Authors: Daniel Arnold
JUST BEFORE DAWN, Sam tossed off his sleeping bag. The Brits were long gone, already plunged into their war with history. Asleep, Sam had barely registered their departure in the middle of the night. He imagined them now, two bearded faces staring wide-eyed up into the unknown. He could feel their sweat freeze at the belays in the shadows on the immense north-facing wall. Sam found it uncomfortable to wake up rested and easy knowing that nearby, the two of them were working hard to stay alive. They had crossed over to a territory inhuman, and he was standing around inside a womb of milled wood. The air and floor were sharply cold, but Sam stayed barefoot and shirtless in defianceâof what, he couldn't say. He walked outside to piss off the porch into the stained snow below.
The mountain teeth in the first sunshine: big, sharp, erupting out of the earth and towering over the hut, tapering to points so slender Sam imagined balancing on their tops with one foot. Lower, closer mountains crowded forward and blocked his view of the Aiguille de la Flèche. A few cuts of steep, dark rock and curtains of ice hinted at
the beast rising just there over the edge. Shivering, Sam retreated to the hut and told Tyson to get his carcass out of bed.
They climbed rock that day, following a zigzagging crack system for twelve hundred feet up the Tomas Spur. They climbed well; they climbed fast. It was a good day, the kind of day when gravity lets go and the rock reaches out and shakes your hand with a firm grip. The sun kept them warm, but the rock stayed crisp. Sam hand-traversed the final knife ridge to the summit, pasting his climbing shoes to bare friction, looking down past his feet through an immense well of air all the way to the glacier below. Following, Tyson stood up and took the edge on tiptoe, arms raised like a wire walkerâbecause he could, because the stone was that good to them. The afternoon sun angled down and colored him gold, and Sam hooted and whistled from the summit like a spectator at the fair.
The top, a lightning-scarred anvil for the local thunderheads, allowed them just enough room to sit stuck together at the shoulder. They stared out at the surrounding peaks, which seemed built to shred the sky. Curling zephyrs and updrafts swam past, tugging the two climbers into space. On three sides, the ground fell away, stamped into flat two-dimensionality by the sheer distance down. On the fourth side, a notch connected them to the Azzu Massif, to which the Tomas Spur was really only a satellite. The Azzu dwarfed the Tomas to the west, but to the south, the Aiguille de la Flèche lifted its head high above them all.
The line was breathtakingânot like the Venus at the museum, breathtaking like being held underwater in the middle of a cold ocean. From east and west, two great planes of rock joined in the
center, the prow of a stone ship cutting through the earth. From far back, the prow looked straight, monolithic. Spit from the summit on a dead-calm day, and you'd dampen the ground right where you'd started. But when Sam pried into the details, trying to piece together the climb in his head, he saw cut-stone roofs, cresting waves of rock, stacked icicles like stands of inverted white pines dangling down the wall. The mountain pushed him further and further into space with every move.
“Crazy,” Tyson said. “Those Brits better not suck.”
Sam looked for the Brits but saw no sign of them. This meant nothing. The mountain opened for him like a Chinese box each time he looked closer. The Brits could have been hidden in a hundred places. Still, Sam would have liked to have caught a glimpse of the two, to give the mountain some scale and put a chink in its armor.
“Come on,” Tyson said. “We should go. Look at the sun.”
Eleven rappels toward the shadows leaking from the base of the mountain took them back down to the Gesner. They slid down their ropes, letting gravity reclaim them, the work of the day undone in lengths of 150 feet. Then down the glacier and up the tatty rope and back into the hut, where they had food and goose down and protection from the twilight winds. Sam sat on the porch an extra few minutes, feet dangling over the glacier, watching the late sun drench the mountains in color. It had been a good dayâa good day, but not a proud day, not the kind of day that added enough coal to the fire of satisfaction for it to be carried through the valleys and cities.
The last light leaked away slowly, and Sam spent some time cleaning the hut. He cleared the cobwebs and spider husks from the
corners. He wiped out the copper washbasin. He felt like an archaeologist. Restoring the hut's interior made it easier to see the climbers who'd been there. Maybe the walls would tell him about Zapelli. The night before, had the man been calm, jittery, wild? What had he done to push himself over the Styx and off the map? With his pocketknife, Sam pried candle wax off the walls and beams, uncovering the nail-less joinery and the glow of the wood. Beautiful craftwork, clean, solid.
