The Ascent Read online

  “Here,” he said. “You gotta fuckin’ catch this, dude.”

  “I’m … a horrible … shortstop,” I responded.

  Chad actually chuckled, and had we been on solid land I would have wrapped my arms around him and kissed him right on the goddamn lips.

  “You’re a wiseass, Shakes,” he said and tossed the rope.

  I didn’t so much as catch it as it got tangled around my arm. Nonetheless, I snatched it, worked it through the karabiners, and cinched it at my waist. The strain in my other hand from hanging from the spring-loaded camming device was causing numbness throughout my whole arm.

  “Let go,” Chad said.

  “No, man. Let me … reach for the … the goddamn …”

  “Just fucking let go, Shakes. The rope’ll hold.”

  “I think I can—”

  “Do it!”

  I closed my eyes and let go. My stomach lurched as I felt myself drop and swing in an arc at the end of Chad’s line. I couldn’t tell when I stopped swinging, and I wouldn’t open my eyes. I wouldn’t.

  The line strained, sounding like someone twisting a leather wallet in big hands. Open your fucking eyes, coward, I thought and opened my eyes. I was turned on my side, twisting horizontally in midair, as the safe line held me suspended over the abyss.

  “You’re still alive,” Chad said.

  “I’m gonna puke.”

  “Climb up.”

  I was beginning to hyperventilate. My exhalations burned my throat. Suddenly I was positive I was going to die out here. But unlike that day in the cave, lying in the dark with my bone jutting from my leg, I did not want to die. You might have come out here not caring whether you lived or died, a small voice spoke up in my head, but you care now, and you’re not going to die. Do you hear me, Overleigh? You’re not going to die.

  I rolled over and gripped the safe line. A single tug sent me vertical. Hand over hand, I climbed up until the bottoms of Chad’s boots thumped against my helmet. I climbed higher, so intent on Chad’s pant legs I could make out the individual fibers woven together in the fabric. When I’d climbed high enough, Chad grabbed my shoulder.

  Petras shouted something incomprehensible. He could have been shouting from another planet, for all it mattered to me.

  “Up, up,” Chad urged. He was running out of breath. “Grab onto me if you have to. Just climb up and grab the cam above your head. Come on, Shakes. You can do it.”

  Somehow I managed to do it. Using Chad’s body for extra support, I climbed the rope until I was able to hook back into the network of cams that ran the length of the arch. I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet, and I had serious doubts as to what strength remained in me to climb the rest of the way, but the outcome was suddenly looking much better.

  “All right,” Chad mumbled, his voice nearly a gasp. He seized the next cam with his free hand. “Not bad for a lousy artist.”

  “Move … your … ass,” I said. “In … my way.”

  “Let’s go, fireball.”

  It seemed to take an eternity to make it across. I hadn’t come down from the final cam before Petras and Hollinger dragged me onto the ledge. Solid ground never felt so good. I staggered a few feet, brushing off all the hands that were eager to hold me up, until I dropped to my knees and vomited in the snow.

  4

  PETRAS WAITED TILL AROUND MIDNIGHT BEFORE

  going back for the rest of Curtis’s gear. After what happened crossing the arch, there was nothing left in us to continue, so we built camp against the mountain and lit a fire. The wind came moaning through the canyon, so cold it could fillet the skin off our bones.

  Petras bundled up in extra layers and trekked to the arch to collect Curtis’s pack and the extra line that still flapped in the wind. Twenty minutes later, he returned in utter silence, Curtis’s pack over one of his broad shoulders, the broken line wound around the other. He set the items at the farthest corner of our cramped little tent, then sat down heavily, exhaling a sigh that shook the tent fabric.

  “We should say something.” It was Hollinger, his face mottled. “A fucking prayer or something.”

  No one said anything. None of us was religious, and what was there to say, anyway?

  “Fuck it,” Hollinger growled. “He was a good fucking guy. He had a daughter. She was beautiful. Her name was Lucinda.”

  I thought of the photograph, flapping over the freezing air until it vanished against the backdrop of ice.

