Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  “How is the surprising animal up there, Sahib?” Tashi’s high voice niggles at him and finally it’s clear, maybe because Lawson feels so raw, stunned and oddly moved by his discovery: the young Sherpa is definitely taunting him. But…why this raw emotion? As usual, he recoils from looking deeper. He refocuses on his anger at Tashi Sherpa, the leering sidekick. Flippant court clown. One more thing Lawson could do without. Trembling, he snaps three photos with his digital camera—it emits worrisome brittle clicks—then checks his descender and gets ready to rappel down.

  When they reach Camp Three, Shiva teeters out of the snow cave. Before Lawson can speak, Shiva says that Jake Kravchuk is now at rest. Lawson stares at the small man’s puffy, puzzled face; he looks like he’s both drunk and baffled to find himself so. “That is…he is exceedingly well, Sahib!” He has picked up the sahib thing from Tashi. There’s more news from the embassy and Shiva pants it out like a messenger who has just run up the mountain: Dr. Book, Ms. McRae and the Tibetans have indeed escaped from the army base near Drongpa, perhaps with help from “forces of Tibetan terrorists” (Shiva can’t clarify whether the embassy believes this to be true, or the Chinese believe it to be true, or simply claim it). He concludes by saying that several more people are now murdered, and the Book daughter is still loose.

  To climb above 7,000 metres is to enter a dreamlike world where it takes stern focus to keep your reason belayed and safe. This bulletin might be the latest sequence in a prolonged anxiety dream. As if Lawson has only to focus his mind and slap himself awake and it will vaporize; as if Shiva has emerged like a genie out of the mountainside and might be dispelled by force of will.

  He sends Shiva and Tash back into the cave, but Shiva remains for some moments, ominously wobbling, before at last going, leaving Lawson to his seething thoughts. The view into Nepal—layered ranges of giant peaks islanded by moats of mist filling the two-mile-deep valleys, sunset red—stuns his mind into momentary silence, the kind he usually experiences only on hard solos, when he seems attuned to some higher guidance, when past and future shear away to either side like the walls of Kyatruk’s razor ridge—the living moment, a mere atom thick—and there’s nothing but him and the rock.

  Over ramen and energy bars, the last in their supply, Lawson talks over the climb, and his discovery, with the others. Jake wants to try summiting despite the gash in his swollen eggplant of a knee, which Lawson has crudely covered with gauze and surgical tape from the first-aid kit. Jake’s determination is impressive. With bottled gas and the fixed ropes, he probably can make it, yet Lawson feels an uncharacteristic, almost maternal, caution. Gruffly he says, “We’ll look at the knee at dawn and decide then.” Then he adds, reflexively, “But you should be able to do it—hell, looks like Murloe got up the wall without ropes or even equipment!”

  “Thanks for putting it that way,” Jake says in a muted voice. His red eyes are beady and his long rodent’s nose protrudes, sunburned purple, over the lip of the mummy bag. His blond, thinning hair looks electrified.

  “I just meant …” Lawson stops. It’s hardly worth trying to explain that he’s not putting Jake down, he’s simply amazed and gripped by his predecessor’s achievement.

  “You believe he did climb on, to the tip top, Sahib?” Tashi looks serious now.

  “Possibly. It has to be considered. But on the whole, I really doubt it. The wall would have beat out of him whatever he had left. He’d have been eating snow by now. Freezing to death. Totally alone. I mean…Jesus, who’s ever been more alone than that? And still, he, uhh …” His aching throat contracts and stops his words. His eyes smart. The same thing occurred after the stillbirth—missing night after night of sleep, he grew prone to these embarrassing losses of control. To a softening of the will. Unhelpful sentimentality. Is that what’s making him so uneasy about Shiv’s condition? The porter is curled in his mummy bag, confused and lethargic, so Tashi has had to take over stirring the snow in the melting pot. It’s probably simple altitude sickness but Lawson finds himself fretting about cerebral edema. He has applied Shiv’s oxygen mask for him, like a passenger helping a child in one of those pre-flight videos. Shiv is going to have to go down very soon. But who the hell can take him? The surviving team has to push for the summit, tomorrow.

