by Jeff Long
The mountain had handled too many people to deserve coveting, yet no one could
erase the memory of her glorious virginity. He'd wanted to go to the big mountain for
so long that the very idea had come to defeat him. But the Kore Wall?
'Four of our team's already in Kathmandu,' Jorgens said. 'The rest of us leave in
thirty-four days. That's five weeks minus a day,' Jorgens said. 'Can you handle that?'
'I could try,' Abe said.
'Is that the broader affirmative then? You can appreciate my need to know. Are you
with us, son?'
Abe knew ex-military when he heard it. Emergency work abounded with it: cops,
medicos, firemen. He had nothing against hierarchies and their jargon, but life was too
short to spend three or four months at high altitude fighting cabin fever with a
commander in chief. Jorgens was handing him Everest on a silver platter, and Abe
wanted it. But some inner radar told Abe that if he didn't back this man off right now,
even just a little, then he might as well not go. And so, though he meant yes, Abe said
maybe.
'I'll have to call you back,' Abe said. For extra weight, and just to prick Jorgens's
chauvinism, he added, 'My wife gets final say.' Then he hung up.
Jamie wasn't his wife, but Abe figured 'girlfriend' would never carry enough weight
with a man like Jorgens. He'd once asked Jamie to marry him, but the institution
hadn't worn too well with her. She'd already been married once, too young and to the
wrong man. She had borne a baby boy. Her husband had disappeared with the child.
Jamie had fallen into emptiness.
Abe had met her a few years after that tragedy. It seemed like a long time ago. The
first time she told him her story, Abe had determined never to speak to her again. He
had enough doubts about why he did what he did for a living without taking on a
victim for a lover. But she had eyes like black magnets. And Abe found himself in love.
It was one of those hospital hookups, the ambulance cowboy and the angel of mercy.
She was an R.N. up in maternity, slender and quiet as a flower. Between his reserve
and hers, it was a marvel they'd ever gotten beyond hello. On the day they started
living together in his Victorian townhouse with the skylight over the bed, they'd made
a house rule: No shoptalk. She wouldn't talk about birth. He wouldn't talk about death.
As it turned out, all their problems lay in between.
Over the years, Abe had watched other professional Samaritans grow to distrust
their own charity. With Jamie he tried to be careful to keep the kindness of rescue out
of the kindness of love, only to discover she was beyond rescue anyway.
Every night he helped her bury the lost child all over again. Every morning he
helped dig up her hopes for the new day. She had a habit of sleeping curled in a fetal
ball and sometimes crying in her sleep. It was not the best life.
They had grown apart. Abe blamed her losses. She blamed him. 'You never let me
smile,' she accused him. He wondered if that could be true. He wanted her happiness
and had said so. But that left him uncertain about what it was he wanted for himself.
Life with the drama stripped out and the siren turned down, that much for sure. Life
without the noise, without the losses. Part of him believed she had worn him out.
Jamie got home from the hospital at 5:30, out of sorts over a new boss and rumors
of a pay cut. Abe gave her a few minutes to sit on the couch and unwind. Then he
broke the news about the Ultimate Summit invitation. She took it well.
'I'd be gone a hundred days, maybe more,' Abe said.
'You really want this, don't you?' She was decent about subduing her relief. This was
probably the good-bye they'd been waiting for. There were no tears and she didn't
say leave. She said go. 'You need this.'
Abe was grateful for her dispassion. On a sudden impulse, he wanted to convey to
her just how important the mountain was to him.
'I can still remember, I was seven years old when the first Americans to climb
Everest came to the White House. JFK was there in the Rose Garden and he
welcomed them like they were astronauts. I saw it in the papers and my mother cut
the photo of it out and taped it to the refrigerator door.'
Abe paused and looked at Jamie to see if she cared about any of this. She was
wiggling her toes and winnowing her black hair with long fingers. Her interest seemed
more than polite.
'That photo stayed up on the refrigerator all week long, eye-level, and for a whole
week I imagined what it must be like up there. And then my father came home. You
know, rig work, one week on, one off.'
Now Jamie spoke, perhaps to abbreviate his tale. 'And your dad took you on his
knee and said, "Someday, Abe, someday."'
'No,' Abe said. It was his father who had first traced constellations for Abe, flat on
their backs pointing between the fireflies, and taught him how to build a fire, how to
whittle and read a compass. But all of that had stopped when his father lost part of
one hand to a wellhead accident. After that he'd quit sharing the stars. 'No. He took
the photo off the refrigerator door.'
When he was done, she said. 'I feel sad, Abe.'
Abe swallowed. 'I haven't said yes, yet,' he said.
'No,' she said. 'That's not what I mean. It's just, I can remember when you used to
talk like this. Excited. Alive.'
Thinking she wanted to hear more, Abe went on. 'I would bring you a fossil,' he said.
