Mysterium

by Susan Froderberg

  Twenty-five years ago, he had stood with Hilman at the top of Mount Mysterium trying to take the moment in, so potent the moment was. The experience had been almost too much for the senses. One feeling gave way to another as he beheld the infinite allure of the world in front of him, a perfection and beauty it seemed he finally had come to possess. The mountain had been penetrated. They could walk no higher. They had not so simply, yet somehow, yes, simply: they had arrived. Then all logic was toppled. Like a flip of the coin, an emotional antipodal, their overwhelming joy turned in an instant to the deepest regret. And though he and Hilman later spoke of it, they could not say from where the remorse really came. Perhaps it was hunger and fatigue, as well as the heights and the light-headedness, so they agreed. They allowed any tears to freeze and so desist, and without further delay, they started back down the mountain.

  Adams gazes up at Mysterium’s summit, he and Hilman since disappeared from it as if what had happened never had been, their feat turned to no more than story, now but a piece of imbued history. He sees no longer a paradise, as he had in his youth. The mountain Sarasvati was heaven for him when he first pursued her. Yet once she accepted him, once he had had her and was betrothed to her, the maiden had thereby lost her charm. For how could she remain heaven if she had stooped so low as to hold him?

  The understanding comes over him like a weightlessness.

  “Hilman,” he says, “you bet, my man, I have got it.”

  * * *

  SARA STUMBLES into Camp II behind her father, pulling mittens off with her teeth. She unleashes her wrist from the wrist-sling and lets the ice axe drop with a thunk to the snow. Then she unstraps the crampons and kicks them free of her boots, shucks her backpack off, climbs into the tent, and plunges into sleep.

  The others remain outside in the unfolding crepuscular light, collecting snow for the stove. They pass around a pair of binoculars as water heats in the pot, each man studying the headwall of rock cliff that fortresses the summit. They search for possible routes upon a rimy crag of pure vertical, a face cracked by overhangs and ossicles of rock; at the buttress’s top a skullcap of snow. Devin aims a finger toward a cleaver that spikes sharply out of the névé just at the halfway point, and above this Wilder sights a draw, the long glazed leg of a pathway that leads to the base of an arachnoid mass of perpetual ice and snow. They can only hope for a ledge below the spidery growth that will allow for a traverse, if they are to find a decent ledge there at all. Troy glasses the aprons of ice, the blocks of rock, siting a number of exit cracks higher up that lead to the smooth snowfield that tonsures the bulwark. All three agree that breaching the rampart isn’t going to be easy.

  So, who ever said it was going to be easy?

  In any case, no one is expecting a promenade.

  That night, in preparatory drudgery, the foursome gathers rope and webbing, pitons and hammers, extra tent and poles. They melt water for water bottles. They sort through clothing, untangle harnesses, rig safety tethers, adjust crampons. In the morning they will pack in the food and the water and the extra garb. The plan is to be off by daybreak.

  It is a long and miserable night for everyone. They are four adults with backpacks packed into a three-man tent, pillared together in columns of down with most of their clothing on. It is the most bone-chilling cold they have so far encountered, but at the very least they need not put boots at the bottom of their sleeping sacks as they usually do, so tightly are they jammed inside the tent. The boots are tucked into the tight spaces between their feather bags where the leather will remain in a state of defrost. But lug soles protrude into hip bones and collarbones, leather shanks poke into tailbones and ribs. Wilder adds to the jabs and spurs with his constant cough, a brassy hacking that pains the others the whole night long. There is a muttering and babble of cursing until dawn, wind thrashing at the tent, spindrift grating like sandpaper against the soft walls. Any sleep is at best spasmodic and modicum, and when it comes at all it carries no more than pieces of broken dreams.

  Devin is amazed to find his mother in his arms, all the way up here near the top of the mountain and in the middle of the night. His mother is light as snow. She is hard and cold as ice. Her bones jut out like cleavered rock. Her skin is ash-colored and fissured. Only her eyes are alive, dark wet stones, eyes that prod, eyes that tell him once more to give her more, please give her all of it again. No, there is no more medicine left, he has given it all. And she went to sleep already, didn’t she? Finally. Such a deep and final sleep. No, Mother, please do not, please do not plead. But his father is too selfish to do it, too much a coward, isn’t he, a man too much in need? Yes, Maggie knows this, you can see it in her imploring eyes. But a person should only have to die once, and Devin cannot do it again. Now he is doing the pleading, but only a pitiful whining comes out of him. It hurts to hold on to her, so sharp and cold are her bones, but he knows not to let go.

