Every Lost Country Page 22

  Pain hauls her awake, tugging and griping. A saffron light glows down through the canvas that ripples and flaps in the wind. Sophie groaning softly beside her. Lew on Amaris’s other side, close enough to warm her. She wonders if he knows it. He smells like smoke and some pungent spice, maybe fenugreek. She would like nothing better than to remain here, snugly enveloped, but she has to sit up, clutching her stomach, squinting urgently out into the overexposing glare of sun on sand. Tenzin, with his long rifle, lies just under the lip of the nearest dune, peering over the top, his back turned to the shelter, the hood up on his sheepskin coat. She wriggles free of Sophie and Lew, stands, hobbles quickly outside. It’s like her muscles have been eaten by necrosis. She passes sections of broken wall but wants to get farther away. Hopes the handsome Tenzin won’t turn and see her down here and really how can she care about such things now? Hurries through the remains of a wood frame doorway, squats behind a rubbled wall. She can just see the shelter. The sun burning hot, the wind glacial. Checking over her shoulder like a spooked child: just wilderness, the sands giving way to a gravel plain, then the high mountains drowning in cloud.

  A scream rips the air, slicing through her. She looks but can’t see much in the shadows under the canvas. Lasya must be in labour. Or Norbu is attacking someone—Choden, Lew. She sees that now he’s pouncing up, reeling among the others with garbled cries, stepping in the ashes of the fire and staggering out into the light, gripping his child-sized weapon. Could he be looking for Amaris herself? She’s already in such distress that the fear seems irrelevant. She clamps her eyes at another spasm. Cold sweat. Now Lew is out there with Norbu, addressing him in soft, coaxing tones. Choden there too. Tenzin gazing down from his lookout, pensively smoking.

  Lew and Choden lead Norbu back into the shelter. He seems cooperative. Maybe he was dreaming, hallucinating, maybe he’s still asleep, suggestible, not really dangerous to anyone but the Chinese. You are Chinese.

  Sophie hunches out next, clutching her stomach with both hands, face tipped down so that it’s lost in her hoodie. She walks with tight little steps toward Amaris’s spot. Amaris in her pain says nothing, then realizes the girl will stumble on her and be startled, terrified. Putting on her sunglasses she calls softly, “Comfort station’s over here.”

  “Hi,” Sophie says, hiking her black Tibetan skirts and squatting next to Amaris. The girl fits a note of stoic humour into that Hi, even smiling. Impressive.

  “Is Norbu…?”

  “My dad’s talking to him. With Choden and Sonam. Trying to give him a shot of something.”

  They’re silent for some minutes until Amaris says, “Used to worry I spent too much time, back home, taking baths, grooming. Makeup. Dressing to the teeth. And you know what? It was all worth it.”

  The girl nods, winces. She and Amaris, side by side, unselfconscious in their predicament as if they’ve been doing this for years.

  Amaris, finally: “I think it’s incredibly brave what you did, coming after him.”

  “You really think so?”

  “If I say it, I think it.”

  Pause. “All I hate is that I have to feel selfish. Just for wanting him home.”

  “That’s what got you into trouble, isn’t it?

  “What?”

  “With the cops. You wanted to bring him home.”

  The girl’s brow tightens pensively—or in pain. “I still am in trouble. We’ll be dealing with it when we go home.”

  When, she says. Amaris is downgrading her own hopes to if. But then Sophie is at an age of residual faith—disillusioned, but still believing the tarnished guardians of her childhood have some protective power. Then again, maybe hers do.

  Norbu is wailing now. Tenzin with his rifle lopes and seat-slides down the back of the dune and strides toward the shelter, flinging down his cigarette like a man whose patience has finally caved. Lew and Choden come out to meet him. The three huddle for a few seconds and then duck back under the canvas. There’s chaotic movement toward the back of the shelter, a stifled cry. The yak bellows and snorts. A minute later Tenzin emerges into the light with his rifle in one hand and Norbu’s machinegun in the other.

  Thank God, thinks Amaris.

  At five p.m. the fugitives set out, a fiery wall of stormcloud looming ahead above the mountains, the sun already lost behind it. Lew has given Amaris and Sophie pills so they can continue the march. Norbu, still limp from the heavy dose of sedative that Lew shot into him when they seized his gun, is slumped on the yak, though Lasya’s pains are worsening and she would seem the obvious passenger. But she walks, she says she wants to, up this sun-and wind-chapped plain rising to a pass between two bare, low, eroded peaks: like a portal to the real mountains beyond. Tenzin, shouldering both guns, hollers them onward, slapping the yak’s haunches, glancing back toward the razed monastery and the hours of sand dunes, layers of them undulating like an inland sea.

