Split

by Lisa Michaels

  It’s difficult to build suspense in a tale of peril in the first person. The story survives, so it gives up its ending. But as I went through that day, I didn’t know how it would end. That was the terror. (Or I could say, that is the terror, for all of us live with this ignorance of our fates, though we manage to submerge that fact for long stretches.) The trail continued on, neither rising nor falling. I had not crossed the last ice field; I came to one after another, and all the while the mist grew thicker, until finally I could see only a few yards.

  Fog has a peculiar, dual nature: it’s both a comfort and a blot. When I’m tucked inside with a comforter and tea, I like the way it pillows at the windows, and I like to go out into it, bundled, and let it wet my face. But then again it shuts down the view. I walked that day with the trail always blunted off before me. Beyond that mist, there might have been a forest or a cliff or a valley opening gently away, but I would never know it. I could have only one chunk at a time, and I had to make of it what I could.

  The footprints continued, but I never heard or saw any other signs of my friends, and after a while I began to believe that I wouldn’t survive. I’d had a few brushes with disaster before—one foot off the curb and a truck barreled past, lifting my jacket lapels. I stood there, shaking, on the lee side of my death; but it was over before I could even call out, and there was nothing to do but cross the street with the rest of the preoccupied foot traffic.

  Midway through that day in the snow, I understood that I had made a fatal error, that I had stepped over that line of rocks like a pedestrian stepping off the curb, but I stayed in that canyon of time: the truck bearing down, no way to turn back. That hair-trigger terror lasted and lasted. I stopped on the trail and shook my head, stomped up and down, yelped. I couldn’t believe it—this was real. Perhaps this is why we never dream our deaths. When the dream becomes too dire, and the dreaming mind believes in its plight, it scans for exits, just as the waking do when they face the gun, the long fall, the room filling with fire. The sleeper thinks, Perhaps I don’t have to suffer this, and the mind lets go of the nightmare and wakes. But there was no trap door from that trail to my sheet-tossed bed. I was awake and lost, and I had arrived in that spot out of carelessness.

  But it seems to me now that it wasn’t only inattention that got me in trouble. It was more than that. It was my idea that fear had to be conquered. I believed, at twenty-two, that I had to force myself toward whatever filled me with dread, and along the way I’d lost the idea that fear was a useful gauge of risk. I was anxious sometimes, but I mistrusted my anxiety, thought it unfounded and overwrought, so I didn’t heed my own instincts. In those days, I didn’t know how to filter out the real news from the static. It was only a matter of time till I lost my way.

  Nonetheless I kept walking, scrambling over more snowslides, sometimes leaving the trail and hiking down below the snow, then climbing up to the path again. What frightened me more than my actual death was the loneliness just before slipping off. I thought of Mau at a café in Bolivia, watching pigeons forage in the square; my mother at her kitchen table, correcting school papers in the glow of the skylight; and my sisters, in Los Angeles, making slow work of cleaning their rooms. How grim to die in this unlikely place. I decided to take a photo of myself, smiling into the camera for all of them. I would snap the shutter and then write a letter about the birds, how along the way I startled them out of the rocks: blue tails, red breasts, a bright dash of color on my starved eye. Or how the rocks piled in prayer mounds beside the trail looked like houses through the mist, how I ran to them, already phrasing my tale of survival, and found only wet stones, an old pennant snapping in the wind.

  My mother, in particular, would have understood how the dimness wore on me. Her stories always described what the light was like. Often in my childhood she had recalled the view from the delivery room on the twelfth floor of Beth Israel Hospital, Newark, New Jersey, the room where I was born. She began the story like that, with all the particulars, the names and stats of a vital occasion. She was twenty-two, the same age I was then, and she labored alone. The nurses, knowing she had hours to go, checked her in and went on to more pressing things, and once the contractions got strong, my father became too frightened to stay with her.

