If a beetle could survive up here, I would see its breath.
Around 3 a.m., I sit up in a panic, clutching my throat. I had started drifting off. This would have been a good thing if I wasn’t also displaying the first signs of altitude sickness. Anyone who has ever been awake and then gone to sleep is familiar with the concept of slowed breathing. But if you’re already struggling to breathe, slipping into slumber feels like an invisible force is trying to choke the life out of you. I look around me at the occupied mattresses and sigh in a pitiable fashion. I’m dehydrated and losing iron to a little cotton finger between my legs. I touch my forehead, disturbed by how good it feels to have this abnormally cold part of my body comfort this abnormally hot part of my body. I lie awake, wheeze, and wait, watching Edgardo’s new helmet not move on the floor below. I wonder again about the weight of inexperience. What percentage of this is my fault? How much of this is my ignorance and how much of it is the mountain’s difficulty? It feels like guessing beans in a jar.
Just before midnight a dainty chorus of digital watch alarms commences. Headlamps are flicked on as, one by one, climbers yawn in various languages. Now, a normal person—and I like to include myself in this category whenever possible—might have stayed in bed at this juncture. Especially with some ilk of ailment that feels akin to going on a carousel with a hangover. But I am here and I can’t not be here. Climbing and not climbing somehow feel like the same thing.
As I come downstairs, I clutch a railing with one hand and an “I’m still drunk and might throw up on the subway” plastic bag in the other. I see that the doctor and his expedition have already gone. Climbers gear up around me, talking about how the conditions have been iffy. There’s a storm that could get worse. Some people are concerned about a particularly avalanche-prone bend in the terrain. Unfortunately, I don’t have the mental palate to discern what “iffy” means. Not until we start our ascent.
This climb is not terribly different from yesterday’s, save for the fact that it’s pitch-black. At first everything is still, the mountain equivalent of a man-made lake at night. But soon the wind starts coming after us and brings with it an especially overpowering brand of sleet. I don’t so much feel like I’m on the movie set of a snowstorm as on the movie set of a snowstorm that’s being blown away by an actual snowstorm. Over the icy ground and into the dark, the other groups move ahead. Pedro and Edgardo are forced to wait for me. I move slower than a Galápagos turtle and am generally a total drag.
“Come on!” shouts Edgardo.
“I’m honestly going to kill you!” I shout back, adding a singsongy “Fuck your mother” for my own benefit.
To keep myself going, I count to five as I step, then start over. Also of assistance is following the spotlight of my headlamp as it points down. I start counting the bounces of light as I plunge one foot in front of the other. I am, I believe, just above 16,000 feet above sea level. To be clear, around 17,000 feet is the height at which you’re liable to believe your companion is an orange and attempt to peel him.
Still, I press on, thinking I will be able to outsmart such delusions. You see, We, the People of Sea Level, have a tough time believing in externally induced insanity. You say you’re born with the sociopathic strain that compels you to burn ants with a magnifying glass? Sure, fine, whatever. Be crazy. But if you are not this person, if you are more or less regular, we will spend the rest of your life teaching you to believe in the power of your mind over the matter of your body. This belief is vital to our existence. We use it for dieting and productivity and heartbreak and exhaustion. Physical pain is the body’s retort to such hubris. Control was an illusion. You were having a lucid dream, my friend. What the mind really is, is a Tupperware container full of leftover noodles.
*
I once sat next to a man on a plane who had climbed Everest and thus had stood approximately 900 feet below the level of our seats. He went with his wife, a champion mountain climber famous in Eastern Europe, as well as several professional guides. They were equipped with all the tents and oxygen tanks money could buy. Still, one never knows how one will react in an environment about as hospitable to humans as the bottom of the ocean. I imagine this is part of the thrill of mountain climbing if you are remotely experienced and already 90 percent sure of how you’ll respond to specific conditions. The rest is a reasonable margin for the unknown. This man’s wife had a bronchial infection within that margin. One thing led to another, which led to her almost choking to death on a piece of her own lung. She turned blue and had to be carried to a tent where one of the guides felt her pulse and mistakenly pronounced her dead. The man was confused.
