“I guess we’re bunking together,” Shelly says, suddenly behind her, above her. Everyone is standing up. Rita rises and follows Shelly outside, where it is still drizzling the coldest rain. The hikers all say goodnight, Mike and Jerry heading toward the toilet tent, just assembled—a triangular structure, three poles with a tarp wrapped around, a zipper for entry, and a three-foot hole dug below. Father and son are each carrying a small roll of toilet paper, protecting it from the rain with their plastic baggies containing their toothbrushes and paste. Their silhouettes are smudges scratched by the gray lines of the cold rain.
Shelly and Rita’s tent is small and quickly becomes warm. Inside they crawl around, arranging their things, using their headlamps—a pair of miners looking for a lost contact lens.
“One day down,” Shelly says.
Rita grunts her assent.
“Not much fun so far,” Shelly says.
“No, not yet.”
“But it’s not supposed to be, I suppose. The point is getting up, right?”
“I guess.”
“At all costs, right?”
“Right,” Rita says, though she has no idea what Shelly is talking about.
Shelly soon settles into her sleeping bag, and turns toward Rita, closing her eyes. Shelly is asleep in seconds, and her breathing is loud. She breathes in through her nose and out through her nose, the exhalations in quick effortful bursts. Shelly is a yoga person and while Rita thought this was interesting an hour ago, now she hates yoga and everyone who might foster its dissemination.
The rain continues, tattering all night, almost rhythmic but not rhythmic enough, and Rita is awake for an hour, listening to Shelly’s breathing and the rain, which comes in bursts, as if deposited by planes sweeping overhead. She worries that she will never sleep, and that she will be too tired tomorrow, that this will weaken her system and she will succumb to the cerebral edema that is ready, she knows, to leap. She sees the aneurysm in the form of a huge red troll, like a kewpie doll, the hair aflame, though with a pair of enormous scissors, like those used to open malls and car dealerships— that the troll will jump from the mountain and with its great circus scissors sever Rita’s medulla oblongata and her ties to this world.
Gwen is to blame. Gwen had wanted to help Rita do something great. Gwen had been ruthlessly supportive for decades now, sending money, making phone calls on Rita’s behalf, setting her up with job interviews and divorced men who on the first date wanted to hold hands and their hands were rough and fat always, and Rita wanted no more of Gwen’s help. Rita loved Gwen in an objective way, in an admiring way totally separate from her obligations to sibling affection. Gwen was so tall, so narrow, could not wear heels without looking like some kind of heron in black leggings, but her laugh was round and rolling, and it came out of her, as everything did, with its arms wide and embracing. She could be president if she’d wanted that job, but she hadn’t— she’d chosen instead to torment Rita with her thoughtfulness. Baskets of cheese, thank-you notes, that long weekend in San Miguel when they’d rented the convertible Beetle. She even bought Rita a new mailbox and installed it, with cement and a shovel, when the old one was stolen in the night. This is what Gwen did, she did this and she humored Brad, and awaited her baby, and ran a small business, as fruitful as she could hope, that provided closet reorganization plans to very wealthy people in Santa Fe.
Rita knows she can’t ask Shelly to share her sleeping bag but she wants a body close to her. She hasn’t slept well since J.J. and Frederick went away because she has not been warm. No one ever said so but they didn’t think it appropriate that the kids slept in her bed. Gwen had found it odd when Rita had bought a larger bed, but Rita knew that having those two bodies near her, never touching anywhere but a calf or ankle, her body calming their fears, was the only indispensible experience of her life or anyone else’s.
As her heart blinks rapidly, Rita promises herself that the next day will be less punishing, less severe. The morning will be clear and dry and when the fog burns off, it will be so warm, maybe even hot, with the sun coming all over and drying their wet things. They will walk upward in the morning wearing shorts and sunglasses, upward toward the sun.
The morning is wet and foggy and there is no sun and everything that was wet the night before is now wetter. Rita’s mood is a slashing despair; she does not want to leave her sleeping bag or her tent, she wants all these filthy people gone, wants her things dry and clean. She wants to be alone, for a few minutes at least. She knows she can’t, because outside the tent are the other hikers, and there are twenty porters, and now a small group of German hikers and at the far side of the camp, three Canadians and a crew of twelve—they must have arrived after dark. Everyone is waking up. She hears the pouring of water, the rattle of pots, the thrufting of tents. Rita is so tired and so awake she comes close to crying. She wants to be in this sleeping bag, not awake but still sleeping, for two and a half hours more. In two and a half hours she could regather her strength, all of it. She would have a running start at this day, and could then leap past anyone.