  That labor room had a pair of narrow windows that gave onto the Hudson River and Manhattan. The skyline, a winking stencil when she arrived, slowly hardened into gray stacks and spires in the daylight. The way she described that view, I knew my mother had looked at it often as the hours passed, perhaps nearly all the time, and for years I didn’t understand that—her minute recollection of the horizon, the way the sun fell into the room like the tines of a tuning fork. She would run her thumb and forefinger down through the air, always off to the right, and squint, as if she were looking again through those panes. Now I know what held her. That window—the choppy glitter of the river, the skyscrapers where people lifted from floor to floor—offered her a way out, the long view, something to fasten on that didn’t heave or sway.

  She had told the doctor in advance that she didn’t want anesthetics, but as the labor wore on, he came in every hour with a needle. “You’ve got a long way to go,” he said. “I could give you some scop.” When she said no, he went out again, closing the door behind him.

  It was full noon when they finally held me up—the fat palpable sun of midday. They wheeled me to her side in a plastic bassinet—a little bundled comma with black hair—and told her she wasn’t to touch me. Then they left her alone.

  “And did you?” I asked once, sure that she had.

  She was slow to answer, lost in the memory. “Oh, no. They said don’t, so I didn’t. I just looked at you and kept saying, ‘I have a baby! I have a baby! Oh, my god, I have a baby!’”

  She laughed and went quiet, sifting back to those hours in the delivery room: “Right at the end, when you were crowning, I had my hands out like this, flexing them, and the nurse said to me, ‘If you can’t keep your hands under the sterile sheet, we’ll have to strap you down.’” She whispered this last line, her lips pressed together on all she would like to say to those people, thirty years later. Then she looked at me with a glint in her eye, and I stared back at her, both of us stoppered by helpless fury, for both of us had been there and neither of us could go back and change any of it.

  Time just keeps moving, past scenes of devastation and sweetness, and I wonder sometimes how much we choose what we carry with us. From my mother’s story, it was the light that I saved—not my father’s fear or the doctor’s pitiful brusqueness, but my mother’s stamina and unlikely courage and her memory of the way the sun fell across the river and into her room. In the midst of that pain, she kept her eyes open and took note of the light.

  As I walked, I cast my mind like that, over people half a world distant, and at times it seemed that they were never more fully with me than in those hours, that I carried in my head the whole story of who they were and how I had loved them, that they were presences within me—my mother, my father, Jim and Leslie, my sisters, my brother, Mau. Loving them could take place in their absence, a conjuring up of their specific dearness, which for the moment of its conjuring changed me in some unnamable way.

  The mist deepened into a thick cocoon, and, wrapped in that cold, I got lonelier. Memory was a thin soup, nothing close to companionship. There I was, swamped by tenderness, by feelings that sprung up between people, feelings that were meant to reach their mark. It seemed to me then that the only things that mattered were the things that got said and done, the places where we struck up against one another and changed course. For that, I would have to make it back.

  I made that vow and then I rounded a bend and saw the path blocked by a wall of ice. A rock outcropping hung over the trail, and a stream seemed to have spilled over it in warmer weather. Now the water had frozen in a solid sheet that continued—a long, slick chute—down the drainage into the mist below. The lost section of trail was short, perhaps twenty feet, and beyond
this impassable gate the path continued, muddy but clear. I squinted to see if I could make out footprints on the other side. In places, the path looked trampled, but I couldn’t be sure. I looked down into the mist, roiling like steam from a teacup. If Ron and Juliet had fallen, the drop would have killed them.

  I called out anyway.

  “Hello?”

  The sound, and the quiet that came after, made fear lift through me in waves. I paced back and forth on the ledge, and considered leaping. It did have a kind of definitive appeal—to hurl yourself toward one sure consequence, your hair blown upward like flame.

  But under my terror was an odd kernel of calm, and I fixed on this, and waited for the panic to pass. I remember surprise at this coldness. After all, I was known as a weeper. Mau would turn from the most foolishly sentimental film and catch me wiping tears from my eyes. I used to say it felt like my skin was gone, but that wasn’t the truth. I wept because I couldn’t bridge the gap between myself and those who suffered. I wept because I was safe.

