How We Are Hungry (20 page)

“Rita honey.”

Rita wants to answer but can’t find her tongue. The light has swept into her, the light is filling her, like something liquid pushing its way into the corners of a mold, and soon she’s fading back to sleep. Hours or seconds?

“Rita honey, something’s happened.”

Rita is now riding on a horse, and she’s on a battlefield of some kind. She is riding sidesaddle, dodging bullets. She is invincible, and her horse seems to be flying. She pats her horse and the horse looks up at her, without warmth, bites her wrist and keeps running, yanking on its reins.

Later she opens her eyes and it doesn’t hurt. Something has changed. Her head is lighter, the pain is diminished. Shelly is gone. Rita doesn’t know what time it is. It’s still bright. Is it the same day? She doesn’t know. Everyone could be gone. She has been left here.

She rises. She opens the tent door. There is a crowd around two men zipping up a large duffel bag. The zipper is stuck on something pink, fabric, a striped pattern. Now they have the duffel in the air, the bag connecting their left shoulders, and there are men around them arguing. Patrick is pushing someone away, and pointing the porters with the duffel down the path. Then there is another huge duffel, carried by two more porters, and they descend the trail. Grant is there. Grant is now helping lift a third duffel bag. He hoists his half onto his shoulder while another porter lifts the other side, and they begin walking, down the trail, away from the summit.

Rita closes her eyes again and flies off. There are bits of conversation that make their way into her head, through vents in her consciousness. “What were they wearing?” “Well, think about it like the cabbies again. It’s a job, right? There are risks.” “Are you bringing the peanuts, too?” “Sleeping through it all isn’t going to make it go away, honey.” “I don’t have my headlamp. Does everyone else have a headlamp?”

J.J. and Frederick are in electric chairs. The Brussels stenographer is there, standing next to Rita, and they are smiling at the children. It is apparent in the logic of the dream that J.J. and Frederick are to be executed for losing a bet of some kind. Or because they were just born to be in the chair and Rita and the Brussels stenographer were born to hold their hands. J.J. and Frederick turn their eyes up to her. Rita is holding their hands as the vibrations start. She is resigned, knowing that there are rules and she is not the person to challenge them. But their teeth begin to chatter and their eyes rise to her and she wonders if she should do something to stop it.

“How do you feel, sweetie?”

Her head is clear and without weight. It again feels like part of her.

“You just needed time to acclimate, I bet.” Shelly is stroking her leg.

Rita raises her head and there is no pain. Lifting her head is not difficult. She is amazed at the lightness of her head.

“Well, if you’re coming, I think you’ll have to be ready in a few minutes. We’re already very late. We gotta get a move on.”

Rita doesn’t want to be in the tent anymore. She can finish this and have done it, whatever it is.

The terrain is rocky, loose with scree, and steep, but otherwise it is not the most difficult of hikes, she is told. They will simply go up until they are done. It will be something she can tell herself and others she has done, and being able to say yes when asked if she summitted will make a difference, will save her from explaining why she went down when two hikers over fifty years old went up.

Rita packs her parka and food, and stuffs the rest into her duffel bag for the porters to bring down to the next camp. The wind picks up and ripples the tent and she is struck quickly by panic. Something has happened. She remembers that Shelly had said something happened while she was asleep—but what? What was—

Mike. Oh Christ. Her stomach liquifies.

“Is Mike okay?” she asks.

She knows the answer will be no. She looks at Shelly’s back.

“Mike? Mike’s fine, hon. He’s fine. I don’t think he’ll be joining us today, but he’s feeling a little better.”

Rita remembers Grant going down the trail. What happened to Grant?

“I’m sure we can find him at the bottom, afterward,” Shelly says, applying a strip of white sunblock to her nose. “You can ask him then. He’s not the most normal guy, though, is he?”

The sky is clear and though the air is still cold, maybe forty-five or so, the sun is warm to Rita’s face. She is standing now, and almost can’t believe she is standing. She steps over the shale to the meal tent, the thin shards of rock clinking like the closing of iron gates.

Mike is at breakfast. It’s 8 a.m., and they are two hours behind schedule. They quickly eat a breakfast of porridge and hard-boiled eggs and tea. Everyone is exhausted and quiet. Grant has gone down the mountain and Mike is not going up. She smiles to Mike as he bites into an egg.

The remaining paying hikers—Rita, Jerry, Shelly—and Frank and Patrick say goodbye. They will see Mike again in about twelve hours, they say, and he’ll feel better. They’ll bring him some snow from Kibo, they say. They want to go and drag their bodies to the top, and from there they can look down to him.

It’s glorious. From the peak Rita can see a hundred miles of Tanzania, green and extending until a low line of clouds intercepts and swallows the land. She can see Moshi, tiny windows reflecting the sun, like flecks of gold seen beneath a shallow stream. Everyone is taking pictures in front of a sign boasting the altitude at the top, and its status as the highest peak in Africa, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. Behind the signs is the cavity of Kibo, a great volcanic crater, flat, paislied with snow.