“I said, ‘What do you mean, my wife is dead?’ and the guide said, ‘She’s not breathing.’”
“And then what did you do?” I asked, enraptured.
This man and I had bonded over a hostile flight attendant when we boarded. For the next few hours, he was as good as family. I leaned on our shared armrest and put my chin in my palm.
“I said … ‘Okay.’”
“What? That’s it?!”
He explained that the unholy trinity of exhaustion, cold, and reduced oxygen can lead to extreme calm. It’s not that you can’t think straight, it’s that you can only think straight. There is no emotion, just a slow and methodical logic mirroring the crunch of your steps. One foot in front of the other. The man’s wife was not breathing, which meant she must be dead and he wanted to know what came next. Still, I knew some part of him must have been devastated at the idea of losing his wife. He considered this.
“I might have also said, ‘That’s not good.’”
As for Cotopaxi, it is only like Everest in that it’s got snow on it. And it’s higher than wherever you are right now, unless you’re reading this on an airplane. Climbing Cotopaxi is something that gets done daily, whereas about 5,000 people total have summited Everest. With the possible exception of watching an Inside the Actors Studio marathon, conquering Everest is the most difficult thing a human being can do. And yet as I push forward in the dark, I imagine a colossal 747 airplane swinging by to pick me up where I stand. It slows down just long enough for me to lasso my climbing rope over the wing and takes me somewhere with mugs of hot chocolate.
At the next bend, one of the headlights ahead of me pauses and shines backward in my direction. It waits for the distance between us to close. Edgardo’s ponytail is covered in snow. It looks gray.
“Okay?” he asks, meaning “If the answer’s not ‘yes,’ I wash my hands of you.”
I say nothing for a second, struggling to breathe. I don’t like going for a light jog and chatting at the same time. I lean on my knees and wheeze.
“I think my legs are bigger than my lungs,” I say.
“I don’t understand this,” he says.
Neither do I, I think. My unacclimatized ass lasts approximately twenty more minutes in the dark before huddling over at 17,500 feet. I make the volcano an offering of partially digested beans. I am not the first to puke on this glacier and I won’t be the last. I can taste the bitterness of the malaria pill.
One’s instinct, when depending on something faulty, is to immediately stop depending on that thing. It only takes a moment of balancing a refrigerator on stilts to realize it’s time to put the refrigerator elsewhere. But to have there be no “elsewhere,” to have your body betray you, is a frightening sensation. You want an extra heart to help this one pump blood. But there is no extra heart. It’s like going through a breakup and wanting to talk about your distress with the person who just dumped you.
I wipe my face with snow and tilt my head back. Between gusts of white is a deep black sky. Imposing ice formations rise like monuments in the distance. Cotopaxi’s crater will have to be stunning for everyone but me.
I am done here.
With Pedro in tow, Edgardo and I make our way down the mountain. My fevered brain finds the language barrier disproportionately comical and every time Edgardo shouts at me over the wind, I ha
ve to sit down and laugh until I can’t breathe. This only irritates him more. Back at the refuge, I request that he rifle through the Baltimore doctor’s things for a thermometer. He looks appalled. Edgardo sincerely thinks I’d like to steal from my bunkmates. Yes, that’s right. There’s a thermometer shortage so grave in the United States, the government had me fly to Ecuador and fake altitude sickness so that I might do an undercover sweep for medical supplies. Though, to Edgardo’s credit, neither of us is a genius at this hour. Had we had our heads screwed on straight, it might have occurred to one of us to crack open the first-aid kit buried in the bottom of his backpack this entire time.
The chances of my having a fever are high, much like the fever it turns out I have. I know this because around 3 a.m., I ask Pedro why so many people are back already. He doesn’t understand what I mean.
