This is no time for third-grade games, sir.
He clips a heartbeat monitor to my thumb.
My heart rate is less than enthusiastic.
What has two thumbs and no pulse? This girl!
“Hmmm,” he says.
They watch as I slide the monitor from my thumb in slow motion. It snaps back together and falls to the floor. I don’t remember anyone touching my forehead but a voice announces that I’m burning up. I push myself upright.
“Okay,” I say, “what are the worst times to go down?”
Pedro lifts the top layer of his sleeping bag.
“Hey!” he says. “There’s a rip in this!”
“Probably between five and seven,” says the Seattle climber, pressing his watch to make it glow.
It’s 5 a.m. In daylight, it would take me forty minutes to get down from the refuge. In my current condition, I suspect it will take me longer than that to get down from this bunk. I decide to wait it out, which entails more nausea and an irrepressible chill. Still, it’s not like I’m dying. At least that’s what I tell my French friend when he asks me if I’m dying. I have never been asked this in a sincere fashion before. I am flattered that he thinks I would know. People who regularly push themselves to the brink of their physical limitations know what dying feels like. When I say something tastes like pennies or piss or shit, I’m not implying a frame of reference for these flavors. But these people—they eat shit for fun.
* * *
The mountain pretends not to know what it did. At sunrise, it looks perfectly innocent, as if it has just chewed my shoe and now it wants to go for a walk. Fever broken, standing outside in the quiet, I wait for Edgardo and Pedro to wake up. The refuge is perched on a ledge so that the view runs right up to my feet. Twin rainbows appear in the valleys in front of me. The contrast of green hills and snowcapped tops gives the entire region a confectionary look. The mountains themselves look like humpback whales coming up for air. It’s all so offensively pretty. There’s not a sign of last night’s storm. You could put a feather on top of the snow and it wouldn’t blow away. For a split second, I kick myself for not having climbed higher last night. This, I think, is how abusive relationships get their start.
I hear a crunch on the ground behind me.
“Imbabura,” Edgardo announces, pointing to my right.
There, surrounded by mist, is the mountain I didn’t climb. It’s the least snowcapped of the mountains. Snow yarmulked.
I nod. “It’s beautiful.”
“I take this,” Edgardo says as he grabs my backpack for me.
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
I am relieved to not compound the thumping in my skull by climbing down with the extra weight. Edgardo unfastens his new helmet and clips it to his own bag. Then he hands the pack back to me. When I don’t immediately take it, he ever so gently rests it against my leg.
“De nada,” he says, smiling.
* * *
When we arrive at the car, I am somehow surprised to see it there, right where we parked it. Unlike Edgardo, I did not expect it to get stolen. But I am surprised to see it so unaffected by last night’s events. By the time I reach for the door handle, my body is almost back to normal, as indifferent to Cotopaxi as the car is.
Edgardo’s foot is heavy on the gas pedal. I would sooner drink a bottle of whiskey and run down a spiral staircase than drive around with Edgardo again. But as I have neither at my disposal, I buckle up.
“Look,” Edgardo says, once we are at the base of the mountain.
“What?”
He ignores me and stops the car. At first I see nothing. Then, on the hillside, meandering between shrubs, are five spots. They’re moving slowly toward us. They are wild horses, four caramel and one black. As they get closer, I see their manes are tangled with unknowable debris. Some of their ribs show when they move. Edgardo grabs his camera from the backseat and gets out of the car to take pictures. He moves with theatrical stealth, trying not to frighten them. They remain calm, stopping to munch on long grass while keeping one eye on Edgardo. This is what he needed last night, an animal with monocular vision to watch his shit.
Our driver missing, Pedro and I get out of the Jeep, closing our doors softly behind us. We lean together, watching Edgardo creep up on the horses, trying to crouch down and move forward at the same time. The sun is bright, my breathing regular. I have done the unthinkable: unzipped my jacket. Pedro laughs at his friend under his breath and shakes his head. He takes papers out of his pocket, sprinkles some dried leaves inside and rolls a joint, expertly sealing it with his tongue. He lights it and hands it to me. As I inhale, Pedro cleans his Oakleys with his shirt, glares at the sky, and says we have to get going. It’s going to rain again. The road to the highway will be covered in mud. He removes a knife and a mango from his other pocket, cuts the mango, and eats chunks directly from the blade.
“He is heartsick,” explains Pedro, placing the knife against his chest, concerned he got the expression wrong.
He gestures at Edgardo with the knife.
“There is a woman he loves and she will not call him. So he texts her. A lot.”
The idea of Edgardo living his life, drinking, texting, going to techno nights at clubs and flirtatiously moving his ponytail down women’s faces like a paintbrush, is amusing to me.
“He lives with his mother,” Pedro continues, “but he wants to move with this woman.”
“Does she ever respond to the texts?”
“She has a new boyfriend. Edgardo knows a little but he doesn’t really know.”
From half a football field away, the wind carries the sound
