Snowblind (2 page)

“Rex was shivering bad. He kept knocking snow from the roof of the cave down on us. I told him to get in his sleeping bag, and Reverend Rex told me to shut the fuck up, he was just resting.

“No way could I light the stove. You understand? I couldn't move. My hands were still blocks. And that meant no water. Rex was no help. How was I supposed to know what was happening inside of him? I got at some chocolate—I tore open the bag with my teeth and put my whole face in—but it was concrete in my mouth. It wouldn't dissolve. I couldn't get away from the thirst. It just kept drilling at me.

“The noise never let up. The wind shook the cave all night long. I thought waves were going to come through the walls. You're sitting here, and it's ninety degrees outside, and you can't know. It was a horrible night. I fell asleep twenty, thirty times. I wish I could have knocked myself out because being unconscious was better. But then the wind would shift and blow snow through the breathing hole we'd left ourselves. I'd wake up, blind in the dark and not knowing where I was, choking on ice in my nose and mouth. It crawled into my sleeping bag. I was out of my head. I thought about termites. Ice cockroaches finding all the spaces.

“We wanted this. We were either going to get broken or remade. We'd said we were badasses. But I didn't feel badass. I was shivering so hard I couldn't see straight and burning up inside.

“Each time I woke up, I was thirstier. Preacher's hell—water all around, and my blood felt like sand. I'd check to see if my hands were alive enough to light the stove. I'd say, ‘dude, get something going, get the stove, get some water.' But then coming out of my sleeping bag would have been insane. I turned on my headlamp once, and the ceiling was ten inches away from my face. Couldn't have been more. A white coffin and two half-dead climbers. I looked over, and Rex
was unconscious but breathing. At some point he'd gotten half into his sleeping bag. He didn't deserve to be out like that. How could he fight back when he was beef in a meat locker? Fucking mountain. It didn't let us do what we could have done.

“We had the snow and the storm between us and the sun, so even when day finally came back around, the cave was still dark. A miserable hole. But we could see, and that was huge. I got the stove running and put Rex deeper in his sleeping bag. He couldn't use his hands, so I spooned soup into his mouth. He gave me a big plastic grin and said, ‘This is it, this is what legends are made of. Give me a moment to get thawed out, and we'll get back out there.' Dude had psych even then, and where was mine? I half believed his bullshit, I always did. He was a lunatic. When I went out with him, I never had to worry about being crazy enough. But now the bullshit was real, and I was panicking, and I never knew if he knew it was real, and that made it worse.

“The wind kept blowing snow into the cave, and I wasted our fuel lighting and relighting the stove. Loose snow was all over. The walls closed in. I tried to shovel it out, but whenever I moved, I got so much snow in my sleeping bag that I gave up.

“Rex said he was amazed he could stay so warm with all the snow around, and I yelled at him to pull himself together, which was stupid because he was better off in his own world. He took a long time turning his head in his sleeping bag to look at me. ‘Don't get shrill, now, kiddo,' he said.

“He blanked out then. Went somewhere else and came back. I thought he'd just shivered himself stiff. Maybe he had a seizure. I don't know.

“The fuel ran out just when the cave went dark for the second night. I never really slept. I decided we'd leave the next day no matter what. We were getting killed where we were, and I didn't know what we'd have left.

“It probably took me two hours to get us up and moving. Rex kept falling over, and he still couldn't move any of his fingers. He said it felt like bugs were crawling up his arms. I didn't look. What could I do? I shoved a piece of chocolate in his mouth and put his harness and crampons on for him and packed his gear.

“I'd hoped it would feel good to be moving. It didn't. I felt weak. Hungover. Like my brain was stuffed with cotton balls. I smelled something like formaldehyde, but I think it was just in my head. The wind blew so hard it'd throw us down, and I kept having to pick Rex up. I hardly noticed when I'd go down. My mind went somewhere else, just split from the body there and drifted. The tethers keeping me together got real loose.

“I tied Rex to me with ten feet of rope between us and pulled him along. We couldn't go down. We could barely walk, so how would we pass the hourglass, or the cliff bands? The only way I saw was going over the top and down the north side. I couldn't see anything, but I could crawl uphill. I don't know why we didn't get killed by avalanches.

“When Rex died, he just fell over into the snow and stopped moving. I screamed in his ear, shook him, punched him. Nothing. I tried to pry open his eyelids, but they were frozen shut, and I couldn't get a grip through my mittens. I don't know how long he'd been following me blind.

“It was easy to leave him. I didn't even untie the rope. I just took off my harness and left all the extra weight behind. Way too easy. Nothing felt real. Still doesn't. Not then, not now. I feel like I'm telling you all of what happened, but none of what's important. Two came, one left. My pace dropped to four breaths between each step. Even then, I had to rest after sets of thirty. I went on my hands and knees a lot because the snow was too deep and loose to stay upright.

“I got to the summit ridge and started down the north side. It wasn't snowing as hard, I think. But this freezing ice fog made the whole mountain blind. I could see even less, and my mind started making things up. It told me I'd hallucinated the ridge. I'd done nothing but turn around. I was headed back to the cave. I got totally wrapped up in the idea, but gravity pulled me down, and I kept walking. Every time I saw a rock ahead of me in the snow, I expected it to be Rex.

“Two human shapes passed me in the fog. I grabbed at them and screamed at them, but either they couldn't understand, or they were too far gone to help me. They wouldn't answer or give me any water. I followed their tracks after they disappeared, and I found the high camp of the normal route and a few tents.

