Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  Barrows of clouds have cleared in the night, and the moon waxes gibbous. The men move along in the rasp and the chink of their bootsteps and axe plants, in a clanking of hardware from inside their duffeled loads, the beams of their headlamps boring a path in the dark, the boot tracks of so many days ago erased. Their muscles are stiff in the bitter cold, their eyes sting in the freeze, and though they are three, it is dark and lonely going.

  It feels a long time before the sun begins to candle the path. Mysterium’s darkened gendarmes color and stand taller in the light. When the men arrive to the base of the glacier they find it a different place than it had been, the path that crosses the steep couloir obliterated since with the pile and cleave of avalanche: the mountain staving off her intruders. The men realize the peril they face: no longer is it a simple gamble of spinning wheels and beads, but instead a lethal game of revolver and bullets, with muzzle set to the temple.

  Troy is first to cross the chute. Behind him, loose chunks of snow roll down the slope like guillotined heads. Once he is to the other side and safe, Karma follows quickly in his tracks. Reddy is the last to cross. They wait. Reddy hesitates, his heart pounding in alarm. He looks up to Mysterium’s icy fundus, all the hardness covered over and softened by snow. He sees the mountain pouring forth during his passage, her sloughing miscarrying him to a cold and smothering death. His head aches as if his skull were being chiseled. He cannot think. Troy and Karma wait, shivering, losing patience, but they know not to call out, fearing the oscillating waves that might set everything above them to rampage. Reddy’s legs are frigid stiff, his mouth sour and dry. He cannot move, cannot even swallow. How long will he make them wait? And how could he turn back? He orders himself to move. Go forward now. He stands paralyzed. The wind gusts up and peals deliriously down the length of the glacier, and in it he hears his wife’s laughter. Her laugh exactly. Move, why don’t you? The sound of her mocking him. Why suddenly now the coward? He stabs his ice axe into the slope’s rimy skin, takes a step, and now finally he is walking, slanting into the wind, staggering into Maggie’s wintry laugh.

  * * *

  ALL NIGHT avalanches crack and slither past, and bursts of wind from their mass and tumble lash at the tent in their passing. The men lie in fear in the dark and the cold, trembling as the mountain loudly purges herself, expecting at any moment a suffocating load of snow to burst forth into the tent, an evil visitant entering viciously to swallow them alive and whole.

  To be interred with one’s heart beating and with the mind still lit with thought, to be frozen and entombed in snow, is altogether more horrifying than falling from the top of a cliff, Troy believes. He has come to see falling as being polar to ascending, both passages defined by laws of motion and gravity. And just as ascension is circumscribed by laws of boundlessness and liberty, so it follows that plummeting can be realized as a release, a letting go, a magnificent deliverance. Troy speaks rarely of his wife, but he has imagined her in her falling, imagined her cascading down the mountain like a droplet of water, as if it had been for Amanda not terrifying, but rapturous, spilled into the arms of death in glorious velocity without time enough for craze or fear or pain, those last moments of worldly excess become an ecstasy. A wonder fall.

  But to die interred is a nightmare. Burial offers no more a solace in its opposite than that of exhuming. To inter and to unearth are occurrences of stagnancy and fixity, the matter contained in the ossuaries and reliquaries of that which is covered or dug up just material turned static, inert, useless, like a thing tilled out and tossed from a garden that hinders the sprouting of seeds and the tubering of roots, whether a rock clogged in the soil or a bone chewed to a nub.

  Reddy could not bear to have his wife’s remains put into the ground at all. At least to throw her ashes to the wind was to see her aloft before the particles settled on the water like snow afloat, a contoured white mass set adrift in the tug of the moon and borne out to the cradling of the sea. The doctor pictures his wife’s essence moving continually, gyrating through time, wheeling like blood cells through arteries.