On the Moshi side of the mountain, the glaciers are low and wide, white at the top and striped from her viewpoint, above. She sees the great teeth of a white whale. Icicles twenty feet tall extend down and drip onto the bare rock below.

“They’re disappearing,” Jerry says. He is standing behind Rita, looking through binoculars. “They melt every year a few feet. Coming down slowly but steadily. They’ll be gone in twenty years.”

Rita shields her eyes and looks where Jerry is looking.

There are others at the top of Kibo, a large group of Chinese hikers, all in their fifties, and a dozen Italians wearing light packs and with sleek black gear. The hikers who have made it here nod as they pass each other. They hand their cameras to strangers to take their pictures. The wind comes over the mountain in gusts, ghosts shooting over the crest.

The hike up had been slow and steep and savagely cold. They rested ten minutes every hour and while sitting or standing, eating granola and drinking water, their bodies cooled and the wind whipped them with broad sharp strokes. After four hours Shelly was faltering and said she would turn back. “Get that pack off!” Frank yelled, tearing it off her as if it were aflame. “Don’t be a hero,” he’d said, giving the pack to one of the porters. Shelly had continued, refreshed without the weight. The last five hundred yards, when they could see the tip of the mountain just above, had taken almost two hours. They’d reached the summit as the sun grew out of a band of violet clouds.

Now Rita is breathing as fast and as deeply as she can—her headache is fighting for dominion over her skull, and she is panting to keep it at bay. But she is happy that she walked up this mountain, and cannot believe she almost stopped before the peak. Now, she thinks, seeing these views in every direction, and knowing the communion with the others who have made it here, she would not have let anything stop her ascent. She knows now why a young man would continue up until crippled with edema, why his feet would have carried him while his head drained of blood and reason. Rita is proud of herself, and loves her companions, and now feels more connected to Shelly, and Jerry, Patrick, and Frank, than to Mike, or even Grant. Especially not to Grant, who chose to go down, though he was strong enough to make it. Grant is already blurry to her, someone she never really knew.

Rita finds Shelly, who is sitting on a small metal box chained to one of the signs.

“Well, I’m happy anyway,” Shelly says. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

Rita sits next to her, panting to keep her head clear.

“Why shouldn’t you be happy?” Rita asks.

“I feel guilty, I guess. Everyone does. But I just don’t know how our quitting would have brought those porters back to life.”

“Back to life? Who?”

“Last night,” Shelly says. “Or the night before last. The last night we slept, when you were sick, Rita. Remember? The rain? It was so cold, and they were sleeping in the mess tent, and there was the hole, and the tent was so wet…”

“Why didn’t we— Didn’t someone—”

“They just didn’t wake up, Rita. You didn’t know? I know you were asleep but really, you didn’t know? I think part of you knew. Who do you think they were carrying down?”

“I didn’t see.”

“They were young boys. They didn’t have the right clothes. Can you imagine doing this without the right gear? Really, Rita? I thought maybe you knew. I think people have a sense for these things, when something like that is going on, don’t you?”

“But why didn’t we—”

“I didn’t want to spoil all this for you. We’ve all worked so hard to get up here. I’m glad everyone decided to push through, because this is worth it, don’t you think? Imagine coming all the way out here and not making it all the way up for whatever reason. Oh, look at the way the glaciers sort of radiate under the sun! They’re so huge and still but they seem to pulse, don’t they, honey? Look at the snow throbbing like that, pushing and pulling with us! Rita what— Where are you going?”

All the way down Rita expects to fall. The mountain is steep for the first hour, the rock everywhere loose. None of this was her idea. She was put here, in this place, by her sister, who was keeping score. Rita had never wanted this. Peaks mean nothing to her. She runs and then jumps and runs and then jumps, flying for twenty feet with each leap, and when she lands, hundreds of stones are unleashed and go rolling down, gathering more as they descend. She never would have come this far had she known it would be like this, all wrong, so cold and with the rain coming through the tents on those men. She makes it down to the high camp, where the porters made her dinner and went to sleep and did not wake up. This cannot be her fault. Patrick is responsible first, and Frank after him, and then Jerry and Shelly, both of whom are older, who have experience and should have known something was wrong. Rita is the last one who could be blamed; but then there is Grant, who had gone down and hadn’t told her. Grant knew everything, didn’t he? How could she be responsible for this kind of thing? Maybe she is not here now, running down this mountain, and was never here. This is something she can forget. She can be not-here—she was never here.

Yesterday she found herself wanting something she never wanted. To be able to tell Gwen that she’d done it, and she wanted to bring J.J. and Frederick a rock or something from up there, because then they’d think she was capable of anything finally and some day they would come back to her and—oh God she keeps running, sending scree down in front of her, throwing rocks down the mountain, because she cannot stop running and she cannot stop bringing the mountain down with her.