  Lawson’s radio bleeps again. He doesn’t know what he can tell anyone that Kaljang or Shiva hasn’t told them already, except one thing: what he just discovered up on the wall. Snow squeaking under his knees, Lawson crawls out into the polar night and unholsters the handset. A crimson moon floats up over the eastern deserts, where some surreal crisis is now playing out.

  He stands up. “Come in, Kal.”

  “Wade Lawson, it’s you at last! I have another call from the magazine Rock and Ice. Over.”

  “All right. Patch them through. Tell them I have some exciting news for them.”

  “Pardon? Oh—okay. And I think they have, uh, exciting new things to be telling you also. They do want a comment from you …”

  “Really?” He’s shivering. “Is it about Book and Amaris?”

  “It is! Over.”

  “Well, what the hell is it, Kal? Kal? Come in!”

  “_____not very certain, but the embassy has heard this also. There’s a, uh, a video of Dr. Book. Maybe. It’s not very clear—”

  “What—the video? You’ve seen this video?”

  Tashi’s moonlit face appears at the mouth of the cave. Lawson turns away, tucks the handset closer to his mouth. The distant lights of Drongpa, pulsing.

  “I mean, maybe just rumours,” Kal says. “But they do think there’s a video, of Sophie’s father, telling the Chinese people he was a, what is the word, an agent, for Tibetan rebels. And maybe Sophie and Amaris also. They must have forced him to say so, of course. Over.”

  “But has anyone seen this thing?”

  “No, nobody yet. Just rumours.”

  Relax, Lawson instructs himself, but his brain, starved for nutrients, oxygen and rest, clumsily swarms over the possibilities. He gazes toward Drongpa. Thought: Book was recently treating Tibetans in India. Was always greeting and thanking the Sherpas in their own language, or something like it. His daughter made a show of refusing to refer to the land across the border as China. It was always Tibet. Yes. But wait. Slow it down. High-altitude paranoia he knows all about—has confronted, point blank.

  He makes himself breathe slower, his chest in a vise. One thing he knows: if the video exists, then Book’s admission, forced or genuine, will be instant Hot News and further overshadow this expedition. Unless Lawson can interest the media in something else. Murloe was no Mallory, but all the same, this discovery of a trace of someone who climbed a remote, difficult peak in the freest style possible will definitely rivet the climbing media, and might intrigue the larger world, too.

  “Patch it through now, Kal. And I’ll talk to any others, till eight tonight. After that, you patch through nada, okay? We need to get a few hours rest. You can explain that I’ll be…I’ll be getting up at midnight”—he more or less overhears himself say this last phrase—“to help a sick porter down to Camp Two, where you’ll be meeting me at, uhh, around two a.m. Which means you’ll have to start up the mountain around eight—eight at the latest, okay? Sorry, Kal, but Shiv has to come down. You and him’ll rest at Camp Two, then go down to base camp at dawn. Bring some Decadron up for him too. Over.”

  “What about you, Wade?”

  Through Lawson’s chest and belly, warmth is spreading like a pleasant hemorrhage. He’s doing the right thing and he knows it. It’s a human sensation, the least lonely thing he has felt since the few calm moments of connection after he and Amaris last had sex. Yet as the feeling spreads, it’s not unlike nausea, or even the pain in frozen extremities as your blood and life flow back in. Meanwhile a corner of his mind applauds itself for this worthy new plan—which only he is still strong enough to carry out—and for thus risking the final success of the climb. (Maybe this will silence his detractors.) “I’
ll have to start back up again right away. We’re going up the wall tomorrow. Then try to summit. We really can’t wait any longer. And you can quote me on that.”

  “Roger, but first”—Kal clears his throat—“uh, I should mention the new weather report.”

  September 22, 4:05 p.m.

  THE FUGITIVES SIT IN A CRAMMED, smoky, tavern-loud room, guzzling butter tea and chang and attacking bowls of peppery, oniony stew and stuffed dumplings as big as kaiser rolls and stacks of flatbread and a basket of apricots. Their cheeks burn with the heat of the room, the tea, the food and the amazing warmth of their welcome. If Amaris could film and screen this moment, no viewer back home could imagine the context—what had been happening just hours before this scene, what sort of emergencies might soon follow. (She tries not to think about it.) Sangye and a village woman are wounded, a Chinese guard is dead, another captured, and more guards and soldiers will surely be on their way here. But for now a feast has broken out, as if the fugitives, even Sophie and Book and Amaris, are long-lost family—emigrants who’ve returned to an ancestral village for a reunion.

