The mementos, likewise, had been left behind. The picture of my nephew that my sister dearly wanted me to carry to the roof of all the worlds. A dozen of these that seemed so small and light to each giver but added up to difficult choices and considerable weight, and so none of them even made it to basecamp.
I longed for all of them in that moment. Not that I could have dug them out with my dead fingers, but just to have them on my body. In case my preserved form was ever discovered and picked through by future explorers. Just so they would see that these things were there. That I wasn’t so alone.
I woke once more and spoke to the sun, and he called me a fool. His climb was rapid and impressive. And who was I? I was a mortal pretending to do godly things. I had wax for wings. I was already dead, my body frozen, but all the effort of my being, my slowing and cooling blood, the best drugs doctors could pump into me, kept my thoughts whirring. Slowly whirring like gears with their dying batteries. Just one more turn. Another thought.
I woke and spoke to an angel. So small. The world was outsized for her. An angel in a mask, breath fogging it with ice, no tanks on for that final and swift climb of hers.
I passed out again, but I felt the world shudder beneath me. The mountain was rising. They did this, you know. Confounding last year’s climbers by lifting up a fraction more for the next season. Always this: our accomplishments subsiding to time and acclimation. That fear that our former feats were yesterday’s glory. Every year, the mountains moved just a hair higher. And I was likewise now rising and falling, numb everywhere except in my mind. Only in my head, by the jounce of my neck, could I feel the world move.
Ziba was there, a face behind a mask, an angel with no oxygen, laboring down that nameless ridge having summited after me.
And Cardhill, whose ankle had seized, whose gears whirred, whose mind was said to be that of the great climber of the same name, but it was not something I ever believed. Until that moment. And I would never doubt again. It was Cardhill who carried me. And the perfect grace that had seemed inhuman at basecamp felt like a real man to me on that summit. Cardhill staggered and limped along. He cradled me in his mighty and trembling arms.
At camp 7, Hanson tended to me, though he was in no shape to do so. He said my hands were gone. My feet as well. I believed him.
At 6, we notified basecamp. We informed Humphries’ and Shubert’s team that they had perished nobly. The controversy was not in my mind at camp 6. I was weeping frozen tears. I was still dead on that peak, blabbering to alien stars. I had not yet been carried anywhere.
There was no memory of camp 5. I’m not even certain we stopped there. At camp 4, a doctor removed my lips and my nose. It required no instruments. My sherpas were there to congratulate me. The horror of what I’d done was far worse than the horror of what I’d become. I could look at myself in the mirror with no revulsion. To think on myself, though, was to invite black thoughts.
Ziba and Cardhill made it down the mountain ahead of me. I asked Hanson to work the radio, and I tried to form the words with my new face. But it wasn’t my lips that caused problems. It wasn’t my tongue.
At basecamp, at this approximation of civilization, I was provided a glimpse of what awaited me across the worlds. And it did not matter who I told or how often. I wrote in every forum, had letters crafted by those who could form them, who could understand my muted, lipless words, but Ziba, I was told, was already off to explore new worlds. And my exhortations that she be remembered fell on deaf ears. Ridgelines had already been named. And when my wife kissed my new face weeks later, the tears I wept were not for seeing her again but for the misery, the pain, of not having been left there where I deserved to lay, where I could be forgotten, frozen in the vastness of time, spinning lazily with broken wings beneath that great orange and alien star. Beneath that star who alone would ever know the awful truth of my most hollow glory.