  It is Wilder who elbows Devin in the ribs and brings him back out of his altitudinous delirium. Or maybe it is a hard boot sole he has rolled into that wakes him, an irritating rubber welt along the backbone. Whatever it is that breaks the dream, he is left in a cold sweat, with the wind keening into the night like a despairing she-demon.

  * * *

  AT FIRST LIGHT they begin the dismal task of melting snow and fixing breakfast in a cramped tent. Tempers reach a boiling point that the water never does, as people struggle to find a lost sock or a glove, only for someone to knock a pot of almost-hot water off the stove and drench the down coats and bags. There are arguments about space enough, sugar enough, patience enough, manners enough.

  “Enough,” Sara says. She remains tucked deep into her sleeping bag hoarding warmth, doing her best to stay out of the chaos. She is dressed for the climb since last night, wearing her mother’s emerald-colored sweater and the kata around her neck. But she is so drained from the day before that she will not sit up to take breakfast or drink anything. Devin tries to coax her into activity, but she doesn’t respond to his cajoles. He hears himself pleading, as he did in the dream. He hears the wailing of the banshee. And then he sees that something is not right.

  “I’m staying here with Sara,” he says. “We’ll take it easy today, go up the buttress and join you guys tomorrow.” Devin looks up at Wilder. “You need to get a move on, friend.”

  Troy puts a hand to his daughter’s cheek. “I would love to have you at my side,” he says. “But you’re tired, I can see. You’ll be better with a day’s rest.”

  Troy and Wilder know they have to set out while the weather is good, tackle the buttress, fix the ropes, and install Camp III a thousand feet above, the last establishment on the mountain. No, they are neither one the companion of either’s choosing, but they shoulder their burdens and their ropes and pair up.

  They look like soldiers strapped with ammo, so racked are they with hardware. The backpacks are heavy, and it is bitter cold. Only cold and howl and snow all around. Rasp and plume of breath. The light paling the sky, illuminating a bald and colorless topography. A wind that staggers. Both know a gale any stronger would send them sailing off to either side of the cliff, down into the darkness of the depths below. To their left the southeast face slips away, disappearing into a murky gray foramen; the northeast flank on the right plummets into an appalling nothing. The knee-deep snow shields them from the temper of Zephyrus as they posthole along, but with heavy loads the labor of breaking trail takes every bit of muscle and heave they can muster. As they near the buttress, the abutment grows so hulking they cannot see the towering summit behind it. It begins to snow. They slog on, stooped and paled like elderly men, their eyebrows and whiskers hoared thick with ice. The wind gusts up and ghosts the snow from their outerclothes, and bodies of vaporous dust spiral out into the gloom. They walk a cold line between heaven and hell, feeling small and armored and insignificant. At midday they arrive to the base of the craggy stanchion. The sun is shrouded in cloud.

  Wilder hefts his backpack off, takes
from out of it a length of tubular webbing, and with the webbing he swamis himself about the waist. He ties the belt off with a water knot, widens his stance to plant himself firm to the frozen ground. Troy takes hold of the belay line and starts up the bulwark of quartzite and ice, brushing sugared snow off every blocky foothold and handhold, moving fastidiously, placing ice screws and thin blades along the way. Wilder stands shivering, scrutinizing Troy ascending in the steady and classic manner that he does. People climb differently these days, with guys carrying less weight and now practically running up cliff faces. How much more quickly this day would go if Devin were his partner instead, the two friends having trained for speed, their style modern and their method sleek, knowing swiftness to be a necessity on any threatening precipice.

  “Slack!” Troy calls down.

  The command snaps Wilder back to the here where he is. He pays out more of the rope and watches the professor muscle his way up a chimney, jamming and manteling with his hands, bridging his feet against the ravine’s pursed walls, moving without falter or pause. The climbing is demanding and thin, and though the professor is not fast, Wilder cannot help but admire the fluid movement of his performance on this arctic stage. The man’s a tiger, he hears his brother Lucas say. A real tough guy, right? Like you, man. Wilder shivers in the cold. A heavy mist settles in from above, and he sees Troy disappear up into the gray haze, becoming just a clinking of ironmongery as he moves higher up, a ghost hauling its chains.