“It's not too late,” Tyson said. “You could warden the hut. Hang out your shingle, have hot dinner going, collect dimes or francs or whatever. Become the old man of the mountain. Who'd bother chasing you away?”
“My cooking's lousy. I'd eat bark if it had calories.”
“Good point. Nickels then.”
Darkness settled, and the temperature dropped. Tyson brought out his pack to find some warm clothes. He also produced a plastic bag of reefer and rolling papers. He shrugged at Sam. “It's not wine, but I bet the Brits will appreciate a little smoke. One way or the other.”
“If they make it back tonight.” Sam felt antsy when he thought about the Brits facing the oncoming night. It was one thing to watch darkness spread from behind wood and glass and another to be up there, enveloped by the black cold, preparing for a night standing in nylon slings, hoping the relentless drip-drip-drip of heat lost to the void won't bleed your body dry.
“It's just enough to go around,” Tyson said. “I'll save it.”
With full dark in the hut, there wasn't much to do besides eat and go to sleep, but Sam delayed both. The wind gusted past outside. Twice Sam went out to check that the rope hadn't blown out of reach.
“This is a side of you I've never seen,” Tyson said. “You're like a mother hen.”
Sam dropped back into a chair. “I feel lazy sitting here. Those two are sticking out their necks, and I'm eating dinner off a table.” He snapped his fingers in the air. “Garçon! Where's my baguette and claret?”
“Hey, man, I was stoked about today. Don't ruin it with your big ideas.”
Toward midnight, the door banged open, and two men entered the hut, strangers at first, then barely recognizable. Both of them looked bewildered by the candlelight. They seemed to sag, all the elastic given out between muscle and skin. They dropped their packs and headlamps by the door without a downward glance. Nigel collapsed into the chair on Sam's left, and James took the one to his right.
“So?” Sam said, after a moment. He'd thought the answer would be obvious, but instead they just looked evacuated.
“So what?” Nigel snarled.
“Did you make it or not?” Tyson said.
“Of course not,” Nigel said. “It's impossible.”
“Impossible?” Sam asked, with visions of a shrunken little Italian man grinning and pounding on the bar for another round.
“Absolutely,” James said. “Nearly dead twice, no progress made. Can't be done.”
Sam watched the two of them uncoil in their chairs, the sap rising through their veins. They seemed to be reinflating, as if the walls and candles had summoned their souls back into their bodies. He marked the signs. Failed or not, they'd crossed the line, hadn't they?
Seen the dragon and returned. What would that do to a person? He watched their eyes relight. The blank inwardness they'd walked in with burned off like a fog.
“Did you two wait up for us?” James said. “Tell you what, that's better than my last girl.”
Tyson ignored him and plopped his magic bag on the table.
“Now tell me, lad,” Nigel said, “and don't be false. Is that her Royal Highness?”
“None other.”
“Well,” Nigel sighed. “I always was a believer in the monarchy.” He reached for the bag, but too slow, and a pair of crooked hands from the opposite direction snatched it out from under his hooks. Nigel roared and leapt full length across the table, sending candles cartwheeling and flickering, his hands reaching for his partner's throat.
“Fuck, Nigel, are you crazy?” James hollered before his chair tipped back and Nigel landed on top of him on the floor. They rolled twice over with the bag lost somewhere between them, until Nigel leapt back to his feet with a tightly rolled joint clenched miraculously, like a magician's denouement, in his teeth. James remained on his back, making a honking noise through his misshapen nose that Sam identified as laughter.
Tyson handed Nigel a candle, and he lit up and took a puff. “Cheers, lads,” he said. James, still lying flat and honking, built his own joint on his chest, and Nigel leaned over and lit his partner's smoke. “Quickly now, watch the wax, there you go.” James propped his head up with one fist and took in three slow drags. Then
he jumped to his feet and strutted over to the packs they had dropped by the door. He grabbed his two ice tools and one of Nigel's, and spun them in the air, spike over adze, his hands in constant motion, the end of his joint glowing orange with each inward breath.
