Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  Mingma shakes his head, mutters his goodbyes, and sets out ahead of the rest in the predawn darkness. The air is gravid with snow as the Sherpa takes his leave of Advanced Camp, and by the time he gets down to Ridge Camp the weather has let go in a scatter of expectant flakes, a downfall that blots out the darkened shapes of every surrounding scarp and prow. He uses the brushwood they have stashed to start a fire. He will make the tea and ready the meal, be prepared for the others when they arrive. All will need fuel before heading back down the gully to return to the Sanctuary and Base Camp. He gets the fire blazing, starts melting snow. He fills insulated flasks with the heated water, melts more snow. So much snow, so little water. But the more water he melts, the more it snows; the gods, he surmises, providing a constant flowing supply for their drinking needs.

  It seems too long a time has passed when finally he sees the others step through the thick pale curtain of uncertainty, the weather having changed dramatically. They are crusted in rime, bent over and beaten down like a troop of doddering soldiers. They barely discern the smoke rising from the fire within the brume of falling snow when they stagger in, the sprinkling from above having turned from thick lazy flakes into a whorling haze. Adams, in his hypoxic stupor, comes in piggybacked on Pasang’s shoulders and hips in a Swiss-style seat harness fashioned out of climbing rope, the sahib’s long arms and legs lolling out, like a wooden puppet attached to strings. They have stirruped his feet with loops of tubular webbing to keep them from dragging on the ground, but there was nothing they could do about his swaying arms. Pasang stumbles, utterly depleted by his human carry. He loosens the ropes from his shoulders, parks Adams in the snow, and collapses onto his back beside his sahib. “Yo!” Adams says.

  The party hurries through a lunch of milky sweet tea along with peanut butter and jelly spread onto chapatis. Vida funnels bite-size lumps into Adams’s mouth. Still chewing, Troy lades his pack with juniper brush and turns to head back up to Advanced Camp, where Karma fends for himself in the worsening weather. The others shoulder their loads and head down in the opposite direction to take leave of the ridge, Adams this time rag-dolled onto Mingma’s back, the sahib’s feet stirruped into loops of frozen rope, his head drooped to one side. Doctor Reddy takes the lead and cuts trail through the deepening drifts, Mingma and his pendulous carry right behind him, Vida and Pasang bringing up the defile. The wind squeals furiously, like tires spinning in the mud. The going is painfully slow, especially moving down through the steeper part of the gully. All cling to the fixed line, gathering to assist Mingma as he piggybacks Adams through the rifts, along the ledges, and on through the crux. When they finally make it down to the Sanctuary they find themselves floundering in a whiteout. Vida takes her glasses off to get her bearings, her corneas needled by lashing snow. Reddy points the way to the left, but Pasang shakes his head and gestures right, shouting to be heard above the wind. Mingma, still shouldering Adams, cries out that he can’t go on; they must dig a trench in the snow and make shelter here for the night. The effort of bellowing out the plea leaves the Sherpa unsteady and breathless, Adams’s bulk toppling them both over into the snow. They haul Mingma back up to standing, but Adams has slipped out of his harness and begins crawling away on hands and knees. “We have got to move!” Vida shouts. “We have no shovels to dig in with. We will freeze if we stop. We will die here!” They get Adams to his feet and Reddy short-ropes him, tethering him to his side with a bight of rope girth-hitched to the harnesses. He will drag him behind on the ground if need be, but Adams stays upright and staggers along.

  Base Camp is very close. It has to be, they agree. They call out in unison, hoping those porters left back to tend home camp will hear them. But nothing. They call out again. Again the wind mutes their cries. They stagger on in cycloning snow, roped together, wandering in circles with the wind driving them off any course they try to keep to, the drifts beneath their feet whiffling like sheeting. No one admits to being lost, no one dares say the word, if even they could be heard, though the worry is palpable in each of their terrified hearts.

  Vida is ready to scream out, giving herself over to panic. She opens her mouth and is suddenly choked by the drowning snow, and in a great fit of coughing and a breach in the mist, the red specks of the tents appear. “There!” she cries out, letting go a last burst of cough.

