Snowblind (21 page)

Each night as he put himself to sleep, he imagined the Aiguille de la Flèche and pulled cold air down into his lungs. But he never went up to look at the mountain because of the hut. He imagined the angry ghosts of old alpinists, there to visit the peaceful staging house of their glory climbs. He didn't feel ready to face them in person. The struggle against the climb was hard enough without confronting the shambles of his part in the mountain's history.

Town was a mile away from his camp, and some evenings he'd go there because nights were long in the middle of winter. He saw Zapelli once in La Pierre d'Or—he was smaller and slighter even than Sam had imagined—sitting on his own at a round table, hunched over a glass. His skin and hair were beginning to grey, but his forearms still looked powerful, and the veins stood out in the backs of his hands. Sam imagined walking up to the table and having a seat and asking a few questions, about the mountains, about the route, but he didn't. If he had been forced to explain, he might have said that he believed that when Zapelli opened his mouth, the words would come out in a foreign tongue, not Italian or French, but something else entirely.

Sam acquired a partner, a Frenchman who spoke a little English. Every few days, the man would show up at Sam's spot and say, “Tomorrow we climb Le Pilier” or “L'aiguille du Midi” or “Les Trois Dents,” and Sam would say
oui
, and sometime in the night, they'd ski up out of the valley and by dawn would be climbing through strange shapes of wind-sculpted snow and ice glued to vertical walls of cold dark stone. Some of these climbs scared Sam badly: a pitch of unconsolidated rime on rock with a ledge below that would break him to
pieces, an ice hose like a wineglass stem that vibrated when he swung his axes into it. Afterward, alone in the dark, he would swear off the mountains, or compromise and promise himself a good, black binge, though he had no money, so he knew this to be an empty offer. The day after would be hard because he'd feel shaky and thin, the wind off the mountains blowing right through him, but then the next day, he would force himself back up into the peaks to do something just as hard, usually alone. When his partner got scared the man unleashed monotonic rivers of profanity, mixing French and English, sometimes in the same word, hardly raising his voice beyond a low chant.

The sun returned and the snow melted and the lupine and edelweiss ruled the high valley meadows. Soon the nights were fleeting and the days long and the Aiguille de la Flèche grew tall on the horizon. Sam slept little. Each time he shut his eyes, he found himself lying on his back in the shadows, staring straight up at the mountain, which leaned back over him. His brain fought in vain to come up with some sense of scale, to piece together the route to the top. On one climb, Sam tried to crack a joke, something about falling off and tidying the gene pool, but his partner just stared back, and Sam thought maybe he'd reached the limit of the man's English. His fears—partly of dying, which he did not want, but also of not knowing enough, of not understanding what the mountains were telling him—lengthened his sleepless nights, and he raced around the mountains during the day through a somnambulant daze trying to outrun his scattered thoughts.

And then the rope hung down out of the darkness, and Sam pulled hard toward the hut. He was not looking forward to opening the door,
but he did anyway and walked into the scarred and gutted interior. The precedent they'd set that night a year ago had not gone unnoticed. The stove looked sleek, fat, well fed, but the hut looked near collapse. The chairs were long gone, the dividing wall reduced to stub-ends of splintered boards, the mattresses stacked in one corner to give access to the bunk frames. Wind gusts blew through chinks in the walls. Sam's partner clucked his tongue and swore under his breath, but said nothing more. Sam had not spoken about that night, but he assumed the story had spread on the other side of the language barrier.

The ghosts of mountaineers past refused to materialize, leaving Sam alone with the wreckage and his partner. They sat against one wall with their backs to the wind and lit the paraffin stove to cook powdered soup for dinner. Sam consumed his share mechanically and was sorry when it was gone. The mountain was massive in his mind, a Chinese scroll a mile long. He went to the window but did not want to see what waited outside. He crossed the hut, over the ragged fringe of wall to the corner where the mattresses were stacked, but the smashup was total, there was nowhere to hide. He knew he was losing the head game. His mind produced two superimposed images of Zapelli: one of the quiet little man sitting alone at his table, the other a fun-house caricature with a skull-splitting grin, banging his fist against the bar for another drink. Here was the wrathful ghost he had expected after all.

