“I said, ‘What do you mean, my wife is dead?’ and the guide said, ‘She’s not breathing.’”
“And then what did you do?” I asked, enraptured.
This man and I had bonded over a hostile flight attendant when we boarded. For the next few hours, he was as good as family. I leaned on our shared armrest and put my chin in my palm.
“I said … ‘Okay.’”
“What? That’s it?!”
He explained that the unholy trinity of exhaustion, cold, and reduced oxygen can lead to extreme calm. It’s not that you can’t think straight, it’s that you can only think straight. There is no emotion, just a slow and methodical logic mirroring the crunch of your steps. One foot in front of the other. The man’s wife was not breathing, which meant she must be dead and he wanted to know what came next. Still, I knew some part of him must have been devastated at the idea of losing his wife. He considered this.
“I might have also said, ‘That’s not good.’”
As for Cotopaxi, it is only like Everest in that it’s got snow on it. And it’s higher than wherever you are right now, unless you’re reading this on an airplane. Climbing Cotopaxi is something that gets done daily, whereas about 5,000 people total have summited Everest. With the possible exception of watching an Inside the Actors Studio marathon, conquering Everest is the most difficult thing a human being can do. And yet as I push forward in the dark, I imagine a colossal 747 airplane swinging by to pick me up where I stand. It slows down just long enough for me to lasso my climbing rope over the wing and takes me somewhere with mugs of hot chocolate.
At the next bend, one of the headlights ahead of me pauses and shines backward in my direction. It waits for the distance between us to close. Edgardo’s ponytail is covered in snow. It looks gray.
“Okay?” he asks, meaning “If the answer’s not ‘yes,’ I wash my hands of you.”
I say nothing for a second, struggling to breathe. I don’t like going for a light jog and chatting at the same time. I lean on my knees and wheeze.
“I think my legs are bigger than my lungs,” I say.
“I don’t understand this,” he says.
Neither do I, I think. My unacclimatized ass lasts approximately twenty more minutes in the dark before huddling over at 17,500 feet. I make the volcano an offering of partially digested beans. I am not the first to puke on this glacier and I won’t be the last. I can taste the bitterness of the malaria pill.
One’s instinct, when depending on something faulty, is to immediately stop depending on that thing. It only takes a moment of balancing a refrigerator on stilts to realize it’s time to put the refrigerator elsewhere. But to have there be no “elsewhere,” to have your body betray you, is a frightening sensation. You want an extra heart to help this one pump blood. But there is no extra heart. It’s like going through a breakup and wanting to talk about your distress with the person who just dumped you.
I wipe my face with snow and tilt my head back. Between gusts of white is a deep black sky. Imposing ice formations rise like monuments in the distance. Cotopaxi’s crater will have to be stunning for everyone but me.
I am done here.
With Pedro in tow, Edgardo and I make our way down the mountain. My fevered brain finds the language barrier disproportionately comical and every time Edgardo shouts at me over the wind, I have to sit down and laugh until I can’t breathe. This only irritates him more. Back at the refuge, I request that he rifle through the Baltimore doctor’s things for a thermometer. He looks appalled. Edgardo sincerely thinks I’d like to steal from my bunkmates. Yes, that’s right. There’s a thermometer shortage so grave in the United States, the government had me fly to Ecuador and fake altitude sickness so that I might do an undercover sweep for medical supplies. Though, to Edgardo’s credit, neither of us is a genius at this hour. Had we had our heads screwed on straight, it might have occurred to one of us to crack open the first-aid kit buried in the bottom of his backpack this entire time.
The chances of my having a fever are high, much like the fever it turns out I have. I know this because around 3 a.m., I ask Pedro why so many people are back already. He doesn’t understand what I mean.
“The headlights,” I whisper, gesturing at the wall across from my bunk, where tiny spotlights bounce on the wood.
Pedro shakes his head. I think he’s a moron. He thinks I’m a moron.
“People coming up the stairs,” I stress.
“No light,” he whispers.
Although the conditions were bad enough to cut short the summit goal for many, a fact that will make me feel like less of a wimp even as I have sworn off testosterone-fueled notions of achievement, I was the one who broke first. No one else will return for another hour.
“Oh, good,” I say, rolling over. “That’s perfect.”
I am lucid enough to be disappointed by my own insanity.
* * *
Among the defeated is the French hiker who gets down from his bunk no sooner than he catches his breath. He talks to me, telling me the occasional joke that makes me cough and muster a “Oui, c’est drôle. C’est très drôle.” He holds my shivering hand for an hour straight. It’s long enough for me to think that not only is this the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me but also the kindest thing I have ever personally witnessed someone do for a stranger. Eventually the Seattle hiker marches up to me and asks to pull my finger. From the top bunk, I see all of these people as floating heads, amateur doctors making their rounds.
“Let me see her finger,”