  Two thousand feet above the others, Professor Troy moves out onto an immense blank page, and faces the storm alone. The weather obliterates landscape, abolishes sky, blots the world out entirely. Even his feet he cannot see. There is a frozen echoing in his head, as if a voice other than his were speaking inside him. A voice he knows is nothing but his crazed thoughts repeating as he grapples on. He thinks about his daughter high up on the rib of Camp I. He leans into the flogging wind and blames himself. He blames everyone else. He curses those whose foolish creed is the might of science, those convinced that human power can conquer nature. What is it but vanity? Just as his vanity has put him here, and put his daughter at risk on a blizzard-plundered cliff above. All for the sake of a name she has been named. A name that could lay claim to her life, a thought he had dismissed in the past. For didn’t he reason the odds of her demise were no greater than any other life when up on a mountain? But now his conclusion seems only a denial, his logic weak. His anger takes on vigor and heat as he pushes ahead, fueling him through a lashing of ice specks stinging like sandblast. The only power now is in his doggedness, his mindedness, his drive. Ignore cold, ignore pain, this the only means of winning. His frozen lips refuse the words, but he hears the speaker speaking. Then he realizes the voice is not within, but is coming from outside, from behind. Someone follows. Troy stops, turns, lifts the goggles from his eyes. He looks into a dizzying white nothingness. He waits. He calls out. His hands and feet ache in the cold. Go on. He moves ahead. Several times he pauses to glance back, hearing the bootsteps of another, hearing a voice not his. And each time he sees the same oblivion of unbroken snowfall. He hears only the voice of a razory wind.

  By the time he makes it back to Advanced Camp the tents are turned Eskimo houses of snow. He finds the sirdar Sherpa trying to knock the accumulation off the tarpaulin over the makeshift kitchen, causing slabs of it to carom off in bunches of minor avalanches. Troy shouts orders out. “Karma! No use. Loosen the guylines. Drop the poles. Tarpaulin the provisions. Weight the tarp. Plant the ice axes in.” They work together quickly. Troy knocks snow off one of the tents and climbs inside. He pulls his boots off, his socks, sees his feet turned a marbled white. He kneads the few toes that remain to him. He pummels his feet. He smacks and pinches them. Karma brings a flask of hot tea to the sahib and offers to help bring life back to his numbed limbs. “Go,” Troy says. “Take care of the other tent. Dig it out and get in and do your best to keep from being blown away or buried alive in it.”

  They huddle each in his separate tent, burrowing deep into their sleeping bags, layered in all their garb. It is hopeless trying to communicate between the two shelters, the fabric slapping furious in the wind. The gale is so strong at times Troy has to brace his back against the poles of the windward side of the tent to keep the aluminum from bending any more than it already has. He knows Karma does the same. They can only hope to God about the seaming.

  There comes a pause in the night when the wind finally begins to diminish. Troy moves away from his post at the wall, the tent making a popping sound in release. He breathes easier, burrows deeper into his feather bag. The wind moves high, tearing across the upper glacier in a loud caterwauling. Sara. Dear God, Sara. Again he tries the radio, and this time a voice comes through—the words abraded and incomplete, but, yes, still a voice, a small voice, and yes, it is his Sara. “Camp One, do you read?” Troy says. “Camp One, Camp One. Please do you read? Come in, Sara. Sara?” He thumps the radio against the shell of his backpack, thwacks it again and again, but the thing is lifeless and cannot be revived. “Batteries,” he says to no one listening. “Goddammit the goddamn batteries.” He cur
ses the device again, flings it. He slips back down into his down bag, cinching himself up to the chin. Closes his eyes. Hears the scratchy voice of his daughter. Tries to keep the dark thoughts away. Hold on to the voice. Troy thinks in directives, in decrees. He tells himself, yes, he will rest, but for only two hours. Two hours will be enough. Then he will pack up and start out for Camp I. The monsoon should subside tonight. The storm cannot go on much longer. He begins finally to slip off into sleep. Until the wind bucks up violently, this time creeping beneath the tent and tossing him about like a drowning man in an angry sea.