  “Climb!”

  Wilder moves at the decree. He fixes the jumars and starts up to join Troy, who waits anchored to a ledge. Troy puts his gloves back on and claps his hands together furiously to bring heat, stomping his frozen feet as he waits for Wilder to ascend. It is very cold, and every halt and post a belayer takes is all the colder in the waiting.

  They find a boot-width ledge below the névé’d mass they had spotted from below in their binoculars. One at a time they move along hugging the wall, the grainy quartzite bulging rudely out. They lean back and kick steps into the firn and inch their way sideways along the buttress, clinging to flakes in the rock above, the weight of the loads on their shoulders bowing them perilously backward, barrages of spindrift pouring down over them like frosty talcum from above. Past the ledge, Troy moves up an ice-throttled crack, his freezing hands gone nearly numb as he crimps and jams his way up, the teeth of his crampons holding only at the foremost toe points. He grabs the hammer from his sling, drives a bong into the rock, clips a carabiner in, an etrier, and then crampons up to the next step. He sets his stance and once again blows life back into his hands, feeling a grateful tingle and ache as he waits for Wilder to meet up with him again.

  A cloud pregnant with malice frees itself from Mysterium’s summit and snags at the top of the buttress, peening the air with icy spicules. They are hungry and thirsty, but there is no perch wide enough to sit or plant themselves on now. They have to keep moving, for not to be moving is to be freezing, and to be freezing is to be dying. It is better to fall off a mountain than to freeze on a mountain, so Troy has always believed.

  They press on, the buttress never letting up, the weather determined to hunt them down. Despite the hardship, despite the stone slides and snow spray the mountain spites on them, the two move as one, rope length by rope length, steadily gaining altitude, automatons on remote control, both white as spooks and crusted with ice, caught in a blinding meteor of snow.

  One last steep pitch of icy rime-covered rock brings them to the rim of the vertical wall where the slope crests off onto an airy snowfield higher up. Troy struggles desperately on this last maneuver, grappling to get a hold of something that isn’t powdery soft and falling away. Nothing offers a decent grip to pull up with. The wind whips at him, and snowdrift finds its way into every opening and crease of his clothing. He feels himself beside himself in the struggle, anguished, finished before the finish. He hasn’t strength left enough to brush the doomed thoughts away, just as he no longer bothers to brush the snow off his face. There is nothing left in him. He is done in. How can it be? Wilder’s calls drift up, words erased by wind. So close. Just rest a minute and gather strength. Stand here a minute and sleep. How wonderful to sleep. Maybe a deathly freezing is not so bad at all.

  A loud crack of avalanche sparks like electricity that surges through Troy’s body, head to toes. With a burst of whatever it is left inside him he reaches up and feels the chunk of rock that had so eluded him. He tests it, finds it does not mock with any give. Carapaced with equipment, he hefts himself up and swings a leg high, his hands frozen to claws. Like a pincered crustacean he crawls up and over the brink, splayed out prostrate in an ocean of snow.

  Wilder starts up the last pitch before the rim, and as he ascends he sees through the flurries the rope stretched across a knife-edge section of rock. He watches the rope stretch and fray over the saw of rock as he moves along, trying with all his might to ease his weight off the line, thinking what a horrible lousy joke, thinking what a spiteful bitch of a mountain this is, thinking all this effort, all this distance, thinking crazy and angry and banal thoughts and all without a moment to be afraid. Then he is up and over the lip and onto the crest, collapsed into the snow next to Troy, thinking holy Christ they have made it.

  The cold bites like a ferocious animal. They labor to their feet and push on, bowed over and pathetically slow, paddling through the snow as the powder deepens. They continue up the incline searching for a site wide and level enough to accommodate the tent, finding nothing. What to do? Where to go? Exhausted, they retreat back to the buttress’s edge, where they find the depressions their bodies had left in the snow. They chuck their backpacks, reach in for the mess tins, and with cups and plates and hands and feet they begin to level out a space all around. They have come to an altitude of more than seven thousand meters, twenty-four thousand feet, and every one of their efforts threatens to put them over the limit. Their lungs rasp in a metered need for a decently sated breath, their hearts pound like kettledrums. Wilder coughs his hacking cough, feeling the splintering in his ribs.

