Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  “Choden!” Amaris calls. “Is there a Nepali flag here? A Chinese flag?”

  Choden is trying to get Dolma to her feet.

  “Keep going!” Lew says. “We can’t stop!”

  “Hard to say,” Choden says in a strained voice, then adds something inaudible.

  “What? This is the border, right? I mean, will the Chinese …”

  “I doubt it,” she says.

  “What? Doubt they’ll follow us?”

  “Go, Amaris, please,” Lew tells her, kneeling beside Dolma. “We’ll be right behind you.”

  “Doubt there are flags,” Choden almost snaps. “It isn’t a true crossing, unless one climbs straight up Kyatruk and over the top. We turn, left. Our route follows the, the border, down to the glacier.” She says something in Tibetan to Dolma. Amaris looks back at the cairn. Just past it through the falling snow, a steep wall—Kyatruk—blocks their line of flight, forcing them on a new one. It’s possible Wade is right above them now, barely a kilometre off, close enough to hear the shots.

  Sonam is driving Zapa to the left, downhill, and Diki now rides on another monk’s back, though Amaris hasn’t seen them switch her. Dechen and the other two monks, chanting low in their throats, all place small stones on the top of the snowy cairn. Amaris wonders where the stones are from—dug from under the drifts? From their pockets? She would happily add one, no scoffing. Anything, anything now.

  She and Sophie have caught up to Lasya and walk with her again as the party turns and starts down a gentle grade along the flank of the mountain. Amaris could weep with relief. It’s still freezing and she’s trembling as if a blue-cold voltage is running through her, but the snow is falling almost softly now, straight down. To their right, Kyatruk, to their left, another, less blatant slope rising and vanishing into the mist and snow. They’re in a ravine or can-yon—a clear route down, but also a trap.

  “I just heard Tenzin”—Sophie jolting her out of another brief coma—“a shot again.”

  “Didn’t hear it,” Amaris says, then asks Lasya, who doesn’t speak English, “Did you hear it?”

  “What? Yeah,” Sophie says vaguely. “I heard it.”

  Lasya seems to be nursing again, weeping as she nurses. Amaris thinks to look behind them, for the others. The visibility slightly better now. No one is there. (How long has it been since we started downhill?) She remembers now—Lew and Choden trying to get Dolma to her feet. She thinks of calling his name. No, don’t, she thinks, for Sophie’s sake—if he’s gone, if Lew is gone, you’ll have to get the girl down to base camp yourself.

  “Keep walking with Lasya,” she tells Sophie. “I have to pee.”

  “What…? No,” Sophie says, “we’ll wait.”

  “Just go. I’ll just be a sec.” She detaches herself from Lasya and turns back, up the trail. Sophie is stuck now—she won’t want to leave Lasya and the baby. The girl peers over her shoulder and says, “No, just…wait, where are they?”

  “Just stay with Lasya.”

  “Amaris!”

  “I’ll be back.”

  Amaris sets out fast and within seconds she realizes she has miscalculated. Uphill is no longer an option. The downhill stretch has conned her. She can no longer be of help. She has to help and only Sophie’s gaze, presumably still on her back, keeps her moving. When she can’t shuffle another step, she looks back down through the snow: no sign of the girl. She grinds out another ten, twenty paces, has to stop, stands on what’s left of the trail, gulping this impoverished air, watching the flakes start to cover her state of the art boots—grey laces untied on the right foot, black grommets, mauve tongue and upper. Her breathing starts to relax. She can’t focus her mind. The snow’s silent voiceover, white flakes over dark boots and garish label, absorbs her, CREST CRUISER. Shoot it in freckly black and white, hand-held and sped-up, like Maddin. Maybe Super-8. These boots are performers, as she was told. Two forty-nine on sale at Peak Stuff. The sales guy young, blond, balding, an anabolic physique. Crudely flirtatious. Whoa—you’re going climbing with him? You should let me take you instead! His T-shirt was mocha and said EVERLAST. She forgets what she’s here for. She has been abandoned here, hours ago or years ago, a lifetime, but it’s all right. She no longer feels any grudge. Solo is how it always ends, so why pretend we’re roped together in any real way? They slash the only real cord at birth.

  “Amaris.”

  Lew and Choden materializing out of the void, Dolma between them, seeming to walk with little assistance, though her eyes are shut fast, snow pasting her lids and lashes. Lew’s stubble also holds the snow; the white has aged him a decade. The cold little eye of the machinegun peeps up at her. He’s too spacey to aim it away, and seeing him and Choden, she’s too relieved, or something deeper, to object.

