knew just enough Asian slang to keep everyone wondering how much he really did
know. Part of his uniform was the fresh set of red
blessing he'd arranged for himself back in Kathmandu. At his throat hung a turquoise
cylinder from his New Age import-export shop in Eugene, and his wispy ponytail was
pulled back to show two tiny gold earrings.
Most of the other climbers tended to treat Carlos's colorful spiels about the
holocaust that China had unleashed upon Tibet as ghost stories rather than real
history. The stories were fabulous and gruesome and no one paid much attention
except for Jorgens, who had instructed Carlos to zip his yap once they crossed the
border. 'A million-plus Tibetans snuffed since 1959,' Carlos regaled Abe as they
motored along. 'That's one out of every six people here starved, shot, bayoneted,
burned, crucified or beaten to death with iron bars. Manifest Destiny, Han-style.' His
claims were horrific, but the land seemed too barren and empty to support such
bloodshed. Certainly there were no bodies heaped along the roadside. For the sake of
keeping up his end of the conversation, Abe said so.
'Oh, there's killing fields here. They stretch for acres. Miles. I haven't found them
yet, but I'm looking, man. Mountains of skulls with a single bullet hole through the
buttside of each.'
They managed to ride in silence for a while, then Carlos leaned close. 'I shouldn't
ever have come back here,' he said.
Abe had no idea what he meant, but it sounded circular and self-absorbed the way
Carlos liked to be. 'Back to Tibet?' Abe asked.
'Everest,' Carlos said. 'Here we go again. Renting the mountain from a regime that
doesn't even own it. Paying lip service to butchers.'
'But all we're doing is climbing,' Abe said.
'Yeah, yeah. I've heard that one. All the world's a playground for us climbers. The
thing is, every time one of us comes and climbs here, we kiss the Chinese ass.'
'Well, I guess I don't know about that.'
'That's okay. You're ignorant,' Carlos said, but it wasn't meant as an insult. 'You
don't know what it's like here. I do.'
'Ignorance is bliss,' Abe lamely offered.
Carlos shook his head bitterly. 'Maybe so. But one thing's sure. Knowledge is
complicity.'
For the rest of the day, their convoy of three army surplus trucks spewed huge
roostertails of dust across the land. The plateau was barren. The land lay as flat as a
Wyoming oil range – except to the south. All along the right-hand horizon lay the
Himalayas, abrupt and enormous. Unlike the Nepalese side of the chain with its
foothills and forests and paddies, there was no preface to these eruptions. Abe couldn't
get over that. There was nothing intermediate between the extremes.
Human beings – even animals or vegetation – were practically an event. At one
point, Carlos thrust his arm out. 'Would you look at that,' he said.
Three horsemen were riding past, dour and fierce-looking. Two wore Aussie-style
cowboy hats, the third a fur cap. One carried a rifle with a twin-pronged stand made
of long animal horns.
'Khambas,' Carlos said. 'Once upon a time the CIA trained a bunch of those dudes as
guerrillas.'
Abe waited. Even when he was serious, Carlos seemed to be pulling your leg.
'No, no, it's true, man. They used to fly guys like them to the Rocky Mountains, an
old army camp in Colorado. Taught them, armed them, had them running ops across
the Nepal border. They'd blow up roads, attack convoys or outposts. But you know
how that goes. After a while the Agency pulled the plug. The spooks call these kind of
guys Dixie cups. Use once, throw away.'
The horsemen had long braids bound with chile-red twine. None of the three wasted
so much as a look at the truck convoy. Abe reached for his camera, but already they
were gone.
They reached a cold little village called Shekar at five and drove straight to a
concrete hostel provided by the Chinese Mountaineering Association. The village
stood at 11,000 feet. Their Chinese liaison officer – their keeper while they were
in-country – met them with a smile. 'There's one of the butchers,' Carlos muttered.
'We belong to him now.'
Wearing a crisp yellow windbreaker with ULTIMATE SUMMIT on the back and along
one arm, the L.O. was easy to recognize. 'Welcome to my country,' he greeted them.
His name was Li Deng and he was tall and well educated, a Han apparatchik from
Beijing, maybe thirty-five years old. He spoke superb British English and occupied
some high rank in the Chinese Mountaineering Association, a government bureau.
With his brand-new clean pump-up basketball shoes and hundred-dollar Revo
sunglasses – all expedition issue – he didn't look very Marxist or genocidal.
There was no heat in the rooms and what illumination there was came from a bulb
dangling by exposed wires. An industrial-strength quilt covered Abe's bed. All the
rooms lacked to be jail cells were metal bars. The CMA was charging over a hundred
dollars per climber for the lodging, but no one complained because that was the price
of climbing in Tibet.
Abe stood at the window. The truckyard was losing its daylight and Abe shivered,
unprepared for the teeth of this highland cold. Tonight's roommate was Robby, a
spidery carpenter with an old two-tone crewcut gone to seed. He was flopped out atop
his quilt, prattling on about about how he'd stayed in this same miserable hostel in '87
on his way to another mountain, Shisha Pangma. He ranked staying here alongside
giving blood – he had a needle phobia – and swimming in the ocean – sharks.
In the window's reflection, Abe could see Robby sitting on his bed. The lightbulb cast
his eyes into shadowy sockets and there was no mirth on his lips. His Great Plains
inflection blunted any intended humor, another misfire. He seemed trapped in his own
monologue.
Abe had a headache and didn't feel like conversation, and it was too early in the
expedition to be telling Robby to pipe down, so he stood there and tuned out, watching
the truckyard. A scarred black mongrel was creeping beyond stone's throw of a pack
of ragged children. Further out, the notorious Tibetan wind skirled dust clouds that
blotted out the middle distance, but not the distant Himalayas.
Abe pressed his fingertips against the dusty Chinese glass and pondered the ghostly
scenery. There was mystery out there and he welcomed it. Absentmindedly he
started tracing a silhouette of the mountains on the cold glass. A moment later Abe
noticed the idle sketch under his finger and stopped immediately. It looked, for all the
world, like the lifeline on an EEG readout. He lifted away his finger before the line
went flat on the far horizon, then chided himself for being superstitious.
It was a forgivable primitivism. They were already beginning to starve for oxygen.
Abe could sense it. From the medical literature he'd steeped himself in, Abe felt well
versed in the effects of high altitude. Even so he was surprised to see the faint blue
coloration underneath his fingernails already.
From here on out, they would be living in a constant state of hypoxia, or oxygen
