He is a proud man; too proud, he would admit. Of the seven deadly sins, pride would be his, most certainly. He is hard on himself, you might say. He has no doubt been hard on his son, anyone would say. He has pushed Devin, accused him of ineptitude, of carelessness and foolishness. The doctor feels helpless to control the outbursts and curses; his faults of temperament, his littleness of mind, perhaps his soul, a soul that cannot be mastered. The flaws and defects in him are now too deeply hewn. He knows he suffers from his own battery when he attacks Devin, a regret he feels after belittling him. And always there is the great remorse from never having been able to love his son enough.
Reddy looked up. Mysterium’s pyramid summit was radiantly still, crystalline, without hint of a plume. The air was so transparent it seemed he was just an hour’s reach of the mountain’s crown. He turned and moved on, his detour of reverie dissolving, though not his regret. He slid the carabiner along the frozen rope.
When the doctor arrived to Camp II he found his son sitting half-in and half-out of the tent, scrutinizing the buttress through the binoculars. Devin glanced his father’s way, then he put his eyes back to the glass and the two dark specks spidering upward, watching the higher dark speck vanish into a cloud. The curtain of mist sunk farther down the face of the headwall, and Devin saw the second man disappear; both climbers severed now from the ordeals of the world below.
“How far have they gotten?” Reddy said.
“Over halfway up the buttress already.”
“And Sara?”
“Trying to sleep. Her belly hurts her.”
Reddy unstrapped his crampons and worked his boots off and crawled inside the tent. Devin moved to follow.
“Where is the pain?” the doctor said.
Sara put a hand to her lower abdomen. “Down here.”
“Let’s hope it’s not your appendix.”
“My appendix I’ve already had out.”
“Maybe just inflamed lymph nodes then? Let’s examine you.” Reddy rubbed his hands together to bring heat, reached beneath layers of wool and down and found the soft flesh of her belly. He pressed gently. She winced.
“She’s been dizzy,” Devin said. “And she hasn’t eaten since yesterday. When I did get her to eat, it was hardly anything. She vomited. Even liquids she vomited.”
“You haven’t been drinking, Sara?”
“Can’t,” she said. “Try, but I can’t.”
“You are feverish.” He took his hand from her cheek and put it to the flesh of her neck, then to her stomach again. “Very feverish.”
“It’s like bad cramps is what I’m having.”
“When did you last have your period, Sara?” Reddy said.
“Before we left home. Only once some spots of blood since.”
Reddy opened his backpack and reached into the depths of it, pulled out a canvas medicine pouch. He sorted through the contents of the pouch, brought forth a blister packet of tablets, pressed a tiny tablet through the aluminum seal. “Put this under your tongue,” he said. “Let it dissolve. In a short while you should be able to start taking liquids again. And then I will give you a pill for the pain.” Sara took the pill, lay back, and closed her eyes. Ice flakes brushed over the skin of the tent, making a soft swishing sound, as if a hand were tenderly stroking it. Devin stretched out beside Sara and put his arms around her. Reddy prepared for an early start the next day, repacking his pack, sorting gear. When Sara fell asleep, father and son were silent, switching their headlamps on as the darkness came on. They started the chore of melting snow and concocting an evening meal. The radio erupted in a pronouncement that ruptured the silence.
Devin grabbed the radio. “Camp Two hearing you loud and clear.”
“We made it up the buttress.”
“Friggin’ knew you guys would do it.”
“Camp Three established.”
Devin handed the radio to Sara. “Hooray,” she said, her voice sounding more feeble than she meant it to be.
“How’s my Sara?”
“Fine. Planning to be up there tomorrow with you.”
Reddy took the radio. “How is Camp Three?”
“We’re perched on the northeast edge. How is Sara?”
“Smiling as usual. Not to worry. How was the buttress?”
“Terrible.”
“Will the rest of us manage it?”
“Bring up extra rope,” Troy said.
Father and son exchanged glances.