  She says, “Came looking for you,” and tears burn into her eyes like acid and spill over. She can’t talk. It has been years since this sort of thing, at least publicly.

  Leaving Dolma with Choden, Lew steps toward Amaris, puts his hands on her shoulders, looks her in the eye. A tremor in his hands, a tear in his eye. “Let’s go, okay? Before it fills in.”

  “Where were you? Isn’t someone…I thought I saw someone behind you. No—wait. That was before. Okay.”

  “We were just helping Dolma up.”

  “Okay.”

  He turns her around on the trail, walks beside her. Their steps are so quiet in this snow. With every step down she regains a fraction of clarity.

  “Lew. The men behind us. Are they far?”

  “Closer than they realize. We heard them when we were back there. But I think they’re in trouble—they’re not dressed for this at all.”

  “You shot one,” she states, as if trying to convince herself, and him, of the fact.

  “The snow was in his eyes. When you shouted, he looked up but he couldn’t see. Then he did…. They must have sent him ahead. He looked cold.” He adds, just audibly, “You might have saved our lives. Is this the trail or is that it?”

  “Here,” she says, but then, not fully certain, calls, “Sophie?”

  “I’m here!” Sophie’s voice comes. “Is he there?”

  “Yes!”

  “Better not shout so,” Choden says.

  They come down the trail and Sophie—standing tensed, her mittens fisted—resolves out of the snow. At the sight of her, Amaris chokes up again, then wonders about Lasya.

  “She went ahead,” Sophie says before Amaris can ask. “She wouldn’t wait. But I had to. Didn’t know whether to go after her or come after all of you. I was just about to. Papa—what happened?”

  “Let’s hurry,” he says. “Let’s go, love.”

  The girl fires a wild look at him. “But you promised you wouldn’t—”

  “But all’s well now,” Choden interrupts in a clipped, conclusive way, settling the matter.

  He sees that Choden must sense Amaris is struggling; the nun now walks ahead and fills in to the left of Lasya. Book and Amaris follow, twenty steps behind. He takes her hand, or she takes his hand. Numb and weak from shock and adrenaline rebound, he stumps along like a patient in therapy trying to regain use of his legs.

  The soldier he killed wasn’t Palden Jangbu, but he looked Tibetan. Fiery red cheeks were all Book could really see of the face. The eyes with snow-caked eyebrows and lashes were downturned as the man cocked and raised his weapon in a spasm of fumbling. He was too cold. Book was cold as well, but he had the drop on the man. He’s glad not to have seen the face—he’d rather not know the age, rather not wonder if he, the good doctor, has really joined the huge army of “adults” who constantly betray and injure the young.

  In a world without adults, every child is a refugee.

  “Lew,” she whispers suddenly, “are you afraid?”

  He nods.

  “Funny, I’m not now. Not anymore.”

  “Good—being scared doesn’t help.”

  She seems to squeeze his hand. It might just be another stint of shiveri
ng. Shivering is good; she’s not hypothermic yet.

  He says, “Harder to judge Lawson now, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m talking to myself. Let’s hurry.”

  Disorienting pauses delay each winded response, like on a satellite phone.

  “You mean, like, leaving someone for dead?” she says. “But you didn’t. You did the right thing—with Dolma, with that soldier.”

  His nod has a sick man’s economy of motion; he can’t really be sure that the soldier was dead. Twenty or thirty more steps and he says, “Choden thinks you had to come back here, you know. To Asia. She thinks this was all meant to happen, in some way. That’s not how I look at life—I wish I did—but I figured it might be some comfort, now.”

  “Whatever you got,” she says.

  The others are slipping ahead, almost disappearing as Choden forces the pace, Sophie now seeming to labour to hold on. He can see that she’ll do it. He thought that he knew the girl, but she is so much tougher than his version of her—deep through the heart, as folks used to say of gutsy horses, like the ones she loved as a child.

  “Excuse me!” a mild voice says, close behind them. He and Amaris wrench their linked hands free and spin around as if they’re not exhausted. Book fidgets for the safety catch, flicks it, lifts the gun. Palden stands wobbling on the trail about twenty steps away, aiming a quivering little gun of the same make. His helmet and flak jacket are sheathed in snow and he has epaulettes of snow on his shoulders, which are bunched high, shuddering. He’s panting. The dressing across his eye has oozed through. With his other eye he stares imploringly, not like a soldier come to arrest them but like a wilderness survivor seeking help.

