from Kelly. Now Gus was taking her turn. Maybe they were freezing him out.
'Nothing personal, Abe. But you have no right to him, no more right than you had to
her. Okay? So I'm asking you, just stay away.'
Abe took half a step backward, speechless. 'Gus...' he finally said, but nothing more
came to mind. It was she who had no right here, not he. She had to be kidding.
'I know Daniel,' Gus explained. 'He's not like the rest of us. He can't afford
memories, not that one anyway.'
Abe recovered enough to be stung and then angry. 'But that's between him and me,'
he said. Gus had nothing to do with that long past matter. It was he who had lived all
these years with the voice in the crevasse, and it was Daniel whose girlfriend had
furnished the voice. Together they had sealed the dead girl in ice. Then it occurred to
him that Gus might be jealous. She could be jealous of Abe's connection across time
with Daniel, he considered. Or jealous of a dead girl. But he didn't say so. It was too
juvenile.
'I don't understand,' he said.
'You could kill him with all that shit.' Gus's white eyes flared in the darkness. 'I mean
it. There's something about this wall. And you. Of all people, he gets you invited. I
don't know what he's thinking. But I do know this. If he can just make it past the Kore
Wall, everything's going to smooth out for him.'
Abe saw the sense she'd made out of the same coincidences he'd already noticed.
But he didn't agree with her. 'Once the monkey finds your back,' he said, 'things don't
ever smooth out.'
'He wants peace, Abe. Is that so bad?'
'So do I. So do you. Who doesn't.'
As quickly as she'd flared, Gus grew soft again. 'I want to get old,' she said very
simply. 'And I want Daniel with me.'
'Gus,' he started to say.
Abruptly she was gone out into the blinding full moon. Abe was left standing in the
big dome tent by himself, smelling her smell. She had seen his desire and turned it
back into itself, forming a circle for him. In the middle lay his emptiness, a surprise.
The memory of Gus's silver flesh stayed with him for hours. Her demand stayed with
him for longer. But the more he thought about it, the less he agreed. They had come
to climb, not act out old history. And besides, as Thomas had put it, they were all
consenting adults.
And still the yaks did not come.
Day after day, Abe preoccupied himself. He arranged his library of medical texts in a
line on one side of his tent. His medicines and equipment were assigned boxes neatly
labeled with a Magic Marker. One morning, he moved everything out of his tent and
took it down, then spent an hour smoothing out the ground and put the tent back up
again and returned his possessions to their previous order. He stacked rocks on the
south side as a windbreak. Next day he took the break apart and stacked it
differently. His chin was shaved to a smooth polish. He washed his white socks three
times in as many days. He even recorded the laundry dates in his journal.
On March 25, someone killed Kelly's potted geranium. Back in her fall quarter at the
high school she taught in, Kelly's students had cooked up a theory that plant life would
add oxygen to their beloved teacher's Base Camp tent. Kelly didn't believe it herself,
but nevertheless she'd gone ahead and bought the stoutest green geranium
Kathmandu had to offer. She had carried it past glaring Chinese border guards who
suspected the plant for no other reason than because a Western woman with yellow
hair happened to be carrying it. She had guarded it from hungry goats and curious
Tibetans and – ultimately – from Jorgens, who one night groused that the plant was a
childish affectation and that they had come to Everest to climb, not garden.
Like a canary in a coal mine, the wilting plant clearly evidenced the effects of their
environment, losing color and leaves by the day. It was dying anyway. But someone
helped it along one morning by reaching into Kelly's tent and setting it out beneath the
sun. By noon it had shrivelled to a crisp. Gus caught Kelly weeping over the small
vandalism and tongue-lashed her for showing weakness in this camp full of men.
Stump heard Gus and told her to ease up, and that led to more hard words.
'This is no good,' Robby said to Abe later on. 'You can't park combat troops in a box
like this or they turn mean. You watch what I say, there's going to be blood soon.'
Abe filed the prediction with all of Robby's other predictions. The carpenter was
best at forecasting dumplings and blue sky, things that were inevitable. Mostly he just
registered hot air.
The yaks still didn't come.
Camp turned into a pressure cooker. The climbers fretted and muttered and
sometimes bellowed, but always in the privacy of their tents or on short day hikes
around the valley. People grew afraid of their own frustration and meals became
largely silent with a sprinkling of small talk. The group's morale spiraled downward.
Abe could see it in his dwindling supply of Percodan, amphetamines and morphine,
the recreational drugs, to which some climbers freely helped themselves in the
hospital. Abe didn't stop them – they were getting his surplus – but he did note their
despair.
And then the sky came tumbling down, or almost did. It was the middle of the day
on March 28, though Abe was starting to slip on which day of the week it was
anymore. They were gathered at what was called the Tomb, a squat stone hut some
hundred yards out from camp on top of a small hill.
When George Mallory disappeared near the summit in 1924, his comrades had
stacked a primitive monument atop the hill. Over the years, expeditions had
borrowed flat stones from the monument for windbreaks and to make this
ten-by-ten-foot hut with its doorway aimed at Everest. Now the only thing left of the
monument was the hut, and there was little left of that. The tops of the walls were
falling in and there was no roof.
Jorgens had talked about making the Tomb their latrine, declaring that the women
should have privacy, a building with walls, not just a hole in the ground. But it was
Gus, a woman, who got mad and told him no. 'It wouldn't be proper,' she said. Jorgens
scoffed and said everything and nothing was proper up here on Everest. And Gus
replied how that was the point, it was up to them to decide what was right and what
wasn't, and shitting in a hut made of monument stones wasn't right. It would be like
shitting into a grave. The climbers liked to gather here and lounge about, some
reading bad horror and techno-military novels and comic books, others snoozing with
their feet jutting out the hut door or fiddling with climbing gear or sipping Sherpa tea.
Behind a rock, Thomas was puffing short, breathless blues riffs on one of his
harmonicas. Jorgens and Robby were taking their crack at trying to fix their seven
Korean-made walkie-talkies. Without the handsets there would be no communication
between camps on the mountain. But that was providing they ever got on the
mountain.
Stump was dabbing at his latest watercolor of the Hill, continually thwarted by the
cold and dryness. Every time he had it right, the paint would freeze and when it
thawed his image became something completely different.
