The crowd stared at me expectantly. I searched for a pithy end to my speech and came up with 'Thanks. I'll be back later.'
Exit, stage center, out through the door. And for once I hadn't felt my usual awkwardness and embarrassment when talking to a crowd. Because I knew I had them in the palm of my hand. Nobody was going to catcall a dramatic revelation of Murder On The Trail.
For some reason I was angry with the people in the lodge, and the way they had reacted. A man was dead, a man who had walked the same trail they had for the last week, and there had been no sympathy, no grief, no cries of 'that's awful!', no voices volunteering to help in any way they could. Just amazement, fascination. As if it was part of the scheduled entertainment. Another notch on their travel belt, that they had walked with a murdered man. Another story for their friends when they returned to their safe European homes. He wasn't really a dead man to them; he was another element in their life-enriching trip, just another Travel Experience, like an animatron on a Disney ride.
And it wasn't just them. I felt some of that myself. Would I have reacted so casually, so clinically, if I had found a dead man with knives in his eyes back in California or Canada? Like hell I would have. But I was here on an adventure. Until today a safe, tame, communal adventure, but an adventure nonetheless, and I was treating the murdered man as just another episode in my journey. I felt like I had co-opted his death, that it was no longer his own.
It was in the seventh lodge, after I had described the dead man for the seventh time, that the silence was broken by a voice from the back. 'We know someone like that,' the voice said, an Australian voice, its tone alarmed. 'His name is Stanley. We were expecting him here but he never showed up.'
The voice belonged to a woman named Abigail who was traveling with a German man named Christian and a younger Aussie girl named Madeleine. I sat down next to them. The rest of the room listened expectantly.
'What happened?' Abigail asked, and she, at least, was genuinely upset. I told her most of the story, leaving out any mention of the knives.
'Fucking hell,' Madeleine said. 'God. I can't believe it. I can't believe I was traveling with someone who was murdered today.'
'Can you tell me anything about him?' I asked them. 'I'm going back to Manang tomorrow to talk to the police. His last name?'
They looked at each other, tried to call it to mind. Christian nodded abruptly. 'Goebel,' he said. 'His last name is Goebel. I saw it at the checkpoint in Chame.' Every day or two on the trail we had to sign in at a police or Annapurna Conservation Area checkpoint, mostly to keep track of trekkers who got lost or stumbled off cliffs. 'It's a German name, that's why I remember.'
Stanley Goebel. The dead man had a name.
'We met him in Pisang,' Abigail said. 'Three days ago. He was Canadian, yeah. He was traveling on his own. I don't know. He seemed like a good bloke. He worked in an auto factory somewhere near Toronto. He was only in Nepal for a month.'
'He didn't have much money,' Madeleine added.
They fell silent. They didn't have anything else to add. I grew irrationally angry again, this time at the paucity of their epitaph. He seemed like a good bloke. He didn't have much money. That was it? That was all they had to say? Abigail and Christian at least seemed upset. Madeleine watched me with that awful wide-eyed fascination.
'All right,' I said. 'I'm staying at the Churi Lattar. If you think of anything else, could you come and let me know?' I sounded to myself like a detective on Homicide: Life On The Street. I should give them my card, that was what Pembleton and Bayliss did. 'I'm going to go check the other lodges, to see if anyone else knows anything.'
And to get away from here, because no offense, I know we only just met, but I can't stand your company any more.
And, maybe, to see if I recognize anyone in the other lodges.
But I did not recognize anyone, and nobody else knew anything. I returned to my lodge famished and exhausted. Some kind soul had saved my dhal baat, and never have rice and lentils and curried vegetables tasted so good. I had a second helping, drank a pot of lemon tea, returned to the dorm room, peeled my boots off, and curled up in my sleeping bag.
Sleep came hard that night, and it wasn't because of the hard wooden bed or my snuffling dormitory companions. I didn't want to be alone. I wanted a warm body next to me. No; more than that. For the first time in a long time I allowed myself to admit what I wanted more than anything, what I knew I would always want more than anything. I wanted Laura next to me. Laura and her quick laugh, her mane of long dark hair, her gentle touch. Laura who had been dead for two years.
Nicole had told me, on the night the tribe of the truck disbanded, that one day I would get over it. Wise and wonderful Nicole. We had camped by the side of a dirt road, just outside Douala, a city popularly and accurately known as the armpit of Africa. It was late, the fire had burned down to ash and glowing embers, and almost everyone had retired to their tents. Only my closest mates had stayed up. Nicole, her husband Hallam, Lawrence, Steve. Thinking about it now I realized they had stayed up primarily to keep an eye on me. I was in bad shape, those first few weeks. I guess they thought I was a danger to myself.
'It'll get better,' she had said. 'You'll get better. I know you probably can't believe that right now, but…Just believe that it's possible. You'll get over it. We'll all get over it. I know that sounds callous and horrible, and maybe it is. But it's true. Remember that.'
I had remembered. But I thought that for once wise and wonderful Nicole might have gotten it wrong.
I didn't want to think about it any more. I didn't want to think about anything any more. I dug out my Walkman, put in my Prodigy tape, and blasted it into my ears as loud as I dared. All I wanted was to exterminate all rational thought, but somehow it eventually put me to sleep.
Chapter 3 Retrace and Retreat
I woke an hour after dawn. At home this would have been a sign that something was seriously wrong. Here on the trekking trail it meant I had slept in. All of the other dorm beds were already vacant. Where there is no electricity, I had discovered, even so-called night people fall into a dawn-to-dusk routine within a matter of days.
I hadn't washed yesterday, but the solar showers on the trail didn't warm up until midafternoon, and I dreaded the thought of the icy downpour I would have to endure at this hour. I could probably talk the proprietor into heating a bucket of water for me, but it seemed like a selfish waste of valuable firewood. Manang, I thought. I'll shower in Manang.
I went through my morning ritual of smearing antibiotic cream on my blisters and covering them with patches of a long bandage roll that I had bought in Chame. The bandage was made in India and the glue had an irritating habit of dissolving in the middle of the day, but it was better than nothing. At this point I was using the antibiotic cream primarily for its placebo effect; the blisters were open, nearly purple, and angry red streaks radiated from them like a child's drawing of the sun. But at least they hadn't gotten any worse today.
A few other stragglers were hurrying to get on the trail. I had overheard in Manang that there was a bed shortage in Thorung Phedi and Thorung High Camp, the next stops after Letdar and last before the Thorung La, and the last few to leave Letdar each day would likely have to turn back and try again the next day. I was almost relieved to be going the other way. The appeal of trekking lay largely in its Zen-like contemplative pace. The idea of having to rush to beat the crowds was just fundamentally wrong.
I ate a breakfast of tasty tsampa porridge and lemon tea, stifled a groan as I shouldered my pack, and started out back down the trail, back towards Manang. I felt wonderful. My altitude sickness had vanished. It was good to be going downhill. The air was crisp and clean, and the mountains loomed around me like glorious visions of some faraway fantasy land, like a Tolkien landscape. Yesterday's clouds had vanished, and there seemed to be more snow cover on the peaks. I wondered if the Thorung La was open. If it shut down for more than a day or two
