Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  You can see now why Murloe and Lawson both succumbed to the mountain’s spell. It’s hypnotic, unearthly. The longer you stare, the more it seems a refuge above all human borders and distinctions and this constant dialogue of violence. Up there, he’d hoped, he and Sophie could step away from trouble and karma for a while.

  At least the girl herself is still safe up there.

  “How far do you think they’re taking us?” Amaris asks from behind him, where she’s wedged between the injured nun and the man with the sleeping girl nested on his lap.

  “I think Drongpa,” he says. “It’s the closest city. There’ll be a hospital there, and we should be able to call the embassy. But this road…I don’t know. I’d have thought we’d go along the river.”

  “Well, I’ll be giving them an earful,” she cuts in, as if letting him finish might make his doubts a reality. “This captain, or whatever, is going to wish …”

  “Zhao—he’s a lieutenant. Listen, that was brave of you, squatting there …”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Courage usually comes down to that,” he says. “But what I mean is—”

  “It’s just my bladder, Lew, not some noble choice! I thought you’d call for a medical stop there.”

  “There wasn’t time, we’ve got to get this man to an ICU. But what I mean is—you need to be a bit more careful.”

  “Well, it’s not like they’re going to shoot us, Lew! This Zhao probably still hopes I’ll turn out to be some Mata Hari, but I’ve got him thinking now. And you’re white.”

  “But they won’t hesitate to shoot at these folks, and we’re with them.”

  “For now.”

  “You should close your eyes, Amaris. You must have walked eighteen hours in the last twenty-four. I was just lounging at base camp till sunset.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Do you want another hit of Diamox? We’re still up pretty high here.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The nuns are talking over each other—no, praying, chanting the same words, but out of sync. The widow weeping, the hard-faced guard hectoring the giant one, Norbu muttering to his friend in the parka and toque and now grimly tapping fists with him. Music thudding. An anxious cacophony.

  “Why did you have to do this, Lew? Cross that border?”

  He isn’t sure if she has forgotten that she made her point last night or is in documentary mode, pursuing an answer. Before he can speak, she adds, “My job is to record things, not get taken hostage. That footage could have made a big difference to this…this whole crisis. Now it’s gone.”

  “Would your footage have made a difference to him?”

  “As if we can save everyone!”

  “But I have to act as if maybe I can.”

  “Right, I knew it, you’re one of those messiah types who want to parachute in and rescue everyone and get credit, and half the time you just—it just makes the trouble worse. Like my adoptive parents, always interfering in every …” Untypically she loses her course, seems unsure. The Tibetans and the guards are all watching.

  He says, “Maybe you’re right about the border.”

  “Why are you agreeing with me, Lew—don’t you ever want to fight?”

  “For one thing, the media’s going to focus on the lost filmmaker and humanitarian doctor from Toronto, instead of on these people.”

  No reply. “Psycho Killer” is on. He and Nika used to dance to these songs back when they were in medical school. How simple life seemed before he realized he owed something back to the world. (He gropes in his kit for the blood pressure cuff.) Book is a bon vivant infected with conscience; if he could forget that he’s urgently needed, in any number of places, he might still, even now, dance and eat and drink and sing and socialize and make love forever without ennui, unlike some of his colleagues—sombre introverts who, if they couldn’t find enough victims to save, would have to invent them. Book would rather be mixing drinks for his patients, dealing cards. We were made to get along, to be together, and it’s a truth that’s medically attested: love and dance and connection strengthen every bodily system, while isolation, rage and sadness poison them with cortisol.

  How well he knows both opposing states. He must be saturated with poison after his years of crisis postings, especially the last dozen. He wonders whether the old, social him is now anything more than a role he occasionally reprises, hamming it up, trying to keep the manic encores rolling and hold the other stuff at bay.

