Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  At first the sex was very, very good—in the hotel in Kathmandu, the lodge in Pokhara, even in the tea houses as they trekked up through the Dolpo, her energy buzzing on the cool, crystal air and the sunshine and the glasses of sugary milk chai and the exercise her body felt born for. And the eye-popping visuals she was taping. Not that she ever much liked Wade. Yes, he has the Olympic body and is handsome in the older way she prefers, with prematurely grey hair that looks terrific against his coppered skin, and he sports a solid, rhinocerine self-esteem that’s striking, almost touching, given his public fall and his private losses, and he remains the proud curator of his own personal hall of fame and either doesn’t know or doesn’t know why this antagonizes people. His unguarded cockiness in an age of canny PR makes Amaris feel almost reluctant now—an expert hunter training her sights on something lumbering and endangered, like a last mastodon.

  Several of her films have focused on a difficult outsider. She believes it’s only by chafing up against abrasive characters that you can agitate your fears and assumptions into the light of day, shed them and grow in useful directions. Most people—most of her acquaintances—instinctively seek out agreeable people as lovers and friends and business partners and creative collaborators, and who can blame them? Like the instinct for musical harmony, it’s perfectly natural. Yet harmony is conservative and you can only surprise and change yourself by diving into discord. She believes that face-on encounters with dissonant people—what she herself tries to be when confronted by the presumptuous—might force her audience to question themselves and their ideas.

  At any rate, making those films has changed her. As has her choice of some highly discordant lovers in the past decade. Each has left her more independent, stronger, smarter. So will Wade. She will not appear on screen, but her voiceover will casually refer to their involvement. Wade’s wife has recently divorced him, so the reference shouldn’t bother him. He’ll probably love it. Wade the horse. As for how it makes her look, she tells herself to forget it. Being hated isn’t what hurts your possibilities, the fear of being hated is what does. How he feels about her after the film’s release means little to her. She knows he’s twinning their mummy bags each night partly in hopes of exercising control over the story. Fair enough. As in real, unrecorded life—or the version of it she has arrived at—they’re using each other. Well, love with no fine print or provisos is a sentiment with wishful splashed all over it.

  These slopes lie in blue shadow but the hidden sun lasers light onto the pass and down the glacier. As she rests at a hook in the trail, she picks out the Tibetans, lit up distinctly, and the Chinese behind them. She hears a faint snapping she doesn’t recognize and decides it must be gunfire. She thinks of taking out her Canon and trying for a hand-held pan, but with her lungs heaving and her heart thudding its way up her throat, she’ll catch nothing with the zoom but a blur. There’s someone by the border stone, wearing black. Sophie Book. The girl should get back from there. She’s way too naive, too trusting. A faint maternal twinge helps push Amaris on, with her quaking knees, shrieking thigh muscles. Just a minute’s rest and her sweat is cold. Up here in the stratosphere, almost, when the sun goes, the temperature skydives like on some outer planet. Wade says that for climbers, above 25,000 feet or so is the “Death Zone.” To her, everything here is a death zone. She thought she’d love it, she was dying to hike up and climb and shoot, but there’s nothing growing or dwelling here, like in Antarctica. She can see the beauty—the naturally polarized light, fresh nuances in the spectrum of whites and blues, these monumental forms—but it’s the lifeless beauty of a tomb.

  An interface of light and shadow bisects the glacier lengthwise, sweeps over it with time-lapse swiftness, muffles it in dusk, while the slope she’s descending lights up again. The sun reappears straight in her eyes, a solar cymbal clash. Wade is down there, spidering through the rock debris at the edge of the glacier, her precious tripod over his shoulder. On the glacier now he lopes up the flagged trail into base camp, surprisingly close below.

  More faint sounds of gunfire, hollering.

  Her legs are themselves again, oddly revived.

