Snowblind (32 page)

When we were upright, I turned back to Skim and waggled my head once up the mountain and once back down.
Up still?
Skim cocked his head uphill and shrugged.
Yep, up. Don't ask why.
I suppose our gestures could have had a dozen interpretations. At the time, I knew what Skim was saying, strong as telepathy.

It took twenty minutes of shivering and step-kicking to drive the cold into remission—it never left, but it wasn't eating my bones. For fifteen hundred feet below us, the snow ridge knifed down toward the glacier. Up above, it disappeared into shelves of clouds. Snow
fell, and the wind whipped it around us. I caught glimpses of the surrounding mountains, arrows and piles of snow flashing up out of the weather and then blinking out of existence.

We climbed through a hive-swarm of noise. Pistol shots whined through the wind. Curtains of ice-flak rasped past. Avalanches followed each other like train cars. Skim and I were silent—we'd have needed megaphones to reach each other, and it was getting hard enough just to breathe.

My stomach gnawed and squirmed, coveting my blood, my flesh, the fatty tissue behind my eyes. I felt hollow, shadowy. But my legs moved my boots higher, and my ice axe spiked the snow. When I pushed my nose down into my jacket to warm my face, I smelled the ammoniac reek of my muscles breaking down, my body burning its own walls for fuel.

The snow ridge pushed up through the clouds, up through the wind. It seemed geometric. A continuum without beginning or end. I saw snatches of the future—on the mountain, beyond the mountain—but the images flicked out of sight like the mountains in the storm. I had trouble placing myself, linking past and present. How had we come to be here? Time seemed broken off.

In a half-sheltered crotch in the snow, we stopped and ate a candy bar, a pro forma exercise. It made no difference—we were taking a piss in the sea.

Wind-chiseled gargoyles of ice forced us off onto the faces of the ridge, and the faces cut away below my crampons. I looked straight down onto clouds. Just looking, I could feel myself dropping, falling, though I wasn't. I wanted the rope, but I didn't want to stop
and wrangle it out of the pack while I was hung out over space. And climbing up would be no worse than climbing back.

The clouds thickened. Snow poured down. It sloughed off the ridge to either side, and there was no good reason to stop, so we kept climbing. The dimensions of our reality had been stripped bare. We moved in a monochromatic bubble, a few hundred square feet of whites and darks, carrying less than we needed on our backs. The only direction was up. The only time was now.

The snow slowed and stopped. The clouds unraveled then blew apart. Fairweather looked down on us through a well of blue sky a mile deep. The mountain! A splinter of star, a whiff of infinite space still smoking off its razor sides. Any shield I might once have had to protect myself from Fairweather's direct stare, I'd lost somewhere on the way. I was pierced. You couldn't have yanked the mountain out of my chest without killing me.

Clouds rolled back in, and the storm-eye closed. My axe pricked the skin of the snow. The ridgeline plunged below my heels. I'd been standing still, in a pair of kicked steps, for how long? Skim was beside me. The wind had dropped in the calm. I felt it breathing back to life.

“That was it,” Skim said. “The moment the mountain speaks. Tongues in trees and sermons in stone.”

“What did it say to you?” I asked.

“What else? Don't run.”

“Yeah? Did it offer you
I am the light and the life
or anything?”

“The opposite, actually. Seemed possessive about eternity. Unlikely to share.”

A belch of wind nearly toppled me out of my steps. “We better go,” I said.

“We better.”

We ascended through storm and snow for hours more, until the sun seemed to be low over the mountain's shoulder—not that we'd really seen the sun since it tried to explode the icefall on our heads down on the glacier. We stopped at a dip in the ridgeline where we could stand in the snow flat-footed. Skim promised he had worked out the kinks in his design, chose a wall of snow like pressed Styrofoam, and began to dig. Three hours later, in twilight, we finished chopping out the last corners of a new cave.

I had the stove going for water. I unrolled my sleeping pad and bag. There wasn't much else to do. We went through our simple tasks of preparation. By silent agreement, we stacked our food into a little shrine between us. Five candy bars, three packets of soup, and the peanuts.

“Tomorrow, the top,” I said, and I dumped the soup and the peanuts into the pot. “I'd rather be hungry tomorrow night than tomorrow.” I didn't bother saying that we had one shot at the summit, and after that, no matter the outcome, we'd be eating snow.

“No panic, right?” Skim said, watching the soup dissolve with a look like a heron stalking a frog. “It's only food. We'll have to get through tomorrow in order to face the day after, anyway.”

I ate slowly, ritualistically, fighting the emptiness at the bottom of my bowl. It was the last dinner we'd see for—well, I had no idea. And my teenage metabolism found that prospect scary as death. So even though the soup was more water than gruel, we gave it its due
respect and licked our bowls shiny. Then there really was nothing to do, other than shush our half-roused, mostly-empty bellies and go to sleep.

Deep blackness wouldn't come for me. My head filled with sea waves, long silver rollers. I tried to suck water, to bury myself below the waves, but kept bobbing up to the surface.