  Someone is weighing down Amaris’s plate with two more of the soft, hot dumplings full of spicy meat. Book has just come in from seeing his patients—all of them stable, he says, Lhundup starting to improve with water, tea and food—and he plops down beside Sophie with a reprieved sigh, puts a hand on her nape and kneads the muscles there. Amaris, whose whole body is a pulled muscle, would love to be in Sophie’s place. The girl doesn’t resist but doesn’t respond, punishing Book a little more, conserving her leverage, and he seems fine with that, his face and body loosening in that graphic, time-lapse transformation Amaris must try to capture when she gets back to her equipment: voilà, the other Lew, the one she likes and buys, draining a small glass of the sour barley chang and licking it from his lips, baring that rakish gap between his front teeth, accepting a fill-up and a dish of dumplings, and he’s laughing now, weak with relief, responding to something Amaris herself has said—who knows what, she’s too light-headed to remember—and he tips his head back, laughing, so for a moment she glimpses the tongue behind his teeth. Next he does a corny trick for Sonam and Lasya’s daughter and the grubby village children, meshing his hands and sliding them apart, seeming to remove his index finger. The kids shriek with delight. He displays his hands now and the kids study them and gravely discuss the phenomenon and repeat a word that must mean “again!” Book does it again. His long-lashed eyes are brilliant, on the verge, she thinks, of tears, while Sophie, lovely in her Tibetan dress and braids, has a glow in her face, a slender, tempered smile, as if she’s seen him do this for kids a zillion times but will humour him under the circumstances.

  The monks and nuns eat with fantastic appetites, like clergy everywhere. Lasya has fallen asleep over her huge belly. Amaris hasn’t felt so enmeshed in a social moment in years—so touched by the cheerful, sincere generosity of hosts, these people with their now-endangered village. It’s as if they expect nothing better. She knows Buddhists advise living in the present, and maybe this is the secret: to live in crisis, in a primitive region, so you have no choice but to exist moment to moment and party every chance you get. Much of the clothing here is black, like in the town of exiles they passed through en route to base camp, as if the Tibetans are a scattered tribe in constant mourning, so used to it, in fact, that it deepens instead of dampens their celebrations. This chang is blurring Amaris. It’s wonderful to lose yourself, to melt into the carnival heat of this living scene, without that fear you get at an urban party, where guests are all calculating status—the fear of dropping your ego and going naked, human, susceptible.

  “You like the beer?” Book asks unclearly, his mouth full.

  “Is that what this is?”

  “You tried the ones,” he says, “with ginger and garlic?”

  “What—beer? Oh, you mean one of the mumus—”

  “It’s momos, actually,” says Choden, and she and Amaris giggle.

  “I just hope they can spare all this food,” says Sophie, reaching for more.

  “Oh, the harvest is going just fine, eat your hearts out!” says Choden.

  With his hands and a few words of English and Tibetan, Book is trying to communicate with their gorgeous hosts, Tenzin, a rangy, earringed brigand of a man, and Karma, his pregnant wife. Book’s Tibetan seems feeble—a few halting phrases that crack up his audience—though Amaris still has her suspicions about him and his involvements. For now, though, forget it. The facts will emerge, one way or another, and for now they have to work together, escape together. So let it go—no editing, critiquing or outing—for a change. (Her shortened fuse at high altitude has been deepening her worry that she’s getting bitter too young. At film school her temper was a sort of gimmick, a facade of brittle charm: the small Asian woman with the big, husky voice who took no shit. Now it’s a mode entrenched by time and habit and it’s starting to push people away.)

  Norbu is the only one who’s resisting the party. He sits on a stool outside the open door, brushing flies from his face. She watched him and Tenzin argue, earlier—clearly Tenzin won’t allow him into the house with his gun and Norbu won’t enter without it. Sullen, glowering in at Choden, Book and Amaris, he cradles the small weapon out there as if shielding a new Christmas toy from other children. He’s collected more ammunition from the dead guard and from the captured one, who’s being held, along with Palden, in the bedroom where Sophie said she slept last night.

