Every Lost Country Read online

  She stares unblinking, unbreathing, half expecting an instant replay, over and over and over, like when the twin towers disintegrated and collapsed. These days, how can you believe what you see, or half see, only once?

  “Lew? Are you…?”

  She hardly hears her own croaky voice over the roaring in her ears.

  “You all right?” Book calls faintly.

  She won’t lower her feet to the floor because of that probing flow of blood. It will move toward her feet, follow her, wherever she walks, she can feel it must. A nosing lamprey of blood. Now it’s inside the cell, swimming through and around the bars, and there it pools for a moment, stops its advance, then continues.

  The pimply kid in the baseball cap prowls up the hallway past her cell, training his little machinegun on the fallen Chinese. An image from TV news, low-res black-and-white video, high school shootings. He’s trailed by a young monk with wet, gaping eyes, who has the key ring and opens Amaris’s cell door and tells her something in a shrivelled voice. She gets to her feet but then sags back down, paraplegic. Norbu is standing over Zhao, with his court shoes set wide. No, she thinks. No more shooting. “Norbu!” Book’s voice comes snapping up the hallway and now he’s rushing past her cell, his eyes bright and bulging in anger, or fear, or anger and fear, yes, both. His right arm extended. “Norbu, please!”

  No way. None of this.

  Norbu’s gang brother appears and he’s tugging a machinegun, not gently, out from under the bleeding soldier. The man’s underside is drenched dark. She winces her eyes shut, stands, opens her eyes. She floats toward her open cell door and over the stream of blood and out into the hallway. Mouths are moving but she can’t hear and there’s moaning but it’s far away. Her eyes are fogged. Maybe it’s the dust and smoke. The cellblock could be a dim subway after a bombing, figures shuffling into the hallway with zombie faces, the old woman and two monks struggling to bear Lhundup on a blanket, the squat nun helping the wounded one to hobble. There’s a caustic, throat-clawing smell. At the hallway’s dead end, by the cell where Book and the Tibetans were, a chip of concrete seems to fall in slow motion from a star-shaped hole, and a monk lies with his arms straight out, another monk kneeling beside him. The giant soldier sits gripping his own arm, rocking fast and moaning.

  Now Book stands between Zhao and Norbu, who clearly wants to finish Zhao off. The other kid, toting a machinegun slung on a bloody strap, peers through the slit in the steel door and she hears herself calling, as if he might understand, Careful…there must be one more in there!…maybe more. Her voice resounds in a hollow way. A nun she doesn’t recognize, bare shoulder, thick glasses, is there now with Book and Norbu. Her fresh face, as she listens and moves her lips, looks calmly concerned, a young guidance counsellor summoned to a school office to deal with a small problem. To Amaris this looks like the end of the world. There’s a loud rattling as if someone has just flung stones against the other side of the steel door. Norbu’s friend ducks low, looks over, calls out.

  Book is kneeling by Zhao, pulling on his glasses.

  “Amaris!” she hears clearly, “my kit and the blanket. In the cell.”

  She nods vaguely, turns and drifts down the hallway. In the last cell, where a few dazed refugees mill around, gathering things, she sees Palden nestled on the floor, whimpering. Nobody else seems to notice. There is blood. She can’t shake off this bloody dream. She gets the blanket and the black vinyl kit and floats back up the hallway. Book’s reaching hand is steady, yet his head trembles. He’s grey, his lips impacted. He grabs the kit, snaps it open. “He’ll live, if I can keep Norbu off him. But we’re completely screwed. I can’t believe they did this.”

  I think we need to leave right now, Lew.

  She isn’t sure if she says this.

  A painful blast of light—Norbu has opened the side door that gives onto the fenced yard through which they entered. In an Irish accent that completes the sense that this is all a trance or dream, the nun is saying, “I’d stay with you, Lewis, to help out, but we’ll have hurt ones with us also, and Lasya, too. I’m afraid you’ll have to come.”

  “We have to bring Palden,” he says.

  “Sure, but Norbu and the rest—I’m afraid they’ll hurt Palden. Hurt him worse.”