“The headlights,” I whisper, gesturing at the wall across from my bunk, where tiny spotlights bounce on the wood.
Pedro shakes his head. I think he’s a moron. He thinks I’m a moron.
“People coming up the stairs,” I stress.
“No light,” he whispers.
Although the conditions were bad enough to cut short the summit goal for many, a fact that will make me feel like less of a wimp even as I have sworn off testosterone-fueled notions of achievement, I was the one who broke first. No one else will return for another hour.
“Oh, good,” I say, rolling over. “That’s perfect.”
I am lucid enough to be disappointed by my own insanity.
*
Among the defeated is the French hiker who gets down from his bunk no sooner than he catches his breath. He talks to me, telling me the occasional joke that makes me cough and muster a “Oui, c’est drôle. C’est très drôle.” He holds my shivering hand for an hour straight. It’s long enough for me to think that not only is this the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me but also the kindest thing I have ever personally witnessed someone do for a stranger. Eventually the Seattle hiker marches up to me and asks to pull my finger. From the top bunk, I see all of these people as floating heads, amateur doctors making their rounds.
“Let me see her finger,” he says to the others.
This is no time for third-grade games, sir.
He clips a heartbeat monitor to my thumb.
My heart rate is less than enthusiastic.
What has two thumbs and no pulse? This girl!
“Hmmm,” he says.
They watch as I slide the monitor from my thumb in slow motion. It snaps back together and falls to the floor. I don’t remember anyone touching my forehead but a voice announces that I’m burning up. I push myself upright.
“Okay,” I say, “what are the worst times to go down?”
Pedro lifts the top layer of his sleeping bag.
“Hey!” he says. “There’s a rip in this!”
“Probably between five and seven,” says the Seattle climber, pressing his watch to make it glow.
It’s 5 a.m. In daylight, it would take me forty minutes to get down from the refuge. In my current condition, I suspect it will take me longer than that to get down from this bunk. I decide to wait it out, which entails more nausea and an irrepressible chill. Still, it’s not like I’m dying. At least that’s what I tell my French friend when he asks me if I’m dying. I have never been asked this in a sincere fashion before. I am flattered that he thinks I would know. People who regularly push themselves to the brink of their physical limitations know what dying feels like. When I say something tastes like pennies or piss or shit, I’m not implying a frame of reference for these flavors. But these people—they eat shit for fun.
*
The mountain pretends not to know what it did. At sunrise, it looks perfectly innocent, as if it has just chewed my shoe and now it wants to go for a walk. Fever broken, standing outside in the quiet, I wait for Edgardo and Pedro to wake up. The refuge is perched on a ledge so that the view runs right up to my feet. Twin rainbows appear in the valleys in front of me. The contrast of green hills and snowcapped tops gives the entire region a confectionary look. The mountains themselves look like humpback whales coming up for air. It’s all so offensively pretty. There’s not a sign of last night’s storm. You could put a feather on top of the snow and it wouldn’t blow away. For a split second, I kick myself for not having climbed higher last night. This, I think, is how abusive relationships get their start.
I hear a crunch on the ground behind me.
“Imbabura,” Edgardo announces, pointing to my right.
There, surrounded by mist, is the mountain I didn’t climb. It’s the least snowcapped of the mountains. Snow yarmulked.
I nod. “It’s beautiful.”
“I take this,” Edgardo says as he grabs my backpack for me.
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
I am relieved to not compound the thumping in my skull by climbing down with the extra weight. Edgardo unfastens his new helmet and clips it to his own bag. Then he hands the pack back to me. When I don’t immediately take it, he ever so gently rests it against my leg.
“De nada,” he says, smiling.
*
When we arrive at the car, I am somehow surprised to see it there, right where we parked it. Unlike Edgardo, I did not expect it to get stolen. But I am surprised to see it so unaffected by last night’s events. By the time I reach for the door handle, my body is almost back to normal, as indifferent to Cotopaxi as the car is.