At the bottom, ten hours later, she is newly barefoot. The young boy who now has her boots, who she gave them to after he offered to wash them, directed her into a round hut of corrugated steel, and she ducked into its cool darkness. Behind a desk, flanked by maps, is a Tanzanian forest ranger. He is very serious.

“Did you make it to the top?” he asks.

She nods.

“Sign here.”

He opens a log. He is turning the pages, looking for the last names entered. There are thousands of names in the book, with each name’s nationality, age, and a place for comments. He finds a spot for her, on one of the last pages, at the bottom, and after all the names before her she adds her own.

WHEN THEY LEARNED TO YELP

THEY WERE OLDER than most when they learned to yelp. Most people, of most generations, in most of the world’s nations, learn to yelp at a young age. Some are born yelping, others learn it when they learn their mother tongue. Yelping, as they say, comes with the territory. But these people, the ones we’re talking about—born in the United States at a certain time— they had not learned to yelp.

“What is this you mean?” their friends abroad said. “This business about you have not yet learned to yelp? What is this, you are Canadian?”

To yelp: open your mouth. Convulse your stomach, as you would before a belch, or before vomiting. Now form a word, a thousand words, but emit none. In place of the words you might attempt, make a sound. The sound is a combination of three sounds. Each of these represents a third of your yelp.

First: there is the shrieking sound you might make if you hit your head on the bottom edge of an open kitchen-cabinet door. It is sudden, high-pitched, angry. It speaks of the stupidity of pain.

Second: there is a whining aspect. Imagine that you have not slept for many days, and after those many days, you are punched in the gut. Then you are told to run over that hill yonder and back. When you return, you are punched in the sternum. You ask for mercy. They laugh and kill your dog. They break the objects you care about. This is the whine to keep in mind. This is exhaustion.

Third: the last factor in your yelp is the moan. The moan is the moan of powerlessless. The moan is shock in the face of natural horror. A landslide. An avalanche. Brutality. A flood. Machetes. This portion of your yelp says that you did not think you could be surprised or overwhelmed, but you have been proven wrong. You did not think, after seeing some ten thousand or so murders on television, after reading so much history, that anything could stick its fist through you. But you have been proven wrong. You did not want to be proven wrong.

When you combine these three things—the shriek, the whine, the moan—and condense them into a sharp burst that originates in your liver and expels itself from your body via all six to seven different orifices at once, you have yelped.

Yelping cannot be practiced or forced. Yelping will come only when provoked.

The yelp is efficient. The yelp says a great deal with great economy. The words, questions and statements which are encompassed in one quick yelp: Fuck! Shit! Piss! How could you? How could you? How do your hands do such things? I won’t believe it. Stop it now. Please stop it now. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Motherfuckers! Animals! That poor man. Those poor women. Look at her arms. Look at his face. I cannot believe it. I will not believe it. Those bastards. Those mother-fucking bastards. This is not how it should be. Nothing should ever be like this. Goddamn all this. I give up. No, I will fight. No, I will give up. No, I will fight.

But for Americans of a certain age, there had until recently been no yelping. There were many of these words said, and emotions felt, and questions asked, but never had they been concentrated enough—for there must be an overwhelming onslaught of stimuli, gradual and topped off suddenly—to become a yelp. Their parents had yelped, most of them, and certainly their grandparents. But they had not, which made them at once stronger and less strong.

Those who have yelped have had their floor removed from them. The floor falls away and the yelper descends between 300 and 1500 feet, down a narrow shaft. Then the yelper must make his or her way back again, to the light.

Yelping can be done on cloudless days. Yelping can be done in any season. In any place. People yelped in beautiful Sarajevo. People yelped on the sugarwhite beaches of Haiti.

Yelping, though, can also be done—is very often done—far away from the source of its yelping. John Lundgren of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, reports having yelped while sitting in the bleachers at his niece’s field hockey game; the man beside him had said, “Can you believe what happened?” and when John heard what had happened, he yelped. Abby Peterson of Cliffside, Idaho, reports yelping while braiding her daughter’s hair as they watched the news. She was stroking her daughter’s smooth rust-colored strands when she saw something on the television and with her hands on her daughter’s head she yelped. Chinaka Hodge of Oakland remembers being at the library, sitting at a white computer, the carpet beneath her quiet and blue. On the screen, when she sat down, was a short grainy film that she watched despite knowing that she should not watch it. And she yelped. She fell 720 feet and is now, many months later, still making her way back to the surface.

There had been some hope that these people would never know the sound we’re talking about. That they would make it through their years without yelping. But now they and millions of others, Americans of a certain age, have followed the path of their parents and grandparents and billions of others before them. They have learned how to yelp. They cannot forget what it felt like—it burns, it burns—when the sound came out of them, but they can try to help those who have not yet yelped to live a yelping-free life. This is what we want. This is all that we can do.