Snowblind Page 9

  There wasn’t any other decision to make. The storm broke out into a raging whiteout. Everything shook in the wind. The snow, the air. Me, too. It was an earthquake up there. And even still, each step I took down, I thought, no, no, no. This is my shot. Got to go up. Can’t go down. But then I thought, okay, no one else is going up today either. We’re not spent. Bill wants the top, too. We’ll get back to the tent, we’ll reload, we’ll be ready for the next window. Just got to get to the tent, warm up, eat, sleep—get ready to go again.

  With gravity pulling us, we were three times faster going down, even in the storm. Which was good, because the snow shredded me. A river of frozen, broken glass, that’s what it seemed like. I got so cold I felt like I’d been turned inside out.

  The camp was wrecked. Tents exploded by the wind. Tents collapsed by fleeing climbers so they wouldn’t get exploded by the wind. But ours was standing, and we piled in. That first moment of shelter was incredible, even with the tent straining and popping. But after two seconds of mindless relief, I realized there were three of us there. Wind was in our tent. Not the wind—you see?—Wind. He was sprawled across our sleeping bags in his own greasy bag, stripped down to some corpse’s stained long johns, munching on a Kit Kat I’d squirreled away for a post-summit celebration.

  “Oops,” he said. “Looks like it’ll be a crowd tonight.”

  I lost it. I grabbed him. Which didn’t do much because he was close to two of me. But then Bill joined me, and Wind was half pinned inside his bag even though he was flailing and struggling. I unzipped the tent with one hand, and the storm blasted in, and we rolled him out the door into the snow and threw all his Frankenstein gear after him.

  For a moment, all I could do was get in my sleeping bag. We’d let in so much weather that the tent was full of snow and I was shaking with cold. I balled up inside my bag and clenched until the shivering stopped.

  Outside the storm was raging. Inside Bill was raging. But I wasn’t anything but cold. I’d murdered the man. You understand? You don’t throw someone into a storm like that in his underwear and expect him to live. And which man had I killed? Not Alan. Not Bill.

  Bill went on all night long. Most of it. I faded in and out. Some of what I thought I heard was maybe nightmare. The howling. At the storm, at Wind, at me, I don’t know.

  In the morning, the storm had dropped. Inside the tent, I packed up my gear. Bill told me that if I left, I was done. He still wanted to go for the top. I packed up and left.

  I checked some of the collapsed tents looking for Wind or his body. In the daylight, I didn’t feel any better about myself. I had bloody hands, red and fresh. Couldn’t wipe them off. I didn’t expect to find Wind, and I didn’t. He’d gone over the edge after all. Body in pieces down on the glacier.

  I worked down the fixed ropes, spoke to no one, just clipped anchors and rappelled. I grabbed as much food as I could find out of our advanced basecamp, then took a long detour on the glacier to avoid basecamp altogether. I cut myself off from all of them.

  Wind’s last minutes looped through my brain. A mammoth on his knees out in the blizzard without his fur. Hands like bricks straining to pull on his insulation. Eyes frozen. The edge of the ridge right there because that had been the only place left to put our tent. The wind stealing back the clothes he’d made, tugging them right up to the edge like baited hooks, and him chasing them around half blind.

  For two days, I was a shell. A body walking around without a soul. Being alone settled me. My I crept back in. It didn’t do anything about the guilt, but I felt like me again. I walked each morning and sat each afternoon. I watched the mountains. I’d find a rock surfing the back of the glacier and just sit and stare. White snow, grey mountains. No color. An infinite corridor of mountains like doorways. What will you see behind this door? Another reflection of yourself, stripped to your bones. I sat and tried to reacquaint myself with myself. The wind shook me down. The glacier inched me downhill. India crashed into Asia and pushed the mountains higher. I kept my mouth shut and my tongue paralyzed, afraid something important would leak out.

  I put myself back in the tent. Tried to call back up what I’d felt when I went for Wind. Because, right, we all could have slept a night in there. People have crammed more bodies than that in a two-man tent and climbed the next day. But he was trespassing. It was my turf—mine. The mountain, the tent, all of it. It was East and West, Bloods and Crips. So, mirror, mirror on the wall, if he was my opposite, what did that mean for me?