  “I didn’t know him well,” Hollinger went on, “but he was a good bloke and he became a good friend.” His eyes searched us all, as if daring us to disagree with him. “He didn’t deserve to go like that.”

  “No one does,” said Petras.

  “Yeah,” Hollinger agreed. “No one does.”

  “I guess we’ve got to make a decision,” I said.

  Everyone’s gaze shifted toward me except Andrew’s. He was peering out one of the plastic windows in the tent, staring at the absolute darkness beyond.

  “About what?” Chad said.

  “About whether we keep going or turn back.”

  Hollinger was quick to respond. “We fucking turn back.”

  Only then did Andrew look at me. “Are you kidding?” There was no aggression in his voice; it was simply a question.

  “Our spirits are shot,” I said. “We’ve already come farther than anyone’s ever come. Isn’t that enough?”

  Andrew turned back to the plastic window. When he spoke, his breath fogged up the plastic. “We’re only two days away from the Canyon of Souls. Three days at the most. If we turn back now, Curtis died for nothing.”

  There was nothing any of us could say to that. So we slept, the cold mountain winds bullying our tent and reminding us of our isolation straight until morning.

  Chapter 14

  1

  DEATH ON AN EXPEDITION SUCH AS OURS WAS NOT

  uncommon. Thousands of people climb Everest every year, and people labor under the misconception that it’s become as safe as skydiving or running a marathon. They believe that the sheer magnitude of mountains must have diminished in the wake of man’s ever-evolving scientific prowess and technical savvy. Yet people still die climbing Everest and its neighboring peaks, and some people, like Curtis Booker, will never be found.

  Mountaineering is quite possibly the last remaining extreme sport. Like Andrew had once told me many years ago, “If you jump out of a plane and your friend’s parachute doesn’t open, you sure as hell can’t fly back up into the plane and call it quits.”

  For the next two days, we were a trail of zombies plodding through a world erased by snow. We climbed the remaining peaks in silence, all joviality gone from us, and descended into bowl-shaped valleys with grim expressions on our bearded, windswept faces. It had become taxing. Not just the climbing but being around one another, like coal miners about to go stir-crazy.

  Petras and Andrew stopped speaking to each other completely,though whether this was a conscious decision or not, I had no idea. Likewise, Chad’s usual jokes at our expense had ceased altogether. He kicked up tufts of snow as he walked, occasionally humming under his breath while listening to his iPod. When his iPod froze, he chucked it off the side of the mountain, then offered a military salute as it shattered on the biting rocks below.

  Michael Hollinger looked the worst. His lips were cracked and bleeding from the cold, dry wind, and I doubted he would physically be able to talk even if he wanted to. With each passing hour, his eyes narrowed more and more until they were nothing more than eyeless slits beneath his brow. He hardly ate, and his clothes began to grow too big for him, like he was swimming in them. Several times while trekking along a straightaway, Hollinger had to stop and catch his breath, though I did not think this had anything to do with physical exhaustion. It was a sure sign of an atrophied spirit.

  My own temperament fluctuated with the various positions of the sun. My fever had worsened, and my insides alternated between boiling like stew and freezing to a h
ard lump of coal in my stomach. I sweated profusely during the warmest parts of the day—so much so that the collar of my shirt and nylon anorak became discolored with sweat. When night came, I would quake and rattle beneath both my own sleeping bag and Curtis’s.

  I wrapped extra pairs of socks over my hands while my gloves dried by the fire—a fire for which we had difficulty finding fodder to burn. In the end, we ripped pages out of my George Mallory book, crinkled them into loose balls, and set them ablaze.

  Since that strange night before crossing the arch, Hannah’s ghostly image had not returned. Even at night, when my mind seemed most active, she refused to come. In dark solitude I wondered about Petras’s mythical dakini, the female spirit of Tibetan lore. I thought of Hannah’s quicksilver flesh and the flash of her eyes as she crossed from behind mountainous lees into haunting

  moonlight. A shiver accompanied each new thought.