  Karma believes death, by whatever measure—whether it be a snuffing or a stamping out, a toppling to a final landing, a heart failed or an organ withered—that mortality, by any means, is to be seen simply as a first step outwardly. He knows that one should acknowledge life’s sufferings, but not live in fear or dread and so relinquish one’s mind and soul to the torment of that which cannot be swayed. He knows it is necessary to turn thoughts away from the worry of future sorrow and demise, to contemplate instead the clemency that death brings. For Karma sees the movement through the posthumous intervals before one’s next rebirth as an opportunity for liberty most profound. One is offered guidance through the state of the in-between of birth and death, guidance handed down in ancient teachings, lessons incorporated into a knowing while one is still alive. It then comes naturally to see the between-life, the interim time that comes after death, as akin to being guided up a mountain, and so an ascension most divine.

  * * *

  THE THREE men get little sleep with loud snow vipers sliding by in the night, and by two in the morning they are sitting up to light the stove for hot water. They gear up, zip the tent closed, leave Advanced Camp, and start back down to the ridge. After a long night of rumbling and quaking, Mysterium has finally settled into a cold slumber of her own. Her icebound tors stand guard in the distance as the men move toward the couloir. The wind mewls through cleavers and rifts. This time it is Reddy who takes the lead when it comes time to traverse the avalanche chute. He cannot bear the hideous shriek of the wind and in it the sound of his wife laughing at him. He does not look up, does not look down, but instead he keeps his headlamp aimed straight ahead and does not hesitate, knowing the line across the jumbled plot of rock and snow better on the return. Troy follows, hungry for breath in Reddy’s tracks. Then Karma, yellow patches in place on his face, and almost nonchalant in his bearing as he crosses the snow-crudded gully. His comrades watch the sirdar Sherpa’s traverse as he approaches, nervously wishing him more quickly to safety, and barely has he gotten across the icy quandary when the mountain erupts and a terrible blast of snow shoots off the snout of the glacier. The two look back to see Karma launched like a missile, a seething mass sliding past beneath him. The frozen expulsion lands the Sherpa near Troy and Reddy’s feet. They help him up and all scramble on, Karma unaware that one of the yellow patches has been brushed from his face and is left behind, embedded deep in the snow.

  * * *

  FOR THE next many days they will carry. Any plan for alpine methods quick and light are by now amended to Himalayan enterprise. They will manage logistics in the manner of a traditional siege-style expedition. They will freight loads from lower Base Camp up to the small camp at the ridge throughout the day repeatedly, building up the cache there, and from the cache pile they will ferry the stockpiles up to Advanced Camp, heavily laden and slowed to a plod as they try to move swiftly across the avalanche path. They will lug up sustenance and safety, heave implements for shelter, for comfort and necessity, emergency and undertaking. They will bear the hardships of weather, the difficulties of fatigue, the torment of fright, the numbness of denial and dismay, all the while urging the porters along with encouraging words and smiling faces as Mysterium awaits them.

  “Please God don’t let avalanches fall on us,” Sara said before making the first of many traverses to Advanced Camp.

  And none did.

  * * *

  ADVANCED CAMP is set in the snow on the broad spine of a humped ridge, a 19,200-foot promontory wide enough for a scattering of people and a strewing of equipment. The party’s stakes and poles, axes and ropes, appear a tangle of lines and lances and barbs stuck onto the back of an albino seagoing beast. Fish-shaped clouds bleed red into an eventide sky.

  The porters build walls of boxed loads to fix a wind-protected scullery on the ridge’s prow. They cover the shelter over with a large tarpaulin and bunker themselves in. Ple
nty of juniper brush has been hauled up from the Sanctuary, and the Sherpas fetch stones from the undercliff below to encompass a fire pit. The party’s settlement soon turns an alpine sprawl safe enough from avalanche, with runoffs ravined on either side.

  “Safe enough, unless she should toss us clean off,” Adams says, reaching to a billet of wood and affecting to knock it. Wilder, hand in pocket, fiddles with his nugget of orgonite. Karma presses the lone adhesive tab on the side of his face. Reddy searches among the strewn gear for his medical kit and the remedies within, believing he alone on the expedition shuns superstition. Sherpa Pasang hums as he scatters rice blessed by a village lama around the perimeter of the camp. The porters turn their noses up at Pasang’s Buddhist practice of grain sprinkling, instead asking their Didi to keep them safe from harm by performing the ceremony of Raksha Bandhan, a service typically carried out by a sister for her brother, in which the sister secures a colorful thread to his wrist and vows prayers of love to him.