Sam watched his partner as the man put away the stove and fuel bottle, then methodically packed his rucksack and leaned it against the wall by the door. Then he walked back across the hut, prodded Sam with his toe, and pointed at Sam's own pack, which sat empty
on the floor. Sam got to his feet and organized his things for the morning, which would really still be the night. And he felt better, at least for a moment. But then he lay down in his sleeping bag on the floor of the hut, and the mountain reappeared, two miles tall now, while the corners of his mind felt black without offering sleep and his body felt heavy without being tired.

Sam had no memories of unconsciousness, but he couldn't remember the whole night either, so his mind must have left his body at some point before the alarm from his watch brought him to his feet. They turned on their headlamps, took up their packs, and were out on the glacier before reality and sleep came to full disconnection. The moon was on the other side of the earth, and the mountains were flat shapes etched against the stars.

The stone was still there. Soon enough, Sam could reach out and touch it. There at the base, half the sky was dark star-shadow as the mountain spread out above and before them. Their headlamps cast yellow cones up at the route, but the mountain swallowed the light without telling any secrets.

The first pitches followed a strip of ice the width of a plate glass window for five hundred feet up to where the mountain bulged out past vertical. They climbed into the darkness, needing to put the delicate glass below them before the sun lit the air and the ice began to melt. At the top of the ice, they hung in their harnesses from a hammered piton and holstered their axes. Sunrise filled in the mountain above and the land below. Sam had the next lead, but he stared up at the mountain, trying to make some sense of where the route would go through the overhangs and dangling icicles. He felt his partner's
hand push down on his helmet, until Sam's eyes pointed straight ahead at the handholds five feet in front of him. Sam followed these features with his eyes, up a hundred feet, then another hundred and beyond, trying to piece it all together. His partner rapped Sam on the helmet with his knuckles.

This time, Sam kept his eyes forward and fastened his hands to the hold and pulled, and his body responded, surprising Sam so much he nearly let go. A hundred and fifty feet later, he stopped and brought his partner up to the belay. His partner climbed the next pitch, a wide, toothy crack that chewed the skin off their hands and forearms.

Sam's lead again. No cracks split the face, which meant no pins or cams for protection. The rope hung free below him, and a fall would already be a whistling dive into empty space. He held onto a crystal with his right hand, and he could see the next hold, but nothing above that. He called down, “It's blank up here,” and his words were loud because the air was calm and they so rarely spoke to each other during a climb. His partner said nothing, but paid out more rope from the belay, as if to say, you may as well go up now, you'll fall the same distance either way. So Sam crimped the hold above the crystal, committed his weight to it, left the crystal behind. He reached up, and another hold appeared, a shallow, creased water track that took the ends of two fingers. The entire pitch unfolded like that, each new hold emerging from the stone only after Sam moved toward it, each move supported only by the conviction that he would make do with whatever the rock provided. When at last he found a crack for a piton, he stopped and hung and brought his partner up to join him.
Sam looked down and saw how far the rope hung out from the wall, with no pitons for protection, and he knew that a fall would have ripped out the lower anchor and that his partner had made a leap of faith as well.

After that pitch, the rope came alive between them. An electrical current seemed to hum along the nylon thread. They urged each other on through deep black chimneys locked in ice, up overhanging fingercracks, out through hanging forests of blue icicles that creaked and groaned. Reversing what they had climbed looked impossible—the ropes hung too far out into free air. They were utterly committed to the line. And though the summit never seemed any closer while the ground was wrenchingly far below, Sam didn't struggle against their position.

