Above All Else

by Dana Alison Levy

  Paul slows to wait for me.

  “Can you believe this is really happening? Just being in Kathmandu is a dream come true, and we haven’t even gotten close to the mountains yet!” He grins. “If only I could go back and tell my sad, bullied fourth-grade self that I’d be heading off to climb Mount Everest someday. Though maybe I should thank the jerks who made me so miserable. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have run into the mountains every chance I got.”

  I put an arm around him. “I hate that anyone was mean to you. If you want, I’ll fly back to Salt Lake City and beat them up. Or beat up their kids. Whatever.”

  He laughs. “Rose the Avenger. Thanks for the offer, but I think sending the article headlined ‘Acclaimed Psychiatrist Aims for the Summit, Dedicates his Climb to LGBTQ Youth’ to my alumni newsletter will allow enough gloating. Besides, that’s all in the past. I need to—”

  “If you sing ‘Let It Go,’ I swear…” I side-eye him. “Please. No.”

  “It’s a great song!” His smile deepens. “I’m just really, really happy to be here.” He looks around. “Hard to believe we’re only a few minutes from the hotel. This is a different world.”

  “The real different world is when you get outside the tourist area,” Finjo says. “But today we’ll stay in Thamel and get our shopping done.”

  We nod obediently because that’s our only option whenever Finjo tells us what to do. The bossiness continues unabated. Still, as he shepherds us forward, barking in Nepali to the map sellers who are encroaching, I can’t help slowing to stare. The streets are choked with cars and mopeds and the occasional cow, and the sidewalks have even less room, with tables of Buddha statues, prayer bowls, incense burners, and—oddly—old American DVDs for sale. Dust, thick and lung-punishing, hangs over the streets in a cloud, dimming the sun as though smoke from a fire were blowing. Adding to the dust is real smoke from storefronts that aren’t stores but, instead, tiny makeshift restaurants with smoky grills that smell of delicious meat. No tourists stop; only crouching Nepali men grabbing a quick lunch. I can’t help staring wistfully.

  Finjo catches my eye. “No street food, ever. Okay? It will make you sick, and no getting sick before we climb.” He looks fierce.

  I nod, filming the street scene as I walk and nearly knocking over a rack of mountaineering maps. I’m taller than a lot of the men here, and the women only come up to my chest. I feel like a giantess laying waste to a village as I try not to trash the careful displays.

  “Oops! Here, I wanted to get a few maps,” Paul says. He has already stopped to buy an ornate Gurkha knife, a hand-hammered brass bowl, and some carved figurines. We’ve only gone around three blocks from the hotel—I can’t imagine how he’s going to get this stuff home. Now along with the maps he grabs more post cards, some to mail back to the kids he sees in the hospital, some for Drew, his husband, who will meet us here in Kathmandu when we return, along with Tate’s and my families. I think about being back here in close to three months, having stood on the summit of Mount Everest. I try to imagine Mami’s arms around me, her face when I display the photo proving that I held a picture of her at the top.

  My head throbs a little from the noise and smog, and it’s hard to see where I’m going while I film, but I keep at it, narrating the sights for Mami in the brightest voice I can muster. I’ll have to edit before I send it to them. They don’t need to hear me swearing when I realize I’ve stepped in a giant pile of cow manure.

  We’re stopped again, this time while Paul looks at a patchwork skirt for his niece. I pull Tate forward, trying to get him to stop staring at the wall of a sketchy little pharmacy. He appears to be reading an ad about male enhancement.

  “Seriously? You know girls don’t care about that stuff nearly as much as you think,” I say, dragging him along to where Paul is finishing his transaction. “We always say, ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the—’ ”

  “Oh, shut up. I was…you know what? Never mind.” He moves as though to give me a wet willy, but I duck, keeping my ears far away.

  It’s a comfortable seventy degrees or so, and I’m too warm in my long pants and boots. But I hadn’t thought to pack any sandals, which was dumb. Kathmandu’s at the same latitude as Florida—the cold only comes when we get up into the mountains. Still, I fit in here. Pretty much everyone in this part of town is decked out in climbing clothes. Tate snorts at a particularly geared-up blond guy who looks ready to start scaling a peak.