  He billows Lhundup’s coat out around the shoulder and applies the Velcro cuff. Through his stethoscope he strains to hear and count over the road’s roar. Blood pressure still low, though it hasn’t dropped further. He removes the cuff, points at the patient’s waist and says, “Norbu?” Norbu aims the penlight as Book lifts the crusted blanket. Book nods, relieved the clamp is holding, though he doubts there’s enough blood left in the man for another serious hemorrhage. The truck gears down. They’re climbing now. Behind them a tricolour vista: burnt earth, white mountains, blue sky. Above the desert a high pitch of the Kyatruk glacier glows, maybe thirty miles away but seeming much closer. The truck levels out and crunches to a stop. They seem to be on a barren hill. Debris like tumbleweed scurries across the road. Amaris twitches and her eyes shoot open.

  “Hi!”—it’s Palden, clanking open the tailgate—“we arrive at the base, Lewis!”

  “Where’s Drongpa?” Book asks, almost shouting, the music still throbbing out of the cab. “Is this it?”

  “It’s the base!”

  “Drongpa?”

  “Pardon me? No Drongpa here!”

  The guards clomp down, the scrawny giant flopping with fatigue.

  “We need a hospital,” Book says. “Where’s the lieutenant?”

  “It’s not possible today. Tomorrow, maybe possible. Let’s get off, please!”

  The Tibetans filing out. Amaris takes one of the young nun’s arms over her shoulder and, teamed with the older nun, helps her down off the tailgate.

  “Don’t worry,” says Palden in his earflap cap, with his imp’s rictus, “we have a doctor!”

  “Here at the base?”

  “Yes, of course! It’s yourself!”

  The sun has been up for some time. Sophie’s hood is back off her head, her parka hangs open and she holds her daypack limply over her shoulder by one strap. The downhill grade barely keeps her feet clumping along. Ahead, at the trail’s end, where this valley opens onto the desert plain, a concrete building. It doesn’t look big enough, but they must be in there, all of them. Smoke twines up from the chimney pipe. Beyond the building and the parked ATVs—which she heard in the night whenever the wind died down—the plain looks too wide to cross, though a shadowy road, hardly distinct from the desert floor, snakes to the east.

  “Finally,” she breathes.

  As she draws close, she wonders if she should announce herself and approach with hands clasped on top of her head, like in a movie. The low window facing her is barred with four rusty iron slats. Maybe everyone is asleep, jammed together like the refugees on the floor of the control tent—though a guard or two must be awake. She lobs a greeting ahead of her, softly, “Hi,” like a pebble tossed at a window. It sounds pathetic. “Hello?” she tries. She can see inside now, dimly. Two men asleep on cots along the far wall, dark blue tunics and black toques hooked on the wall above. A small barrel stove.

  She leans close to the window. Just two more men asleep beneath it, to either side. That’s it.

  She squats down under the window and lowers her face into her hands and tries to think. If there were anything in her stomach, she would throw it up.

  No feeling in her legs as she walks past the ATVs, not even trying for silence now, boots flapping a slow, defeated beat, fuck it, fuck it. She stands at the start, or end, of the road. And what the fuck now. He always used to be close by when things went wrong or she felt weak. Her head droops, her torso begins shaking as if jerked by electric shocks. Once
he told her that a bad shock can make the muscles clench so powerfully they shatter bone, and that’s how this feels. Her ribs are cracking. I’m going to kill him when I find him.

  A voice calls out and she turns around, her vision blurry. She swabs her eyes with her sleeve. In the doorway there’s a guard in a white undershirt and blue trousers, barefoot. She returns his stare. He ducks back inside. She spins and runs up the road, her pack jouncing on one shoulder, then she veers left across the gravel moonscape toward the ravine that she saw from back up on the trail, the river cutting down into the desert floor. She could still go back, ask him for help, she’d been about to approach the guards, possibly, she thinks, it’s no longer clear, but here she is, just running. The voice hollers. She glances back. He now wears his blue tunic, as if he felt it was important to be officially dressed for whatever comes next. He holds his small machinegun aimed at the ground. He yells again. Her legs are light, flying, and the river isn’t far. She always could run. She and her father trotting in the ravines along the Don River for half an hour, longer, with Bones, the collie cross she’d loved in an earlier, perfect life. An engine yowls behind her like a waking chainsaw. At the ravine’s lip she hardly slows. It could be a cliff edge for all she can see, but she runs straight over it and steeply down a gravel slope in a few giant, sliding steps, like running down a dune. Her small pack flies loose and she lets it go.