  As she trots among the dozen scattered tents of base camp, Lew Book, up ahead, ducks out of the larger “control tent” and strides off, pulling a sweater over his shaggy grey-flecked hair. Now Shiva Gurung flaps out of the tent, waving Book’s medical kit and running after him. It’s the first time Amaris has seen Book in 911 mode. Sometimes he’s subdued, quietly serious, donning his glasses to examine a cut or a sprain, gauging his few words in a voice sounding disused, rusty and deep. More often he’s the heart of the party. She has never known anyone to change so fast in the vicinity of food, drink, company. He’s medium height, handsome in a weathered, rumpled way, pale green eyes, the whites very clear in his sundark face. He’ll enter the tent taciturn but then, smelling dal or ramen, wrapping his hands around a mug of chai, sitting on a camp stool by the Primus stove, he’ll unfold: cheeks flushing, hands and face unclamping as if in a photo sequence in retro order. Book aging backwards. Effusive vitality draws you in from the night, like a campfire or a packed cocktail lounge, and before long the Sherpas (always game for a party), the climbers, Shiva the Chef, Sophie Book and Amaris herself are all clubbed together in chatty rounds of stud poker or a two-board tournament of bagh chal. Even Wade will join in, though he always seems a touch distracted, as if trying to puzzle out just how he’s been deflected from the obsessive work of his climb. Or is it that he’s not the centre of attention here? Then again, neither is Book, who seems to moderate things, an instinctive impresario, so the limelight pivots round among the partiers—Book bantering inclusively, giving astute compliments, refilling mugs with coffee, milk chai, Nepali gin, once breaking out a bottle of decent Chianti he secretly packed up to base camp. She has seen how fast he’ll spot the agitation in Wade, or the skeptic’s edge in herself (she’s a loner more by professional will than inclination, but it’s a habit now and she starts to panic when spontaneous revelry tempts her from her work)—and he’ll strive to draw them out, draw them in, as if sensing in their reticence a threat to the group’s soaring mood. At first she figured he was a drunk, booze loosening his various valves as quick as a nitro tab under the tongue, but then a few times she watched him earlier in the day: Mingma Lama would pour gin into his own chai, but Book just stuck to chai. And still the circle leapt to life. At times Sophie would watch him with a mildly mortified, dubious look Amaris recalls from her own youth: the disillusionment of thinking a parent is donning a public face, as Amaris’s adoptive parents did constantly. But though Amaris is always game to debunk a phony, what she senses here is that Book, the social, sensual Book, isn’t faking. He thrives on groups. His own good mood is umbilically linked to the happiness of others.

  It’s the other Book, the high-minded humanitarian, she doesn’t quite buy.

  Ahead now, Shiva, in shorts and knee socks and a green Gurkha sweater, catches up to Book, gives him his kit and grips his other hand in the Nepali way as they stride together, almost running, toward the border. 4:26 p.m. Nice shot, a part of Amaris’s mind reflects, while the larger part is hurrying after them, her hands unzipping her parka and the inside sack she wears at her navel like an external womb, to keep the camera secure and warm.

  4:02 p.m.

  LEW BOOK AND KALJANG SHERPA sit playing bagh chal on a folding card table in the so-called control tent. They sip milky chai spiked with Snow Leopard gin while smoking two-rupee cigarettes—something Kaljang is always doing and that Book does mostly when he’s having a drink and when Sophie isn’t around. Right now she’ll be a few minutes’ walk away, at the edge of base camp, on the border, where she likes to sit sketching or writing and listening to her music.

  Beside the card table Shiva Gurung sits on a folding stool, watching their game avidly, as if Nepal’s national honour hangs on the outcome. He’s gripping the cracked handle of a skillet full of dry lentils, shaking them as if panning for gold. A
s the game nears its crisis—one tiger trapped, two goats eaten—his shaking takes on small tics and arrhythmias.

  Kaljang flicks the bangs out of his droll eyes. “If tigers win this next match, I receive your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

  “I doubt it,” Book says cheerfully.

  “Tigers are very hungry now.”

  “Sure, but the goats are unscrupulous.”

  Kaljang jumps a third goat and removes it from the board. “Does that mean similar to unsuccessful?” he deadpans.

  “Resourceful,” Book says. “No…cunning, full of tricks.” He tops up the young man’s mug with the eight ounce mickey. “Willing to do anything to win.”

  “Ah, but they’re smaller, the goats—the gin affects them more!”

  “Nah,” Book says briskly—though he hesitates with his next move, sensing that somewhere on the board he is missing some tiny, crucial thing. (That’s always what kills you.) “What’s a cocktail spread out over a herd?” he says, stalling. “Just loosens them up. These goats are in the zone, Kal. These goats are on their game.”