He told her about how climbers would fill their pockets with the sea fossils that riddled
the summit rock band. They had jewelers make the fossils into earrings and pendants
for gifts.
'You need to go,' she said. 'Now I've said it twice. You should go and climb your
mountain. Is there something else you want me to say?'
'I'm afraid of losing you,' Abe said. He didn't mean to be that blunt. They had so
many reasons to separate, but had never had the hate or anger to do it with. How
strange that a cold faraway chunk of stone was going to give logic to their parting. He
felt close to tears and at the same time freed.
Jamie didn't reply that she was afraid of losing him. Instead she said, 'I'm afraid of
you losing me, too, Abe. But your staying won't change that. As for your going? I don't
know. Or maybe I do know.' She stopped. 'Do we have to do this tonight?'
That was the closest she'd ever come to telling him her truth, that through their
three years together it was she who had protected him. Abe heard what Jamie meant
and it startled him because he'd never seen himself as someone needing protection.
'Call the man back,' Jamie urged. She leaned forward and kissed him. 'And smile. I'm
happy for you.'
'I have to go get an onion at the store,' Abe remembered. 'A red onion.' He was
stalling. He wanted more time to think.
'I'll go to the store,' Jamie said. She seemed to have thought about things enough.
'You make your call.'
Abe gave it another half-hour before calling Seattle. By then Jorgens had recovered
his gruff poise. He sounded disgruntled that the team's new medic didn't gush thanks,
but Abe didn't see this as a favor. It was a job, and if it was an opportunity, too, then it
was going to be an earned one. Jorgens said, 'W
elcome on board.'
'Tell me what needs doing,' Abe said.
'Do you have a fax machine?'
Abe didn't.
'First thing, day after tomorrow, go rent one. You've got some catching up to do.'
Abe didn't waste time being thrilled. He marked five weeks on his calendar and got
on with it. He had to get immunized against eight different diseases, obtain a passport,
read and memorize thirty-seven monographs and books on high altitude medicine,
buy a small fortune of personal gear, and train for the most extreme route on the
highest mountain on earth.
Abe had developed a habit of tidiness in approaching new terrain, and that included
the names of things. He'd always assumed Kore was Japanese or Chinese or Tibetan
for north. It sounded Oriental, and the Japanese had spent a number of lives trying to
climb the route in '90. Finally, most big mountain routes were named prosaically for
their geographic features: the North Face, the West Ridge, and so on. But he was
wrong. In an article about the New Zealand attempt three years ago, he found the
briefest of etymologies. Kore was another name for Persephone. Kidnapped by Pluto
and taken into cold darkness to become the queen of Hades, the goddess was
permitted to surface into the sunshine six months of the year. It was an apt name for
a north-facing wall that saw the light of day only with the approach of spring.
According to the article, a climber on the initial British expedition had baptized the
route.
Near the end of his thirty-four-day whirlwind, Abe received a two-pound package.
Compiled by the expedition's former physician, it contained detailed medical histories
of all the members. Abe was just leaving to grab a quick few miles of trail running on
Mount Sanitas, but when the package came he bagged the run, kicked off his shoes,
and put on a pot of coffee. This would be his first look at the people whose health and
lives were his mission.
Inside the package were ten manila file folders with a passport photo paperclipped
to the inner flap of each. Abe cleared a corner of his kitchen table and stacked the files
where they wouldn't fall. One by one, Abe drew these people to him, matching their
pictures with their names and telephone voices – the few he'd spoken to – and trying
to read from their eyes and dimples and haircuts what kind of spirits moved their
cages of bone and flesh. He stared at their photos and tried to guess how they would
laugh and cry, or if they would. Then he lifted their skin aside and peered at the
machinery, translating their medical histories into makeshift biographies, finding here
and there broken bones, a missing thyroid gland, three abortions, a heart with
murmurs, a case of diabetes, and the secretly mentioned venereal diseases.
You are my flock, Abe thought in his kitchen. Their mortality was abundant.
Beneath their muscles and tanned squints and high-flying grins and their dreams like
wings, these eagles were human, and they would need him.
There was only one surprise in that stack of folders, really. It came in the
next-to-last file. Abe opened it as he'd opened the others, casually, and he looked at
the photo, not even the name.
It was Daniel.
Abe had not seen Daniel since that once upon a time on the glacier seventeen long
years ago. He lifted the photo closer, disbelieving. Here was that same black Irish
brow, those same Lazarus eyes and the cheekbones and unsmiling laughlines. The boy
had grown into a man. His features had gravity now, though the wildness was still
evident. The blood was washed from his hair, of course, and life had etched his
forehead.
'Corder D. W.,' Abe read aloud from the file, forcing the conviction. He laid the folder
open on the stack of others.
For a few minutes, Abe sat stunned by the coincidence, then it caught up with him.