  The bank at the bottom is a narrow flood plain and she runs along it, along the churning river, outpacing the current. This urge to run and this running fill her mind and banish all other thought. She is pure, panicked flight. No sounds of pursuit over the gush of the current and the blood thudding in her skull—then the air behind her fills with a whine. She looks back: an ATV edging over the ravine’s lip like a large, awkward predator, trying to pick its way down. The hungry eyes of its headlights. The engine surges, the machine bucks forward. She keeps watching, baffled, her legs still pumping beneath her as if part of a separate animal. The guard seems to be performing some gymnastic feat, handstanding on the handlebars of the machine as it thumps diagonally down the ravine’s face, now tipping sideways, the man’s grasp coming free, one hand and the other and he’s tumbling midair as the machine flips and rolls. It seems the two must somehow reunite, magically completing the stunt, the driver deftly back in the saddle, but he falls out of sight behind the machine, which somersaults twice to a clunking halt, upright on the riverbank, a wheel in the shallows.

  At last she stops running, stands breathing. Behind the machine, in the shallows, a hand flutters, as if beckoning her. The animal in her aches to sprint on, but it’s not an option. It’s like her father is watching—expecting her to do what’s required, no matter how much it scares her. She approaches. The guard lies face down at the edge of the river, just past the ATV, his head cranked against his shoulder at an ugly angle. The little machinegun lies beside him. In a sort of trance she kneels numbly at his side, weirdly resigned. It’s inevitable, this latest outcome, as if she has toppled into a dream and is spiralling from one level of horror to the next. A bit of the guard’s face is visible, the rest squashed into the damp sand. He’s maybe twenty years old. He has bed-head and bare, little boy feet, the toes turned inward. Luckily, his visible eye is closed. She feels for a jugular pulse, as her father has taught her, and her hand shakes. Before yesterday she’d never seen a dead body. Now she is touching one.

  She checks the skyline above the ravine. It seems unlikely but may be possible that the others, in a hard sleep, didn’t wake.

  He could have fired at her, but he didn’t fire.

  Her green day pack lies at the base of the slope, flopped over and dusty. The zipper has come wide open. She peers into the pack vaguely, casts a look around her feet, zips the pack closed. Inscriptions in magic marker criss-cross the fabric: LOVE YOU TONS SOPH!! EAT LOCALY, LOVE GLOBALY. END THE HUMAN WAR! Scott’s rock star signature, a flashy squiggle followed by an ECG flatline. Friends’ names, phone numbers. None of this helps her now. She stares for a few seconds at the ATV, careful to avoid the guard’s body with her eyes, then turns and runs on downstream.

  The banks of the ravine grow higher, the river cutting deeper, and she runs in shadow with the morning sunlight on the opposite side. Her side of the ravine at times plunges straight into the river on a bend and she needs to make her way along a scanty path, maybe a goat track, worked into the steep face. If they do follow her, it will have to be on foot. On the far side of these traverses, more riverbank, small beaches with sand like fine-ground pepper, which she takes care not to step on.

  Even in this shade the air is mild and she’s soaked under her sweater and open parka. The sweater’s humid wool exhales a faint smell like turmeric, woodsmoke—her father’s smell, childhood, those windless October ravines in Toronto. She eases to a jog, then a fast walk. The river is slowing, widening. The banks of the ravine are maybe twenty metres high and thatched now with clinging stands of small poplars turning yellow. A following breeze trembles the leaves. There’s a faint but definite trail now, and on the far side of the river the same.

