Now Rita is walking alone. She has talked to most of the paying hikers and feels caught up. She knows about Shelly’s marriages, her unfinished Ph.D. in philosophy, her son living in a group home in Indiana after going off his medication and using a pizza cutter to threaten the life of a coworker. She knows Jerry, knows that Jerry feels his restaurants bring their communities together, knows that he fashioned them after Greek meeting places more than any contemporary dining model—he wants great ideas to be born over his food—and when he was expanding on the subject, gesturing with a stick he carried for three hours, she feared he would use the word
peripatetic,
and soon enough he did. She knew she would wince and she did. And she knows that Mike is unwell and is getting sicker and has begun to make jokes about how funny it would be for a designer of ambulances to lie dying on a mountain without any real way of getting to one.
The terrain is varied and Rita is happy; the route seems as if planned by hikers with short attention spans. There has been rainforest, then savannah, then more forest, then forest charred, and now the path cuts through a rocky hillside covered in ice-green groundcover, an ocean floor drained, the boulders everywhere huge and dripping with lichen of a seemingly synthetic orange.
The porters are passing her regularly now, not just the porters from her group but about a hundred more, from the Canadian camp, the German camp, other camps. She passes a tiny Japanese woman sitting on a round rock, flanked by a guide and a porter, waiting.
The porters are laboring more now. On the first day, they seemed almost cavalier, and walked so quickly that now she is surprised to see them straining, plodding and unamused. A small porter, older, approaches her back and she stops to allow him through.
“Jambo,” she says.
“Jambo,” he says.
He is carrying a large duffel with Jerry’s name on it, atop his head, held there with the bag’s thick strap, with cuts across his forehead. Below the strap, perspiration flows down the bridge of his nose.
“Habari?” she says.
“Imara,” he says.
“Water?” she asks. He stops.
She removes her bottle from her backpack holster and holds it out to him. He stops and takes it, smiling. He takes a long drink from the wide mouth of the clear plastic container, and then continues walking.
“Wait!” she says, laughing. He is walking off with the water bottle. “Just a sip,” she says, gesturing to him that she would like the container back. He stops and takes another drink, then hands it to her, bowing his head slightly while wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Thank you,” he says, and continues up the trail.
They have made camp. It’s three in the afternoon and the fog has returned. It hangs lightly over the land, which is brown and wide and bare. The campground looks, with the fog, like a medieval battleground, desolate and ready to host the deaths of men.
Rita sits with Jerry on rocks the size and shape of beanbags while their tents are assembled. Mike is lying on the ground, on his backpack, and he looks to Rita much like what a new corpse would look like. Mike is almost blue, and is breathing in a hollow way that she hasn’t heard before. His walking stick extends from his armpit in a way that looks like he’s been lanced from behind.
“Oh Ashley!” he says to his tapeworm, or whatever it is. “Why are you doing this to me, Ashley?”
Far off into the mist, there is a song being sung. The words seem German, and soon they break apart into laughter. Closer to where she’s sitting, Rita can hear an erratic and small sound, a tocking sound, punctuated periodically by low cheers.
The mist soon lifts and Rita sees Grant, who has already assembled his tent, surrounded by porters. He and a very young man, the youngest and thinnest she’s seen, are playing a tennislike game, using thin wooden paddles to keep a small blue ball in the air. Grant is barefoot and is grinning.
“There he is,” says Jerry. “Saint Grant of the porters!”
At dinner the food is the same—cold noodles, white rice, potatoes, but tonight instead of orange slices there is watermelon, sliced into neat thin triangles, small green boats with red sails on a silver round lake.
“Someone carried a watermelon up,” Mike notes.
No one comments.
“Well, it didn’t fly up,” Frank says.
No one eats the watermelon, because the paying hikers have been instructed to avoid fruit, for fear of malaria in the water. Steven, the porter who serves the meals and whose smile precedes him always, soon returns and takes the watermelon back to the mess tent. He doesn’t say a word.
“What happens to the guy who carried up the watermelon?” Jerry asks, grinning.