  There on that blocked trail, caught in my own predicament, I was too shocked to cry—a dry, fixated state. If I felt any sadness, it was for my parents, for the grief that was in store for them. My father told me once that freezing to death terrified him. He loves the desert, that dry enveloping heat, and has a primal mistrust of the cold. If I had asked him why, late at night after a brandy and a bath, I imagine he might have said something about the New York winters, when it became clear his father had left for good, trudging up the snow-lined walk to an empty house. To see me like that, lost in the snow, he might have thought fate knew his heart, its exact fissures.

  But if my body was found, I figured he would be the one to come claim it. My mother, the practical one, couldn’t bear it. Pragmatism was her smokescreen: she had no time for grief, no opening, not even a rib slot in her armor. She made a decision at twenty-three, alone in a flat with a daughter in diapers: she was sick of sorrow; she had had her fill, and wouldn’t sit under its eaves any longer. What a strange gift then from my father, to have him make such a pilgrimage. She had once clung to the idea that he couldn’t be trusted. But my father’s not afraid of life’s mire. He wades in, weeps and shines, somehow returned to a territory he knows.

  But there I was, wasting time on life beyond the grave, when I should have been deciding how to save myself. I went closer to the ice fall and saw that the upper edge had melted away from the rock, leaving a gap the width of a sneaker. If I stood on the narrow crest and held on to the outcrop, I might be able to inch across. The rock was pitted, sharp, and full of handholds. I slid my foot into the crack and pulled myself upright. When I had two good grips, I advanced my right foot, then brought my left beside it, found two new handholds, and began again. I was nearly across, when I stepped to the right and the ice gave way beneath me. It made a sickening sound, like the grinding of teeth. I lost hold of the rock and slid downward. Then just as quickly I stopped. I had sunk straight into the ice, like a sword into its sheath, and when the ice reached my hips, my backpack, jutting out behind me, stopped my fall.

  Not a molecule of air seemed left in my lungs; it had all gone out in one terror-struck howl. I was buried to the waist at the tip of a two-hundred-foot column of ice, and right in front of me, at my new eye level, was a small flower blooming in the rock. It had blue petals, thick as flaps of callus, with splashes of yellow in the center. Each petal was covered with fine hairs, and I was so close I could see tiny drops of mist balanced on their loft. The flower looked like the pansies my mother planted in great rafts along the path to the river. “Frivolous,” she called them, because they were expensive and lasted only one season. This one was a gardener’s dream: able to withstand freezing temperatures and rare sun.

  This was some kind of shock-induced botanical swoon, but I got over it and found two good handholds in the rock. I pulled one leg out of the ice and laid it along the crest, then I dug my fingers into a crack and heaved, letting my weight settle on the free leg. Another leg free, another step, another handhold. Then the blessed firm mud on the far side.

  When I hit that path, I decided to run. I would run until the sun went down, which it seemed near to doing, and then I would turn on my flashlight and walk by its light until the batteries went dead, and then I would crawl in the dark. I started to jog, found a steady pace I could maintain uphill or down, and gave in to its rhythm. After a while, the trail seemed to tend downward, and the snow lightened on the slopes, but I refused to take hope. When I passed the first rhododendron, I didn’t even pause. I took that mark of lower altitude like a runner grabs a drink midstride, without thanks or hesitation. I was sailing down the trail, no sound but the heavy thunk of my sneakers and my ragged breath. Trees appeared between the rocks, and then I turned a corner and saw a hut—a real hut this time, not the rock piles that had tantalized me, but four sturdy walls and roof. I walked up to it slowly and stuck my head inside. It was empty, no bed or blanket, but I could sleep there out of the rain, and I would not freeze. It would buy me a night. In the morning I would begin again.

  Then I smelled wood smoke on the wind. I can’t say how that first whiff wrenched me. I walked out the doorway and over a small rise, and there, on the lee side of the hill, was a collection of huts, each chimney expelling a thread of smoke. A small boy stepped out of a doorway and came toward me, holding his hand up in greeting.

