Every Lost Country Read online

  “You’ve spoken to them? Oh, you mean you’ve been___”

  “Our contacts at the Chinese government aren’t sure, but we’ve had a report that some or all of the prisoners escaped. We’ve tried to_____but_____”

  “Escaped,” he repeats quietly. “Fuck me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Hello?”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Lawson, you’re clear again. We’ve been__________tact the base directly, but we’re not_____”

  “Attacked the base? Who?”

  “Pardon? Ah, no—contact. And are…are you there? We …” The remote voice repeats a word that’s probably hello, but the second vowel keeps getting cropped off so it sounds like help, or hell. He glances up at the three faces studying him, then down the slope toward Camp One and his miniature, toy-tent base camp, a vertical mile below. Those lower zones are flooded with dusk. Soon he and his team will also lose the sun, and when its pursuing shadow, bleeding upslope, sweeps over them like the sea over Pharaoh’s legions in The Ten Commandments, the temperature will drop fast. Tashi now drags on a cigarette as if it’s the tube of an oxygen bottle, Shiva sways under the weight of his pack. This delay could get dangerous, with his team so bushed. He shouldn’t have answered his handset. Communicate with the world down there and things just get worse. Amaris and Book will not be returning in time—that’s clear now. It’s just him and the mountain. Him and his remaining team and Murloe, wherever he is, and the mountain.

  Lawson’s legions.

  “Lisette?” he all but bellows. “I’m going to have to go. We’ll talk again, I’m sure. Can you hear me? Yes? Just keep me posted. Sorry about this mess you’re dealing with.” If you only knew how sorry. “What’s that? Yeah, of course. Okay. Okay…. Kal? Kaljang? Do you copy? Look, I can’t talk to Sophie’s mom now. No. We’ll be at Camp Two in twenty minutes and I’ll try to respond then. Once we’re set up and secure. Okay? Over.”

  Kaljang says, “But I’m worried about Sophie, even more so.”

  “Me too, Kal. Not much we can do, though. The embassy is on it now.”

  No answer. The pulmonary crackle of static.

  “And Kal?” Lawson turns his back on the team, shielding his mouth with his gloved hand. “You said you wanted to climb higher, right? And Shiv really shouldn’t go above Camp Two. Camp One, even. So I’m going to send him down tomorrow morning. You can come up to Camp Two and take his load from there. You can come right to the top, if you want. If you feel strong. We really have to get some people to the top now. For the others’ sake. Hello?”

  “But Shiva,” says Kaljang—“he can’t handle the phones so well.”

  Exactly. “He’ll be all right, Kal. We’ll give him instructions. Kal, you read me?”

  Silence, though not a very long one, considering what the decision must mean to the kid.

  “I’m sorry, Wade Lawson, but I can’t do this. I want to do this, but no.”

  “Kal___”

  “I think, for Sophie’s safety, maybe for the others too, I should be here.”

  “But, Kal…it’s not like you’re a paramedic or something.”

  “No, on the sat phones, I mean. It may be important.”

  A familiar rage radiates through Lawson, but it eases before his body can fully respond and circulate further adrenaline—the last thing he needs right now. He draws a long breath, puffs it through his lips, a sort of respiratory shrug. Kal’s words are not so surprising after all. Lawson finds he’s already accepting them, helpless, as he turns back and grins tersely at the others and waves them on. And with this acceptance, he dimly perceives, he has completed a long transformation: from a man who believed that the world could not rebuff his will to one who expects to be baulked at every hook in the trail. Like that bull moose, besieged by puny predators, scratched and nibbled to the point of collapse. So be it. And screw them all. He still has his will, and the world of predators is a long way below.

