Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

There was no one out there.

—Tim …

I shook my head, closed my eyes. “No. Not now, Hannah. Please.”

—Come with me, Tim …

“I can’t. You need to go away and let me keep my head straight.” Just hearing my own voice out loud caused a tremulous, self-indulgent laugh to rumble in my throat. “Jesus, I’m cracking up.”

Retracting the pickax into the tent, I took one final glimpse of the surrounding gully before withdrawing my head and shoulders through the canvas flaps.

In the morning, we continued along the outer ridge on empty stomachs. Beyond the peaks of the Himalayas, the sky looked scratchy and sepia toned, like an old filmstrip. Low-hanging cumulus clouds drew together like brooding eyebrows against the horizon. The sun was thumb smeared and pink. I began to convince myself that Petras and I were the only two men alive on the planet.

At lunchtime, Petras discovered oyster crackers at the bottom of his pack, which we shared while sucking down mouthfuls of snow.

“Andrew’s just as dead as we are,” Petras said after half a day of silence. His beard was fuller and white with freezing snow. Bits of ice dropped off as he spoke. “There’s no hope for him, either.”

But he has our food, I thought. He has the stove to make heat and the means to make a fire that can last through the night. He has the advantage of knowing where the hell we are, while we don’t know where he is. I thought all these things but didn’t say them. It hurt my throat to talk, and my nose had started bleeding again: the mound of melting snow in my hand was streaked red.

“It’ll take over a week to get back down the way we came.” Petras chewed the oyster crackers like a cow chewing cud—working his jaw in a slow rotation. “And that’s if we can even manage getting back just the two of us. Of course, that’s if we had food, a better source of heat, fire …”

“This is all stuff I know,” I informed him bitterly. “What are you suggesting? We just lie down in the snow, let it cover us up? Stick a few plastic flags around and hope maybe years from now someone will find us?”

“Is that what you want?” Petras wiped away the larger chunks of ice forming in his beard. His knife-blade eyes jabbed at me. “Remember when you told me about your solo trip into a cave? You broke your leg after falling down a ravine, right?”

I shrugged. It pained my muscles. “So?”

“So are you still that same man? The guy who can’t deal with shit and needs to go off by himself in a cave, hoping he won’t comeout?” He looked down at his fingers, powdered with cracker crumbs. “You still that guy?”

I thought about it. I honestly did. I thought about it for so long that it might have appeared I would never answer his question. But Petras didn’t rush me and didn’t meet my eyes in order to intimidate me into an answer.

Eventually I said, “No, I’m not that man. I’m a different man now.”

“Good.”

“So what do we do? You said it yourself we won’t make it back the way we came. And we sure as hell don’t know any other trails.”

“You’re right; we don’t. But if we go straight down—we take the easiest wall and abseil down the face—we can get to the valley in a day, maybe two. And in the valley—”

“There’s food,” I finished, suddenly comprehending. “There’re trees and streams and animals we could catch. It’s not as cold, and we could survive there if we had to. We just have to reach it.”

“Remember Hollinger’s story about living off the land in the outback for months with Andrew? It’s no different. If we can kill enough food, pack it in snow, take it with us … we might have a chance out of here.”

2

WE FOUND WHAT APPEARED TO BE AN EASY RAP-

pel to a series of jagged peaks, their black pointed hoods cresting through the snow. It was a straight run with what looked like sizable handholds all the way down.

“We’ll use one line,” Petras suggested. “Go one at a time.”

“You go ahead first.”

“No,” Petras said, “you go. I’m heavier. I’ll brace the line for you.”

He anchored the line to the ridge and ran it through my harness while I put on my helmet.

Petras breathed into my face: “You strong enough?”

“Guess I’ve got to be …”

“You can do it.”

“Yeah …” But the intervening days—the intervening hours—had weakened me considerably. My head felt filled with helium, and my eyes would not stop watering. The core of my body felt hollow, my face chafed raw from the unrelenting Himalayan wind.

“All right,” Petras said and thumped a hand atop my helmet.

I pitched over the side, Petras’s hands briefly on my shoulders, and abseiled the length of the wall to the craggy rocks below. At the bottom, I dropped my gear onto the ground and took off my helmet. Suddenly weightless, I felt as though a strong wind could sweep me right off the ridge.

I gave Petras a thumbs-up, and he proceeded to climb over the side of the cliff. Behind him, the mountains were a mottled matte of pastels, enflamed with the reflection of a setting sun.

Halfway down the ridge, Petras’s hand slipped from one of the handholds. He pitched to the right, and one of his boots peeled away a tumble of rocks from the rock face.

I staggered back, mesmerized.

Somehow Petras managed to correct himself, pulling upward on the rope and securing a second handhold. He planted his dangling leg firmly into the side of the mountain. Rocks tumbled down and shattered close to my feet. I felt dirt and grit powder my face.

“Careful!” I shouted.

Without looking at me, he returned my previous thumbs-up.

Andrew appeared on the ridge above.

When I saw him, my blood froze; my heart stopped.

Andrew stared down at Petras, who hadn’t yet noticed him. Andrew was a featureless creature, awkward and bent over like a scarecrow come to life. Instantly he was the lunatic who’d stripped out of his clothes and taught me to jump off cliffs in San Juan.

“John! John!”

Andrew disappeared behind the cliff.

Petras paused, swinging lazily, and looked at me over his shoulder. There was a blank expression on his face.

“Get down! Move! Move!”

Petras glanced up just as Andrew’s face reappeared over the side of the cliff. His hair was blowing across his face, obscuring all aspects of humanity. He held something I couldn’t quite make out until the light from the setting sun glinted across a square, metal head at the end of a long shaft. Andrew raised it while Petras and I looked on. It was his ax.

“John!” I screamed.

Petras was only midway down the cliff. A drop from such a height would prove—

Andrew brought the ax down.

Thwap!

The rope recoiled like a snake after a strike, and Petras dropped like a lead anchor. While in reality the fall could have lasted only a few seconds, it seemed to take forever. It was all in slowmotion. I could make out every detail—the flutter of Petras’s clothes in the wind, the way the laces on his boots pointed up at Andrew, the softball-sized rocks that fell beside him at the same speed.

He struck the earth, and the sound was like a house being demolished. I shut my eyes at the last second, not catching the conclusion … although I could feel the reverberation through every cell of my body.

“John.” My voice was distant, sickly.

His body was a broken, undulating terrain beneath a ski parka and harness, his legs splayed as if caught in the middle of a jumping jack, his arms askew. Petras’s gloved fingers slowly curled in toward his palms. His head was at a devastating angle, and I could only make out the back of his shiny yellow helmet.