  Amaris overhears Sophie say to Book, “What? No way. I can’t believe you’d …”

  “What?” Amaris jumps in, afraid of anything that might disrupt or dispel the moment’s glow. Too late. In a low, throaty voice Book is saying that when they flee onward, he should probably stay here to care for his patients, along with Lasya, who could go into labour any time, and Palden, who can’t be trusted to come with them any farther.

  “But Lew,” she says, “you said yourself the Chinese will be here by tomorrow at the latest—right?” (He nods.) “So, they’ll just arrest you and separate you from your patients anyway—after what happened at the base. And the Chinese will have doctors with them now, don’t you think?” He listens with his rumpled head tipped slightly, his gaze flicking between her mouth and her eyes. “I mean, you wanted us all to come this way, and okay, you were right, we did, we all came here together, and now—you can’t just desert on us.”

  “I don’t think desert’s the word,” he says. “It’s not like I’m going to—”

  “I mean it’s no time to play hero again.”

  “Hero’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “The old man,” Choden cuts in firmly, surprisingly, “the one sitting with the wounded now? He has done the Tibetan medicine all his life, Lewis. As for Lasya, she’ll not agree to be separated from her family again. They mean to escape as a family.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Do you?” Sophie says.

  “So you’re needed with us, Lew—with Lasya.” Amaris strains for a note of diplomacy and it’s hard for her, even now. “I mean, more of us might still get, you know. Hurt.”

  “You come with us,” Sophie says, “or I stay and get captured with you.”

  Book turns his head to her. Sophie’s deep-set eyes, shadowed as if with tear-smudged kohl, now make her seem older—a brave young widow at a funeral, serious, wise, unwavering. Amaris sees she’s got him. Book looks down, then swings his gaze to Amaris and nods. “I guess you’re right.” But there’s something more in his expression, a slight softening of the pupils, an easing of the tight muscles around his mouth. He’s relieved—he really didn’t want to stay behind and be parted from Sophie again.

  “And as long as we’re free,” he adds, as if to nail the justification in his own mind, “I guess they can’t really harm the village. Since they can’t be sure of capturing us before we reach the border and report what’s happening.”

  If I just had a camera, thinks Amaris, to document all
this. It’s the least I could do for these people.

  “I better get back to them. Palden’s always glad to see me.” He stands and leans and kisses the part in Sophie’s hair. She won’t look up from the page where she’s producing her latest image of the Dalai Lama for the villagers. Her pen, her hand, her face frozen over the page.

  He’s gone. The circle of sundark faces around them, still urging more food and drink on them, watching Sophie sketch, is thinning out. Norbu and the young monks have slipped away too. Amaris asks Choden what’s happening and the nun speaks to Karma, then explains: people are going to the bridge. The lookouts may have seen something in the distance. “Alas, we have little more time here,” she adds. “Karma Chophel says we should finish the food while her husband loads supplies, and leave with him in the hour. He knows an old trail used by the resisters, years ago, and before them the smugglers. It goes back up to the border crossing at Mount Kyatruk, but on a route that’s more snaky”—her accent makes it doubtful, the word might be sneaky—“and he thinks it best that we walk by night.”

  Some minutes later, as Amaris and the others, bellies filled, sit dozing over the chang, wild cries electroshock them awake. Amaris gasps and meets Sophie’s gaze. Sophie leaps up and goes for the door and Amaris jumps to intercept her, grabbing the larger girl’s arm—“Sophie, wait!”—and then pushing out ahead of her. Karma, head bowed stolidly, keeps stirring a brick of tea into a kettle. None of the others react, either, as if they’ve been expecting the cries and know what Amaris will see when she steps out the door with Sophie on her heels: villagers teeming like gall wasps over the bridge pier, the arc of an axe and the quick, darting glimmer of knives. For a moment she thinks the villagers are fighting hand to hand with soldiers, then it hits her.

  At 5:30, as they set out, the monks and nuns touch brows with the villagers and murmur blessings and Sophie tearfully hugs them all goodbye, as if she has spent the whole summer here. Book and then Amaris embrace the villagers and she echoes the phrase Book keeps using, “Thu-je chef” The villagers, young and old, beam and giggle as she mangles it. “Thank you!” she keeps adding, sure they must understand. But Karma, last in line, is suddenly impatient. She lifts her brows, juts her chin toward the mountains and speaks curtly. Time to go now. Hurry now.