“Glad you’re with my girl, Reddy. She’ll listen to you. If you don’t think she’s strong enough for the buttress, tell her not to come up.”
“The summit is not everything,” Reddy said.
“Right now I cannot Oscar Kilo that.”
“Over and out then, my friend.” Reddy switched off.
Sara sat up. “I think the pain will go away. It has before.”
“How long have you had this pain?”
“Started as a dull ache, and off and on cramping. It changes.”
“Do you think you might be pregnant?” said Reddy.
She looked at Devin. Her smile was her answer.
“Sara,” he said. He touched her head.
“I’m feeling better already. The pain medicine is helping.”
The doctor did not tell her what he was afraid of.
“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” she said.
She smiled, showing snowy white teeth, a smile too soon dissolving.
* * *
HOW TO describe the most beautiful day of one’s life.
Start with the light. Start with the sun rising across a sea of nameless peaks. Peaks that color and oscillate in illimitable distance.
Tell of the light. The sublime light. A radiant, delicate light. Elemental. Colorless. Odorless. Rare and arid and cold.
Try to describe.
Mysterium, the primordial mound of earth they are perched on.
You must tell of it.
Her pageantry. Her display. Her wintry polish of snowy masonry within a summer domain. Her palace filled with alabaster pillars. Paled corridors, circlets and vales. A keep of wind-scoured watchtowers. Escarpments corniced in velvety drapes.
Sara would recall it all, tell it all and always.
She had gone outside, overwhelmed by the spectacle of her morning surroundings. She was squatted down onto her haunches taking every bit of the magnificence in, but in an instant was overcome by a stabbing pain. A different pain. She went back to the tent on hands and knees, crawled in, and settled deep into the sleeping bag again. She wanted to tell Devin what she had seen, but was muted by the pain. She would hold it inside until it burst from her, the experience she could not now describe.
“Don’t speak,” Devin said. He felt a chill, a strange vibe in the ether.
The doctor radio’d up to Troy. He thought it best to let Sara rest another day. Then tomorrow she needed to start down the mountain. She could not remain at this vicious altitude. Troy and Wilder should go ahead to the summit. Get back down here. Accompany your daughter back to Base Camp.
Troy agreed. “Tell Sara we go up today in honor of her birthday.”
“She says this is the best gift you can give her,” Reddy said.
* * *
UP THE slope a crusader will go until arriving to the pinnacle of the ziggurat, a tower of Babel where there is a name to be made for oneself, believing that once to the summit nothing will again be out of reach. So the mountain becomes an emblem of the ceaseless effort to raise oneself higher, to work a pitch above the last height achieved. But when the last step has been taken, and the zenith reached, he or she finds that it is not the end, not in the least. For the end brings only another beginning. And once again, step-by-step, a person is left to scale the mysterious ladder: the lure that forever shines, a light which leads to the next redeemer. The past is swallowed and forgotten, the coming and becoming is all in the All, the journey a never-ending procession.
* * *
SHE SAID, “I’m go
ing to die.” And Sarasvati Troy closed her eyes and did. In an instant her face became a testimonial of stillness and peace. But Devin and Reddy would have none of it, this stillness, this peace.
Devin took hold of Sara’s shoulders and began to shake her violently. He shouted her name, shouted again and again, but she would not wake up. He put his lips to her lips and blew air into her shrunken lungs. Her chest rose and it fell as he breathed for her, rose and fell, rose and fell; his father pressing down on her breastbone to a silent and metered count. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty or ninety, who knows? Devin knows it was daytime, but he felt it like the longest night of his life, a night that continued to be night, would never stop being night. The world was dark and impalpable. Her lips turned so very cold. Reddy, exhausted, ceased to prod her heart. He shook his head slowly. “Stop,” he said.
The wind made the sound of a long and horrible no.
