Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

The four of us husbands and wives had stayed at that pub until five in the morning. We hadn’t even had enough cash to pay the bill, so Agnieszka and Krystyna promised to return the next day to settle up. “Where we’re going to get the money, I don’t know,” Agnieszka complained once the unhappy bartender finally left us alone.

The flight to Islamabad was leaving at eleven. Krystyna had taken to drawing patterns in the condensation rings on the table in order to manage her frustration, and Agnieszka every so often ran her hand through my hair, feathering it back and holding my eyes with hers.

“It’s just so weird to watch the world celebrate their selfishness,” Krystyna said. “I can’t tell you how many times some interviewer has said that there’s not an ounce of compromise in him.”

Jacek raised a glass in a bittersweet toast to himself.

“They all believe some version of ‘Hey, I’m doing something unbelievably dangerous here; all you have to do is look after the house and kid,’ ” she went on. She seemed so worn out with sadness that she was unable to look at him.

“At some point, the wife begins to get it,” Agnieszka said, her arms at her side. I could feel the absence of her hand from my hair. “Being away all the time just isn’t that hard for them.”

“Leaving you is the worst thing I do,” I said.

“Is it?” she said. She sounded genuinely touched that I thought this might be the case. “You know, you sign on for the ride, but then you wonder how long the ride can continue.”

“I have to piss,” Jacek said morosely.

“I never thought we’d be together this long,” Agnieszka explained. “I thought we’d either separate or you’d get killed.”

“Teresa Nelec always used to tell me that being a winter mountaineer’s wife meant always being ready for the funeral,” Krystyna said. “She told me that when her daughter was three, she asked why so many women came over to stay with her and cry. That was her reward for all the weeks he was off in Chad or the Himalayas and she was home with a baby and no car and no money.”

Jacek staggered off to the bathroom. The three of us just sat there. I helped Krystyna with her condensation rings.

“You always say you want to stop climbing, but on your own terms,” she told him once he returned. “And those terms always turn out to be one more gigantic mountain.”

“You know, when climber friends ask what you’re up to, everyone says, ‘Oh, I’m leaving for this’ or ‘I’m getting ready for that,’ ” Jacek said. “If you tell them, ‘Oh, I’m getting a job’ or ‘I’m just going to spend some time with the wife,’ you can actually see the respect leave their faces.” He looked at Agnieszka, who looked back.

“And it’s not an experience you intend to repeat,” she said.

Krystyna drove us home since she seemed the least drunk. I thought but didn’t say that the mountains seemed to us another chance, our attempt to understand ourselves and exorcise those aspects we detested. To become the sort of person we could begin to respect.

Back in our house we looked in on the babysitter, asleep with Wanda, and I negotiated my way to the bathroom with my pants unbuttoned and soon found myself on my back in the tub, where I conceived of other insights it would be important to impart to Agnieszka. Mountaineering was the only life for which I was fit. I understood her despair: we spent every particle of energy we had to get off the mountain alive and return to our homes, then couldn’t wait to go back. We returned to be nursed back to health so we could dally in our marriages and resume our fund-raising. The difference between us and addicts was that you never got us to admit that anything was wrong with what we loved to do.

Agnieszka appeared and shut the door behind her as if she’d heard me. She’d thrown on her gray sleeping shirt and shed her pants. She put a hand on each side of the tub and leaned over me. “Every morning when you were gone, Wanda and I would take down the calendar and cross out the previous day’s date,” she whispered. “Until we got to the day we were going to the airport.”

“You’re not wearing any bottoms,” I said. I sounded appreciative.

“I would cry, too, if I were you,” she whispered, and she pushed me back when I tried to get up and climbed on top of me in the tub. “When I think of the ten million things that could have happened instead of my meeting you,” she whispered, and I grew in her hands and she put me inside her. In her bedroom Wanda cried out in her sleep, and we both stilled for a moment. Then Agnieszka started moving again. “I can’t live without being part of the debate,” she finally whispered, easing us up and down. “With my options being either to support the team’s decisions or leave.”

“I love you so much,” I told her.

“I know. We should talk about that more,” she said. And then she lowered her face to me. We woke an hour before we had to get to the airport, only because Wanda was stirring in her bedroom again and calling for us.

After any prolonged stay above five thousand meters, the body begins to consume itself. Conditioning deteriorates. Fat disappears and muscle tissue follows. With each moment of acclimatization at altitude, strength decreases. Waking in Camp 4 is like waking in prison after having done something awful the night before. The wind seems to be ramming the tent’s nylon walls. I struggle to my knees and Jacek follows. We step out into the maelstrom.

The tent is buffeting as furiously as white water rapids. The sky is clear but to the south the clouds form a wall rolling slowly toward us. When all of that air and moisture hits the base of the mountain it will have nowhere to go but up. And as it does so it will accelerate.

Back in the tent we take final stock of the situation. We’ve now been on this mountain for twenty-eight days and have endured winter storms for twenty-two of them. Water vapor has begun to freeze solid even among the down feathers of the sleeping bags. At some point we lost the will to keep clearing the entrance, and snow has been slowly pouring in like sand through an hourglass. Every so often one of us takes a gloveful and eats it. A filling in one of my molars has cracked. But a needling pain in my fingertips suggests that my capillaries are still functioning.

Jacek loads his batteries back into the radio and calls the other camps. There’s no answer from Camp 2, and from Camp 1 Kolesniak sings out “I’m so lonely without my zucchini!” and then goes silent. The batteries are already coated with frost. The moisture’s probably done the thing in.

Bieniek has not moved since we awoke and we decide to consult with him later. Our thinking has slowed down. At altitude you imagine you’re thinking clearly, but you’re not. Urgency disappears. Sometimes you mistake the intention of acting for the act itself. Climbers have had the notion of hooking on to a belaying rope and then have stepped free-fall out into space.

Above us we can hear the white noise of the gigantic air masses splitting around the peak. Crystals continue to spatter on the nylon over our heads. We try to work it out: the tendency when this close to the summit is to expend your last bits of energy to get there. But once on the summit you still have to climb back down, with only the shortest of pauses in which to recover.

“I can do it,” Jacek says. And it’s as if he’s speaking for me. The plan becomes to go up and get back to the tent by nightfall. We’ll leave at three the next morning to get as far as possible before daybreak. We immediately set about trimming gear weight, so desperate to lose ounces that we tear labels from our clothing. We even leave the foil space blanket, which hardly weighs a thing. This activity exhausts us and after two or three actions we have to stop for a count of ten to draw some breath.