  “Namaste,” he said, as if I had just stepped away for a moment, and he had been expecting me.

  At first, my awkward sobs seemed to confuse him. He stood in front of me, in a small peaked cap and a tattered windbreaker, furrowing his brow.

  Then he recovered his poise. “Come,” he said, pointing toward the huts. He started toward them, and when I didn’t follow, he came back again. I didn’t think I could move, and I didn’t want to, so we stood there for a while, as the mist fell apart and at last I could see where I was. Below us was a scallop of hillside, and below that a deep valley, thick with pines. I quit crying and wiped my face, and the boy nodded, but he didn’t move. We waited together a while longer, as steam lifted from the roofs of the huts, and watched a pair of goats chewing their way across the tough mountain grass.

  Once we were inside, the boy set about stoking the coals for tea. As the room filled with smoke and the sun went down, I mimed and gestured at the way I had come. The boy spoke quickly to his father, who sat on the doorstep puffing on a long pipe.

  The man turned and gave me a surprised look. “Road no good,” he said. He waved his pipe in the direction I had come, clicking his tongue. “Three men lost.” So it wasn’t Ron and Juliet I had been following after all. It seems that three other trekkers had made the wrong turn the day before, and it was their boot prints that had led me astray. The man squatted on the mud floor beside his son, nodding encouragement while I gulped down some broth. The boy made lemon tea and bread, which puffed up on the fading coals. Then he showed me to a bed—a pile of hay wrapped in a cloth. I lay awake for hours listening to the snap of the fire and the rustle of beetles in the straw. Brief flashes of the afternoon returned with a clarity that made my heart thud. Then I slept without warning, as if I’d fallen into a black slot.

  It took me three days to hike back down to Kathmandu. My knees were like jelly. Every morning I ate four aspirin with my tea and picked out a stout walking stick from the scrub. The trail cut back and forth across the hillsides, through terraced fields of rice and wheat. As far as I could see in the hazy sunshine, the hills were banded with bright green and gold, and children passed by with scythes on their backs.

  On the third day, I arrived at a dirt turnout with a few houses and a store: Sundarijal. Here the bus would come to take me to Kathmandu. The turnout was filled with schoolchildren in blue cotton uniforms and villagers who had trekked down from the mountains. I half expected some kind of reception, some ac knowledgment that I had finally hit flat ground. I did get a few long looks, mostly for my green backpack and running shoes. But no one knew or car
ed where I had been.

  I stepped into the store and bought myself a Hershey bar. The proprietor told me I had just missed a bus. The next one would come in three hours. I didn’t mind. I laid my pack against a low rock wall and turned my face up to the cold mountain sun, eating chocolate and dozing.

  When the bus came, a crowd suddenly appeared and I was lucky to get a seat. The man who wedged himself in beside me was a businessman, an English speaker, and we chatted a little as the driver revved the engine and turned the bus around. Just as we were pulling out onto the road, a woman came running beside the door, cradling a bundle against her chest. The driver stopped and she got on, dipping her head in thanks. Something in her bundle moved, and then a small foot pushed out of the cloth. The woman edged her way down the aisle, protecting the child’s head from bags and elbows, and squeezed onto the bench across from me. She turned then, and adjusted the drape, and I saw a face I will never forget. It was the face of a girl, a one-year-old with round cheeks and a button nose, but her eyes were ancient, and her whole scalp from forehead to nape was a raised blister, ruddy and crusted with matter.

  The mother held the cloth gingerly away from the bum, and the child didn’t once shift or whimper. Her stillness sent ripples out into the crowded seats, all of us turning and murmuring, a few of the mothers touching the woman’s shoulders and arms. Someone asked what had happened, and the man beside me translated her story. The baby had pulled a kettle of hot dahl onto her head. The mother had carried her for two days to the bus.

  “Where will they go?” I asked the man.

  “To a clinic. They might have to wait a day or two, but someone will see them.”

  “Can’t they afford a doctor?”