  The fabric whips and luffs. Their frozen hands are clumsy as clubs as they pole and stake and tame the tent into place. They are dredged in white, featureless creatures swallowed up in the terrain. Clouds slink down the mountain and settle in at the base of the buttress, cloaking everything over. The sun casts a cataracted eye.

  They camp at the mountain’s throat. After they radio down to Camp II they begin to melt snow. They drink potfuls of warm tea and dine on tinned chicken spread and cold hard candy bars. They discuss the summit, which route to choose. Troy says he wishes to take the most elegant course, traversing the face of the east peak to its top, then getting onto the saddle between it and the main summit, and following this line straight up to Mysterium’s apex. But Wilder argues for avoiding the face of the east peak and taking the couloir behind the peak that joins right up to the saddle, in case they’re short of rope. Then from there follow the saddle to the main summit.

  “The couloir is likely an avalanche trap,” Troy says.

  “Your way is longer, and more exposed.”

  “The others will bring up more rope.”

  “What if the others don’t come up?”

  “Then we manage the route without it,” says Troy.

  “In that case no need to take the same line to the top.”

  “No need, I suppose.” Troy pulls the thermos from his pack, pours a capful of tea, offers it to Wilder.

  Wilder wags a hand at the offering. “Thanks anyway.”

  “You had the worst of it today,” Troy says. “I kicked a mess of ice and rock down on your head with every one of my bootsteps, not to mention the near miss of the teeth of my crampons aimed right at your face when I slipped. You handled it like a pro.”

  “I don’t need pats on the back.” He works to stifle a cough.

  “Have it your way.” Troy swallows the capful of tea down.

  Wilder lets out a rhonchus cough. “Listen,�
� he says. “There’s a frazzled piece of rope on the last pitch before the snowfield.”

  “Will it hold a rappel?”

  “I don’t know. I could see the white core showing through.”

  “So we’ll have to double the rope.”

  “With what?”

  “The others will bring up another rope and we’ll double it.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “Then we’ll fix it on the way down. There’s a trick.”

  Wilder fidgets with a glove. “You should know that I’m why we won’t have enough rope.” He slaps the glove to a knee.

  “You’re why what?”

  “Devin and I thought to lighten the loads up in Delhi.”

  Troy looks at him. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “I know Devin won’t have any more rope to bring up.”

  Troy grabs the glove out of Wilder’s hand, tosses it against the wall of the tent.

  “If we had moved up this mountain faster,” Wilder says.

  “You’ve said enough,” Troy says. He lies back, closes his eyes.

  “What’s your trick to fix the rope?”

  Troy rolls to his side, facing away.

  Wilder switches off his headlamp and zips himself up to the chin. They sleep, or try to sleep, drowsing in and out of an uneven alpha state, a kind of twilight condition between wakefulness and slumber. Even exhaustion does not adjourn consciousness. Call this spell of hours repose. Call it rest. Call it drift. Drift at an altitude hostile to human life, to any life. Their warm breath crystallizes the opening of their sleeping bags with hoarfrost. Their bodies hum on in a state of rapid decay brought on by a paucity of oxygen, organs in a phase of early mottle and rot, blood darkened and sludged, their dreams veered and halted cold in the unlivable kingdom in which they hope now to sleep.

  * * *

  THE NEW-FALLEN snow had covered over the icy walk along the crest of Adams’ Rib. Reddy needed the static line so he could clip in, and digging the rope out of the deep snow there was punishing work. He could have returned to Advanced Camp and demanded that Pasang assist him, but if he did he would have been faced with the task of having to furnish some sort of apology to this man of vassaled allegiance. For Reddy knew he had wounded the Sherpa by calling him a fool—what’s more, an aboriginal fool—and by doing so had no doubt trod on the man’s self-respect. Reddy knew himself incapable of telling the man he was sorry, even though as a physician he had repeated these words over and again to patients and to their loved ones; words spoken in ritual, words said out of training and custom, or perhaps words of vanity meant for himself in his regret at having failed at a task that should have brought him success. But when the utterance is of most account and truly needs to be said, the words catch in the doctor’s throat like fish bones.