  The mountain releases a full moon from out of its darkness, like an ovum spewed from an ovary. The celestial light transforms the encampment into a residence of alabaster. Soon the sacred ritual begins. One by one the porters come forward and hold an arm out to Sara, who wears the kata over her head like a veil again. She loops and binds the wristlet to a wrist, promising a bond of protection. Each devotee gazes at her wide-eyed, feeling the piety that travels through her fingers as a gesture toward the infinite. There is a collective breath of tenderness among the faithful at the end of the sacrament. Sherpa Pasang strikes a match to a bough, humming one of his melodies as he waits for the blaze. The wind chorals up and down the ravine. The stars brim with significance.

  * * *

  SHE IS coming down the slope through a swirling mist, the sun dimmed behind her, when she sees it. The body is an odd triangular shape, magnified and enormous, the towering figure surrounded in an aureole of rainbow, the head gloried in shimmering rings. She wings her arms up and down, knowing the phenomenon of the specter ahead is she, Sarasvati.

  * * *

  ALL NIGHT long the mountain convulses feverishly as Sara lies in her lover’s arms feeling the world in its tumble and spin. Her skin is colorless as the landscape surrounding them, the surface veins in her face like the blue striae of glacial ice, her eyes pale and hollow as thaw holes. Her breasts are tender, her lips parched and fissured, the sores on her hands slow to heal. Vertigo sours her mouth with a taste of curdled milk, and her stomach turns at the hint of food. She has toted provisions for days with little appetite, but today she awakes at Ridge Camp without vitality; even standing upright is an undertaking. Devin urges her to drink, refusing to shuttle again until Sara is well enough to accompany him.

  Vida locates the radio, puts in the call, and Reddy is there with Mingma and two porters by midday. Sara has her head out of the tent and is vomiting a clear ichorous-looking liquid when the doctor arrives. He goes to her and opens his medical kit.

  Vida, having done her share of shuttling for the past week, has packed her backpack, prepared to head back to lower Base Camp, the banging of high avalanches encouraging her down. Mingma accompanies her and leads on the descent, a porter trailing behind her, the sun a gloomy dimness in the clouds. Vida’s thoughts drift and whorl about like loose snow as she heads down the gully toward the Sanctuary. She muses about love as she trudges along, what it is, or was, or wasn’t. Concluding only that happiness is forever for those in love, because love, she sees, is truly aspiring. She knows love is never low, but always a looking up, being ceaselessly above. And now that she has been with Reddy again, she sees clearly that her marriage to Wilder has tumbled down to its end.

  It is finished.

  She will tell Wilder just as soon as she is off the mountain.

  Vida’s eyes water and her nose drips in the biting air. The wind whimpers through the gully. She plods on, trying to think of the kindest words there might be to tell Wilder she is leaving. She sinks up to the knees, cursing the deep and wet snow of midday. Aspiring tablets, she thinks, must be what I need.

  * * *

  DOCTOR REDDY gives Sara a pill to melt under her tongue, medicine that relieves the queasiness and makes her sleepy. Sherpa Pasang prepares cup after cup of hot instant orange drink for her to drink. Once she can take in no more, Reddy prescribes oxygen. He puts the canister next to her, handling it gently as a baby, covering the tank with a down parka to keep the cold of its metal away from the patient. He puts the mask on Sara’s face, pulls the elastic ties snug at the sides, adjusts the regulator. She is soon asleep in the susurrus hum of pressured gas.

  In her sleep Sara sees a woman roaming up and down the mountain. The woman has dark hair, her mother’s color, and a furrowed brow. The woman is not lost, but something has gone wrong. Sara follows and sees that the ice is suffused with blooms of blood. The woman works to wash the blood away, sploshing each spot with water from her water bottle, the water turning the rime a pale pinkish color, like an oozing. But as soon as the woman has doused one part of the icy slope, she finds a trail leading to another section seeped by the bleeding. The task seems endless, hopeless, yet there is no choice but to carry on. So she waters and she waters. She soaks, sops, rinses, thins, wanting to purify, to rectify.

