Snowblind (16 page)

But it was better to be climbing than waiting at the anchor with nothing to do but watch the darkening sky and Ian's struggles to keep them attached to the mountain, or to look inward and feel the invasion of the cold as his blood retreated toward his core. In the later morning, the snow began in earnest. Ian, already a formless shape under his red unisuit and helmet and scraggly blond beard, became blotted out behind the falling snow. By the time he reached the two-hundred-foot limit of their rope, David could hardly see him at all.

When David rejoined Ian at the next anchor, he tried to be enthusiastic and positive. “That was a good lead,” he said. “Spooky loose rock. Nice work.”

“Cut it out,” Ian said. “You're using your baby brain. You've been acting like that all goddamn morning.”

David felt lame and slow for being called out. “Fine,” he said. “Your gear was crap, and you took a year to turn the roof above the groove.”

“That's better,” Ian said. “Now you're talking like the mountain. Better grow up fast. I can feel the knife under my skin already.”

David couldn't tell whether Ian meant his words lightheartedly or otherwise. The wind snatched away intonation and whole sentences, and Ian's face was masked behind numb lips and the tightly drawn hood of his jacket. David felt like they were being dragged over rocks. They were coping all right, he thought, trading words that were mild enough to still be friendly but sharp enough to offer some release, but then one of them would say something that jabbed too hard, and they'd be back to spitting glass at each other.

“Just give me the rack,” he muttered into the wind, “and go fuck yourself.”

“Quick now, little beaver,” Ian said. “Cut your teeth.”

The storm revved up until it seemed like the jet stream washed directly over Yunshan. Pockets of turbulence struck at them, heavy fingers of air that seemed to want to pluck them right off the mountain. David hunkered down, gasping for breath, commanding the fragile holds to stay attached for a few more seconds and bear a few more pounds. He flailed and hacked at the mountain, and sometimes he imagined it was Ian, but other times he looked down and a gap in the blizzard showed how carefully Ian tended his rope, and he felt, again, the corded assurance that bound them—and sometimes, when the wind seemed to drive bits of ice right through his brain, he thought nothing at all.

Imperceptibly, at first, the angle decreased. But then David found that he was crawling as much as climbing. He plowed ahead through the snow on his knees, in order to stay low, in order to give the wind as little leverage as possible. He lost feeling in his hands, but he could still move his fingers and hold onto his ice axe.

The mid-afternoon was as grey and murky as their starlit nights down on the glacier. The ground leveled out to the point that they could stand and walk unroped in the wind lulls. They did not explore the boundaries of this area but dropped their packs and immediately began to dig down toward the hope of a stable layer to which they could anchor the tent. The wind blew sharp points of ice into every open seam of their clothing, and soon they each wore undershirts of slush. They worked feverishly, at first, so that the snowfall would not undo what had already been dug, but then Ian stopped and stood up.

“What's that?” Ian said.

“What do you mean?” They had to shout at each other nose-to-nose in order to be heard through hats and hoods and above the avalanche of wind noise.

“That sound,” Ian said.

“It's the wind!”

“No. Listen. Over there.” Ian abandoned their partially constructed platform and staggered off into the gale. The outline of his body fuzzed out, as if the reception were fading away on an old television, and David hardly knew whether to follow his partner and risk losing their spot entirely to the blizzard, or to stay and lose his partner. But then, as he strained his eyes through the static dropping out of the sky, he saw that Ian had stopped and was waving at him with one bent arm. David followed, ready to hogtie Ian and drag him back.

“What the hell are—” but then David stopped as he pulled even with Ian.

There was a man on his back in the snow. His nose was charcoal black. White frost-craters dimpled his cheeks. Ice cased his thick dark
beard. His mouth was open and, David realized after a moment, from between his cracked and blistered lips came a sound which David's brain had been filing away as wind noise but now clearly separated into a scream.