  Though Hannah’s ghost remained elusive, I did hallucinate … or at least I managed to convince myself that it was all a hallucination. Because surely there was no one else up here. Surely …

  But climbing the outer rim of the Godesh Ridge on that second day, I paused to tighten the laces on my boots and happened to glance down to the snow-laden, black rock valley below. A man—or what appeared to be a man—stood within the shadow of a massive snowbound overhang halfway up the valley. It was a place we’d crossed earlier that morning, and I could still see the fresh snow punctuated by our footprints. I stared at the shape, recalling how I’d seen a mysterious figure following Andrew up the slope of the pass after Shotsky had died. Was this the same man? Was it a man at all?

  I raised my hand in a wave, but the figure did not respond. At this distance, it was impossible to make out any details, but there was no movement, no acknowledgment of my greeting.

  It was then that I realized I was sweating through my clothes. I peeled my collar away from my throat, and a waft of warm body heat exited. All of a sudden, I was breathing in great whooping gasps, my heart rumbling like a freight train.

  Something wasn’t right. This was more than just the fever I’d been fighting the past couple of days. My clothes started suffocating me, my helmet squeezing my cranium. It was as if I were growing to twice my size in a matter of seconds.

  Unsnapping the buckle of my helmet strap, I pulled it off my head and tossed it aside. I dropped my pack and fumbled with the zipper on my parka. Then I took my parka off, whipped it into the snowbank, and lifted my anorak over my head. My flannel shirt and thermals were drenched with sweat. Wasting no time with the buttons, I tore the flannel shirt from my torso, the buttons popping loose and soaring through the air, then sloughed off the sopping wet thermal beneath it.

  Petras closed one hand around my wrist. “What the hell are

  you doing?”

  “Gotta … get out of these clothes …” My voice was breathless, struggling. “Claustrophobic …”

  “You’re not.” Petras grabbed my other wrist. I struggled to get free, but his grip was too tight. “It’s onset hypothermia. You’re actually freezing to death and dehydrated, but you feel like your body is on fire.”

  “My heart,” I gasped. “Jesus … help …”

  My eyelids fluttered, and the world tilted to one side, knocking my legs out from under me. I collapsed into the snowbank, the world grainy and distant before my eyes. My heart was like a jackhammer trying to drill through the wall of my chest. I actually placed one hand over my heart to steady it and could feel its reverberations against my palm.

  “Hey!” Petras shouted to the others. “Man down! Some help here!” Strangely his voice was laden with echo. It took me several seconds to realize I was also hearing it come through the walkie-talkie affixed to my backpack, two feet away from me in the snow.

  “I think … think I’m having a … a heart attack …”

  Petras’s hand fell on my chest. “Be cool,” he said in his big bear’s voice. “Relax.”

  I forced my eyelids open. They were gummy, and my vision was blurred. Once it cleared, I could make out the wind-chapped skin stretched taut over Petras’s high cheekbones and the flecks of snow caught in his auburn beard.

  Suddenly I was a child in bed with a fever, and John Petras was my father, who incidentally was also named John. My father mopped my brow and smiled warmly down to me and told me to relax and stay warm. He told me of the birds roosting in the fig trees in the yard and how the limestone wall by the shore was becoming infested—absolutely infested—with lichen. It was nothing to worry about now, but I would have to scrub the wall clean once I was better, scrub that

  moss and lichen and green slime right off.

  And what I wound up doing was chiseling away sections of the wall, carving faces and hands so that it looked like people inside the wall pushing against it and trying to get out. My father was angry and sent me to my room for three days, though by the end of the three days, he came to my room and told me I shouldn’t have carved up the wall but that my carvings were very good and that he was impressed that they were very good …

  I was lifted off the ground, my head cradled in someone’s hands, and my shoulders and legs were carried by others. I was wrapped quickly in a warm sleeping bag, while Andrew and Chad created a lean-to to keep the freezing winds at bay.

  “You’ll be all right,” Petras said very close to my face. I could smell his sour breath and feel its warmth along the side of my face and down my neck. “Drink some water.”