Devin called her to come back. Please come back. He tugged at her clothes, he pulled at her fingers, he pulled at her hair, but she stayed lax as a cloth doll. He slapped at her cold swollen face. He shouted her name. He slapped again and harder, and then his father pulled him away from her. Devin curled into himself, buried his face in his arms. He rubbed at his head. He balled his fists and rubbed at his eyes and he bawled like a child. He wept for Sara and he wept for Sara’s father and he wept for himself and he wept for everyone else, wept at her missing out on a world so brimful and significant, wept for the world entirely and now so cold and without her. His cries rustled the tent and rushed out through the door flap, went pouring out across every kettle and drumlin, every dale and fell, through valleys and coulees, through fosse and kame. It surged up into gutters and chimneys and ravines, the way blood runs through the veins, loosening footwalls and breaking cornices free, before it went seeping into the folds and the cleavers of all the sentinel peaks. The sobbing was caught up in a burst of wind and was swept up to Mysterium’s tremoring heights, where Sara’s father would stand at the summit and feel it like the deepest quiver and chill, as if someone had just stepped across his grave. He would grow weightless, feel himself lifted up and into the expanse, all the sorrow from below moved past and out into the vastness of the swirl and the pulse beyond, in boundless time and boundless space, a lament become requiem.
* * *
ON AUGUST 17, twenty-five years to the day after the first successful ascent of Mount Sarasvati, Stuart M. Troy and Walter “Wilder” Carson exit the tent to make their way up to the summit, intending to stand in the vanished footprints of Adams and Hilman. They set out confident of good weather ahead, the firmament so clotted and awash with planets and galaxies that it seems some great hand has tried to scrub the great soffit of all its darkness. Over the distant plateaus of Tibet silhouettes of cumulus dendrite the horizon with a spread of red vessels, the storm moving farther away and off into China. They walk without headlamps needed to beam the way, the slopes polished bright in the light of full moon. Vortices of wind lift sheets of the crusty covering. The air is deathly thin, less than a sigh beside the sea.
Their packs are packed with bottles of water, bars of chocolate, altimeters and cameras, an added pair of socks for each; the colorful bandanna a daughter’s bestowal, the extra weight a brother’s remains. They wear all the clothing they have brought along. Their boots are stiff as wood blocks, their gaiters rigid tubes in the freeze. The cold eats at their feet. It gnaws at their faces. They pause to rest and take more breath, stomping about in place, working to keep blood moving.
They continue up along the dark verge, the crusty snow turning soft and deep to the waist, taking turns at the labor of breaking tracks in the bottomless stuff they walk across. They have said nothing since leaving the tent, and when they stop to swap places no talk is traded between them. Together they move on, aimed in common enterprise, lost and separate in thought, their wakened lives seeming brinked on dream, as dream is carried into wakening.
Three hours later they arrive to the base of the east summit. Light begins to pale the sky, revealing a dramatic curvature of earth. Snowdrift banners off the top of the main summit above, a corona seeming within arm’s reach, but both know the mountain’s deceptions.
Wilder is the first to break the silence between them. “No two people climb at the same rhythm. Trying only interferes with a person’s energy flow,” he says. “We all know this. And I’m for taking the quicker route.”
“You don’t know what you’ll find there,” Troy says.
“Your way, neither do you,” Wilder says.
Troy laughs a raspy laugh. “We will see,” he says. He extends a hand and Wilder reaches out and does the same, knocking each a gloved fist one to the other. Then Wilder turns away and plods on, white as a waxen effigy. Troy watches him until he rounds a bollard of rock, and then he is gone.
Once he knows he is out of sight, Wilder stops to rest and catch his breath. It hurts to breathe now. He thinks the coughing has torn cartilage, probably even splintered some ribs. He staggers forward, stopping to take breath after every five steps of the way. How easy it would be to die of exhaustion. Death the only covenant, he hears his brother say. It is a fight not to give in. Breathing takes every bit of effort, especially effort to think. He lifts his head and looks out to sky turned a soft glowing blue, the blue of a great cosmic energy. It is a sight that revives him. He breathes, seeing he is filled with this intangible, immeasurable, life-giving energy and blue light. Volts of impulse like an electric current course through his body. He pushes forward, fracturing the blockages. He knows he must pace himself evenly. He reminds himself to drink.
