Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) (5 page)

“The headlights,” I gesture at the wall across from my bunk, where tiny spotlights bounce up and down on the wood, “people coming up the stairs.”

“No light,” he whispers.

Although the conditions were bad enough to cut short the summit goal for many, no one returned for another hour.

“Great.” I roll over and face the empty Frenchman’s mattress. “That’s perfect.”

I think of the bees. I am lucid enough to be disappointed by my own insanity.

Among the defeated is the French hiker who gets down from his bunk no sooner than he catches his breath on it. He talks to me, telling me the occasional joke that makes me cough and muster a “Oui, c’est droll. C’est très droll.” I am in and out of the moment but never sleeping. He holds my hand for two hours straight. It’s long enough for me to think that not only is this the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me but also the kindest thing I have ever personally witnessed someone do for a stranger.

Eventually the Seattle hiker, who could have made it up Cotopaxi and back jogging had several of his teammates not wanted to turn back, marches up to me and asks to pull my finger. From the top bunk, I see all of these people as floating torsos. Amateur doctors making their rounds.

“Let me see her finger,” he says to the others.

This no time for third grade games, sir.

He clips a heartbeat monitor to my thumb.

What has two thumbs and no pulse? This girl!

My heart rate is less than enthusiastic.

“Hmmm,” he says, and I slide the monitor from my thumb.

I don’t remember anyone touching my forehead but a voice says I’m burning up.

“Okay,” I sit up, having just about had it with Cotopaxi, with being sick, with pretending that everything is okay for the sake of nothing, for some adopted testosterone-fueled notion of achievement. “Okay, what are the coldest times to go down?”

Victor lifts the top layer of his sleeping bag.

“Hey, there’s a rip in this!”

“Between 4 and 6,” the Seattle climber presses his watch to make it glow.

It’s 5 a.m.

In daylight, it would take me 40 minutes to get down from the mountain. In my current condition, I suspect it will take me longer than that to get down from this bunk. I decide to wait it out, getting sicker, which entails more nausea and a chill that won’t quit. Still, it’s not like I’m dying. At least that what I tell the Frenchman when he asks me if I’m dying. I have never been asked this in a sincere fashion before. I am flattered that he thinks I would know. People who push themselves to the brink of their physical limitations know what dying, if not death, would feel like. When I say something tastes like pennies or piss or shit, I don’t mean to suggest I have the literal frame of reference for these flavors. But these people — they eat shit for fun.

“
J’ai peur,” I confess my fear. “Mais c’est la vie.”

Actually this is not “la vie” at all. Someone’s vie, maybe, but not my vie. Mine is not a story about the rewards of conquering one’s fears.

•••

The mountain pretends not to know what it did. At sunrise, it looks perfectly innocent, as if it has just chewed my shoe and now it wants to go for a walk. Standing outside in the quiet, waiting for Edgardo and Victor to wake up, I feel my first wave of the good kind of lonely. The backside of the refuge is perched on a cliff so that the view runs right up to my feet. Twin rainbows develop in the valleys in front of me. The contrast of green hills and snowcapped tops gives the entire region a confectionary look. The mountains look like humpback whales coming up for air. It’s all so offensively pretty. And not a sign of yesterday’s storm. You could put a feather on top of the snow and it wouldn’t blow away. For a split second, I kick myself for not having gone higher last night. Play with any puppy for long enough and you too will forget about the mastication of your footwear.

I hear a crunch on the ground behind me.

“
Imbabura
,” Edgardo points to my right.

There, surrounded by mist, is the mountain I didn’t climb. It is the most gently sloped and least snowcapped of the mountains. Snow yarmulked.

“It’s beautiful,” I nod.

“I take this,” Edgardo grabs my backpack for me.

It’s a surprising act of either generosity or “I just this second remembered you’re paying me.”

“Thank you.”

I am relieved to not compound the thumping in my skull by climbing down with the extra weight. Edgardo unfastens his helmet and clips it to his own bag. Then he hands the pack back to me. When I don’t immediately take it, he gently rests it against my leg.

“De nada,” he says.

When we arrive at the car, I am somehow surprised to see it there, right where we parked it. Unlike Edgardo, I did not expect it to get stolen. But I am surprised to see it, magnificently unaffected by last night’s events. By the time I reach for the door handle, my body is almost as indifferent to Cotopaxi as the car is.

Meanwhile, the rap is back. So is the gas pedal. I would sooner drink a bottle of whiskey and run down a spiral staircase than get in a car with Edgardo again. But as I have neither at my disposal, I buckle up.

“Look,” Edgardo says, once we are at the base of the mountain.

“What?”

He ignores me as usual and stops the car. At first I see nothing. Then, on the hillside, meandering between sporadic shrubs, are seven spots. They’re moving slowly toward us. They are wild horses, mostly caramel and one black. As they get closer, I can see their manes are dreadlocked and tangled with unknowable debris. Some of their ribs show when they move. Edgardo gets out of the car to take pictures. He moves with stealth, trying not to frighten them. They remain calm but stop to munch on long grass while keep one eye on Edgardo. This is what he needed last night, an animal with monocular vision to watch his shit.

Our driver missing, Victor and I get out of the Jeep, closing our doors softly behind us. We lean together, watching Edgardo creep up on the horses, trying to crouch down and move forward at the same time. I have taken my gloves off and done the unthinkable: unzipped my jacket. Victor laughs at his friend under his breath and shakes his head. He cleans his Oakleys with his shirt, glares at the sky and says we have to get going. It’s going to rain again soon and the road to the highway will be covered in mud. Arms folded, I say nothing. I just left two days of malaria pills in a pile of vomit.

“He is heart sick” explains Victor, who puts his hand on his chest, concerned he got the word wrong.

“There is a woman and she will not call him. So he texts her.”

The idea of Edgardo living his life, eating, drinking, texting, going to nightclubs and flirtatiously sticking the end of his scruffy ponytail down women’s faces like a paintbrush, is strange to me.

“He lives with his mother,” Victor says, reading my mind about the rent, “but he want to move with this woman.”

“Does she respond to the texts?”

“She has a new boyfriend. Edgardo knows a little but he doesn’t really know.”

From half a football field away, the wind carries the sound of Edgardo telling the horses to be “tranquillo,” which they already are. They’re not running from him nor are they charging him. They’re just casually meandering away from this nuisance.

“Do you know this guy?”

“He is my twin brother.”

“I see,” I say with a “my wife is dead” level of energy, “that’s not very good.”

“No,” Victor laughs, and removes a mango from his pocket, “it’s not.”

He offers me a half the fruit and I accept.

This doesn’t make it okay. None of what has happened in the past 36 hours is okay. When Edgardo comes back to the car, I stare out the window, refusing to feel bad for him. The inexplicably German rap gives way to explicably German techno. It’s less of an affront to my ears. The German language and techno go together like peanut butter and jelly. I really don’t care who broke Edgardo’s heart or why or how badly. Furthermore, the idea that it was done over text only aggravates my casual distain. How grand could this alleged love affair have been? I am not sorry he is lonely. A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are lonely even when they’re surrounded by other people. And yet, on the drive back to Quito, when Edgardo shouts the names of the mountains, releasing the steering wheel to point enthusiastically each time the road provides a new angle, as if I have not just spent the night on one of them, as if he has not told me a million times already, I crane my neck and look up and nod, sufficiently awed.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The names and identifying characteristics of individuals have been changed to preserve their anonymity. In addition, time lines and dialogue have been marginally adjusted.