  In bagh chal four tiger-shaped pieces try to “eat” their prey—twenty smaller pieces in the guise of goats—by jumping them checkers-style, while the goats try to neutralize the tigers by surrounding them. Book needs to pin down a second tiger, soon. At this altitude, thinking a few moves ahead is hard. If he loses a fourth goat, the game is all but lost. If he loses a fifth, it’s over.

  The rattle of lentils, louder now, is like a drum roll before an execution.

  “Attention now!” Shiva tells Kaljang, who plucks up a tiger and pauses, exhaling smoke with cocky slowness, then raps it down decisively behind a stray goat on Book’s side of the board—right under Book’s nose. Book has been wholly focused on the main crisis on the other side of the board. How very like him. He shakes his head and groans.

  “Oh dear—too bad!” exults Shiva. (Book has defeated Kaljang just once, Shiva twice, but the Nepalis collectively mourn, debate and recriminate each time it happens.) Shiva adds something celebratory in Nepali, then quits shaking the lentils to tweak out a few black pebbles that have worked their way to the edge of the pan.

  “You can resign now, Doc,” says Kaljang, suavely relighting Book’s cigarette. “To spare the goats their final shame.”

  “You mean the tigers take prisoners?”

  “Why should they not?”

  “Besides, we might rally,” Book says. “Never discount the goats.” Squinting through the smoke of his cigarette, Book moves to block the threatening tiger. Shiva tops up his mug again. Book knows they oil him with gin partly in hopes that he’ll retaliate with his comic Nepali—really a random salad of Hindi and Nepali. He’s been posted in Nepal and India several times in the last few years and wherever he’s posted he picks up local phrases and mannerisms, though he only really performs them while at table, drinking tea, coffee or booze, playing cards or telling jokes.

  In July he was in Darjeeling, treating outcaste locals and exiled Tibetans, including several who’d recently fled their country, when he got the news about Sophie. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in trouble with the law, though in the past it was after protests—against an arms fair, nuclear power, the closing of a women’s shelter—and less serious. Book arranged to cut short his posting and return to Toronto, but not before he read a mass email about a climbing expedition seeking a base camp doctor. As Book flew home (if you could call it that: divorced now, growing distant from his daughter and son, he stayed in motels on his brief stints in town), it occurred to him that by taking the job and bringing Sophie back with him to Asia he could temporarily remove her from her troubles, her now ex-boyfriend and her manic texting and general stress, while allowing himself and the girl to reconnect. And they’d be in the mountains—an isolated base camp—where she could hike and sketch. He knew she was yearning to go to Asia and was passionate about the Tibetan cause and they’d be right on the border, so she could still feel politically engaged—which would matter to her, he knew. At the same time, she would be on a true retreat.

  That Amaris McRae is up here with them is a bonus he didn’t expect. He hasn’t seen her films, but he knows that her last one, about the alleged hypocrisies of a demagogic documentary filmmaker in the States, got up a stir. Now she and Sophie are spending a bit of time together, and Amaris is even talking about using a few of Sophie’s photos as stills in her film—a huge thrill for the girl. Amaris acts really different around Sophie. With Lawson, Book and the rest, she often speaks with a pre-emptive aggression, as if anticipating resistance or disrespect; with the girl, she’s like a slightly tart but affectionate young aunt. And while Book can tell she’s indifferent to Sophie’s earnest politics, she acts tolerant enough—though she keeps challenging Book himself about his own work.

  Book keeps his connection with Lawson civil but reserved. Not that the man will care. Book guesses he sees doctors on expeditions in the same way a ramrod colonel might see an army chaplain on a campaign: one extra gut to fill, but necessary for show and for the comfort of the weak.

  “Your cause is hopeless, Doc,” Kaljang says now. “Please resign.”

  Book sips his drink. “Still lots of goats on the hoof, Kal.”

  “The altitude is affecting them, I think.”

  “They’re mountain goats.”

  Kaljang draws on the roach of his filterless cigarette and butts out on the table next to the game. Shiva has set the skillet in his lap and is following the endgame with bugged eyes: Kal advancing his cutthroat tiger to the kill.

  The fifth goat falls.

  “It’s nature’s way,” Kaljang says, shaking his head in sham condolence, extending his right hand over the board.

  “Nice work, Kal.”

