Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

Chad, Hollinger, and Curtis were playing cards beside a couple of lanterns when I walked past them twenty minutes later. Petras wastaking care of personal business in the nearby woods. The Sherpas had cautioned him to carry a knife in case a bear or wild cat came sniffing around. Petras only nodded. I noticed his pearl-handled hunting knife jutting from his belt.

The Sherpas huddled together in one tent, inking long swaths of parchment and murmuring to themselves. Their tent smelled of incense and burning grape leaves and exuded an intense heat, as if the under-the-breath praying generated physical energy.

Andrew was off in the distance by himself, secluded in shadows, meditating. As I approached, my boots crunched the stones to dust beneath my weight, but Andrew did not turn around. I stood there for several minutes, staring at the back of his head, watching the slow, dilatory rise and fall of his respiration, before I felt like a fool.

“Is this something new?” I said.

“What’s that?” he said, not turning to face me.

“This meditation thing. This praying. I thought you were agnostic.”

He dropped his head. After a moment, he stood and rolled his sleeves up his arms. His face looked almost see-through in the moonlight. The square cut of his jaw was dressed in three days’ beard growth.

“Did you pay Shotsky twenty thousand dollars to come on this trip?”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation, no emotion.

“Why?”

“Because he wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

“And why was it so important that he come?”

“Because,” he said casually, “that’s the point of this whole thing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not necessary that you understand.”

“Did you pay anyone else?”

“No.”

“No one?”

“No one else. Just Donald.”

“So why is everyone else here?”

“The same reason you are.”

The thing was, I could no longer remember what my reason had been.

“Do you think this is a game, Tim?”

“I don’t know.”

Andrew smiled. “Neither do I.”

“Shotsky shouldn’t be here. He’s a fucking novice. He’s scared of heights for Christ’s sake.”

“Donald Shotsky nearly died on a crabbing boat in the Bering Sea,” Andrew said, his voice turned up a notch. “Since then he’s been living in a one-bedroom shithole apartment in Reno. Last I spoke with him, there were men looking for him because he owed them money. Bad men. So I offered him this job. He comes out here; he gets twenty thousand dollars. Enough to keep those bad men at bay for a bit longer.”

“And what do you get out of it?”

“Why are you suddenly so accusatory?”

“Because something doesn’t feel right. Something doesn’t make sense.”

“I think maybe you hit your head hard on that fall from the bridge.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit, Andrew. I asked you a question. Shotsky gets the money; what do you get?”

“I,” he said, “get Shotsky.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

Andrew sighed. He bent and gathered up the mat on which he’d been meditating and rolled it into a tube. “I didn’t save that man’s life on that boat so he could have it taken from him by a bunch of Vegas thugs. After that accident on the boat, if he was too much of a coward to go back to work, to work like a man, then I’m going to help him overcome that fear.” He grinned, and it was the old devilish Trumbauer grin. “I’m going to save his life again.” He tucked the mat under one

arm and stepped around me, heading back toward camp. “Then why am I here?” I called after him.

Andrew paused. I expected him to face me, but he didn’t. I didn’t need to look at his face to know he was still sporting that horrible grin. “Same reason,” he said and walked away.

2

IN MY DREAMS. I SHUTTLE THE MOTORCAR OVER

the sloping lawns of the Italian countryside. Hannah laughs from the passenger seat. She is not the Hannah from real life—not the woman I was married to a million years ago—but rather she is the Hannah from my dreams, my nightmares. Her hair is short, and she wears a lambskin jacket and pantsuit. I grip the steering wheel, a silk scarf flapping in the wind. I am David, the man Hannah fell in love with after she left me. Or perhaps the man she fell in love with while she was still with me, still my wife. None of that was ever clear.

I’m not going to mess things up, I shout over the engine, the wind. Yes, you are, she says, and she doesn’t need to shout. I’ve got a second chance, I say. I’m going to make things right. I’m going to fix things for us. You can’t, she tells me. Why not?

Because I’m dead , she says. And because we are flying . I imagine cliff diving with Andrew and how I soared naked through the air, suspended for a million eternities, before crashing down through the black, icy waters. Flying, flying … What do you mean we’re flying? I say.

Hannah—the Hannah from my dreams, the dakini , not the real Hannah—faces forward and says, Look .

I look and find the ground has vanished from beneath the motorcar. We are careening over a precipice, suspended in air, a pair of cliff divers,the engine groaning and the wheels spinning without traction, and the chrome headlamps glinting in the sun.

3

IN THE MORNING. THE PROXIMITY OF THE GODESH

Ridge was overwhelming. The Valley of Walls lay at the base of the range, the earthen path that was once a river carved straight through a pass where it disappeared. The Sherpas said the drop had once been a beautiful waterfall, something witnessed by generations long gone. It was dry as bone now.

The mountain itself was tremendous, twisting and bulging at its foothills like slaps of clay stacked atop one another to dry in the sun, its peak obscured by cloud cover. With the waning darkness still toward the west, two of the Sherpas led us through the arid pass, their sandal-clad feet kicking up tufts of white dust. They spoke perfect English when they wanted to, but mostly they kept to themselves.

Half a mile through the pass, I could see where the rutted, dried riverbed ended at a sharp drop. Far below stood the jagged pincers of exposed, sun-bleached rocks. I could easily imagine this as a waterfall, and the quarry below still held the shape of a basin, although filled with boulders and lush with plant life. While I watched, a flock of giant black birds took flight, calling shrilly to one another.

Our group continued along the base of the foothills, winding farther and farther away from the Valley of Walls, which was now situated directly below us. From this vantage, I could see all the stone walls and how the valley itself curled slightly like a monkey’s tail. From this distance, the arrangement of the walls seemed nearly prophetic, something akin to crop circles or the looming statue heads on Easter Island. I tried to derive sense from the pattern, but it meant nothing to me. And perhaps that was how it was supposed to be.

We trekked through a series of stone portals wreathed with lichen,constantly ascending at a gradual incline. There was very little to grab onto here for support, and as the incline grew steeper, my back strained and I leaned closer toward my knees. A few of us skidded in the dirt, launching cascades of tiny stones down the face of the mountain.

I couldn’t help but look up as I climbed. The clouds were wispy but in copious amount, and I still could not see beyond the first summit. It was impossible to judge the distance. Yet each time we wound around the passageways (once, even entering a cave which smelled of kerosene that emptied out on the opposite side of the foothill), a new plateau would appear closer and closer above us.