  Hours later as they file into the higher cold—snowflakes starting in the dark—the throbbing drone of a helicopter builds behind them. An incandescent light descends and settles near the ruins where they slept, maybe ten kilometres behind them now. The edge of the sand desert is bathed in its light. Hard to tell the size of the aircraft or how many men are disembarking. Amaris checks her triathlon watch—8:22 p.m.—and the tiny diode display seems fatally conspicuous, like a lit match in a blackout.

  Lew calls softly to Choden, “How much farther to the pass? It’s Lasya. Her water just broke.”

  Lawson, Tashi and Jake start up the wall not long after dawn. There is no dawn. Solid cloud swarms the mountain. Snow squalls, shocks of wind. The lens-shaped clouds he saw late yesterday were, as he feared, the forerunners of a massive stormfront billowing southeastward. In the night, as he walked Shiv down the moonlit mountainside, he kept glancing back at that nearing mass, a sierra of icy clouds like a floating replica of the Himalayas. Of course he’d known it was coming—before eight p.m. Kal, patching through calls from base camp, had given the latest weather bulletins. Of course, of course. Just when he’d gotten people interested in his discovery. Though it was not just his discovery, or his emergency escort service for Shiv, that callers wanted to talk about. They rehashed their “ethical” questions. They wanted comments on the rumours about Book’s video. They mentioned the weather warnings and asked if Lawson still meant to push on.

  How insulated they all were, in every sense.

  He and Shiv didn’t reach Camp Two till after three a.m.—later than planned—because Lawson had slept through his alarm at eleven thirty. He coughed himself conscious an hour later and tried to rouse the porter, tightly curled in his green bag like a larva. Come on, come on. He’d kept a Thermos of water in his own mummy bag so Shiv could have a few mugs of tepid tea before they started down. Amphetamines now seemed a better bet.

  At some point, in a half dream, he saw his wristwatch and realized he’d been helping lace poor Shiva’s boots and crampons for over fifteen minutes.

  He hauled the man out of the cave into the constellations: with the storm approaching, the last of the clear sky seemed violently clear. This was the lower edge of the troposphere, almost outer space. The night’s cold was interstellar. Lawson linked the astronaut umbilicus of the rope from his own harness to Shiva’s and turned the small, addled man to face downhill, to start him going like a Slinky. Shiv went first so that Lawson could brake him and also watch and dig in if he fell. Though Shiv’s arms hung dead at his sides, he kept his legs flopping steadily. Lawson recalled that he had a wife and four children to return to.

  “Okay, Shiv, that’s it. Nothing but downhill now. You’re going to be okay.”

  Delivering him to Kaljang at Camp Two, Lawson got the verdict at last. The embassy had reached base camp just after eight—Lawson’s cut-off time for patched calls—so Kal hadn’t radioed up, but the news was in: the video would be appearing that night on a hundred million Chinese TV screens and was already posted on official websites, where Book and the others we
re being called “terrorists at large.” And somehow a leaked version was already logging hits on YouTube—thousands of them.

  Lawson’s plight has gone viral.

  He staggers back up to the snow cave at six a.m., his mind reeling, erratic. The last half-hour, with clouds enveloping the mountain and visibility dropping, he’s had to follow the bamboo wands marking the trail. To push on to the summit today would be more than dangerous, and yet to stop, to give up and turn back, would be, for him, suicide. The end of everything. There’s a faint glow from inside the cave—Tashi heating water? You just need some hot coffee, he thinks, a short rest. No food. Can’t stomach it now. Nothing good left anyway. Maybe just climb the fucking rock alone—others always bring trouble. Word is, the doctor doesn’t look coerced on the video. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Amaris was involved, is involved, too. They were plotting to abandon the expedition from the first, maybe, just using it, using me, to get up to the pass…who knows. Walk away. The wind’s still light—moderate—and the ropes are there and Murloe’s trail is waiting at the top of the wall.