  Wind had said he’d been up in the hills around Askole, sitting with monks. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I couldn’t fathom Islamabad, let alone Los Angeles, and I figured I could at least count on monks not to ask me questions.

  After a few days looking, I found a couple dugout hovels where some toothless old men sat facing the opposite side of the Braldu Gorge. Wind’s monks were like his mountaineers: strictly C-listers. They had clay bowls and hairy blankets and expedition turds: plastic bottles, T-shirts, empty Pringles cans. Maybe it was a monastery, but it could just as easily have been the local retirement home. The leathery old coots pointed and laughed at me, and I took that as a sign I could stay.

  I sat for a while, days, I mean. Time seemed broken off behind me. And the future didn’t come, even though the earth was turning. So I woke and slept up there in my holding cell, hoping for someone or something to hand me my sentence. Wind’s monks farted and scratched and waited. I resolved to quit climbing. I’d opened that door and gone all the way through. Heart and soul. And I’d accomplished, what? Killed a man and an ideal.

  Of course I hadn’t. That was just another delusion of grandeur. Wind came walking up to the hovels one afternoon, eating the ground with his gigantic strides. I got another “Chase, my man” and a hug that pressed my face into his ribs. He exchanged some kind of coded bow with the monks. Where he’d learned that, I don’t know. They gripped his shoulders and rubbed his head and made clucking noises in the backs of their throats.

  He’d burrowed. Into the snow. Grabbed his gear, burritoed himself in an exploded tent, and wormed down below the surface. He’d read about huskies sleeping buried in Alaska—he figured it was like that. “Kinda cold at first,” he said. “But once I got my shirts on and the snow covered me up, I was all right.” He had some black around his fingernails, no big deal. He didn’t blame me for anything. “Kinda hairy up there,” he chuckled at me, whinnying his pony laugh. Like I’d pranked him and gone just a little overboard.

  I wasn’t sure the simple fact that he was unkillable cleared me of much, but he was alive, and the relief was like a popped cork. By walking up the hill, he rolled a great big damn rock off me. I could get on with my life, devote myself to stock brokering or drilling natural gas or whatever.

  Wind had kept a breathing hole clear by poking at it all night long as the snow piled up. In the morning when I left, he saw me through a long white tube. He said he was happy as a clam in the mud. He thought about popping up and surprising me, but even he knew that was a bad idea, with Bill right there in the tent. An hour later, Bill descended, and Wind had the tents to himself.

  It took him some time to dig free, because his gopher hole was well and truly buried. Then he borrowed our tent again—“no problem, it was empty,” he said, like I hadn’t been there—and rubbed himself warm and dry. And then? He broke off. He got shifty. Uncomfortable. Eyes wandering, that infantile smile crawling over his rubber lips. At first I thought he was having some kind of tic. Then it flashed on me. He hadn’t gone down. That’s why he’d stopped telling me. He’d gone up. How far? Damn it, how high did you go? He rocked back like I’d hit him. I must have been a sight. I was so sure I didn’t want to hear his answer that I didn’t ask again.

  I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted to throw him into the storm all over again. I was right back to where I’d been. If I’d stayed, I might have gone after him with a rock. He was too much for me. I all but ran away. From him or myself or fucking Asia, I don�
��t know. Los Angeles suddenly seemed sane. I feel like I failed the test. I’m the hillbilly who gets visited by an alien but spends the whole night hiding behind his pitchfork.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Jay drove Chase out into the desert. They talked about solo circuits in Joshua Tree and autumn ice climbs in the Sierra.

  “You don’t sound like you’re done climbing,” Jay said.

  “Nah. Like I said. I’m back to where I started.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You headed back to the Himalayas?” Jay asked.

  “No. No way. Weren’t you listening?”

  “I was listening.”

  “Okay then. No.”

  “Right.”

  The road narrowed. The concrete peeled back layer by layer. Jay felt the same buoyant pop he always experienced when Los Angeles receded in the west, as if he’d come up for air. The Mojave jesters, the Joshua trees, crowded the roadside. Jay drove them higher, up to the pyramids of monzonite, heaped skeletons of the past weathering to sand, returning to the ground. The rock was orange and so was the heat coming off the ground.

