Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

— I know it’s real. Ashley and Imogen are real—

— They may have been real once, Mireille says, but they’re gone now. You and I, we’re the only part of this that matters. You’re worried you’ll lose the money if you stop looking, but if you keep going—

The phone makes a beeping sound. I drop in a few more coins.

— What’s that? Mireille asks.

— I’m at a pay phone. It takes a lot of coins to call a French cell phone. We don’t have long.

— Tell me where you’re going.

— Iceland.

Mireille says nothing. I press the receiver against my ear, the last coin in my other hand. The reverse has a picture of tree and the inscription LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ.

— It doesn’t make sense, Mireille finally says. You know it doesn’t make sense.

— I can’t explain now, you just have to trust me. If you’d seen what I’ve seen—

The phone beeps again. I drop in the coin.

— This is terrible, Mireille says. Just come back. I don’t care how you get here.

I lean against the phone booth. I don’t know what to say.

— You’ll come, Tristan, won’t you?

The phone beeps again.

— Tell me if you’ll come, Mireille says. I need to know if I should wait.

The phone chimes and the line goes dead. Cursing, I slam the receiver down. I walk up the street and wander into a deserted park, circling a pond and trying to figure out what I can do. There doesn’t seem any choice.

I go back to the hostel and type Mireille an e-mail, promising I’ll come to Paris as soon as I can. The message doesn’t come out right, so I keep rewriting it over and over, knowing that I’ll miss my flight if I don’t leave soon. I click SENDand shoulder my backpack, dashing across the street and into the U-Bahn station.

At a bookstore at Tegel Airport I buy a thick copy of The Icelandic Sagas and I sit near the airplane gate, my backpack between my knees. The brooch is in my pocket. I open the book and try to concentrate.

10 May 1924

Camp III, 21,000 feet

East Rongbuk Glacier, Tibet

An inch of powdery snow covers every surface in the tent. Ashley and Price sit on the windward side, pushing their backs against the flapping canvas to anchor it in the gale. Their camp is a cluster of tents pitched below an ice cliff at 21,000 feet, only the thin sheet of weatherproofed canvas separating them from the blizzard. Ashley sits with his legs in his sleeping bag, the gabardine shell stiff and coated with ice.

The wind eases for moment, then rises to a scream, hammering the canvas until Ashley cannot believe only air and snow are striking the tent. The flapping is so hard that nothing but a yell can be heard between them.

— Shall I check the guylines? Ashley bellows.

— No, Price calls. We’d only get more snow.

Their eyes follow the sputtering lantern hung from the tent ceiling. It swings and pitches and the shadows in the tent shift with the wind. They are too exhausted to yell much, but it is too dangerous to sleep. The climbers wait, hoping it will pass.

Half an hour later the wind lowers enough to allow talking. Somervell’s face appears in their shelter’s door, his eyebrows and beard crusted with snowflakes. He squeezes inside, clawing the snow from his collar.

— What’s the verdict? A stroll up to Four in the morning?

Ashley coughs into a dirty handkerchief. He looks at Somervell, whispering hoarsely.

— Hugh’s sulking. He left his swimming togs at Phari.

No one laughs. The climbers have been battered by storms for five days, the winds too strong for travel, the nights too cold for sleep. The weather is worse than on any previous expedition and they do not know why. The porters believe the expedition is doomed, that it is being punished by the mountain gods as a warning. Even the British know they will have to retreat soon if the weather does not break.

Price pries open a tin of strawberry jam.

— We must eat something—

He gathers snow from the tent floor and drops it in a tin bowl, dumping the frozen jam on top. He stirs the icy reddish mixture with a large spoon and passes it Ashley. Ashley takes a tentative bite.

— Not half bad.

They pass the bowl around and Somervell picks a book off the floor. Three Tragedies . The leather binding is soft from use, the gilding nearly worn off the page ends.

— Surely it’s Walsingham’s turn?

Ashley shakes his head, touching his throat.

— Not over this racket.

Somervell flips to where they left off in Hamlet and begins to read, his voice rising and falling not for theatrical effect but to overcome the changing volume of the wind. Ashley watches Somervell’s hand tremble as he reads. They are all shivering.

The wind returns to its previous strength and they can no longer hear. The three men lean into the windward side of the tent, the wind lashing their backs as it rises to a deafening howl. The lamp blows out. It is pitch-black inside, the canvas snapping and fluttering as the Sherpas call anxiously from the next tent. Price yells back in Nepali.

Something hard strikes Ashley’s shoulder through the canvas, stunning him. A rock or a piece of ice. He wonders if the tents will tear and he pictures the scene: huge flurries of snow pouring in, the swirling maelstrom of sleeping bags and foodstuffs and equipment, then the tent itself gone, carrying off the climbers or leaving them naked beneath the glow of the clouded moon. It would be death. They are so far from base camp, and base camp so far from civilization, that they might as well be the only men in Tibet, the only men in the world. Price bellows to the other climbers.

— Sounds like Fritz has brought out his Maxim.

Ashley yells hoarsely in the darkness.

— We’ll never get to the third act.

Hours pass before the wind calms and Somervell returns to his tent. Ashley lies on his back in the dark, his eyes open. He feels the rock below him jutting into his shoulders. He gets up to realign his kapok mattress, replacing the sleeping bag on top. He lies back down and curses.

— I swear there’s a fucking boulder right under me. Who cleared the ground here?

Price chuckles in his sleeping bag.

— It wasn’t any sahib. Want to swap places?

— No.

Ashley closes his eyes, listening to the flapping of canvas, a sound of clinking metal. A guyline must have broken from its anchor, freeing the metal fitting to flail among the stones.

— Someone ought to anchor that, Price whispers.

— They certainly ought to.

They fall silent. The unanchored canvas keeps flapping.

— Bloody freezing, Ashley mutters. I don’t suppose there’s a spare fleabag in the other tents?

— I doubt it. Would you fetch it if there was?

Ashley turns onto his side, trying to avoid the sharpest stones beneath him. Occasionally the wind looses a clump of snow upon his face and he sweeps it off clumsily with a wet mitten.

— You remember, Ashley says suddenly, the girl I was talking about. Soames-Andersson.

— Of course.

— It was my fault she went off. I didn’t know what I had, nor how to keep it.

They hear footfalls outside their tent, Somervell walking by to fix the guyline. The flapping ceases. The footsteps pass by again.

— I only wanted to say that, Ashley adds. I’d never said it before.