“Probably goes down,” Frank says. “A lot of them are going down already—the guys who were carrying food that we’ve eaten. A lot of these guys you’ll see one day and they’re gone.”
“Back to the banana fields,” Jerry says.
Rita has been guessing at why Jerry looks familiar to her, and now she knows. He looks like a man she saw at Target, a portly man trying on robes who liked one so much he wore it around the store for almost an hour—she passed him twice. As with Jerry, she’s both appalled by and in awe of their obliviousness to context, to taste.
The paying hikers talk about their dreams. They are all taking Malarone, an anti-malarial drug that for most fosters disturbing and hallucinatory dreams. Rita’s attention wanes, because she’s never interested in people’s dreams and has had none of her own this trip.
Frank tells a story of a trip he took up Puncak Jaya, tallest peak in Indonesia, a mountain of 16,500 feet and very cold. They were looking for a climber who had died there in 1934, a British explorer who a dozen groups had tried to locate in the decades since. Frank’s group, though, had the benefit of a journal kept by the climber’s partner, recently found a few thousand feet below. Knowing the approximate route the explorer had taken, Frank’s group found the man within fifteen minutes of reaching the correct elevation. “There he is,” one of the climbers had said, without a trace of doubt, because the body was so well preserved that he looked precisely as he did in the last photograph of him. He’d fallen at least two hundred feet; his legs were broken but he had somehow survived, was trying to crawl when he’d frozen.
“And did you bury him?” Shelly asks.
“Bury him?” Frank says, with theatrical confusion. “How the heck we gonna bury the guy? It’s eleven feet of snow there, and rock beneath that—”
“So you what—left him there?”
“Course we left him there! He’s still there today, I bet in the same damned spot.”
“So that’s the way—”
“Yep, that’s the way things are on the mountain.”
Somewhere past midnight Rita’s bladder makes demands. She tries to quietly extricate herself from the tent, though the sound of the inner zipper, and then the outer, is too loud. Rita knows Shelly is awake by the time her head makes its way outside of the tent.
Her breath is visible in compact gusts and in the air everything is blue. The moon is alive now and it has cast everything in blue. Everything is underwater but with impossible black shadows. Every rock has under it a black hole. Every tree has under it a black hole. She steps out of the tent and into the cold cold air. She jumps. There is a figure next to her, standing still.
“Rita,” the figure says. “Sorry.”
It’s Grant. He is standing, arms crossed over his chest, facing the moon and also—now she sees it—the entire crest of Kilimanjaro. She gasps.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he whispers.
“I had no idea—”
It’s enormous. It’s white-blue and huge and flat-topped. The clarity is startling. It is indeed blindingly white, even now, at 1 a.m. The moon gives its white top the look of china under candlelight. And it seems so close! It’s a mountain but they’re going to the top. Already they are almost halfway up its elevation and this fills Rita with a sense of clear unmitigated accomplishment. This cannot be taken away.
“The clouds just passed,” Grant says. “I was brushing my teeth.”
Rita looks out on the field of tents and sees other figures, alone and in pairs, also standing, facing the mountain.
Now she is determined to make it to its peak. It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She’ll do it and have done it.
She turns to Grant but he is gone.
Rita wakes up strong. She doesn’t know why but she now feels, with her eyes opening quickly and her body rested, that she belongs on this mountain. She is ready to attack. She will run up the path today, barefoot. She will carry her own duffel. She will carry Shelly on her back. She has slept twice on this mountain but it seems like months. She feels sure that if she were left here alone, she would survive, would blend in like the hardiest of plants—her skin would turn ice-green and her feet would grow sturdy and gnarled, hard and crafty like roots.
She exits the tent and still the air is gray with mist, and everything is frozen—her boots covered in frost. The peak is no longer visible. She puts on her shoes and runs from the camp to pee. She decides en route that she will run until she finds the stream and there she will wash her hands. Now that this mountain is hers she can wash her hands in its streams, drink from them if she sees fit, live in its caves, run up its sheer rock faces.
It’s fifteen minutes before she locates the stream. She was tracking and being led by the sound of the running water, without success, and finally just followed the striped shirt of a porter carrying two empty water containers.