  The road curved between the rocks. The Joshua trees pressed close. Chase pointed to a dirt road that split off toward Queen Mountain, and Jay nosed the Subaru along the twin ruts.

  “Want to stay and climb a few days?” Chase asked.

  “Nope,” Jay said. “Carrie. School. Work.”

  “Want to boulder just this morning?”

  “No. But we get out here a few times a month. Though I don’t know how we’ll find you. Particularly without Big Yellow.”

  “I’ll be around. Look for me.”

  Chase told Jay to stop at a bend where the road swung near Queen Mountain’s farthest outlying cliffs. They got out and swung the duffel off the road into the sand. They shook hands. Jay got back behind the wheel and turned the car around. When he had himself pointed west, Chase waved once. The car rolled back toward the ocean and the city, and Jay watched in the mirror as Chase left the road and disappeared into the Joshuas and stones.

  THE SKIN OF THE WORLD

  I

  DARKNESS AND COLD come early in December. It was not much past five o’clock, but David and Ian had already cocooned themselves in their sleeping bags. They sat upright, side by side, on a ledge a few feet wide and a dozen feet long. Between and above them, the ropes and hardware were stacked, racked, and tidied for the night—though the result looked more Gorgon-ish than tidy, with coils of rope and cruel-looking metal geegaws dangling from slings. They had their backs against the stone, their legs in the bags hung over the edge. A thousand feet down, the green-black pines rocked back and forth in the wind like waves on dark water, shadows in the blackness above the snow that buried their trunks and lowest branches.

  “I think I’ve found a mountain for us,” David said.

  “Is it beautiful?” Ian asked.

  That was just like Ian. Not “how high?” or “how hard?” He would never admit to wanting to know the gross measurements of a mountain. David rubbed his hands together, trying to rub out the cold from inside his bag. “Like nothing I’ve seen before,” he said. “Honestly.” He studied his mental image of the mountain, which was never far from the surface these days. “It has cheekbones. Like Sophia Loren.”

  “And where does Lady Loren live?” Ian asked.

  “In China. Near the old border with Tibet. It’s called Yunshan.”

  “Yunshan,” Ian repeated. “I’ve never heard of her. What does the name mean?”

  “Yunshan?” David said. “I don’t know.”

  The moon lifted itself up out of Tenaya Canyon, flooding the valley with light, turning the snow to glass and the granite to silver. It was the Yosemite Valley below their ledge, which meant there were signs of the other world down there: headlights, even tacked Christmas lights, on cars being driven to the little outposts of commercial cheer within the park. Seeing those lights, imagining the heavy windows of the lodges shielding fires and compressed voices—the merry bunching of humanity against the cold—only increased the distance David felt between himself and the ground. He felt pressed up against the rim of the world.

  “It looks hard,” David said.

  “Sure it does,” Ian said. “You wouldn’t be taking us to China otherwise.”

  That was the risk of climbing with Ian. He didn’t say no. Which didn’t mean he was fearless. He’d whimper and shake his way up a scary lead just like anyone else. But he would agree to a big climb without even bothering to say yes, and that worried David sometimes. By the time he made a suggestion, it was a reality, with no chance to step back and laugh it off. Already, sitting there in the cold on their ledge on another climb, he could feel them inching toward the Kunlun Range. He didn’t even know how to get there, really, or where the money would come from, or what lengths of red tape the Chinese would wrap around their mountain. Still, he felt the first stirrings of gravity pulling them toward Yunshan. So there was the risk, and the payoff, too. David would dream big, and Ian would shrug as if it were the most natural suggestion in the world. The wheels would turn, carrying them to the Alps or Peru or Alaska, and then David would climb outside of himself, beyond the limits he imagined, pushed on by Ian’s refusal to confess any notion of the lunacy of their project. But Yunshan was the biggest dream yet, and David had half hoped he would get some kind of new reaction from his partner.