  The coffee revives him and briefly clears his head and gutsy Jake says he’s ready to climb, though his face, usually on the gaunt side, is puffed up as if from hives or a hockey fight. In comparison, Tashi’s bony face, sunburned black but for a milk chocolate ring around the eyes, looks freakishly small. It could be hanging from a headhunter’s belt. Yet the beady eyes are clear and sharp: “Ready as always, Sahib—though I hope the monsoon dies first!” As for Jake’s knee, it looks no worse than before, and Jake says he can move it, can manage, and he intends to. Getting him to the top will be a challenge but there’s no way Lawson will refuse to help a man showing grit and spirit.

  The summit team weakly clink their mugs over the hissing stove.

  As they set out, with Jake and Tash using oxygen, gusts start to swirl and blow snow. (Should have started at three, four a.m.) His large concession: he will ascend the ropes with them, to speed up the assault. Because even now he might have tried soloing, even though Tashi would not have been able to get photos in these conditions and his critics, far below, would have disapproved—disbelieved. So let them. Fuck them. (Dust-devil gusts now, like the loops of his thinking.) Himalaya.net calls him a megalomaniac. Rock and Ice calls him a megalomaniac. No one ever talks about micromaniacs—the critics, the mild-hearted many, desperate to fit in and keep their heads down, who fail to climb their own mountains. They’ll never understand a Lawson. They want champs to root for, but they still feel they can judge mavericks (like a Lawson) for their necessary obsession. (Him first, then Jake, then Tashi, jumaring up in short jerks—too damn slow—toward the clear skies he hopes to find above the wall.) He’s mumbling lines he has tacked on the corkboard above his desk, laser-printed in bold 24-point caps, among clippings, photos of himself, and one of Jenn and the dogs. Mumbling fragments, though usually he can quote it all. A worrisome sign. But normal up here. And I feel okay. Getting a bit warm. (He’s in his wind suit and down thermal gear over what Tashi calls his superhero clothes—the Lycra and fleece bodysuit he’s trying to patent, hopes to market.) It’s not the critic who counts, nor the one who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the, uh…the doer could have done better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, who at worst fails while daring greatly…whose place is never with those, uh, cold, cowardly…no, cold and timid … souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

  Teddy Roosevelt.

  They’ve stopped again. Jake needs another break. Lawson’s breathing slows, his mind clears, goes silent, a vacuum. And as he stares at the wall, insight comes, like a chock dislodged by some ghost climber high above, falling and striking his helmet: his colleagues are not just critics, they climb and risk as well. And Book and Sophie and Amaris—in serious danger of their own. Then he glimpses a second, larger truth that flits out of view like a stone vanishing into the mist below, even as he tries to look away: there’s a lie at the heart of every adult life. A buried self-deception that makes it possible to climb on.

  He removes his overmitts, finds his sunglasses, holds them to his face in the grey light: his image in the mirrored lens deformed to a big-nosed cartoon. He often uses the lenses to fix his hair or adjust his toque while on a climb, especially before a photo. Now he just stares. A muscle jumps in his jaw. He’s out of gum. He’s out of everything, he recalls, and his mind rockets away into familiar grievances and vindications and his radio starts beeping and he swears and ignores it and he’s Wade Lawson again.

  They rest briefly on top of the wall by the husk of Murloe’s sheepskin coat. The coat remains exposed despite the snowfall—windswept for eighty years. Tashi, on all fours, examines it like a snow leopard sniffing a carcass. Though Jake seemed interested in Murloe last night, he now sits with his back to the remains and to the wind, his legs straight out in front of him as he gapes into cloud. Lawson turns the man’s gas regulator higher. He, Lawson, still hopes they’ll climb above the storm, soon. This is no place to bivouac, as Murloe must have found out.

  When Lawson looks closely into Jake’s face—at last catching the man’s emptied eye—to ask if he’s good to go on, Jake nods slowly, saying something inaudible over the wind and through the mask.

  Sunless noon. They inch along the razor ridge, step, pause, step, pause—Lawson leading, using the ferrule of his axe like a cane to test the snow. They might be halfway to the top or more. Wind steady, straight at them, freezing the skin, but it’s better like this—side gusts would be deadly, and this headwind helps fill his lungs with the diluted air. Snow still falling and blowing and everything monochrome, the narrow ridge under their crampons, the whiteout around them. Treacherous how you can’t see the ridge peeling away to either side, though for Jake now that might be helpful. He’s in obvious pain, limping, slowing them down, yet if he could see where they actually are up here it might stop him dead.

