Another thought came to him. 'Oxygen,' he said to Kelly. Her eyes had closed
though. Abe set the mask back across her mouth. He checked the regulator on her
oxygen bottle. It was a quarter full. He checked his own. It was empty. He'd been
sucking on ambient air at 27,500 feet. For how long, he couldn't say.
Abe pulled the mask off Kelly's face and strapped it to his own face. It was like
robbing a child of candy. She didn't protest or even notice. He cranked the flow rate
up to four liters per minute and breathed as deep as one could up here, a modified
pant. After five or ten minutes, he felt warmer and less stupefied. His few priorities
marched into view. They had to breathe, drink and eat.
He unzipped the door. The wind blasted him and the tent bellied in the rear. As
quickly as possible, Abe opened his pack and pulled in two more bottles of oxygen,
then closed the door. It took awhile, but he finally got a second oxygen set assembled
with a regulator showing full. He nestled the second mask over Kelly's mouth and
turned it on. It would be good for four to six hours.
Kelly slept. Abe cooked. Rather than open and close the door each time the pot
needed more snow, he simply ripped the floor apart and took snow from underneath.
Since Kelly was out of the loop, Abe talked to himself. 'We're in trouble now,' he said.
He wondered if the regulator had lied. It seemed likely he was out of oxygen again,
but it was too much effort to check. He wasn't scared. To the contrary, a host of old
friends and half-familiar faces had come from nowhere to offer encouragement. They
were friendly and anxious for him, mumbling kind, if incoherent, advice. The tent
seemed much larger than it was. It filled with dozens of visitors. Abe kept at his stove.
There was suddenly so many to give water to.
At one point, the tent shook harder than ever. More voices cried out, adding to the
disembodied conversations Abe was enjoying. The tent door opened. More ghosts
joined Abe's gathering of souls. He looked for Jamie among the new faces, but she was
nowhere to be seen. Abe's father drifted through with his old oil-rig scars, and the
Tibetan monk rested against one wall, smiling, bundled in yak skins, looking more
boyish than ever. Daniel was there and Gus and all the others. The babble of voices
sounded like the roar of the wind and the roar of the wind reminded Abe of one vast,
unending prayer, a sort of high mass. And he was the priest. 'Water,' he offered one
and all.
Abe sat jammed against Kelly, who curled fetuslike. He handed out cups of melted
water and went on with his cooking, scooping new snow through the hole in the floor.
There was no room to work really – too many bodies in one tent – and he had to
protect his hanging stove from their elbows and commotion. Finally someone
volunteered to take over. It was Daniel. Pressed tight against Kelly and with someone
sitting on one of his legs, Abe fell asleep.
He woke slowly, still sitting upright. He was breathing oxygen through his mask.
The tent was full of people, but everything seemed different. The people had changed.
The wind had stopped. The simplicity and friendliness were gone. Once again the tent
was a small, shabby space. The walls had grown dark.
Daniel looked at him. He wasn't wearing an oxygen mask. 'You okay, Abe?' he asked.
Abe nodded yes.
'You were singing,' Daniel said. 'We came in. You were out of oxygen. And you were
singing.'
Besides himself, Abe counted a total of three others in the tent, Kelly and Daniel and
Gus. Gus and Kelly were dozing, crammed in one corner, zipped in bags. Daniel was
minding the stove.
Abe started to decipher his long, bizarre afternoon. He must have run out of oxygen
again. He'd been hallucinating, that was clear. Maybe he still was.
'We couldn't find you,' Abe said. He lifted the mask off to speak. 'We thought you
were dead.'
'So did I,' Daniel said. 'We had trouble getting through the Band. The wind trapped
us. We were close. But we ran out of time. We had to come down.'
'Where's Stump? Where's J.J.?' Abe asked. He accepted that Daniel had lost them.
Daniel squinted at Abe, perplexed. 'They came in the tent for a while. You gave
them tea and talked. Then they went down the ropes. They made it as far as Three
before dark stopped them. I talked to them on the night call.'
'I don't understand.'
'It's nine o'clock, Abe.'
Abe frowned. So many hours had passed. There was still a disembodied sheen to the
people and things in the tent, and he realized his escape from the underworld was not
yet complete.
'What else?' Abe asked. 'Any news?'
'Robby and Thomas came up to Four. But Thomas is dog sick. Unless there's some
improvement, they go down in the A.M.'
'And Jorgens? He's still at One?' It helped for him to be locating the others. Already
he felt more composed.
'Still in One. Tonight he went on the record. Not guilty.'
'Not guilty?'
'Jorgens said it wasn't him who turned the kid in.'
Abe hadn't forgotten the monk. But he had to remember if Jorgens's treachery
really mattered to him. He couldn't say. It seemed to matter to Daniel, though.
'Jorgens hangs for this one,' Daniel said. 'Stump and I decided. He can explain this to
his precious AAC.'
Abe hadn't thought of that one. The American Alpine Club took itself very seriously,
and Jorgens's presidency wouldn't last the first round of cocktails at their next
meeting. That would hurt Jorgens where he lived, more than any curse or fist could.
But Abe's small pleasure vanished when he pictured the board members who would
vote. Most were lawyers and professionals used to savoring all the grays between
black and white. And besides, few climbers thought of ethics as anything but a set of
rules governing how much chalk they put on their hands or how many bolts they
hammered in the rock. Ten thousand miles and months or years from now, the
notions of guilt and betrayal would strike them as absurd. They would say what
Jorgens would say, that a climber has no duty except to climb. And so revenge didn't
matter, especially not tonight at 28,000 feet with the ghosts crowding in.
'What about the boy?' Abe asked.
'Carlos said they take him off tomorrow. He hasn't seen the kid since the one time.
Hog-tied in the Tomb.'
Abe would have sighed if there was the extra air for it.
'Also, Li wants us down.'
'I thought we had ten days.'
'Two more days, Abe. Then our ten are up.'
'I guess so.' People, days, even reasons for being up here: It was so easy to lose
count anymore.
'Carlos said one other thing. The yaks down at Base, they've run off.'
'So?' For all Abe knew, yaks regularly ran off.
'Carlos said the herders are all freaked. The yaks were fine until today. They they