There is conversation from the next tent. The voices are not whispering, not even attempting to whisper.
“You’re kidding me,” one voice says. “You know how much we paid for these tickets? How long did we plan to come here, how long did I save?”
It’s Jerry.
“You know you didn’t have to save, Dad.”
“But Michael. We planned this for years. I talked to you about this when you were ten. Remember? When Uncle Mark came back? Christ!”
“Dad, I just—”
“And here you’re going down after one freaking day!”
“Listen. I have never felt so weak, Dad. It’s just so much harder than—”
“Michael. Yesterday was the hardest day—the rest will be nothing. You heard what’s-his-face… Frank. This was the hard one. I can see why you’re a little concerned, but you gotta buck up now, son. Yesterday was bad but—”
“Shhh.”
“No one can hear us, Michael. For heaven’s sake. Everyone’s asleep.”
“Shh!”
“I will not have you shushing me! And I won’t have you—”
There is the sound of a sleeping bag being adjusted, and then the voices become lower and softer.
“I will not have you leaving this—”
And the voices dip below audibility.
Shelly is awake now, too. She has been listening, and gives Rita a raised eyebrow. Rita reciprocates, and begins searching through her duffel bag for what to wear today. She has brought three pairs of pants, two shorts, five shirts, two fleece sweat-shirts, and her parka. Putting on her socks, wool and shaped like her foot, the ankle area reinforced and double-lined, she wonders if Mike will actually be going down so soon. There is a spare garbage bag into which she shoves her dirty socks, yesterday’s shirt, and her jogging bra, which she can smell—rain and trees and a musty sweat.
“You’d have to break my leg,” Shelly whispers. She is still in her sleeping bag, only her face visible. Rita suddenly thinks she looks like someone. An actress. Jill Clayburgh. Jane Curtin? Kathleen Turner.
“Break my leg and cut my tendons. You’d have to. I’m doing this climb.”
Rita nods and heads toward the tent’s door flap.
“If you’re going outside,” Shelly says, “give me a weather report.”
Rita pokes her head through the flaps and is facing fifteen porters. They are all standing in the fog, just across the campsite, under the drizzle, some holding cups, all in the clothes they were wearing yesterday. They are outside the cooking tent, and they are all staring at her face through the flap. She quickly pulls it back into the tent.
“What’s it like?” Shelly asks.
“Same,” Rita says, having never felt so sad.
Breakfast is porridge and tea and orange slices that have been left in the open air too long and are now dry, almost brown. There is toast, cold and hard and with hard butter needing to be applied with great force. Again the five paying hikers are hunched over the small card table, and they eat everything they can. They pass the brown sugar and dump it into their porridge, and they pass the milk for their coffee, and they worry that the caffeine will give them the runs and they’ll have to make excessive trips to the toilet tent, which now everyone dreads. Rita had wondered if the trip might be too soft, too easy, but now, so soon after getting here, she knows that she is somewhere else. It’s something very different.
“How was that tent of yours?” Frank asks, directing his chin toward Grant. “Not too warm, eh?”
“It was a little cool, you’re right, Frank.” Grant is pouring himself a third cup of tea.
“Grant thinks his dad’s old canvas Army tent was the way to go,” Frank says. “But he didn’t count on this rain, didja, Grant? Your dad could dry his out next to the fire, but that ain’t happening up here, friend.”
Grant’s hands are clasped in front of him, extending awkwardly, as if arm-wrestling with himself. He is listening and looking at Frank without any sort of emotion.
“That thing ain’t dry tonight, you’re gonna be bunking with me or someone else, my friend.” Frank is scratching his beard in a way that looks painful. “Otherwise the rain and wind will make an icebox of that tent. You’ll freeze in your sleep, and you won’t even know it. You’ll wake up dead.”
The trail winds like a narrow river up through an hour of rainforest, drier today, and then cuts through a hillside cleared by fire. Everyone is walking together now, the ground bare and black. There are twisted remnants of trees straining from the soil, their extremities gone but their roots almost intact.