  I sipped water from a bottle. It seared my throat on the way down to my guts. My body was quaking, my teeth chattering. I thought I had gone blind until I realized I had my eyes shut.

  Yet when I opened them, it was dark. A small fire burned outside the lean-to. My body had ceased quaking, and my heart had resumed its normal pace. I was alone beneath the lean-to. When I peeked out past the fire, I could see no one.

  I pulled on a sweatshirt and edged out into the night. Petras was crouched low to the ground, filling water bottles with snow.

  “Where are the others?” I croaked, my throat raw and abrasive.

  “Making an advance up the east ridge. Andrew said the Hall of Mirrors is right over the next pass, which is the doorway to the Canyon of Souls.” He looked me over, his eyes like black pits in the firelight. “You look better.”

  “I think my fever broke.”

  “Gave us all quite a scare earlier.” He returned to his work.

  “It was no picnic on my end, either. Need help?”

  “I’m just about finished here.”

  “It was like my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I’ve never heard of hypothermia causing a heart to race. In fact, it does the opposite, doesn’t it?”

  “You were also sick as a dog,” Petras added. “Let’s not forget that.” “Still …”

  “Still what?”

  “Forget it. My head’s been funny lately.” What had Hollinger said? My head’s playing funny games. I can’t think straight.

  Petras gathered a number of the water bottles in his arms. “Give me a hand with these, will you?”

  I helped him load the bottles into our various packs. While we worked, I said, “You want to hear something crazy?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Earlier today I thought I saw a man down in the valley below the ridge. Just before I had my little, uh … attack, I guess.”

  “A man?”

  “He was too far away to see very clearly, but I was certain of it.”

  “Are you certain of it now or just certain of it then?”

  “I don’t know. Hard to say.”

  “It could have been a hallucination. You were babbling when I got to you and when we carried you away from the ridge. A couple of times you even called me dad.” Petras smiled warmly.

  “Strange thing is, I thought I saw someone following Andrew up the pass after Shotsky died.”

  Petras froze. I didn’t realize what I’d said until he very slowly turned to face me. Then it
all rushed back, and I felt like hiding my head in the snow.

  “Fuck,” I groaned.

  “Shotsky’s dead?”

  I sighed. “Yes. The end of the first day taking him back to base camp. Heart attack. We tried to revive him, but it was quick.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Andrew and I agreed it would be best not to tell anyone. Morale reasons or whatever. I don’t know. It made sense at the time, but now … well, shit, everything’s fucked up now.”

  Petras’s eyes bored into me, heavy on my soul. I told him I was sorry for deceiving him and the others.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t bring Shotsky back.”

  “No,” I admitted, “it doesn’t.”

  “And there’s no good reason to tell Mike and Chad now. Especially after what happened with Curtis. This whole thing’s turned into a fuck-a-row.” He handed me one of the fresh bottles. The snow inside had already melted. “Here. Drink this. Stay hydrated.”

  I gulped down half the bottle, wiping my mouth on the sleeve of my sweatshirt once I’d finished. Out in the snow, I refilled the bottle, while Petras, in contemplative silence, rearranged some of the items in his pack. When he swiveled in my direction, his expression was telling.

  “What’s the matter?” I said after the silence had become overwhelmingly obvious. “What are you thinking?”

  Petras chewed at his lower lip. “Not quite sure yet. Working over some things in my head but nothing that’s—”

  He stopped as voices floated down to us from the top of the pass. A moment later, three darkened figures sauntered toward the lean-to.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Petras promised and zipped up his backpack.

  “Look who’s decided to join us again,” Chad said, his heavy boots kicking up clouds of snow dust as he approached the fire. “You were babbling like Linda Blair for a while there, Shakes. Was waiting for your head to spin around and pea soup to come spewing out of your mouth.”

  “Lousy company will make people do strange things,” I retorted, although since the incident on the arch where he’d saved my life, I no longer felt any genuine disdain for Chad Nando. It was all playful shtick now.