  “What the hell? What’s he going to do? Boulder up that two-story building?” he asks.

  “He’s just excited,” I say. “Like us.” But my voice makes it a question. I want to be excited, but I’m still so tired it’s hard to think of anything other than sleep.

  Tate doesn’t answer.

  “Hey,” I press. “We are excited, right?” I knock lightly on the side of his head. “Right? You home in there?”

  Tate swats my hand away. “Sto-ooop!” he fake whines. “You’re messing up my hair!”

  I laugh but keep staring at him. “Yeah? All good? You’ve been super quiet all day. And yesterday.”

  He nods. “All good. Still a little zonked.”

  I nod but keep looking at him. Tate notices and shoves me.

  “I promise. Things are fine. I’m deliriously excited. Orgasmically excited. Radioactively—” He starts to spin around, Sound of Music–style, and almost knocks over a table of brass singing bowls.

  “Fine!” I laugh, relieved. He is back. Endless-energy-constant-optimism Tate. The tiny knot of unease I hadn’t really noticed dissolves. Normally Tate’s bad moods are epic, more tantrums than moods, and they never last long. This quiet “just tired” attitude since we arrived in Nepal weirded me out a little and made me realize how much I count on him to keep our energy up.

  We move slowly up the street.

  “Did you see the poster?” he asks, after a minute.

  “About male enhancement? Dude, I am not the person to talk to about this,” I say.

  “Dumbass. Next to it, for the missing climber.”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t notice. What did it say?”

  He shrugs, shouldering through the crowd. At six feet, three inches, Tate looms even higher than I do. I follow along easily.

  “Tate?” I ask, trying to slow him down.

  “Nothing. It was nothing. A Dutch dude last seen two weeks ago, heading toward Annapurna 1. I don’t know why they bother putting up signs. If he hasn’t been found by now, he’s not going to be,” he says, catching up to Jordan and Paul, who are standing outside a restaurant that Finjo has deemed acceptable for lunch.

  I don’t know what to say. Of course it’s dangerous, climbing mountains. We know this.

  “Tate…” I start, but I trail off.

  “It’s fine. It’s too bad, that’s all.” He turns to me, his grin bright and real in his stubble-covered cheeks. “Hey, did I tell you? It was on CNN in the lobby this morning: a dog summited Everest!”

  I blink at the change of subject, then scowl.

  “That’s bull. You totally made that up! Who’s going to bring a dog twenty-nine thousand feet up a mountain! Humans can barely survive it, and most of them are wearing oxygen masks.”

  Tate takes his hand, puts it over his heart. “Scout’s honor. It was a rescue dog. With its own tiny O2 canister hookup specially designed for him by a group of NASA technicians.”

  I look at him, skeptical. His brown eyes open wide, looking innocent. He shrugs.

  “Okay, I made up the part about NASA, but the rest of it is true. Seriously, I saw it on the news. Ask Finjo.” He turns and taps Finjo on the shoulder. “Didn’t a dog summit Everest this week?”

  Finjo snorts. “No summit. It was just to Base Camp. It was a Sherpa dog.”

  “That makes more sense,” I say, comforted that I ha
ven’t been beaten to the summit by a canine.

  “But the headline read ‘First Dog to Summit Mount Everest!’—How is EBC a summit? It’s not even eighteen thousand feet! Middle-aged tourists go there all the time.” Tate snorts. “False advertising.”

  “Well, eighteen thousand feet is still something,” I say. “Especially for a dog, I guess. After all, most mountains stop at that height. It’s just that Everest starts there.”

  I glance over at Tate. We joke about the climb a lot, but we haven’t talked about what it’s really going to be like. Probably because—even with all the books and documentaries and live, in-real-time blogs—we don’t really know. We don’t know what it will take, only that it will challenge us in ways we’ve never been challenged before. That’s the part of climbing I love best, solving a puzzle that’s unfolding in front of me. The part I like least is the amount of time it takes, time that was increasingly hard to find as high school got harder and harder. Time that Mami had to remind me I owed to climbing, to our grand Everest plan. Time that I often gave all too grudgingly.