  She glances back: she’s leaving no prints. As for the crumbly gravel bank she ran down, the guards have surely gone down before, and the rolling ATV should have scrambled her tracks. She hopes so. Being captured was actually her intention, and getting arrested is not, to her, a terrifying unknown, but she wants to be rounded up with her father and Amaris and the others, not alone in a hut with the surviving guards.

  The impulse to grab her cellphone whenever she wants to reach someone has been fading slowly in the weeks since they set out from Kathmandu, but now she feels another twang of it. It still seems unlikely that there could be places right off the dial, where even 911 doesn’t work. Years ago, on a family trip in the Yukon, her father or mother had set the car radio to scan and she’d watched it loop through all the numbers and cycle round again, AM, FM, searching for a lone signal to hook onto. There are still such places. Being isolated from all her contacts would have seemed unsurvivable just three months ago, before things started to fall apart for her. Now, in some ways, it feels better to be off the dial. Just not out here, right now.

  On the edge of a crescent beach she drops to one knee and strips off her parka and sweater and fleece hoodie. Her T-shirt is wet through. She manages to cram the parka and hoodie into the pack, but the sweater won’t fit. She knots its arms around her waist. She finishes her water and refills the plastic bottle from the shallows and walks deeper into Tibet, the lost country she has wanted so much to see.

  You get what you want, but never in the way you want it.

  Across the river, the north side of the ravine, or valley now, is much wider and has patches of cropped grass and stands of tall poplars fully leafed, gold and green. Its riverside path looks more defined, almost a minor road. The whole north side and its high, far-off embankment are flooded with laser-pure sunlight. Between groomed-looking stands of trees, a stone hut. No smoke from the chimney, but in a lull of the wind she does smell smoke. Past the second woodlot, a field of yellow grass that must be some kind of grain and beyond it another field terraced above the first. Beyond that, stone buildings, fumes from a chimney, a dog standing in a doorway with its ears pricked, looking toward her. A pen with horses, necks stretched over the fence. She’s a long way across the fields and the river but they watch her, as if unused to seeing movement over here on the shadow side of the valley.

  As far ahead as she can see, there’s no bridge to the north side and the river is a long stone’s throw across, deep and strongly flowing. More farms appear. In the fields of the next one, several men and women, faces dark under their hats, are cutting grain, light flashing off the scalloping scythes. She stands watching. It’s such a relief to see these calmly working figures; she wants to wave or call out, yet they seem barely real. It’s like the river’s far bank is a computerized set where digital figments perform in a historical film. Gleaners from a distant time.

  She close
s her eyes as if to clear them and leaves them shut a few seconds. A strange parade crosses the inner screen of her eyelids—cartoon faces, lava lamp blobs, fluttering hands, like when you first lie down and shut your eyes after being up all night. In June she and Scott and a few friends ate hash in the form of zucchini cake and she didn’t like those intensified visions—though she didn’t admit it to her friends. She’s a vivid dreamer as it is. She opens her eyes. One of the gleaners, a woman in a headscarf and long black skirts, stands among the flattened stalks, a hand peaked above her eyes. Sophie lifts her own hand in a tentative wave, slowly lets it fall, as if to say, Yes, this is odd, isn’t it. And I don’t know what to do about it either.

  She walks on while the Tibetans stand watching. Beyond those terraced fields, an orchard where women and children pick fruit—apples, pears. She is seeing things with hyperacute clarity, as if her eyes had a zoom lens. The high slope of the ravine on her right still keeps her in shadow. She walks on, dizzy, weak and excited. Across the river, beyond the orchard, a larger pen where yaks are grazing and a man sits straddling a fence, smoking. He doesn’t look over. She doesn’t wave. She can see some distance downriver. The country on the north side seems to get ever greener and lusher, riotous with life—the damp and dense green smells of it!—but no sign of a bridge. Maybe there is no bridge, maybe no one from the rich side of the river ever needs to cross. More orchards, a big dog cantering among the trees where a woman stands on a stool picking apricots and dropping them into her apron.