  For forty-eight hours all on the mountain remain in a constant state of shoveling and scraping and digging out. For forty-eight hours, wind and snow drum at the tents, synthetic walls groan in strain, poles creak and warp at the contort. For forty-eight hours they prevail, havened in down bags, laboring to keep the snow-laden walls off their heads and their faces, staving away the weight of the downfall to keep themselves from suffocating, struggling all the while to keep their minds on happier times past or more pleasant days ahead, as the wind carries on in a satanic ear-piercing litany.

  * * *

  THE LIGHT was flat and weird as Wilder walked along the narrow span of Adams’ Rib, making it difficult to tell what was up from what was down. The space around him seemed to expand and contract, ripple and stretch, the colorless light of land and sky become one. The rib was the singular route north that lay safe track to the upper mountain, and there could be no getting lost on it, instead only a perilous fall to the bottom if he should slip, for the crest was spectacularly exposed on both sides. He anchored one end of the rope and began to move ahead, hacking away warily at the soft snow with his ice axe, trying to find solidity before taking the next step, his balance shaky with the bulk he bore on his back. There were places where he would plant his ice axe and it would be swallowed up to the hilt, and every few yards he would strike a piece of cornice only to watch it fall into the horrible void below. He had to detour closer to the brink and the sheer cliff beneath, death only an inch or two away from the edge of his boot. He planted wands along the way, but there was no place to put in a second anchor to fix the line. He had to put his mind on his footing, to the sensation there, working to find the pressure points right under the balls of the feet, his eyes fixed on a single point ahead, like a funambulist would do it. He felt no fear, for to admit to himself that he was scared would be to admit it to his brother. He was never more conscious of his brother’s presence as he was now, and this made Wilder think sharply and it made him want to carry on. He refused to look down. Forward was the only choice.

  The arête tapered, becoming so narrow he considered sitting astride the ridge à cheval as if riding a hoofed animal and scooting himself across. But the technique would be painfully slow, and he did not want to freeze his hands and feet. So he sucked in a breath and let the breath out, moving lightly across the snowy high-wire, eyes fixed once again on a single spot ahead of him. And then he found himself past the crux. He planted his ice axe into solid firn, and here he drove in a deadman and fixed the other end of the line. A strange fascination with danger drove him on.

  A death wish? No, just the opposite. How can you climb a mountain if you’re dead?

  The boil of clouds from the valley darkened as they rose overhead, and with a shrug of the peak’s shoulders they let go their keep of snow. He crossed over a rickety ice bridge that brought him to a cascade of seracs at the base of the high glacier. He maneuvered through until the slope began to open up, planting stakes and pickets along the way. The snow was falling fast and thick. He knew he could not get back across to Camp I in a whiteout.

  His goggles were fogging up bad, and when he took them off to try to wipe them clean the wind blustered stinging snow into his eyes. He struggled to get the goggles back on, and then he had to take his gloves off to tie the hood of his anorak tight about his head and chin, his fingers useless in the cold. He knew he could go no farther. He was wandering in a goddamned monsoon blizzard is what was happening. He needed to find a place to bivouac quick. There was no level spot for the tent, and he carried no snow shovel. He had to use his boots to push the snow off to the side, and he flattened the ground out by stamping it down. What a breathless ordeal a simple task could be this high up. It took him a long time to level out a site with the snow bombing down and the wind lashing him. Gusts kept lifting the tent as he tried to pitch it, and he clung to the fabric to keep the thing from blowing off the mountain. He would die without it. He might even die with it.

  He struggled, but finally he got the tent poles aligned and into the sleevings. He brushed the snow off his pack and tossed it into the tent to weigh the shelter down. Then he collapsed inside, his boots protruding out the door flap, the wind mewling down the slopes. His chest hurt from his cough, and his throat felt as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it. He was exhausted, wanted only to sleep. He began to doze off. Snow beat against the tent like bursts of little firecrackers. He opened his eyes, hearing his brother telling him to sit up and get your damn boots off and bring them inside before they freeze on you. Then you need to start up the stove and get snow melting. Without drinking you die, man. You die.