“There’s your forest fire,” Frank says.
The fog is finally clearing. Though the pace is slow, around a field of round rocks knee-high, it is not as slow as the day before, and because Rita is tired and her legs are sore in every place, from ankle to upper thigh, she accepts the reduced speed. Grant is behind her and also seems resigned.
But Mike is far more ill today. The five paying hikers know this because it has become the habit of all to monitor the health of everyone else. The question “How are you?” on this mountain is not rhetorical. The words in each case, from each hiker, give way to a distinct and complicated answer, involving the appearance or avoidance of blisters, of burgeoning headaches, of sore ankles and quads, shoulders that still, even with the straps adjusted, feel pinched. Mike’s stomach feels, he is telling everyone, like there is actually a large tapeworm inside him. Its movements are trackable, relentless, he claims, and he’s given it a name: Ashley, after an ex-girlfriend. He looks desperate for a moment of contentment; he looks like a sick child, lying on the bathroom floor, bent around the toilet, exhausted and defeated, who’s forgotten what it was to feel strong.
Today the porters are passing the paying hikers. Every few minutes another goes by, or a group of them. The porters walk alone or in packs of three. When they come through they do one of two things: if there is room around the hikers, when the path is wide or there is space to walk through the dirt or rocks beside them, they will jog around them; when the path is narrow, they will wait for the hikers to step aside.
Rita and Grant are stepping aside.
“Jambo,” Grant says.
“Jambo,” the first porter says.
“Habari,” Grant says.
“Imara,” the porter says.
And he and the two others walk past. Rita asks Grant what he’s just said.
Habari
, Grant explains, means How are you, and
imara
means strong. She watches them pass, noticing the last of the three. He is about twenty, wearing a CBS News T-shirt, khaki pants, and cream-colored Timberland hiking shoes, almost new. He is carrying two duffel bags on his head. One of them is Rita’s. She almost tells the man this—Hey, that’s my duffel you’re carrying, ha ha!—this but then catches herself. There’s nothing she can say in English she’d be proud of.
“Blue!” Jerry yells, pointing to a small spot of sky that the fog has left uncovered. It’s the first swatch of blue the sky has allowed since the trip began, and it elicits an unnatural spasm of joy in Rita. She wants to climb through the gap and spread herself out above the cloudline, as you would a ladder leading to a treefort. Soon the blue hole grows and the sun, still obscured but now directly above, gives heat through a thin layer of cloudcover. The air around them warms almost immediately and Rita, along with the other paying hikers, stops to remove layers and put on sunglasses. Frank takes a pair of wet pants from his bag and ties them to a carabiner; they hang to his heels, filthy.
Mike now has the perpetual look of someone disarming a bomb. His forehead is never without sweat beaded along the ridges of the three distinct lines on his forehead. He is sucking on a silver tube, like a ketchup container but larger.
“Energy food,” he explains.
They are all eating the snacks they’ve brought. Every day Steven gives the paying hikers a sack lunch of eggs and crackers, which no one eats. Rita is inhaling peanuts and raisins and chocolate. Jerry is gnawing on his beef jerky. They are all sharing food and needed articles of clothing and medical aid. Shelly loans Mike her Ace bandage, to wrap around his ankle, which he thinks is swollen. Jerry loans Rita a pair of Thinsulate gloves.
Fifteen porters pass while the paying hikers are eating and changing. One porter, more muscular than the others, who are uniformly thin, is carrying a radio playing American country music. The porter is affecting a nonchalant pride in this music, a certain casual ownership of it. To each porter Grant says jambo and most say jambo in return, eliciting more greetings from Jerry—who now likes to say the word, loudly.
“Jahm-BO!” he roars, in a way that seems intended to frighten.
Shelly steps over to Frank.
“What do the porters eat?” she asks.
“Eat? The porters? Well, they eat what you eat, pretty much,” Frank says, then reaches for Shelly’s hips and pats one. “Maybe without the snacking,” he says, and winks.
There is a boom like a jet plane backfiring. Or artillery fire. Everyone looks up, then down the mountain. No one knows where to look. The porters, farther up the trail but still within view, stop briefly. Rita sees one mime the shooting of a rifle. Then they continue.