Abe could see the cobalt sky between Daniel's outstretched legs. He was moving
quickly, especially for a man nearing 26,400 feet. Among climbers, 8,000 meters
marked the border between what was mortal and ordinary and what was something
more. Back in Boulder, Abe had been awed at the very prospect of grappling his way
into that fabled region. Now that he was here, over twice as high as Mount Olympus,
8,000 meters seemed impoverished, hardly Olympian. Far from anointing them, the
mountain had reduced them to virtual idiots, with spit on their faces and shit in their
pants and scarcely enough wind in their lungs to complete a full sentence. He tried to
remember what treasure he'd come to find. Everest was supposed to have bestowed
on him all the sacraments in one, baptizing and confirming and confessing him all at
once. But the only blessing he was likely to return home with was a piece of red string
tied around his throat by an epileptic in yak skins. So much for glory, he thought, and
paid out more rope to Daniel.
Daniel scooted up fifty, then seventy feet. He didn't bother placing any protection.
Setting an ice screw took time, and besides the Shoot was laid back now at a relatively
comfortable 70-degree angle. For a climber of Daniel's abilities it was next to
impossible to fall from such a plane.
Just the same, Daniel fell. In truth he was shoved. Shot. Ambushed by the Yeti.
It was a lone piece – rock or ice, all the same thing. Abe never heard it. He was
watching, but all he saw was Daniel suddenly kicked backward into space. He didn't
touch the slope for a full ten feet, the shock was that powerful, and when he did it was
to glance off and fly another five feet.
Abe was sure he had no more adrenaline left after their long, hot gauntlet of rockfall.
But he did and it jolted him with a chemical voltage that bulged his vision and sped his
mind and turned his hands into vise grips. He locked down on the rope. He stared
hard at the sure death of an alpinist.
Daniel skipped twice more on the ice and by that time he was halfway down to Abe.
There was no time to react really. Abe made a try at pulling in some of the slack rope,
but it piled in wild serpentine loops over his arms and shoulders.
Minus the ten or fifteen pounds they had all lost on this expedition, Daniel still
weighed a good one-eighty. With the instantaneous wisdom a catastrophe inspires,
Abe knew the man would strike him with a gross force approaching a ton or more.
Abe's sole hope was to be missed. And to hold on to what was in his hands. And to
pray that the anchor would hold, that the world would not let him go.
Daniel neared. Abe could hear his Gore-Tex windsuit hissing on the ice. Then he
heard the metal chattering of Daniel's ice axe beating loose against the wall, and a
loose ice tool was like a chainsaw amok.
Abe's lips peeled back from his teeth. Now it was clear what he had come so far to
face, not the summit but the abyss. It wasn't Daniel's death he was witnessing, but his
own.
And then Daniel was past. He sliced within inches, close enough so that one crampon
tooth ripped a neat gash down Abe's right arm. He heard the fabric unzip. When the
opening burned – when it sluiced a line of blood against the ice – he knew the fabric
had been his flesh parting.
But his wound and his pain were beside the point. The anchor could not hold. Not
against this kind of momentum. Here was chaos. Here was the world unpiecing itself
at a speed beyond all reckoning. All the same at terminal velocity.
Abe wondered if it would seem this fast all the way down. He wondered how deep
into the pit he would stay alive. Sometimes people went all the way without losing
consciousness. Sometimes they lived for a while, tucked down a crevasse, say. He
remembered that Gus was on a rope that was anchored to him. And J.J. was on a rope
attached to her. They would all go, tangling into a ball of bloody yarn. The glacier
would eat them. In a hundred years someone would find what was left. Abe was sorry
for the others. He was sorry for himself.
The loops of rope draped across his arms began vanishing, one by one. He didn't
follow Daniel's descent with his eyes. He just stared at the anchor. He counted four ice
screws. They had been so close. A drink of water, that's all he'd really wanted. The
rope whipped away from his arms. For a moment there was peace.
The peace shattered. Abruptly Abe heard a howling.
It was himself. He was filling the void with a cushion of sound. Here was his precious
sacrament then, all he was going to get, last rites.
In that millisecond of acceptance, the rope came taut. Abe's hands flew from their
grip. The ice wall sprang into his face, smashing against his helmet. One – then two –
then three – ice screws blew free like rivets in a submarine bottoming out.
But the last screw held. For no good reason but the faith that had placed it – Daniel's
faith, not his – the titanium ice screw stayed firm.
Abe was saved.
He returned to himself tenuously. He took his time. He trusted nothing. Until he
touched it all with his fingertips, piece by piece, he could not take for granted even
that single bent ice screw with the mass of ropes and loose screws dangling from it.
Even then he hardly dared to trust that he'd survived.
For a space of time, Abe simply drew in perceptions and let his senses sort through
them. His goggles were still intact and the light filtered through with the color of new
lettuce. The still air was moving now, bringing with it a whiff of the solar winds just
beyond their tissue of stratosphere. In the ice dust from the blown anchor holes, Abe
could smell time itself, geological afterbirth. He felt the breeze cooling his face, listened
to it whistling through the stem of Daniel's good ice screw. His right forearm hurt, but
the pain was ritual, bearable. He held the hurt with his left hand. From a great
distance, he watched the blood running through the sleeve and between fingers that
were his.
In that dazed state, Abe sat on his ledge. Head back against the ice, he stared into
the blankness of Tibet. He might have dozed.
At some point Daniel appeared. The black-haired ghost rose up along the newest of
the ropes, seeming no worse for the wear. Abe knew that couldn't be so, not after such
a fall. On second glance, he saw that this figure was moving slower than the old Daniel.
But that was to be expected from a dead man.
'Abe?'
Abe didn't answer. He knew the mountain was playing a trick on him. Starved for
oxygen, the human brain freely invented its own fictions, populating the world with
angels and demons and other imaginary beings. High altitude climbers often reported
a third man on a rope for two. They would talk aloud to their guest. They would cook
food for him.
'Are you okay? Look at your arm.'
Abe ignored the hallucination.
'It hit you too?'
'No,' Abe said. 'That was you.'
The apparition sat down beside Abe on the little ledge.
'Man. What a ride.'
'Now what,' Abe said aloud. He didn't mind the company, but he wasn't speaking to