  But everything is different now. Everest is unlike anything we’ve ever done, and Mami can’t be here, but I can. I itch to start climbing, to push away the Dread and concentrate on the work ahead. I can’t worry about Mami, or about anything, when I’m climbing. And right now that’s exactly what I want.

  All around us, Kathmandu roils and bustles, but I barely notice. Instead I’m seeing a route up through snow and ice, Tate beside me, roped in. We’ve climbed so many mountains together; maybe Everest will be just another peak. Maybe. But I can see it so clearly in my mind: me and Tate, arms around each other for the expected photo at the summit, sending it across the world to Mami in real time. Need like fire burns in me to do this, to be this.

  Millions of tourists flock to Nepal every year, and most of them are there to gaze on Mount Everest. Getting to Everest Base Camp takes less than two weeks of walking—not climbing or doing anything technical—and doesn’t even have a view of the mountain, since it’s so close. It’s unimaginable to me, really. The idea of traveling so far and paying so much money to walk up and see the side of a glacier where climbers pitch their tents. The prize isn’t there, among the junk left behind by the expeditions. The prize is at the top.

  Chapter Four:

  Tate

  (Four Months Earlier) January 5

  Paradise, Mount Rainier, Washington

  5,400 feet above sea level

  It’s a perfect climbing day, if brutal icy winds, frozen eyelashes, and mild frostbite can be part of perfection. On Rainier in winter, it definitely can be. It’s day one of our winter summit attempt; we’ll make camp in a few hours and wake at midnight to push for the top. I grin, even though nobody’s around yet. This is my happy place. I adjust my earbuds under my helmet and wait for the others to catch up.

  Rose, when she gets to me, looks a little less pumped. “Argh! I think I’m in worse shape now than I’ve ever been! I’m sucking wind already.” She takes a few deep breaths, and she groans.

  “You’ve been slacking, Keller. I told you to keep training with me at Rockface. Time for beast mode.” I keep my voice easy, trying not to sound like I’m saying I told you so. But I’m totally saying it. She was so busy this fall with her millions of extracurriculars and honors classes and volunteer hours, all laser-pointed at getting her into Yale, that her climbing time definitely took a hit. It’s fine—I can usually find someone to partner up with at the gym or even for a day trip into the mountains, but Rose is kidding herself if she thinks she can blow off training and zoom up Mount Everest in a few months. I glance at her, and her mouth’s smashed together, which is Rose code for pissed off, usually at herself. So I lay off.

  “At least you get to look at this view while you catch your breath. That doesn’t suck, right?” I say, gesturing around me.

  Below us, ribbons of white and fading-purple mountain peaks blaze in the late afternoon sun. I wave my hands around like a game show host or something, and finally Rose grins. So far we’ve barely climbed. We’re just hauling ass up the trail. There are hikers and skiers and all kinds of outdoorsy types who have no intention of spending the night at 10,000 feet and leaving at midnight for the crux of the climb—a rocky and wind-scoured cliff. Suckers. They’re missing the good stuff. The older we’ve gotten and the more we climb, the more it becomes the best part of my day, my week, my year. Unlike Rose, I’m not really looking for five hundred other things to do every minute of the day. Especially now that Everest is finally—finally—in our sights.

  Partly to keep moving and partly to keep from bitching more about training to Rose, I bend down to make a snowball, and the next time she’s looking all gooey-eyed at the view, I pelt her on the back of the head.

  “Oh, it is ON!” She spins and starts hurling snow so fast her arms look like those cartoon circles. I duck, then figure it’s easier to put her in the snow than the snow on her and pile-drive her. We both go down right as Dad and Maya join us. Maya used to lead, every single time, but lately whatever bug she’s fighting keeps her slower than the rest of us. She tries to smile when she reaches us, but her hands are on her knees, and she’s breathing hard.

  “Tate! Enough with the games! This isn’t exactly a playground.” Dad is level-orange annoyed, despite the fact that we’re on a plateau that is literally as safe as a playground. Probably safer, since there’s none of that crappy mulch that always gets stuck everywhere.