  Late afternoon Sara wakes, finding Devin still in the tent beside her. The doctor’s remedies bring relief, and by evening she is herself again, her cheeks restored to a rosy glow, her eyes lively and bright. By evening, she is baking apples for dinner, infusing the air with cinnamon, the warm desert and her good health restoring the lull in the party’s morale once more.

  * * *

  “AND YOUR father and I saw the splendid mountain and said one day we will have a daughter just as splendid and we will christen her Sarasvati.”

  “What was I then?” Sara said. “Before I wasn’t?”

  “Well, let’s say we are each of us pieces of fleshy fruit.”

  Sara watched her mother’s lips moving as she spoke.

  “Yes, and inside each of us there are hollow stone ovaries.”

  “What’s ovaries?”

  “An ovary stone is like a peach pit, sweetie.”

  “Oh.”

  “Children have little stones, and adults have big ones.”

  “They grow in us, the stones?”

  “In girls the stone grows in the uterus. Here, down in here.”

  Sara looked into her mother’s eyes. “Then what?”

  “That’s all there is to it,” Amanda said. “You are born with the stone and you carry it all through your life. This is what your dying is. It is just something you have in you from the very beginning. It is part of you.”

  “You carry it?”

  “Men are especially proud of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because without it they wouldn’t be here at all. And they are honored because women carry stones for them in their uteruses, so they can make more stones and more boys and men and make more of all of us.”

  “Then we are lucky?”

  “Very, for our fruit is double that of a man’s. Our fruit is twofold. Women carry a new life and they carry dying at the same time.”

  “Is there a stone in the baby inside?”

  “There is, so the mother has two stones inside her, you see.”

  “You mean two dyings in her?”

  “Two deaths. Yes. She holds her own and also the child’s.”

  “Where does my stone go when I die?”

  “It goes back into the garden.”

  “In the dirt?”

  “How else can a stone grow into a peach tree? Of course, in the dirt.”

  Sara nodded her head. “What if I were a peach?”

  “Then you would be the most perfect peach there ever could be, sweet Sarasvati.”

  * * *

  THERE ARE more days of bad weather, more days of waiting it out; a festerfest, as Devin likes to call these layovers, as they all fester about in layers of wool and fleece in thei
r tents. People are bored, weary of being sedentary, and tensions begin to rankle like blisters. The mountain shakes off wave upon wave of new downfall, and though Adams considers Advanced Camp a relatively secure location, nerves are taut. On the next cold morning of cloudless sky, Wilder and Devin gear up in readiness to set out, aiming to reckon a course to Camp I safe enough for everyone.

  Devin wants Sara to come along, but it is another day of stomach trouble and so she stays back to rest up for the more difficult days ahead. Reddy riffles through his kit and brings her a bottle of pills. “Take one capsule three times a day until all the capsules are gone. Follow each with plenty of water. We’ve all been through these disturbances of the gastrointestinal tract, a common problem on every expedition,” he says.

  “If you say so, Doctor,” Devin says, looking at Sara as he speaks. He squeezes her hand.

  “Go on, Devin,” she says. “Go with Wilder.”

  And Devin does. He and Wilder pack up their harnesses, their hardware and rope, both eager to begin some real climbing after so many weeks on the trail. Wilder is pleased to have his friend once again at his side and all to himself. The two are paced together the way they used to be back in the days of their training jaunts, and little to no conversation is all right by both of them. They revel in the glorious morning, filled with camaraderie, with brilliant sunshine and an ultramarine sky. They tromp up toward the middle of a col, the snowy ground radiant as the sea, their glacier glasses necessities against the intensity of the glare. Both are content and lost in thought as they make their way through heavy drifts in the steep of a waning slope. But the sudden rasp of a snowslide shakes them from their silence. The earth quivers beneath their feet. Wilder feels it like the church bells ringing forlorn as he and his brother started out toward Stone Sentinel; when the bells stopped the sound still resonated from the ground, seeping deep into his boot soles. Wilder feels an omen in the tremoring.