  The hero keeps no covenant, except with death. Who said this? No answer. Wilder sat up and did what he had to do, his teeth chattering like castanets. He took the gas stove out of his pack, the small aluminum pot, the plastic bag of matches. Crawled out of the tent and filled the pot with snow. Got back inside the tent, took his boots off, lit the stove. As he did all this he talked softly. Imagine if he were without his brother’s company. Imagine how lonely it would be. Lucas’s very absence had brought him back close again.

  The snow melted to less than a cup of water. Hardly anything. He drank it lukewarm out of the pot, and then he put his boots on and went back outside, this time taking with him a large plastic sack from out of the bottom of his backpack. He filled the sack with snow, returned to the tent, started melting more snow. He drank tepid tea, though he didn’t feel thirsty. He ate bites of cheese, though he wasn’t hungry. Not to sleep until you have had enough to drink and eat, he told himself, or was it his brother telling him now? Either way, he knew this was right. He drank and kept talking with Lucas and this kept him going. He talked about the words for snow, about why there’s so few words for snow in English when the Eskimos are known to have so many. Yeah, but always a prefix or a suffix or a modifier or qualifier or whatever the hell you call it is attached to the root of the word. Really, they only have the root word snow, same as we do. So big deal, you’ve got your falling-snow and your slushy-snow and your fluffy-snow. And then you’ve got your yesterday-snow versus your tomorrow-snow, and your remembered-snow versus your forgotten-snow. Then there’s your snow-with-husky-piss-in-it as opposed to your clean-snow for making the daiquiris to drink along with your horse ovaries. Wilder laughed and this got his cough going again. Don’t make me laugh, man. But now there’s too much snow on the tent again. This is snow-coming-at-us-from-every-direction-snow. This is snow-that-won’t-stop. This is snow-a-person-might-die-in. Get out and dig, man. Melt more snow. Because that stupid piece of orgonite in your pocket isn’t gonna do it for you, man. It’s as useless as those ashes you carry with you. Brother, what kind of superstitious bug got into you anyway? Just go on and melt more friggin’ snow.

  * * *

  DEVIN WAS trying to describe to her his feelings the first time he saw her. He talked about her appearing out of nowhere, described how the blossoms were coming down snowing pink all around her, and how the petals were caught in her hair like a flowery tiara or something. He told her he was carried away by her at first sight. He was still carried away, he said. Would always be. She had lifted him up and was taking him higher. “Up into the heavens,” he said. Sara laughed. He hoped she laughed out of shyness and not because he sounded like any other fool trying to talk about love.

  A heavy sky came down on Adams’ Rib. The sky looked like it was filled with
tiny white butterflies, is how Sara described it. She and Devin stayed inside and slapped the walls of the tent to keep the pileup off. All day it snowed, and they stayed nestled inside a sleeping bag. All day they made love and melted snow, made love and melted snow. They drank and they ate and they slept and they talked and they made love again. The falling snow muted all sounds but for their own. Remote avalanches came and went in fitful vibrato.

  He told her of the callings he had lately, and about the man he hoped one day he might be. He had been thinking of studying engineering, either that or going into computer sciences, as this was the way the world was heading. They were launched into the eighties now, and before they knew it they’d be nearing the millennium. Imagine that. Imagine they would reach the millennium together, he said, and from there go on for years together, he and Sara, just as they would reach the summit of Mysterium together.

  The snow fell harder and it was no longer enough to knock it off the tent from the inside. Every thirty or forty minutes Devin got out and took big armfuls of powder off their portable home. He brushed the flakes off his coat and shook his hat and crawled back inside, careful not to bring snow back in with him, but always there was some that got in. Sara swept as much as she could out with her gloved hands. Still their feather bags were getting wet, their clothes too. It got dark and the temperature dropped and the cold began to inflict itself. But when Reddy called up on the radio from down at Base Camp, Sara and Devin had no complaints. They told him they had enough food and plenty of snow to melt. They could barely hear through the faulty broadcast.

  “We are fine,” Sara said.

  She handed the receiver to Devin.