  Book nods at Zhao and whispers, “If I can do some work here, he’ll make it till help comes. And the giant’s going to survive. But Palden, he’ll be a dead man for letting this happen. What genius came up with this plan?”

  “No plan,” the nun says quickly—“there was a—a debate while you spoke with the officer. Norbu and his chum Sangye and one of the monks and old Dechen all wanted to attack, to take Palden’s gun. The rest of us argued, but we couldn’t stop them. Then even Sonam and another monk helped, when the moment came.”

  He shakes his head. “Here, take the swab.”

  “It’s like this now in Tibet. Some won’t listen to the Dalai Lama’s teachings. We fear, the violent ones will have their way.”

  “The syringe now—the needle.”

  “They say if His Holiness is in another country, how can He understand?”

  Refugees are filing toward the exit: the two nuns, the father with his sobbing daughter in the crook of his arm, a very pregnant woman Amaris doesn’t know, then the old woman and the straining monks bearing Lhundup. Norbu shouts from the side door and the nun with the glasses remarks, “He says we ought to hurry, Lewis.”

  “I know.” There’s something in Book’s voice—as if he’s aware of some other reason for haste beyond the obvious. His hands work fast, injecting what might be local anaesthetic, filling the pulpy wound with antibiotic gel, unrolling gauze. Zhao is now on his back, seeming dead except for his eyes, which gaze up at Book with unblinking attention, as if he’s committing the face to memory. Over Zhao’s body, Book spreads the blanket Norbu gave him last night and says, “Dui bu qi”—I’m sorry—a bit of simple Mandarin Amaris does know.

  “You’re apologizing,” she says, not questioning, just noting this latest surreal detail.

  “For leaving him like this,” Book says.

  They exit into the desert’s incendiary sunlight and flinch and raise their hands blindly as if coming under fire. Somebody sneezes repeatedly. She and Book shoulder Palden’s limp arms on either side. His gruesome head lolls and the toes of his boots drag in the gravel. The nun with the glasses walks with them, glancing around, ready to translate, it seems, or to defend their decision to bring Palden. Ahead, the others clump up at the swing gate in the high safety fence topped with a helix of razor wire. Beyond the gate, the two trucks. Beyond the trucks, the earth falling away. This hilltop commands a panorama of the high desert and the Kyatruk massif floating huge and white to the southwest.

  Norbu and his friend stand between the refugees and the base—a long cinderblock bungalow crowned with a gleaming white satellite dish. There’s a tinkle of breaking glass. From the base’s small window, now shattered, comes a terse, tentative spray of shots. Norbu and the other man fire back wildly, pockmarks appearing in the concrete around the window, where a shadow ducks out of sight. Norbu yells over his shoulder and his voice cracks like a pubescent boy’s. In the small, panicked crowd pushing up against the gate, a monk is fumbling, the big key ring in his hand. Norbu’s friend dekes in among the standing and lying Tibetans. Amaris expects him to blast the padlock with his machinegun but instead he takes a pistol—it must be Zhao’s—out of his baggy jeans and holds it sideways, gangsta style, and fires until it clicks empty. He drops it and pushes the gate and it swings out on its wheel. The three monks lift Lhundup. Amaris and Book and Palden follow the nun and the others through the open gate, Palden’s head drooping toward Amaris’s shoulder, her face. A smell of salt blood drying on his scalp. He’s mumbling, “Leave me, please…leave Palden, please …”

  “You’ll be okay,” she says, as if she could know, as if, out here, her assurances mean anything.

  Book has his free hand up, shielding his eyes, scan
ning the desert falling away to the west. The first truck’s tailgate claps down. Two monks scramble up, turning and extending hands to help load the others aboard. A spatter of gunshots and everyone ducks and freezes, then continues with the boarding, faster. The nun with the glasses, nodding toward Palden, addresses the other Tibetans. Norbu is backing toward them, hunched down, still aiming his puny, deadly gun at the base, but now he scowls a glance over his shoulder at Palden, Book, Amaris, and yells words at the nun with the glasses. She answers briefly, calmly. More head-splitting gunfire—the other gang kid shooting out the tires of the second truck—and Amaris is ducked low, trembling, almost dropping Palden, whose body is now moving strangely, jerking downward as if something has leapt on his back.