It was a surprise to reach the top. Sam hadn't even noticed its nearness, so focused had he become on the holds directly in front of his face and the flow of small moves linking one to the next. His surprise at running out of mountain to climb did not prevent a swelling joy, pure and sweet, from rushing through him and carrying his eyes over all the mountaintops in the uninhibited space on all sides. His partner smiled, a wide crack in the man's thin-boned, sun-browned face, something Sam realized he had never seen before. They shook hands, wrapped their arms around each other, then raced the setting sun down the far side of the mountain.

Back on the Gesner, the twilight winds were a noisy river above the ice, but Sam couldn't stop at the hut. It was too shameful, he did not want to think about what had happened there, so they put on speed and ran down the Gesner, working within the narrow beams
of their headlamps. By the time they reached the valley below the mountains, it was deep into the night, but Sam didn't want to retire to his plastic hovel either. So they went down into town, which was dark and filled with sleep except for La Pierre d'Or. The bar was mostly empty, but even the few people there threw Sam's mind into confusion. He had not realized how far he'd retreated into his interior, that his body had been working mechanically through the night unguided. He stopped in the doorway and stared out through dazed eyes at the human shapes inside: arms, eyes, hands, mouths. His mind struggled to reconnect with the surface. He realized everyone was staring at him and his partner, waiting for the inevitable question to be asked and answered. It came from across the room. “Did you succeed? Is it done?”

Images, like startled birds from the alpine meadows, flew into Sam's mind. The route put down on paper and in magazines, passed from hand to hand. People there on weekdays and on weekends holding those pieces of paper up between their eyes and the mountain, chopping it to size, bleeding it dry. Zapelli coming to La Pierre d'Or to be slapped on the back and told tales about his route. The mountain of history behind the mountain of stone dynamited with a word.

“It's impossible,” Sam said, and it sounded clear enough in his head, but distant and flat to his ears. “It can't be done.”

His partner clapped him on the shoulder and took him to the bar and bought him a drink; the barman poured, saying, “Yes, yes, the mountains are better from here.”

DOWN FROM THE COLD

I
T HAPPENED IN the same place each time. Up near the top where the snow got a little steep and the air a little thin, where the mountain curved round them and squeezed out the lower world. That's where clients got scared. Where they started huffing and chuffing like mired horses and leaning into the ice, which was the worst thing they could do. Lisa felt for them, but it was no joke to catch a 250-pound galoot whose crampons had sheered out because he wanted to give the ice a hug, like the ice would hug him back. Catch him with no running belays, because they were
guides
and
guides
were freakin' omnipotent mountain demigods who hadn't needed running belays since the eighteen-whatevers in the Alps. Of course, those guides got pulled off and killed just the same as the current batch of pros, and if you did get pulled off, you might as well just let go and tumble yourself down into the bergschrund, because any guide who got yanked by a client must die of shame—it was written in the bylaws. Ice axe
seppuku
, right there in the snow.

So Lisa kept her clients on a short leash, treated them like a matador with a bull. Kept them close, but not
too
close. But really she felt like a midwife. Sometimes the labor was short, sometimes long and hard, but if all went well and they got through the heavy-breathing terror, then up on the summit out popped a little child, eyes freshly open to the world, hands clapping with delight. That was something to see.

The man this morning had had the shoulders of a cast iron stove and the potbelly to match. What did he say he did? Busy-ness of some kind, money farming for some corp. Red-raw cheeks that all but glowed. Lisa took right to him because he had a sense of humor about his fear. When he got scared, he
laughed
. Called himself a chickenshit. Seemed to think his own panicky cardio was the damnedest thing, like it was happening to someone else. Lisa could work with that. She kept him laughing, kept his feet moving, kept him upright until he was past the Gates, where the mountain eased climbers up to its summit ridge. On top, on trembling legs, he smiled like the sun and lurched around like a foal.
Whoa there, big fella, I got you.

On the descent, with the upper mountain behind them, he did most of the talking, which suited Lisa fine because it was his afterglow and his day. She could happily stare south, across the thick green ocean of trees, to the next fire mountain, Jefferson, with its shapely sides, its glaciers knocking sunbeams around.