Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

“It’s not like we don’t take every precaution,” Jacek told her.

“Well, there’s a relief,” she answered. “That should prevent the avalanches and blizzards and oxygen starvation and cold.”

Jacek reminded his wife that he’d shown her the entry he’d made in his notebook on Annapurna: “It’s high time that I stopped this kind of Russian roulette and starting thinking of someone other than myself.” And then she pointed out that after finishing that entry, he’d left for the summit.

Locating the Polish tents in a large encampment is always easy: they’re the ones still lit and noisy at four a.m., the ones rising up out of a sea of bottles. At this time of year, though, we had the glacier to ourselves. We set up next to the windblown remains of an unsuccessful Japanese expedition from the summer before. At 3,500 meters there was already sixty centimeters of new snow. Inside the main tent, Kolesniak hung smoked meats and salamis he’d brought from home. As the interior warmed up the salamis dripped fat on whoever was beneath them.

The camp was centered on a glacier forested with ice towers. Every so often we’d kick up out of the snow an old tent peg or film canister. In the areas surrounding our doorways, cleared down to the ice, crevasses opened and shut slowly, like giant clams. The whole assembly was drifting away from the mountain a few inches a day with the movement of the glacier.

The shortened days made everything harder. By three the sun was behind the ridge and the temperature fell off the scale. Fingers became wood blocks and noses clogged with frost. We huddled in our tents eating pasta and salami, with loaves of chapati that were full of sand that the local monopolist leavened into the flour to increase its weight. The sherpas requested the water we drained from our pasta and drank it from small wooden bowls they pulled from their coats. When not working Kolesniak read to us aloud from something entitled Reign of Blood , about Idi Amin’s dictatorship. From this we learned that Amin kept his ex-wives’ severed heads in his kitchen freezer in order to keep his current wife in line.

We believe in acclimatizing by working hard and stressing the body. Only multiple ascents at these altitudes can teach you how you’re really doing; the first few times, every sensation feels abnormal, and the body is sustaining such a beating that it’s hard to judge how poorly it’s adjusting. To get to Camp 1, at 5,500 meters, we had to negotiate a maze of ice falls. We left on schedule at midnight, the advance team having already pressed on ahead, with Kolesniak, as leader, bringing up the rear to better follow the progress of the entire group spread out ahead of him.

Telephone reception is now much better than it used to be, so even in the high valleys blackout periods last days rather than weeks, and Agnieszka had managed to get through to me at the Base Camp before our first acclimatizing climb. She worked me like a strop while I turned to the tent wall and strove to ignore the jeers and jokes from Kolesniak and Nowakowski.

She said she was happy it had gone well so far, but I could hear in her voice the steeliness that derived from the extent to which she’d already disappointed herself. I asked after everything at home and she said that the night before she’d been to a dinner party at which all of the wives had wondered what it was like to love someone so often away and always at risk of never returning. She said she got so fed up that she finally started answering, “Why? Have people died doing that?” She said it was worse than when she met climbers and they asked if she climbed, and then seemed to believe she couldn’t register the change in their expressions when she answered.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Oh, you left me at home with the baby and the dishes and the window sash that needs fixing,” Kolesniak sang out in his stupid falsetto.

“The boys are having a time of it, are they?” she asked.

“We’re going up to Camp 1 in a few hours,” I explained.

“So you need your rest,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I told her.

She said that after we’d said goodbye this time, upon leaving the airport she’d merged onto the highway in the wrong direction and then had thought to herself, Who cares? She’d gone thirty kilometers before Wanda’s complaining had allowed her to summon enough energy to turn around. When I didn’t respond, she added she sometimes felt superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns, but then realized that was only because she was superfluous and uninvolved with my concerns.

“We were talking about this maybe being the last trip for a while,” I told her. “Jacek and me.”

“You’re addicts,” she said. “Krystyna and I decided that the night you left. A trip like this is about the loss of your ability to control the dose.”

“I’m lonely,” Kolesniak sang while he stripped excess weight from his pack. “Here in my bed with only my zucchini.” He opened his hood and stretched wide its collar to show me again the tattoo on his neck in English: Love Is Pain .

“I’ll think of something,” I told her.

“Oh, you’re resourceful when it comes to things like raising money for climbing,” Agnieszka said. “It’s in everyday life that you’re not so clever.”

“I never claimed I was clever,” I told her. “I only know I want to be with you.”

“Who in their right mind tries to build a relationship with a high-altitude winter mountaineer?” she asked. “I mean, when you’re with me you seem to understand words like ‘love’ and ‘commitment.’ ”

“They mean more to me now than they ever did,” I told her.

“ I signed up for this,” she said. “But what about people who didn’t? Like Wanda?”

“This trip’s different,” I finally told her.

“I know,” she said. “The more people a mountain’s killed, the bigger deal it is to climb it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I told her.

“What would happen in Formula 1 racing if one out of every twenty-five drivers died?” she asked. “How long would it take people to put a stop to it?”

“If you can’t live with what I’m doing, then I won’t do it,” I told her. “If it comes to that.”

“Let me lay it out for you so you can think about it,” she said. “If you felt about me the way I feel about you, you would stop climbing. Period.”

“Let’s go, Chief,” Kolesniak said, giving my shoulder a shove. “Coffee klatch is over.”

“I have to go,” I told her.

“Of course you do,” she said. “Listen to me: you come home alive.”

“I will,” I said.

“I love you,” she said. Then she hung up.

Nanga Parbat is the world’s ninth-tallest mountain, its summit at nearly the cruising altitude of commercial airlines. Passengers on flights from Islamabad to Beijing fly past it, not over it. It appears as a pyramid in the sky above an ocean of cloud. It has three faces: the Rakhiot, the Diamir, and the Rupal. The Rupal features the highest known precipice in the world: an ice wall of some five thousand meters. The Diamir, considered the climbable face, involves an ice fall known as Death Alley and, above that, a couloir pitched at seventy degrees and rising one thousand meters to the crest of a northwestern ridge. We dug Camp 2 into the top of that ridge before clouds and snow reduced visibility to zero.

Inside the tents with the stoves operating the temperature was twenty below. We could only imagine the temperature outside. It was so crowded that everyone had to lie still for one of us to accomplish anything. In that kind of storm everyone bunked with whomever they found themselves beside in line, and so Kolesniak, Bieniek, and I took turns every few hours to go outside and loosen the heavy accumulations straining the sides of the tent. Once he was settled Bieniek struggled with his camera, which was refusing to work because of the cold. Kolesniak told stories of the catastrophic Central Peak expedition of ’75: the immeasurable winds that shredded their tent from around them and blew melon-sized rocks into the air, the same windstorm that on the other side of the ridge severed their teammates’ tent moorings and swept their entire camp off the edge of a drop that fell a vertical mile.