  As the two shake hands, Shiva asks Book, “You play against me, now, before I make the dal?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “And I be tigers?”

  “Number me among the goats.”

  “I’ll go check on Sophie,” Kaljang says, standing, “now that we two are betrothed.”

  “Tell her I did my best to save her.”

  Shiva Gurung is a dark, sun-dried little man with broomstick limbs, who, as a porter, can carry what appears to be several times his own weight. Over a bagh chal board, unlike the impulsive Kal, he’s a tentative, anxious plodder. The game starts slowly. The light is changing, the afternoon sun returning, transfusing the tent with its tranquil amber, the warm colour of bourbon. How lovely it makes the polished brass board and the small, shadowed tigers and goats! Shiva ponders his second move. Book stifles a yawn. He hears a sound. Distant echoes of a climbing axe smashing ice, he thinks, or rock. But no, he shouldn’t be hearing sounds from the mountain—there’s only snow at Camp One, and the climbers up there should be done for the day. He takes off his glasses, tilts his head. A voice crackles out of the handset radio holstered on Shiva’s hip. Shiva drops the tiger he’s holding, toppling two goats, and fumbles the radio to his face.

  “Come in?”

  Book hears every word Kaljang is saying to Shiva, Sophie’s voice in the background, her words unclear, the tone shrill. More of those snapping sounds. Book is on his feet before Shiva signs off.

  As he nears the border, his medical kit in one hand and Shiva holding the other, every stride changes the picture for the worse. Sophie is standing behind one of the prayer flag boulders, holding her cellphone camera over the top like a periscope. Kaljang’s hand is on her nape, his elbow flexed high as he tries to force her to duck down. Lobsang peering around the side of the boulder, yelling what sounds like sports field encouragement, and Jigme squatting on top of the boulder, his little earphones still in place. And Lawson: between Book and the boulder party the man stands with Amaris’s green tripod over his shoulder. He’s staring down the glacier, mouth ajar, arms slack at his sides. The strap slides off his shoulder and the tripod falls next to his boots with a dull crump. Book speeds up, more or less dragging Shiva Gurung,
who as usual refuses to liberate his hand.

  A little mob of ragged Tibetans comes lurching up the glacier, as if wading against a current or fighting a monsoon. The lead group, adults and children, is maybe a hundred metres off, while a second, larger group lags behind, lugging some burden. Book can imagine. The faint firecracker din he heard in the control tent and over Shiva’s radio goes suddenly louder, and louder still the sonic ricochet of those shots off the cliffs—a harsh, tearing sound, as if jet fighters were keening overhead. The men pursuing the fugitives are dropping to one knee to shoot, but they seem to be aiming high, muzzles angled steeply, warning shots, maybe because of the foreigners watching from the border. It’s a body they’re carrying, the slower Tibetans, two monks and two other men each holding a limb, while a man in a sheepskin coat bears in his arms what looks like a child. He’s falling behind. The soldiers screaming.

  “Wade!” Book calls as he walks behind Lawson, straight toward his daughter. “Let’s go, take cover!” He doesn’t look back to see if Lawson follows.

  “Papa,” she says—a form of the term she hasn’t used in years.

  “Your hand,” he tells her. “Get it down.”

  Kaljang has given up on Sophie and is gripping Jigme by the back of his parka to drag him off the top of the boulder.

  “I have to,” she says.

  “You have to keep down.”

  “Someone has to record this!”—and her blue eyes flare at him, earnest as a small child’s—long-lashed eyes so embedded in her face that even when she wears no eyeliner they look kohled, just as the hair falling across them is so black it seems dyed. Her mother’s eyes, her mother’s hair. A cramp in his throat stops his words. He kisses her cheek. Detaching himself from Shiva, he steps back the way he has come, to one side of the boulder, exposing himself, as if the best way to protect her is to offer a better target. Lawson is still out there, in his own exposed spot, though now he’s hunkered down. And now, as Book gapes, Lawson swivels on his haunches, turns his back on the action and holds a small camera out in front of him, getting shots of himself with the chase on the glacier in the background. Amaris is approaching blindly from the edge of base camp, her video camera at her face, feeling with her boots over the rough, dirty ice. No more firing. A thud as Jigme and Kaljang tumble to the ice together amid half-hysterical laughter.