  “In his pockets,” she hears Book, “it must be!”

  A monk straightens up—he has been digging in Palden’s pockets—and says something to the nun with the glasses. “Nothing there,” she translates—“no key.”

  “Palden—wake up! Where’s the ignition key?”

  Palden shakes his bloody head. “Inside the base, I think, please.”

  “Let’s get him on the truck.”

  “But, Lewis,” the nun says, “if there isn’t a key …”

  “Help me talk to Norbu. Can he drive? Amaris, can you?”

  “I can try. I haven’t driven stick in years.”

  “You’ll only have to steer, and brake. It’s downhill from here. Toward the river—the Khiong.” He points in the direction of the late-afternoon sun. “From there we can try to hike back up to the glacier.”

  “I’m not sure about Norbu,” the nun says, “but I’m quite a good driver myself.”

  5:40 p.m., 6,800 metres. Lawson follows Tashi, Jake and Shiva up the thirty-five-degree slope between Camp One and Camp Two. The men, roped together a few body lengths apart, carry heavy packs—rope, food, fuel, oxygen canisters—on what should be the last supply run up this stretch. Lawson carries the lion’s share. If all goes well, they’ll get these loads up to Camp Three tomorrow, and then he and Tashi will finish preparing the fixed ropes on the Lawson Wall. By the day after, if this weather holds, they’ll push for the summit.

  This stretch is essentially a gruelling stair climb, at least for the others. Lawson doesn’t find it all that tough. A crampon slog on hard-packed snow. He’s in caboose position so he’ll have time to dig in and help anchor the team with his ice axe if somebody slips—and because if he were out front, he knows, he would want to forge ahead too hard, thoughts of capturing this peak making him forget there are climbers behind him who want to stop every thirty steps or so and lean over their ice axes and pant. Tashi, a chain-smoker, is the most unathletic Sherpa that Lawson has ever seen, and his daydreamy pace is perfect for Jake, as well as for little Shiva, who shouldn’t be up here anyway.

  Jennifer used to tell Lawson that on their forest hikes with Reinhold, their malamute, he, Lawson, would forget her presence and stop conversing, start to “brood,” accelerate till he was ten strides ahead of her or farther if she didn’t labour to keep pace. Until she called him back, called him out of himself. He wasn’t aware of doing it until she started to complain. I wish you lived in the world sometimes, Way. And she had a point. In a sense, he doesn’t live in the world—the truest part of him resides up here, in the high troposphere, lives for these tense, striving hours and this particular integrity of light.

  Maybe the real reason the marriage died was that he could never persuade her to climb with him.

  These frequent stops give him leisure to skim the vast, expanding views of desert rolling to the northeast, views he would normally be savouring. From up here you can see as far as a large lake, some eighty kilometres off, near Drongpa, a city he has seen on the map and that now manifests as a darkening, like a cancer on the landscape, under a sickly yellow dome of smog. He has no idea where Amaris and the doctor and now Sophie might be. Kaljang hasn’t radioed for three hours, Lawson having asked him not to patch through any calls until they reach camp—unless Sophie and the others should reappear.

  At the edge of Camp Two, a few hundred steps above, the bright blue tent that he shared just last night with Amaris can be seen. Some hours higher is Camp Three, a snow cave hidden in Kyatruk’s steepening flank. Above it loom the ice cliffs of the Lawson Wall. Then the peak, at 25,998 feet—a figure that seems to thumb its nose at Lawson. He prefers to round up. Or give the elevation in metres. He feels suddenly tired, leaning on his ice axe like some codger with a cane—last night’s many sleepless hours. Picture a pack of coyotes harrying a bull moose, darting in as the bull slows, nipping, needling away with those high, yapping calls.

  He won’t be going back down, as Kal asked him to. Going down wouldn’t bring the girl back. He doesn’t believe in hollow gestures. None of this is his fault. The girl has gone and done the same idiotic thing as her old man, and on Book’s shoulders be it. He should have known what she might do. If he was a good father wouldn’t he know her that well? He shouldn’t have risked bringing her up here. He knew the dangers. Etcetera, etcetera…Yet something in Lawson still sits wrong. Lawson, who hates looking inward, who can gaze down between his knees while soloing a wall at 20,000 feet and feel merely thrilled, yet can’t take a hard look into himself without suffering vertigo, even nausea.

