If a beetle could survive up here, I would see its breath.
Around 3 a.m., I sit up in a panic, clutching my throat. I had started drifting off. This would have been a good thing if I wasn’t also displaying the first signs of altitude sickness. Anyone who has ever been awake and then gone to sleep is familiar with the concept of slowed breathing. But if you’re already struggling to breathe, slipping into slumber feels like an invisible force is trying to choke the life out of you. I look around me at the occupied mattresses and sigh in a pitiable fashion. I’m dehydrated and losing iron to a little cotton finger between my legs. I touch my forehead, disturbed by how good it feels to have this abnormally cold part of my body comfort this abnormally hot part of my body. I lie awake, wheeze, and wait, watching Edgardo’s new helmet not move on the floor below. I wonder again about the weight of inexperience. What percentage of this is my fault? How much of this is my ignorance and how much of it is the mountain’s difficulty? It feels like guessing beans in a jar.
Just before midnight a dainty chorus of digital watch alarms commences. Headlamps are flicked on as, one by one, climbers yawn in various languages. Now, a normal person—and I like to include myself in this category whenever possible—might have stayed in bed at this juncture. Especially with some ilk of ailment that feels akin to going on a carousel with a hangover. But I am here and I can’t not be here. Climbing and not climbing somehow feel like the same thing.
As I come downstairs, I clutch a railing with one hand and an “I’m still drunk and might throw up on the subway” plastic bag in the other. I see that the doctor and his expedition have already gone. Climbers gear up around me, talking about how the conditions have been iffy. There’s a storm that could get worse. Some people are concerned about a particularly avalanche-prone bend in the terrain. Unfortunately, I don’t have the mental palate to discern what “iffy” means. Not until we start our ascent.
This climb is not terribly different from yesterday’s, save for the fact that it’s pitch-black. At first everything is still, the mountain equivalent of a man-made lake at night. But soon the wind starts coming after us and brings with it an especially overpowering brand of sleet. I don’t so much feel like I’m on the movie set of a snowstorm as on the movie set of a snowstorm that’s being blown away by an actual snowstorm. Over the icy ground and into the dark, the other groups move ahead. Pedro and Edgardo are forced to wait for me. I move slower than a Galápagos turtle and am generally a total drag.
“Come on!” shouts Edgardo.
“I’m honestly going to kill you!” I shout back, adding a singsongy “Fuck your mother” for my own benefit.
To keep myself going, I count to five as I step, then start over. Also of assistance is following the spotlight of my headlamp as it points down. I start counting the bounces of light as I plunge one foot in front of the other. I am, I believe, just above 16,000 feet above sea level. To be clear, around 17,000 feet is the height at which you’re liable to believe your companion is an orange and attempt to peel him.
Still, I press on, thinking I will be able to outsmart such delusions. You see, We, the People of Sea Level, have a tough time believing in externally induced insanity. You say you’re born with the sociopathic strain that compels you to burn ants with a magnifying glass? Sure, fine, whatever. Be crazy. But if you are not this person, if you are more or less regular, we will spend the rest of your life teaching you to believe in the power of your mind over the matter of your body. This belief is vital to our existence. We use it for dieting and productivity and heartbreak and exhaustion. Physical pain is the body’s retort to such hubris. Control was an illusion. You were having a lucid dream, my friend. What the mind really is, is a Tupperware container full of leftover noodles.
* * *
I once sat next to a man on a plane who had climbed Everest and thus had stood approximately 900 feet below the level of our seats. He went with his wife, a champion mountain climber famous in Eastern Europe, as well as several professional guides. They were equipped with all the tents and oxygen tanks money could buy. Still, one never knows how one will react in an environment about as hospitable to humans as the bottom of the ocean. I imagine this is part of the thrill of mountain climbing if you are remotely experienced and already 90 percent sure of how you’ll respond to specific conditions. The rest is a reasonable margin for the unknown. This man’s wife had a bronchial infection within that margin. One thing led to another, which led to her almost choking to death on a piece of her own lung. She turned blue and had to be carried to a tent where one of the guides felt her
