mouths. They made me feel like a kid. They looked old in the eyes. And amused. Like they knew that the mountain was made of dirt, and they were made of dirt, and the relative positions of the big dirt clod and the little dirt clods mattered less than nothing, and the fact that they were here at all was part of a colossal joke planted in the human mind. Best to play along and not take the joke too much to heart. They looked tribal. We didn’t look anything like them. We were making so much noise! We were a nation of only children. Bill started talking about a summit bid. If Nick and Alan got up to Camp 4 and carved out a platform and left a tent, and if we started working our way back up the camps after a rest day, ferrying up a bit more food and fuel, we could be ready in five or six days.

  All six of us left basecamp. Gregor and Hubert went to advanced basecamp, and Frank, Bill, Luther, and I continued to Camp 1. Two of us would have our shot at the summit, with the other two in reserve, and then it would be the reserve pair’s chance. Bill didn’t put names to the pairs, so we were left to wonder. Frank found this amusing, I think. He kept humming the stare-down tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I asked him if he had our roles assigned. He told me to look around, we were all ugly, which was right enough—shaggy, sun-scorched, zinc-smeared beast-men, all of us. Frank didn’t seem at all affected by the actual question of who would be in the first summit team. Which left me and Luther to twist in the wind together. And it was blowing hard up there, though the sun was out.

  The summit had become more than ordinarily important to me. I had gone so far from where I had begun. Half the planet just to climb dirt a few thousand feet higher than what we’ve got at home. Dirt swarming with monomaniacs all standing on top of pyramids of human flesh and garbage. Monomaniacs just like me. I was having trouble laughing at the joke. I looked around for Wind, and sometimes I thought I saw him, but I was never sure and never got close. I’m sure Luther wanted the top badly, too, in his own way, though he was still talking about it as if it were a boar’s head for his living room. To me, the summit had begun to feel like a pardon in the sky. Because if I didn’t get the top, what would I have? No boar’s head. No living room. Just me and my own head.

  Back up to Camp 1, back up to Camp 2, we had two tents at each, so the four of us moved together. Nick and Alan passed us going down. They had been to Camp 4 and left a tent there and had thought about the summit but were too gassed. There was only one tent at Camp 3, so Bill had to speak his mind. He sent Luther and Frank back down to relay up another load of food and gas. Luther took the decision manfully, I guess you’d say—I mean dumb silent. What did I want from him? Rebellion? I guess I did. I wanted someone to rebel. He hugged me and said he’d look for my tracks on top. Frank punched his shoulder and said, “Come on, foot soldier, we’ve got work to do.”

  Camp 3 was like living in the mountain’s lungs. The wind was moving all the time. It felt like a permanent avalanche without the snow. Even in the tent I was holding on, waiting for the wind to pick us up and flick us away. We could hardly talk at all during the day, but in the tent, Bill went over and over a list of the people he thought were most likely to die: the Italian with the earring, the German woman with the pointed chin, the Japanese guy with the rising-sun patch on his jacket. One was too slow, one was too sloppy, or too technically weak on ice, or too cheerful. “Did you see that toy Italian? If I were the mountain, I’d give him a little shove and see if he’d hold me then.” He offered me a bet: we’d each choose five climbers, and the one who had the most die off his list would win. He was acting carnivorous. His beard had gone bushy, and his mouth was a pit flashing teeth that kept opening and closing, like he was chewing instead of speaking. Maybe he’d woken up with a hangover from his cheerfulness. I told him that the only thing I could bet with was my plane ticket home. He offered that I could include myself on my own list.

  We called up basecamp on the radio and got the forecast from Captain. It was unclear. The edge of a front was sitting on us. If it moved a few miles one way, we’d be in the sun. A few miles the other, and we’d
be in a stewpot of bad air. Bill broke the connection and asked me what I thought. I wasn’t expecting the question. For a moment, there was nothing to listen to except for the wind while he waited for me to answer. I was so used to him commanding, it took me a moment to form an opinion. And then I had to think, was he testing me? What answer did he want? Because here was my chance to get a finger on the wheel, but for all I knew, he was just measuring me and it wouldn’t matter. I told him I wasn’t overly attached. “Oh ho!” he said. “You’re a dangerous man.” That felt good, hearing him say that. I was proud. I remember wondering if there were people making bets about us, too, and that also felt good.

  So the next morning, early, we started for Camp 4. There were a few fixed lines, but mostly old and pointless. Nick and Alan hadn’t left any. The snow felt big and hollow. I don’t know how I knew it, sound or sense or what, but we were on a drum skin; nothing anchored the layer we were climbing to the mountain. The point was that if something came off, it was going to be so big that ropes weren’t going to matter. The whole shoulder would collapse, and the sky would fill with falling snow and climbers.

  Clouds swallowed us. The sun disappeared, the sky, the other mountains. It was all the same, the snow and the clouds. My mind drifted far. I went traveling in and out of time. I’d check back in on the present and remember that I should have been piss-terrified by the void I knew was somewhere under my feet, but instead I just drifted off again.

  It started to snow. A few flakes. Nothing bad. Then a few more, shaking down pretty as Christmas. Then demons filled the sky. Howling, shrieking. All those pretty flakes turned into angry white bees. I was deep asleep at the wheel, my mind fully separated from my body, and then I was back all at once. Before too long, Bill and I were standing next to each other. We couldn’t really see or hear, we were screaming over the wind, and we were pointing downward.