  But now he does look deeper. Like scanning a ragged, foreign landscape with dusty binoculars. There. It’s his lost son, briefly embraced, and what Lawson was able to feel for that flayed-looking creature without even having known him—so that now he can’t help pondering what it must be like to love a child you’ve known and loved for years.

  Kaljang’s voice comes crackling from the radio. Shiva glances back down expectantly at Lawson. If Lawson answers the call, the rest stop will last longer. As the other two also look back—Jake in his big moustache and aviator shades, Tashi in those ludicrous goggles—Lawson lifts a hand and nods, Hang on.

  “Lawson here. Is it Sophie and the others? Over.”

  “Pardon? Oh…no Sophie yet …” (Lawson hears the words as Soviet and for some moments stands gaping at the snow, scintillas of evening gold now showing among the glittering blues and whites. Then it clicks.) “Sorry not to wait until you’re up at the camp,” Kaljang says, “but it seems too important. You see, strange news has come about Sophie. Now I have Sophie’s mother again on the phone, and on the other phone it’s from your embassy in Beijing. Which one do you want to take first? Over.”

  Lawson lets out air. “Give me the guy in the embassy.”

  “Uh, it’s a woman, Wade Lawson…. Go ahead.”

  The voice comes through, more or less. At these removes, communication is a bit like playing broken telephone in a swarming schoolyard.

  “Alio? Is it Wade Lawson here?” French-Canadian accent, a nasal voice scraped raw as if with overuse, though that might be the reception.

  “Lawson, yeah. I can’t hear you very well.”

  “Lysiane Girard at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. Allo? You can hear me very well? I am assistant to the charge d’affaires here, and, ah …” Static mangles the rest.

  “Can’t hear you. Look, we have to keep this short, I’m on an exposed slope above 22,000 ft and we’re running out of sunlight. Can you tell me what’s up with, uh, with Ms. McRae, Dr. Book and the girl?”

  “Well, yes—no. It isn’t clear. I was hoping to ask you some questions about exactly what it was that—what passed when the, the—”

  “The thing is, I don’t know. Oh, you mean at the border?”

  “—encountered the Chinese party, at the frontier. Pardon? Did you say…?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get up to camp—the full story. Or Kal, Kaljang, he can fill you in right now. But just tell me what’s happening with my team members, okay? They all right?”

  “Pardon? Are they…? Oh, all right. We’re receiving different messages. The Chinese say they’re trying to”—long moments of snarling static—“and running. A guard was hurt or even killed
pursuing her, this morning. They may have captured her already, but ah—ah—sorry, I was speaking Mandarin for an hour just now—”

  “Pursuing Sophie?”

  “Ms. Book, yes. It’s not clear. You know we’ve been attempting to reach you for some hours?”

  “What isn’t clear? Killed how?” His heart is going like a trip-hammer. A moment ago he was still wondering if Amaris might somehow make it back up here for the climb; now he’s alarmed on Sophie’s behalf—and on his own, yes, should the girl get hurt—and even concerned about Amaris, who until this moment has struck him as too tough and smart to get into real trouble.

  “Conflicting reports,” the voice says crisply, the line suddenly so clear it’s as if the woman is standing beside him. “One official, he thinks she is now in custody, another, that she’s still in flight. They are being very civil, but not clear with us, you know. Maybe they don’t want to be clear, it’s possible, but I think maybe they’re not sure themselves.”

  “What about Mari—Ms. McRae?” The climbers stare down at him, Tashi digging in his parka pocket for the cigarettes he carries loose there. “And the doctor.”

  “Excuse me? You’re very unclear. You mention a copter…helicopter? Ah, wait, you wanted to say—”

  “McRae. And Book.”

  “—I said, yes, something is going on at the base. We aren’t sure what.”

  “What base?”

  “Where they were taken today, about, ah” ___another harsh squall of static___ “the frontier. We’ve been working __________ speak to them.”