  AIR THIS THIN TURNS ANYONE into a mystic. You can see why Murloe and Lawson succumbed to the mountain’s spell. It looks, even now, like a sanctuary above all borders and distinctions and this constant dialogue of violence—the sort of place where Sophie should have been safe, the sort of place (you think now, recalling what you know of the country) that Tibet itself tried to be. Centuries ago, when Buddhism first arrived here, it converted a nation of warriors into one of monks and nuns and farmers, united by the Buddhist impulse to relieve suffering and avoid seeding it for the future through unmindful action and reaction. So Tibet became its own unique, isolated experiment, a nation trying to dissolve the ancient chain of reactive consequence going back, an eye for an eye for an eye, to a time before countries or even tribes. For centuries Tibet’s mountain palisades helped insulate the experiment, but the world finally crashed in: feudal mandarins from the east, capitalist materialism from the west, Maoist fundamentalism from the east again. You can’t help regretting the experiment’s disruption. For years you’ve been treating and burying the victims of other failed experiments, political and religious; it would have been nice to see how this one—flawed, halting, but overseen now by a modern, open-minded leader—might have gone. An experiment not based on the notion that future utopias can be floated on seas of blood, or houses of worship built with enemies’ bones, or happiness mass-produced through material advancement.

  You’ve always felt an affinity for these Buddhists, in part because their faith replaces gods and temples with the human brain and heart, but also because your own work, field surgery above all, is a sort of Buddhist practice, demanding calmness in crisis, a mind fixed on the pulsing moment, an awareness that mental wobbling into past failures or future fears can mean disaster. And maybe this is more than just affinity. Maybe now, with Sophana lost in Tibet, you are finally being made to take sides. Maybe, in a way, you’ve found your country at the very moment the country itself—occupied, hemorrhaging exiles through its passes, its young people turning to violence, its banished leader approaching death—ceases to exist.

  And yet to belong to such a place means belonging to something beyond countries and tribes—beyond belonging itself. Such a place, you think, can’t really cease to exist.

  A COLD, BONY MOON, a few days past full, shines down through the still leaves of the poplars. It’s in the same place in the sky where the sun was when she fell asleep. Disorienting transition. She remembers her phone. Its ringing just now woke her, unless she was dreaming. She yanks back her fleece hood and with the other hand gropes inside her parka. The phone hasn’t played its ring tune, the theme from The Prisoner, since they were in Pokhara almost three weeks back, and it shouldn’t work here, but she fumbles it open, certain he has somehow found her, found a way of reaching her. Of course he has. He always will. “Papa! Hello?”

  Silence, then a sharp deedling, repeated three times: the battery dying.

  She stares at the lightless power gauge, her tight breaths clouding. The earth may be going greenhouse, the glaciers melting, but the universe, according to what she has been reading, is getting colder. Still, it’s milder here than it was last night coming down out of the mountains. Smells of Canadian fall, like a windless night in October—the sharp, toasted odour of dead leaves.

  Going by the moon, it must be eight or nine. She has slept since around noon, her throat so painfully dry it feels like a strep infection, her chilled body hangover stiff. She feels in her daypack and after some groping finds the bottle and uncaps it and chugs down half the cold water. Exhaling, she stares at her pack. Shoves her hand back in and pulls out the plastic flashlight, aims it down into the pack, though the moon’s light is more than enough. She upends the pack, spilling its contents onto the dappled, moon-blue imprint her curled body made, like a fetal ultrasound, in the sand. The wasabi rice crackers have worked loose from the packet and lie strewn among her things. A zip-lock bag of gorp she’d forgotten about. Half a dozen pens and pencils. She shakes and searches the daypack a second and third time. No journal.
r />   She picks up a cracker and without brushing off the grit she slides it into her mouth and grinds slowly as she looks at her pathetic possessions. Her eyes blur with tears. From inside her head, the crashing sound of her chewing seems fatally loud. They’ll definitely be after her. Her journal left behind like a killer’s calling card, not far from the guard’s body where her pack flew off and came open. She wonders if her father could know by now, and will he think she drowned in the river—she’s a poor swimmer—and there’s a twist of grim pleasure in the thought. He’ll never know how often, during his dangerous absences, she has had to picture him dead.

  Her throat too dry to swallow, she washes the cracker down with her last drops of water.

  She squats in the sand for a fast, vigilant pee, then gathers her stuff, dons the parka and pads through the miniature forest toward the river’s sound. She picks her way between wind clusters of leaves, but steps on a few. Their small, tinny rattle seems so loud.

  At the edge of the grove she looks up and down the riverside track as far as she can. Across the river, on higher, terraced ground, a fresh-mown field, sheaves of grain looking like tiny, stylized mountains in the moonlight. They weren’t there yet when she entered the grove. From somewhere the clank of an animal bell and a dog’s answering bark. Soft yellow light from a window across the river, maybe a hundred metres upstream.