“Better'n a juke-box, ain't he?” Nigel said. “Put in a penny, and he'll give you an hour's entertainment.” The ice axes spun and flashed in the candlelight, and James spun underneath them, catching one behind his back, under his shoulder, between his legs. Nigel hummed a marching tune and clapped his hands in time to the beat of the twirling axes, while Tyson flapped his arms and shuffled out some sort of bent-legged dance, hopping up and down.
“Here,” Tyson said, “throw one to me.”
An axe flew toward his head, and he plucked it out of the air. In that curious way he had of transfiguring himself from loose-limbed awkwardness to graceful control, a moment Sam had witnessed every time they went climbing, Tyson took two measured steps toward the west end of the hut, then turned and threw the axe back across the room, over the empty chairs, and pick-first into the opposite wall, where it stuck with a knife-thrower's precision at eyelevel in a pine timber.
Maybe if he'd spoken up right away, Sam could have altered the course of the night, because he saw in that first moment of speechlessness not so much the destination as the shape of what was to come. But by the time he was ready to say
What the fuck, Tyson?
or to punch his partner in the arm, Nigel had already bellowed, “That was brilliant!” and grabbed the other two axes from James to try his hand. Looking back later, Sam wondered if that moment's pause had
come because he himself had enjoyed too well the puncture of the axe through the hut wall, had found the flying splinters of old, gold wood too satisfying.
They were all terrible, except for Tyson, who could stick the same spot every time. But Nigel didn't seem to care. He hurled the axes against the wall over and over again, ignoring Tyson's suggestions as to how to make them stick. Eventually, he took a seat under the scarred wall and lit another joint. But he jumped back to his feet before the doobie was half gone and said, “James! Isn't it cold in here?”
“It's a bit arctic.”
“Well, shake a leg, then, and fetch me my north-wall hammer.”
The hammer was in a rucksack, and James took it out and handed it to Nigel, who stepped over to the wall that divided the hut in two and brought the hammer crashing down. For a moment, Sam thought the timbers might have the laugh and the hammer would bounce back into Nigel's face. Instead, the metal head burst through the panels, and Nigel bellowed, and white lines of spit stuck in his beard. Sam's blood was up, but the smoke was in his head, and rather than tackle Nigel and pin him to the floor, he manned the stove and stacked the shards inside it and used a candle to set the old wood ablaze, while James smashed chairs into kindling and Nigel and Tyson carved up the walls.
II
THE SUMMER SUN drifted south toward the horizon, and the air grew cold teeth that bit down into the mornings and evenings. Sam
and Tyson made big plans for big climbs but always ended up on friendly routes instead. Tyson didn't seem to notice. After finishing a climb early, he would go to town and drink wine dregs from abandoned glasses with the waiters behind the café, or go to the patisserie where the baker's pretty daughter gave him day-olds, and a smile, for free. When the ice froze blue and hard in the couloirs, Tyson headed home to California.
Sam stayed. He'd come into the mountains of his dreams, and he felt he hadn't reached them yet. Like in a dream, they were always on the horizon. Even from a summit, he never felt he had found the climb he was looking for, the line that needed so much from him that it changed his words, his way of speaking about what had happened between the bottom and top of the mountain. Alone, the woods and wind were louder, and at first he chattered to himself to dampen the noise, but gradually he learned to still his tongue and let the sounds bury him. Sam's visa expired and still he stayed, and the winter covered the mountains in snow.
Sam felt his body turning to rails and stones, his skin stretching tight, a months-long metamorphosis fueled by cold air, work, scant food. He lived behind some trees in the prelude valley to the mountains, steep hills rising up on all sides, the sharp quills of the real mountains spiking the air above. He had a pull-up bar hung from a branch and a sheet of plastic lifted from a construction site that covered his little camp. For the first week, he worried he'd be rousted in the dark by flashlights and dogs, but the gendarme never came, and the expressions of the people he passed on the dirt trails and narrow cobbled lanes remained impenetrable.