He had a connection to this man, so of course they would meet. Now or later, standing
in line at a grocery store or walking down a sidewalk or climbing a mountain. The only
real surprise was that they had not met before.
Then it caught up with him, what Jorgens had said in their first conversation: Your
buddy Corder said so. This was Corder then. You're the one.
For a time, Abe had liked to believe that he and Daniel had been orphaned by the
same event and that they had been bound by the same disappearance. But that had
just been his way of not making the event answer for itself, a chore that he'd
conveniently heaped onto his other, this twin, Daniel.
After a while, Abe had dismantled that imagined fraternity. For one thing, it was
bizarre. And for another, Abe had held the hands of too many patients who in their
fear and pain had raved with his own confusion about the falling rock or the car or the
bullet or the cancer, whatever it was, to believe death had any value.
They had talked to a ghost, he and Daniel, but that didn't mean they had to be
haunted for the rest of time. For his part, Abe had finally made himself be done with it
all. After recovering from his own ordeal, Abe had avoided revisiting that fateful range
in Wyoming, never even learning the name of Daniel's mountain. Abe had closed the
whole thing off. He had sealed the voice in the crevasse beneath seventeen years of
daily happenstance.
Yet here was Daniel again. He wondered why the man should remember him now,
so many years later. Was this expedition some sort of payback? Or was Daniel
perhaps still haunted, still needing rescue? Or just curious about that girl's long
ending?
Almost as if he were invading his own privacy, Abe picked up the folder.
Daniel's medical read like a masochist's ode to the wilderness. Their former
physician had listed Daniel's injuries in careful reverse chronology, like a résumé,
which made it easy for Abe to construct Daniel's story. Abe skipped through the list at
random.
Eight years ago Daniel had elected to have arthroscopic surgery on both knees, one
at a time, for cartilage torn by years of humping big loads down big mountains. And
the year before, he'd spent three weeks hospitalized for malaria contracted in New
Guinea.
Around that same time, surgeons had fused part of his spinal column after he'd
fallen and collapsed several vertebrae. There was a note that Daniel would be bringing
along a TENS unit, a portable battery-powered device that electrically over-rode
chronic, localized pain. Killing two birds with one stone, the surgeons had taken the
same occasion to cut the nerves in Daniel's toes to address the pain of his Morton's
neuroma. Climbers liked their rock shoes so tight that they sometimes developed
hammer toes, similar to the effects of Chinese foot binding. That was back when
Daniel still had toes.
In 1984, the records showed, Daniel had spent several months in the hospital
getting most of every toe amputated because of frostbite. Abe checked a secondary
page in the folder, and there it was, a photocopied report chronicling the long,
agonizing fight to save the damaged toes. Abe flipped back to the first page and found
what he was looking for. The frostbite had occurred on Everest, in Tibet, on the north
side, in 1983.
'You,' Abe whis
pered to the page.
Now he recollected the tale of five Brits and an American who had been the first to
attack the Kore Wall. Just before reaching the summit slopes, they had been struck
by a winter storm. No one had died, but the group's horrible retreat had come to be
dubbed the Lepers' Parade. The American media had ignored it altogether – they
rarely took notice of mountaineering triumphs, much less failures. But among
climbers the story had spread. In fighting their way down the valley to a Tibetan
village each had suffered major frostbite. Each had lost toes, three had lost fingers,
and one had lost portions of his lower legs. Afterward, so the story went, all of the
climbers had given up climbing, all except one. Now Abe knew. Daniel was that one.
Sobered – a little sickened, even – Abe stored the nugget of history away and
finished studying Daniel's long list of injuries and disease. The severity of pain and
debilitation ebbed and flowed on the page, and Abe had to remind himself that this
was the profile of one man, not an entire ward.
The previous year Daniel had undergone surgery for another problem common to
high standard rock climbers, tendinitis in the elbow. The doctors had split the tendons
in both arms, cleared out the scar tissue, and transferred the ulna nerve from its
normal groove to across the elbow. Abe could picture the half-moon scars Daniel
would be carrying on his inner arms.
There had been double pneumonia in '84, tropical parasites in '82 and '79, the
anterior reconstruction of his left shoulder in '83, rabies shots for a dog bite in
Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in '80, and a spiral fracture of the right tibia in '77.
The list went on. It was grotesque. In the context of a normal sport, Daniel's
relentless suffering and compulsion would have depressed Abe. But his fascinated
him. Here was the sort of obsession he'd always associated with Himalayan ascent,
and it was written in flesh and blood. The other members might have the same
passion, but only here did Abe see proof of a heart and mind whipped by demons.
Now he knew who it was on that British expedition who had named their route for a
woman locked away in the underworld.
2
THE BEGINNING – 1992
Abe woke at dawn on the border of Tibet, flat on his back beneath a truck axle. After