  The cold was looking for him through his layers. David could feel it brush his skin and then retreat, waiting for his blood to slow. He was wrapped up in every scrap of clothing he’d brought, plus his harness and the rope, which ran up out the neck of his bag to their anchor so that he wouldn’t roll off their ledge. As far as he could tell, he would not be taking off his harness or even a single layer for another three days—and that assumed no blizzard was tracking down from the north to ambush them first. The cold dug deep, even for December. They had waited until a river of arctic air swung down off the Bering Sea, icing the entire West. This had been another of David’s ideas, to try to make a Yosemite winter feel like a Himalayan summer. They were evaluating their fitness to handle hard climbing in the cold. Ian said they were prospecting their souls.

  David had left his tether too tight. He slipped one hand out to loosen the clove hitch tying him to the anchor. To get to the anchor, he had to reach through the snakes of rope and also through the charms and juju beads Ian had hung there when they set up for the night: a string of feathers, a chain of amber teardrops, two old coins with center-holes, and John, Ian’s shrunken head. David had never quite gotten over his revulsion of the head—the wrinkled skin-leather, the grotesque features, the history it represented. Ian had explained that he was misdirecting death, which made little sense to David, since the thing looked very much like death. Anyway, it hardly mattered. They were hauling six gallons of water—enough for the two of them for five cold days—so Ian’s talismans weren’t exactly holding them back. The feathers were something new. David finished fiddling with his rope and snatched his hand back into his bag and retightened its hood. “Ian,” David said. “What’s with all the feathers?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Ian said. “A month ago—a Thursday—I walked out to my car, and there were two white birds on the hood, staring back at me. Not pigeons, not gulls, I don’t know what they were. But they stared at me till I put the key in the door, and then they were gone. I drove up 140 and slept by the river. The next morning, I walked up to Arch Rock, and when I got there, two climbers decked right in front of me. Two white birds. Two dead climbers.”

  “What?” David said. “What happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Leader had just started the last pitch of Lesser Evil. He fell and ripped the anchor. Gone just like that. Bloody mess. You were doing that concrete job, and I didn’t see you for a couple weeks. Besides, I hate telling you stuff like this. You’re such a skeptic.”

  David tried to clear his mind of sarcasm lest anything about albin
o sparrows wriggle off his tongue. He knew he could be a bastard, and Ian had watched people die, so it didn’t seem to be the time. “What did you do?” he asked.

  “Not much to do,” Ian said. “I poked around at the bodies a few minutes.” (David was always caught by Ian’s frankness. He, too, would have stayed to poke at the bodies—he had never seen what granite teeth would do to human flesh, though he had imagined it often enough. But would he have admitted to it so casually? He wasn’t sure.) “Then I walked back down and called search and rescue. I spent the rest of the weekend soloing, looking for nests.”

  Of course. Only Ian would watch two climbers land in front of him like that then go on a soloing, feather-collecting, spree. And then wait a month to mention it.

  “You all right?” David asked.

  “Yeah, all right,” Ian said. “It wasn’t me that fell—though it felt like it at first watching them come down.”

  “Did you ever find out who they were?”

  “I asked around,” Ian said. “A couple of guys from Georgia no one had ever seen before. Makes me wonder how word will get back home for them. Who’s going to track down their wives, girlfriends, moms, or whatever?”

  “You could make that your work. Saint Ian of the fallen climber. It’d suit you.”

  “No way. I’d creep them out. Can you imagine me showing up at your door? Better leave that to guys with crew cuts and uniforms.”

  David waited for Ian to say something more. In truth, he wanted Ian to say something about the mountain in China. Dead climbers and feathers were surprisingly uncomfortable subjects once the basic facts had been covered. What could David say? What a tragedy? What do you suppose those birds were up to? Did you see their livers? And here, David had proposed that they climb a mostly unknown mountain on the other side of the planet, and all his partner wanted to know was what the name of the mountain meant! David had things to say on that subject: this many thousand feet of rock, so many pitches of ice, stacked overhangs at half height, the choice between twin ropes or a ten-millimeter lead line. He knew, in part, his reason for wanting to talk through these details. He was afraid of Yunshan, maybe even terrified of it. The mountain dwelt on a plane they hadn’t touched before. Talking about the tools they would use and the sections they would climb would help still his mind. But Ian wasn’t biting. Apparently he wasn’t ready for that sort of business yet.