  “Chill out,” I say, trying to get snow out of the neck of my jacket. Rose gestures for me to bend down and brushes it out, then I do the same for her. “We’re all good. According to Rose’s master plan, which is never wrong, we’re still fine to get to Muir Camp by four thirty p.m. to set up. Rosie, I swear you have a bright future in trail guiding if architecture doesn’t work out.”

  Dad snorts. “I’m sure she’s been banging away at AP courses for four years so she can haul tourists up mountains. No, I suspect we’ll be reading about her in either Fast Company or Architectural Digest, or both. I know you’re holding out to get off the early decision waitlist for Yale, Rosie, but you’ll have plenty of options. You, on the other hand, buddy…Well, hopefully we’ll get some good news in the next few months. I hope your personal statement and recommendations are enough to let them see what you’re actually capable of.”

  Maya and Rose both start talking at the same time.

  Maya says, “Jordan, let’s enjoy the view and worry about the future later,” while Rose bursts out, “I’m sure schools will be all over him! Tate’s an incredible artist and designer. He’s a lot more likely to be famous than I am. The stuff he designs is real genius!”

  I do love to design stuff, though I don’t think it falls into genius range. First with Legos when we were little kids, now with fancy software (though let’s be real: Legos are still completely dope). Somehow my whacked-out ADHD brain settles into some kind of holding pattern when I’m working on these kinds of projects, and I can totally focus. Hyperfocus, according to Jimmy the Shrink, and one of the reasons ADHD people can go on to greatness. I’m not counting on greatness; I’d settle for consistently decent.

  Dad shakes his head and smiles a tight smile. “You two—maybe you should have written Tate’s personal statement.” But he stops. Maya changes the subject, and the two of them examine a crampon that has a busted strap. Maya’s had my back forever, trying to tamp down the constant stream of Tate-Do-Better-Tate-Just-Concentrate-Tate-Can’t-You-Please-Just-Put-Some-Effort-Into-It.

  Now she grins at us, her smile like Rose’s. “Last chance for photos. The cold is draining the battery something fierce. Better make it good!”

  She points the camera toward us, and I immediately lean over and pretend to lick Rose’s face.

  “Don’t lick my zipper! Remember what happens to a tongue on metal in this cold.”

  We both laugh. “Remember the ski lif
t?” I say. “Dad, you kept saying, ‘Yank it off, son! Come on, we’ve got to get off the lift!’ And I was all, ‘Uh-uh!’ ” I mime shaking my head with my tongue stuck to the metal bar in front of me.

  “They had to stop the lift and pour the lift guy’s coffee on it,” Dad sighs. “What a fiasco.”

  Maya looks at the sky. “We should keep moving. It’s going to get dark fast, and we want to be well set up at camp by then.”

  The others agree, and we start moving again, a straight line of bulky bodies against the white of the mountain. Everyone’s moving slower now. It’s the slow, slogging parts that I hate.

  Rose calls back to Dad. “I saw your email. Do you have all our flight details for Kathmandu yet? I still haven’t really wrapped my head around how soon it is.”

  “Final flight info arrived a few days ago. We change planes in Seoul. Our flight to Seoul leaves early. I think it leaves at seven, which means—”

  “Ugh, we have to get there at five in the morning! Which means getting out the door at four. That’s brutal.”

  “Sorry, Rosie, we need to be there by four thirty or so,” Dad says.

  “Well, that’s. Just. Wonderful.” Rose makes her voice extra cranky, and we laugh.

  “Weeks without a shower? No problem. Dehydrated food? Check. Hanging from a cliff face? She’s good. But no waking up early…. That’s our Rosie.” Dad turns to Maya. “When they were younger, did you ever need to separate them in the mornings? When Rosie used to sleep over, I’d have to take Tate out to play in the park because otherwise he’d bug her until she either cried or punched him.”

  I do an accurate impression of my younger self: “Rose; hey, Rose; hey, Rose, are you awake? Hey, Rose, are you awake? Hey, wake up! Are you awake? Oh, sorry, did I wake you?”