Edgardo’s foot is heavy on the gas pedal. I would sooner drink a bottle of whiskey and run down a spiral staircase than drive around with Edgardo again. But as I have neither at my disposal, I buckle up.
“Look,” Edgardo says, once we are at the base of the mountain.
“What?”
He ignores me and stops the car. At first I see nothing. Then, on the hillside, meandering between shrubs, are five spots. They’re moving slowly toward us. They are wild horses, four caramel and one black. As they get closer, I see their manes are tangled with unknowable debris. Some of their ribs show when they move. Edgardo grabs his camera from the backseat and gets out of the car to take pictures. He moves with theatrical stealth, trying not to frighten them. They remain calm, stopping to munch on long grass while keeping one eye on Edgardo. This is what he needed last night, an animal with monocular vision to watch his shit.
Our driver missing, Pedro and I get out of the Jeep, closing our doors softly behind us. We lean together, watching Edgardo creep up on the horses, trying to crouch down and move forward at the same time. The sun is bright, my breathing regular. I have done the unthinkable: unzipped my jacket. Pedro laughs at his friend under his breath and shakes his head. He takes papers out of his pocket, sprinkles some dried leaves inside and rolls a joint, expertly sealing it with his tongue. He lights it and hands it to me. As I inhale, Pedro cleans his Oakleys with his shirt, glares at the sky, and says we have to get going. It’s going to rain again. The road to the highway will be covered in mud. He removes a knife and a mango from his other pocket, cuts the mango, and eats chunks directly from the blade.
“He is heartsick,” explains Pedro, placing the knife against his chest, concerned he got the expression wrong.
He gestures at Edgardo with the knife.
“There is a woman he loves and she will not call him. So he texts her. A lot.”
The idea of Edgardo living his life, drinking, texting, going to techno nights at clubs and flirtatiously moving his ponytail down women’s faces like a paintbrush, is amusing to me.
“He lives with his mother,” Pedro continues, “but he wants to move with this woman.”
“Does she ever respond to the texts?”
“She has a new boyfriend. Edgardo knows a little but he doesn’t really know.”
From half a football field away, the wind carries the sound of Edgardo telling the horses to be “tranquilo,” which they already are. They’re not running from him nor are they charging him. They’re just casually m
eandering away.
“Do you know this guy?”
“He is my brother.”
“I see,” I say with a my-wife-is-dead level of energy. “That’s not good.”
“No.” Pedro laughs. “It’s not.”
He offers me the mango, which I take in exchange for the second half of the joint.
When Edgardo comes back to the car, I stare out the window, refusing to feel bad for him. I will not care who broke Edgardo’s heart or why or how badly. I am not sorry he is lonely. A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are lonely even when they’re surrounded by other people. I am determined to deny him my empathy. But everything is thawing, inside the car and out. So when Edgardo enthusiastically shouts the names of the mountains, releasing the steering wheel to point each time the road provides a new angle, as if I have not just spent the night on one of them, as if he has not told me a million times already, I can’t help but crane my neck and nod, sufficiently awed.
The Grape Man
My roommate came running out of the closet and did not stop until he reached Los Angeles. I knew this day would come. Sometimes it’s easier to be your actual self where nothing of your alleged self exists. Sometimes that’s how you find out who you are in the first place. But after three years of cohabitation, I knew I would never find a better roommate than him, decoratively, hygienically, or morally. The day my previous roommate moved out, he caught her and a friend escorting her queen-size mattress up to the tar roof of our building, where they intended to discard it. The apartment was on the fifth floor of a fifth-floor walk-up, so it was easier to battle gravity for one flight than pivot down a narrow stairwell for four. He stopped her, saying something like, “Hey, that’s not where that goes.” I wouldn’t have. I would have tattled or seethed or judged or indulged in all three at once, like dipping sauces.
Look Alive Out There Page 9
