* * *
Up a flight of narrow wooden stairs are a series of Holocaust beds. I wish there was a better means of describing them but rarely have I seen something that looks so much like something else. It’s as if The Brady Bunch were filmed in Nazi Germany and we’re spending the night on set. There’s a flurry of multilingual whisper-shouting as climbing partners bid each other good night in the semidarkness. I heave my backpack onto the top of an unoccupied bunk and it bounces on the mattress.
“I sleep downstairs,” says Edgardo, who will never explain why this is, “but I keep my pack here.”
“Sounds fine,” I say, fiddling with the zippers on my backpack.
I’m not mad at him, not really. My predicament could have been easily avoided with some minimal research on my part. I know that one day I will be relieved that I had not seen a photograph of Cotopaxi prior to being located on it. Because if I had, I never would have come. One day I will try to remember but ultimately forget feeling as sick as I’m about to feel. I’ll just think: Here is something I did. But right now, looking at the clusters of confident climbers around me, I feel like I got saddled with the worst lab partner in the world.
Of the myriad garbled mutterings that spew forth from Edgardo’s mouth, it is unfortunate that his paranoia about crime is not one of them. He knows how to say “Watch your shit” in English as well as he does in Spanish. I can feel us being overheard as my bunkmates climb into their squeaky beds. I can sense them bristle in the dark, as they’ve nothing better to do than listen to our conversation. I worry that by sheer association with Edgardo, I will be the victim of punitive theft or molestation. The latter of which would be welcome so long as the molesting process consists of a vigorous foot rubbing.
“Keep all of your eyes on my stuff,” Edgardo practically shouts.
He gestures at my borrowed backpack, which also happens to have his new climbing helmet strapped to it. Go to sleep but also watch his stuff? Sleep with one eye open? That’s more of an expression than a possibility.
“And what is this?” He points at my bunk.
“What is what?”
I can’t imagine to what he’s referring. The bare mattress you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw it in New York? But then he plucks a small leather case from my bed. Along with my dwindling bottle of water and sleeping bag, that’s all I have on me.
“You have too many things,” he says, gesturing at my series of invisible steamer trunks. “We need to go light.” He rattles the leather case in my face. “You need this?”
“Yes.” I grab it back. “I do.”
“It goes in the backpack.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
Everyone in the room not magically asleep by 7 p.m. is hushed and listening, waiting for the squall to pass.
“Fine,” I hiss. “You want to do this? Let’s do this.”
I mumble under my breath as I open the case. My thumbs are numb. There has to be as much of a male aversion to open discussion of feminine hygiene on this continent as there is on mine. I hold up three tampons, fanning them out like cards. Or scissors. Scissors for hands. Edgardo squints at them, momentarily confounded by the foreign packaging. Recognition sets in.
“Okay, okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I snap.
Great. Now I’ve completely blown my chances at molestation. A Frenchman on the bunk next to mine starts snickering and Edgardo glares at him. The Frenchman rolls over in his sleeping bag, where he whispers to his partner on the other side. At one point in the night I shake so uncontrollably, I climb down to the ground and move my whole bunk a few inches away so as not to put his bed on vibrate.
* * *
The following cannot be overstated: Had I known what I was getting into, the thing I would have left home with—my emotional EpiPen—is a friend. Someone I trusted. Someone I had slept with. Someone who already knew my name. Someone to whom I owed money and who thus had a vested interest in seeing me make it off Cotopaxi in one piece. All the mountain-climbing accounts I have read post-Cotopaxi seem to say the same thing: You’d be an idiot to climb a major mountain alone. More than experiencing dehydration as your feet punch through the very substance that might otherwise hydrate you, loneliness is one of the elements. And no mountain guide in the world, good or bad, can protect you from that.
There is a rip in Pedro’s sleeping bag. As the night ticks on, I want to spread the extra fleece jacket lent to me by the Seattle guide over my already layered body, maybe stick my hands in the sleeve ends. But every time I move to retrieve the fleece, the sleeping bag rips a little more. The rip is cunning, a worthy adversary. It will not be tricked by me slowly lifting my knees or gradually extending an arm down from the side.
Frustrated, dizzy, and desperate to get to the outhouse, finally I just sit up. The rip shows no mercy and now runs the full length of the sleeping bag. When I return, I have to clamp it shut between my knees. I experiment with comfort, using my forearm as a pillow. But the skin exposed by being forced out of