  “Palden!” Book says, stalling. He’s vividly aware that the snow has eased off. Between him and Palden, each separate flake seems to loft down with a precise and crucial slowness.

  “Hello, Lewis and Am-am-amaris…. Please drop that now.”

  “Palden, please—your hand. It’s trembling. Careful, please.”

  “P-please, Lewis…d-don’t …”

  Book shoves Amaris with his left hand, meaning to push her well clear of himself. He’s so enfeebled that she goes nowhere, simply deflates and folds up by his boots.

  “Lew!” The huff of her breath bearing his name drifts up and past his ear with fantastic languor. In slow motion she is trying to rise.

  “Please, now, Lewis. I d-don’t want to…I must not fail again!”

  “We’ll help you, Palden. Come with us—please.”

  Amaris is up. Palden thrusts the little gun way out in front of him, as if hoping it will do something that he can’t.

  “I must arrest you! P-p-please!”

  “Lew, turn and walk.”

  “What?”

  She clasps his arm, the one supporting the snub muzzle, and slowly draws him backward. Right—she’s right. He says, “We’re going to keep going, Palden. You can come with us, but we have to keep going.”

  They turn away from him and walk, gravity guiding them stiffly downward. Book’s legs are dead as prostheses. Their hands, though equally numb, join up again.

  “Stop, Dr. Lewis—I’m warning, please! Last w-warning…!”

  A palpitating burst of fire. Amaris shrieks softly and Book sucks air through his teeth and they both dip down in mid-step, but their knees hold—they’re still going.

  “P-p-please!”

  They sleepwalk on, five, six steps. Another burst of shots, a faint clatter and a thud. Book and Amaris turn. Palden lies on his back on the trail with one leg straight out, the other twisted sideways at the knee. His arms are lax at his sides, his head tilted back so the face is hidden. The smoking muzzle of the gun rests on the front of his flak jacket, pointing toward his chin. And the slurry of blood and brains on the snow—Book has seen far too much blood in his forty-four years, but never blood as red as this, a wrenching anomaly in the heart of this dove-coloured world.

  They stare for only a few seconds, then turn and start back down the trail. Amaris says nothing. Book can say nothing. After a minute that might be an hour, they catch up to Sophie, Choden, Lasya, who are stopped on the trail, Sophie gaping, Choden wearily resigned, watching for whatever’s about to loom out of the storm. Without meeting anyone’s eyes, Book mutters, “Had to fire a bit more. Try to slow them down.”

  Sophie exhales and lets her head fall. Through half-misted glasses Choden studies Book for a few seconds, then turns and calls an explanation ahead to the others, barely visible down the trail. And they all stagger on.

  This last, bizarre showdown has tapped out Book’s reserves: full adrenal collapse, with marked hypoxia. He struggles to keep his boots on the narrow track, keep his mind working, work matters through—what the soldiers are likely to assume, and do next, when they stumble on poor Palden. Think. Shouldn’t be so hard to work out, but in his mind the variables keep mutating and dissolving. His gasping frontal lobe throws up its hands. He frowns at his watch, trying to make sense of the digits.

  Still a few hours of light, if you can call this light.

  From behind them a faint prattle of yelling voices seems to morph into gunfire. For a moment he doesn’t get it. He looks behind them: just cloud. No way the pursuers can see them. A tight, concise fizzing draws his eye upward: snowflakes switching direction as sharply as damselflies. The shooting stops, then resumes. There’s no question. The fugitives are clumped together, Book and Amaris herding from the back, and he realizes they’ve all broken into a loose, slamming trot. The binoculars slap against his chest and he should toss them but he keeps running. The mother and baby joggling between Sophie and Choden, Dechen clinging to one of the monks as if she has pounced on his back and he’s running to shake her off. More of that distant shouting. Maybe they’re firing high on purpose and yelling warnings, maybe they’re delirious, maybe they’re afraid of being picked off one at a time.