The sun made its brief swing over the pole. We hauled ourselves upright about the time it came flying back toward Alaska, though we had ice, mountain, and clouds between us, so our cave was a little tank of night. We took two candy bars each for ourselves and left one in the cave. Skim put the last wizened Snickers inside my sleeping bag and then rolled up my sleeping bag inside of his, muttering: “Little fucker might grow legs. It's a million to one, but better to be safe.”

Outside, we could see, but the line between snow and cloud was muddy as the line between night and day. Thick, gristly vapors wrapped the mountain like fat on meat. We had to all but scrape them aside to find the snow. Hunger and sleep clouded up my internal sky. My eyes connected world and brain like two long tubes, and they got longer and narrower the higher I climbed.

The connections between moments got real slack. I'd snap into the present and find myself leading sixty-degree ice, the rope running down below my boots, two screws already clipped, and me hacking away, clearing an inch of crust to get to the good ice below. And I had to assume everything was okay—knots tied, Skim belaying, some kind of anchor down there in the grey where the ropes disappeared.

We were roped together but not belaying. The ridge was broad and flat on top. The sides dropped into the abyss, but we couldn't
see that. Wind poured over us. Exploded clouds and loose snow flew by. I hauled in two breaths, stepped forward, hauled in another two, stepped forward. At least I hoped that forward was the same direction the rope was running.

Skim belayed me from above. The ice was wind-scoured concrete. My tools bounced. My calves shook. My front points skated. At the belay, where snowflakes spiraled around us like moths, we began to crack.

“We won't find our way down through this,” Skim said, swatting at the blizzard with his hands.

“I don't know if I can keep bouncing back,” I said. “Muscle's all gone. I'm eating brain.”

“What's the mountain worth?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing,” he repeated.

We nodded at each other. We'd made up our minds. Skim handed me the leftover ice screws from his lead. I racked them. And I began climbing—up—while Skim settled back into the belay.

How this happened is hard to explain. We'd decided to go down; I intended to go down. I expected to see—remember, I was watching through some long, skinny plumbing—my hands go to work setting up a rappel so we could retreat. When the opposite happened, my mind in its skull castle threw a fit. I'd felt panic before, and I braced, expecting my hands to shake, my breath to come drowning-man fast. Instead, I reached my left arm up, flicked a clot of snow off the surface of the ice with the pick of my axe, reached back, and drilled the exact spot I wanted, easy as a dart in the bull's eye. Could be it
was sheer dumb, unturnable momentum that moved me. Words only cut so deep, and we'd been plowing ahead toward Fairweather since approximately the dawn of man. That ship might not be the kind to reverse itself on a dime. In any case, my inner-I concluded it wasn't alone and didn't control the body near as tightly as it thought. There was another agency up there, in the flesh, or maybe something called up between Skim and me, a third person on the mountain that was neither one of us but no one else either. Meanwhile, Skim said nothing to contradict me as I scratched up the next pitch of ice, and I presumed he'd ceded his own internal ground just as I had.

The snow whirled around me. My crampons nicked the ice. My muscles jumped around inside my skin, reminding me of a dead frog in an electric current. I had time to think about dead frogs. My mind had taken a backseat.

We traded leads where the ridge narrowed. Skim climbed the back of a white dinosaur, around plates and horns of ice. I hunkered down in a notch, eyes closed, feeding out rope, listening to the wind.

A wall of green ice disappeared up into the weather. It couldn't have, but it glowed, turning the clouds that wreathed it a nuclear shade. The ice was stone, kryptonite. It slagged my forearms. The green light infected me. My fingers melted; my stomach-rat turned flips. The wind moaned and raged. Maybe it was me moaning and raging. It hardly mattered.

Above the green wall, the ridge tunneled through the wind and flying snow. We waded through new powder, a zombie pair, the alpine undead driven higher by a pressure as elemental as a hurricane. We stayed roped, ten feet apart, for no reason other than to feel
bound together. I babbled wordlessly to myself, to the mountain, to the third climber tied between us. Skim dropped and puked because of the altitude and his starvation, then got up and said, “Good. I was feeling heavy. Now I'll float.”

The earth spun below us. I don't remember it getting dark, but I couldn't swear to the day, and I wasn't sure sub-Arctic night at fifteen thousand feet would be much different from the twilight of the storm.

When the snow fell away on all sides of us, nothing overhead but weather, elation didn't take me. I don't think I had enough calories left in my tissues for that. We planted ourselves shoulder to shoulder, backs to the wind. Two moons, desire and circumstance, converged in their orbits, and all the contrary tides below ran smooth. Despite the naked, howling air and freezing cold, it was the most peaceful place. I could see beyond the mountain for the first time. The future knit itself to the past. A thin, sickly looking thing, my immediate future, but there it was.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
FEEL VERY FORTUNATE to be associated with Counterpoint Press, particularly since they seem content to let me play around in my own little corner of the literary world. My thanks go to my agent, Felicia Eth, my editor at Counterpoint, Dan Smetanka, and the entire Counterpoint staff for their thoughtful approach to books and attention to detail. I am also lucky to be from a family of talented writers and sharp readers. My two frontline readers, my wife, Ashley Laird, and my mom, Stephanie Arnold, are insightful and hard to please, qualities I value beyond measure. Finally, my thanks go to two decades' worth of climbing partners—the good, the bad, and the ugly. I've been all three myself over the years.