“Jambo,” she says to the man, in the precise way Grant does.
“Jambo,” the porter repeats, and smiles at her.
He is young, probably the youngest porter she’s seen, maybe eighteen. He has a scar bisecting his mouth, from just below his nose to just above the dimple on his chin. The containers are the size and shape of those used to carry gasoline. He lowers one under a small waterfall and it begins to fill, making precisely the same sound she heard from her bed, in her Moshi hut. She and the porter are crouching a few feet apart, his sweatshirt lashed with a zebra pattern in pink and black.
“You like zebras?” she asks. She rolls her eyes at her own inability to sound like anything but a moron.
He smiles and nods. She touches his sweatshirt and gives him a thumbs up. He smiles nervously.
She dips her hands into the water. Exactly the temperature she expected—cold but not bracing. She uses her fingernails to scrape the dirt from her palms, and with each trowel-like movement, she seems to free soil from her hand’s lines. She then lets the water run over her palm, and her sense of accomplishment is great. Without soap she will clean these filthy hands! But when she is finished, when she has dried her hands on her shorts, they look exactly the same, filthy.
The sun has come through while she was staring at them, and she turns to face the sun, which is low but strong. The sun convinces her that she belongs here more than the other hikers, more than the porters. She is still not wearing socks! And now the sun is warming her, telling her not to worry that she cannot get her hands clean.
“Sun,” she says to the porter, and smiles.
He nods while twisting the cap on the second container.
“What is your name?” she asks.
“Kassim,” he says.
She asks him to spell it. He does. She tries to say it and he smiles.
“You think we’re crazy to pay to hike up this hill?” she asks. She is nodding, hoping he will agree with her. He smiles and shakes his head, not understanding.
“Crazy?” Rita says, pointing to her chest. “To pay to hike up this hill?” She is walking her index and middle fingers up an imaginary mountain in the air. She points to the peak of Kilimanjaro, ringed by clouds, curved blades guarding the final thousand feet.
He doesn’t understand, or pretends not to. Rita decides that Kassim is her favorite porter and that she’ll give him her lunch. When they reach the bottom, she’ll give him her boots. She glances at his feet, inside ancient faux-leather basketball shoes, and knows that his feet are much too big. Maybe he has kids. He can give the shoes to the kids. It occurs to Rita then that he’s at work. That his family is at home while he is on the mountain. This is what she misses so much, coming home to those kids. The noise! They would just start in, a million things they had to talk about. She was interrupted all night until they fell asleep. They had no respect for her privacy and she loved them for their insouciance. She wants to sign more field trip permission slips. She wants to quietly curse their gym teacher for upsetting them. She wants to clean the gum out of J.J.’s backpack or wash Frederick’s urine-soaked sheets.
Kassim finishes, his vessels full, and so he stands, waves goodbye, and jogs back to the camp.
In the sun the hikers and porters lay their wet clothes out on the rocks, hang them from the bare limbs of the trees. The temperature rises from freezing to sixty in an hour and everyone is delirious with warmth, with the idea of being dry, of everything being dry. The campsite, now visible for hundreds of yards, is wretched with people—maybe four hundred of them—and the things they’re bringing up the mountain. There are colors ragged everywhere, dripping from the trees, bleeding into the earth. In every direction hikers are walking, toilet paper in hand, to find a private spot to deposit their waste.
Rita devours her porridge and she knows that she is feeling strong just as a few of the others are fading. They are cramped around the card table, in the tent, and the flaps are open for the first time during a meal, and it is now too warm, too sunny. Those facing the sun are wearing sunglasses.
“Lordy that feels good,” Grant says.
“Thank God,” Jerry says.
“You sure, dear Lord, we deserve this? Sure we haven’t suffered enough?” Shelly says, and they laugh.
“I don’t want to spoil the mood,” Frank says, “but I have an announcement. I wanted to make clear that you’re not allowed to give porters stuff. This morning, Mike thought it was a good idea to give a porter his sunglasses, and what happened, Mike?”