route.
Near the end of his thirty-four-day whirlwind, Abe received a two-pound package.
Compiled by the expedition's former physician, it contained detailed medical histories
of all the members. Abe was just leaving to grab a quick few miles of trail running on
Mount Sanitas, but when the package came he bagged the run, kicked off his shoes,
and put on a pot of coffee. This would be his first look at the people whose health and
lives were his mission.
Inside the package were ten manila file folders with a passport photo paperclipped
to the inner flap of each. Abe cleared a corner of his kitchen table and stacked the files
where they wouldn't fall. One by one, Abe drew these people to him, matching their
pictures with their names and telephone voices – the few he'd spoken to – and trying
to read from their eyes and dimples and haircuts what kind of spirits moved their
cages of bone and flesh. He stared at their photos and tried to guess how they would
laugh and cry, or if they would. Then he lifted their skin aside and peered at the
machinery, translating their medical histories into makeshift biographies, finding here
and there broken bones, a missing thyroid gland, three abortions, a heart with
murmurs, a case of diabetes, and the secretly mentioned venereal diseases.
You are my flock, Abe thought in his kitchen. Their mortality was abundant.
Beneath their muscles and tanned squints and high-flying grins and their dreams like
wings, these eagles were human, and they would need him.
There was only one surprise in that stack of folders, really. It came in the
next-to-last file. Abe opened it as he'd opened the others, casually, and he looked at
the photo, not even the name.
It was Daniel.
Abe had not seen Daniel since that once upon a time on the glacier seventeen long
years ago. He lifted the photo closer, disbelieving. Here was that same black Irish
brow, those same Lazarus eyes and the cheekbones and unsmiling laughlines. The boy
had grown into a man. His features had gravity now, though the wildness was still
evident. The blood was washed from his hair, of course, and life had etched his
forehead.
'Corder D. W.,' Abe read aloud from the file, forcing the conviction. He laid the folder
open on the stack of others.
For a few minutes, Abe sat stunned by the coincidence, then it caught up with him.
He had a connection to this man, so of course they would meet. Now or later, standing
in line at a grocery store or walking down a sidewalk or climbing a mountain. The only
real surprise was that they had not met before.
Then it caught up with him, what Jorgens had said in their first conversation:
For a time, Abe had liked to believe that he and Daniel had been orphaned by the
same event and that they had been bound by the same disappearance. But that had
just been his way of not making the event answer for itself, a chore that he'd
conveniently heaped onto his other, this twin, Daniel.
After a while, Abe had dismantled that imagined fraternity. For one thing, it was
bizarre. And for another, Abe had held the hands of too many patients who in their
fear and pain had raved with his own confusion about the falling rock or the car or the
bullet or the cancer, whatever it was, to believe death had any value.
They had talked to a ghost, he and Daniel, but that didn't mean they had to be
haunted for the rest of time. For his part, Abe had finally made himself be done with it
all. After recovering from his own ordeal, Abe had avoided revisiting that fateful range
in Wyoming, never even learning the name of Daniel's mountain. Abe had closed the
whole thing off. He had sealed the voice in the crevasse beneath seventeen years of
daily happenstance.
Yet here was Daniel again. He wondered why the man should remember him now,
so many years later. Was this expedition some sort of payback? Or was Daniel
perhaps still haunted, still needing rescue? Or just curious about that girl's long
ending?
Almost as if he were invading his own privacy, Abe picked up the folder.
Daniel's medical read like a masochist's ode to the wilderness. Their former
physician had listed Daniel's injuries in careful reverse chronology, like a resume,
which made it easy for Abe to construct Daniel's story. Abe skipped through the list at
random.
Eight years ago Daniel had elected to have arthroscopic surgery on both knees, one
at a time, for cartilage torn by years of humping big loads down big mountains. And
the year before, he'd spent three weeks hospitalized for malaria contracted in New
Guinea.
Around that same time, surgeons had fused part of his spinal column after he'd
fallen and collapsed several vertebrae. There was a note that Daniel would be bringing
along a TENS unit, a portable battery-powered device that electrically over-rode
chronic, localized pain. Killing two birds with one stone, the surgeons had taken the
same occasion to cut the nerves in Daniel's toes to address the pain of his Morton's
neuroma. Climbers liked their rock shoes so tight that they sometimes developed
hammer toes, similar to the effects of Chinese foot binding. That was back when
Daniel still had toes.
In 1984, the records showed, Daniel had spent several months in the hospital
getting most of every toe amputated because of frostbite. Abe checked a secondary
page in the folder, and there it was, a photocopied report chronicling the long,
agonizing fight to save the damaged toes. Abe flipped back to the first page and found
what he was looking for. The frostbite had occurred on Everest, in Tibet, on the north
side, in 1983.
'You,' Abe whispered to the page.
Now he recollected the tale of five Brits and an American who had been the first to
attack the Kore Wall. Just before reaching the summit slopes, they had been struck
by a winter storm. No one had died, but the group's horrible retreat had come to be
dubbed the Lepers' Parade. The American media had ignored it altogether – they
rarely took notice of mountaineering triumphs, much less failures. But among
climbers the story had spread. In fighting their way down the valley to a Tibetan
village each had suffered major frostbite. Each had lost toes, three had lost fingers,
and one had lost portions of his lower legs. Afterward, so the story went, all of the
climbers had given up climbing, all except one. Now Abe knew. Daniel was that one.
Sobered – a little sickened, even – Abe stored the nugget of history away and
finished studying Daniel's long list of injuries and disease. The severity of pain and
debilitation ebbed and flowed on the page, and Abe had to remind himself that this
was the profile of one man, not an entire ward.
The previous year Daniel had undergone surgery for another problem common to
high standard rock climbers, tendinitis in the elbow. The doctors had split the tendons
in both arms, cleared out the scar tissue, and transferred the ulna nerve from its
normal groove to across the elbow. Abe could picture the half-moon scars Daniel