They grabbed the man under the armpits and dragged him back to their packs. As they lifted him out of the snow—his lower half had been buried by a drift—they caught sight of shreds of nylon and pack cloth. Ian swiped at the snow with one foot, but he turned up nothing more than wreckage and fragments: bent tubes that could have been tent poles, a stiff, frozen ball that could have been a jacket or a sweater, red slices of tent fabric. All worthless.

With the man lying by their packs, they attacked the snow again. David worked by instinct. They needed shelter, and for that, they needed to dig down. When their platform had at last been flattened, they spread out the tent and pushed the man inside as ballast against the wind. They staked out the corners and linked the poles and guyed two lines on each side before giving up and piling their packs and themselves into their thin nylon shelter.

The inside of the tent was a sopping mess. It had filled with snow when they loaded the man, and more came in on their packs and clothes. The tent was barely big enough for two—with three they couldn't move without hitting each other and knocking snow around. Every time they bumped the man, he screamed. David had lost most of the functionality in his hands, and he began to shake as his now-stationary body cooled further. He curled up against one end of the tent and tried to shiver himself warm. “What the hell do we do with him?” he yelled.

“Snap out of it. We've got to warm him up.”

“But where did he come from?”

“Ask him. Fuck! Stop mumbling and answer the question.” Ian kicked the man, and he screamed again. “Witch, stop blowing,” Ian said. “Hell mouth.”

The vapor in their exhalations froze immediately to the fabric walls, then fell in showers of ice whenever the wind shook the tent. Ian used his teeth to open one of their packs, and he spread the contents out over the top of the man, who thrashed weakly from side to side and moaned. David caught their squeeze bottle of oil—which they had carefully doled into their nightly soups—between his hands and sucked down half of it because he remembered a story of an Antarctic climber who drank olive oil to keep from freezing. He passed the bottle to Ian.

“Is he talking?” Ian asked.

“He looks Russian,” David said.

“Speak up! What are you saying?”

“It sounds like Russian.”

“You don't know any Russian.”

They spread a sleeping bag—David's—out over the man and pulled off his harness and the frozen layers of his clothing until they had him down to long johns and gloves. David felt better, whether from the oil or because his body temperature had stabilized, he couldn't tell. He was sleepy and strongly tempted to lean back and catch a nap, but at least he knew that this was a bad sign, something to fight. He could squeeze between his thumb and forefinger now, which was useful when it came time to zip the sleeping bag
up around the Russian. It was harder yet to get the stove lit, but he managed, and the blue flame had a hypnotic quality that seemed to pacify them all.

“We'll be dead from carbon monoxide,” Ian said, “but at least we'll be warm and it won't hurt as much as freezing to death.”

“I hear it actually feels pretty good by the time you're ready to die from the cold.”

“He doesn't look like he's enjoying it.”

The Russian moaned with every exhale. The ice had partly melted out of his beard, leaving him wet and matted. His eyelids were pinched into a shape that spoke of pain. When his eyes did occasionally flutter open, they were vacant. The pebble-sized blisters on his lips were filled with milky liquid. He would surely lose most of his nose. He took up one half of the tent. David sat at the back and minded the stove, while Ian sat at the other end, facing his partner. They had Ian's sleeping bag draped across them as a blanket. Out of the wind, with the three of them in the tent pressed against each other, David felt the python squeeze of the cold unclench.

“Ian, what's he doing here?”

“What do you think he's doing here?”

“He shouldn't be here,” David said. “He doesn't belong here.” David knew he wasn't really right in the head. The storm, his hypothermia, the stove gasses filling the tent—he knew his thoughts were insensible, nightmarish. They scuttled around the dark corners of his brain. He was not making clear sense out of the sudden appearance of this misshapen, pain-blistered face. It sickened him. He wanted to wish it away.

Ian shrugged. “Did you think you were the only one to ever hear of Yunshan? Hell, this is practically his backyard.”