  There’s a raw stench and he’s trampling over a greenish spoor in the snow and it goes on and on, Zapa hemorrhaging shit, panic’s contagion has swept through them all, nobody immune, a rabble of runaways almost all separate except for Lasya and her nameless baby. You could forget your own child, almost. When the Black Death ripped through Florence and other cities, many parents abandoned their dying children. Another far-off burst of shooting. A feeling of déjà vu. The worst were Beirut, Kigali and a small town in the Congo. In the Congo he did simple arithmetic with spines. The human spinal column is a miracle of resilience. A mortar shell smashes a hut and the parents and grandparents and children are atomized, but the spinal columns remain and you tally them one by one to calculate the losses. As if loss could ever be calculated, redeemed as data.

  The purr of an airplane somewhere far above. At some point the snowfall has died. The sun must be falling toward the event horizon of the Himalayan ridges, yet daylight is building inside the cloud like an electrical charge. A breeze reaches upvalley into the cloud, which now seems to be moving, shreds of mist gusting by them and increasing the illusion of speed: space and time shuddering past. Another spatter of gunfire, distant now, and he gets a vision of the freezing men shooting not at the refugees but at the storm itself, that solid crypt of cloud. Minutes elapse. There’s no more shooting or yelling. By evening, still short of the pass, all movement ceased among the multitude. But the soldiers won’t have collapsed, helpless, this suddenly—maybe they’ve given up now, turned back.

  The refugees slow to a steady, determined hobble. The sun appears and vanishes, gauzed over with mist, tatters of scutting cloud, then it breaks through fully and he feels its heat and they’re out of the cloud, below the storm. The view engulfs him: the ravine descending, fanning open toward its end, where a wide reach of the Khiong glacier is lit up, effervescing in his eyes. They push on, seeming to lean forward precariously, eagerly, the main border crossing rising to meet them, green and grey military tents now clustered around Sophie’s favourite outcrop. It looks tiny. Absurd little flags ther
e. “Look, love!” he tells her, his voice clotting in his throat—he can hardly get the words out—as he prods her gently, Go. Base camp is still out of view behind Kyatruk’s lower slope. They spill onward, Sonam with his hand at the small of Lasya’s back, Zapa clipping along through the shallower snow, seeming years younger, as if sensing the end. Book lifts the binoculars: Chinese and Nepali soldiers on the glacier, to either side of the border. Slowly the fugitives come to a stop, transfixed and blinking, Sophie embracing Choden, whose cheeks have regained their dimpled lustre, Amaris hugging Book, who kisses the salty crease between her eyes, then her upturned mouth. He tastes her tears and wonders if tears of joy taste less bitter, like these ones. They just have to keep to the right-hand wall of the ravine, as they’re doing—they’re already on the Nepali side.

  As they near the glacier, base camp comes into view. Next, a party climbing toward them up the ravine. He stops and looks through the binoculars: it’s a platoon of Gurkhas, the short, fit-looking troops he saw in tropical Pokhara. Now they wear khaki parkas and maroon toques. They come striding up through the shadows under the west wall of the ravine, dragging stretcher sleds like a first-aid crew on a ski hill. Strange to see people moving so smoothly, athletically. There are non-soldiers carrying what look like medical kits, and a stocky Sherpa in tight jeans, with a self-conscious sway and a cigarette in his mouth, as if he knows he’s being watched—by Sophie, thinks Book, amused, jubilant.

  “Stretchers, and doctors too,” he announces. “And Kaljang’s there.”

  The girl doesn’t seem to hear. Book focuses on Kaljang again, to be certain, then sweeps the lenses down onto the glacier and finds the outcrop of boulders, the small border stone, Chinese soldiers milling around. He thought there might be media crews here, on the Nepal side, but the Nepalis must have kept them away. A few Chinese and Nepalis are arguing, one of the Chinese pointing a hand up the slope toward the refugees. Something glints among the boulders where Sophie and Kaljang and Book and the rest of them took cover during the first attack. The light lifts everything to high resolution: soldiers tucked down there like a SWAT unit behind a car, heavy black rifles with long scopes on top. An officer talking into a radio. Book’s breathing tightens, but then he thinks, They can’t shoot people on this side of the border, not with the Nepalis watching and the Tibetans unarmed. He senses a flaw in this thought—like leaning over a bagh chal board, smelling danger but unable to pinpoint the threat. He lowers the binoculars, brings them back to his eyes, swings the lenses around, trying to find the snipers. There. The flaw hits him at the same moment he sees the muzzle flash, like a neural spark clearing a synapse. He’s not Callum Lewis Book, borderless doctor, with a G-8 embassy and a prominent NGO to speak for him, he’s Tenzin Lodi or some other poor, dark local who has bloodied the long trail behind them with corpses.