He stops, takes his backpack off, and sets it at his feet on the slope. The air tastes harsh, tastes of emptiness, tastes of need. The pyramid ahead looks small and flattened. Surreal. He takes off his gloves and opens his pack and takes the water bottle out. He unscrews the lid, puts the rim to his lips, and tips his head back to drink. So much effort even in this. He swallows, pauses for breath, choking for breath, and now he is coughing violently again, his throat and lungs burning as though he were spewing fire, his ribs ripping apart in pain. He works to tame the cough. He drops the lid of the water bottle, and as he bends to reach for it he drops his gloves to the snow. He falls to his knees, struggles for the gloves, but they are lifted by a gust of wind. He crawls forward and reaches and again the wind gusts them up, as if someone were playing a trick, and then he lunges and traps them under the length of his body. He rests a minute, feeling a moment of relief. He rises to his feet, gloves back in hand, and as he is putting them on he sees the backpack moving away from him. He thrusts his arms out as the thing goes sliding away down the cliff. And then it is gone. His arms are held out stiff, still waiting to take hold of it as he watches the pack that carries his brother’s ashes go sailing off the steep pitch, tumbling out into the nothingness. The howling is a sound that comes from him, though he hears it as the wind. He brings his hands to his head and looks down into the emptiness, into the great yawning hole below, the echoing wailing pumped through his blood, frozen into his bones.
* * *
HER LIPS were cold as metal when he touched them, her face changed to porcelain, pale and bluish, translucent. She was beautifully serene. He had never seen a face so serene, like a fairy-tale queen in slumber she was. She had a look of just-about-to-smile on her face. He put his lips to her cold lips. He tied the knitted strings of her wool cap beneath her chin and he kissed her again. Then he entombed her into the sleeping bag, the zipper sounding an unbearable moan in the closing.
His father helped him carry her body out of the tent. They had no rope to secure it to the slope with, so they wrapped loops of tubular webbing around the down bag at the head and the feet. They used their ice axes to stake the slings into the snow, anchoring the bag into place. They would not move her until her father returned from the summit. Reddy would have to tell him. Troy would radio once he was arrived back to Camp III, and then Reddy would speak the words to him. He
would say, “I am sorry. I have some bad news,” he would say. He thought of all the times he had uttered these words in the past, words engraved into the seams of his brain having been so often repeated. How could he say the same to his friend?
Reddy tried to break his son out of the frozen silence between them. Devin remained curled on his side in his sleeping bag facing the wall of the tent, listening to the wind cry out like a woman giving birth. Finally the wind settled, and the stillness about them grew immense and horrible.
“I am sorry,” his father said. The words burned like dry ice in the throat. They scalded his lips. He crawled out of the tent and left his son alone. The sun was hot and brilliant, pouring its light upon the lonely and colorless slopes. Mysterium rose merciless, remorseless, cold. He looked to the summit, where Troy might have by this time made his hard-won appearance. Why not climb up and meet his friend at Camp III? It would be better to be with Troy when he said to him what he had to say. If he left now he could make it up the buttress before nightfall. He turned back to the tent to gather his gear, and he saw that Sara’s sleeping bag was gone. He stood for a moment, bewildered into position. Then he rushed forward to see the depression the body had left in the snow. But no, no body. No stakes, no webbing, no anything. He turned and surveyed the wintry emptiness around him. He called his son’s name out. He called again. He put his head inside the tent, his son lying there quiet and alone. Reddy got up and looked around again. His eyeballs constricted in the cold. He blinked, frozen in pose, lips parted and hardened as if shaped by the word how. How does a person simply vanish? This, a question not the first time asked of himself.
Mysterium Page 24