“Someone took me in. They didn't want to, and they made me sleep in their tent's vestibule. Their language didn't mean anything to me, but I got that. The storm let up maybe days later—they all blurred together—and I hiked down and around the mountain to our basecamp.”

JD stopped talking. No one else said anything. We waited for a last morsel. JD tapped the table with the palms of his hands. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. “We were close. And the mountain never gave us a
chance. You see that, right? We needed one hour. If the storm had held off one hour, we'd have been all right. Rex would have been all right. He'd be sitting here grinning at me like a jack-o'-lantern, like always. It could have given us an hour.” That was it. JD looked up without tilting his head, just his eyes. His eyes were blue, and they shifted back and forth. Twenty faces, that was how many of us were in the room, looked back. The moment stretched, then the flock of us broke into smaller groups and an international babble of conversations. Paco brought JD a little glass of wine, and his brother said a few inaudible words.

I thought of going to him, I did. But there were others on the way, and I didn't know him, and I was still a creature of the mountain. Packed full of snow and shitty Andean rock.

Angela hooked her ice axe on the back of the couch and sat forward. “I don't mean to be crass,” she said from our side of the room, “but his gear, do you think it's still up there with his body—”

Her husband cut her off. “For Christ's sake, Angie, it's the kid's partner. Can't you wait a day?” He turned to me and said, more softly, “Horrible, horrible. He'll have a good slideshow. I'd have put up my ten bucks.
The Tragedy of Rex
. Killable, as are we all. He got what he deserved. I wonder if anyone will miss him. You just down off the mountain?”

I told him I was, while his wife muttered to herself that booty was booty.

“How'd it go?”

“Miserable,” I said. “Same storm as the kid said. Had me shitting into bags in my tent for days. Couldn't go outside. Would've ended up with a frostbite enema.”

“You on your own?” he asked.

“I was going to solo the Slovene Route, but I never even got started.”

“Yeah? Sounds like you should have teamed up with the kid. He didn't stay in his tent five days.”

“Fuck off.”

I kept my eyes on JD, waiting, thinking that someone probably would miss Rex. Most everyone's got someone. JD had a gulp of wine, put it back on the table. Two Americans who looked city-soft by contrast sat down to his right and left, and he couldn't look at them, didn't know where to put his eyes. They spoke quietly, faces milky-kind. Comforting words, sure. One put a hand on JD's shoulder. Hell, they all missed Rex now that he was dead.

“Kid must have some of the beast in him to have survived all that,” I said. “He could make it up some serious routes someday.”

My friend shrugged and sucked on the dregs of his maté. “Sure, but what'll his head be like after this? Sounds like he wouldn't know a fool if one up and died on him. Why should a mountain give a fool an hour?” Pleased with himself, he hiccoughed through his tea. “A fool and his hour are soon parted!” he said.

One of the Germans detached himself from the other three and walked over to the table at the center of the room. He pushed his face right into JD's and said, “You didn't put the sleeping bag on your partner?” His voice was thick, like he was talking through brown stout. “No hot drink? No help? You should not go back into the mountains.”

Before JD had a chance to react, the man who'd put his hand on JD's shoulder leapt up and planted the same hand on the German's
chest and gave a little shove. The German looked shocked, then shook his head and stalked off.

Angela's husband slurped his tea dregs again and spat brown leaves back into his gourd, then said: “Trust the Germans to get right to the point!” He giggled—a high sound like a dying fan belt.

But I was watching JD. I watched him watch the German get pushed back. His shoulders went up, his head tilted back, he had a sip of wine. Something unbent inside him. I wondered if anyone else even noticed.

THERE WAS A party that night, a typical climber shindig. Someone's always ready to celebrate, and others have sorrows, alpine or otherwise, and at least one group of smooth, clean faces will be looking to medicate their nerves. Two Brits who had summitted via the normal route before the storm brought three cases of Andino, the local brew that came in brown liter bottles with little red-and-silver labels. Miscellaneous liquors emerged from pockets and brown bags, and Paco made available two bottles of wine with his stock benediction, “for the summertime.”

All through the afternoon, JD's story continued to bother me. Maybe I thought I could have told it better, that it was wasted on him. I could find the soul of it. I wanted a go at it. While I slipped back into the comforts and claustrophobias of the house, I kept seeing the way he'd straightened up and lifted his eyes. I felt hunched by comparison.

We spilled out onto the roof at twilight, into the first pleasant temperatures for me in three weeks. On the mountain, I'd gone from heat itch to frostbite so fast my body still had complaints about the one as it warned of the other. Now I'd showered and shaved away most of my beard, which killed two razors plus most of the sharpness of a third. In the end, I had to leave a thick under-mane of coiled fur below my jaw and chin because I'd only thought to buy two razors and couldn't scrounge more than one other at the house. But my face, at least, felt light and airy. The roof was bordered on three sides by a low wall and finished with cream-colored tiles that were cracked and dusty. My tent was shoved to one corner, and from the look of things, it would be hours before the rooftop was mine.

It was nine o'clock, but down on the streets, the night had just begun, and the first evening walkers headed out for early dinner, or to enter the discotheques before a cover was charged. Strings of bare lightbulbs nailed tree-to-tree through the park blocks across from
Calle 25 de Mayo
swung back and forth on the whim of the breeze, and kids who were too young for the clubs shadowboxed dance steps in and out of the moving lights to the rhythm of the music leaking into the streets.