  She dips across the path to the river and hunkers in wet sand to fill her water bottle, then starts downstream at a brisk, cautious walk. But soon, unable to resist the instinct, she runs. There has to be a bridge. Where there’s a will, there’ll be a trail—her father used to say that when they were out jogging with Bones in the ravines and wanted to find a shortcut home, and it always turned out to be true.

  Water slops in her belly as she runs and it’s as if both thighs are charley horsed. After a while—she can’t say how long; none of this seems to be happening in real time, the real world—she slows to a walk. As the liquid-full feeling eases, hunger comes. Hunger is not the word. This is a clawing, scraping vacancy that shrieks to be filled. And she keeps going. She has read of Native bands in the Yukon whose girls had to go into isolation in the mountains, fasting, surviving, and the romantic in her has envied that rite of passage, the sort of challenge she thought only boys in those tribes ever got to face.

  Sooner or later you get what you envy.

  Just before a full turn in the river, where the steep embankment blocks her view of the next stretch, she veers off the trail. At the embankment’s foot she crouches among thorny, small-leafed scrub. She zippers her pack open quietly. The loss of the journal sickens her nearly as much as the thought of being pursued and beyond help. Those pages contain her urgent last few months encrypted in poems and cartoons and quotations and drawings, a feverish self-portrait in process.

  She’s chewing gorp (raisins, tamari almonds, peanuts, pumpkin seeds, banana chips and Smarties) when she gets a waft of something bad. She peers into the mesh of moonlight and shadow in the bushes behind her. Luminous squares of toilet paper around a dark heap of something. She seals the bag of gorp and closes her daypack and stays down, listening, scrunching up her nostrils. A few moments and she hears voices, barely hears them. A murmur diluted by the river’s rich drone. She might be dreaming it. And the dream returns—she and the dead guard whispering in the river’s language. But this is real, a soft swell of conversation from downstream, around that bend in the trail.

  The guards—they must have passed the tiny grove when she was sleeping. Somehow she’ll have to get around them now. There’s no way she’s turning back, retreating upstream, uphill, who knows how far back. Her bridge is ahead. It must be.

  The embankment here is like the Scarborough Bluffs, and she should backtrack before climbing something like this, find a better spot, but she’s too tired and sore and starving—that word her father won’t let her use casually—to think it through. She starts up on all fours, diagonally to the right, away from the hidden camp. Sandstone, gravel, jutting shelves of harder rock. Her hiking boots have good treads and she has bouldered a little with Zeph and Kaljang up at base camp. At first, fear seems to levitate her, as if she’s bounding free of gravity up the inside of a lunar crater. Then she’s stopped by a smooth, vertical face, as high as the brick wall of her school. She edges laterally along the base of it, feet on a narrow shelf of loose stone, her arms spread wide and forehead pressed to the rock. With the skewed, stubborn logic of panic, she feels there must be a way up, since she won’t be able to find her way back down. No question of down now. She jars a rock loose and freezes, hearing it slide and thump and clack to the bottom. She’s higher than she thought. She forces herself on, traversing, close to crying, I hate you, I hate you., speeding up now, reckless, get this over with, because he deserves that, whatever happens. And finds herself leaning forward as the slope tilts away from her, easing off. She looks up. Different rock, a sedimentary face, all cracks and ledges that the moonlight tags for her like rungs. Okay. She rests for a moment, embracing the slope, trying to slow her heart down as it pumps against the cliff. Then she drives for the top. The grade lessens even more and her relief sucks a sigh from her, the top within a few minutes’ steady clamber. And her dead phone revives. Those warning bleats again. Even from inside her pocket, with what must be the last of the charge, that sound seems to gouge the moonlit quiet like a car alarm. She stalls, frozen to the rock like a gecko, then jerks upward again, tearing at the slope, going for the top. Cheap useless stupid fucking phone. Sophie all but running up a steep, narrow gully of scree, panting hoarsely, sagging back with each step almost as far as she advances, avalanches of stones behind.

  She falls over the top and lies there for some seconds, then rolls clear. Pulls out her cellphone and smashes it against the ground three times, one for each of those betraying beeps. She gets up and hurls it inland as far as she can and she’s sobbing as it flies, not just her music but her photo gallery, her family, her friends and the ex-friends she’d lost by being so obsessive about Scott, a last undeleted picture of him, another piece of her gone.

