The Abominable: A Novel

exploration?”

I sighed, realizing how unprepared I was as an interviewer. (And, in some ways, as a man.) “What can you tell me?” I said. “I mean something that I might not get from books.”

Perry rubbed his chin. Some white bristles there scraped audibly. “Well,” he said softly, “when you look at the stars near the horizon…especially when it’s really cold…they tend to jitter around. Jumping left, then right…all while they jiggle up and down at the same time. I think it has something to do with masses of super-cold air lying over the land or frozen sea acting like a lens that’s being moved…”

I was scribbling madly.

Mr. Perry chuckled. “Can this trivia possibly be of help in writing a novel?”

“You never know,” I said, still writing.

As it turned out, the jiggling stars near the horizon appeared in a sentence that spanned the bottom of the first page and top of the second page of my novel The Terror, which came out sixteen years later and which was about Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage debacle, not about Antarctica at all.

But Mr. Perry had died of his cancer long before The Terror was published.

I found out later that Mr. Perry had been on several famous climbing expeditions, and various Alaskan and South American expeditions, and to K2 as well as the three-year South Polar expedition with Admiral Byrd we discussed that summer day in 1991. Our “interview”—mostly wonderful conversation about travel, courage, friendship, life, death, and fate—lasted about four hours. And I never asked one right question the whole time: a question that could have told me about his amazing Himalayan experience in 1925.

I could tell that Mr. Perry was tiring by the end of our long talk. He was also speaking with more of a wheeze in his voice.

Noticing me noticing, he said, “They removed a chunk of one of my lungs last winter. Cancer. The other’s probably packing up, too, but the cancer’s metastasizing elsewhere so probably the lung won’t be what gets me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the absolute inadequacy of the words.

Mr. Perry shrugged. “Hey, if I reach ninety, I’ll have beaten a lot of odds, Dan. More than you know.” He chuckled. “The pisser is that I have lung cancer but I never smoked. Never. Not once.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“The added irony is that I moved to Delta so that I would be just minutes away from the mountains,” added Mr. Perry. “But now I end up wheezing and gasping if I climb a low hill. Just climbing a few hundred feet of pasture at the edge of town now reminds me of trying to climb and breathe above twenty-eight thousand feet.”

I still didn’t know what to say—the loss of a lung to cancer must be a terrible thing—and I was too dull- witted to ask him where and when he might have climbed above 28,000 feet. The region above 8,000 meters, around 25,000 feet, is called the Death Zone for good reason: every minute a climber is at such altitude, his body is becoming weaker, he is coughing, gasping, always short of breath, and the climber is unable to recharge energy even by sleeping (which is all but impossible at such altitude anyway). I later wondered if Mr. Perry was just using that altitude—28,000 feet—as an example of how hard it was for him to breathe now or if he’d actually ever ventured that high. I knew that Mount Vinson, the tallest mountain in Antarctica, was just a little over 16,000 feet high.

Before I got around to asking an intelligent question, Mr. Perry clapped my shoulder. “I’m not complaining. I just love irony. If there is a God of this poor, sad mess of a universe it’s got to be Bitch Irony. Say…you’re a published writer.”

“Yes,” I said. My voice may have sounded wary. The most common thing that published writers are approached for by new acquaintances is to be invited to help that would-be writer either (a) find an agent, (b) get published, or (c) both of the above.

“You have a literary agent and all that?” said Perry.

“Yes?” I was even more tentative now. After just four hours I admired the man greatly, but amateur writing is amateur writing. Almost impossible to get published.

“I’ve been thinking of writing something…”

There it was. In a way, I regretted hearing those familiar words. They were the punch line of too many conversations with new acquaintances. But I also felt a sense of relief. If he hadn’t already written his book or whatever, what were the chances that he could do so now, almost ninety years old and dying of cancer?

Mr. Perry saw my face, read my thoughts, and laughed loudly. “Don’t worry, Dan. I’m not going to ask you to get something of mine published. I’m not sure I’d want it published.”

“What then?” I asked.

He rubbed his cheek and chin again. “I want to write something and I want someone to read it. Does that make sense?”

“I think so. It’s why I write.”

He shook his head, almost impatiently I thought. “No, you write for thousands or tens of thousands of people to read your thoughts. I’m hunting for just one reader. One person who might understand it. One person who might believe it.”

“Family, maybe?” I suggested.

Again he shook his head. I sensed that it was hard for him to make this request.

“The only family I know about is a grandniece or great-grandniece or whatever the hell she is in Baltimore or somewhere,” he said softly. “I’ve never met her. But Mary and the home here have her address written down somewhere…as a place to send my things when I check out. No, Dan, if I manage to write this thing, I want someone to read it who would understand it.”

“Is it fiction?”

He grinned. “No, but I’m sure it’ll read like fiction. Bad fiction, probably.”

“Have you started writing it?”

He shook his head again. “No, I’ve been waiting all these decades…hell, I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. For Death to bang on my door, I guess, to give me some motivation. Well, he’s banging.”

“I’d be honored to read anything you’d choose to share with me, Mr. Perry,” I said. I surprised myself with the emotion and sincerity of my offer. Usually I approached reading amateurs’ efforts as if their manuscripts were coated with the plague bacillus. But I realized I’d be excited to read anything this man wanted to write, although I assumed at the time it would probably be about Byrd’s South Polar expedition in the thirties.

Jacob Perry sat motionless and looked at me for a long moment. Those blue eyes seemed to touch me somehow—as though the eight blunt, scarred fingers of his were pressing hard against my forehead. It was not altogether a pleasant sensation. But it was intimate.

“All right,” he said at last. “If I ever get the thing written, I’ll send it your way.”

I’d already given him my card with my address and other information on it.

“One problem, though,” he said.

“What?”

He held up his two hands, so dexterous, even with the left hand missing most of the last two fingers. “I can’t type worth a damn,” he said.

I laughed. “If you were submitting a manuscript to a publisher,” I said, “we’d find a typist who could type things up for you. Or I’d do it myself. But in the meantime…”

From my battered briefcase, I produced a Moleskine blank book journal—its 240 creamy blank pages never touched. The blank journal was wrapped in a soft leather “skin” that had a leather double loop to hold a pen or pencil. I’d already slipped a sharpened pencil into the loop.

Mr. Perry touched the leather. “This is too dear…,” he began, moving to hand it back.

I loved hearing the archaic use of the word “dear,” but I shook my head and pressed the leather-wrapped blank journal back into his hands.

“This is mere token payment for the hours you spent talking to me,” I said. I’d wanted to add “Jake,” but still couldn’t manage calling him by his first name. “Seriously, I want you to have it. And when you write something you want to share with me, I look forward to reading it. And I promise you that I’ll give you my honest assessment of it.”

Still turning the leather journal over and over in his gnarled hands, Mr. Perry flashed a grin. “I’ll probably be