Snowblind (12 page)

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.

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.