  The second she pitches it away she regrets it. She wants to go looking for it among the zillion cellphone-sized rocks on this desert plain, but there’s no time.

  The plain is flat, featureless, rising slowly toward the east, where a few small lights cap a distant height of land. She thinks of running toward those lights but can’t tell how far they are, or what they are. She looks back to the southwest—the wide gorge of the river narrowing as it winds back up to the foot of the mountains. A high strip of glacier glowing blue as a Bunsen flame under the moon. She knows she has come some distance from there, yet it seems so close, the peaks still huge and eerily black-lit in their snow.

  In a downstream direction she runs along the top of the embankment, though far enough in from the edge that she and her shadow are clear of it. Just past the bend in the river, she creeps over to the edge and peeks down. In the gorge below, a campfire burns by the trail. A man—from up here he’s a brimmed cap over a foreshortened body—stands by the fire yelling into something. A response crackles back. The other guard or guards must be back around the curve now, searching where she just was. The small bayonet stuck on the man’s machinegun shines in the moonlight. That bayonet scares her more than the gun, yet her memory of the haunting dream has reduced, if not her fear, then her aversion to the Chinese, who she has hated with a convinced, confirmed hatred since the massacre up on the glacier. Now, looking down, it’s as if she’s spying on a different kind of search party—sad searchers looking not for her but for the young guard, as if his body has been washed downstream.

  She runs on. Clear of the guards’ fire she runs along the edge of the embankment, so she can see the river and, on the far side, a few lamplit windows. After some time, up ahead and far below, a bridge finally appears, its hanging span traced by the moon like a blueprint. She stops and stands panting. Her will insists on the bridge but her mind disputes it—the unlikel
y geometry of its arc out here in the wilderness and how it leads across to a snug cluster of huts, buttery light from the slits of windows, smoke rising. She has never seen anything so inviting. She longs to climb down into the gorge, but the embankment is even higher here and there must be a better way down, ahead.

  Where there’s a will, there’ll be a trail.

  She’s a little past the bridge when her path falls away into a small ravine intersecting the gorge at right angles, cutting into it from the southeast. She scrambles down the side of the ravine to a dry streambed that must be a snowmelt torrent every spring. It’s a steep, short walk down the streambed into the gorge. Now, at a cautious lope, she approaches the bridge, which is just upriver. She peers farther upriver, watching for the guards, but she has come several kilometres and probably not in the direction they think.

  Stone steps polished with years of use climb to the top of a white plastered cairn. From there, the bridge’s hanging span falls away to a point just above the river, then rises to a second cairn on the far bank. For handrails there are two ropes strung with prayer flags. A flimsy walkway of footboards hanging below. Walking her hands along the ropes, she totters down the boards to where the current flashes just under her feet and there she freezes—the bridge jiggling wildly—then draws a breath and climbs on upward.

  Ahead on the landing there’s motion, a large dog rising out of the shadows with its ears pricked. Sophie stops and tenses for the barking spree. The dog lowers its boxlike, hyena’s head and prowls slowly toward her down the footboards. From its thorax, a warning rumble. The hackling mohawk of fur on its spine is moonlit grey.

  Sophie stops on the trembling bridge but doesn’t withdraw, because there’s no way to back up fast and no way she’s not crossing. The dog, this mythical guardian, pauses and weighs her with its eyes red like in a botched photo. She whispers to it as she edges forward. If you’ve owned and adored a dog you’re not easily scared by them. She is scared, but not enough to turn back toward the guards. Again the bridge quivers with her steps. The dog’s deep, abdominal growling thins to a whine and it looks at its paws on the footboards. Sophie sees what’s happening. She shimmies the bridge hard, see-sawing with her feet, pulling in on the ropes with her hands. Everything wobbles. The dog retreats a few steps, turns tail and trots back up to the landing, where it rounds on her, reinflating itself. It’s granting her the bridge, but no more. Sophie is going to have to do that thing she hates most—that the people she most admires never seem to do. The pathetic melodramatics of it. Hard to imagine Amaris or her father or mother ever doing it, and she hates how people see kids of her age as needy, indecisive. “Hello,” she calls softly, then much louder, “Hello!” She’s trying not to say the actual word, help.