Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

“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 hard 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.