  Then he’s down on one knee, waving, pointing at his mask. Shouldn’t be out of gas yet. Lawson edges closer—as close as he dares. Jake trying to speak. He pulls down his mask and the words tumble out as if they’ve bunched up inside. “Just leave me here!”

  “Don’t be stupid, Jake! If you can’t go on, we’ll stop. Or Tash’ll take you back.”

  “Go back on my own.”

  The words blowing away in a streamer behind him with his breath.

  “Jake, listen to me! Don’t worry, Jake. Uh, we’re going to, uhh …”

  Tashi eyes him through his goggles as if to say, Well, Sahib? Lawson tries to think clearly. (If this wind would just shut the fuck up.) Send Tash back with Jake? A part of Lawson does want the mountain to himself. And Murloe—if he finds another trace of him, he’d rather, for some reason, find it alone. Then again. (Then again what?) Jake doesn’t look like he can go another step. (That’s it. Right.) He might pull Tash off the mountain with him, on the way back. In fact, it’s likely. (Is there another option?) For a moment Lawson stands panting, trying to decide. Static in front of his eyes—his radio beeping again—nothing.

  “Build you a cave here, Jake. Side of the ridge. Make you comfortable. Tash’ll stay with you. Or maybe come to the top, with me. Then we’ll take you down together. Won’t be long.” Glancing sidelong at Tashi, he realizes that he, Lawson, is waiting for feedback from the kid. Tashi tugs down his mask, says words the wind instantly impounds. Across the burnt Sherpa face, as he stands in the gale on a blade of a ridge thousands of feet in the sky, a wide, impudent grin is creeping. Or it’s a grimace. Again Tashi speaks and again Lawson hears only the tone, which to him seems…mocking. “Tash!” he shouts. “I mean, Jake! Both of you—get your fucking masks back on!” And he reaches around to the side of his pack for the snow shovel.

  Lawson radios down to Kaljang to tell him Jake is resting in a snow cave while he and Tash go for the summit. Kal wants to patch through Sophie’s mother again. “Not now,” Lawson tells him. Not ever, he thinks. “Need to save our breath for this last push, Kal.” Need to m
ove fast, he thinks, trying to coach another dose of adrenaline from his wasted body.

  Jake isn’t looking his best. Could be simple altitude sickness or something worse—maybe a fast-moving infection from the knee? Could that happen, when you were this weak, infection spilling through your system in hours? No, he decides. They mark the cave with wands and leave Jake a Thermos of what is now iced tea. Tashi, who seems to be having trouble with his hands—he hates his clumsy overmitts and sheds them too often—leaves Jake his half-used oxygen cylinder, plus his extra. “Just in case Sahib and me are delayed,” he says, insisting he can finish the climb without gas. This act surprises Lawson, moves him. Maybe he has underestimated the kid. (But is it a good idea?) Lawson’s radio again. Don’t answer. He instructs Jake not to talk to anyone on his own radio except Kaljang. “Including your own relatives, Jake—okay? They might get the wrong impression. About your, uh…your condition now. By how your voice sounds. Don’t worry, man—back for you soon.”

  Lawson means it.

  They leave Jake in his windless den, stretched in his long mummy bag, nothing showing but the snout of his oxygen mask. By the cave mouth they rest a few more minutes, Tashi now breathing hard. Chafing his hands together. That’s definitely a wince, not a grin. No more chatter. He’s learning to be serious. Tough climbs can do that.

  “Let’s rope up,” Lawson calls.

  As they struggle back onto the ridge, something gnaws at him, as if he has forgotten some minor but mandatory task. Jenn needs him to pick up one of the dogs at the vet’s. Faintly he hears the beeper on Jake’s handset going. Lawson has turned off his own.

  On the ridge some time later there’s a sound like a cackle, a burst of raucous, mocking laughter, and he turns his head, ready to brace with his axe. He’s alone. A brief, sharp tug on his harness and he throws himself down and digs in with the pick, bracing hard. Nothing. He looks around. The rope from him to Tashi trails down the sheer ridge’s northeast face and vanishes, not far below, into the whiteout. With the dullness, the drugged calm of his exhaustion, he reels it in, hand over hand. Its end comes jiggling up the slope. He holds it to his face, and for a while he stares and stares stupidly. Like a senile man trying to lace up his shoes and not finishing the job, Tashi didn’t tie in properly. He needed that gas—and his hands were bad, Sherpas hardly ever complain and he was slapping his hands and grimacing and Lawson recalls that he’d noticed that and was about to speak up, but then his mind had strayed.