While Abe ate and drank, he listened. It was essentially the same tune over and
over. The words weren't real words. They were sounds to mark a path. Locked in
place, Diana was circling around and around. Soon the vortex would suck her into its
deepest part. Abe knew he was listening to the sound of death.
Finally Abe joined in the singing. He'd heard this song many times before, but he
couldn't remember what the words were either. With the woman's same abandon,
Abe threw his voice out into the void all around them.
After a while Diana seemed to notice the extra voice. Somewhere in her benighted
skull, Abe's singing freed Diana to depart from the song and actually talk. She began to
emit bursts of story. Abe labored to hear what she had to say. It was a freewheeling
autobiography, woven together from memories and fictions and pleas for her mother's
comfort. It made Abe weep sometimes, and other times just bored him.
The stormy day passed. Night moved in again.
As the darkness stretched out and Abe drifted into delirious catnaps, it was hard to
tell what was real anymore. He grew colder and a little crazy himself, and it was hard
to know what was even spoken. Much of what Abe heard he may have imagined.
Diana may or may not have been a college student with a bad job and a drafty
trailer-home and allegiance to some crazy woman. She seemed to have three brothers
named John and Wes and Blake, which Abe began to suspect because those were his
own uncles' names. Her talk about mountains was probably real, because she
described spring wildflowers Abe had never heard of. She wanted to climb Everest
someday, though that might as easily have been Abe's overlay. Abe gave up trying to
keep the woman – or himself – lucid with questions or dialogue.
Abe finally concluded that the name of her dogged savior was completely lost to her,
for she'd quit saying his name altogether. He accepted that she had ceased to
understand he was lying on the surface above or even that she was caged inside the
mountain. Abe's presence had not loaned one ounce of dignity to her long and ugly
dying, and he resigned himself to anonymity. It was then, during a lull in the gale, that
she cried out.
'I love you,' she yelled.
Abe knew she meant someone else, yet all he could think to reply was the same. 'I
love you,' he shouted into the crevasse, and so she wouldn't think it was just her own
echo, he added, 'Diana.' Her name sank down the hole, a pebble dropped into the
ocean.
But something happened. A single word came drifting back up the hole. 'Abe,' she
spoke.
The storm and the waiting went on for a very long time. Abe's watch had come off in
his struggles, so he had no idea how much time passed, only that he and his invisible
lover were both losing their faculties and blurring their memories and mixing in the
same dream.
At one point Abe turned his palms up and noticed that he'd rope-burned the pads
down to the white gristle. He didn't remember doing that, but the snow was pink with
blood around the blue rope, and the pink was fresh.
In the end, there was silence.
Dawn never broke, but an exhausted light did finally seep into the sky. Overnight,
Abe had taken ill from the water or maybe from the storm itself and the cold and the
sounds, and his tent had collapsed again. He was very cold and thirsty and tired. But
the storm had passed. The wind had quit. He flapped open the tent door. The
crevasse had pinched nearly shut. Nothing more could be done.
'Hello,' he called into the crevasse. The word emerged as blue frost.
There was no answer. No more song, no more jibberish. Maybe she was still alive,
just mute now, eyes wide, a zombie pinned in its crypt for the rest of time.
Abe shook loose from the snow and wormed out of the tent. The night and day and
night had bled him of his strength. It took his full concentration just to stand up. His
parka was soaked and frozen. His feet were dead blocks.
He faced the crevasse, which had puckered shut again. The hole was only a few
inches across now. The blue rope was buried deep again. The earth was sealing over.
'Good-bye,' Abe croaked. He said it to a memory, to the place itself. He said it to deep
part of himself.
Without another thought, Abe abandoned the tent and the torn sleeping bag and his
pack, which had blown away anyway. The water bottle was frozen solid and useless.
The thought of food turned his stomach. He simply backed away from the hole and
faced downhill and let gravity herd him off the glacier.
Abe stumbled and kicked and plowed his way out of the high cirque and across the
plateau, which was now scalloped with drifts like a hard, white sea.
He descended into the forest.
The path they had taken up the frozen river was buried under two and three feet of
snow, but he was patient. Every time he seemed lost, Abe stopped and listened for the
water running through its deep veins. He followed that song, humming to himself.
It took all day. Not once did Abe sit down, because then he would have lain back and
disappeared into the dream. He reached the trailhead at dusk and started down the
road into night.
Abe kept moving simply because he could. There was no other reason. Survival was
the furthest thing from his mind. Night came on.
The path turned black. The forest walked him in, squeezing him tight. After some
time Abe couldn't be sure his legs were still moving. He felt motionless and suspended.
Just before dawn on the next morning a single bright light appeared like a hole in
the darkness. It was a big truck with one broken headlight and it was filled with
rescuers. While the engine idled, Abe stood transfixed by the hard white light. One by
one the rescuers emerged to touch him.
When they laid him down, it was tentatively, not quite certain of his reality. They
had been on their way to retrieve Abe or Abe's body from the cirque. They dressed
the wounds in his hands and started on IV and zipped him into a sleeping bag in the
back of the truck and started the long road back to Boulder. The roof rocked back and
forth.
Two rescuers sat beside Abe to monitor his vital signs and pour him full of soup and
coffee and herbal tea, whatever hot liquids the group could muster. Abe's voice was
nearly gone from dehydration and the raw cold and his singing, so they filled his
silence answering questions they thought he might have asked.
Daniel was in intensive care, they said. He had gotten very agitated at the hospital
and kept repeating the woman's name until a nurse explained that someone had
stayed at the crevasse. After that he'd dropped into a deep sleep. He had multiple
fractures, but the doctors said Daniel would recover.
'That's the good news,' said the man pumping up a blood pressure cuff on Abe's arm.
'The bad news is the girl. She was a dropout from the university at Laramie. She
moved back to Rock Springs to take care of her sick mom, Alzheimer's or something.
Anyway, that's where she hooked up with this fella and he got her into the climbing.'
'She was getting good. But nowhere close to good enough for that wall,' the second
rescuer said. 'I guess the boyfriend's some local legend. First ascents all around here.