Ian fed the first pot of lukewarm water to the Russian. He dribbled it into his mouth with a spoon until half the pot was gone. Then he mixed one of their four remaining oatmeal packets into the pot and fed that to him as well. David said nothing, though he could not tear his eyes away from that oatmeal.
One packet. That's all right. We can afford it. We're not Ethiopian. Not yet.

“But what's he doing
here
,” David said. “Alone. You know what we've climbed through to get here.”

“We haven't been able to see a damn thing all day. Maybe we traversed half the mountainside. Who knows where we are.”

“Bullshit. We must be in the third eye. How did he get here?” David's voice sounded accusatory, even to his own ears, though he did not mean it to be. Maybe he did.

“Well, maybe he's got seven friends frozen out there in the snow,” Ian said.

The next pot of water was hot, and Ian filled a bottle and placed it under the top of the sleeping bag and against the man's chest. Even though its grip had loosened, the cold still had David. A cupful of that hot water would be better than a Jacuzzi. He watched it disappear under the sleeping bag cover. The warmth liberated terrible odors: stale piss, flesh-rot. Occasionally, a spasm made the Russian's whole body clench. David could only imagine what could be happening in the man's extremities as his brain and nerves became reconnected. They hadn't seen his hands or feet—they'd left his gloves and boots on for fear of doing more damage than good.

Ian and David split the next pot of water to drink, and the plain warm water went down without touching David's thirst. On the outside, David felt damp and ice-crusted, but on the inside, he realized, he was stone dry. The next pot was for soup, and it seemed to take an age for the snow to melt, and fisheye, and boil. When the soup was finally ready, it tasted thin, bloodless, without the oil. David could tell he was fighting a losing battle against lethargy. He could feel himself sliding down.

A sharp, new odor reached David's flagging brain and brought him back to the surface. Ian nodded against the front corner of the tent.

“What's that smell?” David asked.

“What?”

“That smell, where's it coming from?” David reached out and unzipped his sleeping bag from around the Russian. The odor nearly made him gag. He pushed the Russian over on one side, ignoring the man's cries and Ian's commands to be gentle. Brown fluid seeped through the back of the man's long johns, the product of the relaxing of his rewarmed bowels.

“Goddamnit!” David yelled. The oatmeal, the nearly bursting tent, the longed-for rest now gone, his frozen fingers, the wasted stove gas, the snow still swirling inside their tent, and now this, his own sleeping bag beshitted. “Why are we keeping him? How are we going to go up if my sleeping bag is full of Russian shit!”

Ian stared, wide-eyed. “We're finished,” he said. “Don't you know that? We're done. Tomorrow we're taking him down.”

“He's already dead,” David said. “Look at him. You think he's going to live through forty rappels? Out there? He's not even going to live through the night. We'll be lucky if we do.”

“You want to just throw him out?”

“I want to keep going. We can leave him here in the tent. If he lives until we get back, we can talk about taking him down. Look at him. There's no reason to go down.”

“If you want to keep going,” Ian said, “you'll go on alone. Zip up his bag and get some sleep.”

The night passed slowly. With the stove off and the three of them motionless, the tent grew cold and frozen. It was less comfortable, even, than their ledges of the previous nights, because David had nothing to lean against. Every time he shifted position, ice fell from the patchwork of rime layering the walls and ceiling of the tent. He listened to the Russian's labored breathing and realized, with no small amount of self-revulsion, that he hoped that those gasps would stop. One after another, he found himself rooting against the next wheeze and disappointed when it came. It was horrible, and fascinating, but he could not stop it, could not help wishing that the man would desist here and now and relieve them of the burden (and that he could be there, and aware, as it happened). He thought, too, of Ian's suggestion that he go on alone. The longer the night stretched out before and behind him, the more seriously he entertained the notion.
Why not?
he thought.
It can't be any worse than what we've put behind us. Without a rope, without stopping for belays, I would travel so fast. I would float.
He could go up until he'd run out of
mountain. But somewhere in his mind, he recognized the implausibility of this course. He was not that strong. He had too little left. He wouldn't tackle Yunshan's crown alone.